Chapter Eleven
The price came due that same night, and it changed everything, which is how prices work.
I should have known better than to walk the corridors alone after humiliating Lord Cael in front of the Court.
But I was reckless with something I didn’t have a name for yet (the look Aerec had given me down the table kept turning over in my chest like a coin), and so I was halfway to the queen’s room when the water in the hall changed its voice, that thickening, that held note, and I had Nissa’s iron nail in my fist before I’d finished the thought.
It was not Cael. Cael never did his own cutting. It was three of the lesser Court, and they were careful this time, and they did not bother with apologies.
I did not wait to be drowned. I had learned that much.
I called the sea, not in panic, not the flood that had saved me on the third night, but the way Aerec had taught me, a current looping my wrist, mine, glad, and I set it between me and them like a wall, and for the first time in my life the working did exactly what I asked, held exactly where I put it, and the lesser Court drew up short before a render who knew how to hold the ocean on purpose.
“She’s trained,” one of them hissed, and I heard the fear in it, and the fear was sweeter than I want to admit.
I am not proud of how sweet it was. I had spent my whole life being the thing that flinched: the marked girl, the one the marsh leaned toward, the one who bowed her head on tithe-mornings and let the priest’s eyes pass over her to someone taller.
I had made an art of being unfrightening, because frightening a village is how a salt-witch ends up walked out onto the pans at dead low.
And here, in a cold corridor, three of the drowned drew up short before me and one of them said she’s trained with fear in his cold dead voice, and the fear was for me, of me, and something in me that had been bent down its whole life stood up straight and liked it.
That is a dangerous thing to like. I knew it even as I liked it.
The flats teach you that the pleasure of being feared is the first step on the road to becoming the thing that does the frightening, that Cael had surely felt this exact sweetness once, three hundred years ago, before he learned to pin grief to his throat and call it gold.
I held the wall of sea where I had put it, and I felt the lesser Court’s fear, and I let myself like it for exactly one breath, and then I set the liking aside the way I set aside everything that could turn me into the thing I had walked into the sea to refuse, because the difference between me and Cael was never going to be in the wanting.
It was going to be in what I did with the wanting once I felt it.
He fed his. I learned, that night and every night after, to feel mine and set it down.
But three is three, and I was one, and trained for three weeks is not trained for three centuries, and they came at me from the sides where I couldn’t hold the wall, and a cold hand found my hair and another my wrist, the one with the nail, and twisted until my fingers opened and the iron fell ringing to the wet stone, and the sea I’d been holding wavered—
—and then the corridor went dark, truly dark, the deep-edge dark, and the temperature dropped past cold into something with teeth, and a voice I knew said, without any warmth at all:
“Take your hands off her.”
I had seen the Sovereign part the sea. I had not seen him angry.
The two were not the same, the way a tide is not the same as a wave.
The dark itself bent toward him as he came down the corridor, and the lesser Court let go of me and fell back and then simply fell, all three, to their knees, as though the water had grown heavy as iron over their shoulders, and Aerec walked through them without a glance, the way you walk through weeds, and reached me, and his hands came up to my face, cold no longer, warm, the only warm thing, turning my head to the light to see where they’d hurt me.
“You’re bleeding,” he said. There was something terrible in his voice, held very tight, not the cold of the Sovereign but a heat I had not heard in him before, a thing on a leash of its own, straining.
“It’s nothing. Aerec.” My own voice was shaking, and not from fear now. “Aerec, the nail, I dropped the—”
“Let it lie.” His thumb moved over the cut at my temple, gentle, at odds with the fury still bending the dark around us.
The blood was warm. I could feel it, a thin warm line down toward my jaw, the only warm thing besides his hands, and I watched his eyes follow it, and watched the dark draw tighter around the three kneeling lords behind him, and understood that the only reason they were kneeling and not undone was that he had not yet decided which.
“Maren. Look at me. Are you—” He stopped.
