Chapter Seventeen
He told me the rest in the dark, his voice low, my head on his chest and his heart a slow drum beneath my cheek, and I have set it down here as near to his words as I can hold them, because it is the spine of everything that came after, and because someone other than the two of us should know the truth of the Drowned Court before the Drowned Court drowns it.
“Before the city,” Aerec said, “there was the cold sea, and in the cold sea there was a hunger, and the hunger had a shape, and the shape had a name the old tongues only ever spoke once, at the end, when speaking it could no longer make it worse. The Tide-Mother. She is not a god the way your priest’s bell is a god, a thing you bargain with, that keeps a ledger.
She is older than ledgers. She is the sea’s appetite given a will, and her will is single, and it is this: she wants it all back.
Every grain of salt that ever climbed out of her into a living thing.
Every drop of warm blood that the cold water did not get to keep.
She is the tide that does not turn. The flood with no shore. And three hundred years ago she rose.”
His fingers moved slow through my hair, and I felt the old grief in him, three hundred years deep and stranger than I’d known, because it was not only his.
It was the grief of a whole drowned people carried by the one of them who refused to forget it, and I understood, listening, why the Court did not like the names.
The names were the grief. A court that remembered every name it had lost would not be able to feast over the count once a year; it would simply lie down in the dark and let the tide come.
Forgetting was how they survived. And Aerec had spent three hundred years refusing to forget, which was why he could not feast, and why he could not laugh, and why the whole hall had turned to stone at the autumn rendering when he laughed at last, down the table, at me.
“My people were not tide-lords then. We were drowned. That is the joke at the bottom of the Court, render, the one Cael forgot and Líoth never did: we are the first tithe. We were a coastal people, warm and mortal as you, and the Tide-Mother came up our channel one spring like a creditor and took us all, the whole city, three breaths and the water stood where we had been. And we did not die. That was her cruelty and her mistake. She did not want us dead; the dead are no use to a hunger. She wanted us kept: cold, and hers, and aware, drowned souls poured into the shape of the people we’d been, to serve the appetite that ate us.
She made the Drowned Court to be her hands.
We were meant to go up the coast, tithe after tithe, and feed her the warm world one village at a time, until the sea had it all back and the tide never turned again. ”
I lay against him in the dark and let that settle, and the settling was a slow cold thing, because I knew the shape of it from the inside.
Tithe after tithe. I had stood on the salt-flats on a hundred tithe-mornings and watched the grey-oilcloth priest unroll his vellum and read the sum, and I had thought him the worst thing the sea could send, a man hollowed out and filled with tide, reading the bill in a bored voice.
And now I understood that the priest was nothing.
The priest was a clerk. The Court was the collector.
And the Court was only the hands, the drowned-grey hands, of a hunger that had eaten a whole warm city three hundred years ago and set its corpse to work fetching the next course.
Cinderhollow had been paying its salt to my own grandmother’s grandmother’s killers, and to theirs, all the way down, a long grey line of villages handing their daughters to the sea because the sea sent a man with a bell to ask politely, and behind the man with the bell, behind the drowned lords in their stolen pearls, behind even the Sovereign on his throne of ribs, the flood with no shore, patient as a painting, waiting for the warm world to finish paying itself back into the cold.
“How many villages,” I said. “Up the coast. That the Court has collected.”
“I keep that count too,” Aerec said. His voice did not change, and the not-changing was the worst of it.
“I told you I would not become a man who couldn’t say the number.
The villages are a longer count than the witches.
I will not say it tonight, with your head on my chest. But I will say it, one day, if you ask me to, because you are the only living thing in three hundred years who has had the right to ask.
” His hand stilled in my hair. “Cinderhollow is on the list, Maren. Three times before yours. Your village has been feeding the thing that drowned my city for longer than your village has had a name.”
I thought of Brannoch’s pipe, drifting out toward the deep.
I thought of my mother, dead at thirty-four with the tide three feet from the door.
I thought of every grey back bent over every grey pan on every tithe-morning of my life, all of us paying salt up a channel to the corpse of a drowned kingdom, and none of us knowing it, and I understood, finally and all the way down, that the war I had walked into with my hands open was not the Court’s war and not Aerec’s war.
It was mine. It had always been mine. It had been collecting my people one daughter at a time since before there was a Maren Sael to be afraid of it.
“But you didn’t,” I said.
“One of us didn’t.” I felt him breathe. “A salt-witch. Mortal, like you. She’d been the last living thing in the city when the water came, hiding her magic the way your mother taught you to hide yours, and the Tide-Mother poured her into the Court along with the rest of us and did not notice, because to a hunger that old a salt-witch and a fishwife look the same going down.
