Chapter Six — What He Told Her

She had said all of it, tonight. He did not intend to give her all of it tonight. He intended to give her enough.

He sat at the table in the common room, in the chair nearest the door. She sat across from him, where she never sat — the chair was his, in the way the long bench was hers, and by choosing it she was telling him that tonight the room was different. She had put down a cup of tea in front of him. She had not poured one for herself. Her hands were folded on the table and he saw the slight ink-stain on the side of her index finger, the scribe’s mark she had worn since her third year of apprenticeship and no longer noticed.

“Start anywhere,” she said.

“There are things about you that you do not know,” he said. “I am going to tell you some of them now.”

“Some of them.”

“Some of them tonight.”

“And the rest.”

“When you need to hear them. Not before.”

She looked at him. She did not argue the premise. She had lived with him long enough to know that he was an exact man, and when an exact man said when you need to hear them, he meant the timing mattered more than she might think.

“Start,” she said.

——— ◇ ———

“You are not my biological daughter.”

He said it without preamble because preamble would have made it feel like a thing being prepared. It was not a thing being prepared. It was a fact, and he laid it on the table between them.

Her hands did not move. She did not look away from his face. For a long breath she sat in the chair and took the sentence in, and then she said:

“I know.”

He had not expected that.

“Since when?” he said.

“Not a particular date. I have thought for a long time that something did not add up. There was never a grave. There was never a name I was told. There was never a family you took me to meet. I did not press because you did not want me to press. At some point I stopped asking myself whether it was true and started asking myself why it mattered whether it was true.”

“You concluded it did not.”

“I concluded that what I had was more than enough. I stopped testing it.”

He looked at her for three seconds and did not speak, and she let him not speak, which was a mercy he did not know he needed until she gave it.

“The rest of what I am going to tell you,” he said, “is harder.”

“I expected as much.”

“Your biological parents were killed the night you were born. They were killed in the course of a larger killing. Seven people in the household died. You were an infant. You were in a room separated from the violence. You slept through it.”

She drew in a slow breath.

“Who were they?”

“They were of House Rellyn. A Karath merchant house that has not existed for twenty years. I found you in the household after the killings. I was the only person still living there. I took you.”

“You took me.”

“I did.”

“Where did you take me?”

“To a foster-house near the southern atolls. I stayed with you there for four years. Then I brought you to Karath and we lived in the rented rooms in the Middle City, and then in this house. You know that part.”

“I know that part.”

She moved her hands once on the table and then folded them again in the same place. He watched her watching him. Her eyes were Rellyn eyes, which he had known for twenty years without being able to say it to her. Her mother’s eyes exactly.

“House Rellyn had enemies,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Who were they?”

“House Tannath. A rival Karath merchant house. Copper routes. Contested scrip. A two-generation feud that the Tannaths ended by hiring the killings that finished your family.”

“And House Tannath is still here.”

“It is. Orvos Tannath is its head. He is old and dying. His son Ishmen will succeed him. I spoke with Ishmen yesterday. He did not know who I was; I wore a face. The reason I spoke with him is that Ishmen is running out the clock on what his father began twenty years ago, and what his father began has become a threat to you.”

“A threat how?”

“If the Tannaths knew a Rellyn heir was alive, they would want that heir dead, or at least silenced. There are redemptions — scrip, property, old claims — that would revert to an acknowledged Rellyn heir. The Tannaths do not want those things to revert. They would prefer that the line ends.”

“I am the line.”

“You are the line.”

She absorbed that. She did not move her hands. She did not look at the fire, which was her habit when she was thinking through something she did not yet have words for. She looked at him.

“You have been protecting me from this for twenty years,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And protecting me worked, for twenty years.”

“It did.”

“And now it is breaking.”

“It is.”

“Because?”

“Because a woman named Maren Telvir is investigating old Rellyn cases on commission from the Tannaths. She is competent. She will reach the answer that you are alive and that you are here. I estimate she has ten to fifteen days. Less, if she catches a break.”

