ON THE BALCONY

I had never seen my mother's house.

I had bought it from the other side of a desk, through a lawyer in a gray suit, for the price of a mid-sized ship. I had signed a deed in the back room of a funeral parlor. I had told Mabel Quinn that I wanted it, and I had not told her why, because I had not known. It had simply seemed right. A big old house on a ridge, with a view of the sea, and a name I had once been taught to read as a cipher.

Now, in the cold gray hour before sunrise, I stood on its balcony and looked down at the drive, and I knew why I had wanted it.

It was a handsome place. Honey-colored stone, tall windows, a slate roof streaked with lichen. Four chimneys. A porch with columns. A terraced garden, gone wild, that fell in broad steps towards the road. Behind it the ridge rose in a long dark wall of beech, and before it, past the lawn and the iron gates, the land dropped away in a great quiet sweep to the harbor. The lights of Ravenport lay spilled along the shore. Far out, on the water, a lone steamer was making its way toward the mouth of the bay.

I had come at midnight, with Declan and Nimbus. Hawk had followed in the dawn. Josie and Mabel had come up from the city by cab, in a fog of worried chatter, with a wagon of provisions and a servant. We had unlocked the door. We had found it dusty, silent, hung with sheets. A single old caretaker, a bent gray man who had lived there alone for thirty years, had wept when he saw me. He had taken one look at my face and said, You've the Ashgrove nose, miss.

I had not known what to say.

I had spent the night walking through the rooms. A long library, its shelves still lined with the leather spines of my ancestors. A conservatory of broken glass. A drawing-room with a pianoforte and, above the mantel, a portrait: a tall, thin, grave man in a black coat, with a pencil in his hand and a roll of drawings under his arm. I had stood before it for an hour. He had my chin.

And in a bedroom in the east wing, in a drawer, wrapped in tissue, a child's wooden doll with a cracked porcelain face. A little paper label was tied to its neck. In faded ink, in a hand I did not know: Elinor.

I had held it for a long time. Then I had put it back.

…

They came as the sun rose.

I saw them first as a smudge on the road: a gray, shuffling, ragged column, a mile off, winding up out of the haze. A dozen carts. A scattering of riders. A great many people on foot. As they drew closer the shapes sharpened. They were not soldiers. They were servants, mostly, and retainers, and a few elderly relations, in the black of mourning, clutching bundles. They walked with their heads down. The carts were loaded with trunks.

In the van, on a gaunt gray horse, rode an old man in a plain dark cloak.

I knew him by the set of his shoulders. The great gray head hung low, and the hands on the reins were slack. Beside him rode a heavy figure with a bandaged face, who sat his saddle like a sack. Behind them, a cart, and in the cart, wrapped in blankets, a small pale shape propped against a trunk.

And at the rear, afoot, with his coat open and his hair in disorder, walked a young man.

I watched them come to the gate.

The iron gate was locked. They stopped before it, in the road, in the early light. For a long while nobody moved. The horses blew. A child cried. A rooster crowed from somewhere behind the stables. The old man sat his horse with his chin on his chest, and the retainers shuffled, and the dust drifted in the pale air.

Then Patriarch Whitlock dismounted.

It was not easy. His legs were stiff. He clutched at the saddle, and Torrance leaned to help him, and he waved the arm off. He stood in the road, swaying, a heavy old man in a shabby cloak, and looked up at the house. His eyes found the balcony. They found me.

He went down on his knees in the dust.

…

I had expected many things. I had not expected that.

I stood at the balustrade with my hands on the stone and watched the head of the House of Whitlock, who had signed the order that sealed a general and the order that sold a girl, kneel in the road at my gate. The retainers followed him. One by one they sank to their knees, in the dust, with their hats in their hands, old men and women and boys, until the whole length of the column was a field of bowed gray heads.

Even Torrance. He did it last, and with the worst grace of all, but he did it.

Alden did not kneel.

He stood at the back, with the cart behind him, and looked up at me. I could not see his face. The distance was too great. But I saw the line of his shoulders, rigid as a post, and the hands hanging at his sides. He did not move. He did not bow. He stood in the road and looked.

"Miss Reeve!" called the Patriarch.

His voice was cracked and thin. It carried badly on the morning air.

"Miss Reeve! I beg you to hear me!"

I said nothing.

"We are ruined." He lifted his hands. "We are driven from our home. The mob has burned the Manor. The Senate has declared us outlaws. We are hunted like beasts." His voice broke. "We have nowhere to go. Nobody will take us in. We are begging you, madam, for mercy."

"I see."

"I know that we have wronged you." The old man bowed his head. "I know it. I will not insult you by denying it. But I plead with you, in the name of the old days, for the sake of the years you spent among us—for the love my son bore you—to remember our kindness."

Our kindness.

I stood very still.

"There is a girl," the Patriarch said. "My ward. Miss Fairchild. She is dying, madam, in that cart. She has nothing. I beg you. Give us shelter for a month. A week. Let us bury our dead. Give us only that."

The silence was long. The sun cleared the ridge and lay in a bar of gold across the lawn. A thrush began to sing in the beeches. Behind me, in the doorway, I heard a soft step.

I knew it.

He did not speak. He came and stood at my shoulder, a little behind, in the doorway of the balcony. He had put on a clean shirt. His hair was tied back. His arms were folded across his chest. I did not look at him. I felt him there, like a wall at my back, silent and solid and warm. He had said nothing since dawn.

