THE PORCH

The rain began a little after midnight, softly at first, and then with a steady, whispering insistence that drummed on the tin roof of the porch and ran from the eaves in a bright curtain.

Soren sat on the top step with his elbows on his knees and his bare hands hanging between them, staring at the dark shape of the hill across the lane. He had been sitting there for almost two hours. He had left the kitchen after the old woman finished speaking, because he could not bear the fire and the low voice and the smell of drying herbs, and he had walked out into the wet night without his coat. A lantern burned on a nail beside the door. The yard was a puddle of mud and black cabbage stalks, and beyond the garden wall the valley was filled with a pale drifting fog that glowed faintly in the lamplight, like milk poured into water.

He did not feel the cold. He did not feel anything at all, which was a state he knew well, and which had never before seemed so much like drowning.

She was born here.

Granny Odell had told him the rest in the kitchen, in her dry flat country voice, while Tamsin slept on the settle with the quilt to her chin. Adeline Marsh had been the daughter of a woodcutter's widow, a bright quick fierce little girl who learned her letters from a book of herbs and talked of nothing but the world beyond the ridge. She had left the village at nineteen with a letter of introduction to a milliner in Highmark. She had written for two years, short cheerful notes on cheap paper, and then the letters had stopped. Nobody had known what became of her. The old woman had not heard the name again until she saw the news of the Emperor's marriage, and a portrait in a paper, and read the words Adeline, daughter of a Prairie grain merchant, and said to the empty kitchen, Well, lass, you've done it now.

He had asked what she meant, and she had said only that it was not her story to tell, and that Soren would have to ask someone who had been there.

Her eyes, he had said, because it was the only question he could make himself form. They were gold. I remember them. There are a dozen portraits.

Granny had looked at him with her pale fierce eyes, and her face had held no cruelty at all.

They were green, boy, she said. Green as the first leaf in spring. I don't know what they did to them after.

…

The door creaked behind him.

He did not turn. He knew the quality of the step, the light, unhurried tread that had been taking possession of his days, and a moment later a blanket settled across his shoulders, heavy and warm and smelling of lavender and wood smoke. She sat down beside him on the step, close enough that her knee pressed against his, and drew the other end of the blanket across her own lap. They sat for a long time without speaking, watching the rain.

"You should be in bed," he said at last. "You gave three hours of yourself to your brother tonight, and you collapsed."

"I've been in bed all evening. I'm tired of it." Her voice was husky with sleep. "Granny said you walked out in the middle of her story. I thought somebody ought to see that you didn't walk into the creek."

"I considered it."

"I know you did, because you have the look." She turned her head and studied him in the dim lantern light, and her eyes were so gentle that he looked away. "You don't have to talk about it. I only thought that you shouldn't be alone."

He thought about that for some time. The rain ran down the gutter in a thin silver rope, and a drop fell from the eave and burst on the step between his boots.

"Tell me about your childhood," he said.

"You want to hear about my childhood?"

"I have told you nearly everything about mine. You know the window seat and the cold tea and the funeral. I know the name of your grandmother and the cough of your brother and the fact that you correct my grammar. I know nothing of how you came to be the person who walked into my gate." He drew the blanket closer. "I should like to know."

She was quiet for so long that he thought she would refuse. Then she gave a small dry laugh and tipped her head back against the post.

"It's not a very romantic story," she said. "My mother died of the Gray Cough when Jonah was two, and I was thirteen. My father went on working the Calder seam for three more years, and then there was a roof fall. Eleven men went down, and the Colliery Board's inquiry said it was an act of God. After that it was just Granny and Jonah and me, in that cottage, on whatever I could earn from gathering herbs and doing the washing for the overseer's wife." Her fingers plucked at the edge of the blanket. "There was no school in the Hollows for Rootkin. There was one in Calder Junction, but they didn't take the Blighted. So I taught myself."

"How did you manage that?"

"With fish, if you can believe it." She smiled in the lamplight. "The fishmonger wrapped his catch in old newspapers, and I used to wait at the back of his stall for the wrappings. I'd carry them home, and flatten them out, and read them by the fire. The Highmark Dispatch, the Prairie Courier, even a Frost Coast paper once, three weeks old and smelling of herring. I learned my letters from the advertisements. I learned to read from the obituaries. By ten I could read a leading article. By twelve I had decided that I would one day work out what was wrong with the water." She lifted her shoulders. "Everyone told me that it was impossible. A Hollows girl at Ashby College. A Blightborn scholar. They said I would be thrown out in the first month."

