CHAPTER THIRTEEN Wanting Is Not Choosing
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Wanting Is Not Choosing
I came up on the thirty-fourth day and told him everything inside four hours, and then for most of the day after I barely said a word.
The front room again. Neither of us suggested the kitchen.
He had a fire built and going before I’d got my coat off, and I sat on the settle with a blanket round me and my hair still dripping down inside my collar and told him about the archive, and the gap of fifty-one years, and the receipt with Sethe’s name on it, and the eleven words in the precedent rack.
When I got to the eleven words his hands went slack on his knees.
I read them out in Threnn’s translation. I’d made her say it to me four times over so I wouldn’t get a syllable wrong.
In consideration: to the line of Vale, of the coast at Duskmere, in perpetuity. The blood.
“Say it again.”
I said it again.
He sat down on the hearthstone. On the stone itself, back to the fire, where I couldn’t get a proper look at his face, and I knew he’d picked the spot for exactly that reason.
“Nine hundred years.”
“Yes.”
“And there’s no payment anywhere in their books, because it was paid once. At the start. Into the line.”
“Yes.”
“Into the men.” Very level. “Not to. Into.”
“Elias.”
“No. Let me get it right. If I say it in the correct words the first time I won’t spend a year saying it in the wrong ones.
” He rubbed his palms down his thighs, slowly, once and then again, like a man drying them after something he’d rather not have touched.
“My grandfather told me the family was chosen. He was proud of it. He said the word at me four hundred times before I was nine, and I’ve been carrying it about ever since like a coin in my pocket I keep turning over. ”
“They did choose. They chose a family, and then they put it in them.”
“They bought a shoreline.” His jaw worked. “And they paid in the one currency that keeps nine hundred years, and the currency was us.”
? ? ?
He didn’t say anything for a while. A log settled and threw up sparks and neither of us looked at it.
“There’s more,” I said. “It’s worse. I’d rather get it all done tonight.”
“Then get it all done tonight.”
So I told him about Kael on the rail, and the four tellings, and the transfer, and how in every single version the one who takes it on never comes off the gate.
He didn’t react. Nothing. That scared me worse than anything he might have said.
“Elias.”
“I heard you.”
“You’ve not said anything.”
“Because I’m doing the thing you’d like me not to do.
I’m working out whether four unreliable tellings of a nine-hundred-year-old story are enough to act on, and you can see me working it out, and I’m not going to pretend I’m not.
I promised you in October. No more doing things in your kitchen without telling you. ”
I put my face in my hands.
“You’re going to look for it.”
“Yes.”
“After what I just said.”
“Rose.” He turned round on the hearthstone.
The fire was behind him now and his face had gone into shadow, and his voice didn’t shake, not even slightly, and I’d have given a great deal for it to shake.
“You’ve just told me my family was paid for nine hundred years in a coin that’s sitting in my blood as we speak.
That the only reason any of us was ever any use to them is that we’re a bit theirs.
I can’t do anything about the first part.
But if the second part means there’s one thing in the world that I can take off you, me, and no other man in Duskmere, then you’re asking me to turn down the only good news I’ve had since September. ”
“It isn’t good news. You’d be down there for ever.”
“Yes.”
“You’d be down there for ever and I’d be up here.”
“Yes. I’ve thought about that. It’s an appalling arrangement, and I’d take it tomorrow, and the two of us are going to have to find some way of sitting in this room together knowing it.”
? ? ?
I didn’t sleep and neither did he. Some time after two he came up and stood in my doorway, and I said come in, and he said no, and I said Elias, for God’s sake, and he came in and sat on the floor with his back to the bed frame. We talked in the dark till the window went grey.
Somewhere in all that I told him the rest. The part I hadn’t told Threnn, or Kael, and had barely let myself pick up and look at.
That when I stood at the rail with the vent field black for three hundred feet under me, I’d felt relief.
He heard all of it and didn’t move.
“And the offer.”
“It wasn’t a voice. Nothing spoke.”
“But it offered.”
“It offered to make it permanent.” My voice came out thin as paper. “Not power. Nothing grand like that. Only that I’d never have to pick it up again.”
Elias didn’t answer straight away.
“Do you want me to tell you you’re not a monster?”
“No.”
