Chapter Two

The Terms I had crossed out four lines before he offered me a chair. "You can sit down." "I'm nearly finished." Two in the morning in a room with more books in it than our town has. He had put a lamp on. He had not sat down either. He was at the window with his back to me and I could see his reflection in the black glass, watching me work. Clause six. I struck it and turned the page round. "It says I present at pack functions on request. Whose request?" "Mine." "It doesn't say yours. Somebody's aunt could request me." "Nobody's aunt is going to request you." "That isn't the point." "It stays," he said. He did not explain. He came over, took the pen out of my hand, and wrote the clause back in above my crossing-out in small even letters, and handed the pen back. I want to be honest about what happened to my face when he did that. I had spent the whole walk up the hill deciding what I would refuse. Four clauses. I had them numbered. I got through one and a half. Clause nine, about where I live. Struck. Restored. Clause fourteen, about what happens to my things. "Why do you need to know what happens to my things?" "Because if it goes wrong, somebody has to know where they go." "They go to my sister." "Then write that." So I wrote it, and it was the first thing all night that went the way I wanted, and it took him about four seconds to allow it, and I understood that I had not won anything. He had simply not cared. Then I got to the one I had come for. I had a speech. I had built it on the walk. It had a structure, and it opened with the pack's own succession law, and it was going to be the best thing I had ever said out loud. "Beata," I said, and then nothing else arrived. He waited. "My sister. Bee. She gets pack standing. Her own, not through me." My voice did something I did not authorise. "Whatever happens to me it doesn't unhappen to her. That's it. That's the only thing I actually came here for. The rest of it I don't care about, you can have the rest of it, I don't care where I live." Silence in that room. The lamp buzzing. "Please," I said. I have gone over that word a great many times since. He took the paper. He read what I had written, all the way through, twice. Then he put his initials in the margin. "Done." "Just like that." "You could have opened with it." "I had a speech." "I imagine it was very good," he said, and he did not say it unkindly, which was somehow worse. I got the pen back and went to the last page, and my hand was shaking, and I put it down flat on the desk to stop it. "Page eleven," I said. His hand went still on the edge of the desk. It was small. Half a second. But I had been watching that hand all night and it stopped, and then it kept moving like it had not. "What about it." "There's a clause about the contract voiding. I want it out." "No." "You gave me my sister." "You can have anything else in the document. Not that." "Why." "No," he said. He did not explain that either. He stood with the lamp making one side of his face orange and the other side nothing, and he waited, the way he had waited in the yard while I laughed at him, like a man who has decided that silence is cheaper than lying. I should have read it. It was there under my hand and the print was perfectly clear and I could have taken forty seconds. Here is why I did not. Because I had walked up that hill with four objections and lost three of them in nine minutes. Because I had begged for the only one that mattered and got it in a way that made it a gift rather than a win. Because I had no route and no argument and it was two in the morning and I was so tired of being the reasonable one, and because forty seconds of reading would have meant standing in that room forty seconds longer being a woman who did not know what she was doing. So I signed it fast, before either of us could improve on it. He looked at the signature for a long moment. "That was quick," he said. "Do you want it back?" "No." "Then don't comment on my handwriting." Marek was outside in the hall. He had been there the whole time. That is its own kind of insult, being read at two in the morning by a man who would not look at you at ten. "It needs the mark first," he said from the doorway. "I can't count what isn't sealed." "Fine." "It's not fine, it's the back of the neck, and you'll want to move your hair." I moved my hair. Here is the thing nobody tells you. I had spent my entire adult life being handled by strangers. Marek's fingers under my jaw every winter since I was nine. Doctors. The woman at the parish office who put her hand on my arm every single time and said, and how are you, in that voice. I had been touched by half the territory and none of it had ever been for me. Ivar put his hand on my shoulder to hold me still, and I stopped being able to hear the room. He bent. His mouth went to the back of my neck, at the top of the spine, where the hair starts. It took nine seconds. I counted them because I count things, because it is what I do when I cannot do anything else, and I got to nine and it stopped and I stayed exactly where I was with my hair in my fist. Neither of us said anything for about a minute. Iron and cold water. That was what he smelled like, and I was furious about it, because it is not a thing you notice about a person you are doing business with, and because I was going to keep noticing it. "Done," Marek said. There was something wrong with his voice too. "Sit down, girl. Both of you sit down." I sat. He put his fingers under my jaw and breathed in. I watched Ivar while it happened. He had gone very still, standing by the desk with his hand flat on the wood, and for the first time since the census hall he looked like a man who wanted something. Marek let go. "Three winters," he said. Nobody spoke. "Do it again," Ivar said. "I don't need to do it again." "Do it again." Marek did it again. Longer this time. Then he sat back and rubbed his face with both hands and said, to nobody, "God help the pair of you." "Say it properly," I said. "Nothing's moved. Not a day. Not an hour." "The mark's on her," Ivar said. "You just watched me put it on her." "I know what I watched." "Then it transfers." "It doesn't transfer because it's signed." Marek looked up, and he looked old. "That's not what it runs on. It never has been. A mark opens the road, boy. It doesn't put anything on it." "Then what does." And Marek, sixty-some years of counting other people's lives, said it the way you say a thing you have said at a hundred weddings and never once had to explain. "Wanting," he said. "It moves along wanting. Real wanting, both ways, or it sits where it is." The room was very quiet. "Say that again," I said. "You heard me." "I want to hear you say it again in front of him." "It runs on desire," Marek said. "Not paper. You can sign your name a hundred times, Ilka Brennan, and if the two of you don't want each other it'll sit in your ledger and rot." I started laughing. It came up out of me the same way it had in the yard, and I could not stop it, and I sat in that chair in that beautiful room with my hair still in my fist and laughed until I had to hold on to the arm of it. Marek looked away. Ivar did not. I had lost three clauses and begged for one. I had signed a page I did not read. And I had just sold three winters to a man who could not spend a penny on me unless he meant it. "Get out, Marek," Ivar said quietly. "Alpha." "Please." The door shut. He was still standing with his hand flat on the desk. He had not moved since Marek said the word desire, and I got up out of the chair and crossed the room and stopped close enough to make it a question. "Did you know?" "Ilka." "Did you know that before I signed." I watched him. I want to be precise, because I have gone over it since. He did not look away. He did not blink wrong. He did not do any of the things a liar does. He just took one second longer than a man needs to say no. "No," he said. And we both heard it.