Richard awakes alone, in darkness, and thinks this must be Purgatory, for Hell would not be so quiet.

He hears the fire crackling in the hearth, though, and turns his head - on aching neck, God have mercy - to look, to see the outline of his high-backed armchair there before the flames, and Anne's thin hand hanging over the arm.

Anne. Oh, Anne .

He tries to call to her, but there is only a rasp left of his voice - he remembers only slightly, what came between the battlefield and here, and presumes that he must yet be King, if he is in his bedchamber and Anne is nearby.

His left arm is… Hardly there, save for the deep, aching pain in his shoulder and neck, and he is scared for a moment. He reaches over with his right arm, to find his left, and is relieved that it is still there, even if he cannot yet feel it. That will come in time, he is sure of it.

He tries again to call for Anne, but still cannot. Good enough - if she cannot come to him, then he will go to her.

The pain burns white-hot again, when he hits the floor, and Anne is with him in a moment - but then she is coughing, a terrible, hacking sound, that seems to shake her whole body. And how frail she is! How delicate!

When they are themselves again, his senses regained and her breathing steadied, he looks at her properly, in the firelight, and is horrified by how unwell she looks.

But at least she is alive.

"Now I shall have to find someone to put you back in bed," she says, "for I do not have the strength to do it, and neither do you."

She stumbles to her feet, not even knocking the dust from her skirts, and throws the door half-open to lean against the frame. He can hear someone replying to whatever it is she's saying, and then Francis and Hal are laying him back in bed, and he is not sure how he got there.

"What a great bloody fool you are, Richard of Gloucester," Anne says, sitting by his side and setting a cloth to his lips - a cloth soaked in honey-water, the sweetest thing he has ever tasted. "What possessed you to get out of bed, you idiot?"

Francis and Hal are behind her, snickering, and he wants to shoo them away - this is his bedchamber, and Anne is here, so there should be no one else at all.

"The fever has probably eaten away at your brain as well as your strength," Anne grumbles, and Francis devolves into outright laughter, damn him. "Why in God's name did you want to get up?"

More honeywater, and he can speak.

"You," he says, "are alive. "

It is another four days before he is strong enough to sit out, and even then, it is only in his solar, in his high-backed chair with a heavy blanket wrapped around his shoulders and a heavier blanket tucked around his legs.

Anne, shaking with tiredness and thin-lipped with annoyance, tucks them around him herself, and sets his hair someway to rights before stepping back.

"You'll do, I suppose," she says, and they are the first words she has spoken to him not in anger since he woke. "Do not faint, or we shall never convince the people that you are fit to rule."

John de la Pole has been ruling in his absence, he's told, with Francis and Hal and Anne to help him, and he wonders if Anne would not rather that John were ruling in truth. She has not looked him in the eye all over these last days, and it is killing him, because all he wants is the strength to take her in his arms and kiss her senseless.

But she will not even look at him, so doubtless she does not wish to be kissed.

There are petitions to be heard, honours to be granted, but Richard has not the strength to sit even half a day - and Anne is worse even than he is.

She is the one who faints, and he pulls open the stitched-together ruin of his shoulder trying to catch her.

"She is not allowed to die," he tells the physicians, and God forgive him but he will hang every one of them if she dies now. He has come home to her, survived the Welsh boy, and he cannot permit her to die now. Not without seeing her smile one last time. Surely God will at least give him that?

"Your Grace ought to be abed," they tell him, but how can he rest when Anne is so ill?

Francis is the one to come up with a solution - or at least, so Richard thinks, until his sisters arrive in Anne's bedchamber without so much as knocking on the door.

"Come now, Dickon," Annie says, pressing a kiss to his hair, "you've far too much to be doing to hover over the lady so - give her space to breathe, little brother, and see to all your correspondence."

Bess is holding the door, and Annie shepherds him out to Anne's solar, away from Anne herself, and his knees nearly give out with terror that she will die while his back is turned.

"Come now, little brother," Bess says, as she and Annie settle him down to sit, as they coax him to eat and drink. "What use are you to her if you cannot stand on your own, hmm? Do you think she would want you to neglect the realm in her favour?"

"Look at all these letters, Dickon," Annie scolds him, kissing his hair again. "How have you let them pile up so high? You were always so diligent as a boy."

Annie was already well married when Richard was a boy, and he spent much of his boyhood at Middleham besides, when he was not abroad in the Low Countries, but there are an awful lot of letters, so terribly many, so they set him up with a desk and a comfortable chair in Anne's solar, and they position him so that he can see through the door, to where she is small and pale against her too-large pillows.

She loves them like that, huge and soft, and he has never been able to sleep on them at all - he has always spent his nights in her bed with his head on her chest, or her belly, or between her breasts - just she she finds his pillows too hard and thin. Right now, he would give away every comfort in the world, just to have her well again. Any price is worth paying, to save her from this darkness that is dragging her away from him.

He has set out his new privy council and answered all the most urgent correspondence when she wakes up.

It is slow, in the late evening, and she coughs herself upright.

