WHAT VESPER WANTS

Day 25 of 100

The headaches began at dusk, as they always did now, behind the left eye.

Vesper sat before the glass in Mara Ashgrove's room with a hairbrush in her fist and a cold cloth against her temple, and waited for it to pass. It would not. It never did until the memories had finished arriving, one by one, like a flock of gray birds coming home to roost. She'd learned to sit still and let them. She'd learned, too, not to scream.

Water.

That was the first. It came up out of the dark in her skull, and she shut her eyes.

Water, flat and gray as a slate, and a smell of rot and wet rope. A dock. A pair of bare feet on warped boards. A cold light, as of an evening in October when the sun has slid behind the hills and the sky has not decided yet to be dark. A rope in her hands. Not hers; she was fourteen, and small, and she had never held a rope in her life. And a boy.

She'd seen the boy a dozen times. He was always at the edge, always out of focus: a tall thin shape in a rough shirt with a lock of black hair across his eyes. She had never seen his face. Mara had never seen it either; the memory was cut clean, as with a razor, at the moment before he turned.

Tonight he turned.

Vesper's hand tightened on the brush until the bristles bit.

He was nineteen. He had a long pale serious face, all bone, with a boy's softness still about the mouth. His eyes were gray. There was no scar through the brow. And he was crying, openly, helplessly, with his head thrown back and the tears running into his collar; and in his two hands, held before him like something holy, he had a light.

It was blue. It was silver. It was shaped like a snowflake with three arms, and it burned in his palms with a brightness that made the whole lake into a plate of white fire. And as she watched, as the fourteen-year-old watched from the end of the dock with her heart stopping in her chest, he said, in a voice she'd have known anywhere, in a thousand years, in the dark:

"I'm sorry. Oh God, I'm sorry. I didn't know it would do this."

And he tore it in half.

…

She came back to herself on the floor.

The brush had rolled away. The cloth lay in a wet knot by the bedpost. She was on her hands and knees on the Turkey rug, shaking all over, with sweat standing cold on her upper lip and a taste of copper in her mouth. She'd bitten her tongue.

Rooke.

She said it aloud, to the empty room. It sounded very small.

"Captain Callum Rooke."

There was no mistaking him. She'd been looking at that face for a month across a library table, across a dinner, across a desk heaped with the Wardens' papers. She had learned the scar and the long jaw and the way he stood with his weight on one foot. She'd looked into the gray of those eyes and thought, there's something I know, and had put it down to the Soul-Sight, to his reputation, to the usual uncanny pull that a dangerous man has.

It wasn't that.

It was Mara's memory. Mara's heart. Mara, who had stood at the end of that dock in a thin summer frock, ten years ago, and watched a boy of nineteen who was weeping take her soul out of her body with his bare hands and split it down the middle.

And she doesn't know.

The thought came with a terrible clarity. Mara did not remember. Her mind had shut over the thing like water over a stone: a fever, a blank, a month in bed. A tidy lie that she'd told herself since she was fourteen. The memory had been there all along, buried under the wound, and it had only come out at the Ascension, when the sigil cracked, and the soul-line parted, and Vesper had walked out of the broken half with all of it intact. All of the lake. All of the boy. All of the grief.

I know something she doesn't.

She sat down on the edge of the bed. She put both hands to her mouth.

…

It was an odd thing to be a person with a secret that big.

She had not thought of herself as someone who had them. She'd been born, if that was the word, at a quarter to eight on a Wednesday in the Founder's Chapel, in a rush of light and pain; and she had spent her first days entirely occupied with the question of how to remain alive. A thing with a purpose, and a dress, and a plan. A hunter's clear vision of the field.

It was only lately, in the long, strange, unwatched hours, that she'd begun to notice that she had a self.

It wasn't Mara's. That was the horror and the wonder. She had every memory Mara had; she could have recited the date of Mara's first communion, and the name of the horse she fell off at eight, and the exact blue of her mother's best shawl. But she liked different things. She liked wine, which Mara thought sour. She liked red, and the feeling of a corset pulled tight, and the sound of her own voice in a lighted room. She liked the way men looked at her. Mara had never noticed it. She was fearless in places Mara was cautious and cautious in places where Mara had been bold, and when she looked in the mirror she did not find the pale intent bluestocking with her nose in a book.

She found a stranger.

She looked.

The glass was cracked. She'd done it herself on the third night, in a fury, with the back of the silver brush, and a long white fissure ran across it from corner to corner, dividing the room into two. In the left half, a lamp. A wardrobe. A bed. In the right, her. Vesper, in a wine-red wrapper, with her hair undone to her waist and her face the color of paper and her eyes much too large. She was very beautiful. It was an almost useless thing to know.

Nobody made me, she thought. Nobody asked. I am what happens when you break a girl, and the break doesn't go all the way through.

