The East Wing

You read his messages three times before you put on your shoes. Afterward you won't remember exactly what you typed back, only that your thumbs were shaking and that you were already halfway down the corridor when you hit send.

The east wing is at the end of a long gallery lined with portraits of dead kings. They all have the same gold eyes. None of them look kind.

There's no guard at the double doors. That surprises you, until you realize it's on purpose: he sent them away. He didn't want anyone to see.

You knock once and push the door open.

The room beyond is enormous and almost empty. A bed big enough for four people, untouched. A cold fireplace. Moonlight from three tall windows lying in long pale stripes across a stone floor. And on that floor, with his back against the foot of the bed, the Lycan King.

He's shirtless and soaked in sweat, his knees drawn up, his head tipped back against the mattress. The silver has come out of hiding. It covers the left side of his chest in a branching web, bright as frost on glass, and it's moving. You watch a thin line of it crawl a quarter inch toward his heart while you stand in the doorway.

"You came," he says without opening his eyes.

"You said please."

"I'm told I never say it." His mouth twitches. "It's a big night for both of us."

You cross the room and kneel. Up close the heat coming off him is frightening. "How long has it been like this?"

"Since midnight. It's worse at night. It's always worse at night." He opens his eyes and looks at you, and they're glassy with pain. "You don't have to do this. I mean that. You can go back to bed and I'll be exactly as I was yesterday. Alive, mostly."

"Hold still."

His brows lift. "Did you just give the king an order?"

"I did. Hold still, Majesty."

Something like a laugh catches in his chest and turns into a cough. He holds still.

You put your palms flat over the web of silver. For a terrible second, nothing happens. You're just a woman from the swamp with her hands on a stranger's chest, and he's dying, and you're a fraud.

Then the light comes.

It's slower than on the pass, as if your body has to remember how. Pale blue, then silver, pooling under your hands and spreading. The web flinches. You feel it now, which you didn't before: a cold, oily resistance, like pressing your hands into icy mud. It wants to stay. It wants to go deeper.

You push.

It's the hardest work you've ever done. Harder than setting bones, harder than sitting up three days with the river fever. Sweat runs down your back. Your arms tremble. Every time you think you've moved it an inch, it slides back half of one. Somewhere in the second hour you start talking, just to stay awake, about nothing: the reed beds at home, the herons, how to make salve from cedar resin and lard.

He listens. He doesn't interrupt once.

At some point you realize he's been watching your face the entire time.

"What," you say.

"You hum," he says. "When you're concentrating."

"I do not."

"You do. It's terrible. Don't stop."

You glare at him. He looks almost peaceful. The line of silver nearest his heart has retreated a full two inches, and his breathing is easier, and the heat is going out of his skin.

"Tell me about the five," you say.

The peace goes out of his face. But he doesn't look away. He promised, you remember.

"The first was a lowland healer from the river towns. Very famous. Very confident." He speaks slowly. "She put her hands where yours are and pulled, and the silver went into her. It doesn't leave a body. It jumps. Up her wrists. Up her arms. She was dead in an hour."

You keep your hands very still.

"The second was Piotr's student. Then an old Lycan herbalist from the far north. Then twin sisters who swore that two of them could share the load." His jaw works. "That made it worse. They went together."

"The court says you killed them."

"I know what the court says." His voice drops. "I didn't kill them. But I let them try. I was afraid to die, and I let them try, and I held each of their hands while it climbed. All five. I know their names and their families and how long each one took. That's the least I owed them." He swallows. "After the twins I stopped letting anyone touch me. Then you walked up a mountain in a blizzard and didn't ask."

"You told me to go home."

"You didn't listen."

"Nobody's ever accused me of that before," you say, and something in your chest lurches, because it's true. In Marrowfen you listened to everyone. You listened so hard you disappeared.

His eyes are on you again. Gold, and soft at the edges now.

"Ava," he says carefully, as if testing the weight of it. "Thank you."

By the time the windows turn gray, the silver has pulled back into a tight knot over his heart, no bigger than your palm. You can't push it any further. Your hands have stopped glowing and you can't feel your fingers.

He gets you a blanket. He makes you sit on the bed while he stands, which is absurd, because he's the one who was dying four hours ago. He looks like a different man. Still pale, but upright, and the lines of pain are gone from his mouth.

"Eat something, Ava," he says. "That's a royal order."

"You sound very pleased about giving one."

"I'm practicing. You started it."

There's a knock. Not on the main doors; on a small side door you hadn't noticed, set into the paneling.

"Majesty?" A woman's voice, nervous. "It's Mirela, from the apothecary. I'm looking for the new healer. Ava? Doctor Benedek said she might be..." A pause. "I'm going to stop talking now."

The king's mouth twitches. "Come in, Mirela."

The door opens on a young woman in a stained apron, freckles everywhere, red hair escaping a knot. She takes in the king without a shirt, and you on his bed in a blanket, and turns the color of a beet.

"It's not," you start.

"I didn't see anything. I'm blind. Born blind." She holds out a parcel without coming any further into the room. "This came up from the gate at dawn. A man from the lowlands rode all night to bring it. He said it was for you, and that it was urgent, and then he left before anyone could ask his name."

You take it. It's small, wrapped in oilcloth and tied with garden twine. Your fingers are so numb it takes three tries to turn it over.

Then you see the handwriting on the label, and everything in you goes still.

You know that handwriting. You learned to read from it. Recipes and remedies on a hundred little cards in a tin box by the stove, in looping brown ink.

Your mother has been dead for three years.

For my daughter, the label says. To be given to her only when she is beyond Bastien Ardell's reach.