ASH AND AFTERMATH

For three days and three nights, Soren did not leave the room.

They had carried her out of the Cathedral on a door torn from its hinges, with Dorian at one corner and Jonah at another and two of the freed Bayou miners at the others, through a nave that was dripping and green and strewn with fallen stone, past two thousand silent Gilded who had drawn back against the walls to let the stretcher pass. Nobody spoke, because nobody had the heart to. He had walked beside her with his hand on her forehead and his coat pulled over her feet, and he remembered afterward only the sound of water, everywhere, running down the walls and over the steps and through the cracks in the floor, as if the building itself had begun to weep with relief.

They had taken her to Vandermere. It was Granny's decision, and nobody had argued with it. The east-wing infirmary was the nearest place with a warm bed and clean linen, and it was the room where Tamsin had once knelt on the floor and healed her own scalded hand while he stood at the door and pretended not to watch. The whitewashed walls were the same. The little iron cot was the same, with a clean gray blanket tucked up to her chin. The window looked out upon the winter garden, where the glass roof had cracked in the tremor, and through the cracks there fell a pale cold light that lay across her face and made it look like something carved from wax.

She did not wake.

She lay very still on the narrow bed with her hair spread over the pillow and her bandaged wrist laid on the blanket, and her breath came so slowly and so shallowly that he found himself bending close to the bed twenty times an hour to be sure of it. There was no fever. There was no pain that he could see. She was simply gone, as a candle is gone when someone has put a hand over it, and the green that had burned in her so brightly seemed to have withdrawn to some deep and silent place from which it would not be called.

"She is not dying," Granny said, on the first night, for the fifth time.

She sat on the other side of the bed in a wooden chair that someone had brought from the kitchen, small and bent and gray as a stone, with her stick across her knees. She had not slept either. She had only closed her eyes now and then, and opened them again at the least sound, and she had refused every offer of a bed.

"She gave everything she had to that Well, Your Grace, and it took it, as it takes from all of us. It will take some time to grow back. It is like a tree that has been cut to the ground, and you must not think that it is dead because there is nothing showing above the soil." Her voice was dry and sure, but her hand on the stick was white at the knuckle. "She is down in the roots. She will come up when she is ready."

"And if she does not?"

"Then I shall be very much surprised," said Granny, "because I have never known that child to leave a task half done."

He laughed, and it came out wrong, and he put his face in his hands.

…

He held her hand.

That was all that he did, in those days. It was all that he knew how to do. He sat in the hard chair beside the cot with her cold fingers in his bare ones and his thumb moving back and forth across her knuckles, and watched the light change in the window, and listened. The house beyond the door was full of noise. There were voices in the corridors and boots on the stairs and the sound of a thousand things being decided that he was supposed to decide, and he heard none of it. Dorian came and went. The Convention, he gathered, was sitting in the Great Hall under the presidency of Lord Ashcombe, who had risen to the occasion with a bluff and unexpected competence, and had shut the press out, and the Council in, and was reported to have said that nobody was leaving the building until the Dominion had a government. The Wards were open. The fences had been torn down by their own inmates in the first hour after the Well broke, and forty thousand people had walked out through the gap into the clean cold streets of Highmark, singing, and the Gilded had stood at their windows and watched them go by.

He heard these things from a great distance. He did not care about any of them. He cared about the small steady pulse in her wrist, which he counted with his fingers, and the faint rise and fall of the blanket.

Lila came on the second morning, in her gray flannel gown, with the rag doll tucked under her arm.

She climbed up on the foot of the cot without a word and sat cross-legged on the blanket, watching the sleeping face with solemn green eyes. After a time she put out one hand and laid it on Tamsin's ankle through the blanket, and began, very softly, to hum. It was not the Rooting Song. It was the lullaby, the plain one, the Hollows one, the song that he had heard through a nursery door on the second night of Tamsin's employment and had not understood until now.

"She can hear me," said Lila. "I know that she can. She's just a long way down."

"I know, little one."

"I will go on humming. It makes it easier to find the way back." She looked up at him, and her face was gravely sympathetic, as of an older person consoling a younger. "You should eat something, Soren. You look dreadful. You look as though you'd been put through a mangle."

He ate the bread and cheese that she fetched. It was the first thing he had swallowed in two days, and it tasted of nothing.

…

They brought the Chancellor to him on the afternoon of the first day.

He had gone out for a moment, the only time he left the infirmary, to speak with the captain of the Frost Guard in the passage, and the captain had said in his stiff soldierly way that there was a prisoner who wished to be seen. Soren had not wished to see him. He had gone anyway, down the stair to the old guard room beside the east door, because there is a kind of duty that is no less binding for being hateful.

Harlan Sterling sat on a wooden bench with his wrists in iron and a pair of Frost Guard privates at his shoulders.

