Chapter Twenty
The joining could not be practiced.
That was the first cruelty of it, and Aerec told me plainly the way he told me everything, sitting across from me in the flooded solar with the green light slow and a chart of the binding drawn in salt on the black floor between us, because there was no chart, there had never been a chart, and so he had spent two nights making one from memory and dread.
“You cannot practice giving everything,” he said.
“By its nature it happens once. We can teach your hands the shape of it. We can strengthen the current you hold until it could take the weight. But the joining itself, the moment you lay your living heart against the binding and ask it to hold you instead of burn you, that is a thing you will do for the first time at the worst possible moment, with no rehearsal, and either it will work or you will go the way Líoth went.” His jaw tightened.
“I have done many cruel things in three hundred years. Teaching you the shape of your own death and calling it a lesson may be the cruelest.”
I knelt down at the edge of the salt-chart and looked at it the way I had once looked at the drowned charts on his wall, not for what it showed but for what the drawing of it told me about the hand that drew.
He had laid it out in lines of dry salt on the wet black stone: the great working at the throne hall a knot at the center, and from the knot the seams running out like the cracks in a pan that has dried too fast, and at the deep edge the longest crack of all, the one he had kept lit with his own two hands for forty years, drawn heavier than the rest because his hand had pressed harder there without his meaning it to.
Forty years of dread in the weight of a salt line.
I did not say so. But I understood, looking at it, that he had not made a chart of the binding.
He had made a chart of the thing he was most afraid to hand me, and the place where the salt lay thickest was the place it would most likely kill me, and he had drawn it heavy anyway, because I had made him promise never to refuse me the truth, and the truth was a line of salt pressed deep into cold stone.
“Show me the seam,” I said.
“Maren.”
“You drew it heaviest. So you know where it is. Show me.” And he did, his finger hovering over the deep-edge crack and not quite touching it, the way you point at a thing you are afraid to wake, and I looked at the place where I might give everything and live, or give everything and go the way Líoth went, and I made myself look at it the way you make yourself read a debt-ledger, line by line, because the powerful and the deep both want you to look away, and the small revenge of the rest of us is that we refuse.
“It’s not my death you’re teaching me,” I said. “It’s my choice. Those aren’t the same. You of all people should know the difference by now.”
He looked at me across the salt-chart, and something in his face eased, just slightly, the way it always did when I refused to let him carry a thing alone, and I understood that this was a kind of gift too, that for three hundred years no one in his Court had ever once refused to let the Sovereign suffer for them, and that being refused, gently, by a render with salt under her nails, undid him more than any kindness could have.
So we worked.
The days went green and slow and the windows came up gold in the deep, and the school grew.
It grew the way the marsh greens after a flood, not all at once, but everywhere at once, a little at a time, until one morning you look up and the grey has gone over to living.
By the second week there were a dozen of us in the solar most mornings; by the third, more than the basins, so that we worked in turns, the drowned and the mortal taking the water up and setting it down, and a low murmur in the green light that I realized, one day, was a thing I had never heard in the Drowned Court before: conversation.
Not the counting of the dead, not the careful sideways questions of frightened lords.
People talking. A drowned weaver showing a kitchen boy how to soften his hands on the working.
Vesh, slow and patient, telling a young lord who kept slamming the door shut out of old habit that it was all right, that he had done the same, that the sea forgave you faster than you forgave yourself.
I had not understood, until I heard it, how silent the Court had been.
Three hundred years is a long time for a city to hold its breath, and it had.
The drowned do not need to speak, having nothing new to say to one another after three centuries of the same cold, and the warm staff had learned to move through the rooms quiet as held water so as not to remind the cold what warmth sounded like.
I had walked those streets my first day and read them through my feet for want of any other sense, because there had been nothing to hear.
And now there was. Now the highest room in the dead city had a sound in it that carried down the green stair and out along the swept avenues: voices, low and overlapping, the ordinary music of people teaching each other a thing with their hands.
A laugh, once, that did not curdle into the dry rustle the Court made at the table, but ran clean and surprised and stopped short, as though the one who made it had frightened themselves.
Someone humming under their breath at a basin, a few notes of a tune three hundred years dead, dredged up out of a body that had not sung since it was warm.
I stood at the door one morning and only listened, and I thought: this is the thing the windows are made of.
Not the working. The talking. A people remembers what it wears, and a people that has started talking again has started, very quietly, to remember that it is a people.
Nissa learned to hold a cup and then a basin and then, one astonishing afternoon, a whole standing column of the sea that she set down without a single drop spilled, laughing, her face lit gold from the windows she’d kindled.
She had stopped calling me my lady somewhere in the second week without either of us noticing the day it happened.
She had stopped rounding her shoulders, too.
She took up room now. She stood in the middle of the solar with her hands full of the sea and her chin up and taught the newest ones the thing I had taught her, it’s not that you can’t feel it; it’s that you were taught not to, and I watched a girl the Court had called furniture become the person the rest of them turned to when the working would not close, and I thought my heart would crack with it.
She coached the frightened ones the way I had coached her, which is to say she gave them her own failures first, freely, the way you hand someone a lamp before you ask them into the dark.
I couldn’t feel it at all the first day, I heard her tell the brass-scissors midwife, who had stood at the back four days for the same reason Nissa had wept at a basin.
Not a flicker. I called myself furniture.
I thought they’d been right about me my whole life.
And the midwife, three hundred years old, looked at this mortal girl of seventeen as though she had said something in a language the cold had stolen and was only now giving back.
Nissa had learned the one thing that cannot be taught from a chart: that the gift is not in the hands but in the un-hiding, and that you can only show a person how to stop hiding by stopping in front of them first. She stood taller every week.
She let her shoulders down out of the rounded shape grief and service had pressed into them, and the un-rounding changed her whole outline, so that I would catch sight of her across the green light and not know her for a moment, not the kitchen girl who did everything half-turned toward the door, but a woman standing square in the middle of a room with her hands full of the sea, taking up exactly as much space as she pleased.
Her mother had served the kitchens, and hers, and the dark had been promised all of them first. Nissa was teaching the dark to wait its turn.
The drowned came and learned beside the mortal, and some of them wept the first time the working closed clean and kind under their hands, because they were three hundred years old and had only ever been taught to take, and no one had ever shown them that the sea could be asked.
The drowned weep without tears, they have no warmth to spare for tears, but the face does the thing a weeping face does, and it is worse, somehow, dry, a grief with no water in it in a place made all of water.
And below us, week by week, the dark drew back, slower than it ate, still slower than it ate, but back, and gold, and growing.