CHAPTER EIGHTEEN What the Sea Keeps #3
It wasn’t kindness. It was panic. Threnn told me afterwards that by the time we got back to the city three houses were demanding I be examined, the fourth had entered a claim at second light, and Sevrid Anvarre had come down the stairs of her own house in her own colours, at an hour she is never awake, and said to a room full of people, “Put her on the surface before somebody does something that cannot be undrafted.”
So I went up.
Kael took me. Eleven miles, then the long rise, then the dark, and the violet, and the long blue, and the green going on and on, and then the surface coming down at me like a lid.
And I did not go through it.
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I came up under the surface off the reef in my own cove at nine in the morning, with the light falling through six feet of green water.
I could see the undersides of the waves.
I could see the black ribs of the reef. And on the last rib, one hand up to shade his eyes, I could see the shape of a man.
I swam up into the last foot of water, and the last foot wouldn’t let me through.
There was no barrier. My hand broke the surface. I felt air on my fingers, cold and dry, the air of the fourth of April. My hand went through and the rest of me didn’t, and nothing was stopping it: no wall, no pressure, no grip on my ankle.
I just couldn’t go up.
? ? ?
I’ve heard this part told as though I was dignified about it. I wasn’t.
I fought.
I went at that surface like a dog at a shut door. I got both hands out into the air and hauled, and my shoulders wouldn’t follow, and I did it again, and again. I could feel the wind on my wet fingers. The wind. I kept on until my arms gave out.
Then I dropped ten feet and came up fast, the way you kick off the bottom by a jetty, and the last foot took the whole force of it like a blanket pulled tight.
I tried four feet along. Then eight. Then I swam out past the last rib into deeper water and came up there, in case it was the cove, in case it was the reef, in case there was one place in eleven miles where the world hadn’t yet made up its mind about me.
The air. Every time. Four inches away, and I could taste the cold coming off it.
I made a noise under that water that I’m not going to describe.
And through all of it, broken and wobbling and strange, there was the shape of him above me on the last rib. Then in the water to his knees. Then to his thighs. Then he was in up to his chest, in April, in the north, with his hands under the surface, reaching down for me.
He found my hand. He took it in both of his and pulled, pulled hard, and I could hear him through the surface as a shape with no words in it, and I was four inches from the air and couldn’t get into it.
? ? ?
Kael came up beside me and didn’t touch me.
I twisted round and caught the front of his coat in my free hand and spoke into his chest, in the water, the way you speak down there:
“Make it let me go.”
And Kael, who had stood beside me on the rise and offered to take me up, and who has never once lied to me about anything, said:
It has let you go, madam. That isn’t a hand on you.
“Then why?”
Because something in that ridge has held a gate shut on its own for thirty-four years, and two days ago it found out it isn’t on its own any more.
? ? ?
He came down every day.
That’s where I want to end, because it’s the only part of that spring I can think about without my mind going somewhere else.
Elias Vale came down the cliff steps to the cove at every low water for the whole of April and the whole of May and the whole of the summer after, and got into the sea up to his chest whatever the weather was doing, and I came up into the last six feet of green water on my side of it, and we put our hands through, and from the wrist down we could hold on to each other.
That was all we had. Two forearms and the surface between them.
The first day, I put my hand up and his closed round it, the back of it first and then his palm sliding in underneath, and he kept it there a moment, shut in, out of the cold, the way you cup a match against a draught.
Then he let the top hand go, set his thumb in the centre of my palm, and pressed. Firmly. Like a man marking a place on a chart so he can find it again.
I couldn’t see his face. I could see the dark wool of his sleeve going pale with cold where it met the water, and the grain of his knuckles, and nothing else. There were six feet of moving water between us, and the light was wrong, and everything above the line was broken up and strange.
But I felt that.
Far down and far out, in the western third of the seam at Ilmarren, something that had held a gate shut alone for thirty-four years shifted its weight for the first time since before I was born.
Away to the north, a city noticed its light change.
None of that belongs in this part of the story. Not yet.
What belongs in this part of the story is a woman four inches under the surface of her own cove with her hand up in the air, and a man standing in the cold sea holding on to it, and neither of them letting go.