She told Alaric that night, in the dark of their tent, with her mouth pressed against his shoulder so the canvas would not carry her voice.
"Roth," she whispered.
He did not move. She felt the whole length of him go still against her, the slow stilling of a man who has been handed a thing he had been afraid to pick up.
"You are certain?"
"I am not certain of anything." She drew a shaky breath. "I have no proof. I have a way a man stood, and a cup of tea, and a smudge of ink on a cuff that I noticed weeks ago and thought nothing of. It was blue. It was on his right sleeve, just above the wrist. I was looking at his hands, and thinking how tired he looked, and I thought, he has been writing."
"Writing what?"
"Reports, I assumed. For the garrison." She laughed bitterly. "It was only that. A man with ink on his sleeve. I do not think I would have remembered, if the pigeon had not fallen."
"He has been with us since Shadowfall." Alaric's voice was very low. "He fought on the east wall the night of the siege. He buried eleven of our dead. I have trusted him with my life."
"I know."
"Why?" She felt the word drag out of him. "What does he gain? He is a captain of the garrison. He has served for twenty years. If Cedric had offered him gold, he would have spat in his face."
"It is not gold." She laid her hand against his cheek. "Alaric. Cedric did not write 'Your reward is waiting.' He wrote 'Your daughter is safe.' You know what that means."
His breath caught. "Roth has a daughter."
"I do not know. I do not know anything about him. But I know that the man who stood at the edge of that circle this morning was not the face of a traitor. It was the face of a man who has been hanging over a cliff by his fingertips for months, and has just felt the rope go slack."
They lay together in the dark for a long time, neither speaking. Outside, the wind stirred the canvas and a night bird called from the marsh.
"We cannot arrest him," said Alaric, at last. "Not yet. If we do, Cedric will know within hours. He will assume the letters have stopped because we found the leak, and whatever hold he has on the girl..."
"He will use it."
"Yes."
"So we say nothing." She nodded slowly against his chest. "We keep him close. We let him believe he has not been seen. And we give him something to write that does us no harm." A faint, sad smile touched her mouth. "It would be a kindness, in its way. If he is writing, then the girl is alive. If the letters stop, she will not be."
"You would use him."
"I would use his fear." She swallowed. "Not to hurt him. To find her."
He was quiet. Then, slowly, he drew her against him and pressed his lips to her hair. "You are the least vengeful person I have ever met," he said. "It is a very strange quality in someone who has every right to be a monster."
"I am only tired of monsters," said Valeria, and closed her eyes.
*
The Weeping Chamber lay beneath the palace's western wing, down a spiral stair so narrow that Alaric had to turn sideways to descend it.
The ruins had not been kind to it. A great beam had fallen across the entrance, and half the stairs had collapsed in a tumble of broken masonry. Kaelen's men had spent a full morning clearing the way, grunting and swearing in the dust, until a ragged opening gaped in the wall and a cold breath of damp air rose out of it, smelling of stone and standing water and something faintly, sweetly rotten.
At the bottom of the stair, the floor ended.
Valeria stood at the edge with the lantern in her hand and looked down into a vast dark circular pool. It was easily forty paces across, a great domed cistern of black stone, its ceiling lost in shadow, its surface perfectly still. Pale roots hung from cracks in the dome like frozen rain. A dripping sound filled the air, soft and endless and strangely musical, the slow patter of water falling into water from a thousand tiny seeps. It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful ruin she had ever seen. It was also, she thought, the kind of place where people died.
"The Weeping Chamber," said Malakor, at her shoulder, in a hushed voice. "Orlan was not exaggerating. I think it must have been a reservoir, once. A cistern for the palace. And over a hundred years, the toxins seeped in..."
"And the lilies took root." Valeria pointed.
Far out in the black water, almost at the center, a faint pale glimmer rose from the surface. Not a single flower but a drifting constellation, dozens of them, floating like stars on the dark. Each had six narrow white petals, tinged blue at the heart, and the lantern light caught them and made them glow.
