The soil of Cinderhold was not dead. That was the first thing Liora learned when she finally knelt in it with a trowel.

It was only tired. She worked her fingers into the gray crust of the old garden on a bright, bitter morning, loosening the top layer where the frost had lifted it, and found beneath it a dark, fine, crumbling earth that smelled, very faintly, of rain. Ash lay over everything like a skin, thin and powdery, drifting into the creases of her gloves. But underneath, the ground was alive with the small white threads of roots, the ghost of a thousand forgotten plants waiting for someone to say they might try again.

"It's too sour," she said aloud, rubbing a pinch between her fingers. "The ash makes it too sharp. Nothing will take until it's sweetened."

"Sweetened with what?" asked Tobin.

"Rotted leaves. Old straw. Manure, if the stables can spare it. Eggshells and bone meal from the kitchens." She sat back on her heels and looked at the long, ragged rectangle of the garden, hemmed in by crumbling walls and strangled by dead stalks. "A great deal of patience."

Tobin stood at the edge of the bed with his hands in his armpits and a skeptical expression. "The last one tried," he said. "The second queen. She put in roses."

"What happened to the roses?"

"They grew," said Tobin. "Then she died, and nobody watered them."

It was said with the flat, absent-minded cruelty of a child reciting a fact. Liora thought for a moment, and then reached up and tugged his sleeve until he dropped to his knees beside her in the dirt.

"I'm not putting in roses," she said. "I'm putting in willow and comfrey and yarrow and feverfew, and some thyme because Hesta will like it, and a bed of poppies for the bad nights. Nothing that anyone is going to be sorry to see in the spring." She held out the trowel. "And I'm planning to water them. Every day. Will you hold me to it?"

Tobin looked at the trowel. Then he took it, in a small, grave, careful hand, as if she had handed him a sword.

"All right," he said.

It took them nine days to clear the first bed.

Hesta, to Liora's surprise, was the one who set it in motion. On the second morning she appeared at the garden door with a wooden crate on her hip and a face like a locked chest. Inside were cloth packets of seeds, tied with string and labeled in a crabbed, old-fashioned hand, a pair of small hand shears with a worn horn grip, a dibber, a ball of garden twine, and a thick canvas apron that smelled of cedar and camphor.

"They belonged to the first mistress of the garden," said Hesta. She did not meet Liora's eyes. "Before. There was a physician's garden here once, with a woman to keep it. She was very particular. I have kept these, in case."

"In case of what?"

"In case," said Hesta, "somebody should be fool enough to try." She set the crate on the edge of the bed and brushed an invisible speck of dust from her sleeve. "Some will not be good. Seed does not keep forever. But the willow cuttings in the blue jar are sound, and the comfrey will root from anything. I have taken the liberty of having the stable boys leave a cartload of manure by the east wall. They will complain. Let them."

Liora looked at the crate. At the shears, with their handles polished by some other woman's palm. At the faded labels in the crabbed script, and the neat knot of the string. She felt her throat tighten with something she could not name.

"Hesta," she said. "Thank you."

"It is only seed," said Hesta gruffly. She turned to go, and then, without looking back, added in a lower voice, "The apron will need to be taken in. She was a bigger woman than you."

She left. Liora stood holding the canvas apron against her chest, and she did not trust herself to speak for some time.

They worked from first light until the winter dark came down. It was brutal work. The frost made the ground iron-hard at dawn and sticky at noon, and the ash worked its way into every seam of her clothes. Her hands blistered and then callused. Her back ached in a way that was almost pleasant. She had forgotten how good it felt to be tired from honest labor, rather than from the slow, grinding exhaustion of fear. At night she fell into bed with dirt under her nails and slept like a stone.

Tobin worked beside her in a kind of sober ecstasy. He had never, she gathered, been permitted to do anything that was not for someone else, and the discovery that he might dig a hole simply because a hole was needed seemed to strike him as a revelation. He dug as though the ground owed him money. He hauled barrows of leaf mold with his tongue between his teeth, and dropped the first seeds into the first furrow with such solemn concentration that she had to look away so as not to laugh.

He talked as he worked, in his quick clipped way, never quite meeting her eyes. He liked the garden better than the kitchens, he decided, because nobody shouted in it. He liked bread, and the smell of the stables, and a particular gray cat that lived in the woodshed and had once allowed him to hold it for the whole of a rainy afternoon. He disliked cold feet, and being called *boy,* and the dark landings on the north stair. He did not like to be asked about the dark landings.

"What did you do before you came to Cinderhold?" she asked him, one afternoon, as lightly as she could, while they sieved ash from the compost.

"I don't remember."

"Nothing at all?"

"No." He shook the sieve harder. "I was small."

"Where did you live?"

"I don't know."

"Do you remember your mother?"

