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

What the Dead Are Made Of

My father had been dead for twenty years, and the first thing I noticed was that he had not cleaned his spectacles.

A thumbprint clouded the left lens. It was such an ordinary imperfection that the market around us lost its drowned towers and impossible sky. I was seven again, standing on a stool behind the workbench while he searched three pockets for the cloth hanging from his collar.

He pushed the spectacles higher on his nose.

“You grew into your elbows,” he said.

The sentence hurt because I had forgotten it.

Not the words. The way he used to look at my thin child’s arms as though their awkwardness were a private joke between us and not another defect the world might punish.

I took one step toward him.

Kieran did not catch me. He did not say my name in warning. He moved with me until his shoulder was level with mine.

Beside me, not between us.

The man at the stall set the brass watch beneath the green lamp. His hands were broader than mine, the nails cut blunt, the right forefinger crossed by the white scar he had earned repairing a mill charm that bit him.

I had remembered the scar on the wrong hand.

Until that moment, I would have sworn it belonged to his left.

“Are you my father?” I asked.

His crooked smile faded.

“No, Magpie.”

The answer entered cleanly and found somewhere deep to cut.

Kieran’s hand turned beside his thigh, palm open. An offer, not an interruption.

I put my fingers in it.

The man watched our hands join. My father would have pretended not to notice until he could embarrass me with it later. This one only looked sad.

“What are you?” Kieran asked.

“What was left at the bottom of the account.” The man picked up the blue-handled screwdriver. “A voice taken so a daughter could not call it to mind. Three afternoons removed from a wife who tried to remember the last year kindly. The smell of tobacco surrendered by a creditor who wished to forget whose debt he collected. A dozen small pieces that passed through the courts and were sent here when no one above wanted to admit they had value.”

He turned the screwdriver in his fingers.

“Namarra keeps what is transferred. Sometimes kept things learn one another.”

“Memories cannot learn,” I said.

“The Crown said pain could not testify. It testified anyway.”

That sounded like a riddle. I opened my sight.

Silver threads ran through him, but not as they ran through a living person. He was stitched rather than woven. One thread carried my mother’s memory of my father sleeping on his stomach with one foot outside the blanket. Another held the sound of his laugh as Mrs. Valez had heard it across Bell Street. A third contained only the pressure of his thumb on the back of my hand while he taught me to steady a gear.

None descended into a soul.

None belonged to a ghost.

All of them were real.

I closed my sight.

“You are made from what people lost of him.”

“And what was taken.”

“Do you believe you are Tomas Ellery?”

“Some mornings.” He glanced toward the water moving above the city. “There have been many mornings.”

The tenderness in his voice was borrowed. That did not make it false. It made the person feeling it more difficult to name.

Behind us, the market continued its business. A woman traded a spool of red hair for a winter she had never lived. A boy opened a paper packet, inhaled the smell of bread, and began weeping for a mother whose name was written on the price tag. No one shouted. No one chained the buyers to the stalls. Hunger did the work more elegantly.

“Did Neris make you to lure me?” I asked.

“She permitted the market to show you what you named at the gate.”

“I named a way to return stolen prices.”

“You also wanted your father before you admitted wanting anything at all.”

I thought of the watch speaking on my counter. Magpie.

Kieran’s thumb moved once over my knuckle.

“That desire is not permission,” he said.

The man’s gaze shifted to him. “No. But it is direction.”

He opened the watch.

Light spilled across the stall.

A summer afternoon appeared inside it. I saw our old workshop before the roof sagged, sunlight hot on the front windows, twelve-year-old me at the bench with a regulator clock in pieces. My father stood behind me, guiding neither my hand nor the screwdriver.

“Again,” the memory said.

The child I had been groaned. “The spring hates me.”

“Springs are incapable of personal hatred. This one merely distrusts your technique.”

“That is worse.”

“Usually.”

He leaned close enough that his beard brushed my temple. I felt the remembered sensation on my skin.

My hand came off Kieran’s.

The man held the watch toward me.

