CHAPTER FIFTEEN #2
"I don't know." And before Maren's face could close: "I swear it to you on Nessa, I don't know.
It was full dark and I was coming in from the back side and my eyes were on Calla and the water.
There was somebody who came in with her, earlier, who walked her down.
A figure at the edge that left before the end, I think, I had an impression of someone going back up the path while I was still in the grass, but I never saw a face and I couldn't swear to height or hair or anything you could use.
I've gone over it a thousand nights. There's nothing there.
Whoever walked your Lark down to that water, I never saw them, and I've hated that more than I've hated almost anything, because that's the one thing I had that might have been worth the having, and the dark took it. "
Maren sat with it. Somewhere underneath the grief a colder, clearer machine had started turning, the one that had been hunting since the morgue, and it had caught on the one true thing in all of it and would not let go: Lark, who shook crossing a footbridge over slow water, who would not wade past her knees at the lake, Lark had walked of her own will down into a black backwater in the dark.
There was exactly one kind of person she would do that for.
The thought put out a hand toward a shape Maren was not ready to look at, and she took her mind off it deliberately, because there was a woman bleeding out the truth in front of her and that deserved her whole attention first.
"You watched her die," Maren said. "And then you found me. Weeks later. And you stood in my shop and read my mark and worked beside me and let me walk around inside this not knowing you'd been there at the end of her, and you said nothing."
"Yes."
"Why."
Rowan's hands came off the counter. She looked, for the first time since she'd come in, like she might not get the next part out at all.
"Because by the time I'd found you, you already had it on your skin," she said.
"I came looking for the survivor, the way I always do, too late to save anyone but maybe in time to warn them.
And I found you, and the mark was already deep in you and already lying to you, already playing the grieving sweetheart and walking you toward the kill that completes the cup.
And I knew if I came to you on day one and said, I watched your girl drown and I couldn't stop it, and by the way the tattoo that's the only piece of her you've got left is the cult's hook in your mouth, you'd have thrown me out the door and gone the rest of the way alone, straight down the chute they built for you.
So I lied. I made myself useful instead.
I told myself I'd earn the right to tell you the whole of it before it mattered, and then the days went and it never stopped being the worst possible morning to say it, and Vesper said it for me.
" She was quiet a moment. "That's not an excuse.
I know the shape of that lie. It's the same shape as your bind.
I decided I knew better than you what you could survive being told, and I took the choosing away from you to keep you safe.
That's the cult's whole gospel, Maren. Take the choice off them for their own good.
I learned it in the cradle and I did it to you in your grief and I'm not going to stand here and tell you it was love.
It was fear wearing love's coat, which is the only kind of love that place ever taught me. "
And there it was, laid on the counter between them, plain and ugly and true, and Maren found she could not hold the fury she had carried in from the river, because the woman had taken it out of her hands by naming it first and worse than Maren would have.
That was the thing about Rowan. She would not let you punish her any harder than she had already punished herself, and she would not let you off it either.
She just put the whole of it down where you could see it and stood there in the light of it, weathered and gray-faced and waiting, and let you decide.
"I built the cage," Maren said.
Rowan went still.
"You keep saying it like you're the only one with a thing on your hands.
" Maren's voice had gone rough. "I pushed for the bind.
Not her. Me. I was nineteen and my mother had been gone twelve years and Edith was getting old and I had finally found the one person who I could not survive losing, and so I made her unloseable.
I dragged her up those stairs to Vesper and I held out my wrist first. Lark would've been happy to just love me the ordinary way, the way that can leave.
I'm the one who couldn't stand a love with a door in it.
And the thing I did to make her safe is the exact thing that made her worth killing.
A pure bind. Vesper said it. The mercy in it was what marked us.
So don't, " and her voice cracked and she let it, "don't stand in my dead girl's studio and tell me about the love that's really fear in a coat.
I wrote the book on it. I tattooed it on both of us in our own blood. "