Chapter Six

Page Eleven The archive was cold and the lamp was the kind that hums, and page eleven was worse than Emeric had made it sound. I had come down at five in the morning because I had not slept. The contract copy lives in a box file on the third shelf with the timber leases, which is a thing I know now, and I put it on the table and turned to the page and read the whole clause twice before I understood it, and then a third time because understanding it was not the same as believing it. Voidance. If the transfer failed to reach a threshold by the Long Frost, the contract voided. Clean. No penalty on either side. He walked away, I walked away, and, the exact phrasing, the ledger reverts. Reverts. Not to three. I sat down. Because I had four. I had four winters since Tuesday, and everybody in that house was very pleased about it, and I had gone around for four days with a whole extra year in my chest like a stone in a pocket. But the winter that had gone into me had come out of somewhere. And if the contract voided, whatever the bond had moved went back where it came from, and I would be where I started, which was not three anymore, because three was the count on census morning and census morning was eleven days ago and the season had been running the whole time. I did the arithmetic on the back of the box file. Two. I did it again with a pencil in case I had been stupid about it. Two. If this went wrong I did not lose what I had gained. I lost the year I had gained and the year the winter had already taken, and I came out the far side of it at two. He had written a way out of this for himself and it cost me a third of everything I had left. "You're up early." Emeric was in the doorway holding two coffees. He had a coat on over a jumper and his hair was flat on one side and he looked like a man who had been standing in a cold corridor for a while, and I understood with total clarity that he had known which shelf, and which morning, and roughly which minute. "How long have you been there." "Not long." He came in and put one of the cups down beside my hand. "Long enough to watch you do the sum twice." "Three times." "Three, then." I did not touch the coffee. He sat down on the other side of the table with his hands round his own and did not say anything for a while, which was the cleverest thing he could have done. "You knew the number," I said. "I knew the clause. I didn't know your count." "You know it now." "I know you did a sum three times and then sat down," he said. "That's all I know, and I would rather you told me than that I guessed." "Two." He closed his eyes briefly. Nothing performed about it. "Ilka." "Don't." "I'm going to say something you won't like, and then I'll stop." He put the cup down. "Mark with me instead." The lamp hummed. "Same law," he said. "It doesn't specify which Vashti. If I take a Luna before the Frost the succession is settled and the pack is stable and nobody's crown falls anywhere. And I have no clause. No page eleven. There's nothing to void because there's nothing conditional in it. You'd be marked, and you'd be shielded, and you'd stop losing three a year on the first of the season like clockwork." "You'd be marrying a woman with four winters." "I'd be marrying a woman with four winters and a working transfer," he said, "which, forgive me, is more than my brother had eleven days ago." "And would it move? For us?" He looked at me steadily. "I don't know," he said. "I think it might. I think you like me more than you want to and I know I like you more than is convenient, and I would rather try it than watch you go down to two on a technicality in a document you didn't read." That is the thing I have never been able to get around. He was not lying. Every part of it was true and every part of it would have worked and he offered it at five in the morning in a cold room with a coffee he had carried down for me. And I did not say no. That is the sentence I have to put down. I did not say no immediately, I did not say no at all, I sat there in an archive with my mother's coat over my knees and let a man offer me a way out and thought about it. For maybe nine seconds. I thought about the ledgers and the two hundred and forty households and Sunna's red line down the middle of the page, and I thought about a hand on mine at a dinner table for two hours, and underneath all of it I thought: two. "I have to go," I said. "That isn't a no." "I know it isn't." "Good," he said, and he stood up and left the coffee on the table for me, and that was somehow worse than if he had pushed. I found Ivar in the yard at seven with the road crews. He was in the middle of eleven men with a chart on the bonnet of a truck and I did not wait, I walked in among them and said his name once, and he looked at my face and told them to give him ten minutes. We went into the tack room because it was the nearest door. "Page eleven," I said. "Yes." "You confirm it." "I wrote it." "It puts me at two." "I know what it puts you at," he said. And I hit the wall with the flat of my hand, which I have never done in my life, and it hurt, and I did it anyway. "Then say something. Apologise or explain it or tell me it was a mistake, do anything at all except stand there and confirm it like a man reading a weather report." "I won't apologise for it." "Why." "Because I meant it when I wrote it and I will not pretend otherwise to make this easier." He had not moved from the door. "You want the explanation. Fine. When I had that drawn up I had not met you. You were a name Marek gave me and a number, and I was buying a stranger, and a stranger who is being bought needs to be able to get out. If it did not work between us, if you could not stand me, if you looked at me in three weeks and wanted to be anywhere else, then you would be legally bound to a man you could not bear and losing years to a bond that would not carry. So I wrote a door." "You wrote a door that costs me a year." "I wrote a door that costs you a year instead of ten. Yes." "You could have told me that at two in the morning." "Yes," he said. "I could have." "Then why didn't you." He was quiet for long enough that I heard the men outside laughing at something. "Because I did not expect to want you," he said. "And by the time I did it was in the document, and taking it out would have meant explaining why I was taking it out, and I was not going to stand in front of you and say that out loud eleven days into a contract you signed because you had nowhere else to go." That is the most he had said to me at once, before or since. "Emeric offered to mark me," I said. He did not flinch. He went very still, which with him is the same thing. "When." "Two hours ago. In the archive. He'd been waiting for me to find the clause." I made myself keep going. "No page eleven. No condition. It would work and he knows it would work and he was not lying to me about any part of it." "And?" "And I didn't say no." The tack room smelled of leather and cold iron. Outside somebody started an engine. "Are you leaving," he said. "Not yet." He breathed out. That was all he did. One breath, through the nose, and his shoulders came down about half an inch, and it was over in a second and a half. But I had been in a room with that man for eleven days and I had never once seen him do anything he had not decided to do first, and he had been holding that since the census hall, and I watched it come out of him and I could not speak. Then he put his hand out. Not to me. Past me, to the wall, flat, next to my head, and he leaned on it and put his forehead down against my shoulder and stood there. I did not move. "Marek," he said, into my coat. "What?" "Get Marek." "Ivar." "I'm going to let him count me," he said. "Now, this morning, in front of you, and then you'll have the whole thing and you can decide what you want to do with it. Go and get him." And I went out into the yard to find the Reader, and I was almost at the gatehouse when I saw the door standing open, and the chair on its side, and Marek's coat still on the hook. He was gone. Everything else was there. His book was on the table with the census still in it and his pipe beside it and the fire an hour dead. And on the open page, in a hand that had gone through the paper in two places, one line. Ask your mother who signed for you.