“Good, because I’d have had to think about it.
” He reached up without looking and found my hand where it hung off the edge of the mattress, and brought it down and laid it flat on his shoulder with his own over it, pressing, so I could feel the whole shape of the bone through his shirt.
“You spent thirty-four years with a lid on. That isn’t virtue and it isn’t vice, it’s a lid.
Now you’ve had a look at what’s under it.
So have I, as it happens, and mine turned out to be a nine-hundred-year-old purchase order.
So neither of us gets to be grand about our insides tonight, all right? ”
I laughed, and halfway through it went into something else, and he let it, and didn’t move his hand.
? ? ?
I told him about the apple book on the third day. I made a complete mess of it.
I’d meant to do it properly. I had it all laid out in my head: the corners gone soft, the fold at page forty, what page forty was about. What happened was I walked into the kitchen while he was at the stove, said “I took a book,” in the voice of a woman owning up to arson, and put it on the table.
He turned round with a cloth in his hand.
“From where?”
“Her rooms. On the seventh day. I put it down the front of my dress and it’s been in my bag ever since, and I didn’t tell you the night I came up, when I told you every other thing in the whole world, and I’ve spent a month trying to work out why.”
He came over and looked at it. He didn’t touch it.
“May I?”
“It’s a book about apples.”
“I can see it’s a book about apples.”
“There’s no earth down there,” I said. “There’s no sky.
There’s no frost, Elias, there isn’t any weather at all, and she had this, and she read it till the corners went like that, and somebody in that city catalogued it as a gift.
And the page she turned down is the one about telling whether a young tree’s dead after a hard spring or only sleeping. ”
He opened it at the fold and read. He didn’t say anything for so long I started to wish I’d left it in the bag.
Then he shut it. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Rose.”
“Because it’s the one thing of hers nobody arranged.
” Far louder than I meant. “Everything else is a document. The slate, the inventory, the receipt, all of it drafted by somebody. This is a book she picked out in a shop, on her own, for no reason at all, and the second I say it out loud it turns into one more thing we examine. We’ll turn it over and decide what it means and it’ll go on the pile with the rest, and there won’t be anything left that’s just hers. ”
He let me get to the end.
Then he picked it up and put it back into my hands and closed my fingers round it with both of his, firmly, the way you’d hand somebody back their coat at the door on a cold night.
“Then it doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “It’s a book about apples. Put it somewhere I can’t reach.”
? ? ?
I said it on the fourth day, out in the yard. I hadn’t meant to.
We were mending the wall. A stone had come loose from the top course by the gate, and Elias had declared this an emergency, and I’d decided to help, and neither of us brought up the fact that it had been like that since before I moved in.
He was mixing mortar in a bucket and I was holding the stone. My hands were filthy. I had grit under my nails. The weather had turned bright and cold the way it does in the first week of December, when everything seems to have an edge you could cut yourself on.
And out it came.
“They wrote it down.”
He looked up.
“On the slate. Fifth line. That the successor should come of her own will, if her will could be arranged.” I was looking at the stone and not at him. “Threnn read it twice because I couldn’t take it in the first time. If her will could be arranged.”
“Rose.”
“No, let me say it while I’ve got hold of it.
” I set the stone on top of the wall. “I’ve been careful my whole life.
You know I have. I’ve sat with my back to walls, I’ve kept men at arm’s length, I’ve turned down things I wanted, because I could never be sure the wanting was theirs.
And all of that, Elias, the whole careful edifice of it, stood on one thing.
That there was a line. On this side, what I did to people.
On that side, what they chose for themselves.
And if I was rigorous enough I could stay on the right side of it. ”
He’d stopped mixing.
“And?”
“And Sevrid Anvarre sat in a room wearing my mother’s mouth and explained exactly how you do it.
Raise her untaught. Raise her hungry. Give her a gift with no use and no explanation and nobody to ask about it, for thirty-four years, and then when you finally show her a hole in the bottom of the world cut to her exact shape, she doesn’t need persuading. She walks in.”
“That’s not the same as compelling you.”
“No. It’s better. Compulsion wears off.”
? ? ?
I sat down on the wall with my dirty hands in my lap.
“Here’s the bit I can’t get out from under. I want it.”
He waited.