What the Dark Keeps

Chapter3

Xanthe

She gave herself exactly twelve minutes to fall apart.

Not visibly. She had never done anything visibly had learned early that feelings left in the open had a way of being used, and so she kept hers filed away in the interior rooms of herself, behind the practical and the composed and the dry remark deployed like a shield. But she sent Etienne out to the landing under the pretense of giving her space to pack, closed the door, sat down on the edge of her bed, and allowed herself twelve minutes of honest reckoning with the fact that her life had just ended and a new, significantly more terrifying one had begun.

She counted them out on the clock on her bedside table.

At minute two she thought about her grandmother, about the mark on the old woman’s arm that she had never explained and the knowledge she had given away in fragments and silences and the one time, only once, when Xanthe was seventeen and had accidentally called fire without meaning to, that her grandmother had looked at her not with alarm but with a grief so specific it could only have been anticipated. I’m sorry, she had said, and nothing else, and Xanthe had understood even then that the apology was not for the fire.

At minute six she thought about the thing in Duskholm. The thing her ancestor had locked away with the full weight of the Veldrath covenant, the sacrifice of her power and her line’s place in the ancient order. She tried to imagine what required that price. What you had to be how vast, how ruinous to demand that kind of answer.

She stopped trying at minute seven.

At minute nine she looked at her flat. Really looked at it, the way you look at things you are about to lose. The books she had carried across four different addresses over six years. The plants she kept failing to water and kept replacing anyway, an optimism so habitual it had stopped feeling like optimism and started feeling like character. The bird skull on the windowsill. The clay jar.

She got up and crossed to the shelf.

The jar sat where it always had, sealed with black wax and something older than wax, round-bellied and palm-sized and humming very faintly in a register that she felt in her back teeth rather than heard with her ears. She had found it wrapped in oilcloth in the bottom of a box her grandmother had left her the box itself unremarkable, full of dried herbs gone to dust and a recipe for a tincture she still used and three old letters in a language she couldn’t read. The jar at the bottom of all of it like a secret someone had decided to keep permanently.

She had never opened it. She had always known she wasn’t meant to. But she had also never been able to leave it behind, had carried it across all four addresses along with the books and the plants and the accumulated debris of her careful ordinary life, because some part of her that operated below thought had always understood it was important.

She picked it up. It was warm. It was always warm.

She packed it first.

Etienne was on the landing when she opened the door, standing with his back against the wall opposite and his arms loose at his sides, and he had the quality she had already begun to identify as specifically his: the utter absence of restlessness. No shifting weight, no checking the corridor, no performing patience the way people perform patience when they are secretly counting the minutes. He was simply still, the way stone is still, the way deep water is still, the way things are still that have no anxiety about time because time has never had authority over them.

It should have been unsettling.

She found it, against all reasonable judgement, slightly steadying.

“Twenty minutes,” she said. “I thought you said before morning.”

“I said we needed to leave before morning,” he said. “I didn’t say immediately.”

“You implied immediately.”

“I implied urgency.” The faintest shift at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile more like the ghost of one, the memory of the shape of a smile on a face that had stopped making them regularly. “There is a difference.”

She looked at him for a moment. He looked back at her with those deep-water eyes that gave nothing away and took everything in, and she had the distinct and uncomfortable feeling of being read thoroughly, carefully, without her consent by something that was very good at it.

She adjusted the bag on her shoulder and started for the stairs.

“Where are we going?” she asked without looking back.

“The Greyfen,” he said, falling into step behind her. She felt him there not through sound, he moved almost silently, but through something else, some low awareness in her blood that had apparently decided he was relevant. She ignored it. “There is a threshold point three hours east of the city. We’ll cross there.”

“Into the Greyfen.” She pushed through the building’s front door into the night air of the old quarter cool, carrying woodsmoke and the distant sweetness of the night market, the sounds of a city that didn’t know the floor was cracking. “And then?”

“Through the Greyfen to Duskholm.”

She stopped walking.

He stopped too, one step behind her, and waited.

The street was quiet at this hour, lamps burning amber and low, cobblestones slick with the earlier rain. An old quarter cat regarded them both from a doorstep with the transcendent indifference of its kind and then looked away.