And in the left half of the mirror, over her shoulder, a pale shape stirred.

…

She'd seen it for the first time on the fifth night. She had thought it a trick of the lamp. A mist in the glass, a smudge at the edge of the frame, roughly the height of a woman, roughly the shape. It never came when she looked for it. It came when she was tired, or in pain, or when the thread tightened in her breast.

It was there now.

She didn't turn her head. She held very still, with her eyes on the crack. The shape stood in the left half of the mirror by the wardrobe, faint as breath on a pane, with a pale face and cropped hair and a pair of gray-green eyes that watched her with an expression she knew.

Mara.

She had never seen that look from the outside. It was not hatred. She'd expected hatred. It was a kind of terrible quiet attention, such as one gives a letter from an unlooked-for quarter, and under the attention, as far down as the bottom of a well, there was a grief so large and so patient that Vesper felt her own heart stagger.

She's dying, thought Vesper.

She'd known it, of course. She'd known it since the tower; she'd felt the thread go thin, week by week, like a cord under strain. She could feel Mara's cold at night, in the small of her own back. She could feel Mara's hunger, in her own stomach, though she had eaten. When Mara had slipped on the ridge, a week ago, Vesper had felt the jolt in her own palm. When Mara had stood in some chill white place and read a card, she'd felt something drop through her like a stone. She'd sat bolt upright in bed at four in the morning with her heart going and no notion why, and lain awake till dawn, sick, with the knowledge that she'd felt it as she'd feel her own.

I do not want her to die.

That was the thing she'd never meant to find. I do not want her to die.

But I want to live.

She said it silently, to the pale shape in the glass. She was not sure what she meant by it. She only knew that the two things sat in her side by side, like two stones in a pocket, and that she could not make them touch.

If I take her, she thought, if I take what she has and she goes out like a lamp, will I be myself? Or will I just be the last of her?

The shape in the mirror did not answer. It put out a hand, a thin pale, translucent hand, and laid it against the crack.

Vesper looked at the hand.

She could see the lamp through it.

…

The knock came at half past six.

It was a knock she knew: three quick, one slow. She rose at once and went to the glass and tidied her hair; she did it with the brush, quickly, and patted her cheeks, and when she turned toward the door she was Mara Ashgrove again, in a gray wool wrapper, with a smile ready.

"Come in, Josie."

Josie Tull came in like a gust of weather.

She was in her healer's apron, with her curls tied up in a scarf and a basket on her arm, and the tip of her nose was red from the cold. She set the basket on the washstand. She looked at Vesper. She looked at the rug, where the wet cloth still lay, and at the brush, rolled under the bed; and the cheerful line of her mouth went flat.

"You've had another," she said.

"A little one."

"A little one." Josie crossed the room and took Vesper's chin in her warm hard fingers, and turned her face to the lamp. "You're the color of tallow. When did you last eat?"

"At noon."

"What?"

"Some toast."

"Toast." Josie let go. "I've a mutton broth in the basket, and I'll stand over you while you finish it. Sit."

Vesper sat. She took the bowl in both hands. It was good broth, rich and salt and peppery; and she drank it with her eyes half closed, in the lamplight, and felt, out of nowhere, a quick painful tenderness for the woman across the room. She'd not been prepared for it. She had expected Josie to be a tool.

She loves her. She loves Mara more than anything in the world.

And I'm not Mara.

"Josie," she said.

"Hm."

"You needn't come every day."

"I know I needn't."

"You've your own patients."

"Mara Ashgrove." Josie sat down on the other end of the bed, and folded her arms. "I have known you since the first day of first year. I've watched you through measles and finals and your mother's death. And if you think I am going to let you sit alone in this room with a face like that, you are a bigger fool than I took you for."

"Then you will be disappointed, because I'm very clever."

"You are." Josie's mouth quirked. It did not reach her eyes. "That's why I'm asking."

Something in her voice changed. Vesper felt it, a faint shifting, like a floor tilting a degree. She set down the bowl.

"Asking what?"

…

"Do you remember the Fourth of July," said Josie, "when we were eleven?"

Vesper did. It was one of the first things she remembered at all. Mara's memory handed it up to her whole and bright: a field of buttercups at the edge of the village, a trestle table, a cake with a flag on top, the fizzing stink of Roman candles, and Josie Tull in a blue sash, small and fierce, stamping on a firework that had landed in her hair.

"You set your braid alight," said Vesper.

"And?"

"I put it out with the lemonade."

"You did." Josie's eyes were on her face. "What did you say?"

"I said, 'Oh, bother, now it's all sticky.'"

"And what did I say?"

I said, I'll never speak to you again. But it came up through Mara's memory in the wrong shape, with the wrong smell. Not the lemonade; something else. The memory was a clean plate, with the edge chipped. She groped.

"You said — you said you'd never forgive me."

