CHAPTER TWELVE
Vesper
Rowan came for her at first light, as promised, and they crossed the city downriver almost without speaking.
Maren rode with her arms folded and watched the Bywater give way to the high bridge over the Industrial Canal, the rust-streaked lift span and a barge sliding under it, and then the long slope down into the Lower Ninth, where the streets ran wide and quiet and half the lots stood empty, grass grown up over the slab foundations of houses that never came back.
Holy Cross, down at the bottom of it, hard by the river behind the levee, where the land thinned out toward water on two sides and the few houses left wore their survival like a held breath.
Rowan drove it like she knew every turn of it.
Of course she did. There was nowhere, it was turning out, that Rowan did not know.
Maren had not forgiven her in the night and did not intend to start now.
She had sat awake in Lark's chair until the gray came up, turning over the new shape of the woman beside her, the one who knew where the bodies were buried and would not say, and she had decided she would use Rowan to get to Vesper and trust her exactly that far and not one inch past it.
If Rowan felt the cold coming off the passenger seat she did not remark on it.
She drove with both hands on the wheel, a woman going somewhere she did not want to go, carrying someone she had not been able to talk out of it.
"Whatever's between us," Rowan said, once, on the empty stretch where St. Claude came down toward the river, "park it at the door.
She is the most frightened person you will ever meet, and frightened people don't give you the truth if you come at them with a knife out.
Let her get there her own way. She will get there.
She has been waiting three years to tell somebody, and she chose, a long time ago, that it would be you. "
Maren said nothing to that. But she filed it, as she filed everything Rowan said now, looking for the lie under it, and found, as ever, only the shape of something withheld.
The house sat at the end of a dead street where the asphalt gave out into shell and weed, a narrow shotgun gone silver with weather, jacked up high on its piers with the dark of the crawlspace under it.
It should have looked abandoned like the rest of the block.
It did not. Things hung along the gallery rail and over the door, small dark bundles, knots of root, a line strung with what looked like little bones, and the swept dirt of the yard had a hard clean order to it that the grown-over lots did not.
The air over the place was wrong in the same way the air over Honorine's house had been wrong, except that this wrongness faced outward, a held line, a wall set against something coming.
Maren felt the mark stir as they came up the walk, not the killer-recoil and not the cold but the deep certain pull it had given in the lamplight at the name, leaning, almost glad, and her stomach turned over, because she still believed that morning that the pull meant she had walked all this way up the path of the one who had done it.
"She knows we're here," Rowan said, the first whole sentence she had given in an hour. "She always knows. Let me go first." She stopped on the walk and looked at Maren, and there was something near to pleading in it. "Whatever you came out here to do to her. Look at her first."
The door opened before they reached it.
Maren had built the woman up across three weeks into something enormous: a dark priestess with deep water in her, the smiling architect of every cold thing that had happened, and what stood holding the door frame to stay upright was an old woman the weather had nearly finished.
Iron-gray hair, loose and uncombed, around a face creased to ruin.
Layered colorless clothes that gave off, even from the walk, tallow and bitter green.
And her forearms, when she lifted one against the morning glare, were laddered on the inside from wrist to elbow with old scars, line over pale raised line, the way a tree carries its rings, except these had been put there one at a time, by a blade, on purpose, some given and some, Maren would understand later, received.
She looked at Rowan first, and something crossed the ruin of her face that was almost tenderness, the look you give a child you were sure the world had eaten and find, against the odds, still walking around in it.
Then she looked at Maren. And then she looked at the place over Maren's heart, and went still, and kept looking, as no one looked, as only Odette had ever looked, except that Odette had read the mark like a stranger reads a hard word and Vesper read it like a mother reads her own child's hand in a ransom note.
Her face came apart. She made a small broken sound and put her knuckles to her mouth.
"Oh," Vesper said, from behind her hand.
"Oh, she went and did it after all. She did it to you.
" Her pale eyes filled and ran without shame.
"And she did it the foul way, the old way, I can see it from here, I can see what she's let it start to turn into.
Child. I am so sorry. Come in, come in out of the light, before more of the wrong thing gets a look at you. "
It was not the greeting of a guilty woman, and it threw Maren badly, because she had carried her fury all the way out here like the last warm thing she owned, and now there was nowhere to set it down.
She followed the old woman into the dim with the accusation still hot and unspent in her mouth.
Inside, the house was close and clean and crowded with the same dark work: candle stubs, a basin of water gone black in a corner, a whole wall of small bound things, every one of them turned to face outward, toward the door and the water beyond it.
A hidden, frightened, fiercely guarded place, kept by a frightened old woman who had wept at the first clear sight of Maren's chest.
Maren made herself say it anyway, because she had come too far not to.
"You married us," she said. "Three years ago, up those outside stairs off Esplanade.
You put this on me and you put the twin of it on Lark.
And three weeks ago somebody drowned Lark in the Vaudry water and her mark came up off her body blank as a healed scar, and everything I have turned over since runs straight back to your two hands.
So you sit there, and you tell me why I should not believe that you killed her. "
Vesper lowered herself into a chair as if her bones were spun glass.
She did not flinch from the words. She looked at Maren out of those streaming pale eyes and nodded, slowly, as though the charge were no more than her plain due, as though she had been waiting three years on her own porch for someone to come up the walk and finally say it to her face.
"You should believe it," she said. "In every way that signifies, you would be right.
I made the thing that made her killable.
I taught the woman who ordered it done every last thing that woman knows.
And I knew it was coming, and I was too far down in my own cowardice to find you in time to stop it.
" She turned her ruined hands palm up in her lap.
"So if you came out here to lay Lark in the ground at my door, child, there is room.
There has been room three years. But you would be setting her down on the wrong half of the truth, and you have lost too much to walk out of here holding only half of it. "
She sent Rowan to put water on, the way the old make tea of a catastrophe because the hands need a task, and there was an ease between the two of them in that small exchange, a known thing, that told Maren more than she wanted to know: that Rowan had stood in this house before, many times, that whatever Rowan was, she was something to this old woman, and the old woman was something to her.
Then, with the kettle ticking toward a boil, Vesper told Maren what she had done to her at nineteen.
The thing on Maren's chest had a true name, she said, an old and formal one.
The Drowning Bind. Two girls' blood, given freely, worked into matching ink by a priestess's hand, so the two souls were tied and would, in the old phrase, drown into one another.
Vesper had done it as a marriage and meant it as a mercy.
Done her way, the safe way, the bind was only that and nothing more: a tether of love, so that if the worst ever came and one of them died too young, the one left behind would not be left wholly alone.
The lost soul would be caught and held in the living one's skin, grieving, kept, but whole.
Nothing taken. Nothing owed to anyone. "That is the rite I gave the two of you," Vesper said.
"Two frightened girls who loved each other too hard and too early and could not stand the thought of being parted.
I have done far worse things in my life than bind you. I am not sure I ever did a kinder one."
"Then what went wrong with it," Maren said.
"Nothing went wrong with what I did." And here the old woman's voice hardened, and for a moment Maren saw the other one inside her, the one who had stood at the head of a room full of the faithful and been obeyed.
"What went wrong is that the bind I used for a love-knot was built, long before I was ever born, to be something else underneath.
A holding-pen. The order I served has an older and a fouler use for two souls tied into one, and it has its own name, and I spent the whole back half of my life trying to burn that name out of the world.
" She looked at her wall of warded things. "The Severance."
The kettle began, thin and far off, to scream.