The second assault came after midnight, and it did not come at the walls.

Alaric had known it would not. He stood at the head of the long table in the great hall, surrounded by candles guttering in the draft and the rolled maps he had studied so many times that their creases had begun to tear, and listened to the reports arrive one after another like stones dropped into a well. The east wall was quiet. The west wall was quiet. The enemy's drums had gone silent an hour ago, and in a siege, silence was never rest. It was preparation.

"They are massing at the main gate," a scout reported, breathless, his cloak crusted with frost. "A ram, my lord. A great one, bound in iron. Twenty men to each side beneath a roof of hides. I saw them wheel it out of the trees."

"How many behind it?"

"I could not count. Hundreds. They carry shields locked above their heads."

Alaric turned to the map and laid his palm flat against the black mark that represented the gate. It was the oldest part of Shadowfall's defenses, a double door of oak banded in iron, three hands thick, forged by his great-grandfather's masons in an age when the north still feared invasion from the south. It had never failed. It had never been tested by anything like what waited beyond it now.

"Reinforce the inner bar," he said. "Twenty men with pikes behind the doors, another forty on the stairs. Oil on the parapet above the gate. If they break through the first door, they will have to climb the second."

"My lord." A young officer hesitated, and Alaric recognized the question in his face before it was voiced. "Captain Kaelen wishes to take the command at the gate himself."

"Then Captain Kaelen shall have it." He straightened. "And I will hold the hall, as I have promised. Send word that I am here, and that I am listening."

He meant it. He had given Kaelen his word, and he had given Valeria, in the quiet before dawn, a promise of a different kind, and he had every intention of keeping both. He stood at the table and heard the ram begin its slow, tolling approach, and each blow struck through the stone beneath his feet and up into his chest, where something old and patient stirred in answer.

The first door gave way at the fourteenth blow.

He heard the sound of it from the hall, a splintering roar like a tree falling in a storm, followed at once by the shriek of the alarm bell and the sudden clash of steel. The pike line held. He could hear Kaelen's voice rising above the din, harsh and carrying, calling positions, calling names. For the space of perhaps a hundred heartbeats, the roar of the fighting settled into a rhythm, and he allowed himself to believe it would hold.

Then a runner came skidding through the hall doors, his face white. "The second door, my lord. They have brought up the bolts. Kaelen is down."

Alaric did not remember crossing the hall.

He remembered the corridor, the cold of the stone, the scream of metal on metal as he drew his sword. He remembered the stairs, taken three at a time, and the sudden hot stink of smoke and oil as he burst out into the gate court. Torches lit the scene in a flickering, hellish orange. The first door lay in splinters. The second, though battered, still stood, but a ragged section of its upper panel had been torn away and through the gap poured a stream of enemy soldiers, their shields locked, their blades bright.

Kaelen lay at the foot of the stairs with a bolt through his thigh, his face gray, trying to drag himself backward with his hands. A knot of the enemy had broken through and was bearing down on him, and the pike line was in disarray, men scattered, faces bloodied, a lieutenant screaming for the reserves.

There was no thought in it. There was only the single bright certainty that Kaelen, who had stood beside him through six years of nights he would rather forget, who had rebuked him and obeyed him and feared for him and never once abandoned him, was going to die on this stone.

He went down the last steps at a run and drove his shoulder into the nearest soldier, sending the man tumbling. His sword came up of its own accord. He struck, and parried, and struck again, and the world narrowed to the rhythm of it, the muscle memory of a hundred border campaigns a lifetime ago. He drove them back from Kaelen step by step. He heard his own voice shouting orders, hoarse and savage. He heard, from somewhere at the edge of hearing, Kaelen yelling at him to withdraw.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, a small, clear voice reminded him that he had promised. He had promised Kaelen to stay behind the gate. He had promised Valeria, in the gray light of the morning, that he would be careful. He had meant both promises with his whole heart, and he could feel them breaking even as he fought, like glass under too much weight. Yet he could not find it in himself to regret it. He had spent six years as a man who stood behind walls, behind chains, behind the cold mask of a tyrant, and he had never once been able to save a single person that mattered. Tonight, at least, he was not standing behind anything. He was standing in front of someone he loved. It was worth whatever came.

He did not see the man behind him until it was too late.

It was a tall soldier in plain mail, without insignia, who had come in under the cover of the smoke. He carried a short, broad blade whose steel had a strange dark luster, an oily shimmer like water on tar. Alaric felt, rather than saw, the blow descend. He twisted, and it caught him high on the left side, glancing off his armor and slicing deep into the muscle between shoulder and ribs.