"Drowned lily," she said softly. "It grows in the dark. The flower is nothing. The root is what I need. It lies on the bed of the pool, in the silt, and it must be pulled up whole, with the soil still clinging."
"How deep?"
"Perhaps twelve feet. Perhaps more." She turned to Alaric. "There is no way to do this from the surface."
He looked at the water for a long moment. Then he began to unbuckle his sword belt.
"No," said Kaelen.
"I am the only one who can swim well enough."
"Alaric." The captain's voice had gone tight. "You are three weeks from the end of the moon. You have a curse in your heart that has begun to wake in the daylight. If the cold takes you..."
"Then I will have a rope around my waist, and you will pull me out." Alaric's tone was gentle and absolutely firm. "I swore to her that I would not leave her to do this alone. I do not intend to break the vow to save my own skin."
"Then I will go instead."
"You cannot. You do not know the plant." He glanced at Valeria. "She does. So she must go down. And I will go with her."
Valeria took a step forward. "Alaric, you do not have to..."
"I do." He smiled faintly. "We agreed. We do this together. That includes the parts that are cold and wet and extremely unpleasant."
She could think of no answer to that. She bit her lip, and nodded, and began to unfasten her cloak.
*
They roped themselves together at the waist with fifty feet of stout hemp, and Kaelen and three of his strongest men took hold of the other end. A fourth man took the rope between Kaelen and the edge. He was a lean, gray-bearded captain, with a drawn face and a bent hat, and he came forward without a word and set his hands on the rope with a solemn, careful air, as though it were a thing he had resolved to hold.
Valeria saw him, and her stomach clenched.
She had thought about it all night. She had thought about it as she walked down the stair, as she watched the men uncoiling the hemp. Roth had come to the cistern with the others, because he was a captain of the guard, and because it would have been strange if he had not. She had looked at him across the dark, and he had looked away. And now he stood on the stone with the lifeline of the woman he was betraying running through his two hands.
She had planned for it. She had not planned to feel so cold.
"You are certain you want me?" said Roth, in a low voice, as she passed. "There are younger men."
"I want you," said Valeria.
He looked at her. His face, in the lantern light, was gray and drawn, and there was a flicker in his eyes that she could not quite read. "As you wish, my lady."
She smiled at him, a small, steady, gentle smile, and stepped to the edge of the pool.
The water was colder than anything she had ever known. It closed over her ankles like iron, then her knees, then her waist, and she gasped aloud. Alaric took her hand. His fingers were warm and strong. Together they waded out, step by slow step, until the water reached their shoulders and the floor fell away beneath their feet, and then they were swimming, and the dark rose up around them like the inside of a bell.
She had a small glass lantern, sealed with wax and strapped to her wrist. By its dim pearly light she saw the pale roots hanging from the dome, the black glitter of the water, the faint ghostly gleam of the lilies drifting ahead. Alaric swam beside her, strong and steady, his hair plastered to his skull. She saw him glance at her, and nod, and she nodded back.
They dove.
The cold hit her like a fist. For a moment she thought her heart would stop. She drove downward through the black water, kicking hard, her ears aching, her lungs burning. The lantern made a small trembling globe of light. Beneath her, the floor of the cistern rose up out of the dark, a bed of soft pale silt, and in it, spreading in thick white tangles across the bottom, lay the roots.
They were beautiful. They were enormous. They coiled and twined through the mud in great pearly braids, each thick as her wrist, glimmering faintly blue at the tips. She reached out, and her fingers closed on one, and a sudden dizzying surge went up her arm. The water seemed to swirl. The lantern light stretched and blurred. She felt a strange warm drowsiness steal over her, soft as a blanket.
The lily's breath, she thought dimly. The pollen. It is in the water. It is making me sleep.
She dug her fingers into the root and pulled.
