Chapter Three
They gave me a room that had belonged to a drowned queen.
I knew she’d drowned because she was still, in a manner of speaking, in residence: a portrait over the cold hearth, painted by someone who had loved her and wanted you to know it, her hand resting on a hound’s head, her eyes following me around the room with the patient attention of the dead.
Pearls at her throat. The same pearls, I realized, that the eel-woman wore now.
They redistributed the dead here the way we redistributed nets and tools in Cinderhollow, and for the same reason: nothing was wasted when there was never enough.
The portrait was the best-made thing I had yet seen in that house of stolen gold, and the best-made thing is always the one to watch, because care is a kind of confession.
Someone had loved the woman on the wall.
You could read it in the hound under her hand, painted with the same attention as her face, a real dog and not a symbol, the kind of dog a painter only puts in if the sitter asked for it.
You could read it in the light the painter had given her: a warm light, a surface light, a light that did not exist anywhere in the Drowned Court and that someone had remembered well enough to mix from memory three thousand feet down.
Whoever painted Líoth had wanted, more than anything, for the person looking at the picture to understand that she had been loved.
And the Court had hung her over a cold hearth in a room it gave to renders, and looped her pearls round the throat of an eel-graced thing that counted the dead in its finest, and forgotten her name on purpose, and forgotten the love hardest of all.
I stood in front of that warm-lit face on my first morning and felt the wrongness of it before I knew a single fact about her, the way you feel the wrongness of a well-loved tool left out to rust. Someone made this with love, I thought, and someone else threw it in a room with the spare bedding.
And I did not yet know that the someone in the painting was still inside it, watching me think it, waiting.
The room itself was a drowned room made dry, and the dryness was its own unease.
The sea pressed at every wall and did not come in.
There was a bed wide enough for four, hung with curtains that had been cloth-of-gold once and were now the grey-green of everything down here, stiff with the memory of richness.
A cold hearth that had clearly not held a fire in three hundred years, because what would you burn, under the sea, and why.
And yet someone had laid it, long ago, with driftwood gone to stone, as though the room had been kept always ready for a warmth that never came.
A chair. A chest. The hound in the portrait had a collar of worked silver, and somewhere in the city, I thought, a drowned lord was probably wearing it.
I sat on the edge of the bed and the bed did not give the way a bed gives.
Three hundred years and the ticking had gone to something between cloth and stone, holding the shape of the last body that had lain in it, and I thought, before I could stop myself, that the last body to lie in it had been the queen on the wall, and I stood up again.
The chest, when I opened it (because I have never in my life been able to leave a chest shut, the flats teach you that anything closed is either a tool you’ll need or a danger you’d better know the size of) held the queen’s things, folded, waiting.
Gowns gone the grey-green of everything.
A hairbrush of bone with a few long pale hairs still caught in it, three hundred years old, and I shut the lid on those fast, because there is a kind of intimacy with the dead that the living have no right to.
Underneath, at the very bottom, a child’s thing: a wooden boat, small enough to fit a palm, carved rough and loving the way a father carves, the kind of boat you float in a puddle for a child too small to be trusted near the real water.
I held it a long time. A queen who built lids over hungers had once been a woman who kept her child’s first boat in a chest. The Court had eaten the woman and kept the queen, and forgotten there had ever been a difference, and I was the only one left in three hundred years to open the chest and find the boat and understand that there had been.
I put the boat back where I found it. Some things you leave for the dead.
But I have never forgotten it, that small rough loving thing at the bottom of a dead queen’s chest, and when, much later, I learned the truth of who Líoth had been and what she had given and what it had cost her, the boat was the first thing I thought of, and not the pearls, and not the crown.
A people remembers what it wears. I had decided, sitting on the edge of that stone-stiff bed on my first morning, that whatever else this city made me, I would be the one who remembered the boat.
Everything in the Drowned Court had belonged to someone, and everyone it had belonged to was either dead or wearing something else that had belonged to someone else, and the whole place turned slowly on that, a wheel of the kept, and I had just been added to it: a girl in a dead queen’s room, sleeping in a dead queen’s bed, watched by a dead queen’s eyes.
“Her name was Líoth.” Nissa, the girl who’d brought me, set down a basin of water that steamed despite the cold and did not stop steaming, which I chose not to think about.
She was younger than me, sixteen or seventeen, mortal as I was.
You could tell the living by the warmth, the way you could tell ripe fruit, the way the air around her moved a little, the way the cold leaned toward her too.
She had the careful quickness of someone who had survived a place like this by being useful and quiet.
She did everything slightly turned away, I noticed, half an eye always on the door, her shoulders rounded in the particular way of a body that has learned to take up as little room as a body can.
I had seen that shape before. I had worn it.
It was the shape of a girl who has spent her life being the one the dark is supposed to take first. “Don’t say it where they can hear.
They don’t like it when we remember the names. ”
“Why not?”
Nissa glanced at the door. “Names are how you keep a thing yours,” she said.
“Down here, that matters more than it does up top.” She wrung a cloth and held it out, and when I didn’t take it, she flushed.
“For the salt. You’re crusted to the elbow.
The Sovereign will send for you tonight, and it’s better, when he sends for you, to not look like the surface.
It reminds them of what they take. It makes them hungry. ”
I took the cloth.
“He sends for me tonight,” I repeated, keeping my voice level, washing thirteen years of salt-flat off my arms in water that should not have been warm. “For what?”
“To talk.” She said it too quickly. Then, more honestly, because she was bad at lying and I think she knew it: “I don’t know, my lady.
He doesn’t send for anyone. Not in my time here, and not in my mother’s before me.
