CHAPTER EIGHTEEN What the Sea Keeps
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
What the Sea Keeps
I stood on that rise a long while, and everything I said out loud that day was calm, and not a word of it was true.
My chest had gone tight and high, the way it does just before you’re sick, and it stayed like that the whole hour.
My hands were fine. I checked them twice, because I didn’t believe it.
But there was a cold band across the top of my ribs, and a pull in the backs of my legs, that animal urge to step back you get at a cliff edge, and under all of it, low and steady and horrible, the thing I’d felt at the rail above the vents in November.
Hunger.
I’d come eleven miles into the dark braced to be afraid. What I got was appetite. It was mine, and it wasn’t clean, and it sat in me with its mouth open, looking at a seam of light.
I made myself stand still. It took everything I had, and then some I didn’t.
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Ivrid was right about the first thing you do.
I’d gone out there with the whole argument in my head, all four months of it: the wall, the jetty, my mother on Mara’s step with me on her hip.
I had come down my own cliff steps on my own feet and stepped off a rock nobody pushed me from.
I had decided. The deciding was mine, and I’d been carrying it about ever since the way you carry a pan straight off the fire, quickly, with a cloth, trying not to think.
Then I stood on the rise and my body said now, and I very nearly went.
Duty didn’t come into it. Nor did the northern quarter, or Hallam’s boy, or Ness and her Thursdays. I nearly walked down that half-mile because the thing in me had seen where it fits and didn’t want to spend one more minute not fitting.
I said out loud, in the water, in front of nine people: “No. Tomorrow.”
Threnn’s head came round.
“Miss Angel?”
“I’m going back to the city, and I’m going to sleep, and I’ll come out tomorrow.” My voice had gone odd on me. “Ivrid told me not to do anything for a day. So. I’m doing what Ivrid said.”
Nobody in that party spoke the whole eleven miles back. I’ve always assumed it was because every one of them had watched me nearly go.
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I didn’t sleep.
I lay in the room on the western terrace with the amber going down, hands on my stomach, running the inventory I’ve run every night since October, and every answer came back wrong.
Nothing hurt. That much was true. But underneath, all night, down at the level of my back teeth, there was a pull, and it had nothing to do with the six-second pulse of the Deep.
It came from a seam of light eleven miles off.
It wasn’t calling me. I want to be exact about that, because otherwise I’ll be accused of romance. It wasn’t a voice. Nothing spoke.
I’d seen where I go, that was all. I couldn’t unsee it now, and while my back was turned the rest of my life had quietly rearranged itself round that.
Somewhere near the bottom of the night I got up and stood at the window with no weather outside it, and I thought of Kael in the boat with the oars shipped, telling me that in forty years I’d look at a man and find I loved him very much, and that Ilmarren would still be the first thing I thought of every morning.
Forty years, he’d said. It had taken an afternoon.
I sat on the floor with my back to the bed and put my hand in my pocket and held Mara’s red cord with its three knots, the one that does nothing, and I cried for about an hour without making a sound.
Then I stopped, and washed my face. In water.
In water, at the bottom of the sea. It’s a stupid thing to do and I did it anyway, and I felt better, which is stupider.
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Threnn came at first light with a face like a shut door.
“There is a thing. It was given to me this morning. I’ve read it four times, and I’m going to hand it to you instead of summarising it, because I no longer trust my summaries.”
It was a single slate, small and freshly cut. The edges were still sharp.
“What is it?”
“It’s an instrument. Before you read it, I’d like you to understand two things. I did not know it was being drafted. And I am the House archivist.” She folded her hands. “Put together, those are the two worst facts of my thirty-one years of service. I would like that on the record.”
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In the end she read it to me herself, and her voice never moved.
It was nine lines. It said that the successor having presented herself at the ridge, and the standing of the gate being vacant, and the term of the guest having expired at sunset on the equinox, the obligation carried under the substitution of thirty-four years previously was now discharged into the person of the successor.
Discharged into the person.
“That’s not a request.”
“No.”
“That isn’t even an instruction. Threnn, that’s a receipt.”
“Yes.”
“They’ve written it as if it’s already happened.”
“They have written that it happened at sunset thirteen days ago, on the twentieth, and that everything since has been formality. Which is why nobody in that party spoke to you on the way back yesterday, Miss Angel. I’m now fairly sure at least four of them had already seen this.”
