Chapter Five
The Court ate in a hall where the ocean was the ceiling and the dead were the centerpieces.
They did not need to eat. I worked that out within the first course, watching pearls-and-coral lift forks to mouths and set them down untouched, the whole performance a play staged for an audience of one mortal girl.
They ate because I did. They wanted to watch the surface put food in its body.
It reminded them, Nissa had said, of what they take.
It made them hungry. I had not understood her until I sat at that long black table under the weight of the sea and felt eleven pairs of drowned eyes track the bread to my lips like gulls following a boat.
It was the lifting that I could not stop watching, once I had started.
A drowned soul would raise a fork to its mouth in perfect time, the gesture beautiful, learned, three hundred years rehearsed, and then the mouth would not open, because there was nothing in it that wanted opening, and the fork would lower again, untasted, and the hand would reach for the cup and not drink, and the cup would set down full.
The whole table did it. Up and down its black length, the loveliest people the sea had ever kept performed the memory of supper for me, an orchestra of hunger with no instrument left to play it on, and the only sound in all of it was my own jaw working, my own swallow, the small wet mortal noises of a body that still needed feeding doing its needful thing under the eyes of a hundred bodies that had forgotten why they once had.
On the flats we ate to live. Here they ate to remember they no longer could, and they watched me to be sure they still wanted to.
I learned some of their names by the third course, because I made it my business to.
A render who sits at the foot of the table and learns no one’s name has agreed to be furniture, and I had not come this far to be furniture.
There was a narrow silver woman they called Sereth, who wore a drowned bride’s veil pinned into her hair and lifted her cup a half-beat before anyone else, always first, as though eagerness could be performed into appetite.
There was a broad cold lord, Hule, who kept a ship’s bell-clapper hung at his belt and turned it over and over in his fingers the way Aerec turned his ring, and whose pearl-grey eyes came to me too often and slid away too fast, the eyes of a man who has lost something to a place like this and has not decided yet whether the newcomer is a threat or a hope.
And the eel-woman in Líoth’s pearls, down toward the head, who did not bother with the eating at all, who only watched, with her set mask of a face, and smiled each time the bread reached my mouth, the way you smile at a thing walking willingly into the trap you built for it.
The table was a marvel and a mockery both.
It was laid as a great house lays a feast: platters of things that had been beautiful once, oysters the size of my palm, fish silvered and arranged as if swimming, fruits I had no name for, all of it gone faintly grey at the edges the way everything went grey down here, all of it cold.
The plates were drowned plates, gold and silver dredged from a hundred wrecks, no two matching, each one stolen from a different dead table.
The cups were the cups of dead men. And the food, when I made myself taste it, tasted of nothing, not bad, not rotten, simply absent, the way the air had no smell, the way the city had no sound; the cold had taken the taste out of everything in the Drowned Court three hundred years ago and never given it back.
I ate cold ash that looked like a feast, under the eyes of the dead, in a hall with the ocean for a roof, and I made myself chew slowly, and swallow, and reach for more.
I ate anyway. Slowly. I had raked salt since I was six; I knew how to do a hard thing in front of people who were waiting for me to stop.
“She has manners.” The voice came from my left, warm as a hearth, and that was how I knew it was him before I turned.
Lord Cael was fair where Aerec was dark, and where the Sovereign wore the channel at dusk, Cael wore drowned gold, a bridegroom’s chain, a christening cup beaten flat into a brooch, and he smiled at me the way the tide smiles at a low wall.
“Manners, and salt under her nails still. Tell me, little render, did they weep when you went? Or were they glad? In my experience the villages are always a little glad. It spoils the grief. Don’t you find? ”
Cael means it, Nissa had said. That’s worse.
“They were glad,” I said. “I’d have been, in their place.
Grief’s a luxury on the flats. We can’t afford much of it.
” I met his warm, terrible smile with the flat calm my mother had taught me.
“You’ll have to look elsewhere for a girl who’ll cry at your table, my lord.
