Confrontation

Dr. Hollis Pike came to Lanternhold on the nineteenth of November, with a black bag and a letter of permission signed by the Magister, to examine the prisoner's health.

"For the child's sake," Crale had said, with his thin gentle smile. "The Order does not make war on the unborn."

He brought an assistant.

…

She heard them in the passage first.

She had been lying on the cot with her face to the wall, as she lay most of the day, counting the cracks in the whitewash. Nineteen days. The cell had grown smaller with each of them. The bar of light from the window had changed from white to gray to a dull dishwater yellow, and the cold had begun to creep up through the stone. She had a second blanket now. She had been given a shawl, by a young nun who would not speak. She had learned the names of the bells.

Boots in the corridor. A bolt. Two voices, one low and hoarse and familiar, the other, a man's, murmuring in a polite undertone, and a third that she did not know, a brother's, dry and bored.

"Ten minutes, Doctor."

"I shall want a quarter hour."

"The Magister said ten."

"The Magister said I might examine a woman in her fifth month, a woman, mind, who has been three weeks in a stone box on bread and water. If he wishes to quarrel about the minutes, I shall be glad to carry my opinion to the Court of King's Bench. Open the door."

A pause. A key.

She sat up.

Pike came in first, stooping under the lintel, his bag in his hand, his silvering temples damp with rain. He looked at her with a quick, searching, professional frown, and then, for the barest second, with something quite different. Behind him came a tall man in a plain brown coat and a round hat, carrying a leather satchel. He stood in the doorway.

The brother shut the door on them. The bolt dropped.

Neither of them moved.

…

He looked terrible.

That was what she saw first. He had shaved, and cut himself at the jaw. His face was hollow, gray, drawn tight over the bones, with the bruised look about the eyes of one who has not slept in a month. His coat hung loose. He had lost a stone. He stood with the satchel clutched against his chest, in the middle of her cell, with the rain dripping from his hat onto the flags, and for a long moment he did not breathe.

Then his eyes went to her belly.

She had not thought about what she looked like. Her gown was gray prison wool, shapeless, belted with a cord. But the child had grown, in the last weeks, with the quickened growth of the Heart, and the swell below her ribs was no longer a thing that could be hidden. It rose beneath the cloth, small and round and hard.

"Pike," said Garrick, without turning his head. His voice was a husk. "Go and stand by the door."

"Garrick—"

"Please."

The physician hesitated. Then he set down his bag, went to the door, folded his arms and set his back against it, and stared at the opposite wall with the iron detachment of a man deliberately not listening.

…

"You've come," said Ixara.

She was astonished by her own voice. It was cool and even. It was the voice she'd used in the hold, when she was not afraid.

"Yes."

"You have been told."

"Crale told me." He took off his hat. His hand was shaking so hard that it crumpled the brim. "I did not know. I swear to you I did not. If I had known, I should never have— I should have—"

"What?"

He opened his mouth. He closed it.

"What would you have done, Garrick? Locked me in a house? Put me on a ship? Sent me to the country?" She did not raise her voice. "You would have done all of it, and for the best reasons. You are a man who does the right thing for the wrong reasons so well that it is difficult to tell the difference."

"That is unjust."

"Is it?"

"I—" He stopped. A muscle jumped in his jaw. "No. I think it is probably not."

Silence.

The rain hammered the high window. In the corridor, far off, someone dropped a pail.

"I want to ask you something," said Ixara.

"Ask."

"I want to ask you in the old tongue, so that you cannot say it was a trick of translation. But you do not speak the old tongue." She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms round them. She was shivering, she noticed, very slightly, as if from cold. "So I shall say it in yours. I shall say it plainly. I have never said it, and I have been afraid to, but I have no more time to be afraid."

She lifted her head and looked at him.

"I saw you."

He went still.

"On the dais. On the night of the Blood Moon. I was lying on the floor, drugged, with the smoke in my lungs, and you came in the east door. You were wearing a dark coat. You had your hair tied back. You wore goatskin gloves, and a black mask over your mouth. And then, when you knelt, you took it off." She watched his face as she spoke. She watched it change, a slow, terrible draining, as water leaves a basin. "You knelt beside me. You put your hand on my cheek. You said, Forgive me."

