A City of Drowned Oaths - The Rookhaven Covenant - Book Two

The Woman Elowen Left

By sunset, Rookhaven had received four hundred and twelve petitions from the dead, the missing, and the parts of the living that royal promises had sent below.

Orla established three temporary witness rooms in Saint Orison’s nave. The bakers brought tables. The undertakers brought chairs and proved alarmingly cheerful about finally being useful before anyone died.

No petition could be heard without someone affected by it. No returned object could be accepted before its claim was stated. No vowcutter could vote on a term she might cut.

The rules were imperfect.

People argued with them.

That was how I knew they did not belong to a crown.

Ione remained at the church with Petar, Mrs. Garn, Ada Hale, and a growing collection of citizens willing to discover how difficult fairness became after supper.

Elowen stood in my shop beside the green thread.

She had filled eleven pages of her ledger with everything the seventh knot returned. Most entries were fragments.

Copper door. Neris singing. A child’s hand in mine. The Crown’s path needs somewhere to fall. I believed the city was empty.

The final sentence had been written three times.

“Did you believe it,” I asked, “or did you need to?”

Elowen did not pretend to misunderstand.

“I don’t know yet.”

Every mirror in the shop turned black.

Neris appeared in the cheval glass.

The bandages were gone from her hands. Blue burns crossed both palms in the shape of Ren’s candle flame.

“The panels have opened four hundred roads,” she said. “Your city learns quickly when consequence knocks on its own door.”

“If you came to complain that people are answering—”

“I came for Elowen.”

My mother closed the ledger.

“I’ll go.”

“The invitation is not a claim,” Neris said. “You may refuse.”

“I won’t.”

I reached for my field case.

Elowen stopped me with a look. “She asked for me.”

“And you intend to walk into Namarra alone after recovering pieces of a memory involving its lock.”

“No.” She glanced toward Kieran, who stood at the back door tightening a clean bandage around his arm. “I intended to ask whether you would come.”

The difference did not erase twenty years of decisions made on my behalf.

It mattered anyway.

We descended through Saint Orison at low tide.

This time the Seventh Gate opened before Kieran touched it. The blood-key grew warm in his pocket. Neris waited on the other side, alone.

She looked at Elowen for a long time.

Elowen had changed more visibly. White threaded her hair. A scar crossed her throat. The Crown had kept her upright through years of captivity but had not preserved youth as carefully as beauty-loving courts preserved their princes.

Neris looked exactly as she had in the memory.

“You got old,” she said.

Elowen’s laugh broke on the way out. “A little.”

“I used to wonder whether I would recognize you.”

“Do you?”

“Unfortunately.”

Neris turned.

We followed her away from the market, through streets where sleepers stood in doorways watching petitions rise toward Rookhaven. Some faces had gained names since morning. Others wore fresh numbers.

The numbered maid we had failed to free waited beneath a bridge.

The silver mark above her heart had changed. It still read 1847, but letters now moved beneath it.

MILA SORN.

Not the maid’s name. A name returned through the same record that had inventoried her.

“The testimony reached us,” Neris said.

The maid touched the letters. “I remembered Mila brought me tea when the clerks worked through the night.”

“Do you remember your own name?” I asked.

“No.”

Hope did not leave her face entirely.

“But now I know someone who might have known it.”

Neris adjusted the woman’s shawl around her shoulders. The gesture was efficient, almost impatient. The maid leaned into it anyway.

“Go to the Hall,” Neris told her. “Speak the memory before it fades.”

The woman hurried away.

“One name opens others,” Kieran said.

“Sometimes.” Neris watched the maid until she crossed the bridge. “Sometimes it opens only the knowledge of what remains lost.”

At the highest point in Namarra stood the Keeper’s tower.

Its room had no bed.

There was a chair in the center, a washstand without water, and walls covered by thousands of taut silver threads. Each ran from Neris’s chair into the city. Dreams moved through them as small pulses of light.

Neris sat.

Every thread entered her skin.

Ren’s fever struck first. His six-year-old body curled on a pallet in a room far below, and Neris’s hands clenched with his pain. A woman’s nightmare followed: forty stolen years returned in the space of one breath. Then a soldier relived the moment his commander transferred a mortal wound into the prisoner he loved.

Neris received each dream without making a sound.

“Stop,” Elowen said.

“This is stopped.”

“What happens when the city sleeps deeply?”

“The dreams come faster.”

Elowen’s face emptied.

Neris released the threads. They withdrew from her arms, leaving thousands of white scars.

