The wax seal cracked under Lord Chancellor Brem's thumb, and the smell of it filled the narrow chamber, acrid and faintly sweet, the ghost of a thousand similar documents pressed in similar rooms. Sera Coldspring watched the red disc fall from the parchment and roll across the polished oak like a drop of blood too tired to climb. It came to rest against a brass inkwell shaped like a rearing stag, and there it stopped, trembling faintly as if it meant to go further and thought better of it.
"Sit," said Brem, without looking up. His voice carried the dry rasp of old paper turned in careful hands. "You may as well. This will take some time, and your knees have been hovering for a full minute. It makes the floorboards nervous."
Sera sat. The chair was harder than it looked, the wood pale and uncushioned, chosen, she suspected, for its discomfort. Beyond the single window, the harbor of Whiteharbor glittered in the early light, the masts of merchant vessels bristling against the pale sky like a forest of bare ribs. She had been staring at those masts for three days now, ever since the summons from the north had brought her down the long mountain roads and through the city gates and into this palace of pale stone and colder eyes. The ships had not moved. Or perhaps they had moved and she had not been paying attention. She had been paying attention to other things. The way the servants spoke in half-sentences around her. The way the guards at her door changed shifts at odd hours, as if the household itself could not decide what she was.
Lord Chancellor Brem adjusted his spectacles, a small brass pair that sat low on a nose reddened by years of stooping over documents. He was a narrow man in a narrow coat, every fold of him pressed flat, every button aligned, the very picture of a man who had mistaken his own desk for the borders of the world. His hands, spotted with age, moved across the parchment with the reverence of a priest handling relics.
"You have been among us," he began, "for some twenty-three days. By my count. By the household's count, which differs from mine by a margin I shall not bore you with. In that time, you have eaten at our tables, slept beneath our roof, walked our corridors, and examined our Prince."
"I healed his fever," Sera said. "That is what was asked of me."
"Yes. That is what was asked of you." Brem did not look up. "And that is what you did. The fever broke on the ninth day. The cough lingered until the fourteenth. The tremor in his left hand, which the physicians had called a passing thing and which I had called a worrying thing, subsided on the morning of the seventeenth. You will note that I am counting. I count everything. It is my principal vice, and the one that has kept me alive in this palace longer than most of its stones."
Sera said nothing. She watched his fingers trace the edge of the parchment, the nail of his left thumb yellowed and ridged, the cuff of his sleeve immaculate. A small clock on the mantel behind him ticked in a steady, unhurried rhythm, and somewhere beyond the heavy door of the chamber, footsteps passed and did not pause.
"What I am about to read to you," Brem said, "is not a negotiation. I want that understood at the outset, so that we may both save our breath. It is not a discussion of terms. It is not a question of preference, yours or mine or the household's. It is a declaration, made under the seal of the realm, and witnessed by those whose names you will find appended below." He cleared his throat, a small wet sound that seemed to surprise him. "Head Chamberlain Othric, if you please."
The door at Sera's back opened without sound. She had not heard Othric enter the room beforehand, and she did not hear him cross it now. When she turned her head, he was simply there, standing against the paneling with his hands folded at his waist and his long face arranged in an expression of such perfect neutrality that it became, in itself, a kind of commentary. He was a thin man, taller than he ought to have been, with a narrow mouth and pale eyes that did not so much look at a thing as take its measure.
"My lady," he said. His voice had a slight hiss to it, as if the consonants were being drawn across silk. "My lord Chancellor."
"Sit, Othric, for pity's sake," Brem said, without turning around. "You make the corners nervous."
Othric did not smile. He did not, so far as Sera could tell, do anything at all with his face. He crossed to a second hard chair positioned against the far wall and lowered himself into it with the care of a man folding a letter into thirds. Once seated, he became, in some essential way, part of the furniture. His eyes remained on Sera, and she felt the weight of them like a cold coin pressed to the back of her neck.