The sieve stopped. A thin gray drift of ash sifted down through the mesh and settled on the earth between his knees. For a moment she thought he had not heard. His face was turned down and away, and the line of his thin shoulders had gone rigid under the oversized tunic.

"Hesta says I came in the winter," he said at last, in a very careful voice. "On a cart. With some of the soldiers. And that I was sick, and then I got better." He tipped the sieve and watched the ash fall. "That's all I know. It's all anyone ever told me."

"All right," said Liora.

"It's not a secret."

"I didn't say it was."

"I just don't *know,*" said Tobin, with a sudden ferocity that startled them both. He scrubbed his wrist against his thigh, the one with the old pale scar, hard enough to make the skin pink. "I don't. I try sometimes. It's like... it's like there's a room, and I know it's there, and I know it's got a door, but when I try to get to it there's just a lot of smoke."

She set down her sieve. She did not reach for him. She had learned, long ago, that the worst thing to do for a child who had told you a hard thing was to hold him. She only sat a little closer, so that their shoulders were nearly touching, and picked up the sieve again and went on shaking out the ash.

"That's all right," she said. "Smoke is a good thing to have a door against. You don't have to open it until you want to."

He was quiet for a time. Then, very low: "Will you tell me if I do?"

"If you do what?"

"If I ever... if I remember something. And it's bad." He did not look at her. "Will you tell me it's all right?"

"I will," said Liora. "Whatever it is. I promise."

He nodded, once, a tight little jerk of the chin. And then he picked up his sieve and set to work again with such grim vigor that the ash flew in clouds, and neither of them spoke of it further.

The first patients came on the fourth day.

She had thought they would send Dunna again, or one of the cooks. Instead, a little after noon, she heard a shuffling at the garden gate, and looked up from her knees to find a delegation. A footman with a bad tooth. A kitchen maid with a splinter in her heel. Two stable hands, huge, awkward young men, red to the ears, who stood twisting their caps and looking everywhere but at her.

"If it's no trouble, Your Majesty," said the larger of them, "we'd heard there was a... that you might..."

"A healer," said the kitchen maid, in a rush. "We heard there was a healer. We didn't want to bother the queen."

Liora sat back and looked at them. At the stable hands' scuffed boots and the maid's chapped fingers and the footman's swollen jaw. She had been called Your Majesty and My Lady and Queen. She had been called, once or twice, in hushed voices, something that was not a name at all. She had not known that she could be called something else.

"The queen is busy," she said gravely, wiping her hands on her apron. "But the healer has time. Who's first?"

By the end of the week there was a line.

It formed on the path outside the infirmary every morning, a ragged, shy, silent line of the household's aches and sores. They brought their blisters and their bad backs and their children's coughs. They brought burns and sprains, gout and chilblains, an abscess, a pulled muscle, a sty. They did not say *Your Majesty.* They did not say *My Lady.* They said, quite simply and without any ceremony, *Healer.* Each time, it fell on her ear like a small, clean coin.

She tended them in the clear light of the infirmary, with Tobin fetching and carrying and Hesta, stiff-backed and expressionless, appearing at the door with an armful of clean linen each morning and not leaving until she had made absolutely certain that nobody was being cheated. She grew used to the smell of willow and horehound. She grew used to the weight of a stranger's hand in hers. She learned the names of the stable hands, who were brothers, and of the footman, who wept when she pulled the tooth and was embarrassed for days afterward, and of the kitchen maid, who had a sweetheart in the village and a rich, rolling laugh that surprised everyone, herself most of all.

Somewhere in the middle of the second week, it crept over her.

She was kneeling at the end of the vegetable bed with a bundle of willow cuttings in her lap, watching Tobin and the stable boys wrestle a barrow of manure through the gate, and she realized with a small, cold shock that she was *content.* It was not happiness. It was a quieter, more dangerous thing. It was the feeling of having a place to stand.

The infirmary smelled of herbs. The garden had its first green shoots, a handful of hardy things, comfrey and feverfew and a defiant row of winter chard, pushing up out of the gray soil like small flags. A line of people waited every morning who needed her. A boy who had grown, without her noticing, into the habit of sitting beside her at the table at the end of the day. A housekeeper who left a pot of the smoky tea on the sill without being asked. She was building something. Not on purpose. It had grown up around her like the garden, a thread at a time, and now she looked at it and saw that it was a home.

She could not have it. She knew that, with the dry, clear certainty of the diagnostician. She had a year and a day. She had a binding and a vow. She had a man in this keep who had promised, to her face, that she would still die, and who had buried twelve women before her. She had a theory in her notebook with the word *chance* written on it, and a long list of questions.

She was a fool to want it. She was a fool to feel the thing in her chest, that warm, treacherous, tightening thing that rose every time Dunna smiled at her. She sat in the cold with her willow cuttings and her sudden, unmistakable fear, and she thought, *Do not.* *Do not do this to yourself.*

But it was already done.