The Court is,” she searched for it, “the Court is talking about you. They’re frightened.
When they’re frightened they get cruel, so.
Be careful at dinner. Lord Cael especially. He smiles.”
“They all smile.”
“Cael means it,” Nissa said. “That’s worse.”
“How long have you been here?” I asked her, because I wanted to know, and because a person tells you who they are by how they answer a question they weren’t braced for.
“All my life.” She said it the way you say a thing you’ve stopped feeling, which is to say not quite all the way, a hairline of feeling still showing at the edge of it.
“Born here. My mother served the kitchens, and hers. We’re,” she hunted for the word a mortal uses for a thing that has no good word, “we’re the warm part of the staff.
The drowned keep the books and read the ledgers and stand at the doors looking beautiful.
But you can’t drown a thing and have it knead bread, or carry water, or mind a fire that isn’t a fire.
So they keep some of us. Living. For the work the cold can’t do.
” She wrung the cloth again, though it did not need wringing, her hands wanting a thing to do.
“They feed us. They don’t hurt us, mostly.
We’re useful, and the useful gets to keep breathing a while longer than the rest.” Her mouth did a small bitter thing.
“My mother used to say we were lucky. Down here, lucky means the dark hasn’t got to your street yet. ”
“And your mother?”
“The wet lung,” Nissa said. “Two winters back. It comes up from the cold, the same as on the surface, I’m told.
There’s damp in the warm rooms no matter how they’re tended.
” She looked at me sidelong, and I understood she was testing whether I would flinch from it, the way the drowned flinched from warmth, the way the warm sometimes flinched from grief.
“She went the way the mortals go down here. Quiet. In the dry corner. With the sea three walls away and pressing.”
With the tide three feet from the door, I did not say.
But I felt it land in me, the kinship of it, two girls in a cold house who had each sat with a mother who breathed out of time with the sea until the sea was breathing and she was not.
I did not say it. But I think she saw it, because the testing went out of her face, just slightly, and what was left was younger and more tired and more like a person than a servant.
I looked at her, really looked, the way I hadn’t let myself look at anyone since I’d walked into the sea, and saw that she was trying, in the only currency she had, to keep me alive. It cost her something to do it. It would cost her more if she were caught.
“Maren,” I said. “Not ‘my lady.’ I rake salt. I raked it this morning.” I held out the cloth, clean now, and she took it, and for half a breath we were just two mortal women in a dead queen’s room, warm in a city built to forget that warmth existed. “Thank you, Nissa. I’ll be careful.”
She slipped out. The drowned queen watched me from over the hearth.
I crossed to the window. There was a window, absurdly, a tall arched thing glazed with glass that should have shattered under the weight of the deep and did not, looking out into the green-black where lights moved that I hoped were lanterns and suspected were not, and I put my palm flat to the cold glass.
It was the only cold thing I had touched since the channel; the room’s dry warmth stopped at the glass, and beyond it the true cold of the deep pressed against my hand through a finger’s width of impossible glazing, and it was like setting your palm to the chest of something enormous and asleep.
The sea pushed back. And the thing under my skin pushed toward it, glad, like a hound that has heard its master on the road, except that down here the wanting was not a flicker, the way it had been on the flats.
It was a flood held behind a door. Thirteen years of practice, and on the flats it had been a thing I could press flat to a table.
Here, an arm’s length from the open sea, it took everything I had to keep my hand only a hand.
You keep that under your skin until you die of old age.
But my mother had died at thirty-four with the tide three feet from the door, and she had kept her hands flat her whole life, and it had bought her nothing but a smaller grave.
I was twenty-two. I had a year and a day in a city that drowned witches and kept what was left, and a Sovereign who knew my name before I gave it and parted the sea to walk beside me, and a thing in my chest that had waited thirteen years to wake and was, finally, awake.
I was done holding still.
I did not decide it the way you decide a small thing, weighing it, listing the costs.
I decided it the way the tide turns, all at once, at the bottom of the slack, a whole sea changing its mind in the space between one breath and the next.
Twenty-two years I had held still, and the holding still had been the whole of my craft and the whole of my survival and the whole of my inheritance, the one thing my mother had to give and the one thing the flats had to teach.
And standing at that absurd window with my palm to the cold glass and the sea pushing back, I understood that the holding still had been a thing I did because I had no other option, and that the not-having-of-options had been the actual prison, not the magic and not the Court and not even the tithe.
My mother had not chosen to hold still. She had been made to, by a village that would have walked her out onto the pans, by a sea that took everyone she loved, by a world that gave a salt-witch exactly one move and called it wisdom.
And I had a year and a day in which, for the first time in the history of my line, the holding still was a choice and not a sentence, because down here, an arm’s length from the open sea, with the thing in my chest finally awake, I could let it out, and the letting-out would either kill me or remake me, and either way it would be mine, the first wholly mine thing I had ever done.
That is what I decided at the window. Not to use the magic.
To stop letting the holding-still be a thing done to me, and start, for whatever year and a day I had, choosing it or not choosing it with my own two hands.
I let the magic come up into my hand, just a little, just enough to feel it, the first time in my life I had ever let it out on purpose, and on the other side of the glass, in the cold dark of the Drowned Court, the sea curled toward my palm and shaped itself, for one impossible heartbeat, into the print of a hand pressed back against mine.
Behind me, from the doorway, a voice I already hated and a smile I could hear said, “Now that is interesting.”
I turned.
Aerec Vol stood in the door of the drowned queen’s room with the dark at his back and the half-smile at one corner of his mouth, and his pale eyes on my hand where it still glowed faintly against the glass, and I understood, far too late, that he had not sent for me tonight at all.
He had come himself.