THE CONFESSION

Day 57 of 100

The fishing hut was six feet by eight, and smelled of tar, old fish, and the cold iron of a stove that had not been lit since February.

Rooke lit it with the last four matches in the tin. He did it on his knees, in the dark, with fingers that would not close, feeding the little flame bit by bit from a heap of split kindling on the floor. The wood caught. A thin red light grew in the belly of the stove and spread outward over the planks: a shelf of lines and floats, a rack of spears, a rusted lantern, a bunk against the wall with a gray army blanket folded at the foot. A hole in the floor, rimmed with frozen slush, showed black water.

Behind him, on the bunk, she sat with her knees drawn up.

He did not look round.

He had got her here by the strength of his arms. Half a mile of rotten ice, and the last quarter of it with her over his shoulder, limp and streaming, her teeth chattering like a loose shutter. He had broken the hut's padlock with the butt of his revolver. He had stripped off her sodden silk with fingers that shook so that he tore the seam, and wrapped her to the chin in the blanket and every piece of dry canvas he could find, and propped her against the wall, and said her name, again and again, until her eyes opened.

She had not spoken.

She had looked at him, once, with a face so white that the lips were blue, and her eyes dark and enormous and quite empty; and then she had turned her head to the wall, and closed them.

That had been an hour ago.

…

He fed the stove. He set the lantern on the shelf and lit it. He took off his boots and poured the water out of them, and put them on the iron to dry, and sat down on the floor with his back to the door and his hands hanging between his knees, and the shaking began in earnest.

It was not the cold.

It was the other thing. It had been rising since the lake, since the moment she went through the ice and he had seen the water close over her head, and he had flung himself down on the breaking skin and plunged his arm in to the shoulder, not knowing if he would find anything. It had risen on the long haul to the shore. It was all through him now, in his hands, his belly, his teeth, a great sick tide of memory that he had held back for ten years and could hold back no longer.

Mara, look at me. Don't go.

He had said it. He had heard himself say it, on his belly on the ice, with his fingers locked in her hair; and the words had come up out of him as if from the bottom of a well, in the voice of a boy of nineteen, and he had known, with a terrible leap of the heart, where he had said them before.

I'm sorry. Oh God, I'm sorry.

He put his face in his hands.

…

"Say it," said Mara.

He lifted his head.

She had not moved. She sat with her back against the wall, wrapped in the gray blanket, with her wet hair clinging to her cheeks. The lantern lit her from the side. Her face was like a face cut in marble: drawn, very still, and quite without expression. Only her eyes were alive. They were fixed on him with a steadiness that made the hair stir on his neck.

"Say it," she said again. "All of it. From the beginning."

"Mara—"

"I want to hear you say it."

He drew a breath. It caught on something in his chest.

"I was nineteen," said Rooke.

His voice sounded strange to him: flat, quiet, a stranger's. "I'd been at the Warden school a year. My father had been—" He stopped. "He was alive, then. He sat on the dock. I'd come home for the autumn to look after him, and to mend the boats. It was the second week of September. There had been a funeral at the Falls that morning. I'd heard of it. A woman who had drowned. A scholar's wife."

"My mother."

"I didn't know that."

"Go on."

"I was working at the landing. And I looked up, and there was a girl at the end of the dock." He swallowed. "I'd not seen her come. She was very small. She had a black dress on, and she was standing on the last board, with her toes over the edge. I knew at once what she meant to do."

"You could see."

"I could see. I always can." He opened his hands. "I'd had the Sight since I was eleven. And I'd never in my life seen a light like hers. It was—" His voice failed, and he forced it on. "It was the loveliest thing I'd ever looked at. Blue and silver. In the shape of a star. A snowflake. And it was going out. It was streaming out of her, in threads, like a fire in a high wind. And she stood there in the middle of it and she did not even know."

He shut his eyes.

"I ran to her. I said don't. She said to go away. I said I could help."

"You said it wouldn't hurt."

"Yes."

"You said you promised."

"Yes."

"Why?" Her voice did not rise. "Why did you say it?"

"Because I believed it."

…

"There was a book," said Rooke.

He had not meant to go on. But now that he had begun he could not stop; it came out of him in a dull rush, as water comes from a burst pipe.

"In the cadets' library at Burlington. A manuscript. It was kept in a locked case with a card on the front that said Restricted: Theoretical, and I'd been given the key to clean the shelves. It was not printed. It was a hand-copy, bound in black cloth, on a sort of thin brown paper, and it was called On the Lifting of Griefs. It was unsigned. There were only two initials on the flyleaf." He opened his eyes. "M.A."

Mara went still.