Her name was Líoth.” His hand stilled. “And Líoth did the thing no drowned soul had ever done. She woke up. The salt in her remembered it had once been warm, and it refused. She could not free us; we were already taken, already cold, already the Tide-Mother’s hands.
But she could build a lid. A working so vast it needed a living heart to keep it lit, and she had one, the only one in the drowned city, and she gave it.
She poured herself into a binding that closed over the Tide-Mother like a stone over a well, and she made the Drowned Court the lid that held it shut, and she bought the warm world three hundred years of turning tides.
” His voice went rough. “And then she burned out, the way a heart does, and the lid began, slowly, to leak. And we have been finding salt-witches ever since to feed the binding she built. Each one a smaller stone on the lid. Each one bought a generation. And every Sovereign before me told himself it was tradition, and a price, and necessary, because the truth was unbearable, and the truth was this: we have been drowning Líoth’s daughters for three hundred years to keep the thing that drowned us from waking, and the thing that drowned us is winning, one leak at a time, one dark quarter at a time, because a stone is not a heart, and a wall built of broken witches was always going to come undone. ”
I lay very still in the warm dark and understood, finally, the size of the thing I’d walked into with my hands open on the salt-flats.
“The city’s going dark,” I said slowly, “because the lid’s failing.”
“The lid is failing because we have been mending it wrong for three hundred years.” His arm tightened around me.
“Líoth held the binding because she gave herself to it whole, alive, willing. A salt-witch’s magic is not a stone, Maren, it is a living current, and a living current can hold a flood that no dead wall ever could.
Every witch we broke after her, we broke into a stone.
We took the one thing that could have actually held the Tide-Mother down, a living, giving heart, and we killed it to get a wall, and then we wondered why the walls kept failing.
” His voice dropped. "And then you walked in. And you gave a little, freely, alive, and you called it back, and you gave again, and a quarter of the dark quarters lit, the first new light in this city in three hundred years, because for the first time since Líoth, the binding tasted a living heart instead of a dead stone. You’re not the cure because you’d make a good wall, render.
You’re the cure because you’re the first salt-witch in three hundred years that this Court has not yet been stupid enough to kill.
I lay against him a long while after that, my head on his chest, his heart a slow drum under my cheek, and let the whole shape of three hundred years settle into me like cold water finding every low place.
Because it was not only the size of it that undid me, the Tide-Mother, the lid, the first tithe, the witches without number broken into walls.
It was the particular cruelty of the arithmetic, the way every choice the Court had made had been the wrong one for the most understandable reason, the way fear had walked them, generation after generation, into doing the exact thing that fed the thing they feared.
They had broken witches because a broken witch was a wall you could own forever, and a wall you own forever cannot leave, and a frightened creature wants above all things a thing that cannot leave.
They had never once tried the living heart, the asked heart, the heart that could choose to go, because the possibility that it might choose to go was more terrifying to them than the certainty that the wall would slowly fail.
They had chosen the certain slow death over the uncertain living chance, every time, for three hundred years, because the certain thing at least could not betray them.
I knew that fear. I had lived inside a smaller version of it my whole life, on the flats, where you do not love too much or want too much or hope too loudly because the things you love and want and hope for are exactly the things the sea will use to break you.
The Court was Cinderhollow grown monstrous and immortal.
And the cure for both, I understood, lying in the warm dark, was the same impossible thing: to love a thing that could leave, and let it stay by choosing, and call the staying worth the risk of the going.
Three hundred years, and no one in the cold sea had been brave enough.
I did not yet know if I would be. But I knew, that night, that bravery was the actual cure, and not the magic, and that the magic had only ever been the thing that made the bravery legible. "
The sea pressed green at the window. Far down in the deep, the light that was an eye turned, slowly, and this time it did not turn away.
“And Cael wants to break me into a wall,” I said.
“Cael wants to break you into a wall,” Aerec agreed, very quietly, “because Cael is afraid, and frightened things do the thing they have always done, even when the thing they have always done is exactly what is killing them. He will pour you into the lid and light the city for a generation and call himself its savior, and he will not understand, he will never understand, that he has just put a smaller stone on a leak that needs a living heart, and bought the warm world thirty years instead of three hundred, and woken the Tide-Mother a little further in the doing of it.” His hand found mine in the dark and held it.
“He thinks he’s choosing between the city and you.
He’s choosing between a witch who could hold the lid alive for centuries and a corpse that holds it for a generation.
He’s choosing wrong, the way this Court has chosen wrong since the water closed over our heads. And he is going to do it smiling.”
I closed my hand around his.
“Then we’d better light the city faster than he can kill me,” I said.
Aerec was quiet for a moment. Then, in the dark, I felt him smile against my hair, and it was the furious hopeful one, the new one.
“Yes,” he said. “We had better.”