They gave themselves two days, and used every hour of them.
Liora had never run a surgery before a dozen people. She had run them alone, in lamplit sickrooms, with a frightened relative holding a basin. She had never stood at the head of an oak table in a vaulted white room and told a housekeeper, a boy, a cook, a stable hand and a dying physician exactly where to put their hands. It turned out to be much the same thing. You laid the instruments out in the order of their use. You said what would happen before it happened. You told every person in the room what to do if everything went wrong, and then you told them again.
She began at dawn with the old man's tools.
They lay on a clean linen cloth in the clear light of the window: a set of curved needles in a case of worn green leather, the largest no longer than her finger; three spools of pale silk, still bright after thirteen years in a box; a pair of small silver scissors, a scalpel with a bone handle, a flat bowl of black stone for water. They had been in Edrin's satchel the day he died. Hesta had kept them. She had carried them out of a marsh cottage in the week of the funeral, wrapped in a shawl, and put them in a drawer in the keep without being able to say why. *In case,* she had said, when Liora asked. *In case somebody should be fool enough to try.*
"He cut with this," said Pell.
He had gone gray with the effort of saying it. He held up the little scalpel in his bare right hand, and it shook, and he let it rest on the cloth. His breath came in short dry pulls. Every sentence that he began at the table cost him something, and he began them all the same, one at a time, between long silences, with a stubbornness that made her want to weep.
"He cut with it once. On a dog." The ghost of a smile crossed his face. "It was a terrier, in the fen, with a growth that the Pact had touched. He said that it was a rehearsal. He did not tell me what for." He drew a ragged breath. "I could not hold the dog. I was too frightened. He held the dog and cut it himself. And the dog lived."
"What did he cut?"
"A root." His eyes closed. "It is the nearest word that I am permitted. It lies under the stitch. Below it. Where the thread goes through. Not the curse itself. The place that the curse is tied to."
She bent over Aldreth's pages, and he put his finger on a passage in the margin, a small slanting note in the old man's hand. *At the last, cut at the root, not the branch. The keeper must stand outside the line.* Beside it, in a different ink and a shakier hand, someone had added a single word. *Willing.*
"Edrin wrote that after the dog," said Pell. "I think that he had understood something. I think that it came to him all at once. He said that the root could be cut by anyone with the skill, but that it would grow back, unless the one whose root it was gave it up." The words came slowly. "Gave. Not lost. Not taken. If it is taken, it is a wound. If it is given, it is a seam."
"A seam."
"It closes. It leaves a scar. But it holds."
She wrote it down. She was filling the notebook now at the rate of a page an hour, in her small plain hand, and every line was a thing that someone had paid for. She drew the diagram that he described, the spiral, the root, the long thread between the two hollows. She drew it again, and again, until it stopped looking like a puzzle and began to look like an anatomy. It was a body. It had a heart, and a spine, and a place where the blood was supposed to go. She had never seen it whole until now. She understood, with a clear cold lurch, that it was not a curse at all. It was a wound that someone had once made on purpose, and had never been allowed to heal.
Tobin was the surprise.
She had meant to give him the easy thread. She had meant to set him at the end of the line, where the pull was lightest, and let him hold it as a gesture. She put the silk in his hand on the first morning, and showed him how to wind it twice about his forefinger and let the slack hang, and he looked at it with narrowed eyes for a full minute. Then he said, "It's not a thread. It's a breath."
"I beg your pardon?"
"It goes in and out." He lifted it. "Look. It's tight when you breathe in, and loose when you breathe out. You've got to move your hand with it. Otherwise it'll snap." He demonstrated, small and stern and absurdly sure, with the silk rising and falling on his finger. "I figured it out on the stairs. Hesta was holding hers too tight."
"I was holding it," said Hesta, stiffly, "as one holds a thing that one has been told is valuable."
"That's why it was going to snap."
Liora stared at him. She had been taught the stitch for two years on linen and pigskin and the inside of her own arm. She had not once been told that it was a matter of breath. She had learned it by hand and by hurt. And a boy of fourteen with a burn on his wrist had worked it out in an afternoon, by watching an old woman's fingers on a stair.
"Show me again," she said.
He did. He taught the whole table. He stood at the head of it with the silk wound round his hand and showed them, one at a time, how to let the thread breathe, and the cook, who was a vast quiet woman called Marta that Liora had never heard say more than ten words, held hers as gently as a bird. The stable hands, the brothers, big red-eared young men with hands like shovels, learned it last and best. They had spent their lives gentling frightened horses. They knew about slack.
