Chapter Five #2
At the head of the table, Aerec watched.
He had not spoken since I entered. He sat with the stillness of deep water and let his Court circle me, and only once, when Cael leaned close enough that the cold of him crossed into my borrowed air, did the Sovereign move at all: a single, unhurried turn of a ring on his finger, and the lights beyond the windows surged bright, and Cael leaned back without seeming to decide to.
So. The tether ran both ways, then. Useful.
I made myself watch him the way I’d watched the rest, openly, ledger-style, because the powerful want you to look away and the small revenge of the powerless is that they don’t.
He gave me almost nothing to enter. He did not eat; he did not perform the eating either, the way the others did, and that absence set him apart from his own Court as cleanly as the bare grey-green coat set him apart from their hoard.
He simply sat at the head of the table in the stillness of deep water and let the play run, and his pale eyes moved over it, over Cael, over me, over the lords doing their small calculations behind their pearls, with the patience of a man who has watched this exact dinner a thousand times and is waiting, with no great hope, to be surprised by it.
Centuries-tired. That was the word my body found for him before my mind did.
He turned the ring on his finger once, slow, and the lights answered, and I understood that the turning was not a habit.
It was punctuation. He was reading the room the way I was, and now and then he underlined a line.
“You favor her,” Cael observed, to Aerec, lightly, as though discussing weather.
“The whole house is talking. The Sovereign who hasn’t sent for a soul in a hundred years, sending himself to a render’s door on her first night.
” His warm eyes slid to me, and the cruelty in them was almost gentle.
“Be careful, child. He’s kept things before.
There’s a shoe in the eel-wife’s collection that used to have a girl in it.
” He smiled. “He keeps what he favors. It’s the favoring you want to survive. ”
The table went quiet in the particular way of people who have just watched someone reach for a knife.
It was not a silence of one kind. I had been raised in the silences of the flats, the silence of the tide turning, the silence of a debt read aloud, the silence after a name is struck from the rolls, and I had learned that a quiet room is the most legible room there is, if you know the alphabet.
This one had three letters in it. There were the ones who leaned a fraction toward Cael, glad, the way a crowd leans toward a baiting; they had wanted the surface bled since I sat down, and Cael had finally drawn the cup.
There were the ones who went very still and looked at the Sovereign instead of at me, checking his face for the weather, because in any court the only opinion that finally counts is the one on the throne.
And there was Hule, who looked at his own bell-clapper and not at anyone, and the lady I would later know had lost a quarter to the dark, who looked at me with something I could not name then and would name later as the particular pity of a person who has watched this play before and knows how it ends for the girl at the foot of the table.
Three reactions, in one silence, in a court that thought it had given me nothing.
A hall this divided over a single cruel toast was a hall a patient woman could one day pry apart along the grain.
I put that away too, behind my breastbone, with the rest.
I felt the magic stir under my skin, the old wanting, awake now, no longer content to be refused, and I felt the sea beyond the windows lean toward me in answer, glad, glad, and I remembered Aerec’s voice in the dark: Don’t shape the sea where they can see it.
The letting go is the part that kills you.
I put my hands flat on the cold black table.
My mother’s gesture. Thirteen years of it. It steadied me the way it always had, and I breathed, and I did not pull the sea down on Lord Cael’s smiling golden head, though every drowned soul at that table would have felt it want to.
“Thank you for the warning,” I said, evenly. “I’ll be sure to survive.”
But I had felt it. And worse, much worse, I had felt the Sovereign feel it, through the tether, the surge and the holding-back, the open door and the hand on it keeping it shut.
His eyes were on me from the head of the table, pale and unreadable, and in them was something that was not quite approval and not quite hunger and was, I would understand much later, the beginning of both.
I went back to the dead queen’s room that night and sat a long while in the dark with my hands flat on the cold chest, the queen’s chest, the one with the boat at the bottom, and I did the thing the flats had taught me to do after any first encounter with a new kind of danger: I took it apart and laid the pieces out and named each one.
The Court was a hoard; that I had known before the soup.
Cael was a ledger that smiled; that I had learned over the bread.
The lesser lords were weather, a thing that would lean whichever way the throne leaned, and could therefore be read but not trusted.
And the Sovereign. The Sovereign was the piece I could not lay flat, because he would not stay one shape.
He had turned a ring and dimmed Cael with the lights, which made him a protector, or made me a thing he was protecting, which were not the same and mattered enormously which.
He had felt the sea surge toward me and felt me hold it back, through a tether I had not consented to and could not see, which made him closer to me than anyone alive and a stranger both.
And he had watched me all evening with the beginning of two things at once, approval and hunger, and I could not yet tell which would win, and the not-telling was the most dangerous thing in the room, more dangerous than Cael’s ledger, because Cael at least I understood.
I sat with my hands on the boat-chest and decided the only thing I could decide: that I would learn him faster than he learned me, because the one who learns the other first is the one who survives, and I had spent my whole life learning dangerous things faster than they could learn me.
I did not yet know that he had decided the same thing about me, in the same hour, at the head of his own cold table, and that two people who each resolve to learn the other first are not, in the end, adversaries.
They are something the cold sea had no word for, and would have to make one.