LULLABY

Tamsin wrote to Granny Odell on the fourth night, by the light of a tallow candle, with the mangle thumping on the other side of the wall and a cup of cold water going stale at her elbow.

She told her grandmother that the house was enormous and the food was heavy with salt, that the Princess was a clever and lonely child, and that the work was not nearly as difficult as it had looked from the Hollows. She did not mention the silverweed. She did not mention the housekeeper's list of rules, or the gray cup, or the Grand Duke's gold eyes pinning her to a chair across a desk. She folded two twenty-dollar bills inside the letter, thinking of the postmaster at Calder Junction, who had once held back a money order for a Rootkin family because the stamp was crooked, and she pressed her thumb into the wax until it bit.

The reply came on the following Tuesday, carried up from the servants' hall by a boot boy who was careful not to touch her fingers.

It was in Granny's square, uncompromising hand, on the back of a handbill advertising a revival meeting in Calder Junction. Jonah is worse since the damp came, it said. The cough has gone down into his chest and he does not want his supper. I have used all the mugwort and the horehound. Dr. Whitcombe will not come up the hill for less than five dollars. Do not come home. Send what you can, and do not let them see you cry, for they will take it as weakness.

Tamsin read it standing in the passage outside the servants' hall, with the smell of boiled cabbage drifting from the kitchen. She read it again, more slowly, and the words began to swim. She bit the inside of her lip hard enough to taste copper and told herself firmly that she would not be seen crying in a corridor by a boot boy, and when she had counted to sixty and was certain her face had stopped doing anything, she folded the letter small and tucked it into the lining of her sleeve, where it lay against her skin like a coal.

…

The key that Mr. Finch had left in her mailbox that morning, with a card that said Compliments of the Archive Board, turned out to belong to a narrow oak door at the end of the second-floor library gallery.

Reference Room B was hardly larger than her bedroom. It had a high window shaded with a green blind, a long table of scarred oak with a brass reading lamp, and shelves from floor to ceiling on three sides, crammed with books bound in cracked calf and dull cloth. The air smelled of old paper, paste, and mice. When she lit the lamp, a soft yellow circle spread across the table, and dust motes drifted through it like a slow snowfall. She had never in her life been somewhere so quiet, or so completely her own.

She stood in the middle of the room for a full minute, simply breathing it in.

Then she went to work. She had come looking for a very specific thing, which was any record of the plant lore of the Hollows that had survived the Purge and the burning of the Rootkin libraries, and the first three shelves told her that she was not the first person to come looking. The books were here, in rows, but they had been treated with a methodical violence she recognized at once. Pages had been cut out with a razor along the gutter, so cleanly that she had to hold a leaf up to the lamp to see that a leaf was missing. In one volume of Dr. Hart's lectures, forty pages were gone from the middle and the stubs had been trimmed. In another, a whole chapter on the properties of bloodroot had been excised, leaving only the heading on the contents page, like the name on a tomb.

She took out her notebook and began to make a list.

It was the kind of work she loved best, the careful counting of absences. She recorded each volume by title and edition, noted the number of the missing pages, and tried to infer from the surrounding text what the excised matter had covered. After an hour she had cataloged thirty-one books. After two hours she had noticed that the cuts were not random: they clustered around a handful of subjects, such as the treatment of water, the signs of silverweed poisoning, and the traditional names of the healing songs. Whoever had done this had known precisely what they were afraid of.

Footnotes matter, she wrote at the top of the page, underlined it twice, and added in smaller letters underneath: and so do the people who cut them out.

"A research method I admire," said a voice from the doorway. "Though I confess I expected you to be crying over the damage rather than writing a bibliography of it."

Tamsin did not jump, though it required effort. Captain Dorian Pike leaned in the doorframe with a tray balanced on one hand, his coat unbuttoned and his fair hair standing up from the wind. He had a lean, good-humored face with a scar through one eyebrow, and the sort of lopsided smile that suggested he had been forgiven for a great many things.

"I'm told that the key to this room is a privilege of the Archive Board," she said. "Is the Imperial Guard in the habit of delivering their refreshments?"

