CHAPTER ELEVEN
Closer
They were most of the way back to the city before Maren stopped shaking, and even then it was not all the way, only down to a fine tremor she could hide by gripping her own knees.
Rowan drove without speaking, both hands on the wheel now, the knuckles still pale, taking the long flat highway back toward the lights at a careful speed that was its own kind of statement, a woman holding herself together by holding the truck together.
The windows were down against the heat, and the night came in warm and wet and smelling first of the marsh they were leaving, then of the city: hot asphalt, the river, somebody's late supper.
Twice she checked the mirror longer than the road behind them warranted.
Neither of them said what they were both watching for.
Nothing followed. The patient thing under the bloom did not need to follow, and they both knew it, and that was worse than headlights would have been.
Once, on the long dark stretch where the marsh gave over to the first scattered lights, Maren said, "Thank you," because it needed saying and she had nothing bigger to put under it.
"Don't," Rowan said. Not unkindly. "Not yet. We're not clear of it yet. Thank me when you're old."
It was the nearest thing to a joke either of them had managed, and it was not very near, and somehow it helped more than comfort would have.
What Maren could not say, what she would carry by herself a while yet, was the part that frightened her more than the Drowned or the cold red water or Honorine's loving voice.
It was that she had wanted to go. Not dragged, not tricked, not only that.
Somewhere down underneath the pull there had been a door in her that opened to it, a tiredness that had said yes before her feet ever moved, and the door had Lark's name written over it.
Come home. She had spent three years afraid of still water, and tonight she had walked smiling to the lip of it because the dead girl in her skin had asked her to, and some small piece of her had been glad to be asked.
She gave Rowan the turns to the studio without thinking, and only when they pulled up to the dark shopfront did she register what she had done, which was bring a living woman home to the one place that was thickest with the dead one.
?
Inside it smelled of green soap and old ink, of work she had been pretending to do.
Lark was everywhere in it, as she was everywhere Maren let her guard down: the second chair, the mug gone cloudy on the sill, the wall of flash they had drawn together across six years.
Maren turned on the small lamp instead of the overheads, because the overheads were too much truth, and sat down hard on the rolling stool.
It was only then, in the low light, that she looked at Rowan properly and saw that she was worse off than Maren was.
She had stopped just inside the door as though she did not quite trust the floor of the place, and she was holding herself with the particular stillness of a person who has decided that if they move at all they will come apart, and her hands, when Maren looked at them, were not steady either.
She had not made a sound about it the whole drive.
She had got Maren out and got them home and said nothing, and only now did Maren understand that the woman who pulled her out of the water tonight had done it by walking straight back into the worst room of her own life, and had been carrying that, alone, in the seat beside her, the entire way.
"She was the one," Maren said. "Wasn't she. The one who held you under, when you were small."
Rowan looked at her for a moment. Then she crossed the room and crouched in front of the stool, and instead of answering she took one of Maren's still-trembling hands in both of hers and turned it palm up, looking at the mud dried into the lines of it, the red silt of that water.
She got up and ran the tap warm and came back with a cloth and cleaned it off her, finger by finger, slow, the way you would clean a child's scraped knee, except that it was nothing like that, and they both knew it.
"Yes," Rowan said at last, to the hand, not to Maren's face.
"Honorine taught the little ones. They called it bringing us to the water.
She'd hold your head under and count, and the first few times you'd fight, and she'd wait, and then one day you didn't fight, and that was the day they said you belonged.
I was four the first time. Six the day I stopped fighting.
" She kept her eyes on the cloth, on the small careful work of her own hands.
"I have spent twenty years building a life where I would never have to stand in front of her again.
And then your girl's ink walked us up her road, and I went anyway, because the only thing worse than walking back in there was sitting in the truck and listening to you drown. "
Over Maren's heart the mark went cold. Cold and tight and watchful, the warning-cold, or the jealous-cold, she still could not tell which and was coming to understand that she never would.
She let Rowan finish her hand anyway. She watched the bent dark head and the steady, costly work of those hands, and felt, rising up through the shock and the grief and the cold disapproving thing on her chest, the want she had been refusing to name since the cab, plain now, and undeniable, and unbearable in this room of all rooms.
"You can stop," Maren said. "It's clean."
Rowan did not stop right away. She finished, and folded the cloth over her knee, and stayed crouched there, close, and her gray-green eyes came up to Maren's, and for a moment neither of them moved, two undone people in a low-lit room full of a third one, and the small distance between them filled up with everything that was not being said.
Maren felt herself lean. A half inch. The smallest betrayal there was, toward the warm living face that had not once, in any of this, looked away from her grief.
The mark bit down, hard and cold, a fist closing over her heart.
Maren pulled back. Not far. Only enough. Back into herself, gasping a little, her hand going up to her chest over the place where the cold was, and Rowan watched her do it and understood and sat back on her heels and gave her the distance, as she always gave Maren the thing Maren could not ask for.
"She doesn't like me," Rowan said quietly. Not hurt by it. Only true.
"I don't know what she likes." Maren's voice came out wrecked.
"I don't know if it's even her. That's the thing nobody warns you about, when they put a person in your skin.
I can't tell anymore where she stops and the leash starts.
I just leaned toward you and it felt like cheating on a ghost, and I don't even know if the ghost is really in there to be cheated on, or if it's only the thing that wants me in the water, keeping me lonely enough to walk in on my own.
