CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Down as Payment
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Down as Payment
Elias got up and walked out of the room.
He didn’t make a scene of it. He said “excuse me” in a perfectly ordinary voice and went out through the kitchen, and we heard the back door open and shut, and after that we heard nothing.
Kael did not look after him. He sat on the arm of my settle with his forearms on his knees and regarded the fire as though it had let him down personally and would be hearing about it.
“Go on. Say the rest of it to me, madam, and Vale can have it when he’s ready.”
“I’ve not got much more.”
“Say what you’ve got.”
“She wrote her family into a promise and never explained it.” He said it to the fire.
“Every Vale born since has carried a piece of it and paid it out without knowing they were paying. That’s why there has never been a payment in any ledger, and why the seal has burned for nearly two hundred years.
” He turned his hands over, palms up, and there was nothing in them.
“It is also, madam, very likely why your gift fails on him. The blood alone wouldn’t do it.
Nine hundred years of thinning could never make a man like that.
You’d need the blood and whatever she put on top of it in eighteen forty-four. ”
I sat down slowly on the hearthstone. It was warm through my skirt, and I remember being annoyed with it, that anything should be warm just then.
“You’re telling me it was arranged.”
“I’m telling you something was done in eighteen forty-four that has an effect on a man alive today.
I don’t know what it was. Nobody living does.
” Kael looked at me at last, and the boredom had gone out of his face, which on Kael is worse than shouting.
“I am not telling you that what’s between you and him was arranged.
I have watched that man for five months and there isn’t a thing in him anybody could have made on purpose.
I’ve tried to picture the workshop and I can’t.
But I’ll not lie to you and say the question doesn’t exist. You’d find it yourself at three in the morning in about a fortnight, and then you’d never believe another word out of me. ”
? ? ?
I found him at the bottom of the yard, sitting on the wall with his back to the house, in the cold, without his coat.
I climbed up beside him and put my shoulder against his. We sat looking at nothing, which at that hour of a March afternoon means a grey field and a hedge and the top of the town, with the light draining out of the lot.
“Four days,” he said, after a long time.
“What?”
“You go down in four days. And this afternoon I’ve found out that everything I was ever sure of about myself was put in me by a woman in eighteen forty-four, and I’ve got four days to have a view on it.”
“You don’t have to have a view on it.”
“I have a view on it.” He wasn’t looking at me. His breath went out white and he watched it go. “My view is that I don’t know whether I love you or whether I was made to be the one who could.”
? ? ?
I did not argue with him.
The old me would have. The woman who came up out of that water in September would have taken his face in both hands and told him it was nonsense, and needed him to believe it for her own sake, and called that comfort.
It would have been the most selfish thing she ever did, and she’d have been proud of it.
What I did instead was sit on a cold wall and let it be true for a minute. It was a long minute. A rook went over, and I watched it all the way to the hedge.
“All right.”
He turned his head.
“All right?”
“You don’t know. I don’t know either. Kael’s right, the question’s there.
” I pushed my hands into my coat pockets, mostly so he wouldn’t see what they were doing.
“I’ve asked that about every man who’s looked at me since I was fifteen, Elias.
Every single one. Was it him, or was it me doing it to him without meaning to.
You’re the only person I’ve ever met who didn’t have to wonder, and now you do, and I’m sorry.
” I knocked my shoulder into his. “And welcome. There’s no tea. The chairs are terrible.”
He made a noise that was nearly a laugh and didn’t get there.
“That’s the unkindest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“I know.”
“It’s also the only useful thing anybody’s said to me all day.”
? ? ?
We stayed on the wall until it was properly dark, and cold enough that staying was stupid.
“Here’s what I’ve got,” he said. “It isn’t much.”
“Go on.”
“Whatever Ceria Vale did in eighteen forty-four, she did it to a family. She didn’t do it to me.
There wasn’t a me.” He was rubbing his hands together, slowly, one over the other, like a man working a stain out.
“So if she put something in the line so a Vale can’t be Influenced, or a Vale runs to the water, or whatever in God’s name it is, then fine.
