Chapter One #2
I thought about Tomas, who was sixteen, who still believed the world owed him an explanation, and who was standing close enough to the priest that the milky eyes had already found him once and lingered, because Tomas was young and whole and strong, and a year and a day in the Drowned Court would take all three and give none of them back.
He had our mother’s hands, my brother, the same long fingers, and he did not yet know what those hands could not do: hold a tide off a door, hold a fever down, hold anyone they loved out of the reach of the sea.
He still thought there were people you could appeal to.
He still thought Da paid it was a sentence that meant something.
I loved him so much in that moment it felt like a stone going down, and I knew exactly what I was about to spend, and I did not let it show on my face, because the flats had taught me that too.
I thought about my hands, and the thing under my skin that had spent thirteen years asking to be let out, and which had gone very quiet now, very still, the way a dog goes still when it finally hears the word it has been waiting for.
And I understood, with the flat clarity of cold water closing over your head, that I had been holding still my whole life for exactly this morning, and that there was nothing left to hold still for.
Every cup of water I had not lifted. Every puddle I had pressed my hands flat against the table to ignore.
Thirteen years of teaching the thing inside me that the answer was always no, and it had all been practice, it turned out, for the one morning the answer would be yes, and the yes would cost me everything, and would still be the cheapest thing on offer.
“I’ll go,” I said.
I did not say it loudly. I have never had to. There is a register a voice can drop into that carries further than a shout, the register my mother used the night the floor rose to my fingers, and I used it now, and it walked across the salt-flats and stood the whole village still.
The priest’s bored eyes found me. Took me in: the knotted skirts, the forgotten rake, the salt crusted to my forearms like a second skin.
“Freely given?” he said.
“Freely given.” My hands had stopped itching. That should have frightened me more than it did. “Maren Sael. I render myself against the debt of Cinderhollow, a year and a day.”
Behind me, Tomas began to say my name, and then to shout it, and then there were arms around him, our neighbors’, holding him back, because they had sons too, and a daughter of Sael had just bought every one of them another season.
No one in Cinderhollow would meet my eyes.
That was all right. I had not done it for their eyes.
He was still shouting when the priest opened his ledger.
I made myself hear it, every word, because I had decided in the space of one breath that I would not have a brother I refused to listen to in the last moments I would have one.
Maren, no. Maren, you can’t. Da paid it, Da paid the tithe, this isn’t—Maren, look at me, MAREN— He had our mother’s hands and our mother’s stubbornness and none of our mother’s hard-won knowledge of exactly how little either was worth against the sea, and I loved him for the not-knowing even as it broke something in me to hear it.
He still believed shouting a thing loudly enough could change it.
He had not yet learned the flats’ first lesson, the one our mother had tried to press into me with her flat pinning hands: that the sea does not negotiate, that the tide does not hear you, that the only power a marsh-born soul ever has is the power to choose which of two terrible things to hand it before it takes the choice away.
I did not turn around to him. I have thought about that more than almost anything in this account: that I let my brother’s last sight of me be my back.
But I knew myself, and I knew that if I turned and saw his face I would either weep, which would feed the priest’s milky eyes, or falter, which would cost me the cold flat calm I needed to walk into a curtain of standing sea, and either way I would make my leaving harder for him to survive, and the one gift I had left to give Tomas was a sister who walked into the sea like a woman who had decided, and not like a girl who had been taken.
So I gave him my back, and my straight spine, and my open hands, and I hoped, the way you hope for weather, that one day he would understand the difference and forgive me the cruelty of it.
The priest wrote in his ledger with a stub of charcoal, my name, the four letters of it, scratched onto the vellum that should have rotted in this damp and did not, and closed it, and rang the bell a third time.
The water at the channel’s mouth stood up.
It rose without wave or warning, a wall of it, green-black and silent, and where it should have crashed it simply held: a curtain drawn across the world, and a road of wet light running into the dark of it, and at the far end of the road, too far and far too clear, the drowned towers of a city that had no business existing under the cold spring sun.
“Walk,” the priest said. Almost kind. “They don’t like to be kept.”
So I unknotted my skirts, and I left my rake in the mud where it lay, and I walked into the sea with my chin up and my hands open at my sides, and I did not look back at Cinderhollow, because I was afraid that if I did, the thing under my skin would finally let go, and I wanted to meet the Drowned Court with it still mine.
The road of wet light was cold underfoot, and it held me the way the standing water held itself, politely, an arm’s length of mannered sea on either side of a path that had no business existing, the channel risen into a wall and parted into a door.
I walked it the way I had learned to walk the pans at dead low: testing each step before I trusted it, because the flats teach you that the ground that held yesterday is not the ground that holds today, and a salt-girl who forgets it goes into the mud to her hip.
But this ground held. That was the first wrong thing.
The sea, which had taken Brannoch in three breaths an hour before, laid a path of light under my feet and held it steady all the way down, and I understood, somewhere around the tenth step, with the grey spring sun guttering out behind me and the green dark rising ahead, that I was not being drowned.
I was being received. There is a difference, and the difference is the whole of what the Drowned Court is: the sea did not want me dead, it wanted me arrived, and a thing that wants you arrived is more dangerous by far than a thing that only wants you gone.
The towers came up out of the dark to meet me, and the cold came up to meet me, and the thing under my skin came up too, glad, straining toward the deep like a hound toward home, and I held it, the way I had held it for thirteen years, with my chin up and my hands open, and I walked down the road of light into the mouth of the thing that had been collecting my people one daughter at a time since before my village had a name.
The water closed over me on the third step.
It did not drown me. That was the first lie the Court ever told me, and the gentlest.
I had braced for the cold and the dark and the weight, the way you brace for a blow you have watched land on other people your whole life.
I had watched the channel take Brannoch an hour before; I knew what the sea did to a body, the unmaking, the green-black closing.
So when the water came over my head on the third step and did not crush me, did not fill me, did not take the warmth out of me grain by grain the way I had seen it do, when instead it drew back from my skin by an arm’s length and held there, a sphere of cold air around me in all that drowned dark, and the breath I had been holding for my death came out and another came in after it, ordinary, alive.
I understood that the worst lie the powerful tell is not the cruel one.
The cruel lie you can brace against. The worst lie is the merciful one: the air they let you keep, the breath they let you take, the small unearned kindness that tells you, before they have said a single word, that they have decided to want something from you, and that they are in no hurry, and that you are going to live long enough to find out what.