Mirel came on the second morning.
She walked up the causeway in the early light with a shawl over her head and a basket on her arm, as she had come before, and with her came Dunna, red-faced and out of breath, and Garrick, grumbling, with his pipe still unlit in his hand. They had gone to fetch her. Nobody had asked them to. They had taken a cart to the north road in the night, and it had taken them a day to find the house with the apple trees.
"I heard," said Mirel, in the doorway of the infirmary, in her flat farmwife's voice. She did not look at the king. She looked at Liora. "They said that there was a thing to be done. They said that you needed people."
"I did. I do."
"I will not hold one for him." She said it quite clearly. Behind her, Dunna made a small despairing sound, and Mirel did not turn. "I want that understood. I would sooner cut off my hand. But I will hold one for the woman who sat on a stone floor in the rain and told my husband that he was doing well."
"That's enough," said Liora, gently. "That's more than enough."
"It is only a thread."
"It isn't."
Mirel looked at her for a moment longer. Then she crossed the room, and sat down on the stool at the end of the long oak table, with her large red hands on her knees, and held them out. Tobin wound the silk on her finger himself. He did it without a word, with his tongue between his teeth. Neither of them looked at the other.
They were eleven by the end of the day.
Hesta and Tobin, and Mirel. Dunna and Garrick and Marta the cook, the two stable brothers, a footman called Oswin, and a scullery girl who had been given a pear by the second queen. Pell, who could not hold a thread, would hold the instruments. And at the table's head, with her notebook in front of her, a woman who was no longer anybody's wife.
She stood them in a ring around the oak and told them the rule.
"Nobody is forced," said Liora. "I want that understood before we go up the hill. If you wish to put down your thread, you may put it down. You may do it today. You may do it at the foot of the stone. You may do it in the middle, with the whole thing in flight, and nobody is to say a word against you. I'll not have it said that anyone was shamed." She looked round the circle. "It might hurt. I don't know how much. It might hurt a great deal, and it might not hurt at all, and I'll not pretend to you that I can say. But it's yours. It's the only thing in this whole business that nobody can take from you."
Garrick raised his pipe, with great ceremony.
"I'd like it noted," he said, "that I have given up smoking."
There was a pause. Then Dunna began to laugh, and then the scullery girl, and then the whole table, helplessly, in a long ragged peal that rang off the whitewashed vault. Liora laughed too. She put her hand over her mouth and laughed until her eyes streamed. Pell's shoulders shook. Even Mirel's mouth had begun to twitch. It was the first time that the room had been loud in a week, and it felt like a window opening.
It was not until late that evening that she found him alone.
He was sitting in the study, at the heaped desk, with a single candle burning at his elbow, and he was writing. He did not look up when she came in. He wrote for a time longer, in his small clear hand, crossing his sevens, and then he blotted the page, and folded it in thirds, and held it out to her across the desk.
"I should like you to read it," said Dravek. "I have learned that this is a thing that one asks."
She took it.
It was a will. It was short, and plain, and exact. It left the house in the western wing, with all its contents, to Hesta, for her lifetime, with the whole of the household's wages secured for fifty years. It left the physician's garden, and the white room, and the land beyond the east wall as far as the stream, to Liora Maelis, to do with as she pleased. It left a sum of money, a small one, but quite sufficient, to a boy named Tobin, in trust, to be released upon his twentieth birthday or at any earlier time that he should ask for it. And it left, in the last clause, written in a hand that had gone a little unsteady, the single sentence: *To the boy, in addition, whatever he is willing to take, and nothing that he is not.*
She read it twice. She set it down.
"You've asked me," she said.
"I have."
"Is it a thing that I'm meant to answer?"
"I would like to know whether you think it is right." He looked at his hands. "I did not wish to do it without you. I have done a great many things without you. I should like to do this one together."
She came around the desk. She sat on the edge of it, facing him, and took the pen from his fingers, and set it down. She did not say that he would not need it. She would not insult him with that.
"It's right," she said. "Except for one clause."
"Which?"
"The garden. I'd like to share it." She smiled. "I'd like to leave half of it to Tobin. He grows better poppies than I do."
