They buried the dead on the third day, when the frost had loosened its grip enough for the gravediggers to break the ground.

Valeria watched from the window of the healing quarters because she was not yet strong enough to stand in the cold. Eleven graves, in a neat row along the eastern slope where the garrison had always laid its fallen, each marked with a rough wooden stake and a strip of gray cloth. Eleven names, which Kaelen had read aloud in a voice that cracked on the sixth and steadied on the seventh, standing on his crutch at the head of the line with his hat crushed in his fist. The soldiers had stood in rows, bareheaded in the wind. When it was done, the old sergeant who had burned the ladders began to sing, a slow, low northern song with no words she knew, and one by one the others took it up until the whole hillside hummed with it.

She did not cry. She had thought she might. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, wrapped in a blanket that smelled of woodsmoke and Alaric, and let the sound wash through her, and thought that this was what it meant to belong to a place. Not safety. Not comfort. Simply to be standing close enough to the grief of others that it cost you something too.

"You should not be at the window," said Malakor, appearing at her elbow with a cup of something steaming. "The draft."

"I am being very careful with the draft." But she accepted the cup. It was a thick, sweet, bitter broth that tasted of bone marrow and herbs, and warmth spread down through her chest as she drank. "Dorren?"

"Sitting up. Eating like a horse. His fever broke on the second night, and the black threads have stopped advancing." Malakor allowed himself the faintest smile. "He asked me whether the Lady of the Healing Quarters would permit him to go home to his daughter. I told him that was a question for the lady herself."

"Tell him yes, as soon as he can walk to the gate." She turned the cup in her hands. "The others who were struck by the bolts?"

"Seven survived, of the nineteen. It is more than I dared to hope for, and it is entirely due to your method." He hesitated. "I have been writing it down. The vinegar and charcoal. I would like to preserve it, if you will permit. There may be others, one day, who need it."

"Of course." She looked at him, at the careful, anxious, stubborn face of a man who had once wanted her blood in a vial on his workbench and now asked her permission to record a recipe. "You may put my name on it, if you like. Or not. I find I do not much care for names on things anymore."

"I will put it down as the Valeria Method," Malakor said with great dignity, and bowed, and left before she could object.

She was still smiling faintly when Kaelen limped in, his crutch tapping a slow rhythm on the flagstones, his dark hair damp from the cold and his weathered face carrying the stiff, careful expression of a man about to do something he had rehearsed.

"Lady Valeria. I am told you are forbidden to stand."

"I am forbidden a great many things. I find it makes them more interesting." She nodded at the stool beside her. "Sit, Captain, before your leg gives out and Malakor scolds us both."

He sat with a grunt and stretched the wounded leg in front of him, and for a moment neither of them spoke. Then he reached inside his coat and drew out a small, flat bundle wrapped in gray cloth, the same cloth that fluttered above the graves.

"The garrison asked me to give you this," he said. "I do not know the right words. I am a soldier. We are poor at this sort of thing."

She unwrapped it. Inside lay a narrow strip of the gray fabric, knotted into an intricate loop she had never seen before, with a tiny wooden bead worked into the center. It was rough and plainly made, the stitches uneven, as though a dozen different hands had taken turns at it.

"It is a mourning knot," Kaelen said gruffly. "The old northern kind. We tie one for each of our dead, and wear it until the grief eases. The men made this one for you. They say you carried eleven of our dead in your hands and you never once turned away." He cleared his throat. "They have decided you belong to the citadel now. They would be offended if you tried to leave."

Valeria held the little knot in her palm and found, to her considerable alarm, that her vision had blurred.

"I have no plan to leave," she said, when she could.

"I told them so." A spark of dry humor crossed his face. "Several times. They did not believe me. You will have to stay long enough to convince them."

"Then I shall have to stay for a very long time."

"That would be the general idea."

She tied the knot around her wrist, over the pale old scars, where the small bead rested against her pulse. It was warm from his pocket. She had worn many things on that wrist in her life, manacles and measuring cuffs and the thin silver bracelets the Crimson physicians used to mark each test, and none of them had ever felt like this.

"Thank you, Kaelen," she said quietly. "For everything. You never had to believe in me."

"I did not, at first." He looked at her squarely. "I am a stubborn man. But I have learned to recognize the thing that is true when it is standing in front of me. And you, my lady, are the truest thing this citadel has ever been given."

He rose, awkwardly, with the help of the crutch, and bowed, a short, stiff, entirely sincere bow. Then he limped out, and Valeria sat for a long while looking at the gray knot on her wrist, before the door opened again, and Alaric came in.

