CHAPTER FOURTEEN Looking for the Seam
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Looking for the Seam
I gave myself a month to find a way out. I didn’t tell anyone that was what I was doing, and every one of them knew.
It started properly in the first week of December, with a list. I’m my father’s daughter in exactly one respect, which is that when I’m frightened I make lists.
By the end of that first week mine had nine things on it.
By the end of the second it had four, and each one that came off came off for a reason I couldn’t argue with, however much I wanted to.
Refuse and go somewhere else. Kael killed that one on the reef in eleven words. “Madam, it’s all the sea. Where do you propose to stand?”
Find another of the blood. That took longer and cost more.
Threnn went through the line rack twice and sent word up with a fisherman’s boy, which I’ll never stop finding funny, a note in an archivist’s hand coming up the hill in the fist of a child who’d been given a coin and no explanation.
There is no other. My mother had one sister, who died at nine.
Before that the line narrows for four generations, and my grandmother was the last to bear two children, and one of them was a son, and it does not go to sons. The note didn’t say why. I didn’t ask.
Break the slate. I actually wrote that down. Threnn’s reply ran to three words and I’m not going to repeat them.
The transfer. I left that on the list three weeks, because crossing it out felt like betraying him, and in the end he crossed it out himself.
A Tuesday. No discussion. He did it in pencil while I was in the other room, and when I came back he’d gone on to the next page and didn’t look up, and I let him not look up, and we haven’t said a word about it since. Not once.
? ? ?
Mara sent for me on the eleventh.
I went up the Hallowwood in the middle of a bright, cold afternoon.
There’d been a fortnight of frost and the trees stood bare and didn’t make a sound, and the ruts in the lane had skinned over with ice.
The wood was how it gets on two or three days a year, when the cold’s taken the smell out of everything and you can hardly tell the air is there.
She was on the step in one shawl with another shawl on top of it.
“You’ve come up looking like a woman who’s decided something.”
“I’ve come up because you sent for me.”
“Mm. Both,” said Mara, and went in ahead of me.
? ? ?
She didn’t make tea. That was how I knew.
She sat down in her chair and put her hands on its arms, the bad one curled over, and said:
“I’ve a thing to say. I’ve sat up here the best part of three months trying to work out how to start it and I haven’t managed, so I’m going to do it badly.”
“Mara.”
“September. You came up and asked how long I’d known your mother, and I said three years.” She wasn’t looking at me. “You noticed.”
The cat came and sat on my foot. I left him there.
“Yes.”
“You noticed and you didn’t say anything, and you went off down that hill, and I stood at that window and watched you go, and I’ve thought about it every day since.
” Her voice didn’t shake. Mara’s voice doesn’t.
“Three years is true. I want that said first. I knew Nerissa three years, and I’ve never once told you a false fact. ”
“But.”
“But you asked how long I knew her, and I told you how long I knew her. What you were really asking, and I understood you perfectly well, was how long I’d been in it.” She looked at the fire. “Thirty-five years.”
? ? ?
“Say the rest.”
“She came to me.”
The fire cracked. The cat shifted.
“That’s the piece you’ve never had. Every version you’ve had off me since you were fifteen, there’s a strange beautiful woman who married a sailor and had two children and died, and there’s a witch up the hill who took an interest in the daughter after.
Out of kindness. That’s the story.” A breath out through her nose.
“It has the merit of being very nearly true.”
“Nearly.”
“She came up this hill eight months gone with you. In the rain. Sat in that chair you’re in now. And asked me to promise her something.”
“What?”
“To keep you ignorant.”
? ? ?
I didn’t shout. I couldn’t get enough air in me to shout.
It went in the way cold water goes into a bad tooth, a delay and then everywhere at once.
I could feel the chair under me and the cat’s weight and all twenty years of that room, the smell of it, the green bitter thing over the fire, the scorch on the mantel from the winter I was twenty-two, and every single one of them had a new fact sitting inside it now, all of them turning over together.
“Not out of cruelty.” Mara hadn’t moved her hands.
“You’ll want it to be cruelty. It was the opposite, and that’s worse.
She knew what had been agreed. She knew the terms better than anyone, she’d signed them.
And she’d worked out the mechanism, Rose, eight months gone, no archive, nobody to ask.
Raise the girl untaught and she comes to it hungry.
So she walked up to the one person on this coast who could have told you what you were, and asked me not to. ”
“Why?”
“Because she thought if you never learned the name of it you might never want it.” And there it went at last, a catch in her voice like a sleeve on a nail.
“She was wrong. I told her so. I said a girl with a gift and no name for it grows up thinking she’s broken, and she said yes.
I said that’s a cruel thing to do to a child, and she said yes. And then she asked me again.”
“And you said yes.”
“I said yes.”
? ? ?
I got up. The cat slid off my foot, complaining. There was nowhere to go, so I went and stood at the window with my back to her and my arms crossed, hands clamped on my own elbows. I found the marks that night, four little crescents on each arm.
“Twenty years.”
“Yes.”
“I came up this hill when I was nineteen and asked you what was wrong with me.”
“You did.”
“I sat in that chair, Mara. I asked you what was wrong with me and I cried, and you gave me tea, and you told me some people are made in a shape the world doesn’t fit and I’d find mine in time.”
“I remember what I said.”
“You knew.”
“I knew.”
“No. Say it properly. Don’t just say I knew. Say what you knew. I want to hear you put it in a sentence.”
A pause behind me. I didn’t turn round for it.
“I knew,” said Mara, “you weren’t broken. I knew there was a name for what was in you, and I knew the name. And I sat in this room and watched a girl of nineteen cry about being wrong in the head.” She stopped. “And I gave her tea.”
