Chapter 63: Old Story
Her childhood was the best part of it, which was not an unusual thing to say.
Silver City sat on the eastern reaches of the kingdom, its name direct and earned: the mines in the hills above it had been productive for two centuries, and the money had made the city comfortable in the particular way of places that have had their prosperity long enough to stop thinking about it. Her father’s house was not the grandest in the city, but it was warm and well-kept and always smelled of something cooking. Her mother had been common-born, which was the kind of thing that produced gossip in the city’s upper circles and then, when the gossip failed to produce any visible consequences, gradually stopped. Her brother Hyde was two years younger than her and had the particular genius of younger siblings who have studied their elder’s errors and worked out how to be charming.
She had been, she thought, happy. In the uncomplicated way of children who have what they need and have not yet been shown the terms under which they have it.
That ended the winter she was fourteen.
A riot in the market district. It was a bad winter, dry before it turned cold, so the harvest had been thin and the city’s supply of stored grain was running on margins that the better-off families didn’t know about. The refugees had come in from the outlying villages as they always did when things got bad, and the city’s tolerance for feeding them was reached before its tolerance for watching them go hungry, and the balance broke on a cold afternoon in the market while her parents were distributing food.
They didn’t come home.
She and Hyde were sent to Mr. Gilen’s house — her father’s cousin, technically, a branch of the family she had met perhaps twice at formal occasions, a man she associated with a very firm handshake and a habit of completing sentences for other people. He had a house twice the size of her father’s and a wife who smiled whenever he was looking at her.
Her ability came in three weeks after she arrived.
She was careful about it. She had heard the Church’s sermons the same as everyone; she understood what was found and what was done with what was found. She used it only at night, only when she was certain she was alone, and for two months this was sufficient.
Then Mr. Gilen called her into his study and told her that he knew.
He was not unkind about it. This, she had thought at the time, was the most frightening part — the matter-of-fact tone, the way he laid out the situation as though it were a business arrangement that they were both reasonable people about. She was a witch. If this became known, he would have a problem. But she was also useful, specifically because she was a witch, and if she was useful he had no reason to make her existence known. Hyde, on the other hand — the title, the position, the legitimacy that came with being his father’s recognized son — needed protecting from the contamination of a witch sister.
Hyde would be kept separately.
As long as she cooperated, he would stay alive.
She had not had the strength to refuse, then. She had told herself it was temporary, that she was gathering her resources, that eventually she would find a way to take Hyde and leave. She had told herself many things, in the years that followed, and each of them was true until it wasn’t.
He sent her to the thieves’ guild for training. She stole documents from his competitors, listened at keyholes in the town hall, put a substance she was not told the nature of into a water tank in a warehouse belonging to a man who had stopped cooperating with him. She worked, and when she made mistakes she was kicked, and when she wasn’t working she stayed in the room with the iron-bar door, and she thought about Hyde.
When she could not bear it any longer, she asked to see him.
Mr. Gilen brought him in.
Hyde looked at her — the room with the iron bars, the clothes she was wearing, her face, which she knew was not the face of someone who had been living well — and the expression that crossed his was not grief. It was disgust. Clean and clear and certain, the way he had looked at things in their childhood when he’d decided about them.
He didn’t want to see her. She was the devil’s servant. She should go where she belonged.
Mr. Gilen had told him.
He had told Hyde that she was a witch, had done so deliberately, had used him as a threat and the threat had produced exactly the expression on her brother’s face that she had spent two years being afraid of. When Hyde left the room, Mr. Gilen explained, gently, that the title and the position and the house would be Hyde’s if she continued to cooperate, and would not be Hyde’s at all if she chose otherwise.
She did not remember the period between that conversation and her coming-of-age day clearly. She remembered it the way you remember a bad season — general conditions, not specific events. Cold, and long, and her world narrowing until the only thing in it was the work she was doing and the thought of getting through to the other side of it.
On her coming-of-age day, she had a task. She completed it. On the way home, in a street she didn’t know, a woman found her.
