Lord Orsen Varr was waiting at the crossroads with three garrisons, a wagon train two furlongs long, and the expression of a man who had been kept standing in the cold for exactly as long as he intended to tolerate.

"You are late," he said, as Alaric reined in.

"We are four hours ahead of the schedule Kaelen set."

"Kaelen is a coward about schedules. I have been here since yesterday." The old lord's pale eyes moved over the column, over the dented mail and the tired faces and the little covered cart where Malakor sat surrounded by crates. "Is that all of you?"

"Two hundred picked men. The rest hold Shadowfall."

"Two hundred." Orsen snorted. "I have eleven hundred, and every one of them is bored. It will do them good to march." He turned his horse and fell into step at Alaric's side, and for a moment the two men rode in silence, the old lord's craggy profile set against the pale sky. Then he said, gruffly, without looking round, "You will pardon an old man's liberty. But I should like to say that it is a poor sort of kingdom that outlaws the only honest lord in it. I have served four kings. I do not intend to serve a fifth who sends bounty hunters after his own nephew."

"You may find the wages are poor."

"I have never served for wages." A glimmer of dry humor crossed the weathered face. "I served for the pleasure of watching fools discover they were wrong."

Valeria rode a few paces behind, with Kaelen on her left, and listened to them and tried not to smile. She had never seen Alaric look so easy in another man's company. It was not that the tension had left him. She could see it still, in the set of his shoulders, the faint pallor under his tan, the way his hand strayed now and then to his chest and then dropped. But there was something looser in him than there had been in the citadel, as though the road itself, the open sky and the frozen miles and the plain, rough company of soldiers, had taken some weight off him that walls had never lifted.

The column moved south.

"He likes him," Kaelen murmured, riding up on her left, and nodded at the two men ahead. "Orsen. It is the highest compliment he knows. He has not stopped complaining since he arrived."

"Is that a good sign?"

"It is the only sign he has ever given." The captain's weathered face creased in a rare, real smile. "When Orsen stops complaining, my lady, that is when you should be afraid."

She laughed, and the sound carried along the frozen road, and several of the soldiers glanced round at it, startled, and then smiled too.

*

It took them eleven days to reach the edge of the Frostfell uplands, and in that time Valeria learned more about marching armies than she had ever wished to know.

She learned that an army of thirteen hundred men moves at the speed of its slowest cart, and that the slowest cart was invariably the one carrying Malakor's glassware. She learned that soldiers complain of the cold in a very specific and ritualized way, and that the best remedy for it was hot soup and a well-timed insult. She learned that the camp followers, the cooks and farriers and washerwomen, knew more about the true state of the army than any of the captains, and that if one wished to be told anything, one sat down by their fires and listened.

She learned, too, that the pamphlets were working.

She had not expected it to be so swift. Kaelen's riders had gone out ahead of the column, in twos and threes, carrying bundles of the cheap gray sheets, and wherever the army passed, the people were waiting. They came down from hill farms and out of hovels at the roadside. They stood at the gates of walled towns and watched with solemn, curious eyes. And in every village, there was someone who stepped forward, an old woman, a barber, a farrier's wife, with the folded paper in her hand and a question in her face.

"Is it true?" they asked her. "Does the vinegar truly draw it out?"

"It does," said Valeria, every time. "It must be done quickly, and the wound must be opened first. But it works. Seven men lived who should have died."

"They say you are a witch."

"They say a great many things." She would smile and spread her scarred hands. "I do not think a witch would write out her receipts so plainly."

At the sixth village a woman pressed a wicker basket of eggs into her hands and would not take them back. At the eighth, a gray-bearded barber presented her with a battered copper cup, engraved with some forgotten family crest, and told her gravely that it had been his grandmother's and that he would be honored if she would drink from it. At the tenth, two small boys ran alongside her horse for a quarter mile, shouting, "Lady Healer! Lady Healer!" until their mother caught them and dragged them, laughing and protesting, back to the road.

"You are very quiet," Alaric said that evening, riding up beside her as the sun sank behind the western ridge and the column began to look for a place to camp.

"I am thinking."

"Dangerous."

"I am thinking that I do not understand it." She watched the red light spill across the frozen fields. "The king calls me a poisoner. A witch. He has put a price on my capture. And these people give me eggs."

"Perhaps they can tell the difference between what a person is called and what she does."

"They have no reason to trust me."

"They have every reason." He was smiling. "They have an entire sheet of paper, in a clear hand, telling them how to save their children from the king's weapons. It is the first useful thing the crown has ever sent them, and it did not come from the crown."