“One afternoon,” he said. “Whole and unaltered. You may keep it until you die.”

I could barely force breath past my throat. “What does Namarra claim if I take it?”

“A road to any memory cut by these hands.”

He lifted my father’s fingers.

Not only this afternoon. Every memory of my father that had been cut away. Every place his hands had touched my childhood. A road was not ownership, but it was access. Namarra could find those wounds through me whenever it chose.

I wanted the watch.

Want was too small a word. My body had already begun arranging itself around the return. My palm remembered the weight. My ear strained for the next dry remark. The child inside the light bent over the clock with absolute confidence that the man behind her would still be there when she looked up.

I could take one afternoon.

I could hear his voice whenever I wished.

I could stop carrying a father shaped like an absence.

Kieran said nothing.

I hated him for that for one bright second. I wanted him to forbid it so I could rage at him instead of refusing for myself. I wanted someone to turn the pain into a fight I knew how to win.

“Tell me not to,” I whispered.

He looked at the watch. Grief tightened his mouth.

“Do you want my judgment or my permission?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then I will wait until you do.”

It was the cruelest kindness he could have offered.

I faced the figure at the stall.

“If I refuse, what happens to the memory?”

“It remains here.”

“Do you suffer?”

He considered the question with my father’s habit of rubbing the scar on his finger.

“I wait.”

“That was not what I asked.”

“It is the answer I have.”

“Can you leave this stall?”

His hand stopped on the scar.

“If the account is settled.”

“Whose account?”

“Tomas Ellery’s. Yours. Elowen’s. Every clerk who marked part of him unwanted and transferred it here.” He glanced at the silent buyers moving between the lamps. “The city does not distinguish cleanly between a debt and the evidence of one.”

“If I bought all of you?”

Kieran’s fingers tightened around mine, but the figure answered before he could speak.

“You would surrender every remaining memory of your father to complete me. Namarra would release this body above. I would know his preferences, his tenderness, his shame, and the shape of his hands. You would know none of them.”

“Would you be him then?”

“No.”

The word came faster this time.

“What would you be?”

He looked down at the screwdriver.

“A stranger forced to perform a dead man so his daughter could believe the price was worth paying.”

The honesty silenced even the most desperate part of me.

I had imagined taking him upstairs. I had seen him scowling at my new workbench, declaring Kieran’s placement of the files an offense against reason, calling me Magpie until repetition wore the impossible into ordinary life.

I had not imagined what it would be for him to wake each day beneath my expectation and discover he could never become the man I was demanding.

“What do you want?” I asked.

His eyes lifted sharply.

Perhaps no buyer had asked.

“To finish one repair that belongs to me,” he said after a while. “Not one begun by Tomas Ellery. Not an object chosen because his hands would know it. Something broken after I existed.”

On the shelf behind him sat clocks from a dozen eras, all stopped at different hours. None looked newer than my father’s death.

“Do they let you?”

“The market offers what a buyer desires. It has little use for what the merchandise wants.”

Merchandise.

The word changed the shape of the stall. Whatever he was—memory, imitation, person in the process of becoming—he was not only my temptation.

He was also confined.

“I will not buy you by erasing him from myself,” I said. “And I will not call you my father to make your cage more comfortable for me.”

Something eased in the face that was almost his.

“Fairly spoken, Mara Ellery.”

The child in the watch laughed because the spring had finally seated. My father laughed with her.

I pressed both hands to the edge of the stall until the wood bit my palms.

“No.”

The light did not go out immediately. For one more breath, I had his beard against my hair and his pride warm at my back.

Then the figure closed the case.

The loss struck harder the second time because I had participated in it.

I turned away before grief could become bargaining. Kieran followed me around the stall. I made it three steps into the narrow space between two awnings.

“Mara.”

“Not yet.”

He stopped.

The market smelled of salt, hot metal, and bread no one could eat. I counted six breaths. On the seventh, anger arrived, useful and clean-edged.

“He had the thumbprint,” I said.

“I saw.”

“He said elbows.”

“I heard.”

“I had forgotten that.”