I left my weeping in the mud with my rake. ”
A few of the Court made a sound, not quite a laugh, the cousin of one, a dry rustle like wind through dead reeds.
It was the first sound any of them but Cael had made, and it told me something: that they could be surprised, that the play they’d staged to watch the surface eat had a part in it for the surface to talk back, and that not all of them wanted Cael to have the only good lines.
I filed it away with the child’s shoe and the parting water.
A court that can be made to laugh at one of its own is a court with seams in it.
“You’ll forgive the table its amusement,” Cael said, warm as ever, recovering on the surface the way a tide closes over the place a stone went in.
“We have so little of it. A render usually arrives weeping, and weeps until she’s spent, and spends, and then she’s only the salt she came to pay.
You came arguing. It’s a novelty.” He turned the christening-cup brooch at his breast, a small fond motion, as though it pleased him.
“Tell me. When you bought your village another season, did you reckon what the season was worth? Or did you simply not want to be the one who held still while the sea chose your brother?”
It was a clean cut. He had found the one true thing under the table-talk and laid the knife on it, gently, to watch me feel where it rested. I had named Tomas to no one. He had not needed me to.
“I reckoned it down to the weight,” I said.
“Forty of salt or forty of flesh or one bound life. I’m cheaper than the salt and I keep better.
” I let that sit, and I did not let my eyes go to the cup at his breast, though I had marked it the moment he sat, a thing that had been beaten flat from a vessel some warm hand once dipped at a child’s brow, and worn now as a jewel by a man asking me to count costs.
“You wear a christening cup at dinner and ask me whether I counted what a life is worth. I’d say you and I keep very different ledgers, my lord.
Mine just has fewer entries I’d rather not have anyone read aloud. ”
Down the table, Sereth’s cup stopped a half-beat short of her lips, and the dry-reed rustle came again, lower this time, and quicker to die, as though more of them had wanted to make it, and fewer had dared.
“Ledgers,” Cael repeated, tasting the word, pleased with it, the way a man is pleased to find his opponent has handed him the very tool he meant to fetch.
“Yes. You’d know about ledgers, little render.
Your whole sodden coast is a ledger: so much salt against so much sea, the sums always running the wrong way, the page never balancing until someone walks into the water to make it.
” He leaned a fraction closer, and the cold of him crossed into my borrowed air, and his voice dropped to the warmth you’d use on a child.
“Here is a sum you haven’t done yet. A year and a day, you rendered.
That’s the debt. But a debt is a thing the Court collects, and the Court has never once, in three hundred years, let a render walk back out the way she walked in.
So tell me. When the year and a day are up, and the page still hasn’t balanced, what do you imagine pays the difference?
” He smiled, and it was the warmest thing in the cold hall, and the worst. “Do the sum, render. You’re so very good at them. ”
“I’ve done it,” I said. I had. I had done it walking into the sea.
“The difference is me, my lord. It always was, that’s what rendered means.
I knew the price when I picked up the rake this morning and put it down again.
” I held his warm terrible smile and did not let mine waver.
“What you’re really asking is whether I’ll weep about it at your table between now and then.
And I’ve already told you. I left my weeping in the mud.
You’ll have to balance your own books for entertainment. I’m not going to do it for you.”
This time the rustle did not come, and the not-coming was louder: a held breath all down the table, a hall full of the drowned discovering that the surface had not only talked back twice but had refused, on the second try, to bleed.
I had stopped being a meal and become a question, and a court does not know what to do with a question at dinner.
Cael’s smile did not move, but something behind it did, the way light moves behind shoal-water, and I understood that I had won the exchange and that winning it had been a mistake, because Lord Cael was a man who forgave being hated and never, ever forgave being bested.
There is a kind of man, I had met two or three on the surface, the ones who run a village’s debts, the ones who decide whose nets get mended first, who can lose a thing and let it go, and another kind who cannot lose even a word at a dinner without adding it to a ledger he keeps behind his teeth.
Cael kept a ledger. I had just made an entry in it, in my own hand, on my second day, and I knew it even as I drank.