The Price

She woke the next morning to a thin, even rain, and a particular absence.

It took her some time to name it. She lay in the narrow guest bed in the east wing of the Sanctum, under a quilt that smelled of lavender, and listened to the water running in the gutter. Somewhere below, a bell was ringing for the half-hour. Somewhere farther off, a woman was shouting at a carter. The ordinary noises of a city getting on with a Wednesday came up through the window, and she lay in the middle of them like a stone in a stream, turning over, trying to find out what was wrong.

Then she understood.

It was quiet in her head.

She had never known it so. For as long as she could remember, there had been a murmur behind her thoughts, a low continuous undertone, like the sound of a library at night. It was the grammar. It was ten thousand declensions, and a thousand idioms, and the great knotted web of the Old Tongue pulling on everything she looked at. She had not known she could hear it. She had thought it was silence. She lay in the wet gray dawn and listened to the place where it had been, and it was as if a clock that had ticked in her house for twenty years had been taken off the wall.

She sat up.

Her notebook lay on the washstand, where she had left it. She crossed the cold floor in her bare feet and picked it up. It was a small black thing with a cracked spine, soft with handling, stained with tea and ink. She had written in it every day since she was seventeen. She opened it at the middle.

The page was covered in her own small square hand.

It was beautiful. She could see that. It had the clean, tight, even look of something done with care, a script as regular as a row of stitches. It ran in neat lines from margin to margin, with notes in the corners, and glosses in the gutter, and here and there a tiny drawing of a bird. It was a language. It had a rhythm. It had the look of something that wished to be understood.

She could not read a word.

She turned the page. She turned another. Each one was the same: a fine black tracery of marks, tidy, deliberate, meaningless. The letters swam and would not settle. She tried to sound them out, the way a child does, with her finger under the line. She got a syllable, and lost it. She found, to her horror, that she did not know which way the lines were meant to go.

Fourth-Century grammar, she thought. I wrote this on Monday. I wrote it three weeks ago, in the Institute, by lamplight, with a cold in my head. It was about the optative.

She did not know what an optative was.

She sat down on the edge of the bed, with the notebook in her lap, and the rain going on outside; and for a long time she did not do anything at all.

…

It was not like the grief for Odile.

That had been sharp. This was dull. It was a grief of absence, of the kind one feels at the loss of a limb, or a house, or a country: no one thing to weep for, but a whole quiet landscape gone out of reach. She went through it slowly. She thought of the Institute, with its long dim corridors and its smell of paste. She thought of her tutor, Master Aldrow, with his ink-stained cuffs and his tendency to quote the Fourteenth Dynasty. She thought of the third-floor carrel by the window where she had worked for four years, and the tall pale manuscripts, and the glow of the lamp on the vellum.

I was good at it, she thought. I was the best.

I was nothing else.

She had not meant to think that. It came into her head quite suddenly, with a clear cold sound like a dropped key. She heard it and sat very still. She had been a scholar for as long as she had been anything. She had been a scholar on the day her father died, and the day Linnet fell ill, and the night she had gone down into the Threshold with a pencil in her hand. It had been her armor. It had been her purpose. It had been the thing that, when everything else failed, she could pick up and look at, and be someone.

And now it was gone, and she was twenty-one years old, in a borrowed nightgown, in a stranger's bed, with a notebook full of birds' tracks.

What am I? thought Isolde.

What's left?

She wept. She did it quietly, with the notebook against her chest, for perhaps a quarter of an hour. It was not dramatic. It was only tired. And at the end of it, when the rain had thinned, and a thread of pale light had begun to show along the sill, she wiped her face and looked about her at the room.

The pot lid was on the chair.

It lay with its dented face to the ceiling. In its hollow, curled in a small drowsy ball, the Hunger lay asleep. A faint golden thread ran along the rim. It was breathing. She could see its warm dark flank rise and fall.

She looked at it for a long while.

It has words, she thought. It has mine. It has them now.

It's the first thing in the world that's ever said my language back to me.

She found that she had stopped crying. It was not that she felt better. It was only that the grief had changed its shape, slightly, like a stone turned over, and she saw for the first time that there was another side.

…

There was a knock.

It was a tentative one. Three taps, light, a little uncertain, as of someone who has been taught that one knocks and has not yet decided how hard. She put the notebook down.

"Yes?"

"I have tea," said Valerian's voice.

She opened the door.