He will not interfere, I thought. He promised.

He is only here.

I drew breath.

"Kindness," I said.

My voice was low. It carried down the long slope of the lawn as clear as a bell.

"You speak of kindness, Patriarch. Let us consider it. Let us make an inventory."

The old man looked up.

"You gave me a room in your house," I said. "A good one, with a view of the garden. It was very kind. It had a lock on the door."

His mouth opened.

"You gave me a place at your table. You taught me which fork to use. You introduced me to your guests as a clever child you were proud of. You let me sit at your son's side. You gave me his hand to hold." I paused. "And when I had finished all the work you required of me, and was no longer of use, you gave me to the Chancellor, with a ribbon on."

"Miss Reeve—"

"I was twenty-three." My voice did not shake. "I was twenty-three years old. I had a mother in her grave and a father I'd forgotten to visit, and a heart I'd given to your son. And on a Thursday in the autumn, you let them take me to a room. I remember the room. I remember the drain in the floor."

He stared at me.

"I don't think," I said, "that you remember it."

"I—I do not understand—"

"No. You wouldn't."

I leaned on the balustrade.

"In my last life," I said, "when you cut the Emberheart out of my chest, was there any kindness? Did you pause, in the middle of it, to say a prayer? Did you tell your boy to hold my hand? Did you think of the garden, and the fork, and the Thursdays?" I smiled. "Did you remember our friendship?"

…

Nobody spoke.

The silence on the lawn was complete. The kneeling figures had frozen where they were. The thrush had fallen silent. In the road, the Patriarch had gone the color of tallow. His hands trembled in the dust, and his lips moved, and no sound came.

It was Alden who moved.

He had been standing very still. Now, slowly, he came forward through the kneeling crowd, parting it with his hands. He walked to the front, to the gate, to the place where his father knelt, and stopped, and looked up.

He had changed. Even from a hundred yards I could see it. He was thinner. His hair, which had been the pride of his life, was dull and unwashed. His face was lined, and gray, and old in a way that no face of twenty should be. His eyes were red-rimmed, hollow, haunted. He had the look of a man who had not slept in a month.

He looked at me.

I looked back.

I do not know what I expected. A cry. A curse. A plea. He did none of them. He stood in the road, with the golden light on his face, and looked up at the balcony with a fixed, searching, bewildered attention, like a man trying to make out a distant figure in the fog.

"Last life," he said.

His voice was hoarse. It was barely audible.

"What do you mean?"

I said nothing.

"You said it at the Ceremony. You said it in the field. You said I left you in the Menagerie." He took a step. "I did not. I've never been to the Menagerie, not since I was a boy. I've never left you anywhere. I don't know what you mean."

"I know."

"Then how—"

"Alden." I spoke gently. It surprised me. "It doesn't matter."

"It does!" His voice cracked. "It does! Because when you say it, when you look at me like that..." He swallowed. "I believe you."

The whole lawn was listening.

"I don't know how. I don't understand it. But I saw your face just now, when you said drain, and I—" He stopped. His eyes were wet. "It was true, wasn't it? Whatever it was. It was real. I did it."

"In a manner of speaking."

"I did it. I did it to you."

"You did."

He closed his eyes. A tear ran down his cheek. He made no attempt to hide it. He simply stood there, in the road, in front of his father, in front of the whole ragged clan of his House, and wept without sound.

I looked at him for a long time.

I looked, and I waited, once again, for the thing to arrive. The satisfaction. The triumph. The cold, bright, deep-water joy I'd thought it would be. I waited for the hollow in my chest to fill.

It did not fill. It stayed as it was: clean, empty, quiet.

I thought: This is what it is to be finished.

I turned my head.

Declan was looking at me.

He had not moved. His arms were still folded, his face still grave. But his eyes, gray and level, had found mine over the stone rim of the balcony, and in them there was no judgment, no pity, no instruction. Only presence. A steady, patient, unmoving there.

I held his gaze a moment.

Then I looked down at the road, and opened my mouth to speak.

…

The sound came from the south.

It was a long, low, rolling concussion, like thunder in a clear sky. It rolled up the ridge, rattled the windows of the house, and shivered the leaves of the beeches. A second followed. A third. A pause. Then, closer, with a sharp wet crack that I felt in my teeth, a fourth.

The kneeling retainers screamed.

I knew that sound. I had heard it in Hawk's workshop, in a demonstration. It was the sound of an arcane cannon: a heavy siege-piece, charged with ley-fire, hurling a shell that burst in the air and rained flaming pitch.

I turned.

Along the road from the city, a mile off, a long dark line was advancing. Banners fluttered. Sunlight flashed on steel. A column of riders, five hundred strong, in the colors of House Aldrin, House Brandt, and the Fairchild green. Behind them, drawn by teams of horses, came the guns: twelve long black shapes on wheeled carriages.

"The Houses," said Declan, very quietly, at my ear.

I watched them come.

"They have not come for me," I said.

"No."

"They've come for the Whitlocks."

"Yes."

"And they will not stop at the gate."

"No."

I looked down at the kneeling crowd, at the old man in the dust, at the boy with tears on his face. I looked at the cart, and the small pale shape in it. I looked at the long line of Frontier-gray riders, and the cannon, and the banners.

And I made a decision.