By the sixth week, Liora had stopped waking up afraid.

She noticed it on a morning of the first hard frost, when the green glass in her window had grown a fur of white ferns and the water in the washing basin had a skin of ice she had to break with her knuckle. She lay under the heavy wool blanket with her eyes on the bed curtains and ran through her inventory out of habit. Breath, even. Pulse, steady. Limbs, warm and obedient. Appetite, shameless. She was hungry enough to eat the egg and the bread and, if Hesta allowed it, the tray.

It was only when she reached the end of the list that she realized she had been waiting for something. A tightness, a dimness, the thin gray ache that the farmwives of Harrowfen had described with such relish. She waited a moment longer, as one waits for a step on the stair. Nothing came.

She sat up. The cold bit at her shoulders. She looked at her hands lying on the blanket, pink-knuckled and capable, and she thought, with the cool precision of someone setting down a heavy object very carefully: *This is wrong.*

It was not that she wished to be ill. It was that she had been taught, over ten years of other people's sickrooms, that the body kept an honest ledger. When something took from you, the account showed it. Twelve women had walked into this keep, and twelve women had been consumed within the year, and she had now lived six weeks in the same stones, under the same sky, eating the same bread. If the ledger said she was whole, then either the ledger was lying or the sum had been done wrong.

She dressed quickly and went down to the infirmary with the question lodged under her ribs like a swallowed stone.

The mornings had acquired a shape by then. Dunna came first, with her shoulder, which was mending, and a basket of eggs she had left on the table without comment. Garrick came second, coughing into his sleeve and insisting it was nothing, and left with a bottle of horehound syrup and a look of deep suspicion. A scullery girl with a burned thumb. A footman with a bad tooth. Two cooks who wished to know whether the Healer might have something for a sore back and who retreated in confusion when she said that she might. They had stopped stepping around the place where she had walked. It had taken weeks, and she had never said a word about it, but one morning she had come down a stair and a maid had simply walked past her, close enough that their sleeves brushed, and Liora had stood very still for a full minute afterward as if something precious had been set into her hand.

And every evening, at the hour when the light went amber on the flagstones, the king came to have his arm looked at.

She did not know when it had become routine. She had said *tomorrow* on the day of the first stitching, and he had come the next day, and the next, and by the end of the first week neither of them mentioned it. He would appear at the infirmary door at dusk, stop at three paces, and wait. She would say, *Come in,* and he would cross the sill like a man stepping onto ice. He sat on the same stool. He took off his coat and laid it over the same chair. She cleaned the arm, spread the salve, and worked the stitch along the seams of the left forearm, and each night the black mesh lay a little looser than it had the night before, though never for long. The hold lasted about a day and a half. She was learning to reckon its rhythm.

They did not talk much. He asked after her patients, and she told him, and he listened with the fixed attention of a man being read a story in a language he had only lately learned. She asked him nothing about the thing he would not name. He did not volunteer it. Between them lay the unspoken name of her master, which he had asked for and she had not given, and she could feel it there in the room like a third stool pulled up to the table.

But that was the evenings. This morning, she had a different question, and she did not intend to ask it of him.

She found Hesta in the still room, sorting dried herbs into jars by the light of the one high window.

"May I ask you something?" said Liora. "And may I ask you not to answer like a housekeeper?"

Hesta did not look up. Her gnarled fingers went on stripping dry thyme from its stems. "I am not sure I have another way to answer, my lady."

"Try."

The old woman set down the thyme. She wiped her hands slowly on her apron, one finger at a time, as she did when she was gathering her composure, and then she looked at Liora with a face that was very tired and quite clear.

"Ask," she said.

"The queens before me. The way they died. I have heard it from the farmwives and I have heard it from the soldiers, and I have heard it in the kind of tone that makes me think everyone is repeating something they have never actually seen." She kept her voice steady. "You saw it. You were here. I want to know what it looked like."

Hesta was silent for a long time. Out in the keep, a door closed. Dust turned in the thin shaft of light.

"It was always slow," she said at last. "People think it was sudden. The tales make it sound like a curse that struck and was done. It was not like that. It was more like a candle in a closed room, burning down the air." She looked at the jars. "The first week they were bright. Frightened, but bright. They would walk the gardens and write letters and eat well. By the second week they began to sleep more. A little. They said it was the cold, or the strangeness, or the grief. By the third, they tired on the stairs. By the fourth..."

She stopped. Her hands had gone still.

"By the fourth week," said Hesta, "they could not climb them."

The word *climb* sat in the air between them. Liora felt the hair rise along her arms.

"Every one of them?"