"Ixara."

"You said, I'll bring it back. I swear it on her life."

"Please."

"Then you took it. And you left a box of gold." Her mouth twisted. "For the grief."

He sank onto the stool.

He did it without grace, all at once, as though his knees had been cut. He sat hunched on the edge of it with his hat crushed in his hands and his head bent, and she saw that he was crying, silently, without any movement, tears falling straight down from his lashes to the floor.

"You knew," he said.

"I have known since the hold."

"And you said nothing."

"I said everything. You were not listening." She swallowed. "I did not know it fully until a fortnight ago. I knew the shape, but not the face. The child showed me."

He raised his head. "The child."

"It sees. It remembers what the stone remembers. It is a window." She laid a hand over the swell. "It showed me the dais. It showed me your hand."

For a long time neither of them spoke.

"I will not lie to you," said Garrick at last. His voice cracked and steadied. "I have been a coward. I have told you half-truths, and quibbled, and hidden behind the long words. I will not do it now. You are right. It was I. I stood on that mountain, in the dark, and I took your people's heart out of its niche, and I carried it down to my ship, and I have carried it ever since."

"Why?"

"For Odette."

"I know that."

"Do you?"

"I know she is dying. I know you love her. I have seen the Quiet round her bed." Ixara's eyes burned. "But I want to hear you say it. I want to hear why a man of conscience, a man of honor, who would not strike a servant or cheat a tradesman, could look at a sleeping woman and a sacred stone and decide that the one was worth the other."

He told her.

…

He told it badly. He told it as a man tells a thing he has told himself in the dark so many times that the words have worn smooth and lost their meaning. The mother dead of the cough. The winter that he had stood in the hall and listened to his sister on the stairs. The physicians, and the Dutchman, and the pamphlets. The night he had heard, at the Society, in the lamplit smoking-room, a story from a drunken sailor about an island in the south where the people did not age and the trees bled red and a blue stone lay in a shrine that was said to heal the sick.

The Duke. The letter. The commission. The ship.

"I thought," said Garrick, "that I would find a village. A chieftain. Some sort of barter. I had a hold full of trade goods. Mirrors, iron, bolts of cloth. I thought I would offer a fair price." His mouth twisted. "I thought I was an honest man."

"And?"

"And I found a forest. And a temple. And a woman asleep." He shut his eyes. "I had gone up the mountain alone. Pike and the others were at the beach. I told myself I would only look. And then I saw it, in the niche, and heard it, and it was like..." He broke off. "It was like hearing Odette cough. And I thought, If I ask, they will say no. And if they say no, she will die. And if I take it, no one will ever know. And I stood there, and I did the arithmetic. I set a girl I loved against a people I did not know, and the scale came down."

"You thought it was a small thing."

"I thought it was a sacrifice. One I was making." He laughed, a short ugly sound. "That is the lie, you see. That I was the one who was paying."

"And the Duke?"

"The Duke told me the stone would be used for her." His voice dropped. "I believed him."

"And now?"

"And now I know that he lied."

She had expected rage, or grief, or the old wry cold detachment. She had not expected the flat, dull, exhausted quiet that came into his face. It was the face of a man at the bottom of a well, looking up.

"He never meant to," said Garrick. "He told me so himself, last week. He laughed. He said I could not have thought he meant it. He wants the island. He wants a treasury of trees. He wants you, or your child, to wake the stone." He shook his head slowly. "Eighteen months, Ixara. Eighteen months, and a hundred nights of lying awake, and the thing I carried across an ocean has been a toy in a cellar. It was never going to be used for her."

"No."

"I broke your world for nothing."

"Not for nothing." She said it before she knew she would. "For her."

He stared at her.

"Do you think I do not understand?" said Ixara. She was crying now. She hadn't meant to. The tears ran down her face and she let them. "I have stood by her bed. I have seen the gray thing on her pillow. I swore on the Heart that I would not let her go. I would have done the same. I did the same." Her voice cracked. "I came here to steal a child from you. Did you know that? To take your child, and your name, and your sister's place at the table, and put my people's key into the world with a man who did not know what he gave. I did it in the dark. I did it under a false name. I have lied to you every night since July."

