Chapter Three

Nine Seconds There was a Reader in the next room and the door was open, which was not doing anything for the mood. "Three rules," I said. "Go on." "No lying. If you can't say it, say nothing, but don't hand me something you made up on the way in." "Agreed." "No flattery. I've been dying in public since I was nine, I know exactly what my face does, and if you tell me anything about my eyes I will walk out of this house." "Agreed." "And no pretending." I had my arms crossed. I had not sat down. "If it isn't there, it isn't there, and we say so and we stop. I'm not spending the next eleven weeks performing at you and calling it a marriage." He thought about that one. "Agreed," he said. "You could have argued." "With which part." I did not have an answer, and he did not push it, and that was the first thing that unsettled me. So we tried. I want to be accurate about this because it was one of the worst quarter hours of my life. We sat on two chairs turned to face each other like people waiting for a train. He put his hand out and I put mine in it. We looked at each other. Somewhere down the corridor a clock was doing its work. "This is horrible," I said. "Yes." "You're supposed to disagree." "You banned lying." I got up and walked to the window and back and sat down again and we did it a second time, and it was worse, because now we both knew what it felt like. "Stop," I said. "Stop, stop. This is a man holding a woman's hand in a cold room at somebody else's request. There is nothing in here. Marek could come in and count me right now and it would be three winters and a headache." He let go. He sat back, and he looked at the fire for a while, and I watched the whole thing go through him. He was going to lose his pack in eleven weeks and the only instrument available to him was a woman who could not stand the sight of the process. "I'll say something true," he said. "You don't have to." "You made the rule." "I made the rule about not lying, not about volunteering." "My father sold nine people the year I turned twelve," he said. I stopped. "Sold." "Their winters. He had a Reader who would take a count and a set of families who were behind on rent, and he built the east wing with it." He said it to the fire, not to me. "I ate in that wing every day for twenty years. I sat at that table and I was polite. And then he died and I inherited it and I have not been able to work out, in eleven years, how to be a man who is not doing arithmetic on people. Which is the reason you are in that chair." The room was very quiet. "That's the worst apology I've ever heard," I said. "It wasn't one." "No," I said. "It wasn't." And something moved. Not much. A pull, low down, like a door opening somewhere else in a house and the air changing in a room you are standing in. It was gone before I could get a hand on it and I sat there with my heart going and said nothing at all. He did not seem to notice. Or he did and he had the sense not to say so. "Your turn," I said, to get out of it. "No. Mine. I'll give you one." "You don't have to." "I made the rule." I have told that story perhaps four times in my life and I have never once told it well, and I told it badly then. "I was nine. First census. You go in with your mother and you hold her hand and it's meant to be nothing, it's a formality, it's twenty seconds and then there's a sweet from a bowl on the way out. And Marek put his fingers under my jaw and I remember he had a scarf on and it smelled of pipes, and he counted me, and then he did the thing where he takes his hand away too fast." I was looking at the fire, same as him. "And my mother said, say it again. And he said it again. And she asked him to say it a third time and he wouldn't. And she took me out of the hall and we walked home the long way and she never said anything about it, and I got no sweet." "How many." "Nine winters is what he said. And I lost three that year, and three the next, and by the time I was eleven the town had done the sums and given me a name for it." "Short Count Brennan," he said. "You've heard it." "Twice this week." "Then you know it isn't an insult," I said. "That's what people get wrong. Nobody's being cruel. They're just describing a thing they can see." He did not tell me it was untrue. He did not tell me they were wrong about me. He did not reach over and do anything with my hand. He just did not look away. For a long time. And there it was again, the pull, longer this time, and I did the maths in my head about whether the door to the next room was open and how loudly I had been breathing. Marek knocked. We came apart like two people who had been doing something, which we had not, which made it worse. "Sit," he said. I sat. Fingers under the jaw. He breathed in. He held it longer than he ever has. I could see the top of his head and the place where his hair has gone. And he made a small sound, and put his other hand on my shoulder as though I might get up, and took another breath, and then stood back and looked at me in a way I did not care for at all. "Three winters," he said. "Right." "Three winters," he said again, more slowly. "You've said it twice." "Get some sleep, girl." He went out and Ivar went after him, and I sat in the chair with my hands in my lap and did not move. Here is what I have since worked out about that night, and I put it down now because it is the only honest place for it. Marek could not count what he was looking for. A ledger tells you a number. It does not tell you a direction. But a Reader with forty years in his hands can feel when a count is about to shift, the way you can feel a fever coming a day before it arrives, and what he felt under my jaw that night was movement. Something in me had leaned toward that man in the chair, and Marek had smelled it, and he had gone looking for the reason it had not landed anywhere. He found the reason. He did not have a word for it yet. He had four sons and none of them lived, and he had put his hands on my throat every winter since I was nine years old, and he stood in that corridor at midnight with an Alpha and made a decision I do not entirely forgive him for and understand completely. The corridor is stone. It carries. I got two words through the door. His, low, and I could not make out any of it. Then Marek, sharper, the way he talks when he is finished being talked at. "Then tell her." I sat very still. I waited for the rest of it. There was no rest of it. Two sets of footsteps going different ways, and a door somewhere at the far end of the house, and then the clock, still doing its work. Tell her. I went to bed in a room I had lived in for one day, in a house where a man had put his mouth on the back of my neck and a Reader had counted me three times in a week, and I lay there in the dark with my hands flat on the blanket. There was something about me that two men knew and I did not.