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“Yes.”

“Then take me with you.”

“Over the causeway. In the dark. On a horse.” I look at her. “I have ridden that causeway at night for longer than this house has stood and I know every turn of it, and I would still not put you on a horse over it with no light. One slip and you are in the water, and I cannot carry the living back out of it.” I see the fight in her face, and raise my hand to stop it. “We go at first light. Both of us. On the horse.”

She stands there with her hand still in my sleeve.

“Then he has tonight with it,” she says.

“Yes.”

“You’re choosing that. Me over him. Tonight.”

“Yes. I am. I always will, whether you like it or not.”

She lets go of my sleeve. She does not step back. She stands in the middle of my hall in her apron with her chin up and I watch her hate it and accept it inside a breath, faster than I have ever seen anyone accept anything, and I watch what it costs her to do it.

“First light,” she says. “And if you’re not at the door at first light I’m taking the horse myself.”

“You will not need to.”

Malo is in the kitchen doorway with a lamp and no expression. He looks at her, and at the hour, and at me.

“Sir.”

“The horse at first light, Malo. Food for the day for both of us.”

“Yes, sir.”

She does not go up. She stands at the kitchen table with her hands on the back of a chair, and I stand on the other side of it, and the kitchen is the only warm room in this house and it does not feel like one.

“If I stay there,” she says, voice breaking. “If I don’t come back inside the month. The market takes it all back, doesn’t it, and the physician stops.”

“Staying with him does not end the marriage. Only saying it does. I had no right to make you choose. I am ashamed of it.” I make myself hold her eyes. “And even if you end it, the Order will be paid. From my own purse, for as long as he needs them. That does not depend on you. It never should have.”

“That’s the best thing anyone has ever said to me,” she says, “and it’s also the fourth or fifth worst timing I have ever heard.”

“Yes.”

She goes up. I hear her door, and the bolt does not go across.

I see to the horse myself, and the saddle, and I stand in the yard a while after that with nothing to do and four miles of black water on every side of me.

It is past midnight when I go up. I stand in the corridor for a moment with nothing in my hands at all, and then I knock.

“It’s open.”

She is sitting up in the dark with the blanket round her and her knees drawn in.

“Don’t talk,” she says. “Just stay.”

I lie down beside her with my boots still on, and she puts her hand flat on my chest, where there is nothing to count, and keeps it there.

She does not sleep. I do not pretend to.

ENORA

The mask is on the chest by the door where I put it the night I took it off him.