“The Keeper could not sleep,” she said. “Someone had to know when a hidden price began killing the person who carried it. Someone had to move a child out of a nightmare before his body believed it had aged. Someone had to keep every name in order while their owners forgot themselves.”

“You told me the spell would put everyone to sleep,” Elowen whispered.

“Everyone in my care.”

“You did not say it excluded you.”

“You did not ask.”

“You have not aged.”

“My body repeated the final hour of the spell.” Neris touched one unchanged cheek. “My mind did not. I lived every minute without being allowed to become the woman those minutes should have made.”

The old intimacy in the cruelty made it more painful. They had once known exactly where to cut each other.

Neris looked up through the tower ceiling. Ship shadows crossed the water above.

“I counted years by the barnacles on the harbor keels,” she said. “In the first winter, I rehearsed what I would say when you returned. In the second, I began saving insults because I knew you would complain if they repeated. By the seventh year, I had decided to strike you before embracing you.”

She rose from the chair and touched one of the silver threads.

The room filled with the smell of oranges.

For one second, I saw two younger women sitting on the seawall above Rookhaven. Elowen had juice on her thumb. Neris wore an archivist’s gray coat and was laughing hard enough to lean against her.

The image disappeared.

“You brought me oranges the day we met,” Neris said. “Keepers were not permitted fruit from above because desire was considered a distraction from impartial record.”

“You ate six,” Elowen whispered.

“Seven. You lost count because you were trying to convince me to falsify a royal ledger.”

“Correct a royal ledger.”

“Your vocabulary was criminal even then.”

For a heartbeat, they smiled.

Then Neris touched another thread.

Ren screamed in his sleep below.

The smile vanished.

“I remembered that afternoon for both of us,” Neris said. “I remembered the room above the dye shop where we planned the first closures. I remembered you swearing we would drink terrible wine on the surface when this ended.”

“Neris—”

“When Ren cried for his mother, I told him stories about the stubborn oathwright who would come back. When Maren forgot her name, I gave her yours for one night so she could hear a human word when she woke. When the eighth year began, I stopped using you as hope.”

She walked around the chair.

“In the twelfth, I tried to sleep. Fourteen people began aging at once. I woke before the youngest died.” Her burned hand flexed. “In the fifteenth, I forgot the sound of my own voice unless someone else was screaming. In the eighteenth, a ship dropped anchor through the west tower. I watched divers swim ten feet above me and could not make them turn their heads.”

Elowen stood very still.

“In the twenty-second,” Neris said, “your daughter wrote a merciful door into every promise, and the city opened around me. I saw your face in a mirror. You were alive. That was the cruelest moment.”

“Because I had not returned.”

“Because I was glad.”

The admission broke something neither anger nor accusation had reached.

Elowen wept without covering her face.

“After the seventh, I stopped arranging the reunion.”

“Neris—”

“Do not begin with the Crown.”

Elowen lowered her hand.

“I promised to return within seven years. I did not.”

“No.”

“The Crown took the route before the first year ended. It removed your face, then your name, then the knowledge that anyone waited.”

“I know what was taken. Namarra kept the receipt.”

Elowen flinched.

“Before it took the memory, I had months,” she said. “I found three royal paths feeding Namarra. I closed two. I did not send word because every messenger could have led the Crown to you. I told myself silence protected the city.”

“Did it?”

“Perhaps.”

“Did it protect you from admitting you might fail?”

Elowen looked at the scarred woman in the chair.

“Yes.”

Neris’s throat worked.

Elowen continued. “I should have given you a way to decide whether the risk of a message was yours to take. I should not have made seven years sound certain because I needed you to agree to sleep. I am sorry.”

“For which part?”

“For using certainty I did not possess. For leaving you alone with work we planned together. For being relieved when memory theft gave my failure a cause that was not entirely me.”

No one moved.

Neris’s eyes filled. The tears rose from her lashes and joined the water above instead of falling.

“I hated you,” she said. “Then I hated myself whenever one of them dreamed of you kindly.”

Elowen took one step toward her.

Neris stood.

“Do not.”

Elowen stopped.

“I will not ask you to forgive me.”

“You always did learn after the lesson became expensive.”

“Yes.”

Neris wiped one cheek with the heel of her burned hand.

“What will you do if I never forgive you?”

Elowen took time before answering.

“Restore the routes I can restore. Give testimony where my choices harmed people. Tell Mara what returns before deciding whether the truth protects her.”

“And for me?”

“Whatever repair you name that does not require me to pretend I can return twenty-two years.”

“Suppose I name hatred.”

“Then I will not demand you make it gentler for my sake.”

Neris’s laugh was raw. “You think endurance is accountability.”

Elowen flinched because the accusation was close enough to truth.

