Chapter Two #2
"Because he did not speak the vow himself," Maren said.
"He witnessed it. Certified it. That is a different office entirely, one step removed from the speaking, and the debt that follows a broken vow attaches most heavily to the one who spoke it, which in this case was the crown, and only more distantly to the one who certified it in good faith.
Your father did not develop the Rot because his portion of the debt was never large enough on its own to manifest that way.
But debts of that kind rarely simply vanish because the person who incurred the smaller share happened to be spared the worst of its physical toll.
They settle instead into whatever cracks they can find.
Into a family's fortune. Into a family's name.
Into, apparently, a child born years later who never had anything at all to do with the vow that ruined his family, and who is now paying a price his father was spared. "
The silence that followed sat heavy in the small warm room, broken only by the distant, endless sound of water against stone, and Calla found she had to press her palms flat against her knees to keep them from trembling.
"He blames himself," she said finally.
"He has never stopped blaming himself," Maren said.
"Which is its own kind of tragedy, because the man who actually deserves the blame has spent sixteen years living comfortably in High Reach while your father works fish lines with hands that once signed vows on behalf of the crown, and I do not believe, not for one moment, that this is a coincidence the Deep intends to let stand forever.
Debts of this size do not simply resolve because everyone involved has agreed to stop discussing them. "
Calla thought of Ademar, glimpsed only briefly and from a distance on her walk up to register the day before, older now than the boy she dimly remembered from childhood visits to High Reach before the fall, a boy she had once, briefly and painfully, considered something like a friend before their families' circumstances made the notion absurd.
She thought of the way his eyes had found hers across the registration hall and how quickly he had looked away again, as though the sight of her cost him something he had not expected to pay.
"He knows," she said slowly. "Doesn't he? Ademar. He was young when it happened, but he's not young now, and if his father's own succession vow is what started this."
"I imagine he knows a version of it," Maren said carefully.
"Whether he knows the full truth of it, whether he even fully understands his own family's part in the breaking, is a considerably harder question, and one I would caution you very strongly against assuming an answer to before you have evidence enough to trust it.
Princes are raised on stories too, Calla.
Just because the story he was raised on serves his family's comfort does not necessarily mean he chose it, or even that he has ever had reason to question it. "
Calla said nothing, because there was too much moving underneath the silence for her to trust any single thought enough to say it aloud, and Maren, seeming to understand this, let the quiet stretch for a while before finally opening the brittle book on the table between them.
"None of this changes what you came here to ask me," she said.
"You mean to enter the Tally. Whatever you learn about how your family fell will not undo the falling, and it will certainly not cure your brother's hand.
What it can do, if you use it carefully, is help you understand precisely what you are walking into when you stand before that court again, because the same people who found it convenient to blame a Voice's certification sixteen years ago have not suddenly become more honest in the years since. "
"You think they'll try to stop me from entering."
"I think," Maren said, "that a fallen house's daughter walking back into High Reach to compete for the very office that ruined her family is not a story the crown will find comfortable, whatever face they put on it in public.
I think you should assume, from this moment forward, that not everyone judging your performance in that arena will be judging it fairly, and I think you should prepare yourself accordingly, because hope is a fine thing to carry into a fight, Calla, but it makes a very poor shield on its own. "
Calla looked down at the book between them, its pages crowded with handwriting in inks gone brown with age, and thought of her brother's grey hand, and her father's bent shoulders, and a prince who had looked away too quickly across a crowded registration hall, and felt the last of her hesitation settle into something harder and more certain.
"Then teach me what you know," she said. "All of it. However long it takes."
"It will not take as long as either of us would like," Maren said, with the particular dry humor of someone who has already resigned herself to an impossible task.
"The registry closes at the turning of the next moon, and there is a great deal to cover before then.
But we will begin where every proper student of vow law begins, which is not with the trials themselves, whatever the temple schools would have you believe, but with the nature of the thing you are actually asking to bind yourself to. "
She turned the book toward Calla, revealing a page dense with careful diagrams, circles within circles, notations in a hand so old and cramped that it took Calla a moment to realize the words were not in the common tongue at all but in something older, something that predated even the founding of High Reach as it currently stood.
"A vow," Maren said, "is not a promise. Ilyra has spent four centuries teaching its people to use the two words as though they meant the same thing, and it is precisely that confusion the Tally is designed to exploit against contestants who have not been taught any better.
A promise is a matter of intent. A vow, properly sworn, is a matter of fact, whether you intended it that way or not, and the Deep does not particularly care what you meant when you spoke the words.
It cares only what the words themselves, sealed in blood and spoken before witnesses, actually bound you to do. "
Outside, the morning had fully arrived, and somewhere far above them, muffled by stone and distance, the temple bell in High Reach rang out again, cheerful and indifferent, marking an hour that meant nothing at all to the two women bent together over an old brittle book in a hollow carved into the cliff face, working against a closing registry and a clock neither of them could see but both of them could feel, ticking down toward a trial that would ask Calla Duskane to bind herself, in blood, to a truth far larger and far older than the small, private grief of a single fallen house.