Chapter Seven — What He Did Not Tell Her

He did not sleep.

He sat at the common-room table until the dawn-bell and then past it. He drank two cups of cold tea. He listened to her breathing on the other side of her door, which he had learned the pattern of many years ago and had measured tonight without meaning to. She slept. She did not sleep well. He heard her turn three times in the first hour and twice more later.

When she came out it was an hour after the dawn-bell. She was dressed. Her hair was tied back the way she tied it for her master’s office, which told him she had not decided yet whether to go to work today and was preparing for both possibilities.

“Tea,” she said.

“I made some.”

“Fresh?”

“Half an hour ago.”

She poured. She sat down across from him again, in the chair she had sat in last night. She put the cup down without drinking from it.

“You said tomorrow,” she said.

“I did.”

“It is tomorrow.”

“It is.”

“Start where you stopped.”

——— ◇ ———

“The house was empty,” he said. “The killings had happened. I went through the rooms.”

“Why?”

“To confirm.”

“You went through to see that the work had been done.”

“Yes.”

“The Hundred was thorough in his work.”

“He was.”

She looked at him. He saw her register that he had said he was and not I was, and he saw her decide, the way she had decided last night, to let the answer stand as he had given it. Not because she was not hearing it — because she was saving the question for a moment of her own choosing.

“Go on,” she said.

“The upper floor had not been reached by the killings. The killings were in the ground-floor dining room where the household had been at a late meal. The upper floor was quiet. I went up because —”

He stopped. He had decided before she came out of her room how he would explain this. Now that he was saying it aloud, the explanation sounded like something an assassin with a conscience had prepared.

“I went up because the contract had been for the whole household,” he said. “And there was an heir unaccounted for. An infant. I went up to find the infant.”

“You went up to kill me.”

“Yes.”

She did not look away. He did not either.

“What stopped you?” she said.

“The nursery lamp was burning. Someone had been with you and had gone downstairs to the meal. The lamp was still on. You were asleep. I stood in the doorway. I had not meant to stop in the doorway. I had meant to walk in and do what I had come for. I stood there. I looked at you for three breaths. I did not do it.”

“Why?”

“I do not know.”

“You came all that way. You had done the rest.”

“I had done the rest.”

“And then you did not do this.”

“I did not do this.”

“Why?”

“I have told myself different things across twenty years. None of them has been the whole truth. The closest I have come is that I had made a hundred faces by then and I had looked at a hundred strangers for long enough to know what they were. When I looked at you, you were not a stranger. I knew it the way I knew my own hands. I did not have a word for it. I still do not.”

She absorbed that. She did not speak for a long time.

“You took me,” she said.

“I took you.”

“Where did you go?”

“To the foster-house near the southern atolls. I had arranged the foster-house before I knew you existed. I had arranged it because I was ending the career that night and I needed somewhere to disappear. I used it differently than I had intended.”

“You kept me there four years.”

“I kept you there four years. I stayed there with you. A woman at the foster-house nursed you. I paid her. Her name was Edris. She did not ask what you were to me. She did not ask what I had been before. When you were three she said I should bring you to Karath and raise you as my daughter because you had been mine in every way that mattered since the first month.”

“Edris.”

“Edris.”

“I do not remember her.”

“You would not. You were four when we left. You asked about her for perhaps six months. Then you stopped asking.”

“Did she die?”

“She was alive last year. I wrote once a year. I have a letter in my closet I have been meaning to send her this season.”

“Send it.”

“I will.”

——— ◇ ———

She sat for a while without speaking. He let her. He had decided that he would not fill silence today. The silence was hers. She would use it for what she needed.

She drank from her cup finally. The tea had gone cold on the table while they spoke. She did not complain.

“You said yesterday the Hundred has not been heard of in twenty years,” she said.

“I said he has not been named in twenty years. That is a different thing.”

She looked at him.

“He is alive,” she said.

“He is alive.”

“You know him.”

“I know what can be known.”

“You know where he is.”

“I do.”

“You know who he is.”

He did not speak.

She held the look for a long moment. He watched her work through the same shape she had worked through last night. He watched her arrive at the same conclusion, or nearly the same, and he watched her decide again, for a second morning in a row, not to cross the last step of the conclusion in words.

“Not yet,” she said.

“Not yet.”

“But soon.”

“Yes.”

“Before this ends.”

“Yes.”

She nodded once. She did not ask any more about him.

She asked instead what the next five days would look like.

He told her. He told her about the documents he was going to need. He told her about Maren Telvir and her timeline. He told her that he was going to have to wear several more faces and that she should not be surprised or frightened if she came home to find him older by a week or two each time. She asked what the cost did to a person in the end. He told her he did not know exactly. He told her the range he had estimated.

“Eight years,” she said.

“Eight to twelve.”

“And less if you work.”

“Less if I work. Possibly much less.”

“How much less?”

“I do not know. I am going to try to find out without using all of it.”

“Promise me you will try.”

“I promise.”

She looked at him for a long time. He saw what she was preparing to say before she said it. He held still for it.

“You are my father,” she said.

“I have been.”

“You are. Not were. Not in the past. Are.”

“I have been,” he said again. “Since the morning Edris handed you to me in the foster-house and said she takes sugar in the water now, she is six months. I understood in that moment that she had been telling me how to be your father for five months and I had been taking the instruction without noticing. I have been since then. I have not stopped.”

“Then say it.”

“I am your father,” he said.

She closed her eyes. She opened them.

“All right,” she said. “Good. Now we go.”

——— ◇ ———

She stood. She took her coat from the hook. She paused at the door.

“You are not coming,” she said.

“I am not.”

“I will be at the master’s by the turn-bell. I will leave by the dusk-bell. I will come straight home. If anything has changed I will send a runner.”

“Good.”

“And you will not leave this house today.”

“I will not.”

“Because you need to rest.”

“Because I need to rest.”

“Say it.”

“I need to rest.”

She almost smiled. She did not smile. She went out.

He listened to her footsteps on the stairs down from the door. He listened to them fade on the street.

Then he stood up from the table and went to the closet and opened the bag that had sat there untouched for twenty years.

——— ◇ ———

END OF CHAPTER SEVEN.