One door closes. One opens onto 1528.

The sweat had come to Hever before her.

Morgana knew it a mile off, the way she knew all the work—in her chest and in the cold place behind her left ear that had marked her for ten thousand years and that no one had ever been able to see. The avenue was unlit. Dusk had thickened to almost-dark by the time the gatehouse rose against the sky, and there were no torches in the brackets. The grooms had been called inside.

She walked up the avenue alone.

She had come on foot up the lane from the village. The wagon that was bringing her things—a bag of linen, a chest with two coifs and the pair of stockings the previous household had given her on her leaving, the iron ring's twin in a linen scrap she had carried since before the body she now wore was born—was an hour behind her at the bend of the road. She had wanted the hour ahead of it. She had wanted to come to Hever alone.

The body she had come down in had been three weeks old to her at the gate of Hever.

She had assumed it in the high country of Hertfordshire, in the late April of that year, from a Carey cousin's widow who had lived through her husband's death and not, in the small accidents of the body, lived through her own grief. The widow had died in a small inn at Hatfield with a fever. Morgana had taken her by the slow method that left a body intact. The widow had been perhaps twenty-six, slight, dark-haired. The body was one she could use.

So, she had used it.

She had walked out of the inn at Hatfield in the body of Hugh Carey's widow and down to a church at the bottom of the lane, where she stood in the doorway until the body settled around her, the way a coat settled around the body it had been bought for. Then she went to the house where the Boleyn family had a kinswoman.

The house took her in for the night, and the next morning the kinswoman told her that the sweat had come to Hever and the lady there was at the fever. Any widow who could be spared was wanted. Morgana had been the answer to the question. The kinswoman had not asked if she was willing. The wagon came, and by stages brought her down through Hertfordshire and into Kent. It let her off at the bottom of the avenue at Hever, and she walked the last half-mile to the gate alone.

The lanes of England had known her on foot since the days when they had been Roman, and the Roman lanes laid over older paths, and the older paths beaten flat by herds whose herdsmen had been gone before her work had a name. The Carey widow she was wearing tonight walked slower than she did as a rule. She moderated her pace.

At the door of the great house the yeoman should have stopped her. Instead, he looked at her, and his eyes went past her shoulder. He stepped back from the threshold and let her in without asking who she was, which was how she liked it and was also how she knew the house was already in mourning. People stopped seeing her, in such houses, before they knew there was anything to mourn. A cold went past him into the hall as she crossed it, but he did not feel it.

The yeoman should have been able to see her in the Carey widow’s body. But she had not, in the three weeks she had been wearing it, lost the trick of being unseen in the houses she came to for the work. The trick was the work's. The body could not change it. So she crossed the threshold of Hever in a body the yeoman should have seen but didn’t and went into the hall.

She was in the hall before anyone met her properly. A woman in a coif came down the staircase with a basin of water in her hands and stopped, blinked, and said, “Are you the woman they sent for?”

“Yes, I was sent for," Morgana said.

The woman nodded as if she had expected this answer for some hours. "She has been calling. Come, come up, please." She turned without putting the basin down and went up the stair, and Morgana followed her, and the great staircase of Hever took her upward, a creature older than its stones.

The chamber lay at the end of the upper gallery.

The door was open, and Morgana recognized the smell that came out of it. Not the smell of the sweat itself, which was scoured and sour and almost clean. The smell of the women working over it—comfrey water, rue, the wax from too many candles too close to a fevered body, the linen that had been changed but still stank of what the body had been forcing out of itself. A pomander hung on the bedpost on a chain. It had not been opened in time.

Three women hovered in the chamber. A fourth lay on the bed.

Morgana had seen Anne Boleyn once before, across a court she had not been part of, in a different season, in a body Anne had not yet finished growing into. Anne had been laughing then. She was not laughing now. The fever had her at full crest. The dark hair had been cropped at the temples to cool her and the shorn pieces lay on the pillow like burned things. Her skin was the color of the candles. Her eyes were closed, and beneath the lids the eyes were working, working, working at a fever dream Morgana did not need to be told the shape of.

"Mistress," said the woman in the coif, "this is—I am sorry, I have forgotten what they told me your name was."

"Carey," Morgana said. "Mistress Morgana Carey."

"Carey," the woman repeated, and looked relieved, as if the name itself were a small reassurance. "Yes, of course. They said you were a cousin's wife. They said —" She faltered. She had not been told anything. She did not know who had told her she was being told. She did not care. "Please. Come."

Morgana crossed the rushes to the bed.