Chapter 19
Carys
“It wants to keep me,” I tell him. “Not the tithe. Me. You heard the clanswoman. And I’ve worked out the shape of what that means, and you’re not going to like it, and I need you to hear the whole of it before you decide to be a wall about it.”
We’re at the meadow’s edge, the town ringed round the anchor behind us, the green thread rising thick in the trees, and I’ve got maybe a hundred heartbeats before this has to begin, and I spend them on the truth I’ve carried all day.
It’s the worst possible time to tell him and the only time there is.
The cold’s already coming up out of the ground into my feet.
The bloom’s already flaring green-gold at the treeline, brighter every breath.
Behind us forty people stand in a ring holding their courage together with both hands, waiting on the bee-girl and the joiner to tell them it’s time to be brave, and here I am at the edge of it stealing a hundred heartbeats to hand the man I love the shape of how I might die tonight.
But I promised him no bracing alone. And I meant it.
And more than that, I’ve learned enough this month to know that the green will smell a secret in me the instant I open myself to it, and a working built on things freely given cannot hold a woman with a locked door in her heart.
So I unlock it. Here. Now. In the last hundred heartbeats before the end of everything, with his honey-gold eyes on my face and the cold rising and the god waking in the trees, I tell him the whole terrible shape of it.
“The working needs a thing given freely. That’s the engine of it, the free giving, because that’s what we broke and that’s the only thing that mends it.
The town choosing each other, that’s given free.
Your anchor, built on faith, free. Us, the binding, free.
But the green’s not reaching for the tithe tonight, Madoc.
It’s reaching for me, because I’m the one soul who heard it true in a hundred years, and it’s lonely, it’s so lonely, a hundred years of being cheated and shamed and not one soul hearing it, and it’s found me, and it wants to keep me like I’ve wanted to be kept my whole life, forever, no leaving.
” My voice cracks. “And I’ve worked out that there might come a moment, when the door’s open and it reaches, where the only free coin big enough to settle a debt this old and this lonely is me.
Given. Walking in. Choosing to be the thing it kept, so it stops taking the tithe out of children forever. ”
His face has gone to stone. I keep talking, fast, before he can build a wall out of that stone.
“I’m not going to do it. That’s the thing I need you to hear.
I’m telling you it’s there, the shape of it, because I promised I’d not brace under it alone, and because if I go into that working with a secret door in me the green can smell it and it’ll aim right for it.
So I’m giving it to you in the light, here, before, so it’s not a secret anymore.
There’s a part of me that’s spent thirty years wanting exactly what it’s offering, and that part is going to scream at me tonight to walk in and finally be kept forever, and I need you to know it’s there so that when it screams I’m not screaming alone.
” I grab the front of his shirt in both fists.
“But I’m not going to do it. Because you taught me the difference.
Kept isn’t chosen. It’d be the sweetest cage ever built and it’d still be a cage, and I’ve already chosen the harder thing, which is you, and a valley I can leave and don’t, and one ordinary morning after another that I have to pick on purpose.
I don’t want to be kept forever by a lonely god.
I want to be chosen every stupid day by you.
So I’m telling you the door’s there, and then I’m choosing, out loud, to keep it shut.
That’s the plan. That’s all of it. Now you get one wall about it and then we’ve a god to answer. ”
He doesn’t answer right away, and I watch what the not-answering costs him, and it’s the most I’ve ever loved him and the most afraid I’ve ever been for him at once.
Because I’ve handed a man who spent his whole life building walls the one thing that would make him want to build the biggest wall of his life, and I’ve asked him not to.
I see it move through him. I see his hands twitch at his sides with the want to grab me.
I see his jaw set and his shoulders square and the whole enormous protective bulk of him strain toward the simple animal answer, which is to throw me over his shoulder and run and let the valley burn.
He’s a man who could do it. He’s a man who’s fast to a failing thing and strong enough to carry me a hundred miles, and every instinct he owns is screaming at him to be the wall right now, and I’ve asked him to stand there and trust me instead, and I can see it’s harder for him than standing in the god’s ice was.
