Chapter Nine
He told me about the curse on the seventh night, because I asked him plainly, and I had learned by then that Aerec Vol would refuse you a kindness a hundred times before he refused you the truth.
We were in the solar again. No basin this time.
The weeks had worn a path between us by then: the lessons in the mornings, the working coming easier under my hands, the closing learned and then half-mastered, the water lifting and setting down with fewer soakings each day.
And the evenings had begun, without either of us naming it, to go long.
He would not send me back to the dead queen’s room when the lesson ended.
I would not go. We had fallen into the habit of two people who have run out of reasons to leave a room and have not yet admitted they have found a reason to stay.
He sat in the green light with the sea at his back and a bottle of something dark and surfaceless between us, a wine from before the drowning, he said, three hundred years in a cold cellar, and it tasted of nothing the way everything down here tasted of nothing, but he poured it anyway, into two drowned-glass cups, the ritual of it, the shape of a thing warm people did.
He turned a glass in his long fingers and did not drink.
I had come to know that pour by then, the way you come to know a person’s tells without deciding to study them.
He poured the tasteless wine on the nights he meant to tell me a true thing, not before the lessons, not after the soakings, but on the long evenings that had begun, without either of us naming them, to go past their reasons.
The pouring was not for drinking; we both knew the wine tasted of nothing, the way the food tasted of nothing, the way the whole cold sea had had the savor taken out of it three hundred years ago.
The pouring was the shape of a thing warm people did, a ritual emptied of its substance and kept for its form, and I understood, watching him turn the glass he would not drink, that this was the whole of what the Drowned Court had become: a people performing the gestures of warmth over the absence of it, lifting forks to mouths that would not open, pouring wine that had no taste, counting their dead in their finest with no grief to spend.
The difference, the only difference, was that Aerec knew the gesture was empty and did it anyway, and the rest of the Court had forgotten it had ever been anything else.
He poured the tasteless wine the way a man keeps one dry match: not to use, only to remember that there had been, once, a world where the gesture meant the thing it shaped.
And on the nights he poured it, he told me the truth, because the pouring was his way of saying here is the shape of how warm people did this, and I am about to do the warm thing inside the empty shape, and tell you a true thing in a city that has forgotten how.
“You want to know why the city’s going dark,” he said. Not a question. He had felt me circling it.
“I want to know if it’s true that I’m the cure.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then: “Three hundred years ago there was a bargain. The Court does not make magic the way your kind does. We hold it, we wear it, we take it. The city was built on a binding, a working so vast it needed a living heart to keep it lit, and the heart we used was a salt-witch. Willing, the first time.” His jaw tightened.
“A queen. She gave herself to the foundations so her people would have a city under the cruel sea. Her name was Líoth.”
The portrait. The pearls. They don’t like it when we remember the names.
“She burned out,” Aerec said. “They always burn out; a heart is not a hearth, it cannot feed a city forever. And when she failed, the Court did what frightened things do. They found another witch. Not willing, that time. And another. And another, each one bound and broken and mortared into the walls to hold the dark back another generation, and the city called it tradition, and I—” the glass stopped turning.
“I called it tradition too, for a long time. I was good at it. You’d be astonished how good a man can be at a thing he hates, if he’s frightened enough and old enough and tells himself there’s no other way. ”
I did not look away from him while he said it, though I wanted to, because looking away is its own kind of mercy and I had learned from him that he did not want mercy, he wanted to be seen.
So I made myself watch the Sovereign of the Drowned Court tell me that he had broken witches into walls and been good at it, and I made myself not flinch, not out of coldness but out of the opposite, because a flinch would have let him off, would have given him the comfortable grief of the man too monstrous to be loved, and I would not give it to him.
I had handed renders to the sea myself, in a smaller way, every tithe-morning I bowed my head and let the priest’s eyes pass over me to someone taller.
I had been glad, in the meanest corner of me, every time the sea took a neighbor and not my brother.
I knew the shape of being good at a thing you hate because the alternative is unbearable.
I did not have three hundred years of it.
But I had the seed of it, the same seed, and I would not pretend to him that I was made of cleaner stuff.
So I held his gaze, and I let him see that I had understood and not absolved, and that was a harder thing to give him than absolution, and I think it was the first moment he understood that I was not going to be the comfort he expected or the judge he feared, but something he had no word for and would have to learn.
