Chapter Twelve — What Was Kept

He sat down across from her.

She looked at his face for a long moment. She looked at his hands, which he had set on the table and which were not doing what hands do when they are set on a table. She looked at the place where his hair at the temples had gone the white it had been threatening all week and had now gone. She did not ask him anything yet. She let him find his breathing.

“It is done,” he said.

“Tell me.”

“House Tannath will be in Compact court by Arhen. The commission record is filed tomorrow. The Rellyn daughter is reported dead of fever, twenty years ago, at a foster-house the investigator will have on record by the end of the week. The investigator’s name is Maren Telvir. She will not come near you. She will not speak of you.”

“She believed the commission record.”

“She believed it. And she saw me wear her face across a table. She will not speak of you.”

Irela was still. She drew a slow breath.

“That is what aged you.”

“Yes.”

“You wore her face in front of her.”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“Less than a minute.”

“And the cost of that?”

“I do not know. I cannot count it. Something I did not have a word for came off with the face.”

She closed her eyes.

“Are you dying?”

“Not tonight. Probably not this year. I do not know beyond that.”

——— ◇ ———

He stood slowly from the table. He went to the closet and came back with the leather bag of Rellyn documents that he had assembled over the last four days in the evenings. He set the bag on the table between them. He did not open it. He pushed it gently across to her side.

“These are yours,” he said. “Names. Signatures. Seal marks. The redemption claim numbers are flagged. A Compact-court advocate who sees this would tell you that you have a clean claim to the Rellyn scrip. Whether you press it is yours to decide. If you press it, you will be Irela of House Rellyn, and your life will have one shape. If you do not, you will be Irela the scribe, and your life will have another shape. Both are available.”

She did not touch the bag.

“And what you want?”

“It does not matter what I want. I have no standing.”

“Tell me what you want anyway.”

He considered the question. He had prepared answers in his head across the three days of preparing the bag, and he had rejected all of them because all of them had been shapes of persuasion, and she had not asked him for persuasion. She had asked him for information.

“I want you to do what serves you,” he said. “I do not know what that is. You know what that is better than I do. I have not been able to think about it without thinking about what I want, and what I want is not relevant. So I stopped thinking about it.”

She nodded once.

She took the bag. She did not open it. She stood up, walked to the long bench, and set the bag down beside her case. She came back to the table.

——— ◇ ———

“There is something else,” he said. “Something I was going to wait and send separately.”

“What?”

“A letter to the woman who took care of you at the foster-house. Edris. I said last week I would write to her this season. I wrote it this afternoon, before I went to the meeting. In case I did not come back.”

“I want to read it.”

He took it from the inner pocket of his coat. It was not long — half a page in his small hand, folded twice. He gave it to her. She unfolded it.

She read it.

He watched her read it. He did not watch her face — he watched her hands, which was his habit when he did not want to intrude on her reading. Her index finger moved along the lines in the scribe’s habit she had carried since her second year of apprenticeship. She read it twice. Then she folded it along the same creases.

“You told her she is grown,” Irela said.

“I did.”

“You told her she has your mother’s hands.”

“I did.”

“She does not. She has Salen’s hands.”

He looked at her.

“I was writing,” he said, “as if Edris were your grandmother. As she has been, in the way that matters. She had you for four of your first years. I have written to her every season for twenty years about you. She knows everything about you that a woman at a distance can know.”

Irela held the letter. She did not give it back.

“Send it,” she said. “Add a line from me at the end. Tell her that I am glad she had me. That I am sorry I stopped asking after I was four. That I am going to write to her myself now.”

“All right.”

“I will write my line tomorrow.”

“All right.”

She set the letter on the table between them.

——— ◇ ———

The fire had gone low. He stood and put two more small pieces on it. He sat again.

“You know what I have decided,” she said.

“No.”

“I have decided to stay here.”

“All right.”

“Not because of you. Because of me. This is my house and my work and my life. I am not going to have them redrawn by anyone — including you, and including the Tannaths, and including twenty years of a thing I did not know until last week.”

“All right.”

“I am also going to decide eventually whether to press the Rellyn claim. I am not deciding that tonight. I do not know yet. I think I may not press it, because I think the person I have been becoming is not a person who has been preparing to be a Rellyn. But I do not know yet.”

“Take the time.”

“I will take the time.”

She was quiet for a long moment.

“And you,” she said. “You are going to live here with me for however long you have. You are not going to leave. You are not going to disappear into the atolls to spare me some imagined discomfort. You are going to stay in this house and be old here and drink tea at this table and let me be the one who decides what it is between us.”

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“I will stay.”

“Say the second part too.”

He understood the second part. He had not been sure she knew there was one.

“I will not decide what it is between us,” he said. “You will.”

“Good. Yes. That.”

——— ◇ ———

The first bell of the night rang outside. Karath at its deepest hour.

“I am not going to sleep tonight,” she said.

“Neither am I.”

“I think I would like to sit here.”

“All right.”

“Pour more tea.”

He poured more tea.

They sat. Neither of them spoke for a long time. He watched the lamp and she watched the documents on the long bench, and the lamp burned lower, and outside the street was quiet in the way the street got quiet at this hour.

After some time she said, without looking at him, “My mother said you are not him.”

“Yes.”

“I have been thinking about it all week.”

“Yes.”

“It is a precise thing for a pregnant woman to say in that moment. She noticed something specific. She did not think, this is not my husband in general. She thought, the thing that makes my husband himself is not here. She was thinking in categories the way I think in categories.”

“She was.”

“I think I have her way of thinking.”

“You do.”

“That is not a bad thing to have from her.”

“No.”

She looked at him finally.

“I am not going to forgive you,” she said. “I do not know whether I ever will. It may be something that does not have the shape of forgiveness in it. It may have another shape. I am going to find out what shape it has by living in the house with you. I wanted to say that clearly so neither of us is waiting for a moment that may not come.”

“I understand.”

“Good.”

“Thank you.”

“Not thank me for that. Thank me for something else.”

He thought about it.

“Thank you for reading the letter,” he said.

“You are welcome for reading the letter.”

——— ◇ ———

The dawn-bell rang.

Outside, the light was the pale that comes before the pale — not yet a colour, not quite grey. Two cups still stood on the table. The lamp had gone out an hour ago and he had not relit it. On the long bench, the documents remained where she had set them. The letter to Edris lay beside his tea.

He looked across the table at her.

She was tired the way people are tired at dawn after not sleeping, and her face was what a face is when a person has decided something and has not yet had to live with the decision. She looked back at him.

“Stay,” she said.

“For as long as I have,” he said.

She reached across the table and took his left hand, which was the hand that had not answered at the door the night before. She held it for a while.

Neither of them let go.

——— ◇ ———

END OF CHAPTER TWELVE.

END OF THE HUNDRED.