It came free in a billow of silt. The cloud rose around her, thick and white, and she lost sight of the lantern, of Alaric, of everything. Her lungs were on fire. Her limbs had gone heavy and slow. She tried to kick upward and could not. She felt herself sinking, slowly, gently, into the soft dark.
Then a hand closed on her wrist.
It was warm. It was iron-strong. It dragged her upward through the silt, through the dark, and she felt the rope go taut around her waist, felt the water rush past her face, and then her head broke the surface and she was gasping and choking in a great roar of cold air.
"Pull!" It was Alaric's voice, hoarse and desperate. "Pull, now!"
The rope hauled. She felt hands under her arms, Kaelen's voice shouting, the hard cold stone of the cistern's edge beneath her back. She lay there, retching, clutching the great pale root to her chest, and above her the vaulted dark was full of the faces of men.
"Valeria. Valeria." Alaric was on his knees beside her, water streaming from his hair, his face white. He had his hands on either side of her head. "Look at me. Say something."
"I have it," she croaked.
He gave a wild, cracked laugh. "Of course you do."
"The pollen. It is in the water. It puts you to sleep. You must..." She coughed. "You must not stay down there more than a minute."
"I know that now."
"I should have warned you."
"You should have done nothing of the kind." He gathered her into his arms and held her hard, shaking, his face buried in her wet hair. "You nearly drowned, you impossible woman."
She laughed weakly into his shoulder. Then, over his arm, she saw a figure standing alone at the edge of the group.
Roth.
He stood with his hands hanging empty at his sides. The rope lay in a loose coil at his feet. He was staring at her with an expression of such naked, helpless horror that for a moment she did not recognize him. His face had gone gray as ash. His mouth was working. And she understood, in a sudden clear rush of sorrow, that for the space of those few terrible minutes, with her life running through his two hands, he had held on.
He had held on with everything he had.
He looked away. He turned, and walked off into the shadows of the cistern, and no one stopped him.
*
The rest came easily, after that.
The crimson thorn grew where Orlan had promised, along the northern wall of the emperor's mausoleum, in a bed of soil that was red as rust. It was a squat, vicious, barbed plant, and it drew blood from every one of them, but Malakor harvested it with a pair of leather gauntlets and a look of absolute rapture. The grave orchid took longer. It lay among the roots of the great cypress in the west garden, a dozen feet down, and they dug for the better part of a day. Kaelen's men, grumbling, took turns with the shovels. At dusk, with the last light slanting gold across the broken towers, a soldier gave a hoarse shout, and they scraped back the soil to reveal a single drooping, ghostly flower, white as bone, its petals stained faintly purple at the tips.
"That is the last," said Valeria.
"All twelve?"
"All twelve." She took the flower in her hands, and felt, for the first time in weeks, her chest loosen. "We have them. All of them. Malakor, we can begin."
The alchemist let out a long shuddering sigh and sat down hard on the turned earth. "Forgive me," he said, in a thin voice. "I think I should like to sit for a moment."
They were still laughing, a little giddily, when the horns sounded from the northern road.
It was Pell Aldous, with two hundred riders at his back and a green banner snapping above his head. He came pounding down the track in a cloud of dust, spurring his horse, and flung himself out of the saddle before it had stopped. His sandy hair was tousled. His face was flushed with hard riding. He took one look at Valeria, and his whole face split into a wide, boyish grin.
"My lady! I have ridden four days without a bed. Lord Orsen told me you would be here, and Merewyn told me I was a fool if I came without telling you first." He drew breath. "She is well. She is running about the garden. She has put on two pounds. The physician says it is a miracle."
"It is honey and thyme," said Valeria, smiling. "And a dry room."
"It is the finest medicine in the realm." He seized her hand and pressed it between both of his. "I will never be able to repay you. I swear on my life, there is nothing I would not do."
"You may begin," she said gravely, "by finding something to eat. Your men look famished."
He laughed, and let her go, and went to see to the horses.
*
The first dose came that night.