She turned her head. His face was soft in the failing light, and there was something in his eyes she could not entirely name, a tenderness, an awe.

"You are looking at me again."

"I am looking at a person who is very good at being loved," he said, "and does not yet know it."

She laughed, a little breathlessly, and looked away, and felt the color rise in her cheeks.

*

The herbs were Alaric's idea.

"I want to be of use," he said, the second week, as they sat over the evening meal outside the great canvas tent that served as Orsen's headquarters. "I cannot brew. I cannot distill. But I can learn to find the things you need. Show me."

"It will take years."

"Then show me the first ten."

So she did. She laid out a cloth on the grass at dawn and arranged, in careful rows, a dozen dried and fresh specimens from Malakor's stores, and walked him through them one by one in the thin morning light, with Kaelen and Orsen looking on with the grave attention of men observing a surgical procedure.

"This is monkshood," she said. "It has a blue hooded flower. The root is deadly. Do not touch it with bare hands. This is nightshade, a black berry, glossy. It looks harmless. It is not. This is foxglove, tall, purple, spotted inside the bell." She tapped each in turn. "And this one, with the finely cut leaves and the smell like mice, is hemlock. Not to be confused with--"

"Wild parsley," said Alaric.

"Yes."

"Which has a similar leaf."

"Yes."

"And a similar flower." He frowned down at the two plants. "Valeria. I confess I cannot see a single difference."

"The stem." She turned the specimens over. "Hemlock is spotted with purple. Parsley is smooth. And the smell."

He picked up the hemlock and sniffed it. His face went through a series of expressions. "That is vile."

"That is how you know."

"I begin to see why Malakor drinks so much tea." He set it down carefully. "And if I should get it wrong?"

"Then you will be dead, and I will have to find another Regent." She said it lightly, but she saw his hand tighten fractionally on the edge of the cloth, and she covered it with her own. "Alaric. I am joking."

"I know." He turned his hand over and laced his fingers with hers. "I only find that I do not enjoy the thought."

"Then you will learn it properly."

"Yes."

They spent the next hour, and every dawn for ten days after, in diligent study. He proved an excellent student. He had a ferocious memory, and a habit of repeating each fact three times under his breath, and by the end of the second week, he could name twenty-three of the twenty-five plants she showed him. The one he persistently confused was the wild parsley, which he insisted on calling "the hemlock that has been to court."

"It is not hemlock," Valeria said, for the ninth time.

"It dresses like it."

"It is a perfectly innocent vegetable."

"I do not trust anything that looks that smug."

Kaelen, listening nearby, turned away with a strangled sound that he later swore was a cough.

*

The nights were the best of it.

She had not expected that either. In the citadel, the dark had been a place for fear and vigilance. On the road, with the tents glowing like paper lanterns along the frozen fields and the fires crackling and the smell of woodsmoke and horse and wet wool heavy on the air, it was something else. Something quiet. After the evening meal, after the last of the day's duties, she and Alaric would walk away from the circle of firelight, a little way up the nearest slope, and sit with their backs against a boulder or a fallen tree and look at the stars.

"This is the first time I have seen them clearly," she said, on the twelfth night. "In the Crimson Empire there was never a window. I did not know there were so many."

"They are brighter in the north." He had one arm around her, and she was tucked against his side under his heavy cloak. "My mother used to say that every one of them was a candle someone had lit for a person they loved."

"That seems rather a lot of candles."

"Perhaps there are a great many people who are loved." He kissed her hair. "I do not know their names. I never learned the constellations. I only know there is one that looks like a spoon."

She laughed. "There. The Plough."

"It is a spoon."

"It is a plough."

"Then it is a very small farmer who has misplaced his oxen." He turned her face up to his, and kissed her slowly, and she felt the steady heat of him through all the layers of wool and leather, felt his heartbeat under her palm. The kiss deepened. His hand slid into her hair. For a while there was no army, no curse, no road. There was only the cold bright dark and the warmth of two people holding one another, and the long, slow sweet unhurried climb of something that had no name.

"We will be seen," she murmured, against his mouth.

"There is a boulder."

"There are a great many soldiers."

"They are all looking at the fire." He smiled. "It is the single great advantage of a night march. No one is looking where they should."

She did not argue. They lay beneath the cloak among the frozen grasses, in the lee of the stone, and gave themselves to one another quietly, with a gentleness that made her eyes burn. Afterward they lay tangled together while the stars wheeled slowly overhead, and she thought, with a kind of sleepy astonishment, that she had never imagined this. Not even in her dreams. She had not known that happiness could be so small and so entire, a cloak and a stone and a man's slow breathing.

