Chapter Ten — The Daughter’s Arithmetic

She came out of her room at the turn past the dawn-bell.

She was dressed the way she dressed for the master’s office. Her hair tied back. Her case on the long bench by the door, packed. She glanced at the case as she passed it, then at him, then away. He understood that she had packed the case so that she would have something to pick up and carry out when it was time. She was not going to work today. She was going somewhere.

She poured herself tea. She sat across from him in the same chair.

“I want to say the thing,” she said, “and I want you to say whether it is correct.”

“All right.”

“You were the man who killed my family.”

“Yes.”

——— ◇ ———

She did not react.

He had thought perhaps she would react. He had prepared for what his face should do if she wept, for what his voice should do if she shouted. She did neither. She sat with the tea in front of her and her hands flat on the table. She sat with the word yes that he had given her. She moved through it the way she had moved through the calculation of it yesterday — carefully, and in the order that served her.

After perhaps a minute she spoke again.

“I worked it out from the clerk’s statement,” she said.

“I know.”

“You saw my face yesterday.”

“I saw your face.”

“I almost did not want to be right. I thought for about an hour, yesterday evening, that I might be wrong. I sat with that hour for a while.”

“I am sorry.”

“Not yet. Do not say sorry yet. You do not know what I am going to ask to be sorry for.”

He said nothing.

“You wore the face of the youngest son,” she said. “You wore it because the rest of the household would admit him. Because he was overdue. Because his return late at night with a drawn face would read as him having had hard travel, and would not raise any question beyond concern.”

“Yes.”

“Teral Rellyn. My father.”

“Yes.”

“Were his death records accurate?”

“The bandits were me.”

“You killed him for the face.”

“I killed him for the face. Yes.”

She took a sip of her tea. Her hand did not shake. He watched her hand and he understood that the thing that would have made a weaker person shake was being held somewhere in her that he could not see.

“I have been trying to decide what question to ask you,” she said. “I have a lot of them. Most I can answer with the Compact record and with what you have told me. There is one I cannot answer.”

“Ask.”

“Did my mother see you?”

He did not answer at once.

He had known this question would come if she ever did the full arithmetic. He had known it would come last of the questions she would need to ask. He had not allowed himself to rehearse what he would say. Rehearsal might corrupt the answer. He had been keeping the answer for her for twenty years and he had not taken it out in that time to look at it.

“She saw me,” he said. “She saw Teral. I had not known your father had been late returning from the atolls. He was supposed to have been home a week earlier. When I came in as him, she said you are late. She said it with her hand on her belly. She was six days from delivering you. I did not know that. She had been told earlier by the household surgeon, but I did not have the surgeon’s information. I had not been close enough to the household to know she was pregnant.”

Irela had gone still.

“Say the rest,” she said.

“I went to the dining room because that was where the contract was. I did what the contract required. She was at the table. She was the —” He stopped. “She was the last of the adults who died. She was last because she had gone to the stairs when the first noise began. She came back down when she heard — she came back down. She saw me. She saw Teral. I had dropped the face partway by then. It had slipped under the — under the work. She saw me between the two faces. She did not scream. She said you are not him. Those were the last words I heard from her.”

“She said you are not him.”

“Yes.”

“She did not know who you were. She only knew you were not Teral.”

“Yes.”

Irela closed her eyes. She kept them closed for a long moment. When she opened them she had not cried. He understood that she was not going to cry here. What she was going to do with the tears — or with whatever was there instead of tears — was going to happen somewhere other than this table.

She stood.

“I am going out,” she said. “I do not know when I will be back. I do not want you to come find me. I want you to stay here and do the work for today and be here when I come back. Will you do that?”

“I will do that.”

“Thank you.”

She picked up the case from the long bench. She did not take a coat. She went out.

——— ◇ ———

He did not do the work for that day.

He sat at the table for some time after she left. Then he stood and went into the closet and looked at the bag. He did not choose a face. He closed the bag. He went back to the table.

The morning light moved across the common-room floor and he moved through it without tracking it. A runner came to the door at the turn-bell with a note from Hanno, confirming a detail about a merchant-house schedule. He read the note. He set it aside. He did not write a reply.

The noon-bell rang and the afternoon began.

He thought about her. He thought about where she might have gone. He let himself think about it because he had promised he would not go find her, and the thinking was the thing he could do instead. She would not have gone to the master’s. She would not have gone to any of her friends — she would not have brought this to anyone else. She would have gone somewhere she could sit and not be asked anything.

He thought of the wall above the Second Port.

He had walked her there since she was three years old. She had stopped there with him a thousand times. She would have gone there because it was the place where her father used to pause with her. Where he had shown her the ships. Where she could sit now and work out what the word father meant after yesterday.

He did not go to find her. He stayed at the table.

The dusk-bell rang.

Outside, the street quieted. Two doors down, a kitchen window lit. He waited.

——— ◇ ———

She came in at the turn-past-dusk-bell.

She was tired in her face and around her eyes in the way a person is tired who has not slept and has done hard thinking instead. She put the case down. She took off her coat. She sat across from him without speaking, and she poured herself tea from the fresh pot he had made at the dusk-bell in case she came home wanting tea.

She drank it.

“We finish,” she said.

“We finish.”

“You finish what you started. You get the Tannaths. You make sure that what happens to me ten years from now is my decision, not theirs. You do this clean.”

“I will.”

“When it is done, I will decide what to do with you.”

“All right.”

“I am not promising anything. I am telling you what I am going to do in the order I am going to do it.”

“I understand.”

She looked at him for a long moment.

“I am also not going to make you wait the whole time in silence,” she said. “I am going to talk to you. I am going to ask you for things. I am going to tell you what I need. The thing I have not decided is not whether to be with you in the house. It is whether to be your daughter after.”

“All right.”

“I think you should know that.”

“I do know it. Thank you.”

She finished her tea.

“Who are you wearing tomorrow?” she said.

“A Compact notary. Two hours.”

“What do you need from me?”

“A list of the redemption claim numbers. Yesterday’s batch. You had them ready last night.”

“They are on the shelf by the window. I will put them on your bag tonight.”

“Thank you.”

She stood. She took her cup to the counter. She put it down. She went to her room.

He sat at the table with his own cup until the room was fully dark.

Then he stood and went to the closet and began the work for tomorrow. Two hours of wearing was perhaps a day off the budget. He had stopped trying to estimate which day, of the days he had left, this one would have come out of.

——— ◇ ———

END OF CHAPTER TEN.