Brem lifted the parchment and began to read.
"Be it known to all present, and to all who shall hereafter inquire, that on this seventeenth day of the month of First Thaw, in the one thousand four hundred and seventh year of the Solhart Reckoning, the following compact is entered into between the Crown of the realm and the person known as Sera Coldspring, called Healer, of the Northern Exile, and last of her name."
Sera's hands, folded in her lap, grew very still. Last of her name. She had not expected to hear it said aloud in this room, by this man, on this morning. She had thought that part of her would be allowed to remain in the north, folded away in the cottage with the thatch that leaked and the chimney that smoked. She had been wrong.
"Whereas," Brem continued, "the heir to this realm, Prince Aedric Solhart, has suffered a wasting illness of such nature and severity as to require, beyond the offices of the royal physicians, the attention of a healer of uncommon skill and rarer gift. And whereas the said Sera Coldspring, being the bearer of an ancient covenant of healing whose nature and origin need not here be set forth, has demonstrated, by her treatment of the Prince, that her presence at his side is, in the considered judgment of the Crown, indispensable to his continued life and recovery."
Brem paused to wet his thumb against his tongue and turned the page. The gesture was so ordinary, so domestic, that it took Sera a moment to understand that the words he had just read were not ordinary at all. Indispensable. The word sat in the air between them like a stone dropped into still water.
"And whereas it is the duty and the desire of the Crown to secure, by every lawful means, the continued health and well-being of its heir, the following terms are hereby declared, and shall hold good from this day forward until such time as one of two conditions shall be met: either the Prince shall be restored to full and complete health, to be certified by his own physicians and by the healer named herein acting in concert; or the said healer shall die, and by her death discharge the compact."
Silence. The clock ticked. Somewhere in the palace, a bell rang once and was silent. Sera became aware that her own breathing had gone shallow, and she made herself draw a longer breath, the cold air of the chamber filling her chest.
"In plain language," Brem said, lowering the parchment, "you are now the Prince's sworn ward and healer. You may not leave this palace, nor the grounds thereof, nor the city of Whiteharbor, without the written consent of the Crown, until such time as the Prince is well or you are not. These are the terms. They are not negotiable. I am told they never are."
He folded the parchment along its original creases, with such precision that the folds seemed to meet of their own accord, and laid it on the desk before him. Then he took up a small brass seal from its velvet bed, held it over a candle flame until it darkened, and pressed it into a fresh disc of wax at the foot of the document. The wax hissed. A thin curl of smoke rose from the impression, carrying with it the faint scent of the north, of pine resin and old snow.
"There," he said, as if he had merely signed off on a delivery of linens. "That is done."
Sera looked at the document. She looked at the seal. She looked at Brem's face, which had resumed its customary expression of mild bureaucratic endurance. Othric, against the wall, had not moved. His hands remained folded, his eyes remained fixed, and his silence had grown so dense that it had begun, in some small way, to hum.
"You are aware," Sera said, and her own voice surprised her, for it came out steadier than she felt, "that the Coldsprings do not bargain with crowns."
"I am aware," Brem said, "that the Coldsprings have not been in a position to bargain with anything for several generations. I am aware that the last Coldspring to sit at a Solhart table did so as a guest of state, and that the one before her did so as a prisoner of war, and that the line between those two distinctions has, in this family, historically been a thin one. I am aware, my lady, of all of it. I have made it my business to be aware of all of it. That is, as I mentioned, my vice."
"And yet you ask me to remain."
"I do not ask. I inform." Brem removed his spectacles and polished them on the hem of his coat, a gesture that seemed almost affectionate. "The Prince is twenty-three years of age. He is the eldest living child of King Aldric and Queen Mother Selene. He is the heir to a throne that has, in recent memory, wobbled on its base more than once. He is betrothed, by treaty, to a princess of the southern reaches whose name I am not at liberty to share with you at this juncture, and he is, as of this morning, sitting up in bed and asking for porridge. These are facts. They are not subject to your approval or mine. They are simply the case."
