Chapter Twenty #2
And there were children. I had not let myself think, until they came, about the children, about three hundred years of tithe-mornings, all the villages up and down a forgotten coast, all the small lives poured into walls before they were old enough to bargain.
The Court had kept some of them. Drowned children, who had stopped at four or seven or ten and stayed there for three hundred years, child-shaped and child-still, the most unbearable thing in all that unbearable city, because a grown drowned soul has at least lived a life to grow cold over and a drowned child has only the cold.
They came to the solar last, and most afraid, herded gently by the drowned who had learned to want better for them, Vesh among them, always, a big slow man with a child’s cold hand in each of his, his daughter four hundred years in a wall and his hands full now of someone else’s.
And when a drowned child held a cupful of the sea and gave it back, and a window came up gold in the deep, the whole solar would go quiet, every grown soul in it, mortal and drowned alike, because we were all of us thinking the same thing and none of us could say it: that this was what the tithe had been spending, all those grey mornings, all those rung bells.
Not salt. Not flesh. This. The small hands.
The thing that could have given, taught instead only to be taken.
And the nights, Aerec and I gave to each other, because we were running out of slow and we both knew it, and because a thing you might lose teaches you fast what it’s worth.
I want to set this down honestly, because the woman on the salt-flats would not have understood it, and because the Pepe of my own honesty insists.
It was not the desperate thing in the corridor and it was not the careful first night in the warm gold room.
It was something that grows only in the narrow place between two people who have agreed, without saying it, that the time is short and the cost is real: a deliberate, unhurried tenderness, the kind that comes when you have stopped pretending you have forever and started spending what you have on purpose.
There is a thing the flats teach you about a short tide.
When the water will only be low for an hour you do not rush; you slow down.
You stop hurrying because hurrying is how you spill, and you cannot afford to spill what you will not get a second chance to gather.
So you work the short window with a care you never bother with on a long one, every motion chosen, nothing wasted, the whole hour given the weight of a day.
That was what we had learned to do with the nights, Aerec and I, though neither of us had words for it then.
We had stopped behaving like people with forever and started behaving like people with an hour of low water, and the strange grace of it was that the short time was not poorer for being short.
It was richer. A thing you might lose teaches you fast what it’s worth, and then it teaches you the harder lesson after: not to spend the time you have grieving the time you won’t have.
To be in the hour. To gather, carefully, what the low water gives, and not look up at the line of the tide.
I had spent my whole life holding still against a thing inside me, refusing it, pressing my hands flat to a table so that nothing would be given away.
And here at the cold bottom of the world I was learning the opposite craft, the one my mother never lived to learn: how to give a thing away on purpose, slowly, knowing the cost, and not call the cost a robbery.
Giving and taking are not the same, and the difference is who chooses.
I had said that to him about the binding.
I had not understood, until those nights, that I had also been saying it about this, about the warmth I chose, every night, to hand to a creature the sea had made cold three hundred years ago, knowing the sea was watching, knowing exactly what each grain of it was worth, and handing it over anyway, gladly, because a warmth chosen and given is the one thing in all the cold water the flood with no shore can never take by force.
He had learned me by then, the cold places and the warm, and I had learned him: the slow drum of a heart that did not need to beat and beat for me anyway, the salt dried fine and silver at his temple that was the only mortal thing left on him, the way his careful Sovereign’s restraint came apart, every time, the moment I set my mouth to the hinge of his jaw and said his name in the low register that carries.
In the warm gold room with the lamps burning low and the sea pressed soft at the windows like something keeping watch, the tether between us pulled to nothing and then past nothing into the thing with no name, and I learned what it was to be wanted slowly by someone who had decided to spend the short time well, his hands unhurried, learning me again as though each time were the first and might be the last, his mouth at my throat, my pulse, the place over my own heart as though he could hold it safe by knowing exactly where it beat.
He gave, that night, the way he had never let himself give in three hundred years of taking and refusing: wholly, without the mask, a man and not a Sovereign, and when I came apart in his hands it was with his name in my mouth and his eyes on mine, and when he followed it was with mine in his, rough and reverent, like a prayer in a house that had forgotten its gods.
After, the sea surged bright at every window, and far below in the deep, three more lights came up gold without either of us doing a working at all, because the binding had tasted it, the giving, the chosen warmth, and it answered the only way it knew how, with light.
I lay with my head on his chest and his fingers moving slow through my hair, and the warm room held us, and I thought: this is the thing the Tide-Mother wants back.
This exact warmth. This is what she means by all of it.
And I understood, lying there glad and unguarded in a dying city, why a hunger that old hated a salt-witch who had learned to give, because every grain of warmth I gave away on purpose was a grain she would never get to take, and a heart that gives freely is the one thing in all the cold sea that the flood with no shore cannot drown.
“You flickered the city again,” Aerec murmured against my hair. “Three lights. In the deep.”
“We did,” I said.
His hand stilled, the way it had the very first night, when a single light had come up and he had felt the cold first edge of fear and I had been too warm and happy to read it. I read it now. I had learned him.
“What is it?” I said.
“The lights came up near the deep edge,” he said quietly.
“The dark edge. Where the binding leaks worst. Where the seam is.” His arm tightened around me.
“She’s pulling them. The Tide-Mother. She feels the warmth and she’s drawing the binding thin around it, the way the tide pulls back before it comes in big.
The lights we lit tonight, they’re bait now.
She’s using our warmth to find the seam.
” He breathed out. “She’s awake, Maren. Not risen.
Not yet. But awake, and looking, and she’s understood what we are before Cael has.
She knows a living heart could hold her down for another age.
And she is going to do everything in her power to make sure that heart gets broken into a wall before it ever learns to join. ”
The lamps burned low. The sea pressed green at the windows. And somewhere far down in the deep dark, the light that was an eye turned slowly toward the warm gold room where two people lay glad and unguarded, and fixed on it, and did not turn away.