Day 4 / 100
Ione did not sleep.
She lay on her back in the gray cave with her blanket drawn up to her chin and looked at her right hand held up against the rock, turning it this way and that in the low light of the banked coals. It was an ordinary hand. The knuckles were chapped. There was a long scrape across the heel of it where the barnacles had taken the skin. The old indigo ran in the creases like ink in the cracks of a plate.
She had seen that hand blue.
Not only that hand. The cord, the rock, the sea, the sky, the woman's bright, astonished face, all of it blue and gold and green, the world as it had been when she was a girl and had thought it would never be anything else. She had held her breath for the length of it. And when it was gone she had held her breath for the length of the day, and now, in the dead middle of the night, it was still there in her chest like a stone she had swallowed.
It had not been joy. She wanted to be clear with herself about that. It had been something enormous and ungovernable that sat on the same shelf as joy and looked a good deal like it, and underneath it, quite distinct, had been the cold flat voice that said: *Tamsin is not here to see this.*
She turned over. She turned back.
Her ledger mind, the one that had gotten her through five winters, sat down with the facts and set them out in a row. Item: the colors had come when Wynne's hand closed on her wrist. Item: the colors had gone when the hand let go. Item: it had not been the cord, because the cord had been on her arm all along, and she had seen nothing in two days. Item: it had not been the fall, because she had fallen before and seen no more than gray. Item: she did not know what else it could be.
The obvious next entry was a test. Ione did not like to leave an entry blank.
Across the cave, Wynne was sitting up with her back to the wall, her knees drawn in, keeping the watch. She had not stirred in some time. Her eyes were open, and she was looking at the fog beyond the cave mouth as though it were a book she had read before and was reading again for the ending.
"You should sleep," Wynne said, without looking round.
"So should you."
"I'm on watch."
"The watch will survive without you for ten minutes." Ione sat up. She had meant to say it differently. She drew the blanket around her shoulders and set her hands flat on her knees, the way she did when she was about to negotiate a price. "I'd like to propose a trial."
* * *
"A trial," Wynne repeated.
"Yesterday, when you took my wrist, I saw color." She said it flatly, the way she would have read a line from a bill of sale. "I saw it for as long as you held on. I haven't seen it since, not once, in five years. I'd like to know whether it was the contact or something else. I'd like to repeat it under controlled conditions. With your agreement."
A beat passed. The coals ticked. Wynne turned her head slowly, and her face in the half dark was a pale, careful oval with the light caught in her eyes.
"With my agreement," she said.
"I'm not going to take your hand without asking." It came out sounding stiffer than she intended, because she had never in her life had to ask anyone for anything that mattered. "I'm asking."
"You want to hold my hand. As an experiment."
"That's how I'd phrase it."
Wynne laughed. It was a short, startled thing, quite unlike her public laugh, and it seemed to take her by surprise. Then she put the back of her wrist to her mouth and looked away at the fog and said, behind it, in a voice that was almost normal, "Forgive me. I've been propositioned in a good many ways in a good many taverns. Never with the word *trial*."
Heat rushed up Ione's neck. "It isn't a proposition."
"I know. I know it isn't." Wynne wiped the corner of her eye with a knuckle and, when she looked up again, her expression was as open and merry as a window with the shutters flung back. It was a very good expression. Ione had been looking at it for four days and could not find the seam. "Of course. Why not. For science."
She held out her right hand across the dim space between them, palm up, fingers a little curled, and waited.
Ione looked at it for a long moment.
It was a lovely hand. She had not let herself notice that before. Long fingers, calloused at the base from years of rope. A scar running across the knuckles that had healed to a thin silver line. And past the second knuckle, a paleness that started at the first joint and faded to something close to glass.
She laid her palm in it.
* * *
The cave bloomed.
It was not the great blaze of the day before. It was gentler, a slow swell, like a tide coming in over flat sand. Color crept up the walls: a dull, soft moss-green on the stone, patches of pewter and rust, a drift of tiny pink and violet lichen she had never noticed. The coals at the cave mouth turned the dull orange of a burning leaf, and then, as she watched, to a deep, brilliant gold. The fog beyond them was lit from the inside like a lamp. Everything glowed.
And under her hand, Wynne's palm.
