CLEAR WATER

Soren delivered the Emperor's message on the evening of the second day after she woke, and he did it so badly that she loved him for it.

He had been sitting on the end of the cot for an hour, in his shirtsleeves, with a cup of broth balanced on his knee that he was supposed to be feeding her and had forgotten, and he had told her the whole of it in pieces: the Convention, the Wards, the Chancellor in his chains, Delphine in the Rose Tower. He had told it in the flat unadorned manner of a man giving evidence, with his eyes on the blanket. It was only when he came to the end, to the north bedroom and the lamp and the dying man's thin hand, that his voice began to falter. He stopped speaking, and put the cup down on the floor, very carefully, as if it might break.

"There is a message," he said. "He asked me to give it to you. I have been trying to find a way to say it for two days, and I find that I cannot do it justice, so I shall simply tell you what he said." He looked up. "He said, Tell the girl, thank you for the song."

She did not answer for a moment. She lay back against the pillows with the gray blanket drawn up to her chin and looked at the cracked panes of the winter garden, where a little snow had begun to drift against the glass.

She thought of an old man in a wheeled chair, with his hands lying open on his knees and his eyes clouded with eight years of poison, who had listened to a child's chatter across a supper table and said, in a voice like rustling paper, that his late wife used to hum that tune. She thought of how his face had looked then. It had been the face of someone who has been struck, very gently, on the place where he has been numb.

"I did not do it for him," she said at last. "I did it because it was the only thing I knew how to do. But I am glad that he heard it. I am so glad."

"So am I." He took her hand. "I think that it was the last thing he heard that was not a lie."

They sat in silence for a time, with the snow falling past the window and the lamplight yellow on the whitewashed wall. She thought that she had never been so tired, or so content.

…

She recovered slowly, and she hated every minute of it.

She had never been ill in her life, not in the way that other people were ill, and she found that she was a poor patient. She was forbidden to stand for the first week, and then forbidden to walk farther than the window, and then forbidden the stairs. Her legs, when she tried them, were as unreliable as a newborn foal's. The green had withdrawn so far into her that she could scarcely find it, and when she sat in the garden in her chair, with a rug on her knees, and put her palm to the earth, she felt only a faint far-off stirring, like the beat of a heart in a distant room. Granny said that it would take the whole of the winter to come back. Granny said a great many things, most of them in the tone of a woman reading from an irrefutable statute, and she took the opportunity of Tamsin's weakness to feed her with the single-minded ferocity of a farmer fattening a goose.

"Another spoonful," said Granny, on the ninth day. "Do not look at me in that way. You are as thin as a rake handle."

"I cannot eat another thing."

"You can eat another thing, and it will be this one." The wooden spoon hovered. "Your mother never had the sense to eat when she was told, and it was the death of her."

"She died of the Gray Cough."

"She did, but she would have fought it better with some flesh on her bones." Granny put the spoon to her lips, with an air of finality, and Tamsin swallowed it, and was obscurely comforted.

The telegram came that afternoon.

It was brought up on a tray by Dorian, who had been made Commander of the Convention's new Honor Guard on the strength of three days' service and a flourish, and who had taken to wearing the title with an air of mock gravity that deceived nobody. He laid the yellow envelope on her blanket with a bow. "From Marrow Creek, I'm told," he said. "The schoolmaster sent it. The operator at Calder Junction says that he came running to the office in his shirtsleeves and had to be given a glass of water before he could dictate."

She opened it with unsteady fingers.

TO MISS TAMSIN REED STOP THE CREEK IS CLEAR STOP FROM THE TIPPLE TO THE WEIR STOP CHILDREN IN IT TO THEIR KNEES STOP THE GRAY HAS GONE STOP DR WHITCOMBE SAYS THREE COLLIERS COUGHING YESTERDAY AND NONE TODAY STOP NO ONE KNOWS WHAT TO MAKE OF IT STOP WE ARE ALL STANDING ON THE BANK LOOKING AT IT STOP PERCIVAL DUNNE SCHOOLMASTER

She read it twice. Then she read it a third time, and the printed letters began to swim and run together, and a drop fell on the paper and spread in a small dark star.

"Is it bad news?" said Dorian, alarmed.

"It is not bad at all," said Tamsin. She was laughing and crying at once, and could not seem to separate the two. "It is the best news that I have ever had. Jonah, come here. Come and listen to this."

