Chapter One #2
Bryn, to his credit, said nothing, though his eyes had gone bright and fixed on the middle distance in the particular way that meant he was working very hard not to cry in front of either of them, and Calla reached over and took his other hand, the good one, the one still its ordinary color, and held it while their father sat with his guilt and his fear and, underneath both, the thin new thread of something that might, if she let herself believe it, have been called relief that someone else had finally said the thing he had not been able to say himself.
The Under-City woke slowly around them as the grey light strengthened toward something that could properly be called morning, though morning in the caves was a relative thing, measured more by the sounds of people beginning their work than by any change in the quality of the light, which never reached far enough down the cliff face to matter much.
Calla heard the first ropes creaking as the lift cages began their long ascents and descents between the ledges, heard the distant clatter of the fish market setting up along the lower quay, heard, faint and far above, the bell that marked the changing of the temple watch in High Reach, a sound that had always struck her as obscene in its cheerfulness, ringing out over people who could not afford to eat the fish their own hands had caught because the tithe took the best of every catch before it ever reached an Under-City table.
She left Bryn in their father's care and went out along the ledge path toward her aunt's dwelling, because if anyone in the Under-City still remembered how vow law actually worked, beneath the layers of temple ceremony and Blood House pageantry that had grown up around it like barnacles on a hull, it was Maren.
The path was narrow enough in places that she had to turn sideways, worn smooth by four centuries of feet doing exactly what her own feet were doing now, and the drop beside it fell away into a darkness that the eye simply gave up trying to measure after the first hundred feet or so.
Calla had walked this path since she was old enough to walk anywhere, and she no longer felt the particular vertigo that visitors from High Reach always betrayed on the rare occasions they were forced down into the Under-City on some errand or other, faces carefully arranged into polite disinterest that did not quite disguise the way their hands stayed close to the rock wall the entire time.
Below her, far below, the Black Tide moved against the base of the cliffs with the sound it had always made, patient, unhurried, a sound she had been taught to fear before she had been taught to read, and she found herself, as she often did on this path, glancing down toward it despite herself, as though checking that it had not yet decided the morning was the morning it finally came to collect.
It had not. It never had, not in four hundred years, though the old women who sold fish along the lower quay still spoke of the Tide as though it were a neighbor with a long memory and a grudge, patient enough to wait out any number of generations for the debt it was owed.
Maren's dwelling was set into a wider hollow than most, a legacy of the years before the fall when the Duskane family had still had resources enough to carve extra space out of the rock for an unmarried aunt who had, by then, already turned her back on the temple training that might have made her a Warden in her own right.
She was waiting at the entrance when Calla arrived, which was not entirely a surprise, because Maren had always had an unsettling sense for when she was about to be needed, whether that sense came from genuine foresight or simply from decades of paying closer attention to her niece than anyone else in the family had the patience for.
"You've heard the bell," Maren said. It was not a question.
"Bryn's hand has started to grey."
Something moved behind Maren's eyes, quick and controlled, the particular flinch of someone who has spent a long time teaching herself not to flinch.
She stepped back from the doorway and gestured Calla inside without another word, and Calla followed her into the close warm dark of the hollow, past shelves crowded with jars and bundles of dried herb that Calla had never fully learned to identify, past the low table where Maren still, after all these years, kept a small brass bowl that Calla suspected had once been used for something considerably more significant than the tea it now held.
"Sit," Maren said, and Calla sat, and waited while her aunt poured two cups of something bitter and warm, and only once the cups were full did Maren finally speak the thing Calla had come here half hoping and half dreading to hear.
"You mean to enter the Tally."
"I mean to save my brother."
"Those are not automatically the same thing," Maren said, not unkindly, but with the particular precision of a woman who had spent her whole life being careful with words because she understood better than most people alive exactly how dangerous words could become once they were spoken aloud and sealed in blood.
"The Tally is not a charity, Calla. It does not simply hand its winner a cure and send them home satisfied.
It grants the Voice the right to cancel one blood debt.
One. And you would be entering against houses that have trained their children for this since before those children could walk properly, against contestants who have spent their whole lives being taught the exact shape of every trial before they ever set foot in the arena. "
"I don't have a choice."
"Everyone always believes that, right up until the moment the vow is sealed and there is no longer any choice to be had," Maren said, and something old and tired moved through her voice, old grief wearing a groove so deep that Calla suspected her aunt had walked this particular argument with herself more times than she would ever admit.
"I am not telling you not to go. I am telling you to understand precisely what you are walking into before you walk into it, because the Tally does not forgive people who enter it thinking only of what they hope to win and never of what they stand to lose. "
Calla wrapped both hands around the warm cup and made herself breathe, once, slowly, the way she had taught herself to breathe through fear since she was a child watching her mother's hands turn the same terrible grey her brother's hand had turned this morning.
"Then teach me," she said. "Whatever you still remember. Whatever they didn't manage to make you forget when they threw us out. I have until the registry closes to learn it."
Maren studied her for a long moment, the kind of look that seemed to weigh not just the words but the whole shape of the person who had spoken them, and Calla held still under it the way she had learned to hold still under her aunt's scrutiny since childhood, understanding somehow, even then, that Maren's silences carried more weight than most people's speeches.
"Your grandmother's grandmother would have called this foolish," Maren said finally. "She would also have gone and registered before the sun had fully cleared the water, so I suppose foolish runs thick enough in this family that there is no sense pretending otherwise now."
It was not quite an agreement. It was, Calla understood, something closer to surrender, the particular surrender of a woman who has spent years trying to protect a niece from a world she knows the niece cannot actually be protected from forever, and Calla felt something in her chest loosen very slightly for the first time since she had woken to the sound of her brother's uneven breathing.
"There is a great deal you do not know," Maren went on, rising to retrieve something from a chest set back against the far wall, moving with the particular briskness of a person who has decided, against her own better judgment, to commit fully to a course of action now that the decision has finally been made.
"The trials have changed their exact form more than once across the centuries, though the bones beneath them remain the same, because the bones are not decided by whoever currently sits on the Ashvane throne.
They are decided by what the Deep itself requires to be satisfied that the promises made in its name are still promises worth keeping. "
"And what does it require?"
Maren set a small, wrapped bundle on the table between them, old leather gone soft and dark with handling, and did not answer immediately, choosing instead to unwrap it with careful, deliberate hands while Calla waited, the tea cooling forgotten in her grip.
"It requires the truth," Maren said finally, folding back the last layer of leather to reveal a slim book whose pages had gone brittle and brown at the edges, handwriting crowding every margin in at least three different inks across what must have been decades.
"Not the comfortable kind. Not the kind High Reach has spent four years teaching your name to mean.
The Tally does not care what story the court prefers about your family, Calla.
It cares only whether a vow is kept or broken, and it will find the difference whether or not either of us is prepared for what it finds. "
Outside, far below the ledge and the winding path and the whole stacked weight of the Under-City clinging to the cliff face above it, the water went on moving against the rock the way it had moved for four hundred years, unhurried, patient, waiting, and Calla Duskane sat in her aunt's dim hollow with a brittle old book open on the table between them and understood, with a clarity that settled into her bones like cold water finding a crack in stone, that whatever door had closed on her family four years ago was about to be forced open again, whether the family standing on the other side of it was ready or not.