The Contract

The printer's apprentice did not mean to do it.

She understood that afterward, and it did not help. He was nineteen, with ink under his nails and a cowlick he had probably spent years trying to flatten, and he had been sitting for an hour in the dark with his hands pressed over his face. She had heard him breathing. She had heard the tiny wet catch of a boy who is trying not to cry. And somewhere in that terrible hour, a thing happened inside him that happens to everyone eventually under enough strain: the body gave up on fear and reached for the nearest opposite.

He laughed. It was not even a loud laugh. It was a gasp with a crack in it, high and silly and horrified, and his hands flew down from his face in time to show a mouth stretched wide.

Outside the chapel, the knocking stopped.

"Jory," someone whispered.

"I didn't—" He was on his feet. "I didn't mean— I can't help— I'm not—"

"Sit down," said Isolde. She had risen as well. "Sit down and put your hand over your mouth and think of something terrible. Think of anything. Jory. Look at me."

He looked at her. His face was working. Under the stripe of ink on his cheekbone it had gone the white of candle wax, and the laugh was still in it, as an echo hangs in a well. He was trying to bite it back. She could see the muscles of his jaw bunching with the effort. He was a good boy. He was trying so hard.

Then, from the other side of the great doors, a hundred small wooden hands began to scratch at the planks, and he broke.

He ran. Not at the doors; he was not a fool. He ran for the vestry, the little low room behind the altar, as a child runs for the cupboard, and Isolde went after him with her arm out. She nearly had his collar. She felt the coarse cloth slip through her fingers. She heard him slam the vestry door and shoot a bolt.

For a moment there was silence.

Then a window broke somewhere in that small room, and she heard him scream, and the screaming went on for a short time and stopped.

…

Nobody spoke for the rest of the night.

They sat in the pews in a ring, shoulder to shoulder, with their faces held as still as masks. She watched Odile bite the inside of her cheek till it bled. She watched the woman with the baby's shawl rock back and forth, and the two sisters squeeze each other's hands in the dark. The knocking came and went. The humming rose and fell. Somewhere in the hours between the ninth bell and the morning, Posy fell asleep with her mouth open, and Isolde, who loved her suddenly and fiercely, reached across and put two fingers against the girl's lips until she shut them.

When the morning bell rang, they all wept.

It was not a loud weeping. It was a slow, exhausted, shuddering release, the sound of people who had spent every ounce of themselves on keeping a straight face and had nothing left over. Isolde let them. She found the vestry door standing open on a small bare room with a broken window and a pair of shoes on the floor, and she shut it again.

Then she sat down in the first pew with her notebook in her lap, and the key in her fist, and thought very hard.

I can do this. It was not a comforting thought. It was a fact, the way a fact can be gathered like a stone. She had cracked the rule in a day. She had cracked it with a sampler and a pair of eyes. But she had lost a man to it, and a boy, and she did not have the first idea what came next, and she could not do it a dozen more times with a dozen frightened strangers who would, one after another, fail.

Twelve doors, said the voice in her head. Pass twelve, and you will go home.

"Home," said Isolde, aloud. She thought of the dark hall. She thought of a girl asleep, with every black flower along her wrist turned toward the light. Thirteen days. Twelve, now. Eleven, if a night in this place was a day out there; it had felt like a day. She did not know the exchange rate. She suspected it was a bad one.

She would not make it with these odds. Not alone. Not without help.

She turned a page of the notebook, and wrote a line, and underlined it.

Overseer: does not interfere. Does not help or hinder. Does not take sides.

She looked at it.

"Does not take sides," she said slowly.

Odile, drying her eyes on her apron, said, "What?"

"It's what he said. He didn't say he can't. He said he doesn't." Isolde tapped the page with the charcoal. "'I do not interfere with those who pass through it.' That's a rule he keeps. A rule he follows. He told me so himself. And the thing about rules, Odile, is that you can always find the clause that lets you out."

"Is there one?"

"There's always one," said Isolde. "That's the first thing the Institute teaches you. Nobody writes a law without a door in it."

…

She found him standing at the edge of the cornfield, with his back to her, looking at nothing.