For a moment there was no pain at all. Only a peculiar, silent cold, as though someone had poured icewater into his veins.

Then the blade's poison reached his heart.

The world went white.

He heard himself cry out, a sound he did not recognize, and felt his legs buckle. The curse that had slept in his chest for six years, bound and tamed and patient, woke all at once with a violence that blotted out thought. It was not like the moon. The moon was a tide. This was a lightning strike. Black fire ran along his veins, from the wound outward, in every direction at once, and he could feel his skin beginning to split.

"Alaric!"

It was Kaelen's voice, ragged with terror. A pair of hands seized his collar. He was dimly aware of Kaelen dragging himself forward on one leg, bellowing for the guard, of bodies closing around him, of the enemy soldier with the dark blade lunging again and being cut down by a pikeman whose face he could not see.

"Back," Kaelen was shouting. "Get him back! Seal the inner door!"

He was lifted. The gate court swung away in a whirl of torchlight and smoke. The last thing he saw before the dark took him was the sky above the broken door, black and cloudless, with a swollen, silver-white moon hanging low over the eastern ridge, three nights from full.

*

Valeria knew before anyone told her.

She was at the table in the healing quarters, her arms in blood to the elbow, holding the edges of a long gash together while Malakor sutured, when the sound of the alarm bell changed. It had been the steady, rolling clang of a siege alarm. Now it became a frantic, stuttering peal, and under it, from the direction of the gate court, rose a roar of voices that carried a particular note she had not heard all day. Not the cry of men fighting. The cry of men afraid.

She looked up. Malakor had stopped sewing.

"Finish this," she said, and thrust the needle into his hand, and ran.

She was in the corridor before she understood where she was going. Men pressed against the walls to let her pass, faces swimming, and beyond the arch she saw the knot of soldiers coming up the stairs, a stretcher between them, and at the front of the stretcher the unmistakable, terrible sight of a man's arm hanging limp over the edge, the skin black and cracked and weeping.

"Put him down," she said, and her own voice sounded very far away. "Put him down here. Gently."

They laid him on the stone floor of the corridor. She dropped to her knees beside him and saw his face, and for a moment the whole world narrowed to a single point.

He was alive. His chest rose and fell in shallow, shuddering breaths. But the fissures had already spread across his neck and jaw, and when she lifted his eyelid with her thumb, the eye beneath was entirely red, the pupil a thin vertical slit.

"The moon is not yet full," a soldier whispered behind her. "It should not be happening."

"A blade," said a second voice, hoarse and strained. Kaelen had been carried in on a second stretcher, a bloody rag tied around his thigh, and he propped himself on one elbow to look at her with wild, haunted eyes. "One of their men. A dark blade, like the bolts. He took it to protect me. I told him to fall back. I told him."

"It is not your fault." The words came automatically. "Kaelen, lie back. Someone see to his leg."

A breathless lieutenant pushed through the crowd, his face streaked with soot. "The inner door is sealed, my lady. The ram broke the first gate but the second holds. They are falling back to the tree line. They took the wounded with them."

"They have what they came for," Kaelen said bitterly from his stretcher, and she saw that he understood it as clearly as she did. Cedric had never meant to take Shadowfall in a single night. He had meant to find the one man in the citadel whose blood answered to his weapons, and to make him bleed.

"Hold the gate," Valeria said, to the lieutenant, to the corridor, to anyone listening. "Whatever happens down here, the walls must stand until dawn. Tell them that."

The man saluted, white-faced, and ran.

Alaric's body arched suddenly against the stones. A low sound tore from his throat, half groan, half snarl, and Valeria caught his shoulders, pinning him as she had pinned Dorren, feeling the muscles bunching and twisting beneath her grip. His claws scraped the floor, leaving long white furrows in the stone.

"Alaric. Look at me. Alaric."

His eyes rolled toward her. For an instant she saw the man in them, wild and anguished, and then the red surged back and he snarled, lunging against her hold, and she felt his teeth snap shut an inch from her wrist.

Hands pulled at her. "My lady, get back, he will kill you--"

"He will not." She shook them off. "Carry him to the cells. The deep ones. Chain him, but gently, and nobody touches him but me."

They obeyed her at once, without a single word of protest. She did not know afterward why they had, whether it was her voice or her face or something in the set of her shoulders. Four men lifted him between them and bore him down the winding stairs, and she followed with Malakor at her heels, panting, pale, his bag of tinctures clutched to his chest.

