Chapter Seven #2
I did not, at first. I want that set down, because the songs will make this easy and it was not easy.
I had not let anyone put their hands on mine since the night my mother pinned my palms to the table, and that touch had been a cage, hers shaking and mine still, and every touch I had refused in the thirteen years after had been a small repaying of that one.
The boys on the flats who reached for my wrist at the harvest fires.
The tithe-priest’s clerk who once took my hand to steady me down a wet plank and felt me go to stone and let go fast. I had built a whole self out of the not-being-touched, the way you build a wall out of the stones the field keeps turning up, and a man with three hundred years in his eyes was asking me to hand him the one thing I had kept back from everyone, including, mostly, myself.
“You’re afraid of it,” Aerec said, not unkindly, only exact, the way he was exact about everything.
“Not of me. Of being shown. You’ve been the only one who knew the size of it for so long that letting another set of hands on it feels like the thing breaking, not the thing healing.
” A pause. “I’m not going to take it from you, Maren.
I couldn’t if I tried; it’s bound to you, not me.
I’m only going to stand where I can feel what you feel, so that when you do it right I can tell you that’s the one.
That’s all teaching ever is. Someone standing close enough to say that’s the one. ”
I gave him my hands.
He turned them palm-up and laid his own over them from behind, his fingers threading mine, his chest at my back, his chin a breath above my hair, and the whole length of me went still and warm in a house built to forget warmth.
“Lift the water,” he murmured, at my ear.
“Don’t set it down. Hold it. And while you hold it, I want you to notice that it isn’t fighting you.
It’s playing with you. It has been alone down here as long as I have, and you are the first one in three hundred years who came when it called. ”
I lifted the water. It rose between the arched windows in a slow bright rope, and under his hands I felt the difference: not a beast at a door, but a current looping my wrist, delighted, a thing that had waited my whole life to be touched without fear.
“Now,” he said, softer. “Don’t close the door. Just loosen your hand. Let it choose to lie down. Tell it you’ll call again.”
I loosened my hand.
And the water, astonished, lay down. It poured itself back into the basin without a single drop spilled, the working closing the way a held breath becomes an easy one, and I made a sound I was not proud of, half a laugh and half something nearer to grief, because it had been so simple and no one had ever, not once, shown me that it could be kind.
I have thought a great deal about that sound I made, the half-laugh, half-grief, the noise of a body learning too late that a thing it had braced against its whole life was never the enemy.
It is the sound of grief for the years, I think.
Because the kindness of the closing did not only teach me a working.
It told me, in a single undeniable instant, exactly what the holding-still had cost: thirteen years of treating the thing inside me as a beast, thirteen years of my mother’s flat pinning hands, thirteen years of a girl at war with her own salt, and that all of it, every clenched refusal, every soaked and furious failure, had been unnecessary.
Not wrong; my mother had taught me the only thing she knew, and it had kept me alive.
But unnecessary, in the deepest sense, the sense that breaks your heart: that there had always been a kinder way, a way where the sea was a current looping your wrist and not a flood at a door, and no one in my whole life had known it, and so no one had been able to show me, and I had spent the best years of my youth at war with the one part of me that had only ever wanted to be let out and asked to rest. You do not grieve a thing like that all at once.
I grieved it in that solar in a single ugly sound, and I have gone on grieving it since, in small, the way you grieve any large thing.
Every time I teach a frightened soul at a basin to thank the sea instead of fight it, I grieve, a little, the girl who had no one to teach her, and I am glad, a little, that she is teaching now, and the grief and the gladness are the same thing wearing one face, the way they always were.
“Who taught you,” I said, when I could speak. “To close it. Someone must have stood behind you once, the way you’re standing behind me.”
For a moment I thought he wouldn’t answer. His hands stayed over mine, and the water lay quiet in the basin, and the far green light dimmed and brightened with a weather I would never feel.
“No one,” he said at last. “That’s the joke of it.
I taught myself, three hundred years ago, the hard way, the only way there was, by getting it wrong until I got it right, and the wrong of it cost things I don’t tell people about at basins.
” A pause. “I swore, somewhere in the middle of those three hundred years, that if the sea ever sent me one more witch I would not let her learn it the way I did. And then it didn’t send one for a hundred years, because I’d made sure it wouldn’t.
And then it sent you, with your hands open, on a tithe-morning, and I found I’d been keeping the promise warm the whole time without anyone to keep it for.
” His voice went dry again, the centuries coming back into it like a tide.
“Don’t look so pleased. I’m a poor teacher.
I’ve only ever had the one pupil and I nearly killed him. ”
Aerec did not let go of my hands.
“There,” he said, and I felt the word against my hair more than heard it.
The tether between us was so short it had stopped being a leash and become a held breath of its own.
Neither of us moved. The sea pressed green at the windows.
The light shifted, weather far up, a cloud passing over a sun I would never see again, and in the slow green dimming I could feel his heart, slow and unhurried, against my spine, and the warmth of him at my back was the first warmth that had ever come to me without my having to earn it or hide it or hold it down, and I stood very still inside it the way you stand still inside a thing you are afraid will end if you move.
I thought about turning around. I knew exactly what would happen if I did, the way you know the tide will come whether or not you watch for it, and I understood that he knew too, and that he was leaving the choice to me the way he had left the threshold of the queen’s room three nights ago: a test, and a courtesy, and the two the same thing.
He would not turn me. He would not take.
He had told me himself, in the corridor, that he had only ever known how to take or refuse, and here he was doing neither, holding my hands and the working and his own three hundred years still, and waiting, and the waiting was the most dangerous thing he had done yet, because a thing taken you can resent, and a thing offered you have to answer.
I did not turn around.
He stepped back first. I told myself I was glad.
“Tomorrow,” the Sovereign said, retrieving his coat, not quite looking at me, “we do it without my hands.”
“And if I can’t?”
His mouth curved, that one corner, but it was different now, less the blade and more the man. “Then we’ll simply have to keep practicing until you can,” he said, and left me alone in the green light with my hands still warm and the sea lying quiet at the windows like a thing that loved me.
I was, I realized, in a great deal of trouble. And not the drowning kind.