Chapter Sixteen
He came on the second night, and he did not come as the Sovereign.
I knew it was him before the door opened, the way I always knew now: the tether ran short and then shorter, the warmth of his column of air reaching mine through the cold stone like a hand reaching under a door.
When he stepped into the green dark of the queen’s room he had left the channel-grey coat somewhere, and he had left the centuries with it, and he stood in his shirtsleeves with salt dried fine and silver at his temple and looked at me as though he had spent two days starving and only just remembered why.
“This is unwise,” he said.
“Deeply.”
“The whole house is watching the door of this room.”
“Then you’d better not have used the door,” I said, and he laughed, the real one, low and surprised, the one that took the centuries out of his face, and crossed the room and kissed me, and the two days of careful distance went out of both of us at once, like a held breath.
Two days. It does not sound like long, set down on a page, and it was not long, measured against three hundred years of his cold or twenty-two of my holding-still.
But it was the first time either of us had been made to want a thing and forbidden it, and the wanting-and-forbidding had taught us both something in two days that the months of slow burn had not: that the tether was not only a leash and not only a rope but a wound now, that the distance Cael had forced between us in front of the watching Court hurt in a way no distance had hurt before, a physical thing, a hook behind the breastbone that had nothing to do with the Tide-Mother and everything to do with a cold-no-longer man two corridors away holding still for my sake.
I had spent my whole life learning to want nothing so that nothing could be taken.
He had spent three hundred years on the same lesson.
And in two days of forced distance the cold sea had taught us both, at once, the thing we had each spent our lives refusing to learn: that we had failed.
That we wanted. That the wanting was a thing that could now be used against us, and that we would not, either of us, give it up to be safe.
And so when he came on the second night and I told him not to use the door and he laughed the real laugh and crossed the room, the kiss was not the desperate thing in the corridor and not the careful first night.
It was two people who had just discovered, in two forbidden days, exactly how much there was to lose, and had decided, both of them, in the same breath, that they would rather have it to lose than be safe without it.
I want to be honest about what I was, those weeks, because the woman who walked into the sea on the flats would not have recognized me.
I had spent twenty-two years being careful.
Careful with my hands, careful with my voice, careful with the thing under my skin.
Careful was the only inheritance the flats had to give, and I had been good at it the way I was good at all hard, joyless things.
And here, in a dying city, in a dead queen’s room, with a smiling lord counting the days until he could knock me out of the world like a wall, I had stopped being careful, and I could not make myself sorry.
The flats had taught me that grief was a luxury.
They had not taught me that joy was one too, a more dangerous one, because it gave you something to lose.
Aerec drew back enough to look at me, his forehead against mine, his hands framing my face the way they had the first night in his warm gold room, careful, as though I were a thing that might dissolve.
“Cael means to take the throne,” he said.
No preamble. He had learned I preferred the truth fast. “Not the city. The throne. The render is a lever, not a prize, which means he will not move on you the way he moved before, quietly, on a third night, hoping I don’t notice.
He will move on you in a way I cannot help but notice. He wants me to choose.”
“Between me and the throne.”
“Between you and the city.” His thumb moved over my cheekbone.
“If I burn the Court to save you, I prove every word he’s spent forty years whispering: that I am a Sovereign ruled by his appetites, unfit to hold the dark, a man who would let a kingdom drown for a render.
The Court will turn. They will follow him, because frightened things follow the one who promises not to be afraid.
And then he will pour you into the walls anyway, and rule the city your death lit, and call it grief.
” His jaw tightened. “He has built a trap with only one door, and the door opens onto your grave, and he is in no hurry, because he has already won and he is enjoying the slow part. I have watched him do this to other men. I did not think he would dare do it to me.”
“He dares because you gave him something to use,” I said quietly. “You looked at me down the table at the autumn rendering. In front of all of them. I told you there’d be a price.”
“You did.” His mouth twisted, not quite a smile.
“And I told myself I didn’t care, which was the first lie I’ve told myself in a hundred years, and I find I’ve gotten rusty at it.
I do care, Maren. That’s the whole of the problem.
Three hundred years I held this Court because I cared for nothing in it.
You cannot lever a man who wants nothing.
And then a salt-witch walked in with her hands open and ruined the only protection I had.
” He kissed my forehead, slow, almost rueful.
“I would do it again. That’s the second lie I won’t tell. I would ruin it again.”
I lay still and let that settle, my cheek against the cold-no-longer of his chest, and I understood the size of what he had said.
On the flats, a man who has nothing is the dangerous one: nothing to lose, nothing to bargain with, nothing to hold over the fire when the debt-men come.
I had thought, my whole life, that wanting nothing was the safest a soul could be.
Aerec had lived three hundred years on exactly that safety: a Sovereign no one could move because no one could find the lever, a cold thing in a cold city that could not be threatened because it had already lost everything worth threatening.
And he had given it up. Not been robbed of it, given it up, knowingly, the way you’d lay down a shield in the middle of a fight because you had decided you would rather have your hands free.
He had made himself moveable. He had let the cold sea find, after three hundred years, the one thing that could be taken from the Sovereign of the Drowned Court, and he had done it on purpose, and he was telling me, in a dead queen’s room with the whole house watching the door, that he would do it again.