"And were you?"

"I was top of the class," said Tamsin, and he heard the old fierce pride beneath the quiet voice. "I did not speak to anyone for nine months, and I read every book in the library, and I wore the same dress until it fell apart. I got a first. And then I came home and found that there was nothing I could do with it, because nobody in Highmark would hire me, and Jonah was getting worse." She laughed again, softly. "And then a letter came, with a seal on it, and sixty dollars a week."

"I am sorry that it came from my house."

"I'm not sorry at all." She turned her head. "I've thought about that a great deal this month. I don't think I'm sorry at all."

…

He had not known that a silence could change its nature so entirely.

It had been companionable. In the space of a breath it became something else, something taut and warm, as though a fine wire had been drawn tight between them. The rain went on falling. A drop slid down the post at her shoulder. He kept his eyes on the lantern, because he knew that if he looked at her he would not be able to stop, and he had resolved in the train, in the cold bright certainty of a man making a vow, that he would ask nothing of her.

"I have been frightened of you," he said, "since the day you walked through my gate."

She said nothing.

"I did not understand it. I thought it was suspicion. I thought it was the habit of caution, the fear that you had been sent for some purpose, and I spent a week telling myself that you were a threat." He drew a slow breath. "It was not that. It was never that. You walked into my study and looked me in the eye, and you told me that my textbook was wrong, and you were right. And I realized that for eight years I had been living in a house where nobody ever contradicted me, and that I had mistaken the silence for peace."

"Soren, you needn't say this," she said.

"You made me want to be someone I am not allowed to be." His voice cracked, and he did not try to mend it. "A man who laughs. A man who sits on a porch in the rain. A man who might be permitted to love someone, without it being a matter of state. I have never been that person. I am not sure he exists. But I wanted, with an intensity that terrified me, to find out."

The rain fell. A cold wind blew a scatter of drops across the boards and they spotted his sleeve. He felt her move beside him, and then her hand came out from under the blanket and took his.

She turned it over. She laid it palm up on her knee and ran her thumb across the base of his fingers, where the skin was hard and ridged, and he realized with a shock that she was examining the calluses.

"You hold a sword," she said softly.

"Every morning, for sixteen years."

"And a pen, and a bridle, and a cold cup of tea." Her thumb traced the long ridge at the edge of his palm. "I thought a Duke would have soft hands. I was quite wrong. These have been worked." She lifted her eyes to his. "I like them very much."

He could not breathe. He sat motionless while she bent her head and pressed her lips, very lightly, to the callus at the root of his thumb.

"Tamsin," he said.

"I'm not afraid anymore," she said. "Of being the reason. I think I've decided that being a reason is a sort of honor. I just wanted you to know."

…

He kissed her in the rain.

He did not afterward recall rising, or drawing her to her feet, or the moment when they left the shelter of the porch and stood on the muddy path under the open sky. He remembered the cold slap of the rain on his face and neck, and the blanket dropping into the mud, and her hands tangled in his hair. He remembered that she tasted of tea and rain and something wild, and that her mouth under his was warm and sure. He remembered the soaked wool of her sleeves under his palms, and the shiver that went through her at his touch, and the way she laughed against his lips, low and breathless and astonished, as though she could not quite believe that this was happening to her.

"We are going to be drenched," she whispered.

"I find that I do not mind."

"Granny will have something to say."

"Granny," said Soren, "is a woman of great perception, and I imagine she will keep it to herself."

She took his hand. She led him back through the dripping dark, up the three steps and across the porch and through the kitchen door, past the cold hearth and the sleeping dresser, and up a steep narrow stair that creaked at every tread. At the top there was a little room under the eaves, with a sloping ceiling and a patchwork quilt and a single window that looked out on the rain. A candle was burning in a saucer on the sill. The air smelled of lavender and old books.

"This was mine," said Tamsin, closing the door. "Until I went to Ashby. I used to lie in that bed and read by the light of that candle. I never once thought of bringing anyone up here."

He stood in the doorway, with the water running from his hair, and looked at her. She had pulled off her wet shawl. Her hair had come loose, and it lay in dark copper ropes across her shoulders, and her face in the candle glow was pale and flushed and very serious. She held out her hand.