They did it in the cell. It was Valeria's idea, and when Alaric stared at her in bafflement, she smiled and said, "It is a good room. It has a hearth, a door that opens, and a very patient man to sit beside the bed. I cannot think of a better place to begin."
Malakor measured it with infinite care. A single drop of bleeding reed, distilled to a thin red tincture, diluted in a cup of warm broth. He watched her drink it with the scrupulous attention of a priest at a rite, a stack of antidotes arranged on the table at his elbow. Alaric sat on the edge of the cot with her hand in both of his, and did not once take his eyes from her face.
"It tastes of iron," she said, making a face. "And something sweet."
"Do not make jokes. Tell me how you feel."
"Warm." She considered. "A little dizzy. There is a fullness in my chest, like a held breath."
"Pulse?" said Malakor.
"Quick," said Alaric. He had two fingers against her wrist. "Fast, but even."
The fever came an hour later. It rose slowly, a flush along her cheekbones, a damp heat at her temples, a faint trembling in her hands. She lay back against the pillow and described it, as she had promised, in a low calm voice. The heat behind her eyes. The strange silver taste at the back of her throat. The way the lantern light seemed to swell and ripple. Alaric listened to every word. He wiped her forehead with a cool cloth. He murmured to her, steady and low, and did not once look away.
By the third hour the fever broke. She felt it go, a long slow ebb of heat, and lay limp and damp and astonishingly clear-headed. Malakor, who had been taking notes at a furious pace, sat back and closed his book with trembling hands.
"It is perfect," he whispered. "It is exactly as expected. The body is responding. In a week we may double the dose."
"Go and sleep," said Alaric, without turning his head. "Both of you. I will sit with her."
Malakor went. Kaelen, who had been leaning in the doorway for hours with his arms folded, clapped Alaric once on the shoulder and followed. The door swung quietly shut.
She lay quite still for a long moment, listening to the pulse in her ears. Then she turned her head and looked at him.
He was gazing at her with an expression so tender and so raw that her heart stuttered. His eyes were bright. He had not wiped his face, and tears stood in them, unshed.
"You did it," he said.
"I did it."
"You walked into the fire, and you came out."
"With you beside me." She raised her hand and laid it on his cheek. "It is the thing that makes it bearable, Alaric. Not the dose. Not the antidote. You."
He bent his head, and kissed her. It was slow and soft and unhurried, a kiss that tasted of salt and relief, and she felt something in her chest unlock. She drew him down beside her on the narrow cot. He came, gently, with a catch of laughter in his throat, careful of her weakness. The lantern guttered. The fire in the little hearth settled to a bed of coals.
They made love quietly, in the amber half-dark, as two people who had very nearly lost the thing they were holding. There was no urgency in it, no desperation. Only a tender deliberate certainty, a slow rediscovery, his mouth warm against her throat and her hands gripping his shoulders. She whispered his name. He whispered hers. And when it was over, they lay tangled together in the wine-colored blanket with her head on his chest and his fingers tracing slow circles on her back, and she felt, for a long time, that nothing in the world could touch them.
It was past midnight when she felt him tense.
It was a small thing. A catch in his breathing. A subtle stiffening of the arm around her. She lifted her head, and saw his face in the dim glow, drawn and intent, his eyes fixed on some point in the dark.
"Alaric?"
"It is nothing." But his voice was thin. "I thought... a moment ago. A pressure."
She slid her hand to his chest. Beneath her palm, his heart was thudding, fast and hard. And under it, faint but unmistakable, she felt something else. A slow, low, rhythmic pulsing, like a second heartbeat, deep in the bone. Very quiet. Very patient. Very close.
He drew a ragged breath, and the pulse faded. They lay motionless in the darkness, staring at each other, neither of them speaking.
"How long?" she whispered.
"I do not know."
"Malakor said two cycles. We have used one."
"Yes." His arms tightened around her. His voice was calm, but she could hear the fear beneath it. "Which means, my love, that we have perhaps fifteen days."
