Chapter Two #2
A woman with an eel’s grace drifted close and circled me, slow, the way a fish circles a thing it has not decided is food, and the cold of her came through my pocket of air like a draught under a door.
She wore Líoth’s pearls, though I did not know that yet, a long rope of them, gone faintly green, looped twice at a throat that had no pulse.
Up close her beauty had a wrongness in it, a smoothness; her face had been lovely once, three hundred years ago, in the warm, and the cold had set it like a mask of itself, perfect and unbreathing, and when she smiled at me only her mouth moved.
“It’s small,” she said, to no one. “And it smells of the surface. Brine and woodsmoke and—” she breathed in, and something behind her eyes sharpened, “—oh. Oh. It smells of salt-magic. Aerec. Aerec, they’ve sent us a witch and they didn’t even know to charge us extra.”
“I know what they’ve sent.”
The voice came from the dark at the head of the hall, and the whole Court turned toward it like weed turning in a current, and I learned the second lie of the Drowned Court, which is that you will know him when you see him, and you will hate that you do.
He came down out of the shadow of a throne made from the ribs of something enormous, and the water did for him what it would not do for anyone else: it parted, fully, so that he walked the flooded hall on dry black stone in a column of air that needed no permission because it was his.
He was not the tallest of them. He was simply the one the others arranged themselves around, the way iron filings arrange themselves and pretend it was their idea.
The Sovereign of the Drowned Court was perhaps thirty, if you did not look at his eyes, and several centuries if you did.
Dark hair, salt-damp, pushed back from a face that had been built for cruelty and had clearly put in the years.
There was a single line of silver at one temple, fine as frost, where the salt had dried in his hair and stayed, the only thing about him that looked as though time had ever touched it, the only mortal thing, and I caught myself looking at it the way you look at the one familiar word in a foreign sentence.
A coat the deep grey-green of the channel at dusk, plain, no pearls, no drowned gold; he wore none of the hoard the others wore, and that absence said more than any jewel could have.
And those eyes, pale as shoal-water, the pale of the channel where it runs over sand, and fixed on me with an attention so total that the rest of the Court seemed to dim around it, as if he had a finite amount of regard and had decided, irritatingly, to spend all of it looking at me.
It was not warmth. I want to be clear, because the songs will make it warmth.
It was the attention a predator pays the one thing in the field that has not yet run.
Interest is not kindness. I knew the difference.
I had been raised among men who knew the difference too, and had still, every one of them, looked away from me on the flats that morning.
He did not look away.
“Salt-witch,” he said. “You rendered yourself freely.”
I had spent my whole life being looked away from.
That is a thing the marked learn before they learn anything else: that the safest way through a room is to be a thing the eyes slide off, one more grey back over one more grey pan, and I had made an art of it, had bent thirteen years of myself into the shape of a girl not worth a second glance.
The men on the flats looked away from me.
The priest’s milky eyes had passed over me a hundred tithe-mornings and found someone taller.
Even my mother, at the end, had looked at the wall and not at me, because looking at me was looking at the thing she could not save.
I had built my survival on being unlooked-at, and I had thought, walking into the sea, that the worst the Court could do was drown me.
I had not reckoned on this: a pale-eyed creature on a throne of ribs who looked at me and did not stop, who spent the whole of his attention on me as though I were the only thing in a hall full of the beautiful drowned worth the spending, and who, in doing it, undid thirteen years of careful invisibility in the space of a single sentence.
It was not warmth, I told myself. It was a predator’s attention.
But it was attention, undivided and unflinching, and I was so unused to being seen at all that even the predator’s kind went through me like the first warm day after a winter, and I hated that it did, and I did not let it show on my face, because the flats had taught me that too.
“I did.”
“You know what we do with your kind.”
“You drown them,” I said, “and keep what’s left.”
Something moved across his face, there and gone, too fast to name, but I would have sworn on my mother’s grave it was surprise, and under the surprise, the faint disreputable beginning of interest. The eel-woman hissed a laugh. The Sovereign did not look away from me.
“And yet you walked in with your hands open,” he said. “Why?”
The true answer was because the alternative was my brother.
The clever answer was a dozen things, and I had time to consider all of them, standing in my pocket of stolen air in a hall full of the beautiful drowned, with the cold of him pressing against the warmth he was choosing, breath by breath, to let me keep.
I could feel that choosing now that he was close: the leash of air, and the hand on the leash, and that the hand was his.
He was the one not letting me die. Every breath I took in that hall, I took because the Sovereign of the Drowned Court had decided, for reasons of his own, that I should have it, and we both knew it, and he was waiting to see whether the knowing would make me afraid.
I gave him neither.
“Because you bound my year and a day before I crossed the water,” I said, “which means you need me whole, which means for one year and one day, Sovereign, you and I want the same thing.” I let that sit. “I’d rather negotiate than beg. Beggars bore you. I can see it from here.”
The hall went very still.
Then the Sovereign of the Drowned Court smiled, just slightly, just at one corner, the smile of a man who has been bored for a hundred years and has just felt the first cold draught of weather, and I felt the bottom go out of my stomach, because I had come here prepared to be drowned, and I had not prepared at all for the possibility that I might be seen.
“Aerec Vol,” he said, as if granting me something.
“You’ll use my name. Everyone here is too frightened to, and I find I’ve missed the sound of it.
” He turned, the coat moving like the tide, and the air went with him, and mine lurched a half-step after his before I caught it.
A tether. Of course it was a tether. “Walk with me, Maren Sael. Let’s discover what you think you can sell me. ”
He hadn’t asked my name.
He already knew it. He’d known it before the priest wrote it down, before I unknotted my skirts, before the water stood up at the channel’s mouth.
I have set a great deal of store, in this account, by the small things the powerful let slip, because the small things are the ones they have not thought to guard.
And the largest small thing the Sovereign of the Drowned Court ever let slip, he let slip in the first hour: he knew my name.
Not salt-witch. Not render. Maren Sael, the four letters of it, before the charcoal touched the vellum on the flats three thousand feet up.
There is no ordinary way for a creature at the bottom of the cold sea to know the name of a girl who raked salt in a village too poor to be remembered, which meant there was an extraordinary way, and the extraordinary way meant that the tithe of Cinderhollow had not been a thing that merely happened to fall on me.
Someone had been watching the channel. Someone had known a salt-witch was hidden on the flats, the way my mother had spent her life terrified someone would, and had let the sour spring floods and the short reckoning do their work, and had waited for the village to do the arithmetic and hand me over freely, because a thing given freely binds in a way a thing taken never can.
I did not understand all of that in the first hour.
I understood only the shape of it: that the Sovereign knew my name, and that knowing it was a kind of claim, and that I had walked into the sea thinking I was paying a debt and was beginning to suspect I had been the debt all along, ordered in advance, the way you order a thing you have been waiting a long time to need.
I filed that away with the child’s shoe and the parting water and the half-smile, in the cold dry place behind my breastbone where I kept the things that would keep me alive, and I followed the Sovereign of the Drowned Court into the dark of his own house, with my hands open, and the thing under my skin awake for the first time in thirteen years, and singing.