Lena Harrow had healed sixty patients in the Ice Court's sickrooms, and not one of them was the person she needed. She wanted the ruler's trust. She wanted peace between the Ice Court and her homeland, the kingdom whose crest she wore stitched to her collar so no one could forget what she was. But the ruler had never once sent for her. A foreign healer did not get an audience. She could mend every fever in the palace and still die a stranger to the throne. So she worked, and she hummed. The tune was her homeland's war anthem. The guards hated it. She hummed it anyway, because it was the only flag she was allowed to fly. One night a footman came for her. She knew him. Everyone knew Kieran Halloway, the young footman who greeted the scullery maids by name and never once raised his voice. He smiled at her now, warm and steady, and that smile was exactly what made her skin crawl. "Come with me, Lena," he said. "Someone important is unwell. He asked for the foreign one." He led her deep into the palace, past doors she had never been allowed near. The room was cold even for this place. On the bed lay a pale man in midnight robes. Sweat shone on his face. His chest heaved. "His name is Rook Kael," Kieran said softly. "The ruler's own sorcerer. The ruler loves him like a son." Lena understood at once. Heal this man, and she reached the one voice the throne actually listened to. She knelt and pressed her hand to Rook's chest to feel his pulse. There was nothing. No beat. No flutter. His heart was silent, and yet his eyes opened, dark and clear, and he smiled at her. "You feel it," he said. "Or rather, you don't." Her training was useless. No pulse meant no patient. But his skin burned, and his breath rattled, so something in him was failing. She crushed a pale, frost-touched moonflower from her satchel and worked its cool juice under his tongue. She hummed low, not the war anthem this time, but the old healing song her mother used. She worked until dawn. The fever broke. Rook sat up, steady, laughing weakly. "No one has ever done that," he said. "They all run when they feel the silence." He caught her wrist, gentle but firm. "You didn't run." Kieran watched from the door, still smiling. By morning the palace was talking. The foreign healer had saved the sorcerer whom no healer would touch. Rook Kael owed her his life, and everyone knew it. But Lena knelt in the cold, her hand remembering that dead, silent chest. She had won the ally she needed. She had also learned that the man closest to the throne was not, whatever he was, entirely alive.