Chapter Seven
The lessons began in a flooded solar at the top of the palace, where the sea pressed against tall arched windows and the light came down green and slow, and Aerec Vol taught me to hold the ocean the way other men might teach a girl to dance: close, and with his hands, and with a patience that was its own kind of danger.
It was the highest room in the Court, and the only one with light that moved.
The arched windows ran from floor to a ceiling lost in green dark, and beyond them the sea went up and up toward a surface too far to imagine, and now and then the light shifted, a great slow brightening and dimming, as though clouds were passing over a sun three thousand feet up, and I understood, the first morning, that I was seeing weather.
Surface weather, come down through all that water gone faint and green and strange.
It was the only thing in the Drowned Court that still answered to the sky, and I think that was why he taught me there, though he never said so.
A man who keeps one dry match keeps one window to the weather, too.
I learned to read that far green light the way I had once read the marsh sky, not by what it showed but by how it moved.
On the flats you knew rain before it came by the way the grey thickened along the channel and the gulls dropped low to the pans.
Here, three thousand feet under the weather, I could still tell when something was passing over the sun I would never see again: a dimming that crept rather than fell, a brightening that came in patient bands, the whole far surface gone to a hammered pewter that meant wind I could not feel and waves I would not hear.
I caught myself, the first week, naming the weather under my breath (squall coming, that’s a high thin cloud, that’s the kind of light the flats went before a long warm rain), and I did not stop, because it was the one piece of the surface that had followed me down, and a girl raised on tides does not throw away the only window she has back to the sky.
There were charts on the walls, drowned charts, coasts I half-knew and coasts I didn’t, and a long table of instruments gone green with age: astrolabes, calipers, a thing for measuring tides, the tools of someone who had once, before the cold, wanted to understand the sea instead of only hold it down.
I touched none of them. But I looked, and I learned more about Aerec Vol from that room than from anything he told me in it: that he had been, once, a man who studied things.
That somewhere under the three hundred years was the boy who had wanted to know how the water worked.
The charts were the part I could not leave alone with my eyes.
They had been inked on hide and on something thinner that might have been vellum, and the deep had got into them the way it got into everything: the colors leached to a brown not far off the brown of old blood, the coastlines furred with the same pale weed that grew on the civic stones, swimming a little when my pocket of air stirred near them.
Some of the coasts I knew the way a body knows a song from another room: a headland here, a channel there, a bay drawn in a careful hand by someone who had cared what shape it was.
Cinderhollow was not on them. Of course it wasn’t.
We were not old enough to be drowned; we were the kind of place that paid so the old drowned places could go on being remembered.
But I found, near the bottom edge of the largest chart, a stretch of marsh-coast the cartographer had marked with a row of small drawn pans, salt-pans, the little squared fields I had bent over since I was six, and I stood in front of it a long time, because someone three hundred years ago had thought the salt-flats worth the ink, and no one in my own century ever had.
The astrolabe nearest my hand had a hairline crack across its face and a maker’s mark stamped at the rim, worn almost smooth.
A man had held that to the sky once and taken the height of a star off it and known, from the knowing, where on the cold earth he stood.
I thought about the difference between that and what the Court did with the sea now, the one a way of asking the water where you were, the other a way of telling it where it could not go, and I thought that somewhere between the two stood the boy who had wanted to know how the water worked, and the Sovereign who had spent three hundred years making sure it did only what he said.
I did not ask Aerec which of them had hung these charts.
I already knew. You do not keep a drowned astrolabe on a green table for three centuries unless some part of you is still asking the old question.
“Again,” he said.
We stood at the center of the room, a basin of seawater between us, and the rule of the lesson was simple and impossible: lift the water, and set it down.
Anyone could lift it. The sea leapt for me now the moment I stopped refusing, eager as a hound off the leash.
It was the setting-down that I could not do.
Every time I tried to close the working, the magic fought me, the door slammed, the water dropped in a sheet and soaked us both, and the wanting under my skin howled at being shut away again.
The lifting itself I could feel in my body the way I felt a haul coming up heavy on a line.
There was a weight to a column of the sea even when it floated free of the basin; it pulled at the place behind my breastbone where the wanting lived, and the pull ran down my arms to my wrists and sat there, a current looping each wrist, glad.
That was the thing no one had ever told me on the flats: that the sea had a heft you held with something other than your hands, and that the holding tired you the same as a real haul did, a deep ache laid into the meat of the forearms, so that by the fourth lift of a morning my hands shook when I set them flat.
Aerec watched the shaking and said nothing, but I noticed he let the rests run longer than he pretended to, and I let him pretend.
The setting-down was a different country.
I would get the column up, glad and rocking gently in the green light, and then I would reach to close it the only way thirteen years had taught me, shove, refuse, slam the lid, and the water would feel the old hatred come down on it and bolt, the way a dog bolts from a raised hand even one that has never struck it, and it would go everywhere, and the wanting would scream behind my ribs at being told no one more time, and I would stand there dripping and furious at myself, because I had wanted this my whole life and now that I had it I was no better at ending it than my mother had been at letting it begin.
The ninth time I dropped it, the sheet of cold water went up the wall and put out one of the lamps that had no business burning underwater, and in the green half-dark that followed I saw, for the first time, what the solar must have looked like when it drowned.
The far windows held the weight of the whole ocean and the slow weather past it, and against that pale moving green the drowned instruments on the long table threw their shadows, the astrolabes and the calipers and the tide-glass, the careful tools of a careful man, and I thought of the room three hundred years ago when the water first came up through the floor and stood where the scholar had been: how the charts would have lifted off the walls and turned slowly in the dark, how the astrolabe would have floated and settled, how every patient instrument for asking the sea a question would have gone on hanging there, asked and answered, in a room with no one left to read them.
I had drowned a lamp and called the whole drowning back.
Aerec relit the lamp without a word, his hand passing over the dead wick and the small gold flame standing up again obedient, and I understood that he had been relighting that exact lamp, in that exact room, for longer than my whole village had stood on the flats.
“I can’t,” I said, for the ninth time, dripping. “It doesn’t want to stop.”
“Because you tell it to stop like an enemy.” He came around the basin.
He had taken off the channel-grey coat for this; in shirtsleeves he looked less like a throne and more like a man, and that was worse, because a throne I could hate cleanly.
His forearms were bare, and the salt had dried fine and silver on them too, the way it had at his temple, and there was an old scar across the back of one hand, white and long, the kind of scar a man gets from a knife and not from a working, a thing from before, from when he had been warm and mortal and able to bleed.
I did not ask about it. I looked at it the way I’d looked at the instruments.
“You spent thirteen years treating the thing inside you as a beast at a door. So now, when you try to close it, the beast hears the old hatred and bites.” He stopped behind me.
Close. The warm column of his air folded into mine and the tether between us went soft and short, and the old want to lean into it rose up in me again and I held it the way I held everything. “Give me your hands.”
“That’s not—”
“Maren.” Just my name. He had a way of saying it that ended arguments, low and certain, and I told myself the thing it did to me was only nerves. “Give me your hands.”