Chapter 37
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“This is the book?”
Darcy inclined his head as he passed the Liber into Harrowe’s thick hands. “I brought it to the Museum Library today because I hoped to compare it with whatever I might find.”
Harrowe’s mouth curved—not in amusement, but in something like awe. “I’ve spent half my life tryin’ to prove that book existed,” he said quietly. “An’ you walk in with it under your arm.”
“It has not proved especially obliging,” Darcy said. “Nor has my family.”
“No,” Harrowe agreed. “I wonder if that aunt of yours can be quite sane.”
Darcy scoffed and shook his head. “She would have you believe she is the only one who is. And according to my uncle, she has another copy, though potentially bearing certain different wordings in crucial passages.”
Harrowe nearly dropped the Liber. “She never does! Where did she find that?”
Darcy shook his head. “She would never tell me if I bothered to ask, which I shall not. Look here, what can you tell me about… well, about anything?”
Harrowe scratched his chin. “I’d have to read it. Study it.”
“You may keep the bloody thing as far as I am concerned, if you are willing to help disseminate its meaning.”
Harrowe weighed it in his hands instead, as though its worth were not settled by its age alone. “Easy. Before I go puttin’ words in it, you tell me what it’s told you first.”
Darcy tipped what remained of the cold, bitter tea to his lips while he considered.
“That it was not preserved so much for consequence… family pride, that sort of thing,” he said at last. “But for continuity. That the record avoids instruction by design—that it names presence without explaining its cost, though it does imply that there is a cost.”
He paused, his gaze fixed somewhere beyond the table. “And that the failure was not absence,” he added. “It was attachment. Something was held when it ought to have been released—and what endured afterward was not meant to.”
Harrowe shook his head slowly. “An act not finished. A thing clutched too long.”
He turned the Liber once in his hands, as though aligning it with something he could not quite see. “But that’s only half the fault.”
Darcy looked up. “How do you…?”
Harrowe did not look down at the book as he spoke. His gaze had drifted instead to nothing in particular, as though the thought had found him from elsewhere and only now required words.
“There’s another sort o’ absence turns up in records like this,” he said, slow and careful.
“Don’t always get named. Sometimes not at all.
It ain’t just what was kept that ought to’ve been let go—there’s what wasn’t kept neither.
” He paused, as if testing the thought against something older than the ink before him.
“Somethin’ that should’ve been kept watch on.
A vow, I’d wager. I’ve seen that silence before.
Different records. Different ink. Same piece left out.
” He closed the Liber with care and set it flat upon the table, then pushed back his chair and rose.
Crossing the room with a heavy, deliberate tread, he reached for a shelf set higher than the rest. His fingers closed around a slim, time-softened volume bound in faded calf.
“The Ballads,” he said, bringing it down between them. “My ancestor’s work. They laughed him near out o’ London for printin’ ’em. Said it were country doggerel. Claimed he’d taken rhyme for revelation.”
Darcy watched him lay the book open. “I know the verses. I read them as a boy.”
Harrowe looked up sharply. “Did you, now?”
“Often,” Darcy replied. “Then, I liked the lyrical quality of them. But of late…” He rubbed his eyes. “I regret to say that they haunt my nightmares.”
Harrowe grunted. “Then you’ve read this one.” He turned the page with care and tapped a finger against the margin. “Read it again.”
Darcy leaned forward despite himself. The lines were familiar—too familiar. He could have spoken them from memory if pressed.
He stood where water meets with land,
And sware no troth unbound;
Yet held his hand where first it lay,
And so the bound unwound.
“I have always taken it for lament,” Darcy said. “A moralizing flourish.”
“Aye. That’s what they all thought. Courage or cowardice. Clean miss of it. It ain’t about what love broke. It’s about what stayed behind—emptied out, and no one there to tend it.” His gaze lifted to Darcy at last. “That’s why she remains. And why he does not.”
Darcy swallowed. “You speak of… the Lady. No name. No lineage or duty or any other identity. She just… arises.”
“No,” Harrowe said. “She’s there already.
Been waitin’, one way or another, all this while.
Only she’d no equal to answer her.” He bent nearer, thick finger riding the line.
“‘No troth unbound.’ That’s the fault. He reckoned a man could divide his troth.