She felt him before she saw him. She had learned that, over the weeks. A sense of weight at the edge of the garden, a quiet pressure on her neck.

She did not look up at once. She went on trimming the willow cuttings with Hesta's old shears, neat, clean cuts at an angle below the node, and she let her shoulders stay loose and her breath slow.

Dravek stood at the broken archway, as he had stood on the day of the garden. He had not been there when she began. He had not made any sound. He was in his black coat with the collar buttoned high, and his hands were behind him, and the pale winter light fell across the side of his face and made the hollows of his cheek look carved from stone. He did not seem to be on his way anywhere. He was only watching.

He watched her trim a cutting and set it in the water jar. He watched her wipe her blade on her apron. He watched Tobin, across the garden, shovel manure with a face like a martyr and be told, in a clear voice, that his furrow was perfectly straight. And Liora, who had learned to read the weather of that stillness, saw that it was not the watchfulness of the gallery. It was not the aching, forbidden longing of the corridor. It was something simpler and more fragile.

He looked, she thought, like a man standing at the window of a lit house on a winter night, who has remembered that he was once welcome there.

She let him look for a long time. She trimmed three more cuttings. She set them in the jar. Then she put down the shears, and rose, and brushed the earth off her knees, and turned to him.

"You can come closer," she said.

He did not move. His eyes held hers.

"The garden's not a room," she said, quite mildly. "There's no door. There's no threshold. I don't know what rules you think apply, but I'm telling you that nobody has ever been hurt by standing in a vegetable bed." She lifted her chin. "You can come closer. I do not bite."

A long, still moment passed. The wind moved in the dead brambles along the wall. Across the garden, Tobin had stopped shoveling and was gaping openly.

Then, very slowly, one corner of Dravek's mouth moved.

"I do," he said.

It was dry as old paper. It was so quiet that Tobin could not possibly have heard it. And it was, unmistakably, a joke. Liora stared at him. She felt the smile begin before she could stop it, a helpless, wide, delighted thing that tugged at her whole face, and she saw him see it. She saw his own expression falter and open and nearly, very nearly, break into something real.

It was not a full smile. It was a thing no larger than the first crack of light in a shuttered room. But it was there. It lit his eyes and softened the hard line of his jaw and for the length of a breath made him look, quite suddenly, like a man of thirty-two who had once, long ago, been young.

Then it was gone. He drew himself up. He inclined his head, a fraction, and the hands behind his back tightened on each other. "Healer," he said.

She stopped breathing.

He said it with the exact weight and shape that the rest of them used, quiet and unadorned, as though he had been testing the word to see if it would hold. And it did. She heard it ring in the cold air like a struck bell.

"Dusk," she managed. "I'll see your arm at dusk."

"Yes."

"Don't be late."

"I have never been late in my life." He turned, and paused, and said without looking back, "The chard is coming up well."

He walked out of the archway and was gone. She stood in the middle of the garden with her hands full of willow cuttings and her face aching from the smile, and she became aware that the entire population of the infirmary line had been watching, in perfect silence, from the gate.

"What?" she said.

Nobody answered. The footman looked at his boots. The kitchen maid, very gently, began to laugh.

The evening was a long, slow, golden thing. She saw to her last patient, a little girl with an earache, and sent her home with a poultice and a pear. She washed her hands in the basin and watched the water run gray with ash. She set out the salve, the cloth, the linen. She took her seat on the stool by the table, and she waited, and the light turned amber on the flagstones and then slowly, softly, to blue.

He came, as he had said he would. He stopped at three paces. She said, *Come in.* He crossed the sill, and sat, and took off his coat. He rolled up his sleeve. She cleaned the arm and spread the salve, and drew the needle through the air, and felt the thread catch, and the black lines ease and retreat. The small, brief weariness settled on her and passed. They did not say much. He asked about the chard. She told him about the poppies. He listened.

At one point, while she bent over his wrist, she felt his gaze on the crown of her head, and she did not look up. She only kept working, her fingers steady and warm on his cold skin, and she thought: *I am going to be so sorry about this.*

When he had gone, and the infirmary was dark, she sat for a while at the oak table with the last of the candle. Her fingers were stained green with comfrey. There was earth under her nails. Out in the garden, in the starlit dark, the first small leaves of the chard trembled in the wind.

She opened her notebook to a clean page. She took up her pencil, and she began, from long habit, to write the date and the number of days that remained.

Then she stopped.

She looked at the empty line. She could not remember the last time she had counted. A week, perhaps. Two. Somewhere in the weeks of digging and weeding and tending the long line of the household's small hurts, the number had slipped out of her mind and she had not noticed it go.

She stared at the page for a long time. Then, very slowly, she lowered the pencil. She shut the notebook without writing anything at all.

It was the first night since she had come to Cinderhold that she did not count the days left.