The First Lie

She bound his wrist with a strip of her own petticoat, and neither of them said a word until it was done.

They sat on the stone lip of the swan pond at the foot of the iron trees, in the thin green light, with the glass roof ringing faintly above them as the wind tried its panes. A porcelain swan floated near the bank. It had a chip in its beak. It watched them with the moderate interest of a bird that has seen a great many people come to grief on this exact spot and is waiting, politely, to find out which kind they are.

Isolde had unwound the black thread with great care. It had not come away. The covenant was not a thing that could be unwound; it lay round the bone like a ring of shadow, flat and fine, and where it had flared it had left a bracelet of angry red on his skin, a hand's breadth wide, blistered at the edges. His glove had burned through. She had cut the rest of it away with Brannoc's knife. Underneath, his hand was pale and long, scarred across the knuckles, and trembling very slightly.

She tied the bandage off, and did not let go.

"You lied," said Isolde.

"Yes."

"It hurt you."

"It is meant to." His voice was perfectly level. "I wrote nothing of penalty in the covenant. I think that you did not intend any. But it was a binding of word and salt, and such things have their own ways. A promise that cannot be broken is not a promise. It is a wall." He looked at his bandaged wrist. "I should have known. I did know. It is only that I have been lying for so long that I forgot what it cost."

"What did you see?"

He said nothing.

"I'm not asking you to tell me," she said. "I'm asking whether it touched my life."

A very long pause. A bubble rose in the pool and broke.

"I think so," said Valerian, at last.

She sat still. The cold crept up her spine. It was an odd thing, to be handed a fact like that. It was not an answer. It was the outline of an answer, a shape drawn in the dark, and she could see all around it the great black space where the rest ought to be.

Whatever he saw, it matters to me.

Whatever he saw, he would rather burn than tell.

"All right," said Isolde.

He looked up.

"I said I'd read to the end." She smoothed the bandage with her thumb. "And I will. I always do. But I'm not going to hold you down and pry. That isn't how it works. I've been collecting this sentence for a week, and I know better than most what happens when you pull on a thread too fast." She gave a small crooked smile. "You'd have to know me better to guess how hard that is for me."

"I do know you better."

"Then you know it's costing."

"Yes." His fingers closed, very slightly, over hers. "I know it is. I am sorry. I would give a great deal to be able to say it."

"Don't. Not till you can say it without it hurting."

"That may be a long time."

"I've time." She swallowed. "Six days. Seven. A lifetime. I'll wait."

He didn't answer. He only turned his hand over in hers, in the green dusk, so that his palm lay against her palm, and held it. She felt the beat of his pulse in the scar-ridged wrist. It was quick and light. It was the pulse of a man who has run a long way.

…

"You could end it," said Isolde.

It was an hour later. The birds were silent. Odile had gone to sleep with her head on Brannoc's shoulder, and the old man sat with his one eye closed and his hand on his knife, snoring faintly. The key had come in an unexpected way: Isolde had found it herself, in the shattered cage, among the pieces of the mirror that had been Valerian's face. It was a little porcelain egg, no larger than a hen's, blue as a robin's, and it lay in the palm of her hand now with a hairline crack along one side and a thread of light showing through.

"End what?" said Valerian.

"The covenant. Fifth clause. It's to be renewed at each threshold, and either may end it at the moment of crossing, without penalty and without reproach." She turned the egg over. "I wrote it so you wouldn't feel trapped. I never thought to use it. But if it's going to burn you every time you lie—"

"You would end it?"

"I'd rather you weren't hurt."

"And what would become of you?"

"I'd do the same as before. Read. Walk. Try not to die."

"Without me."

She did not answer.

"I see," said Valerian, gravely.

"I didn't say that."

"You did not say it. I heard it." He had his head tilted, with that odd inward listening look. "You would be without protection. You would be at the mercy of every Company in the Hollow. And you would have nobody to hold your hand in a hole."