Keep what was done for and what was still his to keep. ”
“You are saying—”
“I’m sayin’ Bedevere didn’t fail for lovin’ his king,” Harrowe cut in. “He failed ’cause he wouldn’t leave him when there were nothin’ left to do. Couldn’t step off from what was already over. And couldn’t give himself over to what came after—not fully.”
He paused, then spoke more slowly. “Blame him if you must. But to a knight, sir, the oath to his king weren’t one loyalty among many. That was the whole of him. His oath. His purpose. Himself.”
The words pierced with a force Darcy felt rather than heard. He drew himself upright, the room narrowing around him, his breath arrested hard in his chest.
Because he had seen it.
Not a dying king this time—but fire, and water, and a boundary that would not yield. The certainty that whatever was asked would not take a portion of him, or a season, or a sacrifice that could be tallied and survived. It would take the whole of him, or it would take nothing at all.
His hand closed at his side, fingers biting into his palm as though to anchor himself to the present. “You are telling me,” he said at last, his voice carefully level, “that what was required was not bravery.”
“Not as he wanted to shape it,” Harrowe said, turning a fragile page in the Liber once more. “No man wants to pay that price, I expect.”
Darcy bit his lips together. He could scarcely draw air. Damn it all, he had come here for reassurance! Information—a way to survive, see it all, whatever it was, done rationally and decently. But that was not sounding like an option.
“And the Lady?” he choked. “What of her? Does she… come to an end?”
Harrowe’s frown pushed out in thought as he followed a line with his finger.
When he spoke it sounded not as if he were reading, but postulating from memory of a different passage altogether.
“What of her? Aye—what of her.” He shook his head.
“She ain’t promised a thing. ’Cause she ain’t the question in it. ”
Darcy’s voice dropped. “Yes, she is. That much I do know. She is at the very centre of it all.”
Harrowe straightened and pinned Darcy with a look of incredulity. He lowered the book and cocked his head. “You… you know who she is,” he murmured. “You found her.”
Darcy turned his gaze to the hearth and did not answer at once. When he did, it was barely above the level of the fire’s soft collapse. “Quite by accident, yes. And not in ‘Cantium,’ as some might suggest.”
“Her name…” Harrowe half rose from his chair, his face alight with the awe of a child. “You know her name? And where she is? Then you must have…”
He broke off, the colour draining from his face as the implication caught up with the wonder.
“Then you’ve drawn it out,” he said. “Not made it—no. But fetched it forward. Took what was meant to stand silent and made it answer afore its proper hour.”
He stared at Darcy as though seeing him at last. “If you’ve stood before her—if she’s known you an’ you to her—then the keeping couldn’t bide as it was. Not after that. You’d have set it on the road to reckonin’.”
Darcy closed his eyes and scrubbed his face with his hands. “Toward collapse would be a better word.”
Harrowe stared at him, something like disbelief breaking through his habitual reserve. “Then why in God’s name are you sittin’ here?”
The question tore loose what restraint Darcy had left.
“Because I do not know what I am meant to do!” he snapped.
He jerked to his feet, the chair legs clattering behind him.
“Every course I can see ends in ruin. When I first came near her, she weakened. Heaven above, I weaken! She drains my strength like sap from a tree, but she still collapsed in my arms. Whatever passes between us takes from me and gives nothing back to her!”
He dragged a hand through his hair, breath uneven now.
“Yet when I am absent, the world itself begins to fail. The land turns against its keepers. Markets collapse. Men riot for bread. My cousin is called back to war when he has already paid his due. And my own mind has turned against me! Day and night, I see nightmares, visions of her face… And I have had word that she is weakening still more in my absence!”
He snatched up the Liber and made as if to throw it against a wall, but a quick yelp from Harrowe stayed his hand. He clenched his fist around the cover and shook it in Harrowe’s face.
“I am told that I must act—and yet no one can tell me how. If I pledge myself blindly, and it destroys her—”
He broke off, shaking, and released the book back to Harrowe’s eager hands. “I will not be the man who finishes what Bedevere began.”
“You’ve no choice left in it, sir. You’ll either keep to it or you won’t. And it’s standin’ before you even now.”
Darcy heaved a sigh. “At the end of it… I am altered beyond retrieval.” He turned to stare at Harrowe. “Am I not?”
Harrowe did not contradict him. “That’s the fear,” he replied. “And it is not an idle one.”
Darcy’s gaze drifted back to the Liber where it lay open in Harrowe's hands. “And there is no other means? There must be a way… some manner in which all can be saved from ruin.”