He did not answer. His throat worked. He bent his head, and she laid her palm against his hair, and they stayed that way for a little while, in the candlelight, with the scratch of the pen and the long shadow of the keep.
"What if I cannot let it go?" he said, at last, into her skirt.
It was very low. It was not the question of a king. It was the question of a boy at the edge of a pool.
"Then we sit with it," said Liora.
"And if that is not enough?"
"Then I'll put down the needle, and sit with you until it is." She stroked his hair. "I won't cut what you haven't given. I'll never take it from you, Dravek. Not for the Pact, and not for the kingdom, and not for the whole of the north. It has to be yours to open your hand. That's the only way that it works. That's the only way that anything ever has."
He lifted his face. His eyes were wet, and clear, and very tired.
"Then I think that I can," he said.
They left at first light.
There was mist on the causeway, and the lake lay behind them like a sheet of pewter, and every window in Cinderhold stood open to the dawn. The household had turned out to see them go. They stood in rows on the steps, in their gray and black, forty strong, with their hands folded and their heads up, and nobody spoke. Dunna wept. A footman bowed, very low, and did not rise until the last of the party had gone through the gate.
They went on foot, in a long straggling line, through the ashen forest. The old man rode the gray gelding, with his stick across his saddle. Liora walked at the head, with her satchel on her shoulder and the green leather case of needles in her hand. At her side, with a stick of his own and a footman at his elbow whom he kept trying to wave away, walked a tall thin man in a plain white shirt, looking about him at the gray trunks with the quiet attentive expression of someone who is trying to remember them.
"I shall not see this again," he said, after a while.
"The forest?"
"No. Not the forest." He stopped. He looked back, over his shoulder, down the long line of them, the housekeeper and the boy, the cook and the stable brothers and the farmwife with her shawl, the old man on the horse. "I should like to remember this. All of it. In case."
She took his hand.
Behind them, a long way back, on the flat pewter surface of the lake that the keep had been built to hide, something stirred. It was not a shape. It was not a voice. It was only a ripple, very small, spreading outward from the middle of the black water in a slow perfect ring, as though a pebble had been dropped into it from a great height. It spread to the shore. It lapped against the stones of the causeway.
It was the first time in thirteen years that the lake had moved.
You've reached the end of this chapter
They gave themselves two days, and used every hour of them.
Liora had never run a surgery before a dozen people. She had run them alone, in lamplit sickrooms, with a frightened relative holding a basin. She had never stood at the head of an oak table in a vaulted white room and told a housekeeper, a boy, a cook, a stable hand and a dying physician exactly where to put their hands. It turned out to be much the same thing. You laid the instruments out in the order of their use. You said what would happen before it happened. You told every person in the room what to do if everything went wrong, and then you told them again.
She began at dawn with the old man's tools.
They lay on a clean linen cloth in the clear light of the window: a set of curved needles in a case of worn green leather, the largest no longer than her finger; three spools of pale silk, still bright after thirteen years in a box; a pair of small silver scissors, a scalpel with a bone handle, a flat bowl of black stone for water. They had been in Edrin's satchel the day he died. Hesta had kept them. She had carried them out of a marsh cottage in the week of the funeral, wrapped in a shawl, and put them in a drawer in the keep without being able to say why. *In case,* she had said, when Liora asked. *In case somebody should be fool enough to try.*
"He cut with this," said Pell.
He had gone gray with the effort of saying it. He held up the little scalpel in his bare right hand, and it shook, and he let it rest on the cloth. His breath came in short dry pulls. Every sentence that he began at the table cost him something, and he began them all the same, one at a time, between long silences, with a stubbornness that made her want to weep.
"He cut with it once. On a dog." The ghost of a smile crossed his face. "It was a terrier, in the fen, with a growth that the Pact had touched. He said that it was a rehearsal. He did not tell me what for." He drew a ragged breath. "I could not hold the dog. I was too frightened. He held the dog and cut it himself. And the dog lived."
"What did he cut?"
"A root." His eyes closed. "It is the nearest word that I am permitted. It lies under the stitch. Below it. Where the thread goes through. Not the curse itself. The place that the curse is tied to."
She bent over Aldreth's pages, and he put his finger on a passage in the margin, a small slanting note in the old man's hand. *At the last, cut at the root, not the branch. The keeper must stand outside the line.* Beside it, in a different ink and a shakier hand, someone had added a single word. *Willing.*
"Edrin wrote that after the dog," said Pell. "I think that he had understood something. I think that it came to him all at once. He said that the root could be cut by anyone with the skill, but that it would grow back, unless the one whose root it was gave it up." The words came slowly. "Gave. Not lost. Not taken. If it is taken, it is a wound. If it is given, it is a seam."