He had slept very little in three days. She could see it in the grooves beside his mouth and the shadow beneath his eyes, in the way he held his shoulders as though some invisible hand were pressing down on them. But he was clean-shaven, and he had put on a plain dark tunic instead of armor, and he carried a small wooden tray with a bowl and a spoon and a roll of bread, and the effect of it, the simple domestic ordinariness, struck her somewhere beneath the ribs.

"You are meant to be eating," he said.

"I am eating. I have a cup."

"A cup is not a meal." He set the tray on the window seat and sat beside her, close enough that their knees touched. "Kaelen has threatened to dismiss the cook if you do not finish at least half of this. I would prefer not to lose the cook."

"Cooks are replaceable."

"Not this one. He makes a barley soup I would sell my kingdom for." He lifted the spoon, hesitated, and held it out to her with an expression of such studied solemnity that she laughed, a small, startled sound, and took it from him.

They sat in silence for a while after that, while she ate and he watched the hillside. Down in the burial ground the soldiers had begun to disperse, drifting back toward the walls in twos and threes. A woman in a faded shawl knelt at one of the stakes, setting a small bundle of dried flowers on the dark earth. The wind caught the gray cloth and snapped it taut.

"I never learned their names," Alaric said quietly. "Not all of them. Six years, and I never learned them. Kaelen reads the list at every burial and I stand at the back and pretend to know."

"You are learning them now."

"It is a poor sort of lord who begins his duties after the funerals." He shook his head. "I have thought a great deal, these past nights, about what I was doing in that corridor when the blade took me. Whether it was courage or only another way of choosing not to be afraid."

"Perhaps both."

"Perhaps." He turned his head to look at her. In the pale morning light his eyes were more gold than amber, and there was an exposed, almost shy quality to his gaze that she had never seen in it before. "I have not said it again. What I said, before the moon. I want to say it properly, in a place without chains or sieges or Cedric's drums. But I do not know how to begin."

"You began perfectly well the first time."

"I was terrified."

"I know." She set down the spoon and took his hand. "So was I. I am still a little terrified. It is a frightening thing, Alaric, to be loved by someone who knows what you are."

He drew a breath. "Do you remember what you said to me in the cell? That you were only a woman who loved me."

"I remember."

"I have turned that sentence over every hour since." His thumb moved across her knuckles. "Only. As though it were a small thing. It is the largest thing anyone has ever offered me. I did not understand until you stood in that doorway with nothing in your hands that I had spent my whole life believing that nothing was ever given freely."

"Nothing was, for me, either."

"And yet." He lifted her hand and pressed his lips to the inside of her wrist, to the pale, silvered scars there, as he had done on the first night of the second moon. She felt the touch all the way to her toes. "I am not good at this. I have no practice. I will make mistakes."

"So will I. I am quite expert at them." She smiled, a little crookedly. "I think we shall have to learn together, the same as everything else."

"That seems to be our method."

"It has been a very successful one, so far."

He laughed, a short breathless sound, and leaned forward until his forehead rested against hers. They stayed that way for a long moment, breathing, while the wind rattled the old glass in its frame and the singing on the hillside faded into the distance. It was perhaps the most peaceful quarter of an hour she had ever known. She wanted to hold it in her two hands and carry it with her always, a small bright coin to spend on the long dark nights ahead.

It did not last, of course. It never did.

She noticed first the way his body changed. The tension that had been draining from his shoulders came back, slowly, a degree at a time, and the arm that had curled loosely around her waist stiffened. His breath went shallow. His right hand drifted up from her knee, almost without his noticing, and settled over his chest, pressing flat against the place where the scar lay.

She had learned the language of his body the way she had once learned the language of poison. It spoke to her now with perfect clarity. He was hiding something.

"Alaric."

"Mm."

"What did Malakor tell you?"

He pulled back, and she saw the shutter come down behind his eyes, swift and polite and practiced. "Nothing of any consequence. A few measurements. He is a thorough man."

"You are touching the scar."

His hand dropped. "I was resting my hand."

"On your heart. The way you do when you are lying." She said it gently, without accusation. "The way you did in the library, the day you told me you had never loved anyone. Do you remember? You said it with your hand on the scar."

He was silent for a very long moment. Then, quite suddenly, he turned away, rising from the window seat and walking three paces toward the door before stopping with his back to her, his shoulders rigid.

She waited. She had learned how to wait. It was one of the first skills the testing chambers had given her, and she had never been so grateful for it as she was now, watching the line of his spine tighten and loosen and tighten again.