"Never forgive you."

"Yes."

"For what?"

"For the — for the lemonade."

"Hm," said Josie.

It was an ordinary sound. It was nothing. It was precisely the tone in which she'd said toast. But something went cold and small in Vesper's stomach, as she watched her stand up and walk to the window, and look out at the dark with her back turned.

"And when I cut my hair," said Josie, to the glass, "the year before the Founders' Ball. What did you say?"

"I said it suited you."

"Did you."

"I — yes."

"I thought you did." Josie's voice was a thread. "I thought that was what you said."

She turned round. In the lamplight her face was perfectly calm, and perfectly kind, and had the look of a closed door. She came and sat on the bed again, closer. She took Vesper's left hand in hers, and turned it over.

"Show me your wrist," she said. "Just for a moment."

…

For a second, Vesper could not move.

She was aware of the room: the lamp, the cracked glass, the wardrobe. She was aware of the pale shape in the mirror's left half, quite still, watching. She was aware of the gray silk band tight against her pulse, the knot she had tied herself, and under it the thing that was hers: a small sigil, red-amber and whole, like a coal in a snowfall.

"It's a burn," she said. "From the kettle. I told the Captain. It's a horrid mess, Josie, truly, you wouldn't wish to—"

"You're a healer's friend. I've seen worse."

"I'd rather not."

"Mara."

"Please. I'd rather not."

The silence ran on. She could hear the clock in the corridor and the beating of her own heart.

Josie's fingers, warm and callused, rested on the gray silk. They did not pull. They did not so much as move. They stayed there lightly, for the space of five slow breaths, as if listening; and then she let go and sat back, and gave a short unconvincing laugh.

"Of course," she said. "Of course, love. I'm being a brute. You've had a hard month."

"Josie—"

"Eat your broth."

She rose. She collected the basket. At the door she turned, and the lamplight fell across her round tired face and the scarf in her hair, and Vesper saw that it was not her usual scarf. It was a bit of ribbon, tied in a sailor's knot at the nape. Narrow. Plain. White as milk.

"It's a thing I've started wearing," said Josie, catching her glance. "Seems cheerful."

"It's very pretty."

"Isn't it." She smiled. "Good night, Mara."

She went out. The door closed with a soft click. Vesper sat on the edge of the bed with her left hand in her lap, and a broth gone cold, and the strangest cold sense of having lost a game she hadn't known she was playing.

She knows something.

She doesn't know what.

But she'll find out.

…

When the footsteps had died away she rose and went to the mirror.

The shape was gone. The glass held only the lamp, the wardrobe, the bed; and in the right half, the red-draped woman with her wide eyes. She looked at that woman for a long time, as one looks at someone one has been told is a friend.

What do you want? she thought. What do you actually want?

It was a real question. She had asked it once before, in the bath, on the first night, and had answered it with a name. Vesper. Evening. She'd taken it because it was the hour at which the light goes red before it goes out. She had thought it fitting.

She asked it again now. She turned it, and weighed it, and looked at it as at a coin. And slowly, out of the confusion, a shape came clear.

She did not want Mara's life. Not truly. She didn't want the cap and gown, and the books, and the sad bluestocking name. She didn't want to be nobody's second.

She wanted to be chosen.

Not mistaken for. Not tolerated. Not used as a locum in another woman's clothes. She wanted to be looked at with horror, and attention, and a kind of awful love, as a man looks at his own wound. She wanted to be seen by the one pair of eyes in the world that could see her, and to find that they did not look away.

Rooke.

The name sat in her mouth like a sweet.

He had torn the soul in two. She'd seen it. She had the memory of it, whole and sharp: the tears, the light, the I'm sorry, I didn't know. A boy who had done a thing he could not undo, and had lived ten years under the weight. He did not remember her; the Bureau must have wiped it, as it had wiped Mara. But the guilt was there. She'd seen it in his eyes at the dinner. She'd seen it in the way he looked at the empty chair.

He feels it even now, thought Vesper. He doesn't know what. But he knows that there is a debt.

And I am the debt.

She could tell him. She could walk into the Wardens' Post tomorrow and say, Captain, you did this. You broke me, and made me, and gave me life. I am yours. It would bring him to his knees. It would bind him to her with the strongest chain on earth.

And it would also tell him who the other was.

No, she decided. Not yet. Not that way.

She took up the brush. She drew it down through her long dark hair, once, twice, slowly, in the lamplight. In the glass, her mouth was beginning to curve.

Let him find me. Let him come to me of his own accord, one step at a time, with that terrible conscience of his leading him by the hand. Let him believe he chose.

And when he's mine, I'll tell him everything.

The brush went down, and up. In the crack of the mirror, between the two halves of the room, her reflection smiled; and for just an instant, at the very edge of the glass, something pale and thin and tired smiled back.