"Every one. The first was strongest, and she lasted nearly the year. The one who came after her wasted fastest. She was a vigorous girl, a farrier's daughter, who could carry a sack of grain on each shoulder. She was carried to her bed in the third week, and she did not leave it." Hesta drew a breath. "I sat with each of them. I have held the basin and I have wiped the brow. I know what it looks like when a body is being emptied out. I would know it in my sleep."

She lifted her eyes. They were wet and furious and very bright.

"And I will tell you something else, since you ask me not to answer like a housekeeper. You have been here six weeks. You went up the south tower yesterday with a tray, on your own, because the boy was busy. I saw you take the steps two at a time. You were humming."

Liora did not move.

"I have not said it before," said Hesta. "I did not know how. I have been watching you for six weeks, my lady, and I have been waiting for the first sign, and it has not come. And every day that it does not come, I am more afraid than I was the day before."

"Afraid?"

"Of what it means." Her voice cracked on the last word, and she turned sharply away and began to screw the lid onto a jar of thyme with trembling hands. "Go and be a healer. It is what you do. Go and find out whether you are well. I would like very much to know."

Liora went.

She did it the way her master had taught her to examine herself, which was the way she would have examined anyone: coldly, thoroughly, and without sentiment. She took her pulse at rest and after a flight of stairs, and counted it against the sand-glass in the infirmary. She drew back her lower eyelid in the polished bottom of a brass basin and looked at the color there, a healthy, ordinary pink. She pressed her thumbnail and watched the blood return to the bed. She looked at her tongue. She pinched the back of her hand and counted how long the skin took to flatten. She listened to her own breath with her ear to the table. Everything was sound.

She ran the length of the old garden, twice, in her boots and her working dress, with Tobin watching from the doorway of the infirmary as though she had lost her mind. She came to a halt at the far wall with her hands on her knees and her breath burning in her chest. It was only the ordinary burn of effort. She counted to sixty and her heart slowed under her hand at precisely the rate that it should.

"Are you being chased?" Tobin called.

"Only by a theory."

"Is it winning?"

"I haven't decided."

She straightened, flushed and breathless, and looked at the long gray shape of the keep beyond the garden wall. It rose out of its black lake like a sentence she could not parse. And she thought about the thing she had been avoiding all morning, the thing that sat beneath all the rest.

She thought about the nights.

The evenings in the infirmary, with her hand on his arm. She had noticed, in the way one notices a tune running underneath a conversation, that each time she began to work the stitch, a small weariness settled on her. It was not a great one. It was no more than the dullness one feels at the end of a long day, a heaviness behind the eyes, a faint ache in the wrist. It came as the black lines retreated under her needle. And it passed at once. By the time she had washed her hands and put away the thread, it had gone, and she was herself again, as if she had stepped out of a cold room into a warm one.

She had thought nothing of it. She had put it down to concentration.

But Hesta had said *a candle in a closed room, burning down the air.* And she had felt, every evening for five weeks, the small brief guttering of a flame that was then, somehow, relit.

She had begun to have a theory. She did not like it. It was the sort of theory that, once she had held it in her hand, she could not put down.

She was still standing at the far wall, turning it over, when she felt the stillness behind her.

It was not the cool pressure of the gallery, nor the weighted quiet of the corridors. It was gentler. A sense of someone arrested in mid-step. She turned, and found him at the edge of the garden, in the broken archway that led to the lower terrace.

Dravek had stopped there, hand on the old stone. He was in his black coat, with a leather folder under one arm, the kind he carried to and from the room he called his study. He must have been crossing from the stables. He had not meant to come this way. She could see it in the way he stood, as though the garden had been a door he had walked through without noticing.

He was looking at her.

Not as he had looked at her in the gallery, or from the end of the passage. There was nothing guarded in it, nothing patient. She had run the length of a garden in her working dress with mud on her hem and her hair coming loose and her face flushed to the ears, and he was looking at her as one looks at something that cannot be possible. His lips were slightly parted. His face, so often shut like a fist, had come entirely open. In it she saw wonder, and under the wonder, as clear as a stone in shallow water, a deep and terrible fear.

It was the look of a man who has seen a miracle and is afraid to ask what it will cost.

She understood in that moment that he had been watching her for six weeks, too. That he had seen her take the south stair two at a time. That he had seen her run. That every day she failed to dim, he had counted it, as Hesta counted, and that he had not been able to decide whether it was a mercy or a threat.

She crossed the garden toward him. She stopped at three paces, because it was the distance he kept, and because she was not yet ready to break it.

"Why am I not dying?" she said.

The wind moved the dead stalks. A raven called from the lake, a long way off.

He did not look away. She would give him that. He did not stiffen or turn or reach for some smooth deflection. He stood in the broken arch and took the question full in the face, like a man taking a blow he had been bracing for a long time, and she saw it travel all the way through him.

"I do not know," he said.

