Aude
Istart going down to the water before the garrison wakes, in the grey hour when the watch turns and the stair is empty, because it is the one piece of the day that belongs to me.
He leaves the dock to me. He told me without telling me, the first morning I went down and found a hand line coiled on the planks and a bait pail beside it.
No note, no word, just the tools left where a fisherwoman would find them.
He gives me the water and stays off it. It is the nearest thing to courtship he has in him, and he has no idea how well it lands.
So I fish. Badly at first, with garrison tackle and no boat, casting off the end of the dock into the east current I marked the day they brought me here.
Then less badly. The fish are the same fish.
The current runs the way it ran under the skiff, the kelp holds what kelp always holds, and my hands remember the work even when the rest of me has forgotten how to want anything that isn’t him.
For an hour before the garrison wakes I am only a woman reading water, and the reading is clean, and none of it is his.
I don’t think about how far the sound of me carries. A woman in heat, alone, at the waterline, where the scent of her runs out over open water with nothing to stop it. I am thinking about the set of the current. I am not thinking past it.
The garrison wakes around me when I climb back up, and I have begun to see it for what it is.
Not a household. A wound the cliff has clamped shut and refuses to let bleed out.
Every body on the walls faces the land, where the rot comes from, and the talk in the halls is all of the north face, where the corruption has eaten three spans of cliff this season and the soldiers shore it up by night and lose ground by day.
They are holding a line that is moving toward them.
I came here thinking I’d been sold into a man’s house. I was sold onto a battlefield, and the man whose house it isn’t carries more weight and less time than I understood.
And he is getting slower. I see it in him now as plain as a change in the weather.
The rut is climbing toward its peak and taking pieces of him with it, his attention, his speed, the edge a commander needs.
I watch him miss a beat on the north wall he would not have missed a week ago, and a younger soldier catch it for him, and I see his jaw set at the cost of being caught.
His body is bending all its strength one way, toward me, and the line is paying for it.
I should feel safer, knowing what I cost him. I feel the opposite. The more of his strength bends toward me, the more I understand I have become a hole in the wall of a place that buries its dead, and something in me that has no business caring has started to care.
That is the part that frightens me, climbing the stair from the water one grey morning with salt on my hands and a thing turning over in my body I have not had before.
Not the wanting he builds. Something my own, deeper down.
My blood has changed. I have read enough cycles in enough women, and in myself, to know the shape of it coming.
The heat that is mine, not his. The fertile one.
It is days off, and it will be different, and for the first time I am not sure I want to be talked down from it.
And I know what it would cost. The collectors spelled the law out on the boat in that flat tide-table voice: a child makes the match a thing Central can’t undo.
It ends any version of this where I walk back onto a skiff and become no one again.
Go to him in the true heat and I am his on paper before I am his in the body, and there is no clause anywhere that gives me back.
I turn it over the whole climb up the stair, days out, while I still have the room to.