It was the third hour of the long gold morning, and the whole field shone. The corn rose to his waist. He had taken off his gloves, and she saw that his hands were pale and long and scarred across the knuckles, the hands of someone who had done very old and very dirty work and had not been permitted to wash. He stood perfectly still. The wind did not move his hair.

"You're not going to ask me why I didn't help," he said without turning.

"No."

"Most of them do."

"I know why." She stopped four feet behind him. "You can't."

A pause.

"I can do a great many things," said the Overseer, politely. "But in the matter of the Doors, no. I may not interfere. It is the first of my laws."

"Who made it?"

"It was made before I came."

"By whom?"

"I do not know." The faintest edge came into his voice, like a draft under a closed door. "I have found it useful not to ask."

She drew a breath. She had practiced this on the way across the field, under her breath, in three languages. It had sounded much better in her head. She held out the notebook, open, with a page turned flat, and said, "I'd like to propose a contract."

He turned.

He looked at her, then at the page. He was taller than she'd thought, and he looked at her from a great height, with a bleak amused stillness, like a man who has been offered a drink by a child. "A contract."

"Yes."

"With me."

"With the Overseer of the Doors. It's the only title I have." She kept her voice level. "I've been reading the law as you've described it. It says you don't interfere. It says you don't take sides. It does not say you cannot be hired."

"Hired."

"A covenant of service. A sworn exchange between two parties, which, once sealed, makes the second party's protection a duty rather than a choice." She swallowed. "In Old Aethel, the verb is vael-sar. It's very old. It was used by the border lords to bind sellswords, and by the Church in the first century to bind angels. Nobody uses it now. Nobody has used it for a thousand years." She turned the page. "I wrote it out."

The Overseer did not move.

She saw something happen to his face. It was extraordinarily slight. A tightening at the corner of the eye, a flicker in the muscle of the jaw, the look of a man who has just trodden on the edge of an old wound. He was staring at the page. He was staring, specifically, at the lines of Old Aethel she had set down at the head of it in her small square hand, in the dead script that no living tongue had spoken in ten centuries.

"You wrote this," he said.

"Yes."

"In that." His voice was strange. "Who taught you?"

"The Institute. And books."

"It is not possible. No one—" He stopped. He drew a breath and let it out, very slowly, and the color of his eyes seemed to change with it, from gray to something darker, like water under cloud. "Read it to me."

She read.

…

The Overseer of the Doors and Isolde of Tallow Lane, being of sound mind and under no compulsion that either can name, do hereby bind themselves by word and salt to the following.

First: that Isolde shall read for the Overseer what the Doors hide, and speak plainly all that she finds.

Second: that the Overseer shall, while the covenant stands, set his strength between Isolde and any creature, rule, or hand that would do her violent harm; and shall do so wholly, without reservation or delay.

Third: that neither shall tell the secrets of the other to any third party, living or dead.

Fourth: that the Overseer shall not lie to Isolde in any matter that touches her life.

Fifth: that the covenant shall be renewed at each threshold, and that either may end it at the moment of crossing, without penalty and without reproach.

She finished. The morning was very still. The wheat ears whispered on their stalks.

"The fourth," said the Overseer.

"Yes."

"I would not recommend it."

"Why?"

"Because I lie as a habit." The corner of his mouth moved, without humor. "It is a very useful habit, in my position. I have been lying to those who pass through for a considerable time. I should find it—" He hesitated, as if over a word he had not used for years. "—difficult."

"Then you'd better practice."

"And what do I gain?"

She had been waiting for it. She found that she was not afraid. She said, "You've watched this a hundred times. You said so, with your face, when that man was dying. You've seen people try to solve the Doors by brute force and by prayer and by sheer dumb luck, and every one of them has died. And you've come to my door, and you've been to the chapel, and you told me where the key was." She held his eyes. "You're not neutral, Overseer. You're curious. You've been waiting a very long time for someone who can read the rhymes."

"And you imagine that you are that person."

"I imagine that I'm the only one who's solved one in a day."

Silence.

"I will not protect you from your own errors," said the man, at last.

