Chapter Three #2
“I am aware.” The wound pulled with each breath. “Ask me a thing I can answer without fitting a rope to your neck, and I will answer it honestly and at length. Ask me what is in that paper, and I will lie, and you read hands far too well to forgive a lie, so let us both be spared the performance.”
“Then I will not ask what is in it. I will ask what it would do.” She held the table and held his eyes both.
“A marriage line, a settlement, the Westmere arms on a woman’s paper.
Such a thing would make a wife of a woman they called a mistress, and a lawful child of a child they called nothing, and a claimant of that child to whatever the marriage entitled her. Tell me I have read it wrong.”
“You have not read it wrong.”
“Then I did not need you to tell me what is in the packet. You have just told me what it is for, and you did it without a rope in sight.” Something fierce and frightened moved behind her composure.
“I am very good at my work, Your Grace. You hired me for it. Do not be surprised when I do it to you.”
“I am not surprised. I am a little afraid, which is a different and more useful thing.” He inclined his head a fraction. “Ask your harder question now. You have earned the right to put it plainly.”
“Then answer this, and look at me as you do it.” She came a step nearer, near enough that the grey light found the wet shine her eyes would not spill. “Did you engage me to put your library in order? Or did you engage me because of a name?”
He had a lie ready, smooth and kind, a thousand of them readied before this one. He opened his mouth to give it to her, but it would not come. The lie weighed the heavier of the two on the scale, which had not happened to him in longer than he cared to count.
“That,” he said, “is the very question I asked you to spare us both.”
“It is not an answer.”
“It is the only one you will have tonight, and you will understand the reason before you understand anything else, and I am sorry, which is a word I spend on almost no one living.” He got himself upright by an act of will.
“There were three men in this house a while ago who would have opened your throat as readily as mine the moment they understood whose face you wear. You are alive precisely as long as they do not understand it.”
“Then teach me to wear it better, instead of deciding for me how much truth my neck can bear.” She had not surrendered the step she had taken.
“I have carried my whole self on three letters and a pendant I cannot read. I have wanted one true sentence about my mother since I was old enough to want anything at all. Do not stand there bleeding through my petticoat and tell me I am too brittle to learn who hunts me.”
“You are not brittle. That is precisely the trouble.” He held her gaze without letting it drop.
“A brittle woman I could frighten into a carriage and send to the coast and never think of again. You will not go, you will not stop asking, and you will get yourself killed being right, and I find I would mind that a great deal more than is convenient for either of us.”
She was quiet for a moment. “That is the most honest thing you have said tonight, and you said it entirely by accident.”
“I say the most honest things by accident. It is the dishonest ones I labour over.”
“Then labour less. It suits you badly, and me not at all.” Her voice gentled and then hardened again, as though she resented the gentling. “Give me enough to stay alive being right. Who was my mother to you that her name should be in your papers at all?”
“Your mother’s name lay in papers I read a long time ago and was paid to forget.
” The words came slowly and evenly. “I did not forget them. The man who paid me to forget is the man those three named. He has wanted your mother’s family ruined since before you drew your first breath.
He is patient, he is protected, and tonight he has learned there is a young woman in my library with the right surname and the right eyes. ”
“Eyes.” She said the word as though it cost her coin she did not have. “You have looked at my face and seen a dead woman. That is the thing you hired into your house.”
“I have looked at your face and seen a great deal more than a dead woman, which is the inconvenience I have been nursing all night.” He did not soften it.
“But yes. The first thing I saw across that table this afternoon was Helena, and I have been trying to unsee her since, for your sake, but with no success at all.”
“Veyr.” The trembling left her by degrees, and something colder took its place, the stillness of a mind laying papers side by side on a table. “Is that the name?”
He looked at her for a long moment, and he set the last small mercy of his silence against the larger cruelty of arming her with everything but the target.
“Yes,” he said. “His name is Veyr.”
She did not gasp, and she did not stagger, and the stillness of her unnerved him worse than either would have.
The colour went out of her face the way it leaves a person who hears spoken aloud a name they have carried alone in the dark for years, and her hand rose to her collarbone, to the pendant hidden beneath her bodice, and her lips shaped a word she did not let out.
“You know it,” he said. It was not a question.
“There is a letter. One of my three.” Her voice had worn to almost nothing.
“Half of it burned away before it ever reached my hands. The part that lived carries a name in my mother’s own hand, underlined twice, and I have read it ten thousand times.
” Her eyes lifted to his, and the scholar had gone out of them, and what stood there instead was the child who had traced a dead stranger’s signature for the comfort of pretending she was loved.
“I never once knew whether it was a place, or a person, or a prayer. It says Veyr.”