Chapter 15 Two Halves
The chapel smelled of cold wax and dust, and someone had lit the dead-watch candles early and left the tallest burning crooked, its wick bent like a broken finger.
Elowen stood behind the candle with her back to the door.
The thread at her wrist was taut. It held.
She had decided to leave when the door opened.
The keeper's door opened slow and doubtful. This one opened once, clean, and closed once, clean, and a figure stood inside where the candle light stopped. White and gold. A book carried at the ribs like something breakable.
"I saw you," Maren said. "In the smoke. I told myself I did not see you."
"You didn't call out."
"I couldn't." A pause. "I still can't."
Elowen let the candle burn between them and counted what she had: one figure, no escort, the door closed of its own accord. Three facts. She filed them.
"You should be out of the city," Maren said. "Past the wall, walking north again. Anywhere but under the seat."
"I know."
"Then why are you standing in a chapel?"
"The door asked no names."
Maren's eyes went to Elowen's wrist, where the sleeve came down over the grey. "Your sleeve is down," she said. "Good. The warden's tally reads wrists."
Maren's hand came up to make the sign of the light over the candle and stopped halfway, fingers curled, the way they used to curl over Seren's bed when the fever ran high and Maren was twelve and certain. The hand dropped to the book.
"Nine went in tonight," Maren said. "You watched them carried up."
"Nine came out empty."
Maren's jaw worked. "The books say nine ascended."
Elowen waited. Maren had not come to tell her what the books said.
"I have read the count of the dying the chapterhouse takes in," Maren said, "and the count of the souls it gives back to the light.
Same hand, same ledger, and the two never close.
I went through it line by line one night with a lamp, and when I reached the end the difference was exactly what it had been at the beginning. One name, and one grave standing open."
"How long?"
"Two winters. Since they gave me the keys to the archive room.
" Maren's voice went lower, and the lower it went the more it sounded like the girl who had once climbed the Wrenth orchard wall to say goodbye.
"I thought it was my arithmetic. I thought it was the scribes.
I checked the scribes' hands. I checked mine.
The difference is always one." She pressed the book to her chest. "I have signed the manifests for two winters.
Nine ascended, the manifest says, and the count of the dying says nine were taken in, and I have signed both, and I have never once signed a page that closed. "
Against the far wall stood the chapel's rack of wax offerings: hands, feet, a child's shape, three coppers a hand, the price chalked on the board.
Someone had bought a hand and never come back for it.
Elowen counted the dust on the rack and waited, because Maren had not come to tell her about the books either.
"I came to give you something," Maren said.
She reached into her robes, to the place a woman keeps what is breakable, and brought out a folded square of paper, soft with handling, the fold worn white. She held it out across the candle.
"Take it. It has lived against my ribs since the salt ring. It is yours. It was always yours."
Elowen took it and opened it in the candle light, and saw her own name.
It was her own name, written clean, in a hand she knew the way she knew the smell of the Wrenth kitchen.
Maren's hand. Beneath it the house name had been drowned in ink, blotted again and again until the letters were only a bruise under the black, and beneath that a date she did not need to read twice.
She had been reading the same form for weeks: a name, a house mark, a date.
The count of the gathered. Her name was written in the count of the gathered, in Maren's hand, and Maren had not been able to finish blotting the house off it.
The blot had been meant to take the name out of the count. It had not finished.
She took the other page from her collar. Forty-one names, forty-two graves, the count that never balanced. She laid Maren's half beside it on the candle stand, and the two pieces of the record sat together under the crooked flame, and she saw what they made.
Same form. Same record. The count of the gathered, kept and never balanced, and the entry it was missing. Her entry. Written out in Maren's hand, blotted, torn.
"The count never balances," she said, "because it is missing a name."
Maren did not look at the page. She looked at Elowen's face.
"The grave stands open," Elowen said, "because I am alive.
Being gathered the way the light gathers, slowly, so the faithful can watch.
" She heard her own voice come out flat and counted the difference again: one name, one open grave, a thousand years of her house paying it.
