It was Alaric who asked to use the cell.

He said it on the evening of the full moon, standing at the edge of the camp with the sun going down behind the broken towers, and he said it so quietly that for a moment she thought she had misheard him.

"You cannot mean that."

"I have thought about it a great deal." His eyes were on the ruins, and his face was calm. "I have spent six years in rooms built for me. Chambers designed to hold the beast. They are all the same, Valeria. Cold stone, iron rings, a locked door. Every moon I have been put in a place whose only purpose was to remind me what I was." He turned his head. "That room is yours. It was built to remind you, too. And I think, perhaps, that if the two of us were to take it, together, and make of it something it was never meant to be..."

"It was meant to be a cage."

"Then let us be what it did not plan for."

She stared at him. She felt something enormous and slow stir in her chest, a feeling she had no name for, a wild, trembling mixture of terror and tenderness and a fierce, shining kind of hope.

"The door would be open," she said.

"Propped wide. With an iron bar from the ruins. No one locked in, and no one locked out."

"Kaelen will have a fit."

"Kaelen will stand at the top of the stair with his sword drawn and complain for the entire night." A flicker of his old dry humor crossed his face. "I believe he has been looking forward to it."

She laughed. She did not mean to, but it came out of her in a small, helpless, shaky burst, and then she was crying, and then laughing again, and Alaric caught her against his chest and held her while the sun went down.

*

They went down at moonrise.

The corridor was not as she had left it. Kaelen's men had been at it all afternoon, carrying out the worst of the rubble, scouring the floors, hanging lanterns from the old iron brackets until the whole long hall glowed amber and gold. Someone had spread blankets in the seventh cell. Someone had set a jug of water on the table, and a bowl of dried figs, and a small bunch of winter heather in a chipped cup. The cot had been dragged to the center of the floor, and the old gray coverlet replaced with a thick wool blanket the color of wine. The iron ring on the wall had been wrapped in a strip of cloth.

She stood in the doorway for a long time.

"It looks," she said, "almost like a place where a person might sleep."

"That was the intention."

"Who did this?"

"The men. All of them. They asked me for permission this morning." Alaric stood behind her with his hand at her waist. "Orsen's men, my men. They said they would not have you go into that room as you had left it."

She pressed her fingers to her lips. "I do not know how to thank them."

"I think you have been doing it for months." He kissed the top of her head. "Come."

They lay down on the wine-colored blanket with the door propped wide behind them, and the lantern light made a long gold path down the corridor to the foot of the stair. Far above, in the cold night air, she could hear the soft sounds of men moving. A cough. A cleared throat. The scrape of a boot on stone. They were out there, hundreds of them, ringing the ruined tower in a silent circle, keeping watch over the two people who lay in the dark and waited for the moon.

"They are very quiet," Alaric murmured.

"They are afraid."

"Of me?"

"For you." She turned in his arms and laid her palm flat against his cheek. "Not of."

He did not answer. He only closed his eyes and turned his face into her hand, and she felt the first fine tremor move through him, the beginning of the long night.

*

It was worse than any before it.

She had known it would be. Malakor had warned her, in his anxious, careful way, that the curse was gathering strength with each cycle, that the weeks since the last moon had given it room to coil and sharpen. She had nodded and said she understood. She had not understood. The first great wave struck him at the ninth bell and seemed to lift him bodily off the blanket, arching his spine in a bow so sharp she heard it crack. A scream tore out of him that she felt in her own ribs. Black fissures opened along his arms and back, running with dark fluid, and his hands, clenched in the blanket, lengthened and curved into claws that shredded the wool to ribbons.

"Alaric." She was on her knees beside him, gripping his shoulders. "Alaric, look at me."

His eyes opened. They were entirely red.

"Valeria," he said, in a voice she barely recognized. It was thick and ragged and strange, and under it she heard another voice, deep and slow, like a stone scraped across a stone. "Valeria. It is... I cannot..."

"You can." She pressed her forehead against his, ignoring the heat that came off him in waves. "You held last month. You held the month before. You will hold now."

"It is stronger."

"I know."

"I do not know if..."

"I know." She cupped his face in both hands. "Alaric. Listen to me. Do you hear the lantern? Count it. One. Two. Three."

He counted. She felt his jaw working against her palms, felt the muscles in his neck stand out like cords. She counted with him. She counted to ten, and again to ten, and again, and between the numbers she told him that she loved him, over and over, in a low steady murmur, as she might have said a prayer. She pressed herself against him, skin to skin through the thin linen of her shift, letting the warmth of her body flood into his. And she felt it, rising from her like heat from a hearth, the soft sweet spiced fragrance of her own blood. It was stronger than it had been in the north, fuller and warmer, the scent of something returning. She did not offer him her blood. She had sworn to him she would not. But she let the scent of it fill the little cell, and she felt his shuddering breath catch, and slow, and deepen.