I thought about asking how many. I did not.
I have wondered since whether that was mercy or cowardice, and I think it was neither; I think it was the flats, which teach you that some sums you do not say aloud at the table, because saying them does not lower them and only makes everyone present have to look at them.
He saw me not ask, and something in his face acknowledged it: a small thing, a tightening, the look of a man grateful for a door left shut.
“More than you would think a city could spend,” he said, anyway, answering the question I’d swallowed.
“Fewer than there were years. We learned to make each one last.” He said it flatly, the way you’d report a tide table, and the flatness was the worst of it.
“There are records. I keep them. A Sovereign who lets himself forget the count is a Sovereign on his way to telling himself it never happened, and I decided, at some point, that whatever else I let myself become, I would not become a man who could not say the number.”
“What changed?”
“I ran out of ways to not see it.” He set the glass down untouched.
I have thought, since, about that phrase, ran out of ways, because it is the truest thing he ever told me about himself, truer than the grief, truer than the count.
A man does not stop doing a cruel thing because he discovers it is cruel.
He has always known it was cruel; the knowing was never the obstacle.
He stops when he runs out of ways to keep the knowing at a distance, when the last comfortable lie wears through like a net mended too many times, and the cold water finally comes in where the words used to be.
Aerec had not been redeemed by a revelation.
He had simply been worn down to the truth the way the channel wears a stone, slow, without mercy, over a length of time no warm thing could imagine.
His pale eyes came up to mine, and there was no blade in them now, none of the Court’s beautiful cruelty, just a tiredness three hundred years deep.
“The last witch we broke begged. They always begged; I had taught myself not to hear it. But she looked at me while the working took her and she said, she said you could have just asked.” He breathed out.
“And I realized she was right. That every one of them might have given what Líoth gave, freely, whole, if we had ever once been brave enough to ask instead of take. That we had spent three centuries drowning the only thing that could have saved us because drowning was easier than asking.” His mouth twisted.
“So I stopped. I let the dark come. I have been holding the last of the line at the throne hall with my own two hands for forty years, losing a street a season, because I would rather watch my city go out than break one more witch to keep it lit. The Court thinks that makes me weak.”
“And then I walked in,” I said quietly. “Freely. Whole. The thing you’d been waiting three hundred years to find the courage to ask for. And you still won’t ask.”
“No,” he said. “I won’t.”
I have turned that no over more than almost any word he ever gave me, because it was the whole of him in two letters, the lock and the key both.
A lesser man would have asked. A lesser man, three hundred years into a dying city, with a willing whole salt-witch standing in front of him offering the very thing that could save it, would have asked in a heartbeat and called the asking love and slept fine.
Aerec would not ask, and the not-asking was the first wholly good thing I had seen in him, and it frightened me more than any cruelty had, because a creature that will not take the thing it most needs, that will watch its own city go dark rather than ask one more person to die for it, is a creature that has finally understood the difference between a gift and a theft so completely that it would rather lose everything than blur the line by half a degree.
He had drowned witches for three hundred years and told himself it was tradition.
And now he would not even ask one, freely, with her own consent on offer, because he had learned at last that the asking, once it carried the weight of a dying city behind it, was its own kind of taking: that there is no free gift from a woman who knows the world ends if she refuses.
He had thought himself all the way to the bottom of it, to the cold floor where even consent can be a coercion, and he had decided to stand there in the dark rather than climb back up by a route that cost someone else their life.
I did not have words for what that did to me, then.
I have them now. It was the moment I stopped being able to tell myself the arithmetic, and started, very quietly, to love him.
“Why?”
He looked at me for a long moment, and the sea pressed green at the windows, and the tether between us hummed.
“Because Líoth was willing,” Aerec Vol said, “and it killed her anyway. And I find that I have, very stupidly, and very recently, begun to mind a great deal whether you live.” He stood, abruptly, the conversation closing like a door he’d decided he couldn’t afford to leave open.
“Finish the bottle if you like. The lesson’s done for tonight. ”
He was at the threshold when I said it. I don’t know why I said it. The flats had taught me to hold still, and I was so tired of holding still.
“You could just ask, Aerec.”
He stopped. He did not turn around.
“I know,” he said. And he left.