He stood in the passage in a borrowed shirt and a coat that did not fit, with a tray in his hands. On the tray was a teapot, two cups, and a plate of toast. He held it out in front of him at arm's length, rigid, like a man carrying a bomb. His hair was damp. He had shaved. There was a small nick on his jaw, and a smear of blood on his collar, and he looked, she thought, extraordinarily young.

"I cut myself," he said.

"I see that."

"It bled."

"They do, as a rule."

"I had not expected it to be so red." He looked down at his hands with a faint scandalized interest. "I attempted to stop it with a flannel. The girl in the kitchen said I had cut the wrong end of my face. I did not follow her."

"Come in."

He came. He set the tray on the washstand with enormous care, and straightened, and looked at her; and she saw him take in her face. Whatever he saw there, it altered his own. The shyness went out of it. The flicker of triumph that had been playing at the corners of his mouth settled, and softened, and became something quieter.

"You have been weeping," he said.

"A bit."

"The language."

She nodded. She could not trust her voice.

"I thought it might be." He did not move toward her. He stood by the washstand with his hands at his sides, and he looked at her with that grave, steady, attentive look he had worn in the Aviary, when she had told him about Tuesday. "I am so sorry. I should have said something. I should have— It was my fault. The Hunger would not have asked, if I had not—"

"It wasn't your fault."

"I am the reason it was starved."

"You were locked," said Isolde. "I've been told it's different."

A short breath escaped him that was almost a laugh.

"I gave it," she said. "I did that. Nobody made me. I stood there and I said take it, and I'd do it again." She wiped her face. "I'm only sad. I'm allowed to be sad. It's a perfectly good thing to be sad about."

"It is."

"It's a lot of grammar."

"It is a very great deal of grammar."

"I was good at it."

"You were the best I have ever met," said Valerian, simply. "And I have met a number of Magisters."

She laughed. It cracked in the middle and turned to a sob and came out the other end as something half-way between. He crossed the little room in two strides and took her in his arms, and she buried her face in his borrowed shirt, which smelled of soap and starch and, faintly, of the rain.

…

"I can still read it," he said, some time later.

They were sitting on the bed, side by side, with the tea going cold. She had her head on his shoulder. He had his arm round her. In the pale light from the window she could see the line of his jaw, and the nick, and the fine dark hair at his temple.

There was a thread of white in it.

It was a single strand, no thicker than a hair, in the black above his left ear. She saw it and said nothing. She watched it for a while, in the light, with a feeling that she could not name.

"I will read to you," said Valerian. "If you would like. Whatever you wish. I have a library of three hundred years in my head, and I have no idea what to do with any of it." He turned his head. "I should like to be of use."

"You're not a book."

"I am an extremely well-stocked one. I have a copy of the Genealogies of the Fourteenth Dynasty in my left lung."

"Don't."

"I am entirely sincere. I could do the optative." He paused. "I am told I have never done the optative well."

She was laughing again, against his shoulder. "I didn't know what the optative was this morning."

"You will find that it is not much of a loss."

"I'll find it out. I'll learn it again. I'll learn something." She sat up. "Not that. Something else. I'll learn to cook."

"That seems wise."

"I'll learn to sing. I've always wanted to sing."

"You have not the voice."

"I know. I'll learn anyway." She wiped her eyes. "I think, if you're going to lose the only thing you were any good at, you ought to start over at something you're terrible at. It's very freeing."

"That is an extraordinary theory."

"It's the truth. Ask Linnet. She learned to knit last month. She's dreadful." She leaned back. "Valerian."

"Yes."

"There's a white hair."

"I know," said Valerian.

She turned.

He was looking at her. He wore an expression she had not seen on him before, calm, rueful, and quietly delighted, like a man who has been told a joke very slowly and has just seen the end of it. He raised his hand, and touched his temple.

"I found it at the glass this morning," he said. "While I was cutting myself. I stood and looked at it for some time. I could not decide whether to be alarmed." His smile deepened. "I believe I am to die."

"Valerian—"

"Not soon. Not for a long while, I hope. Fifty years. Perhaps sixty. I am told that I have the constitution of a horse, and I have had three hundred years of rest." He took her hand. "But I shall grow old. I shall have gray hair, and bad knees, and a cough in the winter. I shall forget where I put my spectacles. I shall have a great many opinions about the younger generation." A breath. "It is the thing the Hunger took. It took the thing that kept me, when the seal was done. It was owed, I think. It was only fair."

"Are you sorry?"

