The Chosen One (The First Book)

Chapter 35

They looked at each other a moment longer.

Then they both turned and looked at me at the same time.

"God," I said.

That was all I said.

My legs went. I had refused to sit down twice in that room, and now I went into the chair behind me without deciding to, the way a sack goes down when you stop holding it.

Seven days.

I went through that night the way my mother goes through accounts, item by item, and I put every item on my own account.

I lay on a bed that was not mine and worked out that there was something in me that had always been going to do it. That night was only when it got out.

It was not mine.

I waited to feel better.

The priest at home had a hell with floors in it. He was very clear about the floors. I have been living on one of them since that night, and I had got used to the heat, the way you do.

This was the one underneath.

Somebody had done it to me. On purpose. In a room where I sit down every evening.

"So," Julian said.

"Go on. Say it again. Say the thing you have been saying to me for seven days." He had come round the end of the table. "Do you believe me now?"

"Not now."

"When, then?"

"Julian."

"Do you know what this week has been? You have looked at me every day since, like you are someone being patient about something. Say it. Out loud. Say you had it wrong."

"You are standing in a room with somebody who was poisoned at your father's table," Cassian said, "and you are still the only person in it you can think about."

That went in. I watched it go in.

Poisoned. Neither of them had said the word until then.

I sat there with it.

I have eaten things that were turning and known it from the smell at the door. I can taste iron in water. When I was a child I could tell you which of two hens an egg had come out of. It is the one thing about me that has never been wrong.

I tasted it.

I put the glass down. I looked around that table and thought somebody in the kitchens had made a mistake with the jug.

I had it in my mouth and I let it go.

"It was not your fault."

Cassian had come across and sat down on the edge of the chair beside mine, close enough that I could see the mark on his chin that had healed since.

"I know."

"Then, be sure of it."

"I don't know how a person could be sure of anything."

He did not have an answer for that. I did not expect one.

"Who pours it," I said.

"Two of the household. The same two every night."

"Then it is one of them."

"It might be."

"Or one of the guards. There are two on that door the whole time we were eating." I was counting them off on my fingers without meaning to.

"Or somebody who came in with the dishes. Or somebody from outside. There were people in and out all that week for the fittings."

Neither of them said anything.

"Or one of the girls," Cassian said.

Julian came and stood over by the window.

"Have you quarreled with anybody?"

"You put eight women in one house and take away everything they have to do. There is a quarrel every day of the week."

"I mean a real one."

"Nothing that anybody would do this for," I said. "Nobody hates me enough for this. I have not been here long enough."

"It does not take long," Julian said.

"It would take something."

"It takes wanting somebody gone."

He said it to the window.

Then he turned around, and it was not at me.

"You ruined it," he said. His finger pointed at Cassian.

"You understand that. Whoever did it, you handed them the whole thing."

"Do not start looking for a way to make this mine."

"It is yours. I said get the physician. I said it twice. You stood there in that garden holding her and told me no."

"Julian."

"We would have had it. Whatever it was, it was still in her. A physician would have said the word out loud that night. There would have been a name on it by morning. Instead, we have a week-old jug and a girl who cannot remember-"

"The only thing I had that night was your hand under her skirt."

It came out of him with the top off it.

I have known that man for a month and I have never once heard him raise his voice.

Nobody moved.

The fire did something small in the grate.

"Do what you like," Julian said. "You always have."

He went out. He did not slam the door, which was somehow worse.

I got up.

"You did not know what it was."

Cassian turned his head.

"You did not know what it was," I said again.

"You put me in a bed and you sat in a chair. You did not know if it would stop. You did not know if it would go on all night, or what it would do to my heart, or whether I was going to be there in the morning. And you decided, on your own, in the dark, that it was better for me not to be seen."

"Yes."

"I could have died in your room."

"Yes."

"Then say why."

"Because I was thinking about you," he said. "Not about the jug. Not about who did it. Not about what a physician would write down. I stood in that garden and thought about what you would have to be for the rest of your life in this place. What they would call you. Whose hands they would say had been on you. That is the whole of it. That is what I was thinking about while I was making the wrong decision. And you can stand there and tell me it was wrong. It was. I would do it again."

I did not have anything to put against that.

That is the trouble with it. There is no part of it I can hand back.

I went to the door.

I was halfway down the passage when something broke behind me. Glass, against stone, hard.

I jumped. My whole body went with it.

I did not turn around.

My bread was still on the floor in there, against the leg of the chair.

I left it where it was.