CHAPTER NINE
Cassius
Telling her costs me something. I don't have a name for what.
"And nobody stopped him."
"No."
"Where were you?"
Here it is. The bill.
"I was holding her hand," I say.
The fire does its thing. Down the cliff, the sea rearranges itself.
"She asked me to," I say, because if I stop now I'll never say the rest of it. "She was frightened and I was standing nearest and she asked me to hold her hand, and I did, and I held it for eleven minutes, and I did not do one single other thing."
Wren pulls her knees up tighter. There it is: the first honest fear she's shown me all night. Not the boy in the basement, not the body coming apart. This.
Good. She should be afraid. It's the only useful thing I've given her.
"Why?" she says.
"Because he made me, and because he was very old, and because I was ninety years dead and still doing what I was told.
" I look at my hands. "And because there is a version of that room where seventeen of us go at him at once and eleven of us are still standing afterwards and she lives, and every single one of us worked that out at the same time and every single one of us waited to see who'd move first."
"And nobody did."
"Nobody did."
She doesn't say anything for a while, and I make myself sit in it.
"Then what happened?" she says.
"Then the world came back." My voice goes somewhere else. "For about an hour. All of us at once, in a cellar, in the dark. Seventeen dead men on a dirt floor weeping because we could smell a tallow candle."
"And after the hour?"
"It went," I say. "And it never came back. Not for me, not for any of the seventeen, not for anyone made since. Two hundred years."
◆ ◆ ◆
"So the whole line's gone," Wren says eventually. "Except."
"Except."
"Except my grandmother's middle name was Verity.
" Her voice has gone thin. "Ilse Verity Kelleher.
Rimebrook, two hours north. She wrote to my mother the year I was born and told her to keep me out of cities and to bring me to her if I ever started bleeding for no reason, and she said it would smell like nothing you've ever smelled, and I always thought that was — I don't know.
Alzheimer's. A weird old woman in a weird old house. "
Ilse.
The name goes through me like a nail through a plank.
My sister's name was Ilse. Four hundred years and a hundred thousand Ilses since; it means nothing; the coincidence is nothing. I put it down and pick it back up twice before I can leave it alone.
"Your nose bled," I say. "When?"
"Tuesday. At my kitchen table. On that exact letter, which I'd like on the record as a bit much."
"Has it happened before?"
"Twice. Once in March. Once at Christmas." She swallows. "I thought it was the chemicals."
"It's coming on," I say. "That's why I could smell you from a roof this week and not last year.
Anchor blood wakes. It gets louder." And then, because she deserves the whole thing: "By the end of the year, every one of us in this hemisphere will be able to find you from a mile away, in a crowd, in the rain, in a sealed room. "
She sits with that.
Then she says, "How much time do I have?"
Not what do I do. Not save me. How much time. The same voice she used on the landlady, flat and kind and load-bearing.
Something in me tilts.
"If you left tonight," I say, "kept moving, never used your name — a year. Maybe two."
"And if I stay?"
"Two days."
She nods slowly, like a woman being quoted a price on a roof she can't afford. Then she reaches over to the coffee table, takes an orange out of the bowl, and starts peeling it.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm having an orange," Wren says, "because I've had a night, and if I don't put something in my stomach I'm going to fall over, and you said they came with the house."
The peel comes away in one long spiral. The smell hits the room.
It's — God. It's citrus. Bitter oil and sugar and something almost green, and it fills the whole space in a second, and I have my hand over my mouth before I know I've moved.
She stops. "Cassius?"
"Keep going," I say, into my palm.
"Are you—"
"Keep going."
So she peels the orange, in the firelight, in my grandmother's silence, and I sit on the floor of my own house with my hand over my face like a man at a graveside, and I smell citrus for the first time since the reign of George the Third.
◆ ◆ ◆
Lucien comes at nine the following night.
He doesn't knock, because knocking is for people who intend to wait. He stands on my terrace in the wind with his hands in his pockets and his hair perfect and he calls through the glass:
"Cassius! Your gate is appalling."
Wren goes rigid on the other side of the room.
"Don't speak," I tell her. "Whatever happens. Don't speak, don't move toward the door, and if I tell you to go upstairs, go upstairs."
"What if I—"
"Wren."
She shuts her mouth.
I open the door. Not wide. Lucien beams at me from the terrace, rain in his eyelashes, radiant with his own cleverness.
"You didn't invite me in," he observes.
"No."
"That's very dramatic. That's a real statement. I'll be thinking about that for weeks." He rocks on his heels. "The cleaning woman."
"Which one."
"Cassius." Softly, delighted. "There was a fledgling on Cadger Row. Three weeks old, made by God knows who, feral as a bin fox — and this morning I found him in eleven pieces and the room still smelled like heaven." His eyes go past me, into the house, and stop. "Ah. There she is."
I don't turn. I hear her heart go and I hate every part of this.
"Hello!" Lucien calls, warmly. "I'm so sorry about your van!"
"Lucien."
"Do you know what you have?" He's not smiling now.
That's how I know it's serious; the smile is the resting state.
"Do you actually know? Because you were there, weren't you.
Salem. You and Aurek and the seventeen. I've heard the story two hundred times from men who lie, and here you are, standing in the doorway of a concrete box on a cliff with the last one in the world behind you, and you think what — you'll keep her? Like a bird?"
"Go home."
"Vespera will have her in a room under the Custom House by Friday and she'll be very civilised about it and it will take forty years." He tips his head. "I'd be kinder. Genuinely. I'd give her a life. Clothes, travel, whatever she likes. A pint a month and she'd barely feel it—"
"She's claimed," I say.
The wind goes on. The sea goes on.
Lucien's face empties out entirely, which is the only expression of his I've ever trusted.
"You did not," he says.
"Blood-claim. Witnessed by the house." Every word costs me. "Under the Covenant she's mine, she's not court property, and anyone who touches her answers to me in the yard at the Custom House with everyone watching. Would you like to be the first?"
Behind me, very quietly, Wren says: "Excuse me?"
"Not now," I say, without turning.
"Cassius—"
"Not now."
Lucien starts to laugh. It goes on a while, out there in the rain, and he presses two fingers to his mouth like a man at the theatre.
"Oh, this is going to be magnificent," he says.
"You know it isn't legal without the second half.
You know that. A claim's not a claim until she takes yours back, and I don't think she knows that yet, does she?
By the look on her face I don't think she knows anything yet.
" He backs away toward the terrace steps, delighted, hands spread.
"Friday, Cassius. The Matriarch keeps court on Friday. Bring her, or I'll tell it my way!"
And he's gone into the dark, and I shut the door, and I stand with my forehead against it for exactly one second before I turn around.
Wren is standing in the middle of my living room in a T-shirt with her arms folded, and she does not look frightened at all. She looks furious.
"Right," she says. "Chair. Sit. Explain claimed."
End of Act One.