“You want to take me into the underworld,” she said.

“I want to take you somewhere the thing hunting you cannot reach you.” His voice was level. “Duskholm is the one place in the three realms where its influence does not extend. Morthane’s domain is the one boundary it cannot cross not yet.”

“Because Morthane is the one keeping it contained.”

“What remains of the containment, yes.”

She turned and looked at him. Properly, in the amber lamplight, in a way she hadn’t allowed herself to do inside the flat where there had been too many other things to process. He was it wasn’t fair, really, the way he was constructed. All that stillness wearing a face like that, dark and sharp and ancient in the way that had nothing to do with apparent age and everything to do with what lived behind the eyes. Looking at him was slightly like looking at something that existed at a different resolution to everything else, too precise, too present.

She made herself focus.

“If I go into Duskholm,” she said, “will I come back out?”

Something moved in his expression. It was brief and it was quickly contained and she almost missed it but she had grown up watching her grandmother perform composure over complicated feelings and she knew the shape of the effort.

“Yes,” he said.

“That wasn’t immediate.”

“I was being precise.”

“You were deciding how honest to be.”

He looked at her steadily. “Yes,” he said again. “You will come back out. I will make certain of it.”

It was not a reassurance. It was a statement of intent, delivered with the absolute flatness of a man who did not make promises he had any uncertainty about keeping. She understood, somewhere instinctual, the difference.

It didn’t make her less afraid. But it settled something.

“I have conditions,” she said.

“Of course you do.”

She almost smiled at that. Almost. “I don’t take orders. If we’re doing this together, we discuss and we decide together. I’m not cargo.”

“No,” he said, quietly. “You are not.”

“I carry my own things. You don’t carry things for me without asking.”

“Agreed.”

“And if I decide at any point that the plan is wrong, I get to say so.”

He tilted his head a fraction. Considering. “You get to say so,” he said carefully. “I cannot guarantee I’ll agree with you.”

“I’m not asking you to agree with me. I’m asking you to hear me.”

A pause. Longer this time. The amber lamplight sat on the planes of his face and he looked at her with something she couldn’t name not the cataloguing attention from before, not the careful strategic assessment. Something quieter than that. Something that had less to do with what she was useful for and more to do with what she was.

“Yes,” he said. “I will hear you.”

She nodded once. Settled the bag on her shoulder. Turned east toward the edge of the city where the buildings thinned out and the dark between the stars got deeper and the air smelled, if you had the right kind of blood, faintly of elsewhere.

“Then let’s go,” she said.

They walked.

The city moved around them, warm and oblivious and alive, and at her back she felt the flat she had just left the books, the surviving plants, the empty shelf where the clay jar had been and she let herself feel it, the grief of it, clean and private and hers, and then she put it away in one of the interior rooms and closed the door.

She didn’t look back.

He walked beside her in silence, and the silence was, she noticed, the same quality as his stillness not empty but inhabited, not the absence of things but the presence of a restraint so total it had become its own kind of language.

She was going to have to learn to read him.

She suspected, with a feeling she didn’t entirely trust, that he was already reading her.

They were twenty minutes from the city’s edge when she said, without looking at him, “The jar on my shelf. The clay one.”

“I noticed it,” he said.

“It smelled of Duskholm.”

“Yes.”

“You know what it is.”

A beat. “I have a theory.”

She waited. He said nothing further, and she looked at him sideways and found him looking straight ahead with a careful blankness that was not quite natural.

“Etienne.”

“It is a conversation for when we are not in the open,” he said. “And when you have had time to sit with the rest of tonight first.”

She considered pushing. She was good at pushing had spent her whole adult life excavating information from people who would have preferred she didn’t have it. But there was something in the set of his jaw, not refusal exactly but protection, and she found that she didn’t have the appetite to dismantle it. Not tonight.

She had twelve things to be terrified about already.

The jar could wait.

They reached the edge of Solmere as the last of the night market lamps went out behind them, and before them the road stretched east into dark countryside, and above them the sky was the particular blue-black of deep night salted with stars, and somewhere far below all of it below the stone, below the roots, below the cold deep aquifers that ran beneath the living world like a second circulatory system something enormous and patient and very old shifted in its partial sleep.

And smiled.