"I read it that spring. I read it a dozen times. It described a technique for lifting an excess of pain from a soul. Not erasing. Not harming. Only drawing off the worst of it, the way one draws an abscess, so that the rest might mend. It said that grief, in a certain kind of person, could become a sickness of the soul. That it could kill. That a Seer with sufficient steadiness might save them." His mouth twisted. "I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever read. I thought: this is what the gift is for."

"And you'd never done it."

"Never. I'd not been taught. It was forbidden; no one at the school would have spoken of it. I'd read the book, that was all." His hands had closed. "I thought a book was enough."

"You were nineteen."

"I was a fool."

"Yes."

"I didn't know. Mara, I swear before God, I didn't know. The book said it was gentle. It said the soul would give up its pain like a child giving up a stone. It said nothing about a Division. It said nothing about— about a light that would not come away whole." He dragged a breath. "I put my hands on you. And it began as it ought. I felt the pain go out. You said it eased. And then there was a— a catch. And I pulled, because the book said to pull, and it tore."

"I remember."

"I felt it go. Like a rope parting. I saw your light split. Two shapes, where there should be one." His voice shook so that he could hardly speak. "I tried to put it back. I tried for what felt like an hour. But I couldn't. I hadn't the art. And you fell, and your eyes closed, and I thought you were dead."

…

She said nothing for a very long time.

The stove ticked. The wind ran along the walls of the hut, a thin wailing note, and the black water in the hole in the floor gave a small cold lap against its rim. Somewhere out on the lake, far off, a voice shouted, and was answered, and faded.

"What then?" said Mara.

"I don't know."

"You don't—"

"I don't know," said Rooke. "That's the truth. I've had ten years to want to remember, and I can't. I woke up in a bed. It was Pryce's spare room, in the East Court. He'd been walking by the lake. He had heard me shouting. He found me on the dock, with the girl in my arms, and I'd gone quite mad, he said, and would not let anyone near."

"Pryce."

"He took us both to the infirmary. He sat with you three weeks. When I woke, a day and a night later, he told me you were alive. That the fever had broken. That you would live." A short harsh laugh. "He told me you remembered nothing. That the tear had— closed over. That you had forgotten the dock, and the funeral, and the boy. That it was a mercy."

"And he told you not to tell."

"He told me I was a boy of nineteen who had ruined his life for nothing. That the Bureau would sooner hang a Warden than admit to a Division. That if it were known, they'd take you. They'd study you, he said. For the rest of your days." He looked at her. "He made me promise."

"And you promised."

"I was nineteen. I'd broken a girl in two. I thought it a small thing to hold my tongue."

"You went on to join the Wardens."

"I joined them because of it." The words came out low and hard. "I thought, if I could be one of them. If I could learn how they worked. I could find the girl one day. I could watch over her, from a distance, and see that she was safe. And I could—" He broke off. "I never saw you. For ten years. I did not even know your name. Pryce said it was better. I had your face, and it faded. All I had was the feeling. A weight. A guilt with no shape."

"And then the Ascension."

"And then the dais."

…

He heard her breathe in.

"On the dais," said Rooke. "You came up the aisle in white. And you put your hand on the Stone, and the light rose in you. And I looked at it, and every nerve I had said I know you. I told myself it was shock. A Warden's strain. But the thing in me turned over, and I thought, oh, there you are. As if I had been looking for it. And then you cracked—"

"And I screamed."

"And there were two."

"And you didn't know."

"I did not know. I swear it." He met her eyes. "Not for a month. I looked at your light, and I felt something, and I thought it was desire, and then I thought it was pity, and then I thought I was going mad. It was only on the tenth." His voice dropped. "In the cabin. When you told me your name."

She went rigid.

"I knew it before you said it," said Rooke. "I think. Somewhere. But when you said Mara Ashgrove, the whole of it came back. The dock. The book. The sound of the light tearing. In an instant, all at once, the whole ten years." He looked at his hands. "And you were sitting across the table with your face in your hands, and you were afraid. And I thought, I must tell her."

"But you did not."

"No."

"For six days."

"Six days."

"You danced with me."

"Yes."

"You said you believed me."

"I did."

"You held me. You kissed me. You said you'd be wrong in my company." Her voice was getting thin and strange. "You let me tell you everything. Every secret I had. And all the while you knew that it was you."

"I meant to tell you—"

"When?"

"When I could do it right."

"There is no right!" It burst from her at last, cracked straight across. She was on her feet, the blanket falling, one hand clutching it to her breast; and her face, in the lantern's light, was no longer marble but a living thing, flushed, tear-streaked, shaking. "You've known for six days that you were the man who— who— and you thought there'd be a right way?"

…

He did not stand. He thought if he stood he would fall.

"I was afraid," said Rooke.

"Of what?"

"That you would look at me as you are looking now."

She stopped.