"A seam."
"It closes. It leaves a scar. But it holds."
She wrote it down. She was filling the notebook now at the rate of a page an hour, in her small plain hand, and every line was a thing that someone had paid for. She drew the diagram that he described, the spiral, the root, the long thread between the two hollows. She drew it again, and again, until it stopped looking like a puzzle and began to look like an anatomy. It was a body. It had a heart, and a spine, and a place where the blood was supposed to go. She had never seen it whole until now. She understood, with a clear cold lurch, that it was not a curse at all. It was a wound that someone had once made on purpose, and had never been allowed to heal.
Tobin was the surprise.
She had meant to give him the easy thread. She had meant to set him at the end of the line, where the pull was lightest, and let him hold it as a gesture. She put the silk in his hand on the first morning, and showed him how to wind it twice about his forefinger and let the slack hang, and he looked at it with narrowed eyes for a full minute. Then he said, "It's not a thread. It's a breath."
"I beg your pardon?"
"It goes in and out." He lifted it. "Look. It's tight when you breathe in, and loose when you breathe out. You've got to move your hand with it. Otherwise it'll snap." He demonstrated, small and stern and absurdly sure, with the silk rising and falling on his finger. "I figured it out on the stairs. Hesta was holding hers too tight."
"I was holding it," said Hesta, stiffly, "as one holds a thing that one has been told is valuable."
"That's why it was going to snap."
Liora stared at him. She had been taught the stitch for two years on linen and pigskin and the inside of her own arm. She had not once been told that it was a matter of breath. She had learned it by hand and by hurt. And a boy of fourteen with a burn on his wrist had worked it out in an afternoon, by watching an old woman's fingers on a stair.
"Show me again," she said.
He did. He taught the whole table. He stood at the head of it with the silk wound round his hand and showed them, one at a time, how to let the thread breathe, and the cook, who was a vast quiet woman called Marta that Liora had never heard say more than ten words, held hers as gently as a bird. The stable hands, the brothers, big red-eared young men with hands like shovels, learned it last and best. They had spent their lives gentling frightened horses. They knew about slack.
Mirel came on the second morning.
She walked up the causeway in the early light with a shawl over her head and a basket on her arm, as she had come before, and with her came Dunna, red-faced and out of breath, and Garrick, grumbling, with his pipe still unlit in his hand. They had gone to fetch her. Nobody had asked them to. They had taken a cart to the north road in the night, and it had taken them a day to find the house with the apple trees.
"I heard," said Mirel, in the doorway of the infirmary, in her flat farmwife's voice. She did not look at the king. She looked at Liora. "They said that there was a thing to be done. They said that you needed people."
"I did. I do."
"I will not hold one for him." She said it quite clearly. Behind her, Dunna made a small despairing sound, and Mirel did not turn. "I want that understood. I would sooner cut off my hand. But I will hold one for the woman who sat on a stone floor in the rain and told my husband that he was doing well."
"That's enough," said Liora, gently. "That's more than enough."
"It is only a thread."
"It isn't."
Mirel looked at her for a moment longer. Then she crossed the room, and sat down on the stool at the end of the long oak table, with her large red hands on her knees, and held them out. Tobin wound the silk on her finger himself. He did it without a word, with his tongue between his teeth. Neither of them looked at the other.
They were eleven by the end of the day.
Hesta and Tobin, and Mirel. Dunna and Garrick and Marta the cook, the two stable brothers, a footman called Oswin, and a scullery girl who had been given a pear by the second queen. Pell, who could not hold a thread, would hold the instruments. And at the table's head, with her notebook in front of her, a woman who was no longer anybody's wife.
She stood them in a ring around the oak and told them the rule.
"Nobody is forced," said Liora. "I want that understood before we go up the hill. If you wish to put down your thread, you may put it down. You may do it today. You may do it at the foot of the stone. You may do it in the middle, with the whole thing in flight, and nobody is to say a word against you. I'll not have it said that anyone was shamed." She looked round the circle. "It might hurt. I don't know how much. It might hurt a great deal, and it might not hurt at all, and I'll not pretend to you that I can say. But it's yours. It's the only thing in this whole business that nobody can take from you."