You've reached the end of this chapter
She told Alaric that night, in the dark of their tent, with her mouth pressed against his shoulder so the canvas would not carry her voice.
"Roth," she whispered.
He did not move. She felt the whole length of him go still against her, the slow stilling of a man who has been handed a thing he had been afraid to pick up.
"You are certain?"
"I am not certain of anything." She drew a shaky breath. "I have no proof. I have a way a man stood, and a cup of tea, and a smudge of ink on a cuff that I noticed weeks ago and thought nothing of. It was blue. It was on his right sleeve, just above the wrist. I was looking at his hands, and thinking how tired he looked, and I thought, he has been writing."
"Writing what?"
"Reports, I assumed. For the garrison." She laughed bitterly. "It was only that. A man with ink on his sleeve. I do not think I would have remembered, if the pigeon had not fallen."
"He has been with us since Shadowfall." Alaric's voice was very low. "He fought on the east wall the night of the siege. He buried eleven of our dead. I have trusted him with my life."
"I know."
"Why?" She felt the word drag out of him. "What does he gain? He is a captain of the garrison. He has served for twenty years. If Cedric had offered him gold, he would have spat in his face."
"It is not gold." She laid her hand against his cheek. "Alaric. Cedric did not write 'Your reward is waiting.' He wrote 'Your daughter is safe.' You know what that means."
His breath caught. "Roth has a daughter."
"I do not know. I do not know anything about him. But I know that the man who stood at the edge of that circle this morning was not the face of a traitor. It was the face of a man who has been hanging over a cliff by his fingertips for months, and has just felt the rope go slack."
They lay together in the dark for a long time, neither speaking. Outside, the wind stirred the canvas and a night bird called from the marsh.
"We cannot arrest him," said Alaric, at last. "Not yet. If we do, Cedric will know within hours. He will assume the letters have stopped because we found the leak, and whatever hold he has on the girl..."
"He will use it."
"Yes."
"So we say nothing." She nodded slowly against his chest. "We keep him close. We let him believe he has not been seen. And we give him something to write that does us no harm." A faint, sad smile touched her mouth. "It would be a kindness, in its way. If he is writing, then the girl is alive. If the letters stop, she will not be."
"You would use him."
"I would use his fear." She swallowed. "Not to hurt him. To find her."
He was quiet. Then, slowly, he drew her against him and pressed his lips to her hair. "You are the least vengeful person I have ever met," he said. "It is a very strange quality in someone who has every right to be a monster."
"I am only tired of monsters," said Valeria, and closed her eyes.
*
The Weeping Chamber lay beneath the palace's western wing, down a spiral stair so narrow that Alaric had to turn sideways to descend it.
The ruins had not been kind to it. A great beam had fallen across the entrance, and half the stairs had collapsed in a tumble of broken masonry. Kaelen's men had spent a full morning clearing the way, grunting and swearing in the dust, until a ragged opening gaped in the wall and a cold breath of damp air rose out of it, smelling of stone and standing water and something faintly, sweetly rotten.
At the bottom of the stair, the floor ended.
Valeria stood at the edge with the lantern in her hand and looked down into a vast dark circular pool. It was easily forty paces across, a great domed cistern of black stone, its ceiling lost in shadow, its surface perfectly still. Pale roots hung from cracks in the dome like frozen rain. A dripping sound filled the air, soft and endless and strangely musical, the slow patter of water falling into water from a thousand tiny seeps. It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful ruin she had ever seen. It was also, she thought, the kind of place where people died.
"The Weeping Chamber," said Malakor, at her shoulder, in a hushed voice. "Orlan was not exaggerating. I think it must have been a reservoir, once. A cistern for the palace. And over a hundred years, the toxins seeped in..."
"And the lilies took root." Valeria pointed.
Far out in the black water, almost at the center, a faint pale glimmer rose from the surface. Not a single flower but a drifting constellation, dozens of them, floating like stars on the dark. Each had six narrow white petals, tinged blue at the heart, and the lantern light caught them and made them glow.