? ? ?
My face was wet. I hadn’t felt it start. That’s happened to me maybe four times in my life, and two of the others were for Samuel.
“Did you ever nearly tell me?”
“Four times.”
Straight out, no hesitation, which meant she’d counted. Which meant she’d been counting for twenty years.
“The winter after Samuel. The night you left your father’s house. The morning we buried Liora. And September, in this room, when you came up and told me a man had walked into Wren’s and not burned.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“The first three, because I’d promised a dead woman.” She gave the fire a long look. “The fourth, because I’d left it so long that telling you would have been about me.”
? ? ?
I turned round.
“That’s the worst thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Yes.”
“You let me go down there and find it out from an archivist. From a stranger in a grey cloak. On a floor, Mara.”
“Yes.”
“Stop saying yes. You could have given me one year. One. Any of them. I’d have had a year to get used to it before anyone put a slate in front of me with my own conception written on it.
” My voice went up and got away from me and I let it go, and I’d never once done that in that room.
“I sat on the floor of an archive two hundred fathoms down and tried to think of one hour of my life nobody had arranged. Do you know what I came up with? A dead gull. Samuel and a dead gull on the shore road when I was nine. That’s all. That’s what’s left over.”
Mara had gone white round the mouth.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It doesn’t matter what it means.” I put both hands over my face and took them away again. “It means you had twenty years and I had four seconds.”
? ? ?
She didn’t defend it. That’s the one thing I’ll say for her, and I’ve tried, since, to come up with a second.
“I’ve got nothing. No defence. I made a promise to a frightened woman in the rain and I kept it thirty-five years, and I picked the promise over the child every day for twenty of them.
A day at a time.” Her hands had come off the chair arms at last and were lying in her lap, and they were an old woman’s hands, spotted, the bad one knotted at the knuckle.
I’d never once thought of her as old. “I’d like to tell you there was a reason.
There was the promise. Then there was the habit of the promise.
Then there was being frightened of how you’d look at me when I stopped.
” She lifted her chin at the window, at me. “That. How you’re looking now.”
“So is this it? Is this where I forgive you?”
“I haven’t asked you to.”
“You brought me up here.”
“I brought you up here because in three weeks, or three months, you’re going down there and you won’t be back for a long while, and I wasn’t letting you go without knowing. That’s all this is. It isn’t a request.” Her mouth worked. “I’d not insult you with one.”
? ? ?
I didn’t forgive her. I’m putting that down in so many words because of what happens later, and because people decided afterwards that I had.
I didn’t leave either, which is a different thing, and people muddle the two. My legs had gone out from under me, so I sat back down, and the cat laid himself across both our feet like somebody had given him the job, and when the fire had burned down to one red eye I said:
“Tell me about her. Not the ballad. The actual woman. You had three years.”
And Mara, who’d been holding on to the arms of that chair for most of an hour, let go of them.
“She was funny,” she said. “Nobody tells you that. She was very funny, and hardly a soul in this town got a single joke she made, so she used to come up here on purpose to make them at me. And I’d laugh, and she’d look so pleased with herself it was frankly undignified in a grown woman.
” A pause. “You pull the same face. You’ve been pulling it since you were fifteen, and I’ve had to sit here and look at it. ”
I didn’t know what to do with that. I didn’t do anything with it.
Then she got up and made the tea after all. Her bad hand slopped it over the rim and across the table, and she wiped the spill up with the heel of her palm and didn’t say sorry, and put a cup down by me.
I drank it. I was cold, and it was tea, and that’s the whole of what it was, whatever anyone says. Afterwards I went down the hill in the blue dark and didn’t look back at the window once, because I knew she’d be stood in it.
? ? ?
The prophecy came at me sideways, three days after, out of nowhere, the way true things do.
I was at the Gull and Anchor. Wren was losing an argument with a barrel. Kael had come up to the surface for reasons he wouldn’t give and was sitting in the corner being stared at by the whole room and complaining about the fire, which he called a bread oven, and enjoying the staring enormously.
I told him about the list. Four items, then three, then one.
“There’s a fifth.”
“There isn’t.”
“There’s a fifth, and you haven’t written it down, because nobody’s told you it exists.” He had his boots up on the settle and Wren was going to kill him for it. “The Court has had a word for you since your first week, madam. You’ve not heard it because it only gets said in rooms you’re not in.”
“What word?”
“It’s not a word. It’s a scrap of something old.
Four lines. Every child down there learns it and nobody takes it seriously, like your lot and that rhyme about magpies.
” He drank. “And then you came up out of the water in September, and a great many people who’ve never taken anything seriously in their lives went and looked it up. ”
“Say it.”
“I’ll say it in Vaelmoorish, and it’ll be the worse for the trip.” He put the cup back down on its own wet ring. “The one who is loved without the gift will be the last to hold, or the first to be free.”
The fire shifted. Somebody laughed down the far end of the room.
“That’s not four lines.”
“It’s four in ours. Ours rhymes, and the rhyme’s the only reason anyone remembers it.
” Kael wasn’t looking at me. He was examining his boots with tremendous interest. “Loved without the gift, madam. Not despite it. Not in spite of. Without. A woman of the line wanted by someone her gift has never once touched.”
I didn’t say a name and neither did he. Across the room Wren won her argument with the barrel, and the thump of it went all round the walls.
“The last to hold,” I said. “Or the first to be free.”
“So it goes.”
“Those are opposites.”
“Entirely. Which is why nobody’s taken it seriously for four hundred years.
” He swung his boots down at last. “And why every soul in that city is taking it very seriously indeed now. Half of them want you at that gate by spring, madam. The other half want you dead in a ditch, on the theory that it’s the second line that’s true. ”