"No. Only from harm done to me by others."

"I will not be your servant."

"I don't want one. I want a partner."

"There is no such thing in the Doors." He said it quite gently. "You will find that I am not a pleasant man. I have done things that you would not like. If we do this, you will see some of them."

"I expect so."

"And you will not look away."

"I'm a scholar," said Isolde. "I don't look away. It's the whole of the job."

He stood for a long moment with his hands loose at his sides. The sun burned on the corn. The air smelled of dust and sweetness. And in the stillness she saw the thing she had half suspected and entirely hoped: a crack in the wall, a small bright seam, into which something very old and weary was leaning, hungrily, with its whole weight.

"Give me the pen," said the Overseer.

…

He had not known that his name was written in it.

It was a small thing. He would have said it was a trick of the light, if there had been anyone to say it to. He took the charcoal from the girl's inky fingers, and his hand shook, and he wrote at the foot of the page where the signatures went: not the title he had carried so long that it had worn smooth, but a name. Four syllables. A scrawl. It came out of his arm as if the arm had remembered it independently.

Valerian.

He looked at it. It was an old-fashioned name, from an old-fashioned place, and he knew it as he knew the number of paces to the barn. He did not know what it meant.

He did not think about why the old script made his teeth ache. He did not think about the sensation, when she read it aloud, of being addressed in a voice he had last heard in a dream. He did not think about the wall. He put the charcoal back in her hand, and the girl bent her head, and signed her own name under his in her small square hand.

The page burned.

Not with flame. A fine thread of shadow rose from the paper and curled upward, thin as a spider's silk, and coiled twice round her wrist and once round his, and drew tight. He felt it set. It was a small quick sting, like a splinter, behind the breastbone. He had felt the like only a few times before, and each time it had ended the same way.

He pushed that thought off the edge of the world.

She was looking at him. She had gone rather pale, and a streak of black ran across her forehead where she had wiped it, and she looked, for the first time since she'd arrived, entirely her age.

"Valerian," she said, trying it.

"Yes."

"It's a good name."

"It is the one I have," he said.

…

They went back to the chapel together, the three of them, for the others were waiting.

It was an odd procession. Isolde went first, with the notebook in her hand and a ribbon of shadow lying lightly round her wrist. Valerian followed a pace behind, silent as a tall black thought. The Harker sisters stared. The woman with the baby's shawl made the sign of the lantern on her breast. Odile, who had no sense whatever, looked up at the Overseer with her round face open and said cheerfully, "Are you with us now?"

"I am with her," said Valerian.

"Is that the same?"

"It is not."

"Oh." Odile considered. "Well. I suppose it'll do."

The lock was easy after that.

They found it before the altar, where the dusty light of the east window fell on a carved oak chair. In it sat the largest doll in the village, a Harvest Queen as big as a child of six. She wore a crown of braided wheat and a gown of real gold-thread brocade. Her painted face was round and kind. Her red crescent smile was the same as all the others, except for a single detail: in the middle of the curve, where the lips met, there was a narrow dark slit, of exactly the width and depth of a brass ear of corn.

The lock is a mouth, Isolde thought. Pay them in the coin they crave.

She held up the key.

"Wait," said Valerian.

It was the first time he'd spoken to her without being asked. She turned. He was standing by the door, with his head tilted a little, as a dog's is when it catches a far-off sound.

"Someone is coming," he said.

Then she heard it too. It came from the road: a tramp of boots, the jingle of harness, men's voices low and easy and entirely unafraid. A great many boots. It was an ordinary human sound, and in this place it was the most terrifying noise she had ever heard.

The chapel doors swung open.

Light poured down the nave. Against it stood a dozen men and women in dark traveling cloaks, with swords at their hips and lantern-shaped pins at their throats, and in front of them, with his hat in his hand, stood a golden-haired man in a green coat. He was handsome in a way that looked like good manners. He had a warm, open, tired face and a smile that reached all the way to the eyes.

"Ah," said Gideon Fallowes, pleasantly. "There you are. We've been looking everywhere for you. I do believe, miss, that you have something that belongs to all of us."