"Drowned lily," she said softly. "It grows in the dark. The flower is nothing. The root is what I need. It lies on the bed of the pool, in the silt, and it must be pulled up whole, with the soil still clinging."
"How deep?"
"Perhaps twelve feet. Perhaps more." She turned to Alaric. "There is no way to do this from the surface."
He looked at the water for a long moment. Then he began to unbuckle his sword belt.
"No," said Kaelen.
"I am the only one who can swim well enough."
"Alaric." The captain's voice had gone tight. "You are three weeks from the end of the moon. You have a curse in your heart that has begun to wake in the daylight. If the cold takes you..."
"Then I will have a rope around my waist, and you will pull me out." Alaric's tone was gentle and absolutely firm. "I swore to her that I would not leave her to do this alone. I do not intend to break the vow to save my own skin."
"Then I will go instead."
"You cannot. You do not know the plant." He glanced at Valeria. "She does. So she must go down. And I will go with her."
Valeria took a step forward. "Alaric, you do not have to..."
"I do." He smiled faintly. "We agreed. We do this together. That includes the parts that are cold and wet and extremely unpleasant."
She could think of no answer to that. She bit her lip, and nodded, and began to unfasten her cloak.
*
They roped themselves together at the waist with fifty feet of stout hemp, and Kaelen and three of his strongest men took hold of the other end. A fourth man took the rope between Kaelen and the edge. He was a lean, gray-bearded captain, with a drawn face and a bent hat, and he came forward without a word and set his hands on the rope with a solemn, careful air, as though it were a thing he had resolved to hold.
Valeria saw him, and her stomach clenched.
She had thought about it all night. She had thought about it as she walked down the stair, as she watched the men uncoiling the hemp. Roth had come to the cistern with the others, because he was a captain of the guard, and because it would have been strange if he had not. She had looked at him across the dark, and he had looked away. And now he stood on the stone with the lifeline of the woman he was betraying running through his two hands.
She had planned for it. She had not planned to feel so cold.
"You are certain you want me?" said Roth, in a low voice, as she passed. "There are younger men."
"I want you," said Valeria.
He looked at her. His face, in the lantern light, was gray and drawn, and there was a flicker in his eyes that she could not quite read. "As you wish, my lady."
She smiled at him, a small, steady, gentle smile, and stepped to the edge of the pool.
The water was colder than anything she had ever known. It closed over her ankles like iron, then her knees, then her waist, and she gasped aloud. Alaric took her hand. His fingers were warm and strong. Together they waded out, step by slow step, until the water reached their shoulders and the floor fell away beneath their feet, and then they were swimming, and the dark rose up around them like the inside of a bell.
She had a small glass lantern, sealed with wax and strapped to her wrist. By its dim pearly light she saw the pale roots hanging from the dome, the black glitter of the water, the faint ghostly gleam of the lilies drifting ahead. Alaric swam beside her, strong and steady, his hair plastered to his skull. She saw him glance at her, and nod, and she nodded back.
They dove.
The cold hit her like a fist. For a moment she thought her heart would stop. She drove downward through the black water, kicking hard, her ears aching, her lungs burning. The lantern made a small trembling globe of light. Beneath her, the floor of the cistern rose up out of the dark, a bed of soft pale silt, and in it, spreading in thick white tangles across the bottom, lay the roots.
They were beautiful. They were enormous. They coiled and twined through the mud in great pearly braids, each thick as her wrist, glimmering faintly blue at the tips. She reached out, and her fingers closed on one, and a sudden dizzying surge went up her arm. The water seemed to swirl. The lantern light stretched and blurred. She felt a strange warm drowsiness steal over her, soft as a blanket.
The lily's breath, she thought dimly. The pollen. It is in the water. It is making me sleep.
She dug her fingers into the root and pulled.
