CHAPTER SEVEN #2
"No." Flat. "I told you. I don't go up against that water.
It is not how my work moves, it is not a fight my work can win, and I am too old to bury another one.
" She had her hand flat on the closed Bible.
"I'll grieve with you. I'll pray for that girl of yours and mean every word.
But I will not take up arms against a god in a lake for a stranger, and you should not ask anybody living to. "
?
Maren stood in the cool clean shop and felt the no settle over her, final and reasonable, and felt the thing she had walked across the city for begin to slip, and she did the only thing she had left, which was to stop performing any of it.
"I'm not asking you to fight anything." Her voice came out low and stripped down.
"I don't care about a god in a lake. I don't care about winning.
I had one person. They took her, and they made the whole city write it down as her own stupid accident, and they left me this.
" She pressed her hand flat over the mark, not hiding it now.
"And it moves. It wakes me in the night.
It walks me places I didn't choose to go.
Some nights I can feel her in it, and I can't tell if that's a mercy or the worst thing that ever happened to me, and there is not one living person I can say that to and stay out of a hospital.
You looked at it, and you knew. I don't want a weapon.
I want somebody to tell me what I'm carrying. That's all I came for. Then I'll go."
The shop was quiet. Out on the street the brass band started up again, far off, a few bars and a stop.
The woman looked at her a long time. Whatever she was weighing, she weighed it to the bottom, slow, and Maren had the sense of a scale coming level somewhere in a back room of her that no stranger was let into.
"Odette," she said at last. "If you're going to tell me things that'd get you hospitalized, you can use my name.
Odette Mercier." She came down off the stool, and standing she was small, smaller than she had seemed, and it took nothing off her.
"I'll tell you what you're carrying. That much I will do, because no soul should carry a thing and not know its name, and because somebody should have told my Saturday girl, and nobody did.
" She came round the counter. "Hear me on the rest. I will read it.
I will not fight it. What you do once you know is between you and your God. Now bare it."
Maren unbuttoned her shirt to the sternum and drew the cloth off the left side of her ribs, over her heart, where the mark lay low on the left of her chest, the top edge of it riding the underswell of her breast, dead over the beating muscle: Lark, and the small dark birds, and the fine lines of water, in a red so deep it read black until the light caught it.
In three years she had shown it to no one but Lark.
Now she stood half bared in a stranger's shop and let an old woman lean in close to look at her dead wife living in her skin.
Odette did not touch it at first. She looked, glasses down, her face gone still and professional, the same flat attention Maren herself gave a piece of skin before she set the first line. She breathed out, slow.
"Well," she said softly. "Aren't you a piece of cruelty."
"What is it."
"A binding. A true one, not the foolishness they sell on Bourbon.
Two of you, tied soul to soul, blood into blood.
" Her stained finger moved over the figure without landing on it.
"And one of you is dead, and did not pass.
Could not. They saw to that." She traced the air above the water-lines.
"She should have gone on to wherever the dead go on to.
Instead she was turned, sent back down the tie into you, and now she is in here, the both of you in the one skin. You feel her because she is here."
Maren's eyes were burning and she let them. "Is it her. Is any of it really her."
"Some." Odette did not lie to her, and Maren would be grateful for that later.
"Some of it is her, sure as I am standing here.
And some of it is the thing that put her there, wearing her face, because that is how a working like this gets built: so you can never quite tell the two apart.
That is not an accident. That is the craft of it. "
She reached then, and laid two fingers flat over the mark, and the mark went cold.
Maren felt it go: the cold spreading out from under Odette's hand with edges to it, the same cold it had given in the lobby, a flinch, a closing, the thing in her skin drawing hard back from the old woman's touch.
Odette felt it too. She lifted her hand away and looked at it, and then at Maren, and there was no surprise in her, only a thing confirmed.
"It's gone cold," Maren said. "It does that. Is it scared of you?"
"It doesn't want me looking." Odette wiped her two fingers slow down her apron, as if she had dipped them in cold water.
"That is the most honest thing it has done since you walked in.
A thing with nothing to hide doesn't shy from being seen.
" She held Maren's eyes. "So hear me, and keep it, whatever else you let go of.
Part of what's in you loves you. I don't doubt that for a minute.
And part of it is the thing that did this, and it is patient, and it wants something out of you, and it will use the loving part to get it.
Every time that mark turns sweet on you.
Every time it leads you somewhere in the dark.
You stop, and you ask yourself who it is that's doing the leading.
You promise me that much, or I'm sorry I told you anything. "
?
Maren did her shirt back up with hands that were not quite steady. The shop had gone very quiet. Outside, the light had stretched long and gold along the street.
Odette did not move to show her out. She stood small behind her counter with her ringed strong hands flat on the closed Bible, and she looked at Maren like a person watching someone stand in a road who has not yet heard what is coming up it, and Maren felt the last of it gathering before the old woman spoke.
"There is more, and you will want it, and I am of half a mind to keep it from you, because once you have it you can't set it back down." Odette's voice had dropped, gentle now, which was worse than the hardness had been. "Give me your wrist."
Maren laid her hand across the counter. Odette took it and turned it palm-up and pressed it flat to Maren's own chest, over the cloth, over the mark, and held it there under both of hers, and went very still, her eyes half closing, her head tipping as though she were listening for something a long way down under still water.
When she spoke, the dryness had gone out of her entirely, and what was left was old, and sure, and afraid.
"Child," Odette said. "You're carrying a debt." Her hands tightened. "And debts get called."