He goes to her without thinking, letters forgotten, pain forgotten, as he staggers from one room to the other, as he collapses to his knees at her bedside.

She looks down at him, and smiles. Even with her hair sticking to her sweaty neck and her cheeks and eyes hollow with sickness and grief, she is radiant, and his heart chokes him with love for her.

"I think," she says, when the coughing has fully subsided, "that we ought to speak properly of all that has come between us, these past months. I do not intend on going to my grave without my husband's love."

"You will never lose that," he says, pushing himself up with only his right hand to settle beside her on the bed. He has not been so close to her for anything save practicality in months and months, and wishes either one of them was well enough for him to kiss her. "My heart is wholly in your keeping, my lady - surely you know that?"

There were those foolish rumours, nonsense about him bedding Ned's daughter, but they truly were nonsense - surely she did not believe that he loved another?

Even if she had so little faith in him as to think that he would bed his niece - surely she could never believe that his love belonged to any but her?

"I knew it, once," she says, leaning forward just enough so that her shining brow is against his good shoulder, hot through his shirt, "but I have had cause to doubt of late, my lord."

He holds court for the first time since victory at Bosworth seven weeks to the day after the battle, and can only manage the morning session before he has to break.

Usually, he would dine with guests - ambassadors, perhaps, or unsteady Lancastrians who can be turned rather than broken - but he has not the patience to sit with anyone. He is sore and tired and out of sorts, and wishes only for solitude.

Anne is waiting for him, wearing a new gown of dark green satin that makes her look paler, but suits her all the same.

"This is new," he says, running the backs of his fingers down her arm - and drawing a flush to her bone-pale face, which is a relief. He has not seen her with any colour at all, since she was last ill, and any sign that she is returning to full health is more welcome than anything in the world. "It is lovely."

"It is expensive," she corrects him, smiling very slightly. "But we are victorious monarchs, and ought to look the part - I have ordered new clothes for you, to be fitted as soon as you are well enough to stand for the fittings."

He sits, and takes her hand, and kisses her wedding ring. Her finger is shiny underneath it, worn smooth, and he likes that, that she is marked as his even when not wearing his ring.

"I would have new jewels commissioned for you," he says, as food is brought to them. "Pearls, and sapphires, and perhaps emeralds, to match your new dress."

"A crown, too, Dickon," Bess says, sweeping toward the table with John at her heels, and Richard could spit with annoyance - he thought that perhaps, he might have time today to speak with Anne as she so desires, but of course not. Bess and Annie have been invaluable since their arrival, keeping court when neither he nor Anne is well enough to do so, but he still wishes they'd remember that he is their King, not just their youngest brother, not just the baby of the family, and leave him alone with his wife for more than half an hour at a time.

"I have a crown," Anne says, squeezing his hand for a moment before withdrawing - more than she has given him in longer than he likes, but he is beginning to understand just why she has been so distant from him.

Neglect - he has neglected her. He wishes it were otherwise, but it is true, and now that she has said it, he cannot but see neglect in his every action since they were crowned.

"I have no need of another," she says, and he wonders at that - she does not always wear her crown, even when they are holding court, and perhaps if he had one made that better suited her, she would wear it more often. Something dainty, elegant and light, in silver and gold with those pearls and sapphires he mentioned earlier, and a dark blue gown to go with it, and pearls for her neck as well-

"When you are quite finished daydreaming, Dickon," Bess chides him, teasing, "we should all like to eat now."

He is thirty-three, Bess forty-one, but it is as if he is a child of seven and she a girl of fifteen again, bickering at table because she wants so desperately to please their lady mother and he simply wants to eat. He has missed his sisters more than he would like to admit, because if he admits to missing Bess and Annie then he must admit to not missing Meg, who was always much more George's sister than she was his.

"Eat away," he says, waving them on, and turning once more to regard Anne. She has gained a little of the weight she lost, her collarbones not as painfully sharp under her thin skin, her wrists not as breakable, and he is glad of it - he likes it best when she is carrying a little weight, because she is so small of frame that he has always fretted over her catching chills and colds. "I have little appetite."

Food appears on his plate regardless, Anne and Bess conspiring to fatten him up as big as Ned was before he died, so he eats it, to please them.

Anne comes to court with him, after the meal and a stop at the chapel, and he feels twice as strong just for having her beside him. His shoulder still aches, his arm still feels strange and numb in its sling, and he is still exhausted, but it all seems to matter less when she is present, when there are people coming forward to congratulate her on her recovery.

"You never spoke of him, after he died," she says while they are playing cards by the fire that night. "Not once. Not to me."

Edward. Who else could it be, but their boy?

"It hurt you so much to think of him," he says, "and I was a coward - it hurt me, too, and I could not bear it. I never spoke of him to anyone, save my father's ghost."

He had prayed and prayed, after Edward was taken from them, that his grandfathers would care for him in Heaven - two Richards, to care for a grandson neither of them could have predicted in their lifetimes. Keep him safe, see him happy, guard him and guide him where we no longer can.