She had thought it would feel like touching a stranger. It was not like that. It was cold, a dry, steady, hollow cold, like a stone taken out of a stream, and yet beneath the cold she could feel the pulse in the woman's wrist beating slow and strong, and the whole hand lay in hers with a dreadful trust. Its color was a warm sand-brown, scattered with freckles. A thin pale ring circled the wrist where the cuff had slipped, bone-white against the gold, and it was far wider than it ought to have been.
Ione's breath caught in her throat. She did not close her eyes this time. She did not look away. She looked, deliberately, at every single thing, the moss and the gold and the grain of the stone, and she let it break over her like water, and she held on to the hand like a lifeline.
"Well?" said Wynne softly. "Does it work?"
"Yes." It was barely a voice. "It's the contact. It's you."
"Me."
"I don't know why."
"No," Wynne said. "I don't think anyone does."
She was smiling, but her smile had gone strangely vague, like a face seen through a pane of wet glass. She had gone very still. And the longer Ione held on, the colder her hand grew, and the lighter, and the more transparent. Ione felt it with her whole skin: a slow draining chill running out of the woman's palm and into her own, as though she were holding a cup of water and the water were being poured away. The freckles on the back of Wynne's hand were going pale. The sand-brown color of her skin faded toward ivory. Around the wrist the bone-white ring crept a little higher, a quarter of an inch, no more.
Ione looked at it. She understood, in one cold flash, what she was looking at.
Wynne pulled her hand away.
She did it fast, much too fast, with a quick light laugh and a little shake of the wrist, as though she had touched something hot. The color went out of the cave like a sigh. The gray rushed in. Ione sat with her palm still held out in the air, her fingers empty, her heart pounding.
"That's quite enough science for one evening," said Wynne. "I'm not as young as I look." She tucked her hand deep into her sleeve and smiled across the dark. "Satisfied, Miss Calder?"
Ione took a long time to answer.
"No," she said.
* * *
She did not say what she was thinking. She was not certain she could have put it in words if she had tried. She sat in the cold gray with her blanket around her shoulders and her hands in her lap, and she thought about a woman's palm going pale in hers, about the sudden fumbling speed of the withdrawal, about a smile that had arrived half a beat too late. She thought about the contract in her coat.
She reached into the coat, drew out the folded paper, and smoothed it flat on her knee.
"I'd like to amend the terms."
"Oh, no," said Wynne. "Here it comes."
"A new clause. Any injury sustained in the course of the journey, by either party, is to be reported to the other as soon as it is noticed." Her voice was perfectly level. She did not look up from the page. "Any. Not only the ones that bleed. Any change in condition that affects the work."
A silence fell. Out in the fog, a long way off, something made a low, wet sound, like a heavy cloth being dragged over stone.
Wynne said, mildly, "That's very thorough."
"I'm a thorough person."
"I've noticed." She did not move. In the gray light, Ione could not read her at all: only a pale outline, a shape against the dark, very straight. "And if I say that I am perfectly well, and have been since the day I was born, and that the clause is unnecessary?"
"Then you'll have no trouble signing it."
A breath, half a laugh. "Cruel."
"Accurate."
Wynne held out her hand for the pen. Ione had it ready. She laid the paper against her own knee to make a desk, and Wynne leaned across and wrote beneath the old signature in her large, looping, unnecessary hand, a flourish that tailed off into the margin. *Of course.* She underlined it. It had the air of a very good performance.
Ione read it twice. Then she folded the paper along its creases and put it away, and she did not say what she knew, which was that the woman who had just signed it was going to break it, and that she would have to watch for the breaking.
"One more thing," she said.
"There's always one more thing."
"If this is what it looks like." She did not look at the hand in the sleeve. She looked at the middle of the fog beyond the cave. "If it costs you something, and I've a feeling it may. I'll pay double."
"Ione."
"It's not charity. It's an adjustment to the price."
"Ione," said Wynne again, quietly. "Look at me."
She did.
The woman was sitting very straight in the gloom with her sleeve drawn down and the lamplight lying in a thin gold line across her cheekbone. The smile had gone. In its place was something Ione had not seen on her face before: a long, still, searching look, as if she were reading a letter in a language she had once known and had half forgotten. It lasted a very long time. It was, Ione thought, the first completely unguarded thing she had ever seen Wynne Harrowgate do, and it was gone almost before she could name it.
"Double," said Wynne.
"Yes."
"Without conditions."
"I've told you. I don't ask what you can't answer."
The smile came back, slowly, carefully, like a lamp being lit by a hand that was not quite steady. "Then I accept, Miss Calder. With considerable pleasure. And I'll do my best to be worth it."