"There," she whispered. "There. That is it. Stay."

It was the longest night of her life.

She would not remember most of it. She remembered his claws on her arms, and the way he flinched from them in horror. She remembered the third bell, when the worst came, and the sound he made, a long keening cry that rang down the corridor and echoed through the ruined halls above. She remembered how the men at the top of the stair did not move, though she knew they must have been shaking. She remembered, at the fifth bell, looking up and seeing Kaelen standing in the doorway with his sword in his hand and tears running unashamed down his face.

"Do you need anything?" he whispered.

"Water," she said. "And nothing else."

He brought it himself. He knelt, set the jug down, and gripped Alaric's shoulder, once, hard, before he rose and went away.

She held on.

It was somewhere after the sixth bell that she became aware of the sound.

It was very faint. A soft, steady, measured tread, coming down the stair, unhurried and light, like the footsteps of a man crossing a drawing room. It did not belong with the thud of the guards' boots or the rattle of their mail. It had a clean, dry, neat sound, like polished leather on stone.

She raised her head.

"Alaric," she said softly. "Can you hear me?"

"Yes." His breath was ragged but his eyes, though still rimmed with red, were clearer than they had been an hour before. "Someone is coming."

"Yes."

"The guards..."

"There are no guards." She was already moving, rising to her feet, drawing her shift smooth with trembling fingers. "He has slipped them. Of course he has. It is what he does."

She did not need to turn. She felt it in the back of her neck, the old familiar prickle of attention, like a cold hand laid on her skin. She stood in the center of the little room with her feet bare on the stone and her back straight, and looked toward the door, and waited.

The footsteps stopped.

A thin pale figure stood framed in the lantern light, in a long gray coat buttoned to the throat and a pair of immaculate white gloves. He was older than she remembered, and more stooped. The fine dark hair had gone to a wispy silver. But the face was the same, narrow and fine-boned and faintly sorrowful, with eyes the color of pewter that moved over her with an expression of almost tender interest.

"Good evening, Subject Seven," said Physician Orlan.

His voice was a murmur. It had always been a murmur. She had not forgotten a syllable.

"My name," said Valeria, "is Valeria."

A small, polite, regretful smile touched his mouth. "Ah. So I am told. I was very sorry to hear it. I had hoped you might retain the designation. It was so much more convenient."

"I am sure it was."

"You have grown." He tilted his head. "You are very well. Remarkably so. I confess I am astonished. After the strain of the siege, the exsanguination, the... what shall I call it... the emotional upheaval, I had expected to find you diminished." His pewter eyes moved over her, clinical and warm and horribly, horribly kind. "Instead you have blossomed. The compound has stabilized. Strengthened. I should very much like to know how."

"You are not going to."

"No?" He sighed. "I did think you might say that."

He lifted one gloved hand. In it was a small glass sphere, no larger than a plum, filled with a fine pale powder. She knew it before he moved. She had seen it a hundred times. She had breathed it a hundred times. And in the instant he opened his fingers to let it fall, she drew a deep breath and held it, and flung up the corner of the thick wool blanket, and swept the little cell with a single great arc of her arm.

The sphere shattered on the stone. A cloud of white dust exploded across the room.

"Grave orchid," she said calmly, and her voice sounded strange in her own ears, muffled by the fold of cloth across her mouth. "Pollen of the white form, dried and ground. Used for sedation. One breath, and a grown man sleeps for a day." She took a step toward him through the swirling dust. "I was dosed with it eleven times. I know the antidote. I know the dilution. I know exactly how far it travels in still air."

Orlan staggered backward. His narrow face had gone gray. For the first time she saw the polite mask crack, and beneath it, a flicker of something she had never seen on that face before. It was fear.

"You were always an excellent student," he whispered.

"I had excellent teachers."

She struck him once. It was a plain, hard, open-handed blow, delivered with all the force of twelve years, and it caught him across the temple and sent him sprawling. His head hit the doorframe. His eyes rolled. And Valeria, breathing slowly through the wool, took out the small pouch at her belt and scattered a pinch of gray powder over his face, and watched his eyelids droop and flutter and close.

The dust settled. She waited, counting, until the last of the white cloud had drifted into the corridor, and then she lowered the cloth from her mouth. Her hands were perfectly steady.

"Valerian and poppy," she said to the unconscious man. "You taught me that one yourself."

There was a sound behind her, a low rough breath, and she turned.

Alaric knelt on the blanket. He was upright, on his hands and knees, shaking from head to foot. His eyes were red. His hands were still claws. But he had not moved. He had not so much as shifted his weight, though the man who had tortured the woman he loved lay a scant pace from his reach, helpless and unconscious and utterly vulnerable.

"You did not," she said softly.

"I wanted to." His voice was a rasp. "I wanted to so very much."