"The Prince," Sera said carefully, "did not strike me, when I attended him, as a man who required a jailer in addition to a healer."
"A fair observation," Brem said. "It is also irrelevant."
Othric shifted in his chair. The movement was small, a settling of weight from one hip to the other, but it drew Sera's attention because it was the first voluntary motion she had seen him make since he sat down. When she looked at him, he inclined his head, a fraction of an inch, as if acknowledging a point in a game whose rules she had not yet been taught.
"If I refuse," Sera said.
"You will not refuse," Brem said, with the patient air of a man who had heard this question before from a great many people and had never once been persuaded by it. "But if you did refuse, the consequences would be these. You would be conducted, under guard, to a chamber in the east wing of the palace, there to remain in comfort but in confinement, for as long as the Crown should require. Your movements would be restricted. Your visitors would be vetted. Your correspondence would be read, and most of it would not be delivered. You would, in short, become a guest of the realm in the older sense of the word, and that sense, my lady, is not the kinder one."
"And if I accept?"
"Then you accept. You remain in your present quarters, which are, I am told, tolerably warm. You attend the Prince each morning and each evening, as you have been doing. You consult with the royal physicians, who will defer to you in matters of the covenant and defer to themselves in all other matters, a compromise that will try the patience of everyone involved. You do not leave. You do not write north. You do not, in particular, write to anyone in the Northern Exile who might be tempted to ride down here in your defense, because there are no longer any who could make that ride in less than a season, and the roads are watched in any case." Brem replaced his spectacles and looked at her over the rims. "These are not threats. They are arrangements. I find that people respond better to arrangements."
Sera sat very still. The pale morning light had shifted across the floor and was now climbing the leg of the desk, warming the brass stag, and she could feel the small heat of it on her own knee through the wool of her dress. Somewhere above them, footsteps crossed a ceiling. Above that, in a tower she had been led to and led away from seventeen times in twenty-three days, a young man with dark hair and a tremor in his left hand was, perhaps at this very moment, eating porridge.
"May I see him?" she asked.
"After you have signed," Brem said.
"Before."
Brem looked at her for a long moment. His face did not change, but something behind it shifted, a small recalibration, as if a scale he had been holding had tipped by a hair. He glanced at Othric. Othric did not so much respond as cease to be motionless, which was, in his way, the same thing.
"The compact," Brem said, "is a matter of state. It is not a matter of sentiment. I will not have the Prince's recovery complicated by scenes at his bedside. If you go to him now, before the seal is set, before the compact is entered, you go as a stranger from the north with a gift for healing and a family history I shall not here enumerate. If you go to him after, you go as a sworn ward of the Crown, and he will know it, and you will know it, and the household will know it, and the knowledge will make every conversation between you harder than it needs to be. I am offering you the easier version. I am offering it once."
Sera looked at the document on the desk. She looked at the seal, still cooling, the wax drawing into itself, the impression of the Solhart stag hardening into permanence. She thought of the cottage in the north, of the thatch that leaked, of the road that came down from the high passes and did not, in winter, come down at all. She thought of her mother, who had been the last to carry the name and who had told her, on a night very much like this one in temperature if not in consequence, that the Coldsprings had always known when to bend.
She thought of Prince Aedric, twenty-three, with his careful court manners and his fever-bright eyes and the way he had said her name, once, on the eleventh day, as if testing whether it would fit in his mouth. She thought of the tremor in his hand, which the physicians had called a passing thing and which she had not called a passing thing at all.
"Will it be witnessed?" she asked. "The signing."
"By Othric," Brem said. "By myself. By the seal. That is sufficient."
"And by the Prince himself?"
Brem paused. It was the first true pause she had seen him take, a hitch in the machinery of his speech, and it told her more than any of the words that had come before. He looked down at the document as if checking its contents, though she suspected he knew every phrase by heart.