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I sat on the edge of the bed with the slate in my lap.
I expected to be furious. What came instead has surprised me ever since.
It was a grey tiredness, coming up from the soles of my feet.
Four months of it: a wall in December, a jetty in March, a boat off the headland.
The hardest thinking I’ve ever done in my life, and Elias crossing something off a list with a pencil, and Wren telling me not to do it for them, and Mara in her kitchen handing me the one true thing she had.
All that, and a woman I’ve never met had drafted nine lines saying the matter was settled at sunset on the twentieth, while I was presumably asleep.
I didn’t feel robbed. I still can’t explain that part. I felt the way you’d feel if you’d carried a wardrobe up four flights of stairs and found the door already open and the room already furnished, and somebody’s cup of tea going cold on the sill.
“Threnn. Did I decide, or didn’t I?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not a figure. You always have a figure.”
“Not this time.” She looked at the slate and not at me. “I’ve been awake since third light trying to make one, and there isn’t one. All I’ve got is that you came down here on your own feet, and that this was written by somebody who assumed you would.”
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I went out to the ridge that afternoon in a party of four.
Threnn wouldn’t be left behind. Kael had come down in the night, which nobody had told me, and I understood why the moment I saw his face. And Ivrid came, and said nothing on the way out, and stayed at my shoulder the whole eleven miles.
The dark stretch was worse the second time.
Knowing what’s at the end of it doesn’t help.
The pulse comes up out of the water ahead of you, and somewhere in the second mile your body starts arranging itself round it, and by the time the floor rose I couldn’t feel my own hands. The cold had nothing to do with it.
The seam was as I’d left it. The western third dark, the eastern end open too wide, and the light spilling out of the middle in that long slow fall down the northern side, going off into the dark, and on, and on.
I stood on the rise.
Beside me, quietly, Kael said: “You have a choice, and I’d like to say it out loud, because that slate was written to make you think you hadn’t.”
“Say it, then.”
“You can turn round.” He wasn’t looking at me.
“Now. From here. There are four of us. I’ll take you up myself tonight, and nobody in that city could stop me, and you’d be in Duskmere by morning, and the whole business would be somebody else’s problem.
This ridge would go on doing what it’s done since your mother left it. ”
“And the northern quarter.”
“Goes dark. More of it, after. And the water off your coast goes on standing up.” His voice was perfectly even.
“I’m not offering you anything clean, madam.
It’d be a thing you had to live with. I’d take you up regardless.
I just want you to know the offer is real before you do whatever it is you’re about to do. ”
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It would make a better story if I’d been tempted.
What I felt was gratitude, huge and embarrassing, that somebody had bothered, at the last possible minute, to cut a door in the wall and show it to me.
That was all I’d wanted for four months. I didn’t need rescuing, and I didn’t want excusing. I wanted somebody to stand next to me and say, here’s the other way, it’s really open, and I won’t think any less of you if you take it.
“Thank you,” I said. My voice went on the second word.
“Mm.”
“Kael. I’m not going to take it.”
“No. I know.” He sighed, the long-suffering sigh of a man forced to be sincere in public. “I’d have been extremely annoyed if you had. I’d have taken you up anyway, and we’d have been thoroughly miserable in the boat, you grumbling about the cold and me about the dry, the entire way.”
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I went down the rise alone, because I asked to.
Half a mile takes longer than you think. The light gets stronger in stages, and somewhere about two hundred yards off it stops being a thing you’re looking at and becomes a thing you’re inside. From there on I couldn’t see the others behind me. I didn’t look.
My heart and the pulse fell out of step, and into step, and out again.
Walking down, I didn’t feel resolved. I felt that odd calm you get when the thing you’ve dreaded for months finally turns up and turns out to be simply the next thing on the list. I could hear my own breathing.
I knew Mara’s cord was in my pocket, and that this was absurd.
And I knew, so clearly it was nearly unkind, that just then Elias was very likely standing on a harbour wall beside a marked pole, writing a figure in a book.
Forty feet from the seam I stopped, because Ivrid had told me one more thing, and I hadn’t understood it until that moment.
You’ll want to hold it the way you hold the fire. It’s not like that. It’s the other way about.
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