The count had kept a Wrenth name longer than the mill road had stood.
Hers was only the latest. "The count is not missing a name. It is missing me."
The thread at her wrist pulled taut and held, and she read the tautness the way she read it now. His holding, the heavier half. It held.
"They read the count aloud at the rites," Maren said. "Every gathered name, spoken from the seat so the families can hear their dead once more. Your name was on the page they would have read."
"You tore it."
"I tore it." Maren's hands were shaking around the book. "That is what I have become. A woman who tears her own books to keep a name out of the light. I could not let them read you from the seat, Elowen. I have lost the ability to let them."
Elowen looked at the two pages on the candle stand. "It is your hand."
Maren did not look at it. "It is my hand. They set a fair copy of the count for the winter rites, and I took the copying of it. I thought if your name was written in my hand I could keep it out of the light's."
"You blotted the house name."
"I blotted it. I pressed the ink in until it would not lift, and it still came through like a bruise." Maren's voice had gone very small. "Then I tore the page, because a blot is a thing they read too. A torn page is only a torn page."
"Forty-one names. Forty-two graves. The count never balances."
"Then where is the forty-second name?"
Elowen touched the torn half. "Here. It has been waiting in your ribs since the salt ring."
Maren stared at the blot, and Elowen watched the faith crack in a woman's face, a little more, along a line that had been hairline before tonight and was now a fissure a finger could fit into.
"There is a man in the cells under the seat," Maren said.
Elowen's hands went still.
"The Pathfinder. Three days they have been asking him about the sealed archives, the rooms under the archive floor that no key has opened in a hundred years.
They want what he told you, and a key no one has found, and who else knows the road to the rift.
" Maren's mouth twisted. "He has not told them.
I have watched them ask. He does not tell them. "
Elowen thought of Aldric drawing the road in the ash with a stick, the dry voice, the way he priced everything in persons and never once raised the price. One, the road's cost. He would not tell them.
"He will not break," Maren said, "but he will not have to. Veylan is coming."
The crooked candle guttered. Elowen did not move.
"He left the capital three days ago with a full retinue and a reader for every writ, and he will be at the gate before the next rite, and he will read the count himself, and the books I have read twice, and he will ask the Pathfinder the questions I was not given the rank to ask.
" Maren's voice had gone very small. "I could not look away tonight.
I have not looked away in weeks. Every rite I stand in the rank and I do not look away, and the books do not close, and I tell myself the light knows what it is doing.
" She stopped, and when she went on her voice had no church in it at all.
"When he is here I will not be able to keep it up.
I am one woman, and the whole Inquisition is coming down that road, and I will not be able to look away. "
"How long until he is at the gate?"
"Two days. Three at the most."
"Then we do it before he gets here."
Maren looked up. "Do what?"
"Get the Pathfinder out. Get into the archives before the net closes."
Maren did not say no. She put the book down on the candle stand, open, and Elowen saw the page it lay open to: a count of the gathered, and at the foot of it a name struck through with one hard line of ink.
"Tomorrow night is the winter rite rehearsal," Maren said. "The chapterhouse doors stand open for the choir, and I hold the keys. I do not hold the archive key. No one does. That is what they are asking him for."
"What do you hold me for?"
"A penitent. A prisoner. I have not decided which." Maren's smile came and went. "It will be easier if you do not look like either."
"There is a girl," Elowen said. "She is not part of any of this."
"I have not seen a girl."
"Keep it that way."
"I keep no accounts of girls I have not seen."
Maren went first, because the rank would be looking for her. She left the way she had come, once, clean, and the door closed behind her, and the chapel was only Elowen and the candle and the two pages on the stand.
Elowen folded the torn half carefully, the way you fold a thing you will read again, and put it in her collar with the other page.
The thread at her wrist was taut. It held.
She counted her way back through the dark the way the road had taught her: two streets, five roots, one girl, one open grave, and two days until Veylan came down that road with a reader for every writ.
The bell went on ringing somewhere above, because it never stopped.