Wendy had a kind face and a direct voice and told her, in precise terms, that there were other people who had been through what she was going through, that they had not given up, and that if she wanted to hear more she could follow her. She said this the way you say things to someone you have identified as being in crisis: careful, specific, nothing wasted.
Nightingale followed her.
One week later — one week of hearing what the Witch Cooperation Association was, what it was trying to do, what it had cost people and what it had given them — she was ready. She’d had a week to feel what she hadn’t let herself feel in two years, and the feeling was not grief. It was something colder and more focused. She let herself know what she wanted to do and then she thought about whether she would.
She decided she would.
She entered Mr. Gilen’s bedroom at the hour he was most reliably asleep. She found the knife. She used it, and the sounds that followed were not sounds she was going to describe, and the calm she felt in the room after was exactly the calm she had expected. When she’d been afraid of the calm, back when she’d imagined this: now she understood it. It was the calm of something that had finished.
She left the house.
She did not go back for Hyde. He had made his choice about her, and she had decided to honor it.
She and Wendy left Silver City before morning.
When Nightingale came to the end of it, she waited. The fire in the hearth had gone very low. Roland was looking at the place on the floor between them with the expression of a man who was still working through something that had landed with weight.
She did not need him to say anything. She had told him because she said she would hide nothing from him, and she had meant it, and it was done. She rose, and wished him goodnight, and went to her room.
The corridor was cold and quiet, the way the castle was always quiet after midnight.
She found, walking back to her room, that she felt lighter than she had expected to.
In the morning, Roland came to see Wendy.
She was sitting up in the bed that had been Nightingale’s, with the arm that had been black to the elbow now pink and whole and visibly hers, and her color had come back overnight with the determined speed of a healthy person who had had a significant fright and been given rest and food. She pressed her fist to her chest when the Prince came in, which was the gesture she had seen others use here, and he waved it off gently in the way he always waved off formality.
“The arm,” he said. “It feels right?”
“As if it were never touched,” she said. She flexed the fingers, slowly, watching them move. “What Nana did—”
“Yes,” he said. “She’s remarkable.” He sat in the chair by the bed and took a folded document from his coat pocket. “I’d like you to work for me. This is the contract.”
She took it. She read it twice, slowly, because the first reading was for the words and the second reading was for what was underneath the words. She had signed contracts before, in various forms — arrangements with people who had decided they needed what she could do and wanted assurance she would keep providing it. Those contracts had been specific about her obligations and vague about everything else. This one was structured differently.
She turned pages. She read Article 2.1.
She read it again.
She looked at Article 4, which concerned what the employer was required to provide. She looked at the clause that permitted her to refuse an assignment that produced discomfort or felt too dangerous, without consequence.
She looked at the clause that said the employer was responsible for her safety.
“This is very detailed,” she said carefully.
“I find that vagueness produces misunderstandings,” Roland said. “Specific terms give both sides something to hold onto.”
She was looking at him again — the same assessment she had been making since the moment she’d woken up in this bed and found it clean and warm and not what she had expected. He looked back at her with the expression she was beginning to understand was simply his default expression: attentive and direct and not trying to be anything else.
“What would I be doing?” she asked. “Specifically.”
“First: use your ability. Daily. Consistently.” He settled back slightly, the posture of someone shifting into explanation rather than negotiation. “I believe the reason Anna survived her day of adulthood without pain is that she had been using her power continuously and had depleted herself before the Bite arrived. The container was empty. There was nothing for it to fight.” He watched her process this. “I want to confirm the theory with Nana’s coming day of adulthood. And yours, when it arrives.”
She was quiet for a long time.
She thought about the Months of the Demons she had survived. She thought about the count of white bands. She thought about twins who had laughed easily and now would not laugh again.
“After practicing,” she said. “What else?”
“We’ll find out together,” he said, and the corner of his mouth moved slightly, and it was, she realized, an honest answer — not false modesty, not a deferral. He genuinely didn’t know yet, and was not embarrassed by this, and was inviting her into the not-knowing as a participant rather than a subject.
She looked at the contract. She looked at him.
She signed it.