It was only afterward, lying awake with her face to the stone, that Ione realized she had not heard the word *thanks*, and that she had not wanted to.
* * *
Wynne kept the watch alone until the dawn.
She sat at the mouth of the cave with her back to the stone and her knees drawn up, and the gray fog moved in slow coils before her, and she did not look at it. When she was certain the Calder girl was asleep, she slid her left sleeve up to the elbow and laid her bare wrist across her knee.
She took out the thread. She laid it against the band of white. She did not need to. She could feel the answer in her bones. It had been two fingers' width for two years. This evening it had been two fingers and a half. Tonight it was nearly three.
She breathed out slowly. Then she pressed her right thumb against the inside of the pale wrist, hard, over the pulse, as if she could push the color back into it, and began, silently, to count. One. Two. Three. She counted the way she had learned as a girl, to hold a mind in a body that wanted to slip. She counted her steps, though she was sitting still, because it was the only prayer she had ever had.
*She asked,* she thought. She turned the thought over like a coin. *She asked first. She said please. She didn't say please, but she asked.* She had not been asked for anything in a very long time. She had been told, and she had been thanked, and she had been pitied in rooms where she was not supposed to hear it. But nobody had held out a hand and said, in a stiff voice, with a face like a shut door: *with your agreement.*
*It's going to cost her,* Wynne thought. *And I let her do it.*
She pulled her sleeve down. She pinned the cuff.
And she smiled, in the dark, at no one, because it was a habit and the habit was all she had left.
When the light came up, thin and white and without a single color in it, Ione woke to find the line between them lying slack in the gravel and Wynne already on her feet, packing the tin cups with a clatter, humming. Far out in the fog, a long way ahead, there was a small steady glow, yellow as a lantern, hanging in the white.
"Is that a light?" Ione said.
"The first waystation." Wynne slung the pack onto her shoulder and turned, bright and brisk, with the dawn on her face. "Roof, hearth, hot food, and an innkeeper who will want to know everything about you. Don't tell her anything." She gave the cord a quick tug. "Come on, Miss Calder. Let's go and be paid for."
You've reached the end of this chapter
Day 4 / 100
Ione did not sleep.
She lay on her back in the gray cave with her blanket drawn up to her chin and looked at her right hand held up against the rock, turning it this way and that in the low light of the banked coals. It was an ordinary hand. The knuckles were chapped. There was a long scrape across the heel of it where the barnacles had taken the skin. The old indigo ran in the creases like ink in the cracks of a plate.
She had seen that hand blue.
Not only that hand. The cord, the rock, the sea, the sky, the woman's bright, astonished face, all of it blue and gold and green, the world as it had been when she was a girl and had thought it would never be anything else. She had held her breath for the length of it. And when it was gone she had held her breath for the length of the day, and now, in the dead middle of the night, it was still there in her chest like a stone she had swallowed.
It had not been joy. She wanted to be clear with herself about that. It had been something enormous and ungovernable that sat on the same shelf as joy and looked a good deal like it, and underneath it, quite distinct, had been the cold flat voice that said: *Tamsin is not here to see this.*
She turned over. She turned back.
Her ledger mind, the one that had gotten her through five winters, sat down with the facts and set them out in a row. Item: the colors had come when Wynne's hand closed on her wrist. Item: the colors had gone when the hand let go. Item: it had not been the cord, because the cord had been on her arm all along, and she had seen nothing in two days. Item: it had not been the fall, because she had fallen before and seen no more than gray. Item: she did not know what else it could be.
The obvious next entry was a test. Ione did not like to leave an entry blank.
Across the cave, Wynne was sitting up with her back to the wall, her knees drawn in, keeping the watch. She had not stirred in some time. Her eyes were open, and she was looking at the fog beyond the cave mouth as though it were a book she had read before and was reading again for the ending.
"You should sleep," Wynne said, without looking round.
"So should you."
"I'm on watch."
"The watch will survive without you for ten minutes." Ione sat up. She had meant to say it differently. She drew the blanket around her shoulders and set her hands flat on her knees, the way she did when she was about to negotiate a price. "I'd like to propose a trial."
* * *
"A trial," Wynne repeated.
"Yesterday, when you took my wrist, I saw color." She said it flatly, the way she would have read a line from a bill of sale. "I saw it for as long as you held on. I haven't seen it since, not once, in five years. I'd like to know whether it was the contact or something else. I'd like to repeat it under controlled conditions. With your agreement."
