The Alpha Threw Me To The Hyenas

Chapter Seven: The Second Row

Ivette Sarn came the next morning, and she came on her own, which was stranger than anything Kael had done.

I heard her before I saw her because of the shoes. Nobody who worked in that house wore anything you could hear on stone. She came down the stairs at a completely ordinary pace, not hurrying and not creeping, like a woman going to look at a room she was thinking of renting.

The door opened. She stood in it and looked at me for what must have been six or seven seconds.

Then she said, "You are on the floor."

"So I keep being told."

"There is a chair in the corridor."

"I know."

Something happened at the corner of her mouth that was not quite a smile, and she came in and let the door swing to behind her without shutting it properly.

She was not in green. She was in a grey coat over something plain, dressed for the cold part of the house rather than for anybody's benefit, and she had her hands in her pockets and she did not take them out.

"I have not brought you anything," she said.

"All right."

"I want to be clear about that before we start, because people bring things and then everybody has to behave as though a relationship has been established." She looked around the store room once, taking in the crates, the sacks, the drain. "I am not here to be kind to you. I would find it difficult and you would find it insulting."

I have met a great many people since. There are perhaps four I would put in a room with Ivette Sarn and expect them to survive the first minute.

"Your hands do not work," she said.

"They work."

"You have been sitting with them palm up in your lap since I came in, and when I opened the door you did not push yourself off the floor, you rocked forward off your hip." She said this without any particular emphasis. "How bad."

"The right one seized for a while. It comes and goes."

"Can you hold a cup."

"If it is not full."

She nodded slowly, as if adding it to a column.

That is the only way I have ever been able to describe being looked at by that woman. She did not look at people. She costed them. She went over you the way a person goes down a page of figures somebody else has prepared, checking the totals, and you could watch her arriving at the number.

"You did not know it was going to happen," she said.

"No."

"You had no idea what you were."

"I still have no idea what I am."

"Mm." She moved a little further into the room. "Do you know what I do when a thing happens that I did not predict? I go back and I find the exact moment I should have seen it and could not. I have been doing that for five days and I cannot find one. There is no moment. I watched you carry a tray past me at a name day four years ago and I would have told you there was nothing there."

"There wasn't."

"There was something there." She stopped by the crates. "Four slabs of stone came out of that floor on Saturday."

"I heard."

"Did you hear where they went?"

"No."

"Neither did I," she said, and for the first time there was something underneath the flat voice, "and I am extremely good at hearing where things go."

She turned round and faced me properly.

"I am going to tell you something," she said, "and I want you to understand why. I am not doing it out of pity. I am doing it because you are going to find out on Tuesday anyway, and I would rather you found out from me, because then you will remember that I was the one who told you. Do you follow?"

"Yes."

"Good. That is exactly the right amount of suspicion." She put her weight on one hip. "Kael came down here last night and offered you a way out."

I did not ask how she knew.

"He offered you a public recantation," she said. "You kneel, you say you were ill, he takes the bond, the woman who feeds you comes back to the kitchen. He believes every word of it. He spent four days getting it and he thinks he has bought your life with it."

"And?"

"It is not real."

The room was very quiet. Above us somebody dragged something across a floor.

"His father agreed to it because agreeing to it kept his son busy for four days and out of the way of nine other decisions," Ivette said. "There is not going to be a recantation on Tuesday. Halvard Varro does not want you recanting. If you kneel in that hall and take it back, then what happened in front of six hundred witnesses becomes a girl who was ill and got confused, and it goes away, and he does not want it to go away. He wants it on the record. He wants it entered."

"Why."

"I do not know," she said. "That is the part that is keeping me up."

I sat on the floor of the lower store with my hands turned up in my lap and understood that the only door anybody had shown me was painted on.

"You should tell Kael," I said.

"He would not believe me. He has decided I am a thing his father arranged, which I am, and he has decided that means I am on his father's side, which I am not." She said it without any self pity at all. "In eleven months he will believe me. He is not stupid. He is just extremely tired of being handled and he cannot tell the difference yet between being handled and being told."

"Why does it matter to you what happens to me on Tuesday?"

"It does not," she said.

Then she took her hands out of her pockets, which she had not done once, and she looked down at the brass cover on the drain with the four leaves and the ring in it.

"You should have let him have it," she said.

And there it is. That is the sentence. I have turned it over more times than I have turned over finish it.

Because I had spent twenty-two years in that house doing the only thing I was ever any good at, which was standing at the edge of a room reading the people in it. You learn it fast when you are the one carrying the trays. You learn that the words coming out of a person's mouth are the least reliable thing in the room and that the reliable things are the shoulders and the hands and the half second before somebody speaks.

Ivette Sarn told me I should have let him have it.

And she said it perfectly. Level, a little regretful, exactly what a woman in her position should say to a girl in mine.

But she had taken her hands out of her pockets to say it. And her shoulders had come down about half an inch. And there was a looseness through her that had not been there when she walked in and was not consistent with regret at all, and I knew, the way I knew when a table was about to want more wine, that the woman standing in that doorway was the only person in the entire house of Ilthar who had gone home on the night of the binding and slept.

She had wanted me to refuse.

She had sat in the second row in a green dress with her hands folded and she had watched me open my mouth, and she had leaned forward.

"Tuesday," Ivette said, and went up the stairs at a completely ordinary pace.