Whatever he saw in my face, it undid the last of the Sovereign and left only the man, three hundred years tired and suddenly, terrifyingly, afraid.
“I felt it,” he said, low, only for me. “Through the tether. I felt them take hold of you and I have not moved that fast in a century. I did not decide to come. I was simply here, the way you were simply holding the sea on the third night, the body moving before the mind can forbid it. Do you understand what that means? Do you understand what you’ve done to me, you reckless, impossible, surface thing—”
And I stopped his mouth with mine, because I was done holding still, and because I had wanted to since the green light and his hands over my hands, and because the corridor was dark and cold and his Court was on its knees around us and I did not care.
He went still. For one heartbeat I thought I had ruined everything.
Then the Sovereign of the Drowned Court made a low sound against my mouth like a man going under for the third time and gladly, and kissed me back, one hand fisting in my salt-damp hair, the other splayed at the small of my back to pull me up against him, the tether between us collapsing to nothing because there was no distance left to leash, and the sea at every window in that drowned city surged toward us, bright and glad and wild, and for the first time in three hundred years, in the dark of a dying hall, something in the Court of the drowned blazed up warm.
I had kissed before. There had been a boy on the flats, the summer I was eighteen, a netmaker’s son with chapped hands and a kind laugh, and we had been careful with each other the way the flats teach you to be careful with everything, two children rationing a tenderness neither of us could afford.
That was the only measure I had, and it was no measure at all, because this was not careful and it was not rationed.
This was a man who had spent three hundred years refusing every warm thing in reach discovering, all at once, that he no longer wanted to refuse, and the discovery went through him like a tide turning, and I felt it turn.
I felt the exact moment the cold of him gave, not melting, nothing so gentle, but the way river-ice gives in spring, all at once, with a sound, the whole locked weight of a season letting go downstream.
His skin warmed under my hands. His heart, that slow impossible drum, went quick.
And the kiss stopped being a thing I had started and became a thing we were both inside, the way the sea is a thing you are inside and not a thing you hold, and I understood, with the last clear corner of my mind before it went under, that the arithmetic I had been so proud of had not just started to lie.
It had been a lie from the third night, when his hands closed over mine and taught the sea to lie down, and I had only been able to keep telling it because he had let me. He was not letting me anymore.
When we broke apart we were both unsteady. His forehead came down against mine. We breathed the same air, truly the same now, the two columns made one.
“That,” Aerec said roughly, “was a catastrophe.”
“I know,” I said.
“Cael will have felt the whole city move.”
“I know.”
His hand tightened in my hair, and his mouth found the cut at my temple, and then the corner of my jaw, unhurried, as though we had all the time in the world and not a dying kingdom and a smiling enemy and a year-and-a-day clock running down around us.
“Come to my rooms,” he said against my skin, and it was not a command now.
It was the question he’d refused to ask, finally asked, and trembling with it.
“Not for the working. Not for the city. I’m not asking the render. I’m asking you.”
I thought about the iron nail, lying in the dark behind us where I’d let it lie.
“Yes,” I said.
And I want to set down, here, what that yes cost, because the woman who walked into the sea on the flats would not have understood it, and because I have learned that the costly things are the ones worth the ink.
It was not the saying of it. The saying was easy; I had wanted him since the green light and his hands over my hands, and I am not a woman who pretends not to want a thing once she has decided to want it.
The cost was the iron nail. Nissa had pressed it into my palm on the loud stairs and told me not to let it lie, and here I was letting it lie, the one mortal thing in the whole drowned city, the thing a living girl had carried against her skin and given me for the buying of one more breath, and I left it in the dark of a corridor to go to the bed of the Sovereign whose laws had drowned my mother.
That is not a thing a careful woman does.
I had been careful my whole life. And I picked, in that corridor, with his mouth at my jaw and his Court on its knees around us, the first uncareful thing I had ever chosen on purpose, and I have never once been sorry, and I have never once forgotten the small cold weight I walked away from to choose it.