A beat passed. The coals ticked. Wynne turned her head slowly, and her face in the half dark was a pale, careful oval with the light caught in her eyes.
"With my agreement," she said.
"I'm not going to take your hand without asking." It came out sounding stiffer than she intended, because she had never in her life had to ask anyone for anything that mattered. "I'm asking."
"You want to hold my hand. As an experiment."
"That's how I'd phrase it."
Wynne laughed. It was a short, startled thing, quite unlike her public laugh, and it seemed to take her by surprise. Then she put the back of her wrist to her mouth and looked away at the fog and said, behind it, in a voice that was almost normal, "Forgive me. I've been propositioned in a good many ways in a good many taverns. Never with the word *trial*."
Heat rushed up Ione's neck. "It isn't a proposition."
"I know. I know it isn't." Wynne wiped the corner of her eye with a knuckle and, when she looked up again, her expression was as open and merry as a window with the shutters flung back. It was a very good expression. Ione had been looking at it for four days and could not find the seam. "Of course. Why not. For science."
She held out her right hand across the dim space between them, palm up, fingers a little curled, and waited.
Ione looked at it for a long moment.
It was a lovely hand. She had not let herself notice that before. Long fingers, calloused at the base from years of rope. A scar running across the knuckles that had healed to a thin silver line. And past the second knuckle, a paleness that started at the first joint and faded to something close to glass.
She laid her palm in it.
* * *
The cave bloomed.
It was not the great blaze of the day before. It was gentler, a slow swell, like a tide coming in over flat sand. Color crept up the walls: a dull, soft moss-green on the stone, patches of pewter and rust, a drift of tiny pink and violet lichen she had never noticed. The coals at the cave mouth turned the dull orange of a burning leaf, and then, as she watched, to a deep, brilliant gold. The fog beyond them was lit from the inside like a lamp. Everything glowed.
And under her hand, Wynne's palm.
She had thought it would feel like touching a stranger. It was not like that. It was cold, a dry, steady, hollow cold, like a stone taken out of a stream, and yet beneath the cold she could feel the pulse in the woman's wrist beating slow and strong, and the whole hand lay in hers with a dreadful trust. Its color was a warm sand-brown, scattered with freckles. A thin pale ring circled the wrist where the cuff had slipped, bone-white against the gold, and it was far wider than it ought to have been.
Ione's breath caught in her throat. She did not close her eyes this time. She did not look away. She looked, deliberately, at every single thing, the moss and the gold and the grain of the stone, and she let it break over her like water, and she held on to the hand like a lifeline.
"Well?" said Wynne softly. "Does it work?"
"Yes." It was barely a voice. "It's the contact. It's you."
"Me."
"I don't know why."
"No," Wynne said. "I don't think anyone does."
She was smiling, but her smile had gone strangely vague, like a face seen through a pane of wet glass. She had gone very still. And the longer Ione held on, the colder her hand grew, and the lighter, and the more transparent. Ione felt it with her whole skin: a slow draining chill running out of the woman's palm and into her own, as though she were holding a cup of water and the water were being poured away. The freckles on the back of Wynne's hand were going pale. The sand-brown color of her skin faded toward ivory. Around the wrist the bone-white ring crept a little higher, a quarter of an inch, no more.
Ione looked at it. She understood, in one cold flash, what she was looking at.
Wynne pulled her hand away.
She did it fast, much too fast, with a quick light laugh and a little shake of the wrist, as though she had touched something hot. The color went out of the cave like a sigh. The gray rushed in. Ione sat with her palm still held out in the air, her fingers empty, her heart pounding.
"That's quite enough science for one evening," said Wynne. "I'm not as young as I look." She tucked her hand deep into her sleeve and smiled across the dark. "Satisfied, Miss Calder?"
Ione took a long time to answer.
"No," she said.
* * *
She did not say what she was thinking. She was not certain she could have put it in words if she had tried. She sat in the cold gray with her blanket around her shoulders and her hands in her lap, and she thought about a woman's palm going pale in hers, about the sudden fumbling speed of the withdrawal, about a smile that had arrived half a beat too late. She thought about the contract in her coat.
She reached into the coat, drew out the folded paper, and smoothed it flat on her knee.
"I'd like to amend the terms."