"I have been trying all morning to find out." He considered. "I find that I am extremely afraid, and entirely glad. It is a curious combination. I am told it is called being alive."

She put her arms round him.

"I'll be there," said Isolde.

"I know."

"For all of it. The knees and the spectacles."

"You will be a very impatient old woman."

"I'll be a terror."

"I shall look forward to it," said Valerian, "more than I can say."

…

They spoke of the rest in the afternoon.

There were practical things. There always are. Gideon came by at noon with a bundle of papers and a face that had begun to look like a face again, to say that the Order's council had met, in some disorder, and voted to suspend the Chapter pending an inquiry; that the Strays in the crypt had been fed, and housed in the east wing, and put in the charge of Dora Mallow, who had immediately begun to give orders; that three hundred men of the Lantern Company had taken off their pins, and that forty of them had gone to ask the Redhand for work. Sabine Orme had been taken to a cell. She had not spoken. She had asked for a candle.

And the Hunger, said Gideon, had better be given a proper place.

"A place?"

"A hearth. A room. Somewhere it can sleep." He turned his hat in his hands. "It can't live in a pot lid. Not for ever. I don't mean to be unkind. But the Chapter's lawyers say it's a matter of record, Miss Hale. The kingdom wants to know where it is."

"It's in the lid."

"I know. But it was in the crypt for three hundred years. It'll be happy there, I'd think. It's a good deal bigger than a lid."

"It'll want me to visit," said Isolde.

"I should think so."

"Every day."

"Every dusk, I expect. When the light changes." He glanced at her. "That's what the Chapter's books say. A thing that's been called will want to be called again. If you're gone more than three nights, it will begin to wonder."

"So I can't leave."

"You can leave. You can't stay away."

"I see," said Isolde.

She looked at the lid. It was warm in her lap. In the afternoon light she could see the faint rise and fall of the dark thing curled in it, and the gold thread, and a tiny movement that might have been a dream.

A tether, she thought. A leash.

No. A hearth.

I have a home to go to. It has a name. It calls me back.

She found, to her surprise, that she did not mind in the least.

…

They did not renew the covenant.

It was Valerian who raised it, that night. They were in the little room again. The rain had ceased. A moon had come out, small and bright, through the open sash, and the candle on the washstand burned low. He sat on the end of the bed with his hands between his knees, and looked at his bare wrist, where a faint pale band showed against the skin.

"It has gone," he said. "The thread."

"Yes."

"The fifth clause said it should be renewed at each threshold. There is no threshold." He turned the wrist over. "I find that I wished to ask. It is a foolish thing. We are perhaps past the need of contracts. But I should not like to have nothing."

"What do you want to put in?"

"Nothing," said Valerian. "That is what I mean to say. I do not want to put anything in at all."

She sat very still.

"I wrote it for safety," he said. "I wrote it because I did not trust myself. I thought, If I bind my hands, I will not do harm. I thought, If she binds hers, she will not run. I had no other way to ask a person to stay." His eyes lifted. "But I do not think I need to bind you. And I would very much like not to be bound myself. I should like to choose it. Every morning. I should like to wake up and find that I had chosen."

"That's an awful lot of mornings."

"I am told I have fifty years."

"It's a lot of tea."

"It is a great deal of tea." He smiled. His voice dropped. "Will you stay, Isolde?"

She had her answer ready. She had had it ready for days, since the garden, since the Aviary, since the night he had held her hand in a hole. She had never thought she would say it aloud. She took a breath.

"Yes."

"Even without a clause?"

"Especially."

He rose.

She had expected him to say something. He had a way of making speeches, in moments of great feeling, in the stiff elaborate periods of a man who learned to speak in another century. She had braced for it. She had her face ready.

But he did not speak. He crossed the little room and knelt in front of her, on the rag rug, with the moon on his hair. He took both her hands in his. They were warm. They were steady. And he lifted them to his mouth and kissed them, the backs, and then the palms, with the grave unhurried care of a man laying down something precious.

"Thank you," said Valerian.

"For what?"

"For the pigs."

She laughed. It was a helpless laugh, tender and wet, and she drew him up and into her arms. And a little later, when the candle had guttered to a stub, and the moon had moved across the sill and onto the quilt, and the door was shut, and the Hunger on the chair had turned over in the pot lid with a long contented sigh, there was nothing in the room that anyone could have written down.

It was very quiet.

Outside, on the roofs of Aethelgard, the rain began again, softly, and nobody in the city stirred.