She gave me a shape. Most people get handed a shape.
My father got his from a man who cut pages out of books. ”
“And?”
“And she did not tell me to walk down a cliff path twice a day for thirty-four days. There’s nothing in anybody’s blood that makes a man do that.
I did that. I did it on a Tuesday in November with the rain coming in sideways and no reason on earth to go, and I went anyway.
” His hands stopped. “So that’s the evidence I’m going to live on.
It’s the only bit I have. That, and four days. ”
? ? ?
The four days were good, which I hadn’t expected and couldn’t have arranged if I’d tried.
We did nothing that mattered, and that’s what I remember about them.
We ate badly and slept late. On the seventeenth we walked all the way out to the headland and back in a wind that ripped the breath out of your mouth and had us both shouting like idiots to be heard.
On the eighteenth Wren shut the Gull and Anchor at nine and let eleven people stay until two in the morning, and nobody said what it was for, and Ness came, which she hasn’t done in twelve years.
Wren cried into the washing-up and swore at anybody who noticed.
? ? ?
On the nineteenth Mara came down the hill, which she does perhaps twice a year.
She stood in my kitchen and wouldn’t sit and wouldn’t take anything.
She put a small cloth bundle on the table and said, “That’s the cord.
The red one with the three knots that came up on the tide.
I’ve re-knotted it. I’d like you to keep it on you, and I’d like you not to ask what it does, because the honest answer is nothing at all, and I’ve made it anyway. ”
I put it in my pocket. It’s in my pocket now.
“Mara.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not going to forgive you. I’m telling you now, because otherwise you’ll spend however long this takes deciding I did, and I’d rather you had it straight.”
Mara nodded, once.
“Mm. That’s fair.”
“But I want you to know what you gave me.” I had to stop and sort it out before I could go on.
“On the eighth you told me she came back. That she stood in your kitchen with me on her hip and asked, what if I let her decide. I’ve been trying to make this decision by myself for four months, Mara, and I couldn’t do it, and that’s what did it.
That’s the only reason I’m going down there on my own feet. ”
Mara stood in the middle of my kitchen with her hands hanging at her sides.
“I nearly didn’t tell you that either.”
“I know.”
“Twenty years of not telling you things, and I nearly kept back the one that mattered, and I’ve thought about it every hour since.
” She picked up her stick, and set it down against the table, and picked it up again.
“Thank you for saying so. I’ll not see you for a good while, I think.
And don’t write to me about the weather. I’ll know it’s you being kind.”
? ? ?
The twentieth came up bright, with a hard frost, and slack water at twenty past nine.
They’d come up the night before, all three of them.
It hadn’t been arranged, and I found out afterwards it had been argued about at some length.
Threnn in the grey cloak with the satchel.
Kael barefoot with his boots in his hand, as if he’d forgotten what they were for and resented being reminded.
And Ivrid, who had no business there at all and who said, when I asked, “You’ve got habits.
Somebody ought to watch you go down with them. ”
We went to the cove at eight because I couldn’t stay in the house.
It was the coldest morning of that winter.
The steps had ice on them in three places, and Elias went first and reached a hand back for me at each one and didn’t say a word about it.
Above the tide line the shingle was white with frost and crunched under us like sugar.
At the water the black ribs of the reef were coming up out of the ebb, each one steaming faintly in the cold, and out past the mouth of the cove the standing ridge was there, the way it had been since January.
That morning it looked about twice the size.
Nobody mentioned it.
“It’s cold,” Kael said instead, deeply wronged. “And it’s dry. Up here it’s always both, and I have never understood how.”
? ? ?
Threnn went first, because her part was procedural and she wanted it out of the way.
“Miss Angel. I’m required to say this and I intend to say it properly.
” She had the satchel open. “You go down of your own will. No claim has been made on you and no oath has been asked of you. Your standing as a guest under precedent runs until the equinox, which is today, and expires at sunset. What happens after sunset has not been drafted, and I have failed for five months to get anyone to draft it. I would like that on the record, for what the record is worth up here.”
“I know.”