CHAPTER TWELVE What They All Knew
CHAPTER TWELVE
What They All Knew
Sevrid Anvarre sent for me on the fourth morning after the vents. Threnn said that was exactly the right interval, and that somebody had chosen it carefully.
“Long enough that it can’t be a summons about the incident. Short enough you’ll still be frightened of yourself when you walk in.” She was fixing my collar, which didn’t need fixing. “She’ll be pleasant. Hang on to the fact that pleasant costs her nothing.”
“You don’t like her.”
“I have no opinion of her at all. I have figures.” She tugged the collar a quarter inch to the left.
“She has held the second house for nineteen years. In that time four people who opposed her have retired to the eastern terraces for reasons of health, and the eastern terraces are where you get sent when somebody wants you to stop turning up to things. I have never found one document recording anything improper. In my experience that means nothing improper happened, or somebody is very good. I’d like that on the record. ”
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Her rooms were low down, near the Court, and they were the first place in that whole city that looked as though somebody had decorated.
Everything else down there is grown, or it’s bare.
Sevrid Anvarre’s rooms had things in them.
Land things, dozens of them. A brass ship’s lamp gone green with age.
A child’s spinning top. A pair of scissors, a folded fan.
Three books in Vaelmoorish on a shelf at eye height, placed so anybody coming in would see them first. I looked at that shelf and thought about twelve books in a dead woman’s room upstairs, one of them in my bag, and kept my face still.
She was small. That was the first surprise. On the second terrace of the Court she’d seemed a big presence, and she turned out to be a slight woman of sixty-one with a very straight back and dark hair going iron at the temples.
And my mother’s mouth.
I stopped in the doorway.
“Yes,” said Sevrid. “And the chin. Come in, sit down. I’m not going to pretend I don’t know why you’re standing there.”
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She poured something pale that smelled faintly of smoke and salt.
She did it herself, and she set the cup down in front of me with both hands, which I understood I was supposed to notice.
Her hands were steady on the jug. Mine weren’t.
I kept them in my lap where she could see them anyway, because hiding them would have been worse.
“You’ve been in the precedent rack.”
“Yes.”
“With the slate I took out.”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s skip the first half hour.” She sat across from me and laid one hand on top of the other, like a woman putting down cards.
“You want to know what I knew and when. Fair enough. You’ll get a straight answer, and it’ll be worse than whatever you decided on the way here.
You decided I knew and hid it. I knew, and I never hid anything. ”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning I’ve known since I was twenty-seven, and so has everybody of any standing in this city, and at no point did any of us agree to keep it from you. It didn’t occur to one single one of us that it was being kept.”
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She wasn’t lying. I believed her nearly straight away, and that was the worst part of the whole conversation.
“Explain that.”
“When you came down the great avenue on your first day, how many people looked at you?”
“Some. Not many.”
“Four hundred thousand people live here. By the third day, how many of them do you suppose knew who you were?”
I said nothing.
“All of them, cousin. A child in the northern dark knew who you were and what you were for and why the Court was in uproar. It’s been the thing everybody knows for thirty-four years, the way everybody in your town knows which of them drinks.
Nobody told you, because nobody tells anybody the weather. ”
“The Court, though. Somebody asked from the rim. Nine hundred people and not one of them said.”
“They were embarrassed.”
“Embarrassed.”
“Embarrassed,” she said, quite calm. “You’re picturing a room full of conspirators.
It was a room full of people who all realised at the same moment that the woman on the floor didn’t know, and who’d each assumed somebody else had told her.
It’s more like a dinner party where nobody’s got round to mentioning to the guest that her husband’s dead. ”
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“Then tell me now.”
“I mean to.” She turned her cup a quarter turn on the table.
“You’re the substitution. Your mother couldn’t be released from Ilmarren, because nobody has the authority to release anybody from a gate, so they arranged a carrying instead.
An obligation held in suspension for the term of a life, against the production of a successor.
You. Untaught, unmarked, raised on land, returned when grown. ”
“Why untaught?”
Sevrid looked up.
“Now that’s a much better question than the ones you’ve been asking. Nobody expects that one.”
“So answer it.”
“A Siren raised here knows what she’s for by the age of six.
We’ve lost four in nine hundred years to what I’ll call refusal, and you may think the word’s a thin one.
