The east tower became brutal in summer.
It faced south and west, and the boarded balcony doors, which had been his only defense against the winter drafts, now trapped the accumulated heat of every afternoon's sun and held it against the stone walls with the thoroughness of a kiln. There was no relief. The single northern window admitted no cross-breeze. The gap in the balcony boards — his precious crack, his sliver of garden and sky — let in nothing but more heat and the dry smell of summer grass beyond the estate walls.
He stripped the gray wool to the minimum decency permitted and sweat through it anyway.
He drank his water ration before it could warm in the cup.
He lay on the pallet in the worst hours of the afternoon with his arm over his eyes and breathed slowly, deliberately, using a technique Deepak Sehwal had learned in a Kolkata summer thirty years ago in a different world on a different continent — breathe in for seven counts, hold for four, release for eight, and the body convinced itself, improbably, that it was cooler than the air insisted.
But the heat brought something the cold had not.
Energy.
In the months of winter and early spring, Gerffron had conserved himself. Had moved slowly, spent sparingly, let his body's processes idle down to the minimum. Survival had dictated it — the cold ate calories, and the servants' rations were barely sufficient to maintain a man at rest.
But summer's heat changed his metabolism the way a bellows changes a fire.
He began to move.
Not the careful, therapeutic stretching of his early months. Something more purposeful. He pushed the pallet against the wall and paced the room's full length in measured strides — eight paces north to south, six east to west. He did not pace aimlessly. He paced with the precise, rhythmic intention of a man measuring something. He tracked his own endurance. He noted the days when six sets of the room's full length left his legs trembling, and the days three weeks later when twelve left him merely warm.
His body, denied almost everything else, responded to the invitation with an enthusiasm that embarrassed him.
The ribs that had been bruised to purple in the winter had long since healed. The face that had been swollen and cracked was simply his face again — thinner than it had been at the Winter Ball, the jaw sharper, the hollows beneath the cheekbones more pronounced. But his shoulders had not narrowed. His hands had not softened. If anything, the months of slow purposeful movement had reorganized him — stripped the decorative from the structural, removed the comfortable padding of a life spent in well-heated rooms with adequate food.
He was, in some essential way, more himself than he had been as consort.
The household noticed.
He saw it in the young woman with the scar — Maret, perpetually Maret in his mind — who had begun, in recent weeks, to wait an extra half-second before closing his door. Not to speak. Not to look at him. Only to wait, as if some impulse toward acknowledgment rose in her each time and was suppressed each time before it could fully form.
He saw it in the midday guard, the still one, who had in the summer months taken to standing at the top of the stairs rather than the bottom, which meant he could see through the small gap between door and frame, which meant he was watching.
He saw it in the fact that the extra bread had become daily.
Something in the household had shifted. He could not name it yet. It was not sympathy — he did not mistake the careful recalibrations of people's behavior for something so tender. It was more like the household's initial verdict on him — traitor, nothing, less than the dirt — was encountering, daily, a counter-evidence it had not expected.
He was supposed to be broken by now.
He was not broken.
He moved through the summer heat of the east tower in patterned, purposeful strides, and he let the household calculate what they liked from it.
And in the evenings, when the heat finally began to ease and the crack in the boards let in the smell of sun-warmed roses — the rose beds were blooming now, a red so dark it was almost black — he stood at the boarded balcony and breathed it in.
It smelled like every promise he had ever kept.