"I know."

"But you said you wished to look at him."

"Yes." She came back across the room and knelt before him and took his clawed hands in hers. "And I have. I find he is a smaller man than I remembered."

Something shivered through his face, a ghost of a smile. Then the wave took him again, and he gasped and doubled over, and she caught him in her arms. The long night ground on. The lantern guttered. The men at the top of the stair did not move.

*

Dawn found them in the cell with Orlan bound in a corner, Kaelen's soldiers standing guard at the door, and Alaric asleep on the wine-colored blanket with his head in her lap.

She had not slept. She sat with her back against the wall, stroking his hair, watching the gray light seep down the stair. He was breathing slowly. His hands were human. The black fissures had closed to faint pale scars. He looked very young.

"He will sleep until noon," Malakor said softly, kneeling beside her. He had come down at first light, white-faced, with a bundle of herbs and a dozen anxious questions. "My lady, the curse. Last night. Did you..."

"It held." She lifted her head. "It was worse. It was very bad. But it held."

"And he..."

"He did not lose himself." Her eyes filled. "Not once."

Malakor pressed his hand over his mouth. He did not speak for a long moment. Then he drew a deep breath and rose to his feet, and turned to the corner, where a thin figure in a gray coat sat slumped against the wall with a rope around his wrists.

"And that?"

"Awake," said Orlan, in a murmur. He had been awake for some minutes, she thought. He sat with his eyes half open, looking at her with that old, calm, curious regard. There was a bruise swelling on his temple. "Awake and rather uncomfortable, I fear. Do you mind terribly if I stretch my legs?"

"Yes," said Valeria.

"Ah." He inclined his head. "I thought you might."

She rose, gently easing Alaric's head onto the blanket, and crossed the cell to stand over him. He looked up at her. He was smaller, she thought, in the thin gray light, and older, and tired. There was a smear of pollen on his white glove. She felt, to her own mild surprise, nothing but a distant pity.

"You came here to take me," she said.

"I came to examine you. It is not the same."

"It is exactly the same." She crouched until their eyes were level. "Orlan. I am going to ask you three questions, and you are going to answer them. And then I am going to decide what to do with you."

"And if I decline?"

"Then I will give you a dose of ashen bell, in a cup of tea, and watch what happens." She smiled a small, cold, courteous smile. "I know the amount. I took it myself, at nine, and survived. I do not think you would."

He studied her. For the first time, he looked a little uneasy.

"Ask," he said.

"There are three plants I still need. Drowned lily. Crimson thorn. Grave orchid, the deep-forest form, not the pale one you carry. Where do they grow?"

He did not hesitate. She understood, with a kind of grim amusement, that he was a scientist to the end, and that the question had engaged him as a puzzle. "The drowned lily is in the old cistern, beneath the palace," he said. "The Weeping Chamber. It has been flooded for decades. The crimson thorn grows on the northern wall of the emperor's mausoleum, where the soil is red. The orchid..." He paused, thinking. "In the west garden, among the roots of the great cypress. You will have to dig."

"Thank you."

"It was no trouble."

"Second question." She held his gaze. "In the note you left for me, you wrote that my recent exertions had altered my compound. That you were fascinated. Three weeks ago, you said. How did you know?"

"Ah." He smiled. "That is a very good question."

"Answer it."

"I have a correspondent." His murmur was gentle, almost apologetic. "A friend at the Shadowfall Citadel. He sends word, from time to time, to the king's chancellor, who passes it on. Reports on your health. Your habits. Your experiments with tolerance, which you have kept so carefully in a notebook under your mattress. I find them very elegant. I should have thought of the technique myself."

The room seemed to go suddenly very cold.

"A correspondent," said Valeria. Her voice sounded distant. "At Shadowfall."

"For some time now. Since before the siege." Orlan's pewter eyes were bright with a mild, scholarly pleasure. "A most diligent informant. I have never learned the name. The letters come in the same blue ink, you understand, and the chancellor does not trust me with details." He sighed. "I imagine it is someone you are very fond of. That is generally how these things go."

No one spoke. In the doorway, Kaelen had gone rigid. Malakor made a small choked sound, and Orsen, who had come down the stair behind them, stood with his hand on his sword hilt and his pale eyes hard as stone.

"Blue ink," said Valeria slowly.

"Blue ink," said Orlan. "I do hope that helps."

She rose to her feet. She looked at the faces around her, one after another, the faces of the men and women she had come to trust with her life. Kaelen's, grave and stunned. Malakor's, stricken. Orsen's, grim as granite. Behind them, on the stair, a ring of soldiers who had stood all night in the cold. She felt a sick, slow, creeping chill unfurl in the pit of her stomach, and she understood, with terrible clarity, that somewhere at the heart of everything she had built, a stranger had been writing letters in blue ink, and that she had been watched for a very long time.