REPAIR, NOT REPENTANCE

She did not remember climbing the stairs.

One moment she was standing in the lamplight of the cellar with Soren's white face turned up to hers, and the next she was out in the cold, on a flat tarred roof among the chimney pots, with the wind scouring her cheeks and the taste of ash in her mouth. A hatch in the drying loft had given onto it. She had gone up the ladder like an animal going to ground, blind and breathless, and she stood now at the parapet with both hands gripping the wet brick, looking out over the sleeping roofs of the Hollows without seeing them.

It was a clear night. The snow had stopped, and the clouds had torn open, and the stars were out in their thousands over the black hills, so bright and so many that they seemed to be pressing down on the earth. Far to the south, thirty miles away across the dark plain, lay a faint smear of orange light on the horizon where the lamps of Highmark burned against the sky. She looked at it for a long time. She had loved that light once. She had stepped off the train at Union Station a few months ago, with a carpetbag and a letter and a sixty-dollar salary, and had thought it the most magnificent thing she had ever seen.

They built it out of us, she thought. Every lamp of it. Every marble stair and every golden window, built on the bones of people who sang by a river.

And then, because there was nobody there to see, and because she had been brave for so many days that she had forgotten what it felt like to be anything else, she put her face in her blackened hands and let herself cry.

It was not the crying she had done in the cell, which had been grief for a single old woman. This was a deeper and a colder thing, a flood that seemed to rise from somewhere below the soles of her feet. She cried for the green-eyed woman running through the smoke with a baby in her arms. She cried for the singers on the riverbank with their hands tied behind them, and for the children of Rootvale coughing in their beds, and for her own mother, who had died of the Gray Cough in a bed in Marrow Creek, and for her father, and for every one of the generations between, who had gone down into the dark of the Hollows with their heads bowed and their songs forgotten and no notion of what had been taken from them. She cried because she had been taught to be ashamed of the green, and the shame had been planted in her by the very men who had spilled it. She cried until her chest ached and her throat closed and there was nothing left in her but a great hollow quiet, as if someone had opened a window in a room that had been stifling for a thousand years.

…

The hatch creaked behind her.

She did not turn. She heard his footsteps on the tar, slow and uneven, and stop a little way off. He did not speak. He had put on one of Mrs. Ketteridge's coats, a shabby brown thing several sizes too small, and the wind plucked at the frayed hem of it, and when she finally lifted her head and glanced sideways she saw that he was standing with his arms hanging at his sides and his gloved hand clenched, like a man waiting for a sentence to be passed.

"You should have a hat," she said, in a voice that sounded scraped raw. "You will catch your death."

"I have not come to talk about hats."

"No, I did not imagine that you had."

"Tamsin, I want to say something, and I would be grateful if you would let me finish before you answer." He drew a long unsteady breath. "I have spent the last hour sitting in that cellar trying to think of the words that would be adequate to what I saw, and I have found that there are none. I could say that I am sorry, but you have forbidden that, and besides it would be an insult. I could say that I am ashamed, which is true, but it is a poor little word for what I feel. I could tell you that I did not know, and that would be true as well, and also completely useless, because a man who does not know a thing like this has simply chosen not to look."

"Soren, you must not talk about yourself in that way..."

"I have lived in a house built on a massacre. I slept in a bed, and ate at a table, and signed a hundred and forty orders for the Wards in a study whose very floors were paid for with that blood. I held a cup of tea in my hand every morning and let it go cold, and told myself that I was grieving, when in truth I was only too much of a coward to ask where the tea came from." His voice cracked. "I do not know how to carry it. I do not know if it is possible to carry it at all."

She turned around.

"I do not want your guilt," said Tamsin.

He flinched as if she had struck him.

"I want you to listen to me, because it matters more than anything you are going to say tonight. I do not want you to be sorry. I do not want you to be ashamed, or to punish yourself, or to go about with a face like a wet Sunday for the next fifty years. Your guilt is of no use to anyone. It will not bring back one of the people in that valley, and it will not clean one drop of the water in Marrow Creek, and if you wallow in it, you will only make yourself so busy being sorry that you forget to do what needs to be done." Her voice was shaking, but it did not break. "I want my people's water clean. That is all I have ever wanted. I want the creek to run clear and the children in the Hollows to stop coughing and the Wards to come down, and if you want to do something for me, then do that, and spare me the penance."

…

For a long moment he stood quite still.

Then, to her horror, he went down on his knees.

He did it slowly, in the wet snow of the roof, with the gloved hand pressed to the tarred surface and the bare one hanging open at his side, and he looked up at her out of that gaunt, drawn face with eyes that seemed to hold the whole frozen sky. There was no theater in it. There was no pride either, or ceremony, or any of the courtly grace that had once made her want to throw things at him. He was a man on his knees on a roof in the middle of the night, and he did not know how else to say it.