He had prayed to Richard Neville for Anne's sake, too, begging her father to find some happiness for her - he himself had deprived Anne of so much happiness, after all, in failing to keep Edward with them, in not finding enough trustworthy men that he had time for her as Ned always had for his Elizabeth - and had thought that Warwick had chosen to ignore his prayers out of spite when misfortune and misery piled heavier and heavier on Anne's slight shoulders.

"I wanted to speak of him," she says, laying down the Queen of Diamonds, painted to look like Elizabeth Woodville. "I want to still, to remember him. He was my only boy, Richard. My only child to survive into this world. Of course I want to speak of him, even if it pains me."

The Queen of Hearts, laid down over Anne's diamonds, is painted in her image, which had made her blush. He cannot remember now who made them a gift of these cards, but it had been before they came to the crown, and meant in malice - Richard is not the King of Hearts, after all, Ned not the King of Diamonds, all of them mismatched and made mock. They use them all the same, and used laugh about it.

Now is not for laughter.

"Then speak of him," Richard says, throwing aside his cards to take both her hands in his one useful one. "Speak of him without pause, if that is what you wish - I will listen. He was mine too, Anne. My only child with you who saw this world."

"You have others-"

"Not with you," he reminds her, wishing she could understand. He loves Kitty and Johnny, but they are not Anne's - he did not love their mother, and that makes it different. I will be a true husband, because I love you , he told her so long ago, and that has not changed. Nothing could change it, and nothing ever will.

"He had just outgrown his new breeches," she says. "I couldn't have them made quick enough to keep up with him - I always thought he would be small, like us, but those last few months made it seem as though he was taking after your brother, or my father."

"He had Ned's look, a little," Richard agrees, leaning over the table to be closer to her. "That nose-"

"And the chin," Anne says eagerly, eyes shining. "But your colouring, the dark hair and eyes."

"Mostly I thought he had your look, I admit," Richard says, feeling almost sheepish. "But that may have been wishful thinking - I wanted him to have all of your good."

"He was blessed to have you as his father," Anne says, that ferocity she keeps dammed up sneaking forth, just slightly. "You loved him better than any man ever loved a son, Richard. I know that, at least."

"You were always his favourite, regardless of how well I loved him," Richard says, just to see her blush. "I cannot say that I blame him - it is a heady thing, to have your love. I am glad he never ran the risk of losing it."

She blinks at him, slow and hard, and then frowns.

"You are a very clever man," she tells him. "Far too clever to be so stupid. "

"Stupid? Anne, I-"

"If I did not love you so," she says, pushing away from the table and him, "then it would not hurt me so deeply to know that your love is not so wholly mine as it once was."

She leaves without so much as a farewell, and he sits where he is until his groom comes to ready him for bed. What does she mean by that? Not so wholly mine as it once was.

Surely she knows him better than to believe the rumours. Surely she does.

"I have never bedded Elizabeth Rivers," he says, pushing into Anne's solar the next morning, ignoring the scattering of the ladies between him and his wife. "I have never wished to bed Elizabeth Rivers. I have never wanted any part of her, because I have had you."

He falls to his knees before her, breathless and mortified by this show of foolishness - he always abhorred Ned's public displays, but he cannot think how else to convince Anne. She must know. She must believe him.

Her hand is gentle in his hair, careful when she trails it down his jaw to cup his chin and draw his face up.

"Your denials will be the talk of court by noon," she tells him, "so we had best pair them with my acceptance, hadn't we?"

Her lips are warm and a little dry, and her scent is sweeter than he remembers it being before.

She draws away before he can so much as lift his hand.

"Now, away with you, husband," she says, smiling indulgently in a way that is alien to all he knows of her - it makes him think of her sister, of the way Isabel used smile when George was being wayward. "You have a country to rule over."

He gets to his feet unaided, bows over her hand for far longer than he needs to, and leaves. He is wearing one of the new doublets she had made for him, with his left arm in a sling under the heavy velvet and the loose sleeve pinned up neatly. It is the deep blue Anne has always favoured on him, the same blue she used favour for Edward, and he feels as though that is a sign of affection, even if all other signs are absent.

How have they come to this pass, where even a kiss between them is a political act, divorced from the love that has been between them all these years?

Margaret Beaufort is brought before him, at long last, the week before Advent begins.

She has confessed to her part in his nephews' murders, it seems.

Elizabeth and Cecily Rivers are in the crowd, clutching one another and red-eyed, but Anne is at his side, her hand warm and firm on his knee because his hand is still hidden away in his sling. All he wants to do is strike the Beaufort bitch down where she kneels, for all the pain she has caused to him and his family (another Ned and Dickon, even closer than he and Ned were, gone because of this madwoman's ambition - and Richard's own).

Afterwards… After he has sentenced her to death, after he has offered his condolences to his brother's daughters and written to his brother's false wife in sorrow and shame, after he has accepted the condolences of the court on his nephews' passing…

After it all, he lies face-down in his bed, reluctant to show his grief, his fury, even in the privacy of his own bedchamber. But then, the mattress dips beside him, and Anne's hand is in his hair, and he is safe. He is loved.

And so he cries.