It was simple. It was flat. It was said in the same dry voice he had used to tell her the days of the last queen's life, and she knew, with the instinct of a woman who had spent ten years being lied to by the sick and the grieving, that it was true. He did not know. He had no explanation, no certainty, no theory he was holding back. On the question as she had asked it, he was as ignorant as she was.

And she knew, equally, that it was not the whole of the truth.

She could not have said how. It was in the set of his jaw, in the way his gaze held hers a fraction too steadily, in the grip of his hand on the stone. He was a man who did not lie. But he had told her, on the first night, that he would not lie *about anything she asked him directly*, and she had begun to understand how carefully that sentence had been built. He had answered the question she had put to him. He had not answered the one beneath it.

*Why am I not dying* was one question. *What do you know about why* was another.

She could have asked it. It was on her tongue. But a healer learns early that there are questions you can only ask once, and that a patient who has been backed into a corner will say nothing at all afterward. She let it lie.

"You've been counting," she said instead.

"Yes."

"Since when?"

"Since the third day." The corner of his mouth moved, not a smile. "Hesta has been counting. I have been counting Hesta counting. It is a very tiresome house."

"And what number are you at?"

"Forty-three days," said Dravek. "I have not been this far with anyone in a long time."

He said it very quietly. It was neither a boast nor a complaint, only a fact. She heard in it a world of old weariness, and something else, a fragile and unwilling thing that might have been the first shoot of hope.

Then he stepped back.

It was a small movement. One pace, no more, a slight withdrawal of the shoulder and the foot. But she watched him do it, and she saw it was not the habitual retreat she had come to know. It was something deeper. It was the movement of a man who had been about to say a thing and had decided, at the last moment, to be afraid of it.

He was farther away than he had ever been. Four paces. Five. As though the answer itself were a thing he could outrun.

"Dravek," she said.

"I have business in the study." He had already half turned, the leather folder clasped to his chest. "I will see you at dusk, if you will have me."

"You know I will."

He glanced back. His eyes met hers across the length of the garden, gray and wary and unbearably tired, and for a moment she thought he would say something else.

He only inclined his head, and went.

She stood in the cold and watched the broken archway empty. The raven called again. In the infirmary doorway, Tobin had given up pretending he was not watching, and he lifted his hand to her in a small, uncertain wave.

She waved back, and found that her hand was not quite steady.

That night she did not sleep.

She sat at the writing desk by the green window with a candle and her notebook and a stub of pencil, in her nightgown and the thick wool shawl, and she wrote out what she knew in the clear, plain hand her master had trained into her. It was an old discipline. When a case defeated you, you set down the facts in a column and the explanations in another, and you refused to let yourself believe any of them until you had tried to kill it.

Her breath made a faint cloud in the cold air of the room. Far below, the black lake lay perfectly still.

She wrote:

*One. That I am simply strong, and that the stories exaggerate. Against: twelve women, one of them a farrier's daughter who could carry two sacks of grain. The stories do not exaggerate.*

She struck it through.

*Two. That the stitch protects me. That what my master taught me is some kind of shield against whatever the Pact takes. Evidence: I feel the small weariness when I work, and it passes. I do not know why it passes. I do not know how it would shield me from the rest of the hours, when I am not working. Evidence is thin. Keep.*

She tapped the pencil against her lip. Then, slowly, she wrote the third.

*Three.*

She stopped.

The candle flame shivered. She watched the pencil in her hand, and she knew that she had been circling this for a week. She had circled it on the stairs and in the garden and in the long dull hours of the afternoon. She had refused to look at it because it was not a thing that belonged in a healer's notebook. It was not a diagnosis. It was a feeling, and a feeling was a danger.

But her master had taught her the stitch at sixteen. He had made her practice it for two years, on linen and pigskin and the inside of her own arm, and he had never once told her what it was for. *You will know when you need it.* She had thought it was the sort of thing old men said. She had thought it was a mystery he had never had the chance to explain.

She thought about the way the king had gone white when she said the word *master.* She thought about the question he had asked, strained and hoping and instantly regretted. She thought about a man who had known, perhaps, exactly what the stitch was for.

And she thought about a dead man in a marsh town, who had spent his last year telling her to keep her satchel packed.

Her fingers had gone cold. She wrote, carefully, in a hand that did not quite match the others:

*Three. That none of this is chance.*

She looked at it for a long time. Then she shut the notebook, and blew out the candle, and sat in the dark with her hands in her lap and her thumb moving over her knuckles, back and forth, back and forth, listening to the silence of the keep. Somewhere in the walls, very faint, something hummed.

She did not sleep for a long while. When she did, she dreamed of a needle passing through the air, and of a pair of gray eyes that watched her from a long way off with a hope so fragile that she was afraid to breathe.