She felt her face go hot. "I said I'd manage."

"I do not doubt it. You would manage splendidly. And you would be a good deal more likely to be killed." He took the egg from her palm, lightly, and set it on the stone between them. "I decline."

"You can't decline. It's my clause."

"It is a mutual clause. Either may end it. Neither is obliged." He folded his arms. The bandaged wrist rested on his knee. "I find I would sooner be burned."

"Valerian—"

"The fourth clause stays."

"It'll hurt you."

"I am aware of that." There was something very close to a smile at the corner of his mouth. "Think what it will do for my character. A man who cannot lie to you, on pain of a blistered wrist, will have to become extraordinarily careful with his words. I shall have to learn to say things. Truthfully. In order." He glanced sidelong at her. "It will be a revelation to us both."

She laughed.

It came out of her in a startled burst, quite helplessly, and she put her hand over her mouth. The swan ruffled its china wings. Brannoc grunted in his sleep. And Valerian, whose eyes were fixed on her face, seemed to lose the thread of his own sentence entirely, and sat looking at her like a man who has seen a fish leap in a pond that he had thought was dry.

"You should do that more," he said.

"What?"

"That." He made a vague gesture at her mouth. "I find it— It does something. To the room."

"It's a laugh."

"It is a remarkable one."

"It's perfectly ordinary."

"I have a very small sample," said the Overseer, with dignity.

…

She told him at midnight.

She had not planned to. It came out of her the way a stone works its way to the surface of a field in the spring. They had been sitting for hours side by side in the dark, with the green panes glimmering overhead, and the porcelain birds like a congregation in the gloom. She had a notebook open on her knee and was not writing in it. The silence was warm. It was the first time in a week that she had felt entirely unobserved.

"I wasn't there," said Isolde.

He turned his head.

"When she got sick. My sister. The first night." She heard her own voice, small and level, in the vast quiet of the glass. "I want to say it, because you saw it. In the Aviary. The birds said it, and I knew they were lying. But it was close. It was very close."

"Tell me."

"It was a Tuesday. In the autumn. Linnet had a cough, and she'd had it for a week, but she's always had coughs. She said it was nothing." She stared at the cover of the notebook. "I was at the Institute. There was a manuscript. A Fourth-Century grammar, copied by some monk in a cellar, with a gloss in the margin that nobody had read in two hundred years. It had come in on the Monday. I had it for exactly three days." She took a breath. "I stayed late. I told her I'd be home by supper."

"And?"

"And I wasn't. I got home at midnight, and the lamp was out, and she was lying on the floor at the foot of her bed." Her throat closed on it. She forced the rest through. "She'd been there for hours. She'd got up to find me. She'd got halfway to the door, and then there was a sound in her arm, and she fell, and there was nobody."

"Isolde."

"The Bloom was in her wrist already. I saw it. A black petal. Just one." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "I thought: I could have been there. If I'd come home when I said. If I hadn't been reading about a dead man's marginalia. She'd have called out. I'd have heard her. We'd have caught it in time."

"There was no time to catch."

"You don't know that."

"I do not." He was quiet. "But neither do you."

"No."

"And if you had been there, it would have been the same night, and the same arm, and the same cough. You would have held her hand. And she would still be in the Hospice." His voice was very gentle. "I do not say it to comfort you. I say it because it seems to me a fact."

She laughed shakily. "That's not how comfort works."

"It is the only kind I know."

"It's not bad."

She sat for a while. The darkness pressed on the panes. A single drop of water fell from a leaf and rang on china, and she counted the seconds until the next.

"My mother died when I was nine," she said. "And Father drank. He was a good man, in the mornings. He mended things. He had a little shop on Tallow Lane, and he sold clocks, and when the Bloom came into the street and took three of the neighbors' children he stopped mending them. He said it was no use. He sat in the back with a bottle and told the customers to go to the devil." She shrugged. "Then he died too. I was seventeen. So there was only me. And a girl of twelve who wouldn't go to sleep."