Her brother was sitting on the floor by the stove with a book on his knees, long-legged and sandy-haired and frowning at a page of arithmetic. He had been there, more or less, for ten days. He got up and came over to the bed and she read him the telegram, and he listened with his head on one side, and at the end of it he said in a quite ordinary voice, "That is nice. The water will be all right now, then," and returned to his sums.

She sat quite still.

He had not coughed. She had been listening for it. She had listened for it every hour of every day since the Cathedral, with the old instinctive dread of ten years, and it had not come. He had run up the stairs. He had laughed with Lila in the garden until he was breathless, and he had drawn his breath again in long clean pulls, without the thin catch and rattle that had been the background to her whole childhood. He sat on the floor, a healthy boy of thirteen, arguing with a quadratic equation, and the silence in his chest was the loudest sound that she had ever heard.

She pulled the blanket over her face and wept into it until Granny took her by the shoulders and shook her, gently, and said that she would make herself ill.

…

She went to see Delphine on the twelfth day.

Nobody approved of it. Soren had said that it was too soon, and Granny that it was not necessary, and Dorian, who had a poor opinion of Chancellors' daughters, that it was positively mad. But she had been lying awake with it for a week, turning it over in her mind, and she found in the end that it was not a question of whether it was wise. It was a thing that she needed to do, as a person needs to close a door that has been banging in the wind.

The Rose Tower stood at the northwest corner of the Hall, a round turret of pink brick with a conical slate roof and a spiral stair, which had been the playroom of the Aldridge children in the last century. A Convention guard in plain gray stood outside the door, a young man with a Hollows accent and anxious eyes. He unlocked it for her and stood aside, and she climbed slowly, holding the rail, with her bandaged wrist tucked into her sling and a small leather bag in her free hand.

The room at the top was round, and full of light.

It had a fire in the grate and a good worn carpet. A table stood by the south window with a pile of books on it, and a tray, and a vase of dried grasses that someone had thought of. Delphine sat on the window seat with her knees drawn up and her back against the wall, in a plain brown dress, with a book open in her lap. She had been looking out of the window at the garden. Her hair was in a braid, and she looked up as Tamsin came in, and Tamsin saw with a small shock how thin she had become, and how quiet.

"Miss Reed," said Delphine, rising. "I did not expect you."

"I was not sure that you would want to see me."

"I do not think that I want to see anyone." Her voice was low. "But you have come a long way, and you should sit down. Please take the chair, and I shall stand."

"We can both sit," said Tamsin. She took the chair by the fire. After a moment, Delphine sat down on the edge of the window seat, with her hands clasped between her knees, and they looked at each other.

It was a very odd silence. It was the silence of two people who have each tried to destroy the other, and who have discovered, in the process, that they have nothing whatever to say.

"I brought you something," said Tamsin finally.

She opened the leather bag. Inside was a small brown bottle, stoppered with cork, and she held it out on her palm. It was a preparation of her own, made in the kitchen of the Hall during her second week of convalescence, with Granny's assistance and Finch's books, from chamomile and lemon balm and the dried petals of calendula and a few other things that she did not name. She had written the dose on the label in her neat small hand.

"It is not a cure," she said. "I cannot give you back the light, and I do not think that you should want it. But I have read a great deal about the feeling that you described to Soren, the dryness and the shaking and the sense of something missing, and I think that I understand it. It is a withdrawal, like any other. This will ease the worst of it. You are to take a spoonful at night, and it will help you sleep."

Delphine looked at the bottle. She did not touch it.

"I do not understand," she said. "I tried to have you killed. I let my father send you to the Cistern. I watched you walk into Frostgaol, and I told every lie that I was asked to tell, and I stood on the altar steps in my wedding dress and put Soren in a cage. Why are you being kind to me?"

"I am not being kind."

"Then what is it?"

Tamsin considered the question for a long moment, looking at the fire, and the plain brown dress, and the hands that were still faintly gray at the tips. She thought of an old woman in a glass cell, with her black eyes full of tears, saying they are only the hands. She thought of a young girl at a ball in a dress of white satin, being led down an aisle by her father, who had been told since the age of nineteen that she was one of the survivors.

"I am not forgiving you," she said. "I want to be very clear about that, because I think that you would not believe me if I did. What you did was wrong, and a number of people are dead who need not have been, and I do not think that I will ever stop being angry about it. But I have found that I do not wish to hate you either." She set the bottle on the little table. "I am choosing not to. It is cheaper."

"Cheaper than hatred," whispered Delphine.

"Hatred is very costly, you see. It takes a great deal of one's time. I have a number of things I would prefer to be doing."

