Slackwater

CHAPTER ONE

The Binding

Three years ago.

Lark went first up the stairs, the way she went first into everything.

The steps were the outside kind, bolted to the flank of a sagging Creole house off Esplanade, on the bayou side of New Orleans, and they had given up being level a long time ago.

Lark took them two at a time anyway, one hand trailing the rail, her sandals slapping the old wood, and Maren came behind her the way she always did, a half-flight back, watching, in case.

In case the night decided to take Lark somewhere she couldn't follow.

They had been together since they were sixteen, which at nineteen still felt like most of a life.

Lark had walked into the parlor where Maren was apprenticing, asked for a swallow between her shoulder blades, and then sat through two hours of the needle telling Maren her whole history unprompted.

Somewhere in the second hour Maren had understood she was finished, that this loud bright girl had simply moved in behind her ribs and did not intend to leave.

People said you couldn't know a thing like that at sixteen. Maren had known.

The heat sat on them both like a second body.

It had not let go since June, and it would not let go now; it came up off the river and the bayou in a green, breathing weight, smelling of mud and jasmine and something underneath it, river-rot or something older.

Two houses down a radio played low through a screen door. Somewhere a dog gave up barking.

At the turn of the stair the bayou showed itself between the houses, a flat black ribbon of water, dead still under the streetlight, not moving at all.

Maren's eyes went to it and her whole body flinched, a small involuntary thing, like a muscle remembering a fall.

She didn't know why still water did that to her. It always had.

Above them the high window stayed lit and didn't move. Lark talked the whole way up, the way she talked when she was nervous and refusing to admit it: about the apartment they’d have one day with a whole room just for the inks, about the shop sign she'd already designed in her head, about nothing at all.

Maren let it run over her and watched the back of Lark's neck and thought, not for the first time, that she would do a great deal to keep hearing it.

"You're shaking," Lark said, over her shoulder. She wasn't even winded.

"It's hot."

"Liar." Lark grinned down at her, gap-toothed and sure of everything, and some of the tightness went out of Maren's shoulders. "You're allowed to be scared. I'm a little scared."

"You're not."

"No," Lark admitted. "I'm not." She held out her hand, palm down, the way you'd offer it to something you were coaxing closer.

Maren took it. She had counted the money for this, twice; she had found the address, written on the back of a receipt in a hand she didn't recognize; she was the one who knew which step was the broken one.

She told herself she'd done all that because she was the careful one, the practical one, and not because some animal part of her could not stop trying to make Lark into a thing she could not lose.

She told herself that, and she went on holding her hand, and at the top of the stairs there was a door with a thin warm line of light under it, and they stopped, and they breathed.

?

The room ate the giddiness the moment they crossed into it.

It was a single low-ceilinged space with the shutters closed against the night, and it was full of candlelight: tallow candles, dozens of them, so that the air was thick and gold and smelled of hot wax and bitter green herbs and, faintly, of the river.

A long table had been laid for work. Maren took it in piece by piece: clean cloth, a needle, small dishes of ink, a twist of salt.

And at the center, a shallow basin of water so dark it might have been ink itself, perfectly still, holding the candle-flames upside down in its skin.

The room was too warm. Maren wanted to leave and wasn't going to.

The woman who'd opened the door was old and built like something the weather had worked on for a long time.

Iron-gray hair worn loose. Rings on hands that had done hard things.

When she pushed her sleeves back to wash them, Maren saw the scars laddered up the insides of both forearms, old and pale and deliberate, and looked away before she could be caught looking.

"Sit," the woman said. Vesper, the receipt had said. Just that. "Not there. There."

They sat. Vesper did not sit. She stood over them and looked at them for a long moment, and her looking had weight, like a hand laid flat against the chest.

"Do you understand," she said, "what it is, to be bound?"

"Yes," said Lark, immediately, the way you'd answer do you love her, with no space in it for doubt. "Forever. That's the whole point."

Vesper didn't argue. She only kept looking, and her silence went on a beat too long, and into that silence the first cold thing crept.

Maren found her eyes had gone back to the basin.

As she watched, the candle-flames seemed to lean, all of them, very slightly, toward the still dark water, though there was no draught in that shuttered room, nothing to lean them.

Then Vesper's eyes came off Lark and settled on Maren instead, and stayed, as though she had already picked out which of the two of them was the frightened one and found it worth her attention.

"And you," she said. "You want this more than she does.

" It was not a question. Maren said nothing, which was its own answer, and the old woman nodded slowly, the nod of someone who has just had a fear confirmed.

"Love wants to keep," she said at last, and her voice had gone quiet and almost kind.

"That is all this is. The wanting, made to hold.

" She reached for the cloth. "There are three things you will do for me, and you will do all three, always.

You will keep it covered. You will speak its name to no one.

" She paused, and her eyes went once to the basin.

"And never. Never near the open water. Do you understand me? "

"We understand," Lark said, and squeezed Maren's hand under the table, and grinned, because to Lark it was a wedding, and the old woman's solemnity was only the part you sat through to get to the rest.

Maren said nothing. She understood that she did not understand, and that the old woman knew it, and was letting it go.

?

They had brought the blood in a jam jar, because they were nineteen and had not known how else to carry it.

They had done it that morning at the kitchen table, both of them, awkward and solemn and trying not to laugh, and then not laughing at all.

It had felt less like magic than like something older than magic, the kind of thing women must have done in kitchens for a very long time without ever telling anyone they did it.

Vesper took the jar without comment, as if girls brought her their blood in kitchen jars every night of the week, and perhaps they did.