"Ixara—"

"We are the same, Garrick. We are both thieves." She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. "I cannot hate you. God knows I tried. I lay in this cell and I tried with all my strength. But I looked into the stone, and I saw a man who was weeping, and I cannot hate a man who weeps for his sister."

He put his face in his hands.

…

She told him about the island.

She had not meant to. It came up out of her like water out of the ground. She told him what she had seen in the smoke on the ship, and what she had felt in the Hall: the silence in the forest, the leaves turning gray, the old men lying down in the afternoon and not rising. She told him about Oma Teyra, who had taught her to sing, who was ninety and bright as a bird, and who had looked at her on the beach with her wise yellow eyes and said, Twelve moons, child. She told him how the Ahtelan lived to a hundred and twenty because the Heart sang in the roots. She told him what would happen when it stopped.

"The trees will die first," she said. "They are the oldest. They have been listening for ten thousand years. When the song stops, they will lose the thread. They will drop their leaves, one by one. The soil will go sour. The streams will thin. The animals will go." Her voice was very quiet. "And then the people. The old first, then the children. Not quickly. It will be slow. They will have a long time to know."

"How long?"

"A year. Twelve moons from the night you took it." She looked up. "There are four moons left, Garrick."

He did not move.

"In four moons, there will be no Ahtelan. There will be a gray island, in a gray sea, and a silence. A thousand years of songs, gone. A forest that bled red and sang to the wind." She pressed her palms against her eyes. "That is what the scale came down on. That is what you weighed."

"I know."

"You do not. You cannot. You did not see it."

"No." His voice was barely audible. "But I will."

"What?"

"I will see it." He stood. The stool scraped on the flags. He stood in the middle of the cell, tall, gaunt, trembling, and for the first time since he had come in, the broken, helpless look went out of his face and something else came into it: something hard and bright, a sort of terrible clarity. "Ixara. Listen. I have been a fool. I have been the Duke's fool, and the Society's fool, and my own. But I am not a fool any longer. I am done. I will undo it."

"You cannot."

"I will take it back."

"The Heart is in a vault under a hundred guards."

"I will take it back, and I will carry it to Corvane myself, and I will lay it in the niche with my own hands. I will go on my knees to your people. I will say what I did. I will ask for whatever judgment they think fit." He drew a long, shuddering breath. "And I will get you out of this place, and the child, and Odette, and we will all go together, and if I die in the doing of it, then I shall at least have died for the right thing."

"Garrick."

"I mean it."

"I know you do." She looked at him a long time. At the wet brown coat, the gaunt cheeks, the shaking hands, the eyes blazing gray and fierce in the dim light, and the old tenderness rose in her like a wound reopened. She reached out and touched his sleeve. "I know you do. And that is why I must say it."

"What?"

"You must go."

"I—"

"You must go, and not come again." She withdrew her hand. "I have seen it, in the stone. The pyre. The boat. The black ship. I do not know the order of it. But I know that you cannot save me by breaking in. If you try, you will die, and Odette will die, and the child will be born in a cage." Her voice was steady, and it cost her everything. "If you wish to help, then be patient. Be clever. Make a plan. Wait for the moment."

"I cannot wait."

"Then learn how."

He stared at her. His chest rose and fell. Behind them, at the door, Pike said very quietly, "Garrick. The brother is coming back."

Footsteps in the corridor. A rattle of keys.

Garrick did not move. He stood looking down at her, and she saw the whole of it in his face: the love and the horror, the shame and the fury and the helpless, boundless, drowning tenderness. His hand came up. He laid it, very softly, against the curve of her belly, over the gray wool, and she felt the child leap beneath his palm like a fish.

His breath caught.

"I will give everything back," he said. His voice broke. "Everything. I swear it. On Odette's life. On this child's."

The key turned in the lock.

Ixara closed her hand over his. She looked up into his wet gray eyes, and she smiled, and it was the saddest smile she had ever worn.

"My love," she said gently. "You have nothing left to give."

The door swung open. The brother stood on the threshold with his lantern. And Garrick Wynmore, Seventh Viscount, stood in a cell with the rain dripping off his hat and his hand on a prisoner's womb, and did not look away from her until Pike took him by the arm and drew him out into the dark.