“And Maren Telvir is why you have aged twice in two days.”

“Yes.”

“Because you have been wearing faces to learn what she is learning.”

“Yes.”

“Faces that cost you.”

“Yes.”

She closed her eyes for a long moment. She opened them.

“I have questions,” she said, “that I am going to ask in a particular order. If you cannot answer, say so.”

“Understood.”

——— ◇ ———

“The people who died that night.”

“Yes.”

“Your mother.”

“Your mother.”

“My mother.”

“Yes.”

“What was her name?”

He did not speak at once. He had known that the question would come. He had not decided until she asked it that he would say the name aloud after twenty years.

“Salen,” he said. “Salen of House Rellyn. She was twenty-two when she died. She had been married three years. She had worked in her household’s copper-accounts office until her pregnancy began to show. She was —” He stopped. He found that he had more to say than he had thought. He cut it. “She was careful with small things. You have her hands.”

Irela looked down at her own hands on the table.

“Show me,” she said.

“Show you what?”

“Show me what you mean by her hands.”

He reached across the table and turned one of her hands over gently, palm up. He touched the base of her thumb. “Here. The proportion is hers. And here.” He touched the side of her smallest finger. “She held a pen like that. Loose. Not the scribe’s grip — she was not a scribe — but she held small things the way you hold them. Your father did not. Your father gripped.”

“My father.”

“Teral Rellyn. Youngest son of the house. He was twenty-five.”

“What did he do?”

“He ran the house’s overland logistics. He was meant to take over the sea-routes when his elder brother moved to Karath Upper. His brother died in the killing. His father died in the killing. His mother died in the killing. A cousin died. A senior clerk died. Your mother and your father died. Seven in all. You did not.”

“I was where?”

“In the nursery. At the end of the hall on the upper floor. I —” He stopped again. “I went into the nursery because I had not intended to. I saw you. I stood in the doorway for three breaths. I took you.”

“Why?”

“I do not know. I have never known. I have told myself different answers at different times across twenty years, and none of the answers has been fully the truth, and I have stopped trying to find the answer.”

She was silent for a long moment.

“Who did it?” she said.

There it was — the question he had known would arrive at this point in the conversation, and the question he had decided, before he started talking, that he would not answer tonight.

He had known the question would arrive. He had known also that he would not answer it tonight. He had set out at the beginning of the conversation to give her the public half of the truth: the Tannath-Rellyn feud, the assassin hired by House Tannath, the surviving infant. The assassin who had not been named for twenty years. The assassin he would not name tonight either. Naming the assassin as an abstract historical person was not the same as naming the assassin as the man sitting across from her at the common-room table. A gap she could cross in a day was not a gap he was going to ask her to cross in a breath.

He looked at her across the table.

“Who did it?” she said again.

“The Tannaths hired a man for the killings. The man was known in the world as the Hundred. He was rare in his trade. He had not been heard of in twenty years.”

“Where is he now?”

He did not speak.

She watched his face.

“You know where he is,” she said.

“I know some of what can be known.”

“Tell me where he is.”

“Not tonight.”

“Tonight,” she said. “You said tonight.”

“I said some of them tonight. The rest is what I cannot give you tonight.”

She looked at him for a long time. He saw her assembling what he had said and what he had not said. He saw her begin to understand the shape of the withheld piece, in the abstract if not the specific. He saw her decide not to press.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

“Tomorrow.”

“You will tell me the rest tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

She stood up. She walked around the table, and she put her arms around him from behind, and she held him for a count of five.

Then she went to her room.

He sat at the common-room table with his cold tea and his hands on the wood, and he listened to her door close. He listened until the lamp in her room went out. Then he sat in the dark a while longer, counting what tonight had spent of the budget he had not been counting, and what tomorrow’s accounting would still have to spend, and finding both numbers unsupportable in different ways.

——— ◇ ———

END OF CHAPTER SIX.