" She was crying, she realized, with none of the usual warning before it.
"I'm sorry. You hauled me out of a swamp two hours ago, you walked back in front of the woman who drowned you as a child to do it, and here I am grieving at you across a tattoo chair. "
"You're allowed," Rowan said. "I told you that already.
" And then, carefully, like setting a foot down on ice: "For whatever it's worth.
I'm not trying to take her place. There isn't a place to take, and I wouldn't want it if there were.
I just don't want to watch the water get you like it got the rest of them.
That's the whole of what this is, for me. "
It was almost the truth. Maren, raw as she was, still felt the almost in it, the shape of some other thing Rowan was not saying, sitting just under the words. She was too tired and too undone to push at it. She would wish, later, with everything in her, that she had pushed at it then.
What she did instead was get up, on legs that had mostly stopped shaking, and fill a glass at the same warm tap, and put it into Rowan's hands as Rowan had put the cloth into hers.
It was small and it was clumsy and it was the only thing she had to give that the mark would not go cold over.
Rowan took it and held it and did not drink, and for a little while the two of them only stayed there in the lamplight, each of them having walked the other up out of a different water, and neither one of them saying so.
?
She let the quiet sit, and into it, unasked, her mind began doing the only thing it knew how to do with pain, which was to work.
She laid the threads out in the lamplight, out loud, because saying them to Rowan was steadier than turning them over alone in her own skull.
The bloom and the old water-families on their drowned land.
The names off the brittle library pages.
Honorine, who had known to the letter what was on her before Maren said a word, who had said owed, who had said she sends one of us home a girl who came up carrying something.
The Drowned wanting her, specifically, the mark on her and not the woman wearing it.
She had begun this whole search at Vesper's own door, the binding-house off Esplanade, and found it lived in by strangers and the trail run cold, and at the time that had felt like a dead end.
Now it felt like a woman who had run. All of it, every strand, organized around the one thing.
Around the bind. Around the particular blood-tattoo that had married her to Lark, and that the cult, somehow, had been counting on from the start.
And the bind had a maker.
"Vesper," Maren said, and felt the word drop into the room like a stone down a well.
Over her heart the mark did a thing it had done for no other name.
It did not recoil, as it did from a killer, and it did not warm, as it did toward the truth.
It pulled. Low and deep and certain, the same pull it gave toward the still water, a recognition so total that Maren mistook it on the spot for an accusation.
"It's Vesper. It was always Vesper. She married us in blood, she knew to the letter what she was making, she built the cult a thing it could use, and then she was gone the same week Lark died.
Every thread I have runs straight back to that woman's hands.
The ink knows her. Feel it. It knows her. "
Rowan had gone very still again. "No," she said.
"Don't." Maren came up off the stool. "Don't do the thing you did in the cafe.
You keep telling me it isn't her, and you keep refusing to say one word about why, and I have sat with that.
I have let you keep your reasons. But I stood with my own feet in that mud tonight, Rowan, with the water at my laces, and I am done letting you protect her from me. "
The flinch was small and it was total, and Maren saw it, and the floor went out of the room.
"You know where she is," Maren said slowly. "You know where Vesper is. You've known where to find her this whole time."
Rowan did not deny it. That was the worst of it, the thing that turned the warm wrecked closeness of ten minutes before into something with a cold floor under it: she did not even try to deny it.
She stood up too, unhurried, and the careful contained competence came back down over her like a shutter, and Maren watched the one person who had just knelt and washed a swamp out of the lines of her hand turn back, right in front of her, into a woman with a locked room inside her.
"It is not what you think it is," Rowan said.
"I'm asking you to trust me one more time.
Please. If you walk in on Vesper Calder believing she is the one who killed Lark, you are going to get something terribly wrong, and once it's done, I don't think there is anything I will be able to do about what comes after it. "
"Then take me to her," Maren said, "and watch me get it wrong."
?
For a long moment she thought Rowan would refuse outright, and that she would have to do the rest of it alone, in the dark, with only the leash for a compass.
Then something in Rowan gave way, some private weighing tipping over behind her eyes, and Maren understood she had chosen the lesser of two fears: better to walk Maren in herself than to let her go in blind and wild.
"Tomorrow," Rowan said. "Not tonight. You're in no state, and neither am I, and the place she's gone to ground does not take kindly to people turning up out of the dark.
I'll take you in the morning." She picked the folded cloth up again from where she had set it, looked at the red silt dried into the weave of it, set it back down.
"And Maren. When she tells you things, and she is going to tell you things, I need you to hold on to one fact through all of it.
That I tried to get you ready. And that there was no ready to be had. "
She left. Maren heard the truck cough and catch and pull away, heard the ordinary small sounds of the street ease back in behind it, and she stood alone in the studio with the one lamp and the second empty chair and the cold certain pull of the thing on her heart, which had not once stopped, the whole night, leaning her toward the woman who had made it.
She did not sleep. She sat down in Lark's chair, which she never did, had not once let herself do in three weeks, and she laid her hand flat over the mark, and she made the dead girl, or the thing wearing the dead girl's face, a promise that was really a question.
"Tomorrow I find out who did this to you," she said into the dark. "And then I make them give you back."
She did not let herself wonder, that night, whether give you back meant the thing she wanted it to mean. Or whether the cold deep pull under her hand had been the thing, all along, that most wanted to hear her say it out loud.