"Then tell me what to do," said Soren. "Tell me, and I will do it. If you say that I must give up the throne, I will give it up tomorrow. If you say that I must go to the Council and confess in front of the whole Dominion, I will go. If you say I must lay down my life, I will do that too, and gladly, because I would rather die in your cause than live in my family's. I am yours to command, Tamsin. Whatever you ask, I will do it."

She looked down at him for what seemed to her a very long time.

She thought of Edmund Aldridge pouring the salt. She thought of the tall dark man on the stair in Frostgaol, holding a sword of light that sang like a bell. She thought of the arm that had come round her in the tunnel, and the voice that had said I've been shaking for six days, and the hand that had held her bloody one in a ballroom full of jeering Gilded and declared in front of them all that she was his guest. She thought that she had spent her whole life being told what she was, by clerks and Wardens and men in good coats, and that this was the first time anyone with a crown had ever knelt and asked her what he should be.

It would be so easy, she thought, to let him.

It would have been easy, and it would have been wrong, because a man who kneels is looking at the ground, and she had no use for a man who looked at the ground.

"Don't kneel," she said. "Please, get up. I did not walk through a burning gaol so that you could spend the rest of your life on your knees in the snow."

"But I thought you wanted..."

"I want you to stand up." She went to him, crouched, and took both his hands in hers, the gloved and the bare together. They were as cold as ice. "Stand up, Soren, and fight with me. That is the only thing I have ever asked of anyone, and it is the only thing that is worth the having. I do not want a penitent. I want a partner."

He stared at her. Something moved across his face, wavering and incredulous and terribly young, and for the first time since the cellar she saw the tears start in his eyes.

"I do not know if I am equal to it," he said.

"Neither do I. I am a scholar from a coal village with a stolen carpetbag and a seed the size of a pea, and I have not the faintest idea how we are going to topple an empire." She drew him to his feet, and it was as much as she could do, for he was shaking so violently that she had to brace herself against the weight. "But I think that we shall find out together, and that is a good deal better than finding it out apart."

…

They stood for a long time at the parapet, side by side, without speaking.

The wind had dropped. A great quiet had come over the Hollows, the deep hushed quiet of snow country at night, in which one could hear the faint tick of a cooling chimney and the distant barking of a dog. She leaned against his shoulder, and after a moment she felt his arm come round her waist, hesitant at first, then firm, and she laid her head against his collarbone and listened to his heart. It was beating too fast. It was slowing, a little at a time, as she listened.

"Do you know that I have never seen so many stars?" he said at last. His voice was hoarse and dry. "In Highmark there is always a haze from the chimneys, and the gas lamps wash out everything fainter than the moon. I had forgotten that there were so many."

"There are even more in the Prairie Provinces. My father used to say that if you lay on your back in a wheat field on a clear night, it felt as though you might fall upward into them."

"Did you ever lie in a wheat field?"

"Once, when I was nine, on a school outing to the Prairie." She smiled into the dark. "I fell asleep, and the teacher had to carry me home, and I got the strap for it on Monday."

He laughed, and it was a real laugh, low and a little rusty, and she felt it shake through his chest. His fingers found hers on the stone, gloved and bare together, and wove through them one by one until they were locked tight. They stood like that in the starlight, two people holding on to one another in the dark, and she thought that if they were to die tomorrow, she would still count this as one of the best moments of her life.

"Thank you," said Soren quietly. "For not letting me stay on the floor."

"You are very welcome. I shall expect you to do the same for me, on the days when I need it."

"I suspect that there will be a great many of those."

"I am almost certain of it."

…

"I beg your pardon," said Finch, from the hatch. "Forgive me for intruding. I am afraid that there is something more."

He had climbed the ladder with the effort of a man twice his age, and he stood now with one hand on the rim of the hatch, panting, in the circle of light from the lantern he had carried up. His round face was gray. The plum waistcoat was dark with sweat despite the cold, and he held in his other hand a thick leather folder bound with a faded ribbon, which shook very slightly as he held it out.

"I should have said it in the cellar," he said, "but I could not find the courage, and it did not seem right to add another weight to what you had already seen. Now I think that you must hear it all, tonight, and not in pieces. I have had it for eight years, Your Grace, and I have kept it from you for every one of them, and it is the thing that I am most ashamed of in my whole life."

Soren's hand tightened on hers. "What is it?"

"Your mother was Rootkin."

The wind gave one small gust and fell still.

Tamsin heard it as if from a long way off. She had known, of course. She had known since the night in the porch at Marrow Creek, when Granny Odell had said her eyes were green, and she had known before that, in the Archive, with the diary page trembling in her hand. But she had not allowed herself to put it into words, and it was a strange thing to hear it spoken aloud, as if the air itself were holding its breath.

