第13章 Half a Truth

She asked him, that evening, at the wall, and this time she asked it the way Ilsabeth had told her to ask it, plainly and with the price named first. What does the Keeper pay when the heir is confirmed. He was lighting the lamp and his hand stopped over the wick and the match burned down toward his fingers and he did not seem to notice. Who told you to ask that, he said. No one in this house can tell me anything, she said. You have all made sure of that. So I am asking you, because you are the one who has to see that I do it, and a man who has to see a thing done should be made to say what it costs. What does the Keeper pay. He lit the lamp and set it down and stood with his back to the wall of doors for a long moment, and then he told her, and the telling came out of him slowly, in pieces, like water out of a cracked jug, and by the end of it she understood why he had carried it so quietly for so long, and why Ilsabeth had stayed sane in a shut room waiting for someone to come up the hill. This is what the Confirming is, he said. When the blood of the house fails, the house takes a bride from outside. The bride and the Keeper are bound for a year, and at the winter turning the house acknowledges its heir, and the heir is the child of the binding, and the name of the house goes on. That is the story the village knows and the story Honoria tells. That is the first half. And the second half, Romilly said. Is in the book, he said. The book bound in black. It has been in this house three hundred years and it says this. When the heir is confirmed, the Keeper is released. That is the word it uses. Released. And in the old tongue of the house the word for released and the word for returned are the same word, and the book means returned, and what the Keeper is returned to is the sea. She looked at the numbered doors in the wall, twenty-seven of them, and she thought of a man who kept his dead below the waterline and a house that had believed for three hundred years that the sea takes back what the land gives, and she said, You are telling me that to confirm the child is to kill you. I am telling you what the book says, he said. Whether it is true I do not know. I have never seen it done. The last Keeper before me never confirmed his heir and died old, and the Keeper before him the same, and back up the line there are three Keepers who confirmed their heirs and all three were found in the water within the year. That is the record. The house does not call it murder. The house calls it the account. He looked at her, and the lamplight made him young and tired and ordinary, and she hated the ordinariness of it, because it made the whole thing real. Eleven years ago the last bride came. She was raised for this the way they raise girls for it now, on a debt and a contract and a promise, and she gave the house a child, and then she found the book, and then she did the one thing no bride had done. She tried to leave, Romilly said. She tried to take the child and go, he said. She got as far as the crossing. Honoria's men brought her back, and Honoria told the village she had drowned, and she has been in the west wing since, and I have been the Keeper who could not finish, and Merisel has been the heir the house will not acknowledge, and the account has gone on being paid a little every night in salt and in me, and it will go on until one of two things happens. Either the child is confirmed, which the book says takes me, or Honoria dies, which would leave no one who can confirm at all, which the book does not cover, and a house with a rule the book does not cover is a house that will tear itself apart to find one. Romilly stood very still. And I am the bride of the third option, she said. The one who finishes it without the killing. He did not answer, which was an answer. She crossed the room to him, which she had never done, and stood close enough to see the salt dried in the cuff of his sleeve and the line along his jaw and the way his breath came, which was still not quite right. Then why bring me here at all, she said. If you believe the book, and the book says I am the instrument of your death, then why bring me here and marry me and bind me to the cloth and stand beside me at the wall. You could have refused. You told me once you argued against it and lost, and I did not ask you the right question then. So I am asking it now. Who did you lose to, and why did you let them win. He looked at her for a long moment, and then he reached out and, very carefully, took her hand, which he had never once done in all the weeks, and his hand was cold and steady now, and he turned it so that her palm lay open in his and he looked down at it as if it were a page he had been asked to read aloud. Because Merisel is seven, he said, and in five years she will be twelve, and when she is twelve she will be old enough for the house to marry her to the next Keeper, and the next Keeper will be a Withergrave cousin I have never met who will come up this hill for the money, and I will be dead or gone, and there will be no one left who remembers what the book says except Honoria. He closed her fingers gently over his. I let them win because I did not know what else to do, and then a woman walked up the eastern rise in a grey dress with a mended cuff and stood at my gate and did not turn around, and I began to think that there might be an option the book does not cover after all. The lamp made small shadows of the folds in his coat and of the salt dried at his cuff, and she looked at him and did not look away, and for the first time since the day she had stood at his gate she let herself see everything that stood in front of her. A man who had been given to a house at eight years old and had paid it out of his skin ever since. A man who had watched a bride he was bound to be kept in a room for seven years and had not been able to get her out. A man who had known every rule of this house and broken none of them, and had chosen to let a woman walk up the hill toward him knowing that she was the last piece of the house's arithmetic and that he was the number the house meant to spend. She did not forgive him for it. She was not ready to. But she stopped, that night, believing that he had wanted it. Romilly stood in the low room with her hand in his and the tide pressing at the stones and the twenty-seven doors behind them, and she thought about a book she had not read and a room she had been forbidden to enter and a rule that had been keeping her out of it since the first morning, and she said, Then we are going to have to open the Room of Years. ---