She divided it between two of the small dishes and worked it into the ink, patient and unhurried, Lark's into one, Maren's into the other, and when she was done she set the dishes down and looked at them both and said, "She will wear you.

You will wear her. Her blood in your skin, yours in hers.

That is the bind." She wet the needle. "You drown into each other.

There's no shore after. You understand that part? "

"Good," said Lark softly. She was not laughing now. She had gone still and bright, the way she got at the rare center of things, and she turned to Maren in the gold light and took both her hands. "Say it with me. We don't have to use her words. Just say it."

So they said it, the two of them, leaning over the basin of dark water as Vesper bid them, their reflections held in it upside down and trembling.

They kept it plain. They promised the ordinary enormous things, I'm yours, you're mine, I'll find you wherever, and Maren heard her own voice come out lower and steadier than the fear underneath it.

And underneath the steadiness was the thing she would never say aloud, which was please, please, let this be the thing that makes you unleaveable.

Her mother had gone when Maren was seven, with no note, in weather like this.

After that the lesson had been simple enough: people left, and the ones you loved left hardest. The bind was that turned backwards.

If Lark couldn't leave, Lark couldn't be lost. It wasn't a good reason and Maren knew it, even then, bent over the black water. She did it anyway.

She bent her head over the black water and let herself go down into the promise like going under, she who was afraid of still water, because it was Lark, and for Lark she would drown.

"There," Lark whispered, when it was done. Her eyes were wet and laughing at once. "Now you can't lose me."

Maren could not answer that. There was no answer to it that the room would survive.

?

The needle, when it came, was a small bright pain, and then a steady one.

Vesper worked on Maren first, low on the ribs over the heart, and Maren held still the way you hold still for the people you trust to mark you forever.

It went on a long time. The needle found its rhythm and the rhythm became the room: the buzz, the wipe, the heat off Vesper's lamp, the small wet sound when she rinsed the color from the skin.

Maren breathed through it and watched Lark across the table watching her, and they didn't need to say anything, and for a while it was almost ordinary.

Two girls getting tattooed on a Tuesday, nothing stranger than that.

She watched it take shape upside down: a figure that was Lark and not-Lark, wreathed about with fine water-lines and a scatter of small birds rising, larks, of course, because Lark could never resist a joke even in ink.

The pain was almost sweet. The candlelight swam.

Across the table she was aware of Lark baring her own ribs, of Vesper moving between them, of her own blood going into Lark and Lark's coming into her, the two of them being quietly stitched into one thing.

Somewhere near the end of it she noticed the candles had stopped guttering. She told herself she was tired. She was nineteen and in love and full of her own blood and a little of someone else's, and she told herself a good many things that night.

And then it took.

It wasn't thunder. The world just went wrong by a single degree, all at once: the fresh ink, which should have been cooling, went warm under Maren's skin, then warmer, a heat that had nothing to do with the needle and came from somewhere inside her; a pressure settled at the back of her neck, the exact weight of being looked at; and on the table the basin of water had gone utterly still, stiller than water knows how to be, its surface like black glass, as if it had stopped breathing in order to listen.

The candle-flames stood straight up. Every one of them.

Straight up and unwavering, in a room with no wind.

Maren felt Lark.

Not a vision. A presence, sudden and total, warm and close beneath the new mark on her ribs, as near as a held breath: Lark, in her, looking out through her own skin. For the length of that one breath she was the most loved she had ever been and the most afraid, and the two were the same feeling.

Then it was gone. Just the ink and the sting and the smell of hot wax and the room, ordinary again, the way it had been before.

But Vesper had gone still too. Her hands had stopped over Maren's ribs, and her face, in the moment before she folded it away, did something Maren had no name for: fear, or grief, or the two of them at once.

She looked at the two girls and at what she had just made of them, and she said, very low, more to herself than to anyone, two words.

"...Too strong."

"What?" said Maren.

"Nothing." Vesper wiped the needle. The candles had gone back to their ordinary flickering as though they had never done anything else. "It's done. Cover them now."

?

Out on the stairs the night gave the giddiness straight back to them, the way the room had taken it.

They were laughing before they reached the bottom.

They were bound, they were forever, the whole impossible thing had been done and the world had not ended, and Lark kept twisting to look at the fresh ink under the edge of her shirt and then back at Maren, delighted, as if she'd got away with something.

Maren couldn't stop touching her own, the bandage warm over her heart, the strange new heat of it still there under her hand.

Vesper caught them on the threshold. Not Lark. Maren. Her old fingers closed hard around Maren's wrist, and her eyes in the door-light were not solemn now; they were urgent, almost frightened, and they held Maren where she stood.

"Cover it," she said. "Tell no one. And keep it from open water. Do you hear me, girl? Whatever else you do. Keep it away from the water."

"Maren." Lark was already three steps down, laughing up at her, holding out her hand. "Maren. Come on."

The joy won. It always won. Maren half-turned to go, and looked back once, and Vesper was standing in her lit doorway watching them with the face of a woman at a graveside.

Then the dark took the stair, and Lark's hand was in hers, and they were down and out and walking home through the wet heat with their arms wound together.

The bayou ran beside the road, flat and black and close. Lark, drunk on the night, said the name of the thing they'd done out loud, careless and joyful, right there at the lip of the open water, and laughed at the sound of it.

And the still black water shivered. Just once. A single slow ripple crossing it from no wind and no stone, the way the surface moves when something far down turns over in its sleep, and settles, and goes on listening.

Then it was nothing. Just the bayou. Just two girls in love, walking home in the dark, who had three years.