"So you read to her."

"I read to her."

"Every night."

"Every night, for twelve years." She smiled, and it was a wavering, crooked, helpless thing. "I did all the voices. I did the wolves. She liked the wolves. She liked it when I got to the part where they came to the door and said Little pig, little pig. And I'd do it low, right at her ear, and she'd shriek." She wiped her cheek. "I don't think she was afraid of anything. That's the thing. She just liked the sound of it. She liked knowing somebody was there."

"And you were."

"I was supposed to be."

"You were," said Valerian.

He said it firmly, quite flatly, without any of the soft hedging that comforters use. It was a statement. It was a ruling. She turned her head and looked at him, in the glimmering dark, and saw that his face was very white and very grave and wet.

He was crying.

She had not seen him do it before. He did it as he did everything, quietly, with perfect control, as if he were ashamed of making a mess. A single tear ran down the pale hollow of his cheek and fell, and he did not wipe it.

"I do not have a sister," he said, in a low voice. "Or I do not remember one. I have no one to read to. But I find that I am— that I would have liked to hear the wolves."

"Valerian—"

"I would like to hear the wolves, Isolde."

She understood. She took a long unsteady breath. She sat up straight, on the cold stone, in the dark of the Aviary, with a hundred china birds for an audience, and put her hand on his sleeve. And she began, in a low voice, to tell him the story of the three little pigs.

She did all the voices. She did the wolf last.

…

He had gone very quiet by the end.

He sat with his head bowed and his hands slack, listening; and when she came to the bit where the wolf fell down the chimney into the pot, he made a small, strangled sound that she realized, after a moment, was a laugh. It was unpracticed, rusty, a little frightened. It cracked in the middle like a plate. But it was a laugh.

She stopped, and looked at him.

He was staring at his hands. He seemed astonished. "That was—" He stopped. "I have never—"

"I know."

"It happened by itself."

"That's how it usually does."

He raised his eyes. He was smiling. It was the smile of a man trying a muscle that has been bound for years, tentative and crooked and entirely unselfconscious, and it lit his whole face from within like a lamp behind a shutter. He looked about twenty. He looked like a stranger.

He looked like the wax young man in the cathedral.

The thought went through her like cold water. She did not let it show. She sat with her hand on his sleeve and her heart beating very slow and hard, and thought: It's not a coincidence. It's not a trick of the Door. That is his face. That was always his face.

"Isolde," said Valerian.

"Yes."

"There is a thing I ought to tell you."

"All right."

"I have been thinking about it since the beech." His smile had faded; he looked grave, and a little frightened, and very young. "I think that I should say it before I lose my nerve. I think that—" He drew breath. "I think that I know what I am."

Her pulse stopped.

"I think that I am not what I have been told," said Valerian. "And I think that when we come to the end of the sentence—"

The Aviary shook.

It was a long, low, shuddering tremor. Every pane in the roof rang. A shower of dust came down, and the porcelain birds rattled on their boughs, and the egg on the stone between them cracked from end to end. A line of white light shot out of it, like a bar of sun, and hung in the air above the swan pond, widening.

In it, behind it, beyond it, there stood a door.

It was a tall door, with a pointed top, of old black oak studded with iron nails, and above the lintel, in letters of gilt, a single word was written.

LIBRARY.

"Door Seven is passed," said the pleasant voice, from the rafters. "Six remain."

Isolde did not hear the rest.

She was looking at his face. The light had come full on it, and the fear on it, and she saw the thing he had been about to say go out of it like a candle blown down the wind. He closed his mouth. He rose, slowly, and held out a hand to help her up, and his bandaged wrist trembled in the glare.

"Not yet," he said.

"You were about to—"

"I know." The ghost of a smile touched his lips, rueful and wretched. "Not yet. Forgive me."

She took his hand.