There was a long pause.

And then, quite suddenly, Delphine Sterling began to cry.

It was not the pretty crying that she had done at the trial, with a handkerchief and a catch in the voice. It was ugly, and helpless, and loud. She doubled over on the window seat with her arms wrapped round her middle and her face contorted, and the sobs came up out of her in great racking heaves, as if she had not wept in years, and was surprised by it, and could not make it stop. Tamsin did not move. She did not touch her, or speak. She only sat in the chair by the fire and let her cry, as one lets a storm blow itself out, and when it was over, and Delphine lay curled on her side among the cushions with her cheeks wet and her eyes swollen and her breath coming in long uneven sighs, she rose, and laid the brown bottle gently on the sill.

"Take a spoonful tonight," she said. "And if you wish to talk about anything, you have only to send word."

She went out. Behind her, on the round stair, she heard a small broken voice say, "Thank you for coming," and she did not turn around.

…

They went to the Hollows in the third week, by the morning train, in a snow-white dawn.

She had insisted on it. She could walk by then, with a stick, and the doctors had run out of objections. The Convention had given its leave, and Soren could not be spared from it, so Dorian rode with her, and Jonah, and Granny, who had refused to be left behind and sat bolt upright in the corner of the compartment with her stick across her knees. Lila had begged to come, and had been allowed. She sat on the opposite seat with her face pressed to the window and the rag doll in her lap, watching the white fields and the black villages go by, and she hummed the whole way.

Marrow Creek was waiting for them on the platform.

She did not know how they had known. She came down the carriage steps on Dorian's arm, with her hand at her scar, and found the whole village drawn up on the cinders in the thin gray light, two hundred of them, in their Sunday coats, with their hats in their hands. Nobody cheered, and nobody said a word. The old men stood with their heads bowed and the women with their shawls drawn tight, and the children, scrubbed and solemn and shivering, were lined up in front of them. They looked at her with enormous eyes. Then the schoolmaster, a tall stooped man with spectacles and a drooping mustache, stepped forward, cleared his throat, and began, in a tremulous tenor, to sing.

It was the lullaby. It was the one that she had learned at her mother's knee, in the kitchen of the cottage by the tipple, in the year of Jonah's birth. The village took it up. It rose over the platform in the cold, ragged and tender and a little out of tune, and she stood with her stick planted and her face lifted and listened to the whole of it.

The roots will hold you while the whole world sleeps.

…

The creek ran clear.

She stood on the bank at noon with her skirts gathered in one hand, and looked at it, and could not at first believe what she saw. She had known that creek all her life. She had known it silver-scummed and sluggish, the color of old pewter, with the dead fish turning in the eddies below the weir and the foam crusted gray against the stones. Now it was transparent. It ran quick and bright and cold over a bed of clean pebbles, so pellucid that she could see every grain of gravel on the bottom, and a school of minnows hanging in the shallows, and the long green weed combing in the current like hair. It smelled of snow and moss and growing things. It sounded like laughter.

Children were in it.

They had come down the bank in a body, as soon as the grown-ups would let them, and now they were splashing and shrieking in the shallows with their boots flung off and their trousers rolled to their knees. A girl of six was sitting in the middle of the current with the water running round her waist, holding up handfuls of it and letting it fall through her fingers with an expression of rapture. Two boys were chasing a minnow. Lila had thrown off her shoes and run in after them, and Jonah behind her, and the doll was lying forgotten on the grass, and the shouts of the children rang off the slate of the old tipple and up the hillside. They had never in their lives been permitted to go near it.

Granny stood beside her with her stick, and her face was working.

"I told them they might," she said. "I stood at the church door on the first morning and told them that if their mothers had any objection they might come to me. Seventy-three years, child, I have been telling children to keep away from that water."

"And now you are telling them to go in."

"It is a great relief." Granny blew her nose on a large gray handkerchief. "I shall have to find something else to scold them about."

The church was open behind them, the old gray wooden chapel at the end of the lane, and Tamsin turned and looked at it. The pews had been stacked against the wall. A row of cots had been set out down the nave, with clean white blankets, and a stove was burning at the east end, and a table held a dozen jars of salves and tinctures. A hand-lettered sign swung over the door on two chains. MARROW CREEK CLINIC, it said, where everyone is welcome and no questions are asked. Under it, in a smaller hand, someone had painted a leaf.

"It was Jonah's idea," said Granny. "He said that it was a waste to pray in a building with so much floor."