They’re taught the gift and they’re taught the function, and somewhere round twenty they work out the two are the same thing.
Two of them walked out into the silt and didn’t come back. ”
The brass lamp sat on its shelf, green along the seams.
“So they raise them ignorant.”
“They raise them hungry. A girl who grows up on land with a gift she can’t explain and no use for it and nobody to tell her what it is? That girl turns up here at thirty-four, gets shown a hole in the bottom of the world cut exactly to her shape, and nobody has to persuade her of a thing.”
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I didn’t move for a while.
I wasn’t angry. What I felt was a slow crawling embarrassment, and I’ve never confessed that to anybody, because she’d just described me at the rail above the vents four nights before, hands shaking, wanting it.
“You’ve just told me the method.”
“I have.”
“You’ve told me how you were going to do it. You could’ve just done it.”
“Yes.”
“So why tell me?”
Sevrid Anvarre put her cup down, very precisely, back in the ring it had left, and looked at me with my mother’s mouth.
“Because it’s already worked, cousin. Telling you doesn’t unwork it. I’d sooner you found that out in here than at the rail.”
I took hold of the arm of the chair. She saw me do it and let it go.
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I stood up. I don’t remember deciding to.
“Sit down.” There was no heat in it at all. “There’s more, and you’ll want it.”
“I don’t think I do.”
“You want the other seal.” She said it flatly, and it put me back in the chair as surely as a hand on my chest. “The lit one. You’ve walked round this city four days with it in your head and asked nobody, because you’ve worked out that whoever you ask will know you asked.”
“Is it you?”
“No.”
“Do you know who it is?”
“Yes.”
The lamp, the top, the scissors, the fan. I counted them like a woman counting exits.
“Are you going to tell me?”
“Not today. Kael’s given you his reason for keeping quiet, and his reason was patronising.
Mine isn’t.” She leaned forward an inch.
“The second house sees two endings. In one, you stand at Ilmarren because you were walked there by people who knew more than you did. Me, that archivist, whoever holds the other half of that promise. You’ll be very useful and moderately content, and I’ll have done my job.
In the other, you find it out yourself and get to the gate knowing everything, which means you’re capable of refusing it. ”
“And which do you want?”
“The second.”
I laughed. It came out ugly.
“You’ve spent nineteen years putting your rivals out on the eastern terraces.”
“I’ve put four people who couldn’t do arithmetic somewhere they can do no damage, and I won’t be lectured about it by a woman who’s been here five weeks.
” Her voice hadn’t gone up at all. “A gate held by somebody who was managed into it lasts about eleven years. A gate held by somebody who chose it with her eyes open lasts sixty. Don’t mistake that for kindness, Miss Angel.
It’s a maintenance question. I’m one of perhaps six people in this city who’s understood that for twenty years, and it has been extremely lonely. ”
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At the door she said one more thing. I’ve never repeated it to anyone, and I’m putting it down here because I’ve run out of places to keep it.
“She was not a good woman, your mother.”
I stopped with my hand on the frame.
“I shan’t expand on that, and I shan’t be drawn,” said Sevrid.
“I know you’ve spent five weeks building somebody out of a bed and a book.
I’d have done the same. I only want it said once by somebody who was in the room with her, so that when it comes at you from a less kind direction you’ll have heard it already. ”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because I’m sixty-one, and she was my cousin, and I’ve carried a very tedious sort of grief for thirty-four years. It’s occurred to me that if I die without saying one true sentence about her out loud, there’ll be nobody left alive who ever has.”
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I told Threnn that evening. She went the colour of the walls.
“She said that? Those words?”
“Eleven years if you’re managed into it. Sixty if you choose it.”
Threnn sat down on the edge of my bed without being asked. She’d never done that before.
“Then she’s read the fifty-one years.”
“What?”
“Where do you suppose a figure like eleven years comes from?” Her hands had gone into her lap and stayed there, folded, as if she’d filed them.
“There’s no record in that archive of a gate failing early.
There’s no record of a holder being managed into standing.
Those things aren’t in the racks because somebody took them out.
Sevrid Anvarre has just quoted you a number from a document that hasn’t existed since eighteen forty-five.
” She was quiet a moment. “I should like that noted. By someone. Preferably not me.”
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