"He measured it the morning after," Alaric said at last, very low. "With his instruments, the glass, the little bone needle. It takes several hours and a great deal of patience. I lay on the table and he drew his lines and wrote his numbers, and he did not say anything until he had finished. Then he asked me to sit up, and he put the paper in front of me."

"And?"

"It is deeper." He still did not turn. "The curse. Last night's moon, the one you held me through. It was the first full moon in six years that I endured without anything to quiet it. Without your blood, without your scent. Only you, and a great deal of luck." He drew a breath. "Luck is not a strong enough medicine, it appears. The thing in my chest bit down. Malakor says it moved a full finger's width toward the heart."

The room seemed very quiet.

"How much remains?" she asked.

"He does not like to say."

"Alaric."

"Three cycles." The words came out flat and dead. "Four, if I am fortunate, and the next moons are kinder than the last. After that the curse will have reached what it has wanted since the day Cedric poured the wine. Malakor says there will be no coming back from it. There will be no one left to come back."

She was on her feet before she knew she had moved. Her knees buckled slightly, and she caught the back of the window seat, and then she was across the room and her arms were around him from behind, her cheek pressed against the rigid planes of his back, her hands flat against the place where his heart hammered.

"You were going to carry this alone," she said into his shoulder blade.

"I did not want you to spend your strength on grief."

"My strength is exactly what grief is for." Her voice shook, and she did not care. "I told you. I do not want to be spared. I would rather know the shape of the thing that is trying to take you from me."

He turned in her arms. His face was wet. He looked, for a moment, very young.

"I was afraid," he whispered. "If I said it aloud, it would become true. And I have only just been allowed to want things. I am not ready to lose them."

"You will not." She cupped his face in both hands. "Three cycles. Four. It is not nothing. It is time, and time is the one resource I have always known how to use." She drew a long, steadying breath, and felt something cold and clear settle over her mind, the old familiar clarity that came to her in the worst moments, the calm of a physician looking into the wound. "We are going to cure you, Alaric. Not manage. Not delay. Cure. We have a text, and a mind like Malakor's, and an enemy who has been kind enough to tell us exactly where to find him."

"The ritual."

"The ritual. Reverse Purification. It is the only thing that has ever promised an end." She held his gaze. "Cedric wants me to come to the Obsidian Palace? Very well. We shall go. But we shall go on our terms, with our eyes open, and we shall take from him the one thing he cannot do without."

"His blood."

"His heart's blood." The words fell into the quiet like stones into a well. "It is what the ritual requires. The conductor, the thing that binds the cure to the curse. The man who cast the spell must give it, or the working fails. So the very man who has tried to destroy you will be the one who saves you, whether he wishes to or not."

Alaric stared at her. Slowly, wonderingly, the first flicker of something like hope began to move across his ravaged face.

"You have been planning this."

"I have been thinking of nothing else since the ultimatum." She smiled, a fierce small smile. "I did not want to say it until I was certain it was possible. I am still not certain. But I would rather be uncertain with you than certain alone."

He kissed her then, hard and quick and trembling, and she felt the whole length of him shudder against her. When he drew back, his eyes were bright with something other than grief.

"Tell me," he said hoarsely. "Tell me everything. From the beginning."

She did. She led him back to the window seat and sat beside him with the cooling broth forgotten at her feet, and in the plain gray light of the third morning after the siege, she told the man she loved how she meant to save his life, in a low steady voice, point by point, the way she had once recited the symptoms of a thousand poisons. She told him about the notes beneath her mattress. About the weeks of quiet study. About the possibility, still only a theory, that a body trained slowly could be taught to carry more than it had ever been asked to bear. She did not flinch when his face tightened at that, and she did not stop.

"I promised you," she said, "that I would tell you before I tried anything. I am telling you now. I have tried nothing. I will try nothing without you and Malakor at my side. But I would be lying if I said I did not mean to find a way."

He was silent for a long time, his fingers laced through hers.

"I do not like it," he said finally.

"I know."

"I do not like any of it. But I find, Valeria, that I like even less the thought of being the sort of man who would forbid you." A faint, rueful smile touched his mouth. "I learned that lesson once already. At great cost."

"You did."

"Then we shall try it your way." He squeezed her hand. "Together."

The wind rose outside, rattling the window, and somewhere beyond the walls the last of the funeral song died away on the hillside. In the quiet of the healing quarters the two of them sat close together on a wooden bench, like any two people anywhere, and began, for the first time in the long, strange history of the Blood Moon Curse, to plan for a future in which it did not exist.