CHAPTER TWELVE #2
"You take a bound pair," Vesper said over it, not lifting her voice, "and you drown the one.
Not anywhere. In her water. The still red water, where she comes up close against the skin of the world.
La Noyée. The Drowned One. Our Lady of Slackwater, when she puts on her kind face to be carried in a church parade.
Drown one of a bound pair in La Noyée's own water, and because the two souls are tied, the drowned one cannot go on to wherever the dead are owed.
She has nowhere left to fall but down the bind, into the other one's living skin.
" Her eyes went again to Maren's chest, and the grief in them was a hard thing to sit under.
"Lark did not slip in that backwater, child.
Lark was carried out to it and put under it, on purpose, by people who knew to the inch what her dying would do and exactly where her soul would be made to go.
What you are carrying over your heart is not a kindness the water left you.
It is the working itself, caught halfway through.
A Severance, half-done, walking around the Bywater in a tattoo artist who thinks she is grieving. "
"Show me," Vesper said then. "I need to see what she has made of my work."
Maren did not want to. She had kept the mark covered from every living eye for three years, on this woman's own instruction, and the habit was bone-deep.
But she undid the top buttons of her shirt and drew the cloth off her shoulder, into the gray light from the shuttered window, and let the old woman who had put it there look at what it had become.
Vesper leaned in close, not touching, her ruined face a hand's width from Maren's skin, and Maren felt the mark do what it always did under close attention, shift and resettle, the dark birds turning on themselves, the fine water-lines crawling. The old woman's breath went ragged.
"There she is," Vesper murmured, and her voice broke clean across the middle of it.
"There's your girl. Held right there in the water-lines, looking out at you.
That part is the bind I gave you. That part is only love.
" Then her face changed, and one knotted finger came up and hovered, not quite touching, over a place near the heart of the figure where the deep red went almost to black, and whatever she found there she did not say.
She sat back instead, slowly, and shut her eyes, and looked older than she had looked holding the door.
"There is more in there than your Lark," she said.
"I will get to it. Let me get to it in its order, because if I say the whole of it to you in one breath you will not believe a word, and you are going to have to believe this part first."
"And the woman who did it," Maren said. Her own voice had gone somewhere far off. "The one you taught."
"Calla Mourn." Vesper said the name and then sat with it a moment, like a stone you sit with in your shoe before you reach to take it out.
"She came to us a nobody from nowhere, half my life ago, starved for somewhere to belong and to matter, as the dangerous ones always are.
I took her in. I taught her. And she listened to me bless the soft new rite, the bind without the harvest, the mercy, and she decided, in that hungry private heart of hers, that I had gone weak and was robbing the goddess of what was hers.
She spent ten years calling my mercy a betrayal, to anyone who would listen, until enough of them listened.
Three years ago they put me out, and she put the old rite back, and she has been waiting, ever since, for a bind pure enough and strong enough to be worth the doing.
" The pale eyes came up. "And then two girls who loved each other since they were sixteen walked up my stairs and gave me the cleanest bind I ever made in my life. "
Maren looked at Rowan then. Rowan had not moved from the stove, two cups poured and going cold and forgotten in her hands, and she was watching Maren with a still, braced grief that was its own kind of confession.
She had known all of this. Every word of it.
She had known it in the cafe, and in the truck, and last night in the studio when she said there was no ready to be had, and she had driven Maren out here to hear it in another woman's mouth because she could not make herself be the one to say it.
Maren turned away from her before either of them could find anything to put in the air between them.
There would be a reckoning for that. It would keep.
Maren found she had sat down without deciding to, on the edge of the table by the black-water basin, with the room gone slow and strange around her.
"Why, though," she said, and it came out very small, a child's question.
"Why Lark. Lark never did one thing to anybody.
Lark drew swallows and laughed too loud in restaurants and was scared of deep water her whole life.
Why would anyone on this earth go to all of that, all of that, just to drown my Lark. "
And Vesper, who had wept at the door and bowed her head to the accusation and gone iron naming the rite, looked at her now with something worse than any of it.
With pity. The particular pity you keep for a person who has not yet understood the true size of the thing that has already happened to them.
"Oh, baby," she said, very softly. She reached across the small space between them and laid one scarred hand over Maren's wrist, gently, the way you steady someone before you say the thing that cannot ever be unsaid. "You still think this was a thing that was done to Lark."
"It was done to Lark. They drowned her."
"They spent her." Vesper's hand tightened. "They never wanted Lark, child. They never wanted her at all. They wanted you. Lark was only the half they could spare."