He’s quiet a long moment. The green light rises. And when he speaks it’s not the wall I braced for.
“I’m not going to tell you not to,” he says, low, rough, and I know what it costs him to say it.
“God knows I want to. Every part of me wants to pick you up and carry you over the Brown Bridge and let the whole valley drown before I let a lonely god keep you. But you spent your whole life braced to be wanted back less than you wanted, and I’d be a liar and a hypocrite to spend three weeks teaching you the difference between kept and chosen and then try to keep you myself the second it got hard.
So I won’t. I’ll not build a wall around your choosing.
I trust you to keep the door shut. I trust you the whole way down.
” His hands come up and frame my face. “But hear me, Carys. If it reaches, and that old wanting screams in you to walk in, you look at me. I’ll be at the anchor.
You look at me, and you remember there’s a man on this side of the door who chose you back and would grieve you every morning of his life rather than cage you, and that a keeping you can walk away from is the only keeping worth staying for.
You look at me, and you choose the harder thing, out loud, and I’ll be looking back, choosing it too.
That’s my part. Not a wall. A face you can find in the dark. ”
I kiss him. There’s no time and I do it anyway, hard, both of us, a whole promise in it. Then the green thread flares full in the trees, and the high bloom breaks over the valley, and it’s time, and there’s no more time for anything but the working.
We take our places.
Madoc goes to the anchor, both hands on the great root-joint, the town ringed round it behind him, human and orc, hand to hand, Ordun on the north side where the pull runs strongest with his marked plank held up like a shield, the innkeeper, the candle-seller, the clanswoman at the ready, all of them, waiting.
And I walk out alone.
Past the ring, past the anchor, past the last of the safe warded ground, out toward the seam where the pull runs strongest and the tear-place where the green comes through, and every step of it is the loneliest I’ve ever walked, because they can hold the line and they can say the words but this part, the hearing, the singing, the standing at the very edge of the green with the whole of yourself thrown open, this part only I can do, and I’ve never in my life been so aware that a thing was mine alone to carry.
Behind me the whole town holds its breath.
Ahead of me the high bloom pours green-gold up out of the trees, beautiful and lethal, the loveliness that is the danger.
I look back once. Madoc’s at the anchor with his eyes already on me, and he doesn’t tell me it’ll be all right, even now, even across all that distance, he just holds my eyes and sets his jaw, a face I can find in the dark, exactly where he swore he’d be.
I turn back to the green. I kneel in the high bloom with my palms flat on the ground. I open the whole of myself. And I begin.
I sing the green its own grief.
Not small. Not careful. The whole deep wide listening this terrible month has taught me, thrown open into the living green, into the roots and the deep old dark and the lonely wronged enormous heart of the thing that’s owed.
It costs from the first note. I feel it start to take from me the moment I open the whole of myself, the warmth draining out of my hands, the ordinary sounds of the world thinning to that high ringing, the blood already coming warm over my lip, because this is the biggest reach I’ve ever made and the green is fuller tonight than it has ever been, pouring up out of the high bloom in a green-gold flood that wants to drink me down along with my song.
I hold it. I plant myself in the bloom and I hold the note like Madoc holds a load, braced, giving it everything and not one scrap more than I choose, and I sing.
I name it. I name the first bargain, the two who loved across the line, the human and the orc who should have been enemies and weren’t, the promise made and kept and then forgotten.
I name the hundred years of a witness made a fool, the tithe that stopped, the mockery, the grief gone slowly to iron.
I don’t flinch from any of it. I sing it all back, out loud, true, witnessed by a whole town, the thing nobody has said to this thing in an age, and I put the whole of my craft and the whole of my heart into three plain words under all of it: I hear you.
You were promised, and we broke it, and you are owed, and I hear you, and I’m sorry, and it was wrong, and somebody has finally come to say so to your face.
The green answers. All of it.