In the lowest cell, the same stone room where she had once knelt to hold him through the second moon, they laid him on the furs and fastened the iron cuffs at his wrists. He thrashed against them, wordless, the black veins now visible across his chest where his tunic had been torn away. The wound at his side was an ugly, blistered gash, the edges already gray.

Malakor worked at it with trembling hands, packing the wound, pouring a pungent liquid across it that hissed and steamed. Alaric howled. The sound shook the walls.

"It is not working," Malakor said, his voice cracking. "It is not touching it. Nothing I have is touching it. The essence is feeding the curse faster than any herb can resist it. He is turning, Lady Valeria, he is turning, and there is no moon to hold him."

"How long?"

"An hour. Perhaps less. If the change completes without the moon's cycle to bind it, I do not think he will come back." Malakor's face crumpled. "I am sorry. I am so sorry. I have nothing."

Valeria looked down at the man on the furs. His breath came in ragged heaves. His chest, scarred and black-veined, rose and fell like a bellows. She thought of the night in the study, his hand open in hers, the quiet astonished sound he had made when she traced the scar. She thought of what he had told her at dawn.

You are not my remedy.

She thought, too, with a strange, cold detachment, of the twelve years she had spent learning exactly how much blood a body could lose before it failed. The Crimson Empire's physicians had measured it for her in basins and graduated glass. They had known her limits to the ounce and used that knowledge as a leash. Now she stood in a cell in the north, and the same knowledge lay in her hands like a blade turned the other way. She knew precisely how far she could go. She also knew, with the same precision, that she would go further.

She had never wanted to be his remedy. She had wanted to be many things to him, companion, adversary, equal, lover, and she would not have chosen the word. But there was one thing she knew with absolute certainty, standing on the cold stone with his blood on her hands. If she let him die in this room because she was afraid of what the cure would cost, she would never forgive herself, and he would never forgive her for it either.

"I am going to give him my blood," she said.

"Lady Valeria, no. You do not understand the quantity. Without the moon, the dose required to suppress this much essence will be many times what you gave in the second cycle." Malakor caught her sleeve. "You will not survive it."

"Then you will have to keep me alive, Malakor, as well as you possibly can."

"I cannot guarantee--"

"I am not asking for a guarantee." She turned and took the small knife from the tray beside the furs. Her hand was perfectly steady, and she marveled distantly at it. "I am asking you to stand here, and count, and tell me when to stop. And when I do not stop, you will make me."

He stared at her, tears standing in his eyes. Then he nodded once, jerkily, and stepped back.

She knelt beside Alaric and took his head into her lap, cradling his jaw in one hand. His eyes rolled up to meet hers, burning red, and for a heartbeat she saw something in them, a flicker of recognition, a thread of the man she loved.

"It is all right," she said softly. "I am here. Drink."

She drew the blade across her forearm, deep and clean, and held the wound to his mouth.

For a moment nothing happened. Then his lips closed over the cut, and he drank, a hard, desperate, shuddering pull that made the room tilt around her. Heat bled out of her in a long, spiraling stream. She felt the cold begin at once, creeping up through her fingertips, a deep, bone-aching chill that settled behind her ribs. She held her breath. She did not look away from his face.

The fissures at his throat stopped spreading. Slowly, slowly, they began to knit.

"Keep going," Malakor whispered, his voice shaking. "It is working. It is working, it is slowing it, but you must continue, he needs more, much more--"

She continued. She poured herself into him in long, steady draughts, and counted the passing minutes by the rhythm of his swallowing, and by the sound of Malakor's voice murmuring the totals beside her ear. Fifty measures. Sixty. The room blurred at its edges. Seventy. A distant ringing began in her ears. Eighty. She felt her own pulse slowing, thick and strange in her wrists, and the cold had climbed to her elbows and was gnawing at her shoulders.

"Ninety," said Malakor, very faintly. "Lady Valeria, you are at ninety--"

Alaric's eyes had cleared. The red had receded to a thin rim around the pupil, and he was staring up at her in sudden, dawning horror. He tried to speak. His hand rose against its chain, trembling, reaching toward her face.

"Almost," she whispered. "Almost, my love. Almost there."

"A hundred," Malakor said, and his voice broke. "A hundred, my lady, that is the line, you must stop, you must stop now--"

She did not stop.

The essence was fighting back. She could feel it, a stubborn, clinging darkness in his blood that refused to yield, and she knew with calm certainty that if she pulled away now, even a little, it would surge back and take him. She tightened her grip on his jaw and held on, and the last thing she saw before the world went gray at the edges was his face above hers, wet with tears and streaked with her blood, mouthing her name over and over, as though it were the only word he had ever learned.