Garrick raised his pipe, with great ceremony.
"I'd like it noted," he said, "that I have given up smoking."
There was a pause. Then Dunna began to laugh, and then the scullery girl, and then the whole table, helplessly, in a long ragged peal that rang off the whitewashed vault. Liora laughed too. She put her hand over her mouth and laughed until her eyes streamed. Pell's shoulders shook. Even Mirel's mouth had begun to twitch. It was the first time that the room had been loud in a week, and it felt like a window opening.
It was not until late that evening that she found him alone.
He was sitting in the study, at the heaped desk, with a single candle burning at his elbow, and he was writing. He did not look up when she came in. He wrote for a time longer, in his small clear hand, crossing his sevens, and then he blotted the page, and folded it in thirds, and held it out to her across the desk.
"I should like you to read it," said Dravek. "I have learned that this is a thing that one asks."
She took it.
It was a will. It was short, and plain, and exact. It left the house in the western wing, with all its contents, to Hesta, for her lifetime, with the whole of the household's wages secured for fifty years. It left the physician's garden, and the white room, and the land beyond the east wall as far as the stream, to Liora Maelis, to do with as she pleased. It left a sum of money, a small one, but quite sufficient, to a boy named Tobin, in trust, to be released upon his twentieth birthday or at any earlier time that he should ask for it. And it left, in the last clause, written in a hand that had gone a little unsteady, the single sentence: *To the boy, in addition, whatever he is willing to take, and nothing that he is not.*
She read it twice. She set it down.
"You've asked me," she said.
"I have."
"Is it a thing that I'm meant to answer?"
"I would like to know whether you think it is right." He looked at his hands. "I did not wish to do it without you. I have done a great many things without you. I should like to do this one together."
She came around the desk. She sat on the edge of it, facing him, and took the pen from his fingers, and set it down. She did not say that he would not need it. She would not insult him with that.
"It's right," she said. "Except for one clause."
"Which?"
"The garden. I'd like to share it." She smiled. "I'd like to leave half of it to Tobin. He grows better poppies than I do."
He did not answer. His throat worked. He bent his head, and she laid her palm against his hair, and they stayed that way for a little while, in the candlelight, with the scratch of the pen and the long shadow of the keep.
"What if I cannot let it go?" he said, at last, into her skirt.
It was very low. It was not the question of a king. It was the question of a boy at the edge of a pool.
"Then we sit with it," said Liora.
"And if that is not enough?"
"Then I'll put down the needle, and sit with you until it is." She stroked his hair. "I won't cut what you haven't given. I'll never take it from you, Dravek. Not for the Pact, and not for the kingdom, and not for the whole of the north. It has to be yours to open your hand. That's the only way that it works. That's the only way that anything ever has."
He lifted his face. His eyes were wet, and clear, and very tired.
"Then I think that I can," he said.
They left at first light.
There was mist on the causeway, and the lake lay behind them like a sheet of pewter, and every window in Cinderhold stood open to the dawn. The household had turned out to see them go. They stood in rows on the steps, in their gray and black, forty strong, with their hands folded and their heads up, and nobody spoke. Dunna wept. A footman bowed, very low, and did not rise until the last of the party had gone through the gate.
They went on foot, in a long straggling line, through the ashen forest. The old man rode the gray gelding, with his stick across his saddle. Liora walked at the head, with her satchel on her shoulder and the green leather case of needles in her hand. At her side, with a stick of his own and a footman at his elbow whom he kept trying to wave away, walked a tall thin man in a plain white shirt, looking about him at the gray trunks with the quiet attentive expression of someone who is trying to remember them.
"I shall not see this again," he said, after a while.
"The forest?"
"No. Not the forest." He stopped. He looked back, over his shoulder, down the long line of them, the housekeeper and the boy, the cook and the stable brothers and the farmwife with her shawl, the old man on the horse. "I should like to remember this. All of it. In case."
She took his hand.
Behind them, a long way back, on the flat pewter surface of the lake that the keep had been built to hide, something stirred. It was not a shape. It was not a voice. It was only a ripple, very small, spreading outward from the middle of the black water in a slow perfect ring, as though a pebble had been dropped into it from a great height. It spread to the shore. It lapped against the stones of the causeway.
It was the first time in thirteen years that the lake had moved.
You've reached the end of this chapter