"Only to those they find interesting." He crossed the room and set the tray on a corner of the table. On it stood a white china cup with a blue rim, a small jug of milk, and a plate of buttered biscuits, all arranged with the kind of unself-conscious care that implied that someone had made a special trip to the pantry. "That is real tea, in a real cup, and no one in this house is going to put salt in it. I took the liberty of making it myself, so you can trust it as far as you trust me."

Tamsin looked at the cup for a long moment. Steam curled up from it and smelled of bergamot and malt.

"And how far is that, Captain?"

"Far enough for a biscuit, I should think. Further if you ask me nicely." Dorian leaned against the edge of the table and folded his arms. "I should explain that I do what I'm told, Miss Reed. I've done it faithfully for most of my adult life. But I am a reader by temperament, and I have always found that the most interesting part of an order is the part between the lines."

"And what does the part between the lines say about me?"

"It says that someone has put a great deal of trouble into a house that should not have wanted you." He nodded toward her notebook, where the list ran down the page in her cramped hand. "And that you have been here for six days, and have already found a pattern in the thing most of us have been walking past for years."

She lifted the cup and drank. The tea was hot and sweet and tasted of something that she realized, with a pang, was kindness.

"Thank you," she said, and found that she meant it more than she had intended to.

"Don't mention it. Truly, I'd rather you didn't, since I have a reputation to protect." Dorian straightened and tipped her an ironic little salute. "But if the Archive ever yields up anything unpleasant, I should be obliged if you would tell someone who can stand in front of it. I am a very reliable wall."

…

The nightmare came at a quarter to two.

Tamsin had gone to bed in her little room with the notebook under her pillow and a plan to rise at dawn, but she had barely closed her eyes when the thin high keening reached her through the wall, passing along the servants' passage and up the back stair. It took her a moment to understand that it was not a cat. She was out of bed and into her shawl before she had decided to move, and she ran barefoot along the cold boards of the corridor, up the stair, and through the baize door, with her heart pounding against her ribs.

The Princess's room was lit by a single night-lamp on the mantel. Lila sat bolt upright in the middle of the great yellow canopy bed, with her small hands knotted in the sheet and her mouth stretched open on a wail that had no words in it. Nurse Crowe, in a nightcap, stood by the bedpost wringing her hands, and the sound she was making was a wretched, helpless murmur of there, there, Your Highness, it's only a dream.

"Let me," Tamsin said gently, and the nurse stepped back with an alacrity that suggested enormous relief.

She climbed onto the bed and sat beside the child, who was stiff and trembling and damp with sweat, and who did not appear to see her. Lila's eyes were wide open and fixed on something in the dark. Her lips were moving. Tamsin took the cold little hands between her own and held them, and then, because there was nothing else to do and because it was the only thing she had ever known to work, she began to sing.

She had not meant to sing that song. It was an old Hollows lullaby that every mother on the creek sang to every baby, so familiar that she had never thought of it as a song at all, but as a sound like wind or water. It came out of her low and slow and a little hoarse, in the voice she used for pulling splinters from small hands and for the worst hours of Jonah's coughing nights.

Down by the creek where the green things grow,

the water runs clear and the willows bow low.

Sleep, little seed, in the dark and the deep;

the roots will hold you while the whole world sleeps.

The wail broke off. Lila's breathing hitched, caught, and slowed, and her stiff shoulders began to loosen by degrees, like a rope being let out through a hand. Tamsin kept singing, more quietly each time, drawing out the long vowels as Granny had done, and her thumb stroked slowly across the knuckles of the small cold hand. The room grew very still. The fire shifted in the grate. She sang the second verse about the mother who watches the creek, and the third about the seed that wakes in spring, and by the time she reached the last line Lila had slid sideways onto the pillow with her cheek on Tamsin's knee, fast asleep.

Nurse Crowe was crying silently in the corner. She did not say anything, and when Tamsin glanced at her, the nurse shook her head sharply, wiped her face on her apron, and went out.

Tamsin sat on in the lamplit quiet for a long time, with the sleeping child's head heavy on her knee, and she felt something inside her chest that she had not allowed for several years. It had no name, so she did not give it one.