It came free in a billow of silt. The cloud rose around her, thick and white, and she lost sight of the lantern, of Alaric, of everything. Her lungs were on fire. Her limbs had gone heavy and slow. She tried to kick upward and could not. She felt herself sinking, slowly, gently, into the soft dark.
Then a hand closed on her wrist.
It was warm. It was iron-strong. It dragged her upward through the silt, through the dark, and she felt the rope go taut around her waist, felt the water rush past her face, and then her head broke the surface and she was gasping and choking in a great roar of cold air.
"Pull!" It was Alaric's voice, hoarse and desperate. "Pull, now!"
The rope hauled. She felt hands under her arms, Kaelen's voice shouting, the hard cold stone of the cistern's edge beneath her back. She lay there, retching, clutching the great pale root to her chest, and above her the vaulted dark was full of the faces of men.
"Valeria. Valeria." Alaric was on his knees beside her, water streaming from his hair, his face white. He had his hands on either side of her head. "Look at me. Say something."
"I have it," she croaked.
He gave a wild, cracked laugh. "Of course you do."
"The pollen. It is in the water. It puts you to sleep. You must..." She coughed. "You must not stay down there more than a minute."
"I know that now."
"I should have warned you."
"You should have done nothing of the kind." He gathered her into his arms and held her hard, shaking, his face buried in her wet hair. "You nearly drowned, you impossible woman."
She laughed weakly into his shoulder. Then, over his arm, she saw a figure standing alone at the edge of the group.
Roth.
He stood with his hands hanging empty at his sides. The rope lay in a loose coil at his feet. He was staring at her with an expression of such naked, helpless horror that for a moment she did not recognize him. His face had gone gray as ash. His mouth was working. And she understood, in a sudden clear rush of sorrow, that for the space of those few terrible minutes, with her life running through his two hands, he had held on.
He had held on with everything he had.
He looked away. He turned, and walked off into the shadows of the cistern, and no one stopped him.
*
The rest came easily, after that.
The crimson thorn grew where Orlan had promised, along the northern wall of the emperor's mausoleum, in a bed of soil that was red as rust. It was a squat, vicious, barbed plant, and it drew blood from every one of them, but Malakor harvested it with a pair of leather gauntlets and a look of absolute rapture. The grave orchid took longer. It lay among the roots of the great cypress in the west garden, a dozen feet down, and they dug for the better part of a day. Kaelen's men, grumbling, took turns with the shovels. At dusk, with the last light slanting gold across the broken towers, a soldier gave a hoarse shout, and they scraped back the soil to reveal a single drooping, ghostly flower, white as bone, its petals stained faintly purple at the tips.
"That is the last," said Valeria.
"All twelve?"
"All twelve." She took the flower in her hands, and felt, for the first time in weeks, her chest loosen. "We have them. All of them. Malakor, we can begin."
The alchemist let out a long shuddering sigh and sat down hard on the turned earth. "Forgive me," he said, in a thin voice. "I think I should like to sit for a moment."
They were still laughing, a little giddily, when the horns sounded from the northern road.
It was Pell Aldous, with two hundred riders at his back and a green banner snapping above his head. He came pounding down the track in a cloud of dust, spurring his horse, and flung himself out of the saddle before it had stopped. His sandy hair was tousled. His face was flushed with hard riding. He took one look at Valeria, and his whole face split into a wide, boyish grin.
"My lady! I have ridden four days without a bed. Lord Orsen told me you would be here, and Merewyn told me I was a fool if I came without telling you first." He drew breath. "She is well. She is running about the garden. She has put on two pounds. The physician says it is a miracle."
"It is honey and thyme," said Valeria, smiling. "And a dry room."
"It is the finest medicine in the realm." He seized her hand and pressed it between both of his. "I will never be able to repay you. I swear on my life, there is nothing I would not do."
"You may begin," she said gravely, "by finding something to eat. Your men look famished."
He laughed, and let her go, and went to see to the horses.
*
The first dose came that night.