"The Prince," he said, "is aware of the compact in its general outline. He is not aware of the precise terms. It was felt, by those whose business it is to feel such things, that the details might weigh upon him in his convalescence. He knows that you will remain. He knows that you are bound. He does not know the shape of the binding, and he will not be told, by me or by Othric or by the physicians or by you, until such time as his strength is such that the knowledge cannot harm him."
"You mean until he is well enough to resist."
"I mean," Brem said, with the smallest possible edge creeping into his voice, "that he is not yet well enough to be troubled. There is a difference. You, of all people, should recognize it."
Sera drew another breath. The air in the chamber had gone cool with the turning of the morning, and the harbor beyond the window had lost its glitter, the masts standing dark against a sky that was beginning to cloud. She thought of the road north, and how long it would take to walk it alone, and how many of those miles passed through country that owed nothing to the Solhart stag. She thought of the Coldspring covenant, which her mother had passed to her in a language older than the one she spoke now, and which she had used, in her small way, to bring a fever down and a tremor still and a young man back from the edge of something she did not yet have a name for.
She thought of the porridge he would be eating, if he was eating porridge, and the way the spoon would tremble in his hand if no one was watching.
"I will sign," she said.
Brem nodded, as if she had confirmed something he had already entered in a ledger somewhere. He drew a second sheet of parchment from the desk drawer, this one narrower, and laid it beside the first. He uncapped the inkwell. The smell of it rose into the room, iron and gall and something faintly resinous, and for a moment Sera was back in her mother's kitchen, learning to write her name in a hand that would one day have to fit on documents like this one.
"One more thing," Brem said, without looking up. "The Prince is not to know, and you are not to tell him, that the compact binds you until his death or yours. He is to believe, and you are to allow him to believe, that the arrangement is a customary one. A healer attending her patient. A ward in the care of the Crown. Nothing more. If he asks you, and he will ask you, because he is his mother's son and his mother's son has never in his life failed to ask the question that would have been better left unasked, you will tell him that you are here because you chose to be, and you will say it in such a way that he believes you. That is not a request. It is a clause. It is the one clause in this entire document that I wrote myself."
He looked up at her then, and for the first time, she saw something in his face that was not bureaucracy. It was a tiredness so old it had become a kind of weather, settled into the lines around his mouth and the hollows beneath his eyes, and it was aimed at her with the weary precision of a man who had long ago stopped expecting to be thanked for anything.
"Do we understand each other," he said, "my lady Coldspring?"
The clock ticked. Othric, against the wall, did not breathe. The harbor beyond the window had gone gray, and the first drops of rain had begun to find the glass, tracing slow lines down the leaded panes.
"Yes," Sera said. "We do."
She took up the pen.
The pen scratched against the parchment with a sound like a thin bone drawn across ice. Sera Coldspring wrote her name at the bottom of the compact, the ink shining wetly in the gray light that fell through the rain-beaded window, and as the last letter closed she felt something in the room tilt, the way a scale tilts when a weight is added to one side. Lord Chancellor Brem took the document from the desk, blew once across the ink to dry it, and slid it into a leather case without ceremony, as though he had taken in many such papers and meant to take in many more.
"Sit," he said, and gestured toward a chair that stood beside a small table on which a tray had been laid, bread and cheese and a clay cup of something that smelled faintly of herbs. "Eat. Othric will conduct you to your rooms when you have eaten. There is no need for you to leave this chamber before then."
"You would have me eat," Sera said, "while the ink is still wet on a thing that binds me until a prince I have not yet met is dead, or I am."
"I would have you eat," Brem said, "because the road from Coldspring is long, and you have had nothing since dawn, and you will be of no use to anyone if you faint in the corridor. That is also a clause, though I confess I did not write it down. I find it is one that obeys itself."
He tucked the case beneath his arm and turned toward the inner door. Othric stepped forward at once, materializing from the wall as though he had been listening for his cue, and Brem paused at the threshold.