"She was born at Marrow Creek, to a woodcutter's widow," continued Finch in a thin level voice, "and she went to Highmark at nineteen with a letter and a gift for needlework. She met the Emperor in the shop of a milliner, where he had come to buy a ribbon for his sister's birthday. He fell in love with her that afternoon. He knew what she was within a week, and he did not care." The Archivist swallowed. "Her eyes were green. They were always green. The gold in her portraits was done with drops, a preparation of gilt, made up for her in secret by an apothecary in the Old Quarter, who is dead now, God rest him. She wore them every day of her married life. She wore them to her coronation."

"My father knew," said Soren, in a stunned flat voice. "He knew, and he said nothing for thirty years."

"He loved her, Your Grace, and he was afraid. He was a gentle man in a hard place. I do not defend him." Finch lifted the folder. "But it was not he who found out the full truth of it. It was the Chancellor."

"It was Harlan Sterling who found it out, then."

"He had suspected from the first year of the marriage. A man in his position sees many things. He had her watched, and he had Dr. Pell's predecessor examine her, under cover of a fever, and he learned that the Empress carried the green." The old man's voice dropped. "He did not go to the Emperor. He did not go to the Council. He went to Dr. Pell, and he ordered a tonic. A mild one, to begin with, a restorative for her nerves. It was the same tonic, Your Grace, that was afterward given to Lila. It dampens the sap. It was meant to weaken her, quietly, over a period of years, so that when the day came that she was no longer useful, nobody would be surprised."

"When the day came," repeated Soren.

"I believe he meant her to be the last of the Rootkin to serve the Sunwell. The Empress could have been a very great prize for it, you understand, the strongest root in the Dominion." Finch's hands twisted on the leather. "But she grew ill faster than he had calculated. She died in the autumn, a year and a half sooner than the plan, and the Chancellor was obliged to find another source."

Tamsin felt the blood leave her face.

"Lila," she whispered.

Finch bowed his head. "The Princess was three years old, and her eyes were still green when her mother died. They went gold in the first year of the tonic. The register in the Imperial Dispensary calls it a normalization. Lila is Rootkin, Miss Reed. She is the daughter of the Empress, and her blood is as strong as her mother's was, and she has been kept alive and weak for eight years like a hen being fattened for the table. The Chancellor means to bring her to the Cistern on the day of the Midwinter wedding, together with you."

…

The sound that came out of Soren was not a word.

It began somewhere deep in his chest, low and rough and terrible, like a growl, and as she turned she saw him wrench his hand out of hers and take two blind staggering steps toward the chimney stack. The brickwork was old and rough and crusted with soot. He stood in front of it with his back to her, his shoulders heaving, and she saw the white frost leap out from under his fingers and run across the stone, and then he drew back his bare right fist and drove it with all his strength into the wall.

The bricks cracked. He struck again, and again, in a silence more dreadful than any scream, and there was blood on his knuckles and frost on the brickwork and the whole chimney trembled under the blows. His breath came in great sobbing gasps. His head was bowed. His whole body shook with a rage so deep and so entire that there was no voice left to carry it.

Finch had put a hand to his mouth. Tamsin moved before she had time to think.

She crossed the roof in three strides and wrapped both arms about his waist from behind, pressing her cheek against the shaking muscle of his back, and held on. He tried to pull away, and she held tighter. He struck the wall once more, a weak, defeated blow, and then his fist uncurled against the stone and his forehead dropped against the brick.

"It was her," he said, in a ragged whisper. "She was dying in the next room, and I sat there with a cup in my hand, and he was in the corridor with his hat in his hand, speaking kindly to me. He told me how sorry he was." His voice broke. "He held my shoulder, Tamsin. He held my shoulder while she died."

"I know, my love," she said into his coat. "I know exactly how much it hurts."

"And now he has my sister. He has had her all this time, in my own house, and I let him." A shudder tore through him. "I let him give her the spoon."

"You didn't know. You could not have known, and you must not carry that one too, because I will not let you." She tightened her grip. "You are going to be angry for a good long time, and I shall be angry beside you, and we will turn the whole of it to account. But not tonight. Tonight we are going to stand here until your hands stop shaking, and then we are going to go down to the cellar and eat something, and make a plan."

He stood without answering for a long time. The frost on the brick melted by degrees, and ran down in small bright rivulets over his bleeding knuckles and dripped onto the tar. Finally he drew a deep, rough breath, straightened, and turned within the circle of her arms to face her. His eyes were swollen and red, but they were clear, and in them was a look that she had seen once before, in the Archive on the night of the storm, when he had said that the throne could burn.

"We save Lila first," said Soren. His voice was quiet, and hard as iron. "Then we end them."