He had been washed. Somebody had taken the soot from his face and combed his silver hair, and the black morning coat had been brushed, though the left sleeve hung in tatters where a root had torn it. The white rose in his lapel was crushed and brown. He sat quite upright with his chained hands folded in his lap, and he looked up at Soren with the same courteous, attentive, faintly rueful expression that he had worn in the Council chamber for thirty years, as if the last three days had been a minor delay in his calendar.

"Your Grace," he said. "How is Miss Reed?"

"She is asleep."

"I am glad that she is alive. I do not say that to be gracious. It was a remarkable piece of work, and I should have been sorry to have it undone." He tilted his head. "I should like you to know, for what it is worth, that I never took any pleasure in it, whether in the Wards or the Cistern or the child. You will think that a very poor excuse, and I do not offer it as one. I only wish you to understand that it was a matter of arithmetic."

"I am aware of that," said Soren. "I have been listening to your arithmetic since I was seven years old."

"Then you will also understand that someone had to do it." Sterling sighed. "The Dominion required a Well. It has been three hundred years since the Founders discovered that civilization is a thing that must be paid for, and I merely chose to pay it in coin that the Council would not miss. I was a pragmatist. Not a monster, Your Grace, whatever the newspapers say. I made the hard decisions that other men were too delicate to make, and in time, when the passions have cooled, I think that history will understand it."

He smiled, a thin mild private smile, and rested his chin on his chained hands.

"History will remember me," said Harlan Sterling, "as a pragmatist."

Soren looked at him for a long time. He had expected, in all the nights that he had lain awake imagining this moment, to feel something large. Hatred, perhaps, or triumph, or the heavy satisfaction of a debt discharged. Instead he felt a vast and tired disgust, and beneath it, odd and unexpected, a kind of pity, as for a man who has spent a lifetime building a house and has never noticed that there was nobody in it.

"History will remember you, Chancellor," he said. "It will have the Ledger to consult. It will have eleven thousand six hundred and four names, and every one of them in your handwriting. And I think that it will be a great deal less interested in your reasons than you imagine."

He turned and left the room. Behind him, for the first time in his life, he heard the silence of Harlan Sterling having nothing to say.

…

Delphine was alive.

He found her in the Cathedral crypt, on the third morning, sitting on the steps of the Chapel of the Queens with her knees drawn up and a soldier's gray blanket round her shoulders. The wedding gown was gone. She wore a plain brown dress that someone had found for her, and her hair hung in a single braid down her back, and she had washed the paint from her face. She looked about fifteen years old. She did not look up when he came down the stair, though she must have heard him, and he sat down beside her on the cold step without speaking and waited.

Her eyes were brown.

They were a warm, deep, honest brown, the brown of a chestnut or a good dark ale, and there was not the faintest trace of gold anywhere within them. He had never noticed before how pretty they were. In the whole of the years that he had known her, he had never once seen them without the shimmer of drops or the glitter of kohl, and he thought, with a pang, that nobody else had either.

"They are the color of my mother's," said Delphine, in a flat small voice. "I had forgotten. She died when I was four. I used to sit in her lap and look into them, and they were exactly like this." She pressed her hands against her knees. "I do not know who I am without it, Soren. I have never known. I have been a Gilded lady since the day I was born. I was a prize and a promise and a name on a card, and now there is nothing, and I find that I do not know the first thing about what a person like me is meant to do all day."

"You might begin by eating breakfast."

"I do not think I could keep it down."

"Then you might begin by being very sorry, and finding out what it is that you want to be sorry for." He said it quite gently. "I will not lie to you, Delphine. There will be a trial. Not for you alone. For your father and Pell and the Magistrate and for everyone who signed an order. The Convention has asked for a public hearing, and I think they are right. I shall ask them to try you as a person, and not as a symbol, and not to hang you."

Her shoulders shook.

"I have given instructions that you are to be kept in the Rose Tower at the Hall," he went on. "It has a south window, and a garden below, and a fire. You will have books, if you want them, and paper. You will be guarded, because you must be, but no one will harm you, and no one will take away the light." He drew a long breath. "I cannot give you back what you have lost. But I think, in time, you may find that you did not need it as much as you thought."

She did not answer. After a while she leaned her head against his shoulder, stiffly, awkwardly, like a child who has been told that it is permitted. He sat very still and let her.

…

The Emperor sent for him on the third night.

It was past midnight, and Soren had not wished to go. But the old attendant in the gray apron stood at the door of the infirmary with her lined face set, and said that His Majesty had very little time. He kissed Tamsin's forehead, and told Granny that he would be back within the hour, and followed the woman along the dark corridors to the great bedroom in the north wing, which he had not entered since the Wexmouth road.