"The rooms adjoining the Prince's chambers have been prepared," Brem said, without turning. "You will find them at the end of the west gallery, past the painted hall. Othric will show you. The Prince is not to know of the compact. That is the only clause that matters."
The door closed behind him. The room was suddenly smaller without him in it, the way rooms always are when a man of office departs and leaves only the sense of his office behind.
Sera did not sit. She stood for a long moment beside the desk, the quill still in her hand, and watched the rain trace its slow calligraphy down the glass. Somewhere beneath the palace she could hear the sea working at the breakwater, a sound like a great beast clearing its throat. She set the quill down carefully in its well, as one sets down a tool one is not yet finished with, and turned at last toward the tray.
The bread was good. The cheese was sharper than she was used to. She ate standing up, watching Othric the way a child watches a cat that has not yet decided whether to be friendly.
"You are from the north," Othric said, when she had eaten half the bread. It was not a question. His voice was thin and faintly hissing, the voice of a man who had spent forty years whispering down long corridors and had been shaped by the practice. "I am told the Coldspring holdings are by the glacier."
"Near it," Sera said. "Not on it. My grandmother would not let us on it. She said the ice remembered names."
"Your grandmother," Othric said, in the tone of a man filing a fact. "She is dead."
"She is."
"And your mother."
"Yes."
"And your father."
"Also."
Othric regarded her with the small, neutral attention of a man weighing whether a person is to be pitied or merely catalogued. "There will be no family to receive word," he said, "if word must be sent."
"No," Sera said. "There will not."
He inclined his head by the precise degree that custom demanded, and gestured toward the door. Sera took the rest of the bread in her hand and followed him out into a corridor that smelled of stone-damp and lamp oil and, beneath those things, the old, sweet, dusty smell of tapestries left too long in one position.
The palace of the Solharts was older than its painted face. Sera had known this from the road, from the look of the harbor walls and the way the gates had been set into older gates, but she had not known how thoroughly true it was until Othric led her through it. The painted hall was a long barrel-vaulted room whose every wall and ceiling had been covered, in the time of some earlier queen, with figures of the Solhart line in the act of receiving blessings: kings kneeling, kings crowned, kings lifting swords toward a sun whose face had cracked and been repainted, and cracked again. The paint smelled of linseed and a kind of sweetness that was not honey. Sera walked beneath them with her head slightly bent, and felt them watching her pass the way fish watch a hook descend.
"The Prince's rooms are at the end of this gallery," Othric said, indicating a corridor that branched to the left. "Yours adjoin them. There is a connecting door. It will be kept locked from your side. That is the arrangement."
"The arrangement," Sera said.
"The arrangement made by his late Majesty's physicians, and confirmed by the Lord Chancellor when the previous incumbent departed."
"Departed," Sera said.
Othric did not look at her. He was moving with the measured pace of a man who had decided to say what he was going to say and was not to be hurried in the saying.
"There have been three," he said. "Three healers set to attend the Prince since the illness declared itself. I will tell you the manner of their leaving, because it is my belief that you should know the manner of it, and because I think you are a woman who would find it out in any case, and better from me than from the kitchen."
The corridor stretched before them, lit by narrow windows set high in the wall. Rain came and went across the distant sea. Othric's voice went on, low and even, the way a man reads aloud from a ledger.
"The first was a man named Heron of the Vale. He had been physician to the dowager Queen Mother before she withdrew from court. He was set to the Prince in the autumn of the Prince's sixteenth year. He lived eleven weeks. He was found at the foot of the gallery stairs with his neck broken. The verdict was a fall in the dark. The Prince was sixteen, and did not like the man, and was not questioned."
Sera said nothing. The bread in her hand had gone cold.
"The second was a woman, Marget Leyne. She came out of the university at Solhaven and was much praised for her learning. She attended the Prince for fourteen months. She was discovered in her own chamber, in her own bed, with no mark upon her. The physicians at the university, when they came for her body, would not say what they thought. The Prince was seventeen, and wept at her funeral, and was not questioned."
