Kept

Chapter 13: What Was Done

Two days before the packet arrived, I went to the border town.

It was not the sort of errand I was in the habit of making. I was not unwell; I had been, so far as I could tell, entirely well for a very long time. But there was a question I had been carrying for years, and I had decided, on no particular morning, to take it to someone whose business was the body and let them tell me whether it was worth carrying at all.

I told no one I was going. The family physician keeps his rooms in the house, and I could not be certain that a question asked in his rooms would stay in his rooms — he has known my father since before I was born. So I said I was going to the border town to look at the market, which was where I was going, and I rode out alone in the morning.

The healer's rooms were over the apothecary's, up a narrow stair, low and warm and smelling of dried herbs. The old woman met me at the door with her sleeves rolled and a look of mild surprise, which was fair; I had never once needed her before.

"My lady," she said. "What brings you?"

"I've been tired," I said. "This past month. And there's a heaviness, low down, in the mornings — here." I put my hand flat against my stomach and took it away again. "It doesn't keep me from work. I only thought — "

The sentence I had planned, the one about whether a woman of my age could be perfectly well and still have no child, was not a sentence I could say to a woman I had met a moment ago, with her sleeves rolled and her hands smelling of mint.

"I only thought I should ask," I said.

She looked at me a moment, the way a woman looks at a bird that has flown into a room. Then she nodded. "Sit down, then. When did the heaviness start?"

"I don't know. It comes and goes."

"With your courses?"

I had not tracked it against my courses. They had been a private, monthly fact of the body for twenty years, and I had never once asked them to account for themselves.

"I hadn't noticed," I said.

"Then we'll notice now." She asked when they had come last, and how long they ran, and whether the heaviness had been there before the tiredness or after it, and I answered, and she wrote none of it down, keeping it in her head the way my father kept the herd numbers. Then she took my wrist and held it, two fingers on the pulse, her eyes half closed. Then she pressed on my stomach through the cloth, light and then firmer, watching my face.

"Hurt?"

"No."

"Good." She stepped back and dried her hands on a cloth. "You're regular. Your pulse is steady. There's nothing in the belly that ought not to be there. The heaviness is a common thing at your age — every woman carries it at one time of the month or another, and the ones who feel it are the ones with attention to spare. The tiredness is your sleep, and you've just told me you haven't slept well in years." She said it without censure, the way a healer states a diagnosis. "There's nothing wrong with you."

She said it kindly, and she seemed to think it was the reassurance I had come for. I should have let it end there.

She was turning toward the shelf of jars when she stopped, looked at me, and came back with a twist of paper instead.

"Take this. Dried brambleroot and honey — a strengthening brew. A spoon in hot water at night. It won't do you harm, and it may do you some good, which is more than most tonics can promise." She put it in my hand and closed my fingers over it. "And if there's something else you came to ask," she said, "it will keep."

I looked at her.

"It will keep," I said.

I paid her and left, with the twist of paper in my pocket and the question still of where I had been carrying it. Nothing wrong. I had known that. I rode back through the border town and the thornfields, and put the visit away with the rest of the morning, filed under not now. There was work. There was always work; it was the one thing in my life that had never once failed to be there.

---

The packet came two days later, in the middle of a morning given over to the northern grazing rotation.

Bram brought it. He is thorough, and he is discreet — which is why my father and I had, without either of us saying so, begun to route everything that required words through him — and he set it on the edge of my desk the way he set everything: flat, square to the table, neither offered nor withheld.

"Courier batch from the south," he said. "Marked for you. No return name."

I looked at it. A plain envelope, sealed with nothing remarkable, the sort of thing that carried bills of lading or a factor's quarterly letter or nothing at all.

"Thank you," I said, and he went, and I opened it.

---

Inside were two leaves of parchment — copies, not originals. The first was an apothecary's standing order: moonwort, in quantity, monthly, addressed to the Luna's kitchen. The hand was tight and abbreviated, the hand of a man who had written the same line a thousand times and no longer thought about it. The dates ran from a month after I arrived at Ashmark to a month before I left. Every month. No gaps.

I knew the name. It had been in my tea every evening for ten years — prescribed for my cycles, the physicians said, a tonic for a condition I had been told I had, and had never once thought to question.

The second leaf was a kitchen note, smaller, in a different hand:

For the Luna's tea, as before.