"I would like," Alaric said drowsily, "to do this every night for the rest of my life."

"You are limited to two cycles of the moon."

"Then I should like to do it twice a night."

She pinched him. He yelped. Then they were laughing, quietly, helplessly, with their foreheads together, and somewhere far below them a dog barked and the camp murmured and the night went on.

*

It was on the fifteenth day that she caught him.

It was a small thing. They had stopped for the midday meal beside a stream, and she was kneeling at the water's edge washing out a cup, and she glanced back over her shoulder and saw him standing alone at the edge of the trees with his left hand held a little away from his body, looking at it.

She knew the stance. She had seen it in the corridor outside the study, the day the claws had come at breakfast. She did not call out. She finished with the cup, dried her hands, and walked across the grass, and when she reached him, she did not say a word. She only took the hand in both of hers and turned it over.

The nails were dark. Not long, not yet, not curved, but black at the beds, as though they had been dipped in ink. A faint tracery of the same dark color crept along the veins at his wrist.

"It happened an hour ago," he said, very low. "I was talking to Orsen. I felt it start and walked away. It passed."

"And you did not tell me."

"I did not want you to worry."

"Alaric." She kept her voice gentle. "We said we would not do this."

"I know."

"We said we would not hide things from one another. Not to protect, not to spare. You promised me in the library."

"I know," he said again, and she saw the struggle in his face, the old habit of silence and the new fragile thing he was trying to learn. He drew a breath. "It is frightening. When it happens in the day, I cannot see an end to it. At night, there is the moon, and there is a morning after. But this..." He turned his hand. "This has no edge. I do not know when it will stop."

"Then we will count it together."

"Count it?"

"Every time. Every hour it happens, every minute. We will write it down. Malakor will want the data." She smiled, though her eyes were bright. "It is not much. But it is a thing we can do, and I find that the only way I have ever been brave is to have a task to hold."

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he bent and pressed his forehead against hers.

"I will tell you," he said. "Every time. I swear it."

"Good."

"And you will not be angry."

"I will be furious. But I will be furious beside you."

That seemed to be enough. They stood together at the edge of the trees for a while, with the stream chattering in the background and the thin pale sun on their backs, and she felt the stillness settle over his body, felt the darkness at his wrist recede by slow degrees until the nails were only nails again. It took a quarter of an hour. When it was over, he wiped his face with his sleeve and gave her a shaky grin.

"That was rather longer than I had hoped."

"We will note it down."

*

The riders came out of the north at dusk, on the sixteenth day.

Kaelen's scouts spotted them first, three horsemen moving at a gallop along the ridge, and for a few minutes the camp stood to arms, with swords half drawn and a ripple of alarm running down the lines. But the leader wore Orsen's green, and when he swung down from the saddle, he was laughing.

"Lord Aldous's compliments to the Lady Valeria," he said, and presented a small cloth parcel. "He asked me to say that his sister has been moved to a dry room, and has had no cough for four days. He says he is eternally in your debt, and that he will join you at the southern marshes with two hundred men."

Valeria opened the cloth with fingers that were not quite steady. Inside lay a small, crooked drawing, done in charcoal on a scrap of paper. A stick-figure child with a very large smile, holding hands with a stick-figure woman in a gray dress. Underneath, in a laborious childish hand, were three words: Thank you, Lady.

She did not say anything. She only closed her fingers carefully around the little paper, and looked up, and found Alaric watching her from three paces away, his own eyes suspiciously bright.

That night, long after the fires had burned low, she woke to a sound she could not name. A scrape, or a rustle, very faint, at the edge of the camp. She lay still, listening. Beside her Alaric slept, one arm thrown across her waist. The air was cold, and the tent was dark. Outside, the sentries called their slow hourly watch.

She waited. The sound came again, closer. A soft, deliberate, careful sound, like boots on frozen grass.

Slowly, carefully, she reached for the little knife she kept under her pillow, and felt along the canvas wall until her fingers found the seam. Through the gap, in the thin starlight, she saw a pale smear of marks on the frost, a line of hoofprints that had not been there at sunset. Shod, deep, and entirely too neat. They circled the camp at the distance of a bowshot. And as she watched, a faint movement in the shadows beyond the sentries drew her eye, a patient, motionless shape against the treeline, watching the tents.

She put her hand on Alaric's shoulder.

"Wake up," she whispered. "We are not alone."