Kieran’s expression broke in a small place around the eyes.

“I am sorry.”

“For what?”

“That refusing the trap did not make it less of a loss.”

I struck his chest with the flat of my hand.

It was not hard. He did not retreat. The second blow became a fist twisted into his shirt.

“I wanted you to stop me.”

“I know.”

“I wanted to blame you.”

“I know that too.”

“You do not know anything now.” The words came out crueler than the truth. “That was the point of breaking the bond.”

Pain crossed his face.

I released his shirt at once.

There it was: the thing I had been afraid of since the silver and black marks vanished. Without magic, I could wound him before I understood what he felt. I could misread restraint as distance and ignorance as abandonment.

Kieran could have made the mistake my punishment. Instead he said, “No. I do not know. I guessed because I wanted the same thing.”

I looked at him.

“When I saw him, part of me wanted him to tell you to take the watch. Then you would have someone you loved giving permission, and I would not have to watch you refuse alone.” His jaw flexed. “That would have served my pain, not yours.”

I put my palm over the place I had struck.

His heart beat fast beneath it.

“I am sorry,” I said.

He covered my hand. “Thank you.”

No absolution. No it did not hurt. Only acceptance of the apology and the fact that it had been needed.

I rested my forehead against him. He smelled of rain, blood, and the soap we had argued over because he considered sandalwood subtle.

His mouth touched my hair.

The contact did not fix anything.

It kept grief from becoming solitude.

When we returned to the stall, the figure had laid the closed watch aside.

“You have his stubbornness,” he said.

“You know that because I know it.”

“Yes.”

“Do not use his pride to reward me.”

His face went still. Then he nodded.

“Fairly spoken.”

My father used to say that after losing an argument he intended to revisit.

I almost broke again.

Instead I opened my notebook to the page containing Mila Sorn’s name and the number from the young maid’s chest.

“You said you are part of an account. Can you read it?”

“Some of it.”

“Where is Kieran Voss’s missing promise stored?”

The figure looked past me.

Kieran had gone motionless. The black ring around his ankle showed through the blood on his boot.

“Not in the market,” the figure said. “Promises volunteered by officers were kept where the Crown could deny they possessed names.”

“The Hall of Closed Names,” Kieran said.

His voice changed on the words, as though his body had recognized a room before his mind did.

The figure turned the green lamp. Its light fell across the wet stones and revealed a line of names beneath our feet. Each had been scored through except one.

KIERAN VOSS.

Below it, another name had been cut so deeply that the stone had split.

“The Hall lies beyond the Keeper’s stair,” the figure said. “Its door opens to the person who closed it, or to the first name returned freely to Namarra’s record.”

“What first name?”

He looked at my notebook.

“The first person Rookhaven erased and Namarra kept.”

“Mila Sorn?”

“Mila was among the last.”

The market lamps began to dim.

One by one, the buyers lowered their heads. Vendors covered their wares. A woman selling jars of sleep swept them into a case and locked it with shaking hands.

The figure that wore my father’s memories reached across the stall.

Not offering a gift. Pointing.

At the far end of the market, a woman walked toward us.

She wore no crown. Rusted keys hung from her belt and struck her thighs with each step. Her dark hair lay wet over one shoulder, and the chain of stamped names still crossed her throat. Behind her came silent figures carrying lamps under the water-sky.

Hundreds of them.

Sleepers with numbers where names should have been.

Neris stopped on the other side of the stall.

She looked first at me, then at the unopened watch.

“You refused him,” she said.

“He was not mine to reclaim.”

“No.” Her eyes moved to the figure. Something older than anger passed through them. “He was ours to keep because your courts could not bear the evidence of loving him.”

Kieran stepped fully beside me.

Every key at Neris’s belt turned toward the black mark at his ankle.

“Seventh Gate,” she said.

Kieran’s hand found mine.

Neris took the largest key from her belt.

Blood darkened its teeth.

His blood.

“You told me you would come back for every name,” she said. “Let us discover whether you meant it before you paid someone to forget.”