The rest was soft and slow and unspoken. It was the sound of rain on tin, and the creak of the old bed, and the warmth of her skin against his in the chill of the little room. It was a hundred small and tender discoveries, the pulse in her wrist and the scar on her neck and the quick shuddering sigh she gave when he said her name, and the extraordinary, humbling knowledge that he was being allowed. It was her fingers in his hair and her mouth at his throat, and a wordless vow made in the dark, with no ceremony except the two of them. At some time in the night the candle burned down and went out, and neither of them noticed.

…

Granny Odell was in the kitchen when he came down, wrapped in her shawl, stirring a pot on the stove. A gray dawn light filled the windows. The rain had stopped, and the air was clean and cold and smelled of wet earth. She did not turn at the sound of his step. She poured two mugs of tea from the blue-checked pot, set them on the table with a clack, and sat down in her rocking chair with her hands in her lap.

He stood at the foot of the stair, with his hat in his hand and his heart doing something unreasonable. He had washed his face and combed his hair with his fingers, and he was acutely aware that his shirt was buttoned wrong.

"Sit down," said Granny, "and drink your tea."

He sat down. The mug was thick and chipped and full of something dark and sweet and smoking. He wrapped both hands round it. Behind him he heard the floorboards creak overhead, and a light step cross the room above, and he could not look at the old woman's face.

She sipped her tea for a long time. The clock on the dresser ticked. Outside a cock crowed, hoarse and distant, and was answered from another farm.

"I don't ask what goes on under my roof," said Granny Odell at last. She did not look at him. She looked at the window, where the first pale light was creeping over the hill. "It's not my business, and I've lived long enough to know that the young will do what they please. But I'll say this, boy, and then I'll hold my tongue."

"Madam, I assure you that..."

"Whatever you two are doing," said the old woman, "do it like you mean it."

He met her eyes. They were fierce and faded and as clear as water, and they held no reproach at all, only a fathomless tenderness and a warning.

"I do," said Soren, and was astonished at the steadiness of his voice. "I mean it with every part of me."

"That is good to hear." She nodded once, and picked up her tea. "Then drink that before it's cold."

…

He took the sample at seven.

He walked down to the creek alone, with a glass vial from his pocket case and the morning sun just touching the crest of the ridge. The fog had thinned. The water ran sluggishly under the bridge, gray and shallow and speckled with silver, and the children of the village had not yet come out to play on its banks. He knelt at the edge, filled the vial, stoppered it, and held it up to the light.

The silver specks drifted in the water, shining like fish scales.

He drew off his glove. He held the vial in the palm of his bare hand, and he let the Gilded Light rise, gently, a soft pearl glow spreading outward from his skin and filling the glass. The water inside went black. It did not do so in the slow oily bloom of yesterday, but all at once, a clot of darkness blooming from the silver flecks like ink dropped in milk.

He stared at the vial for a long time.

He knew that reaction. He had seen it a hundred times, in the Imperial Laboratory, in the lessons of his boyhood, when the old master of Gilded chemistry had demonstrated the properties of the Dominion's most closely guarded compounds. A pinch of white powder, thrown into a glass of water, and a flash of light. The light turned black. It was the identifying mark of a salt that only the Gilded knew how to refine, a compound the masters called gilt, made from the ash of burned sunstone and the crystals of the Prairie brine pans. It was used in the foundries. It was used in the making of lenses.

It was found nowhere in nature. It could be made only in the laboratories of Highmark.

There is gilt salt in the creek, he thought, and a cold hand closed around his heart. It has been there for years. Somebody has been putting it there.

He was still kneeling at the edge of the water when he heard the clatter of hooves on the bridge.

A boy on a lathered pony came pelting down the lane from the direction of Calder Junction, waving a yellow envelope over his head. He reined in so hard that the animal slid, and he held out the telegram with a gasp. "For the gentleman, sir. Come all the way from the telegraph office. The man said it were urgent."

Soren tore it open. It was a single line, in capital letters, from the one man he trusted without reservation.

EMPEROR COLLAPSED LAST NIGHT AND YOU MUST COME HOME AT ONCE. STERLING IS CALLING A QUORUM OF THE COUNCIL BEFORE YOU CAN ARRIVE.