…

She woke at dawn on the edge of the bed with a crick in her neck. The room was gray and cold, the fire had burned down to embers, and Lila lay curled on her side, breathing deeply, with one fist tucked under her chin. The night-lamp flickered and went out.

It was then that she saw the clover.

It was a small cluster of three-leaved white clover, no more than a hand's breadth across, growing on the surface of the Princess's coverlet where her fist had rested. The leaves were fresh and green and wet with dew, as though they had sprung from a meadow in the rain. The tiny white blossoms nodded, perfectly formed, in the cold air. Their roots, pale and delicate, curled out through the weave of the quilt and into the linen beneath, as if the bed were a patch of ground.

Tamsin stopped breathing.

She had seen magic like this twice before, once in her mother's garden before the sickness took her, and once when Jonah was born and every wild thing in the yard burst into blossom at the first sound of his cry. It was the oldest sign of the Bloodroot, an involuntary flowering. It was what happened when the power in a child slept so deep that she could not feel it, and the earth reached out to find her.

She cannot be what I think she is, Tamsin told herself, kneeling stiffly on the carpet. She is the Emperor's daughter. She is Gilded. Her eyes are gold.

But the clover was real, and her fingers shook as she closed them around the stems. She tugged gently at the stems, and the roots came away with a faint, wet, reluctant sound, and she felt a small pang of guilt, as though she were pulling a tooth. She wrapped the clump in her handkerchief, tucked it into her bodice, and smoothed the quilt flat, checking in the gray light that nothing remained but a few dark flecks of soil. Her heart was beating so hard that she thought it must wake the child.

Lila stirred and murmured something. Tamsin held her breath until the small face smoothed again, and then she crept out of the room on tiptoe and shut the door.

…

She went back that night.

She told herself it was in order to check that the child slept well, which was an entirely plausible reason for a tutor, and she brought a small sachet of dried chamomile and mint from her own supplies to leave on the pillow. The Princess had been quiet all day, and she had asked three times during her lesson whether Tamsin would be there at night. Tamsin had said she would try.

Nurse Crowe had gone to bed. The corridor outside the nursery was empty and dim, with the gas turned low in its brackets, and the only sound was the faint tick of a clock somewhere in the dark. She let herself into the room, sat down on the edge of the bed, and watched the little chest rise and fall. After a while she found that she had begun to sing again, very softly, because the silence felt too large without it.

Sleep, little seed, in the dark and the deep.

A board creaked in the doorway.

She lifted her head, and every muscle in her body tightened. A tall figure stood at the threshold, half in shadow, with the light from the corridor falling across his shoulder and one gloved hand resting on the doorframe. His face was in darkness, but she knew the height of him and the set of his shoulders. She did not need to see the pale gold gleam of his eyes to know that they were fixed on her.

Soren Aldridge had been standing there for some time. She understood that from the quality of his stillness. It was the stillness of a man who has stopped in the middle of a motion and has not yet decided whether to complete it.

Neither of them spoke. The lamp on the mantel fluttered in some draft, throwing quick shadows across the ceiling, and the song hung unfinished in the warm air between them. She could have stopped singing. She could have stood up and curtsied and said something suitably deferential about the Princess's sleep, which was what the rules for Blighted staff would have required. Instead she held his gaze across the length of the room, with her hand resting on his sister's hair, and finished the verse in the same low, even voice.

The roots will hold you while the whole world sleeps.

When the last note had died, he made a slight movement, as if he were about to speak. Then he drew back out of the doorway without a sound, and she heard his footsteps retreat down the corridor, slowly at first and then more quickly, until the dark had swallowed them.

She sat there with her heart pounding for a long time afterward. Beside her, Lila sighed and turned over and went on sleeping.

…

The next morning Mrs. Halloway was waiting outside her door.

The housekeeper stood perfectly upright in the dim passage, with her keys at her waist and her hands folded, and her porcelain face wore an expression Tamsin had not seen on it before. It was the look of a woman who has been given an instruction that offends every principle she holds, and who has no alternative but to carry it out.

"Miss Reed," she said, with the rigid precision of someone reciting a sentence in a foreign language. "His Grace has asked that you take your breakfast in the Morning Room."

Behind her, in the doorway of the laundry, three maids stopped what they were doing and stared.