I read them once. I read them again. I set the leaves down flat on the desk and put my hand over them, and I sat without moving until the light from the yard had crossed the desk and the morning was gone. The mill stopped for the noon bell and started again. I had not turned a page in any of it.

Ten years. I had filed it under fate — the quiet arithmetic of a marriage with no children, one more thing that did not grow in a house I had not chosen. And when I had been honest, which was rare, I had filed it under my own body, the way a woman learns to, when there is no other name to put on it.

It wasn't me.

There had never been a condition. They had told me there was one, kindly, and I had believed them — because the medicine was real, and the cup was warm, and I had never once thought to ask what I was being treated for.

The account had been false from the top. Ten years of it, entered by other hands, and I had balanced it faithfully, line by line, and called it my life.

I was not angry. I waited for anger, out of habit — it had been my companion in that house for ten years. It did not come.

My wolf had gone still, the particular way she goes when something is true. She has never needed my kind of proof; she knows a thing by weight. She had known, I think, for years, that there had never been anything wrong with me. She had simply had no way to say so, and I had never thought to ask her.

---

My first thought, when I could think again, was not who had done it. That surprised me. The question was there, waiting to be asked. Somewhere in that house, in that kitchen, behind that standing order, there was a name, and I had spent ten years learning to read a house's accounts. I could have started with the dates and the hands and followed the thread to the bottom of it. I had done harder pieces of work than that in my sleep.

I did not.

The thing was over. That was the plain fact of it: I was not in Ashmark. I was not anyone's Luna. I was sitting at my father's desk in Goldthorn with the morning coming in the window, and whatever had been in my tea could not reach me here. The decade arranged around me was behind me. To take up the thread was to walk back into it, and I had carried it for ten years. I had carried it longer than I had carried anything else. I was not going to carry it home.

I did not forgive anything. I had no practice at that, and no interest. The thing had ended, and I had ended it by leaving, and I would not be the one to reopen it. There was a name in that house, in that kitchen. I did not go looking for it.

I folded the leaves back into the envelope. I put the envelope in a folder with nothing else in it, and the folder in the drawer of my desk, under the current quarter's ledger, and I locked the drawer. I put the key on the same ring as the keys to the granary and the mill, which was, I told myself, all the significance the thing deserved. It was not all that significant. I knew that too. I locked the drawer anyway.

At supper that night, I ate what was put in front of me. My father asked about the mill accounts, and I answered, and he asked nothing else, because I gave him nothing else to ask. The drawer was locked in my desk upstairs. All evening I knew exactly where it was, the way you know where a splinter is.

---

Three days passed.

I did the grazing rotation, the mill accounts, and the reconciliation that had been waiting. I rebalanced the quarterly books and found a discrepancy in the feed column that had been there since spring. I corrected it. I checked the figures twice, and then three times. I did not take the key from the ring. I did not open the drawer. The visit to the border town had receded into the ordinary past.

On the second day, my father found me in the accounts room and stood in the doorway a moment, the way he had taken lately to doing — looking, deciding not to ask, leaving. He had done it eleven days straight before Selene left. I did not look up. I heard him decide not to go.

The letter came on the third day.

It came by the regular post — folded small, sealed plainly, addressed to me by name in a hand I knew: small and level and closed, every letter finished. I had seen that hand once, at the bottom of an agreement, and I had looked at it longer than sorting required, and I had told myself I was noting it for professional reasons.

I knew who it was before I opened it.

Inside was a single page. It was short. It did not say where the packet had come from, or what it contained, or how it had been assembled. It asked, in so many words, whether I knew. I read it three times, the way I had begun to read everything lately. It was the first time in ten years that anyone had asked me that — whether I knew what had been done to me — and it had come, of all people, from the one person I had spent ten years not answering.

And at the bottom, above the signature, in the place we had agreed on ten years ago — across a table, when we were both younger, and the code had been a joke between strangers — was the word.

Transmissum.

Use this if you mean it.

I stood in the middle of the room with the page in my hand, and I understood, without any part of it having been said, who had read the standing order and the kitchen note and the dates; who had decided that I would know. He had not signed the packet. He had not needed to. He had known I would recognize the hand.

My wolf stirred, low behind my ribs — the way a creature stirs that has been sleeping at a door, and has heard, at last, the step it was waiting for.

I did not answer the letter that day.

But I did not put it in the drawer, either.