They did it in the cell. It was Valeria's idea, and when Alaric stared at her in bafflement, she smiled and said, "It is a good room. It has a hearth, a door that opens, and a very patient man to sit beside the bed. I cannot think of a better place to begin."
Malakor measured it with infinite care. A single drop of bleeding reed, distilled to a thin red tincture, diluted in a cup of warm broth. He watched her drink it with the scrupulous attention of a priest at a rite, a stack of antidotes arranged on the table at his elbow. Alaric sat on the edge of the cot with her hand in both of his, and did not once take his eyes from her face.
"It tastes of iron," she said, making a face. "And something sweet."
"Do not make jokes. Tell me how you feel."
"Warm." She considered. "A little dizzy. There is a fullness in my chest, like a held breath."
"Pulse?" said Malakor.
"Quick," said Alaric. He had two fingers against her wrist. "Fast, but even."
The fever came an hour later. It rose slowly, a flush along her cheekbones, a damp heat at her temples, a faint trembling in her hands. She lay back against the pillow and described it, as she had promised, in a low calm voice. The heat behind her eyes. The strange silver taste at the back of her throat. The way the lantern light seemed to swell and ripple. Alaric listened to every word. He wiped her forehead with a cool cloth. He murmured to her, steady and low, and did not once look away.
By the third hour the fever broke. She felt it go, a long slow ebb of heat, and lay limp and damp and astonishingly clear-headed. Malakor, who had been taking notes at a furious pace, sat back and closed his book with trembling hands.
"It is perfect," he whispered. "It is exactly as expected. The body is responding. In a week we may double the dose."
"Go and sleep," said Alaric, without turning his head. "Both of you. I will sit with her."
Malakor went. Kaelen, who had been leaning in the doorway for hours with his arms folded, clapped Alaric once on the shoulder and followed. The door swung quietly shut.
She lay quite still for a long moment, listening to the pulse in her ears. Then she turned her head and looked at him.
He was gazing at her with an expression so tender and so raw that her heart stuttered. His eyes were bright. He had not wiped his face, and tears stood in them, unshed.
"You did it," he said.
"I did it."
"You walked into the fire, and you came out."
"With you beside me." She raised her hand and laid it on his cheek. "It is the thing that makes it bearable, Alaric. Not the dose. Not the antidote. You."
He bent his head, and kissed her. It was slow and soft and unhurried, a kiss that tasted of salt and relief, and she felt something in her chest unlock. She drew him down beside her on the narrow cot. He came, gently, with a catch of laughter in his throat, careful of her weakness. The lantern guttered. The fire in the little hearth settled to a bed of coals.
They made love quietly, in the amber half-dark, as two people who had very nearly lost the thing they were holding. There was no urgency in it, no desperation. Only a tender deliberate certainty, a slow rediscovery, his mouth warm against her throat and her hands gripping his shoulders. She whispered his name. He whispered hers. And when it was over, they lay tangled together in the wine-colored blanket with her head on his chest and his fingers tracing slow circles on her back, and she felt, for a long time, that nothing in the world could touch them.
It was past midnight when she felt him tense.
It was a small thing. A catch in his breathing. A subtle stiffening of the arm around her. She lifted her head, and saw his face in the dim glow, drawn and intent, his eyes fixed on some point in the dark.
"Alaric?"
"It is nothing." But his voice was thin. "I thought... a moment ago. A pressure."
She slid her hand to his chest. Beneath her palm, his heart was thudding, fast and hard. And under it, faint but unmistakable, she felt something else. A slow, low, rhythmic pulsing, like a second heartbeat, deep in the bone. Very quiet. Very patient. Very close.
He drew a ragged breath, and the pulse faded. They lay motionless in the darkness, staring at each other, neither of them speaking.
"How long?" she whispered.
"I do not know."
"Malakor said two cycles. We have used one."
"Yes." His arms tightened around her. His voice was calm, but she could hear the fear beneath it. "Which means, my love, that we have perhaps fifteen days."
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