“Sometimes I do.”

“Suppose I ask you to leave.”

“I will leave.”

“Suppose I ask you to come tomorrow.”

Elowen’s breath shook. “I will come.”

“No vow?”

“No vow.”

Neris studied her for so long that the dream threads pulsed twice.

“Come tomorrow,” she said at last. “Bring oranges.”

Hope made Elowen look young and frightened.

“Seven?”

“Do not presume.”

“Six, then.”

Neris did not smile. She also did not withdraw the invitation.

They faced one another across the distance of an embrace neither had the right to assume.

Kieran stood near the door with his hands open at his sides.

Neris turned to him.

“And you came back when called.”

“Yes.”

“Do you want praise for being only three weeks late after the Crown fell?”

“No.”

“What do you want?”

His gaze went to the chair.

The threads trembled as if sensing him.

I knew the answer before he gave it. Not through magic. Through the careful calm that entered him whenever death began to look useful.

“Someone must relieve you,” he said.

“Kieran.”

He looked at me.

“She has been awake for twenty-two years.”

“I can count.”

“The Seventh Gate was my office.”

“It was a name the court used to turn you into a door.”

“It also gives me access to the threads.”

Neris watched us without interrupting.

“Did she ask you to take the chair?” I said.

“No.”

“Did you ask what taking it means?”

His silence was answer enough.

Anger heated my face. “You recovered one day of guilt and have already found a way to make your body the payment.”

“That is not fair.”

“No. Fair would be letting me volunteer you because I happen to love the result.”

He came closer. “I am trying to help.”

“You are trying to become indispensable before anyone can discover whether they want you when you are not useful.”

The words struck.

He looked away.

I wanted to take them back because they hurt. I did not, because they were true.

I lowered my voice. “I am not asking you to abandon Neris. I am asking you not to offer a lifetime before learning whether she needs an hour.”

“And if she needs the lifetime?”

Fear thinned his voice beneath the defiance.

“Then you tell me you want to consider it. You do not present your disappearance as a finished kindness.”

“Would you ever agree?”

“I don’t know.”

He closed the remaining distance.

“That frightens me more than your refusal.”

“Good. It means I am not lying to keep you calm.”

His hand came to my waist and stopped there. I could feel the heat of it through my coat.

“I do not know how to watch someone carry pain I could carry,” he said.

“Learn.”

The word left both of us breathing too hard.

I caught the torn front of his shirt and pulled him down.

The kiss was anger, fear, and the unbearable fact that I wanted him even while he was repeating the habit most likely to take him from me. His mouth opened against mine. His fingers tightened once at my waist, then loosened, giving me room to end it.

I did.

Our foreheads remained together.

“That was not agreement,” I whispered.

“I know.”

“Or forgiveness.”

“I know that too.”

“It was—”

“You wanted my mouth.”

Despite everything, a broken laugh escaped me.

I kept hold of his shirt.

“If you never sit in that chair, what do you want?”

He glanced at the threads as if desire unrelated to duty required permission.

“Tonight?”

“Start small.”

“A bath. Food that has not been carried through a crypt. To put my second box in the wardrobe instead of beside it.”

My grip softened.

“There is room.”

“I know. I measured.”

“You measured my wardrobe?”

“Your storage practices invite intervention.”

“Kieran.”

The humor left him.

“I want to wake beside you often enough that it stops feeling stolen,” he said. “I want an argument about money. I want to discover whether I hate winter in a house where no one orders me to enjoy it. I want—”

His throat moved.

“Say it.”

“I want to be wanted on a day when I save no one.”

The need in his face made tenderness dangerous. It would have been easy to soothe him with forever because forever was too distant to test.

“Then come home today,” I said. “Do nothing useful for one hour. See whether I throw you out.”

“A rigorous experiment.”

“We believe in evidence.”

He touched his thumb to my lower lip, careful where his kiss had left it tender.

“And if I fail?”

“You can try being useless again tomorrow.”

Neris made a dry sound behind us. “Twenty-two years, and courtship remains the least efficient form of testimony.”

Kieran stepped back, color high in his face.

“What does relieving you require?” he asked her.

“That,” Neris said, “is a question with terms.”

The floor opened beneath the Keeper’s chair.

A spiral stair descended into golden light. At its bottom, the memory market waited. Every stall had turned toward Kieran.

On the nearest counter lay three objects: a spool wound with lost years, a sealed card bearing the name he had been given at birth, and a rusted key labeled SEVENTH GATE.

From somewhere beneath them, a woman began singing a lullaby.

Kieran stopped breathing.

“My mother,” he said.

The market lamps came on.