CHAPTER TWELVE What They All Knew #3
And a woman whose name I never found out stood at the edge of a light in a dead market and asked if I was coming, the way you’d ask if a boat was going out.
Nothing in it about my mother, or my will, or what had been arranged nine months before I was born.
She wanted to know if her street would have light in it.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“That’s fair.”
“It isn’t. You deserve better than that.”
“Madam.” She nearly laughed. “I’ve had thirty-four years of people who were certain. I’ll take the one who isn’t.”
Then she stepped back out of the light and was gone, and I never heard her go.
? ? ?
We went back the long way, because Ivrid said I needed the time. She was right.
Somewhere in the thinning, where the gold starts again and the chord comes back into tune, my hand began to shake, and the light guttered and went out.
I stood in the half-dark with a cold stone in my fist.
“How long was that?”
“Two hours, near enough,” said Ivrid.
“Is that long?”
“For a woman who’d never done it before and was chattering the whole way?” She held her hand out for the stone. “Yes. It’s long. Don’t ask me for more than that. I’ll not have it said I flattered you.”
I gave it back. My fingers had cramped round it into a claw and wouldn’t straighten properly for a good while, and Ivrid watched me work them open one at a time and didn’t offer to help. From her that’s respect.
“Ivrid.”
“What.”
“Eleven thousand people.”
“Eleven thousand.” She dropped the stone in her bag. “And you held one plum-sized light for two hours and your hand’s gone to rope. Do the sums on that before you go out to the ridge. It’s the only honest picture of the job anybody’s given you, and nobody down here’s going to give it you twice.”
? ? ?
Elias’s fourth question was the one I’d carried right at the bottom and asked nobody, because I was frightened of it. I finally put it to Kael on the rail above the vents, on my thirty-first day.
He hadn’t been round since the fire. That was on purpose, and we both knew it.
“Ask, then, madam. You’ve been circling it for an hour like a gull round a pie, and the light’s nearly gone, and this rail is abominably damp.”
“The fourth question.”
“I gathered.”
“He wants to know.” I stopped and started over, because the way Elias had said it on the shingle deserved better than me paraphrasing. “Whether it can be carried by somebody else. Whether a gate can be held by a person who isn’t the blood. Ever. Once. Anywhere, in nine hundred years.”
Kael said nothing. The vent field breathed under us, and he let it breathe twice before he answered.
“He wants to take it off you.”
“Yes.”
“He’d die.”
“He knows he’d die.” My voice cracked. “That’s not the question. The question’s whether it’s possible, because if it isn’t, he can stop. And he can’t stop, Kael. He hasn’t stopped since October. Just once I’d like to hand him something that ends it.”
The rose light came up and went down. Seven times a minute.
“There’s one.”
? ? ?
I turned so fast I lost the rail.
“What?”
“One. In nine hundred years.” He was looking straight out over the vent field, and his face was perfectly blank, which on Kael is the loudest thing a face can do.
“It’s not in the racks. It’s not in anything.
It’s the kind of tale that goes round between people like me, the way a crew tells a wreck, and I’ve heard it four times, and every telling’s different, and I’d not swear to a word of it. ”
“Tell me.”
“A gate held for a season by someone not of the blood, a long way back, and the city it fed didn’t go dark.” He turned his head. “That’s all of the good part, madam. You’ll want to stop me there. I shan’t be stopped, because the rest is the point.”
“Say it.”
“It was a transfer. Nobody would call it a kindness. The one who wasn’t the blood didn’t stand in for the holder, he took it.
The standing, the gift, the whole obligation, lifted off somebody’s back and onto his.
And there’s no telling where it ever goes back the other way.
Not one. Four versions, and in every one of them the holder walks off free and clear and the other one never comes off the gate. ”
The vents breathed.
“Do you see what I’m telling you? You’d call it a rescue.
It’s a swap. If there’s a way for Vale to take Ilmarren off you, then on the day he does it he’s standing at the bottom of the world in your place with your obligation in his chest, and you’re on a cliff path in Vaelmoor with nothing on you at all, walking home to a house with a gate that swings true.
And he doesn’t come up. Ever. That’s the tale. Every version.”
I stood at the rail with my hands gone useless.
Under us the rose light came and went across the vent field, steady as a pulse, and I thought about Elias on the shingle with the wind in his coat, asking his four questions in order like items on a list he could tick off, and keeping the worst for last, because he always does.
“I can’t tell him that.”
“No,” Kael agreed, and for once he didn’t sound bored. “And you’re going to.”