They had reached the door of her new rooms. Othric paused, took a key from his belt, and unlocked it with the unhurried precision of a man who had done so a hundred times.
"The third was a man named Voss. He came from the islands. He was a quiet man. He attended the Prince for two years and three months. He was found at the bottom of the well in the lower court, fully dressed, in the morning. The Prince was nineteen, and would not leave his rooms for a week, and was not questioned."
Othric opened the door and stood aside.
"The Prince is twenty-one now," he said. "He is, I will tell you plainly, a young man of good instincts and bad temper, who reads too much and sleeps too little and has the conscience of a king he has not yet had to become. He is afraid, in private, in a way he would not wish anyone to know. You will see this. You will be asked to be kind about it."
Sera looked at him. "You are telling me," she said, "that three healers have died in four years in attendance upon a prince who is not himself accused of anything, and that no one has been questioned."
"No one has been questioned," Othric agreed, "because there was nothing to question. A fall. A stillness in the night. A misstep at a well. These are not questions. These are the way houses empty themselves of people who have been useful to them."
He looked at her then, and she saw that he had, beneath the long servility of his face, a small dry thing that might have been pity and might have been warning and might have been neither.
"I will not pretend to you, my lady Coldspring, that your rooms are not where the others slept. I will not pretend the door that locks from your side is not the door they locked. I will tell you only that I have seen the bolts of this palace from the inside, and I have learned that what is bolted against is not always what one thinks."
He set the key in her hand. His fingers were cold and dry as paper.
"Eat the rest of your bread," he said. "There is a fire laid in the small chamber. I will have water sent. The Prince takes his supper at eight and his evening walk at ten and returns to his rooms at eleven. If you intend to meet him tonight, the gallery at midnight is where he goes when he does not wish to be found."
He turned and walked back down the corridor. His footsteps faded into the painted hall, and after a moment Sera heard the faint complaint of the great door at the end of it, and then nothing but the rain and the sea.
She stood a long time in the doorway of the new rooms. They were not unkind rooms. They had been made ready for someone, with a fire laid and a quilt turned down and a small glass of dried lavender on the sill. The connecting door was to her left, dark wood set with iron studs, the bolt on her side heavy and new. She did not touch it.
She ate the bread. She drank the water when it came, carried by a girl who would not meet her eyes. She sat by the fire and listened to the palace settle around her, the way a house settles in the night, and thought about three healers who had not come home, and about the key in her hand, and about the clause Brem had said was the only one that mattered.
At a quarter to twelve she rose, left her rooms, and walked the gallery toward the painted hall. The lamps had been trimmed low, and the painted kings moved in the dimness like figures under water. She passed them without speaking. She found the gallery Othric had meant: a long narrow room lined with the portraits of the Solhart dead, ending in a tall window that looked out over the harbor, the rain now stopped, the clouds breaking in long rents to let through a pale and sourceless light.
He was there before her. He stood with his back to her at the window, in a coat too light for the hour, and did not turn at her step. He had heard her, she knew, because his shoulders had altered, the way a horse alters at a familiar sound.
"You are the new one," he said.
It was not a question. His voice was smooth and clear, a young man's voice with the edges of a young man's voice worn off it by long use, and beneath it that royal precision that Sera had been warned of, the careful rounding of vowels that came from being spoken to as a prince before he had learned to speak as a boy.
"Sera Coldspring," she said, and stopped three paces behind him, because three paces was the distance Othric had said was correct between a healer and her patient.
"Coldspring," he said, and turned then, and looked at her for the first time.
He was taller than she had expected, and thinner, and his face was a careful one, the bones good beneath the skin, the eyes set deep and steady. He looked, she thought, like a man who had been told he was handsome often enough to have decided to make use of it and then had decided, more recently, that he did not wish to.
"Up from the north," he said.