"Oh, no," said Wynne. "Here it comes."
"A new clause. Any injury sustained in the course of the journey, by either party, is to be reported to the other as soon as it is noticed." Her voice was perfectly level. She did not look up from the page. "Any. Not only the ones that bleed. Any change in condition that affects the work."
A silence fell. Out in the fog, a long way off, something made a low, wet sound, like a heavy cloth being dragged over stone.
Wynne said, mildly, "That's very thorough."
"I'm a thorough person."
"I've noticed." She did not move. In the gray light, Ione could not read her at all: only a pale outline, a shape against the dark, very straight. "And if I say that I am perfectly well, and have been since the day I was born, and that the clause is unnecessary?"
"Then you'll have no trouble signing it."
A breath, half a laugh. "Cruel."
"Accurate."
Wynne held out her hand for the pen. Ione had it ready. She laid the paper against her own knee to make a desk, and Wynne leaned across and wrote beneath the old signature in her large, looping, unnecessary hand, a flourish that tailed off into the margin. *Of course.* She underlined it. It had the air of a very good performance.
Ione read it twice. Then she folded the paper along its creases and put it away, and she did not say what she knew, which was that the woman who had just signed it was going to break it, and that she would have to watch for the breaking.
"One more thing," she said.
"There's always one more thing."
"If this is what it looks like." She did not look at the hand in the sleeve. She looked at the middle of the fog beyond the cave. "If it costs you something, and I've a feeling it may. I'll pay double."
"Ione."
"It's not charity. It's an adjustment to the price."
"Ione," said Wynne again, quietly. "Look at me."
She did.
The woman was sitting very straight in the gloom with her sleeve drawn down and the lamplight lying in a thin gold line across her cheekbone. The smile had gone. In its place was something Ione had not seen on her face before: a long, still, searching look, as if she were reading a letter in a language she had once known and had half forgotten. It lasted a very long time. It was, Ione thought, the first completely unguarded thing she had ever seen Wynne Harrowgate do, and it was gone almost before she could name it.
"Double," said Wynne.
"Yes."
"Without conditions."
"I've told you. I don't ask what you can't answer."
The smile came back, slowly, carefully, like a lamp being lit by a hand that was not quite steady. "Then I accept, Miss Calder. With considerable pleasure. And I'll do my best to be worth it."
It was only afterward, lying awake with her face to the stone, that Ione realized she had not heard the word *thanks*, and that she had not wanted to.
* * *
Wynne kept the watch alone until the dawn.
She sat at the mouth of the cave with her back to the stone and her knees drawn up, and the gray fog moved in slow coils before her, and she did not look at it. When she was certain the Calder girl was asleep, she slid her left sleeve up to the elbow and laid her bare wrist across her knee.
She took out the thread. She laid it against the band of white. She did not need to. She could feel the answer in her bones. It had been two fingers' width for two years. This evening it had been two fingers and a half. Tonight it was nearly three.
She breathed out slowly. Then she pressed her right thumb against the inside of the pale wrist, hard, over the pulse, as if she could push the color back into it, and began, silently, to count. One. Two. Three. She counted the way she had learned as a girl, to hold a mind in a body that wanted to slip. She counted her steps, though she was sitting still, because it was the only prayer she had ever had.
*She asked,* she thought. She turned the thought over like a coin. *She asked first. She said please. She didn't say please, but she asked.* She had not been asked for anything in a very long time. She had been told, and she had been thanked, and she had been pitied in rooms where she was not supposed to hear it. But nobody had held out a hand and said, in a stiff voice, with a face like a shut door: *with your agreement.*
*It's going to cost her,* Wynne thought. *And I let her do it.*
She pulled her sleeve down. She pinned the cuff.
And she smiled, in the dark, at no one, because it was a habit and the habit was all she had left.
When the light came up, thin and white and without a single color in it, Ione woke to find the line between them lying slack in the gravel and Wynne already on her feet, packing the tin cups with a clatter, humming. Far out in the fog, a long way ahead, there was a small steady glow, yellow as a lantern, hanging in the white.
"Is that a light?" Ione said.
"The first waystation." Wynne slung the pack onto her shoulder and turned, bright and brisk, with the dawn on her face. "Roof, hearth, hot food, and an innkeeper who will want to know everything about you. Don't tell her anything." She gave the cord a quick tug. "Come on, Miss Calder. Let's go and be paid for."
You've reached the end of this chapter