…

She planted the seed at the bend of the creek, below the weir, where the silver scum had lain thickest.

She had not known that there was a second one. It was Granny who had found it, on the evening of the ninth day, when she had taken the little cloth bag from Tamsin's neck to wash it. The husk of the seed had split in the Cistern, and Tamsin had thought it spent. But folded in the lining of the bag, curled like a sleeping mouse in a nest of lint, there had been a tiny kernel no larger than a grain of rice, amber-dark, with a thread of red running through it. Twin seeds, Granny had said. They come so, now and then, in the old stock. Agnes would have known. I believe that she meant you to have both.

She knelt on the bank with her stick laid beside her, in the mud, in her best gray dress. She dug a small hole with her fingers, in the black wet soil by the roots of a willow. The earth was cold and loamy and alive. She laid the little kernel in the hollow, and closed her hand over it, and for a moment she did not move.

Plant it where the water is sick, Agnes had said.

It was not sick any longer. The water ran beside her, bright and quick and clean, and the minnows turned in the shallows, and she could hear the children laughing. But she thought that the old woman had not meant only the water. She thought of the cells in the Glasshouse, and the Wards, and the cold gray rooms of the Chancery, and the Gilded lady in the Rose Tower with her thin hands. She thought of all the places in the Dominion that were still sick, in their several ways, and that would need a long time to be well.

"Grow slowly," she said aloud, in a low voice. "And grow strong. It is going to be a long season."

She covered the seed with earth. Then she sat back on her heels, with the cold creek singing in her ears, and began, very softly, to hum.

…

The news reached them at the station.

It came by the evening train, from Highmark, in a newspaper that a conductor handed down to Dorian on the platform with a face like thunder, and she knew what it said before he unfolded it. She could see it in the set of his jaw. She read it by the light of the lamp over the ticket window, with Jonah and Lila pressed against her sides, and the paper rustled in the cold wind. RIOTING IN THE OLD QUARTER, said the headline. Gilded Conservatives Burn Rootkin Clinic. Society of the Pure Light Proclaims Reed and Aldridge "Usurpers." Troops Called Out.

She read the rest in silence. A body of the Gilded had assembled on the evening of the nineteenth in Founders' Square, led by a number of the old families, and had denounced the Convention as an unlawful assembly. They had called the Well's destruction a crime. They had proclaimed, in so many words, that the Duke of Vandermere had been bewitched by a Blighted sorceress, and that the Dominion could not be ruled by a creature of the Hollows. Bonfires had been lit. A mob had marched on the Old Quarter. Windows had been smashed, and a clinic burned, and a Ward guard had been beaten half to death in the street.

"It's only the first night," said Dorian, in a rough voice. "It will blow over. They are frightened, that's all."

"I know that it will." She folded the paper. "People will be frightened, Dorian. They have been frightened for three hundred years. It will take a good deal more than a clean river to cure it."

The train for Highmark was waiting. They climbed on board, the five of them, and found a compartment, and Granny settled in the corner with a rug and a basket of provisions and an air of grim readiness. Lila fell asleep against Tamsin's shoulder before the engine was out of the station. The country went by in the dark, black and white and silent, and now and then, in the distance, she saw the red glow of a fire.

It was close to midnight when they reached Union Station.

She had last stood in that hall on the day she came, a girl of twenty-four with a carpetbag, a letter, and a shabby gray coat, trembling at the sight of the Registry desk. It was the same vast, echoing, gas-lit cavern, with its iron girders and its great clock. But the Registry desk was gone, and the signs about ash-ribbons, and the wire barriers. The hall was crowded with people in plain coats, standing about in small anxious knots, talking in low voices, and at the end of the platform, under the clock, stood a tall figure in a black overcoat with his hat in his hand.

He had been waiting a long time. She could tell by the snow on his shoulders. He turned as the train drew in, and his face in the lamplight was gray with fatigue and drawn with strain, and then she saw it change, as it always did, as though someone had turned up a lamp inside him. He came down the platform at a run.

"Soren," she said, laughing, as he took her hands. "You look dreadful."

"I have been in the Great Hall for nineteen hours." He was holding her very tightly, and not caring who saw. "I could not stay away. I have a letter."

He drew it from his coat, a long white envelope with a heavy red seal, and she looked at it, and at his face, and her smile faded.

"It is from the Convention," said Soren quietly. "They have made their decision. The Convention is called to order tomorrow morning at nine, and they want to speak to you."