The room was lit by a single lamp. The old man lay propped on pillows in the great carved bed, very small beneath the weight of the quilts, with his white hair on the linen like a sprinkling of frost. His eyes were closed. His breath came with a faint dry rattle. But as Soren sat down at the bedside, the lids lifted, and the gold-brown eyes were as clear as they had been on the day of the wedding.

"Soren," said Augustin. It was hardly more than a movement of the lips. "You have come."

"I am here, Father."

"I wanted to see you while I was still myself. The physicians say that it will not be long, and I find that I agree with them." The thin hand groped over the coverlet. Soren took it. It was dry, and light, and cold, like a bundle of twigs. "You were magnificent, my boy. I was sitting there with my eyes shut, like a coward, listening to you read, and I thought, that is my son, and I had nothing to do with it."

"You stood up."

"I did, God help me, at the end." The faintest smile twitched the corner of the mouth. "I have been practicing for eight years. In my head. It was a good deal easier there."

They were silent for a while. The lamp hissed.

"I should have fought for her," said the Emperor.

He said it very quietly, with his eyes on the ceiling. "I am speaking of your mother, and I should have gone to the Council on my knees, or to the Cathedral with a torch, or into the street. I should have taken her away from this place and hidden her in a cottage in the Hollows and let the whole Dominion go to the devil. I knew what I ought to do. I knew every day for twenty years. And I sat in my study and signed the papers and told myself that it was kindness." His fingers tightened. "Do not make my mistake, Soren. If you love that girl, do not wait until you are certain. You will never be certain. Go and fight for her with whatever you have."

"I will, Father."

"I know that you will. You have already begun." His eyes closed. His voice dwindled to a breath. "There is one other thing. Will you give her a message?"

"I will give her any message that you wish."

"Tell the girl," said Augustin, "thank you for the song."

…

He died at dawn.

It was a clear gray morning, with the first light just creeping over the rim of the eastern windows, and the whole house was still. Lila had been fetched from her bed. She came into the room in her nightgown with her hair in tangles and the doll under her arm, and without a word she climbed onto the edge of the great bed and took her father's hand. She did not cry. She sat there with her small green-eyed face quite calm, looking down at the thin white fingers in her own, and she began to hum.

It was the lullaby. It was the same song that Adeline had sung in the garden among the lilies, and that Tamsin had sung in the nursery, and that the whole of the Hollows had sung on the shining floor of a ruined Cathedral. It went on, soft and clear, through the pale light, and the old man's breath slowed, and slowed. Soren held the other hand. He did not say anything. At some moment between one bar of the song and the next, he felt the fingers in his lose their grip, and the hush that came into the room was not an empty one.

"He's with Mama now," said Lila, when she had finished. She laid the hand gently on the quilt, and smoothed it. "I heard her say hello."

Soren pulled her into his arms and held her until the sun came up. Neither of them said anything more.

…

It was nearly noon when he went back to the infirmary.

He walked slowly, up the long stairs, with his legs aching and his eyes gritty, and he thought that he would never in his life be so tired. There was a task to be done: the proclamation, the funeral, the Convention waiting, and the thousand decisions that the dead man had left behind. He would do them. But for a little while longer he wanted only to sit in the hard chair beside the narrow bed, and hold a cold hand in his, and tell it that his father had died, and that there was a message waiting for her, and that the sun was shining.

Granny was at the door. She stood in the opening with her stick in her hand, and the expression on her face stopped him on the threshold.

"Go in to her now," she said. Her voice was not steady. "I think that she has been waiting for you."

He went in.

The window was full of white winter sun. It lay across the bed in a long bright bar, over the gray blanket and the bandaged wrist and the dark spread of hair, and in the middle of it, propped on one elbow among the pillows, thin and pale and rumpled and blinking at the light like a creature coming up out of a cave, lay Tamsin Reed.

Her eyes were open.

They were gray-blue, the color of the sky over the Silverwater in spring, and they were looking at him with a faint puzzled concentration, as if he were a sum that she was trying to work out. Her lips moved. Her voice, when it came, was a dry cracked whisper, scarcely louder than the rustle of a leaf.

"Did I miss anything?" asked Tamsin.

For a moment Soren could not answer. He stood in the doorway with his hand on the frame and the whole of the last three days rising in his chest, the Well and the Ledger and the Chancellor in his chains, the Rose Tower and the dead man's face, and the long white nights beside her, counting a pulse. Something broke in him, like ice breaking on a river in spring. He began to laugh. He laughed helplessly, and the laughter turned in the middle to something wetter and rougher, and he found that he was crying and laughing at once, with his hand pressed to his mouth, and that he could not stop either.

"Only a few things," he said, when he could speak. He crossed the room in three strides and knelt beside the cot and took her hand, and it was warm. "Only the end of the world, and the beginning of another one. I shall tell you all about it, my love, as soon as I am able."

She smiled, and tightened her fingers on his.

"Start with the footnotes," she said.