"Yes."
"In the autumn."
"Yes."
"Into a house where three have died in my attendance, as Othric has by now informed you, because Othric informs everyone, because informing people is what Othric is for."
"Yes," Sera said. "He has informed me."
"And you came anyway."
"I came anyway."
He looked at her a long moment, and then he laughed, a short breath of a laugh with no joy in it, and turned back to the window. The harbor lay beneath them, the masts of the ships like a forest of bare sticks against the lit water.
"I have not slept in four nights," he said. "I do not say this to alarm you. I say it because I am about to ask you a question, and I want you to know that I am not in a state to be answered with kindness. I am in a state to be answered with truth, if there is any truth to be had in this palace, which I am no longer certain of."
"Ask," Sera said.
He did not turn. He spoke to the window, and the window gave his voice back to her faintly, twice, as if the room itself were repeating him.
"They tell me it is a curse," he said. "My father's physicians. My mother's physicians, while she lived. The priests, when they were still let into my rooms. A curse on the blood of Solhart, a thing laid down at the founding, a price for some old bargain no one can quite name. They tell me it will pass in time, or in the next generation, or in the reign after mine. They tell me this with great patience, as one tells a child that the dark is empty. I am not a child. I have watched three people I trusted die in attendance upon me, and I am not a child, and I do not believe in curses."
He turned then. He looked at her across the dark gallery with a steadiness she had not been prepared for.
"Tell me what is wrong with me," he said. "Not the stories. Not the bindings of the founding. Tell me what is wrong with me, as you would tell a man with a wound on his arm."
Sera was quiet for a long time. She felt the compact in her memory like a stone laid on her tongue, the one clause Brem had written himself, the lie she was meant to live inside for the rest of Aedric's life or the rest of her own. She thought of the three healers. She thought of her grandmother, who had said the ice remembered names. She thought of the pale winterglass, waiting in the north, the thing she had not yet understood.
"I will tell you what I see," she said, "and I will tell you plainly, and you will not like the hearing of it."
"I have not liked anything about this in four years," Aedric said. "Proceed."
She stepped forward until she stood beside him at the window. The harbor was very still beneath them, the water black and silver in the broken light, and the distant breakwater rose and fell against the dark. She watched his reflection rather than his face, because his reflection was the face of a man who was listening, and the real face was the face of a man who was preparing to refuse.
"Your illness is not a curse," she said. "It is a binding. Placed on your bloodline, not by god or by founding, but by a hand, by a person, by someone who knew what they were doing and who set the work deep enough that it would look like a curse to anyone who came after. It moves in you the way a current moves in a wire. It is fed. It is kept. It is not old work. It is recent work, and it is being maintained."
He was very still beside her. She could hear him breathing.
"You said kept," he said, after a moment.
"Yes."
"By whom."
"That," Sera said, "I do not yet know. But I will tell you what I do know. I know it is not in you by nature. I know it was set. I know that the three who attended you did not die by chance, because a thing that is merely cursed does not kill its healers, only its house. A binding kills its witnesses, because a binding has a maker, and a maker does not wish to be known."
He turned his face to her then, and she saw in it what Othric had warned her of, the fear he would not have wished her to see, and beneath the fear the quick bright flare of a young man who has been told that his enemy is not a god but a man, and that he can be answered.
"You are telling me," he said, "that someone in this palace is keeping me ill."
"Yes," Sera said. "Someone in this palace is keeping you ill, and has been for years, and has disposed of anyone who came near enough to see it."
He did not speak for a long moment. The harbor moved beneath them. A gull cried once from somewhere out beyond the breakwater, a single thin sound that cut the air and was gone.
"Who," he said.
Sera looked at his reflection, and at her own beside it, and at the dark water beneath them both.
"That," she said, "I have not yet learned. But I will learn it. I will learn it because the binding is on your blood, and my hand is on the binding now, and the two of us are tied to the same answer whether you wish it or no."