“That’s not a small thing you’ve done,” I said. “Making yourself a creature with a lever. After three hundred years of being the one man Cael couldn’t reach.”
He was quiet a while, his hand moving slow through my hair, the lit-no-yet city dark and leaking at the windows, and when he answered it was not the answer I expected, because Aerec never gave the answer you expected; he gave the truer one underneath it.
“I have been afraid of exactly one thing for three hundred years,” he said.
“Not the Tide-Mother; she is a certainty, and you cannot be afraid of a certainty, only weary of it. Not Cael; Cael is a problem, and a problem is a thing you manage. I have been afraid of wanting. Of letting one warm thing back into a cold house, because I knew, the way you know weather, that the moment I wanted anything the whole architecture of three hundred careful years would come down, that I would stop being a Sovereign who held the line out of duty and become a man who held it out of terror of losing the one thing he loved, and that a man who holds a line out of terror holds it badly, holds it cruelly, holds it the way Cael would have me hold it.” His hand stilled.
“And here I am. Wanting. Holding the line worse and better at once than I ever have. You did not just give Cael a lever, Maren. You gave me back the thing I spent three centuries amputating so it could not be used against me. I do not know yet whether you have saved me or finished me. I suspect, with you, the two were always going to be the same.”
“They were,” I said, into the cold-no-longer of his chest. “You taught me that. The kindest and the most dangerous are the same thing wearing one face.” And I felt him laugh, soundless, a breath of it stirring my hair, the furious hopeful one, and we lay in the leaking dark of a dying city and were, for one stolen hour, two people who had each made themselves moveable for the other and decided the cost was theirs to pay.
“No,” Aerec agreed. “It’s the most reckless thing I’ve done since the water closed over my head.
” His hand moved slow through my hair. “I find I don’t regret it, which frightens me more than Cael does.
Cael I understand. Cael is a thing I have managed for forty years.
But a Sovereign who can be moved,” he was quiet a moment, “I have no idea how to manage that. I’m having to learn it from you.
And you’re a poor model, Maren, because you don’t manage it at all.
You just walk into the sea with your hands open and let it cost what it costs. ”
I should have been afraid. I was afraid.
But under the fear was a thing I had no name for, the thing that had been turning over in my chest like a coin since the night in the corridor, the simple, ruinous fact of being wanted by someone who could not afford to want me, and wanted me anyway, and had decided the cost was his to pay.
“Then we don’t give him the choice,” I said.
He went still. “Maren.”
“You’re letting him build the trap because you think the only two doors are save the city and save me.
” I pulled back to look at him, and I pitched my voice low, certain, the register that carries.
“But I knocked out a wall once already, in front of your whole Court, and it worked, because the flats taught me the one thing your three hundred years didn’t: when every door is a trap, you stop looking for a door.
We don’t choose between the city and me.
We make me the thing that saves the city alive.
The school. The hundred willing hearts. Not someday.
Now. Tonight. We start proving it works before Cael can finish proving I’m worth more dead.
” I took his hands. “You spent forty years holding the line because you couldn’t bear to break one more witch.
Stop holding the line, Aerec. Push it back. With me. Living.”
He looked at me for a long moment, and the sea pressed green at the absurd window, and the tether between us hummed, and I watched three hundred years of a man who had only ever known how to refuse or take try to learn, very late, a third thing.
“You understand,” he said slowly, “that if we do this, if I let the Court see a render hold the sea and give it back, freely, lighting the dark without burning, we prove Cael’s premise.
We prove a witch is the cure. And a proven cure, in a frightened city, is a thing men will kill to control.
We don’t escape his trap. We bait a bigger one. ”
“I know.”
“You’d risk it. The walls. The pouring. To prove a thing that makes you the most valuable corpse in the cold sea.”
“I’d rather be a dangerous gift than a safe sacrifice,” I said.
“I told you that the first week, in the solar. I haven’t changed my mind.
I’ve just stopped pretending the danger was hypothetical.
” I lifted his hand and pressed my mouth to his knuckles, the salt-rough of them, the cold-no-longer of them.
“Teach me faster, Aerec. We’re out of slow. ”
He breathed out. And then he smiled, not the blade, not even quite the man, but something new I hadn’t seen, something that had hope in it and was furious about it.
“There’s a thing I haven’t told you,” he said.
“About the binding. About why a salt-witch and not a tide-lord, why it must be your kind and never ours.” He drew me down to sit on the edge of the dead queen’s bed, and the green light fell slow around us, and Líoth watched from over the hearth with her patient dead eyes.
“If we’re to push the line back together, you need to know what’s underneath the city.
You need to know what Líoth gave herself to. ”
“The foundations.”
“Not the foundations.” His pale eyes came up to mine, and for the first time since the corridor, I saw fear in them that had nothing to do with Cael. “The thing the foundations were built to keep asleep.”
The sea pressed green at the window. Somewhere far down in the deep dark, one of the lights that were not lanterns turned, slowly, like an eye opening, and turned away.
“Her name,” Aerec said, very quietly, “is the Tide-Mother. And the city was never a city. It was a lid.”