Chapter Nineteen #2
I knew, because Nissa told me, and because I could feel it in the hall: the cold pooling at the foot of the table where the drowned gold gathered, the smiles that meant it, the way certain lords stopped meeting my eyes not from fear now but from a kind of advance regret, the look of men who have already decided what they will let happen to you and would rather not have to watch your face while they decide it.
Cael did not fight the school. That was the cleverness of him.
He let it grow. He let the windows come up gold, and he let the Court see the render light the dark, and he said, warmly, to anyone who would listen: Yes.
Yes, it works. Isn’t it remarkable. Isn’t it a pity it works so slowly.
Isn’t it a pity the dark moves faster than the school.
Isn’t it a pity we don’t have a generation to wait, when we have, right here, the answer that lights the whole city at once, tonight, if our Sovereign could only find the spine to use it.
He had found the one argument I could not knock down with the truth, because it was made of the truth.
That was Cael’s whole art. He never lied where a true thing would cut deeper.
He stood at the gold end of the table and praised the school until the praise itself became the knife: he had a way of counting the new gold windows aloud, fondly, as a father counts a child’s small coins, and then setting that number beside the count of streets the dark had taken that same week, and letting the two numbers sit next to each other and do his arguing for him.
Six windows this week. Wonderful. And the Mire quarter went dark on Tideday, that’s, what, forty windows?
Fifty? But six is six. We mustn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the slow.
He never once raised his voice. He never once had to.
He simply made the room do the subtraction, over and over, until even the lords who had crept to my solar began to do it too, in their faces, when they thought I wasn’t watching.
And the cruelest turn of it was how he framed the alternative, never as a drowning, never as a wall, but as courage.
As the hard mercy a real Sovereign owed his city.
He would speak of Líoth as though she were the model and not the warning, of her great single gift that lit the whole binding at once, and let the Court remember the light and forget the death, and then he would look down the table at Aerec with those warm terrible eyes and let the silence ask the question his mouth was too clever to: what is one render’s year and a day, against a city?
He made my staying alive look like the selfish thing.
He made the wall look like love. I had met men on the flats who could do this, turn your own decency into the rope they hanged you with, and I had hated them, and I had never met one half so good at it as Lord Cael in his drowned gold, smiling, meaning it.
He was not arguing against the cure anymore. He was arguing that the cure was too slow, and that the fast version was a body, and mine. And the terrible thing, the thing that kept me awake in the drowned queen’s room with the iron nail in my fist, was that on the question of speed, Cael was right.
We could light a window a week. The dark ate a window a day.
“He’s not wrong about the arithmetic,” I said to Aerec one night in the warm gold room, my head on his chest, the lamps that had no business burning underwater burning low.
“That’s what I can’t get past. We’re lighting the city slower than it’s going out.
Every week we prove the school works, we also prove it can’t work fast enough, and every week we prove that, we make his version look more like mercy and mine look more like vanity.
He’s using our successes against us. The faster we run, the worse the race looks. ”
Aerec’s hand moved slow through my hair. “Then we change the race.”
“How?”
He was quiet for a moment, and I felt the slow drum of his heart under my cheek, and when he spoke there was something in his voice I hadn’t heard before, a decision made, and the weight of it.
“The school lights the city a window at a time because each of you is a small heart giving a small gift,” he said.
“Líoth lit the whole binding at once because she was a great heart giving everything. The difference isn’t kind.
It’s scale. One enormous willing heart, given whole but not broken, not poured into the walls and burned out, but joined to the binding, alive, holding the lid the way Líoth held it, except still breathing on the other side of it.
” His hand stilled. “It’s never been done.
Líoth gave everything and died of it. Every witch since was broken, not joined.
But the binding I built my whole reign holding the line, the working at the throne hall, the thing I’ve kept lit with my own two hands for forty years, that’s the lid’s last seam, the place it leaks worst. If a salt-witch could join herself to that, not break into it, give the binding a living heart at its weakest seam and still walk away from the joining alive—”
I sat up.
“You’re talking about me.”
“I’m talking about a thing I don’t know how to do,” he said, and his pale eyes came up to mine in the low gold light, and they were afraid.
“A thing no one has done since Líoth, and Líoth died. I’m talking about the only way I can see to win the race: to light the whole city at once, the way Cael wants, but with you alive on the other side of it instead of poured into the walls.
And I’m telling you I don’t know if it can be done, and I’m telling you that if we try it and it goes the way it went for Líoth, I will have done to you with my own hands the exact thing I’ve spent forty years refusing to do to anyone.
” He breathed out. “And I’m telling you because you made me promise, the first week, never to refuse you the truth.
So there it is. The truth. There may be a way to save the city and you both.
And it may kill you. And I would rather drown this whole Court than be the one who finds out. ”
The sea pressed green at the window. Far down in the deep, the light that was an eye watched, and waited, and I understood that the Tide-Mother had been listening to this conversation in some old cold way the whole time, the way the marsh listens, and that she wanted exactly one thing from all of this, and it was for us to be afraid enough to choose the broken wall over the living heart, because a broken wall she could leak past, and a living heart, joined and breathing, might hold her down for another three hundred years.
“Teach me the joining,” I said.
“Maren—”
“You said you’d rather drown the Court than find out.
” I took his face in my hands, the salt-rough of him, the cold-no-longer.
“I’m not asking you to find out. I’m asking you to teach me, so that I can.
My hands. My choice. My heart to give or keep.
You don’t get to carry this one for me, Aerec.
That’s the whole thing I came here to learn: that giving and taking aren’t the same, and that the difference is who chooses.
” I held his gaze. “So teach me. And then I’ll choose.
And if I choose to join myself to that binding to light your city and hold that thing down, it will be the most given thing in the history of this drowned house, and you will not turn it into a taking by trying to protect me out of it. ”
He closed his eyes. I felt the breath go out of him, the long unsteady breath of a creature who did not need to breathe and breathed anyway, hard, because the alternative was to feel the whole weight of what I’d just said.
“You are going to be the end of me,” he said.
“Probably,” I agreed. “Teach me anyway.”
And he did.