She stood in the middle of the tiny hut, with her breast heaving and her hand locked in the gray wool, and he saw the anger go out of her in a long uneven shudder. It left her white, and drained, and strangely old. She sank down onto the edge of the bunk. She put her face in her hands.

For a while there was no sound but her breathing.

"I should hate you," she said, in a muffled voice.

"You should."

"I've been trying. All the way over the ice. I kept thinking, I will hate him. I'll hate him for the rest of my life. It would be so simple." She lifted her face. It was wet. "I can't."

"Mara—"

"Don't. Don't say my name. I can't bear it from you." She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. "You were a child. I know that. You were nineteen, and a fool, and you had read a book. I've read a thousand. I might have done the same."

"You wouldn't."

"No." She almost smiled. "I'd have gone to the library and checked the footnotes."

He made a sound. It was not a laugh.

"But that is not what I—" She broke off. "Do you know what you did?"

"I think so."

"No. You don't." She was looking at him very steadily. "You've been thinking you broke a girl. That you took her soul and tore it in two. And you did. But that isn't all. You think I lost half of myself, and you made a Doppel. A copy. A thing out of nothing."

"Isn't that—"

"It isn't nothing." Her voice rang. "That's what I've been understanding, in the water. I've been lying in a hole in the ice with my lungs full of the lake, and I understood. It wasn't a copy. It was the part you cut out. The grief. The anger. The wanting. Everything I put away at fourteen, in the black dress, because it hurt too much to hold. You lifted it out of me. You took it. And it didn't die." She drew a long breath. "It grew. It lived in the dark of the Stone for ten years. And on the twenty-first of March, it walked out of me in a red dress."

"Vesper."

"Vesper." She said the name with a strange tenderness, almost wonder. "She isn't my enemy. She isn't my shadow. She's the part of me that wasn't allowed to be sad. The part that wasn't allowed to be angry, or hungry, or alive. I put her down, because I couldn't carry her. And she has been waiting ten years to be picked up."

He stared at her.

…

"You saved my life," said Mara.

He closed his eyes.

"I know it. I've known since the water. I would have walked off that dock, and been dead by midnight. You came out of nowhere, and you gave me ten years. A degree. A friend. A summer in the Athenaeum with a book." Her voice shook. "It's a great deal. It's more than most people get. I won't say it's nothing."

"But."

"But you destroyed me," said Mara. "In the same moment. With the same hands."

She said it so quietly that it was a moment before the words reached him.

"Both," she said. "Both at once. I don't know how to feel it. I don't know if there's a name. You saved me and you ruined me, and you are the only man I have ever loved, and I do not know whether to kiss you or to kill you." She laughed, wetly. "I think I should like to do neither, and go home."

"Where is home?"

"I haven't the faintest idea."

She stood. She gathered the gray blanket round her shoulders. She went to the door and took down from its peg a coat that hung there, a grease-stained thing of oiled canvas, left by some long-gone fisherman, and put it on over the blanket. It came to her ankles. She turned back the cuffs.

"Where are you going?" said Rooke, rising.

"Out."

"It's three o'clock. It's freezing. The Wardens are on the shore."

"I know."

"Mara, you can't—"

"I need to be alone." She did not look at him. She was doing up the buttons, one by one, with fingers that fumbled. "I need to think. I will not go far. There is a woman in Tanner's Row who will take me in, and I've a friend or two. I shall not do anything foolish. I shall not do anything at all." She raised her eyes. "I have forty-three days. I only need an hour."

"Let me come."

"No."

"At least let me—"

"No." It was gentle, and absolute. "You've been carrying this for ten years, Cal. It's mine, now, too. I'll have to carry it by myself for a while."

He stood in the lantern light with his hands open at his sides, and could not speak.

She opened the door.

A white gray dawn lay behind it, vast and quiet. The wind had dropped. The ice stretched away to the far shore, flat as a table, pale with a light dust of new snow, and above it the sky was the color of a pearl. It was the loveliest morning he had ever seen. The silence rang.

On the threshold she stopped, with her back to him.

"Do you know what the strangest part is?" said Mara.

"What?"

"I don't feel alone."

He did not understand.

"I feel as though there were someone right behind me," she said softly. "As though I'd been walking with a hand in mine my whole life, and had never turned my head." She drew a breath. "I think it's her. I think she's been there all along."

She stepped out into the snow.

He watched her go. She walked away across the white, a small slight figure in a fisherman's coat, with the blanket trailing; and she did not look back, and she did not hurry. The light grew. The great pale plain received her. He stood in the doorway of the hut until she was a speck, a dot, a dark scratch on the shining ice, and then nothing.

Then he sat down on the threshold, in the cold, with his face in his hands, and for the first time in ten years, the Captain of the Wardens wept.