What the Dark Keeps

Chapter 5

Xanthe

The rooms they gave her were not what she expected.

She had braced for cold stone and austerity, for the aesthetic of death rendered in architecture — bare walls, narrow windows, the general atmosphere of a place that had stopped caring about comfort because comfort was a living concern. She had prepared herself for it on the walk to the courts, quietly cataloguing the things she could tolerate and the things she would simply have to endure.

The rooms were warm.

Not warm in a fire-and-candlelight way, though there was a fireplace and it was lit. Warm in a deeper sense, the walls a dark stone that held heat the way good clay held it, the floors covered in rugs woven in deep colours she didn’t have names for. The ceiling was high. The window looked out onto Duskholm’s extraordinary dark sky. There was a bed that looked like it understood the purpose of sleep and a writing desk she already wanted to sit at and a shelf of books in languages she mostly didn’t read, and on a small table near the fire sat a cup of something hot and dark that smelled of black tea and something else, something mineral and ancient, that was not unpleasant.

She stood in the doorway and looked at all of it.

Etienne stood behind her in the corridor. “It’s acceptable?” he said.

“It’s more than acceptable.” She stepped inside. “Where are your rooms?”

“Adjacent.”

She turned. He was watching her from the doorway with his hands at his sides and his face in its default configuration of careful blankness. He had been quiet for the last stretch of the walk, quieter than his usual quiet, and she had felt the difference without being able to name what it meant.

“Sleep,” he said. “I’ll be here in the morning.”

“You don’t sleep?”

“Not the way you do.”

She looked at him for a moment. He looked back at her. The firelight from inside her room reached the doorway and caught the edges of him and she noticed, not for the first time, that he was difficult to look at directly and very difficult to look away from.

“Goodnight then,” she said.

Something crossed his face. Gone before she could read it.

“Goodnight, Xanthe,” he said, and pulled the door closed between them.

She didn’t sleep.

She sat in the chair nearest the fire with the clay jar on the table in front of her and the cup of black tea going cold beside it and she looked at the jar for a long time.

It was so ordinary. That was the thing that got her. Round-bellied and palm-sized, the clay a dull reddish brown, sealed at the top with black wax that had never cracked or dried in all the years she had known it. She had carried it across four flats and six years and she had never once been able to open it and she had always told herself it was because she didn’t want to, which she now understood had been a lie she’d been telling herself with considerable discipline.

She had never opened it because she was afraid of what it would ask of her.

She picked it up. Warm, as always. More than warm tonight — almost heated, the way a stone gets after sitting in full sun, holding the memory of something fierce.

Her grandmother had raised her carefully. Fed her the old knowledge in small careful portions, hedge-witch things, practical things, the herb lore and the warding marks and the tinctures, the edges of what the Veldrath line had been without the centre of it. She had understood, older, that this was protective. Her grandmother had tried to give her enough to survive and not enough to be found.

It hadn’t worked. Whatever she was had found its own way to the surface.

She turned the jar in her hands. Underneath the wax, underneath the clay, she could feel it — a pressure, like something breathed in and never let out. Potential in its most literal sense, from the Latin, potentia: power. Capability. The ability to act.

Her ancestor had been capable of locking away something enormous enough to threaten the balance of three realms. She had done it alone, with her own blood and her own will, and she had paid for it with everything she had. Her power, her line’s standing, her name in the order of things.

Xanthe thought about what it must have felt like to seal all of that away.

She thought about her grandmother raising one hand in the Greyfen, that deliberate gesture. Not farewell. Something more like instruction.

She broke the wax seal.

It came away cleanly, in one piece, as though it had been waiting. The jar sat open in her palm. There was no scent, no light, no dramatic indication of anything at all. She tilted it slightly and looked inside.

Empty, to all appearances.

Then she felt it.

Not from the jar. From the mark on her arm, which went from warm to incandescent in the span of a breath, and from somewhere below her sternum, a place she had no anatomical name for, which opened like a door she had not known was closed.

It came in quietly.

That was the only word she had for it. Not a rush, not an overwhelm, not the violent arrival of something foreign. It came in the way a tide comes in — steady, inevitable, filling every available space with a patience that suggested it had all the time in the world and had simply been waiting for the door to open. It moved through her blood like a language she had always known and never been permitted to speak. Her hands lit faintly in the dark, a cold blue light she felt from the inside out, and the mark on her arm spread two branches further up toward her elbow and she watched it happen without fear and without entirely understanding why she wasn’t afraid.

It felt like coming home to a house you’d never been in but had always known the floor plan of.

The light faded after a minute. Her hands were her hands again. The jar sat empty and slightly warm in her lap.

She sat very still and took stock of herself.

She was the same. She was entirely different. Both of these things were true in a way that did not contradict.

She could feel the walls of the room more clearly now, the old stone holding its centuries of heat, the fire in the grate burning at a frequency she could perceive as more than warmth. She could feel the corridor beyond the door, the particular quality of Etienne’s stillness in the adjacent room, a cold and ancient and very alert presence that was nothing at all like the dead she had spent her life half-hearing and everything like something she had no prior category for.

She could feel, far below the courts and far below the stone and very far below anything she had a comfortable relationship with, the thing that had smiled in the dark when they left Solmere.

It felt her back.

She closed her mind to it the way she closed a door. The new power moved in her blood, recognising the gesture, and helped — she felt it help, fluent and immediate, not like something she had acquired but like a muscle she had simply never been permitted to use.

She exhaled slowly.

Then she stood, crossed the room, and knocked once on the adjoining wall.

A pause. Then his voice, low and even and awake, from the other side: “Are you alright?”

“Come in,” she said.

The door between rooms opened. He stood in the frame of it looking at her with those deep-water eyes moving over her face quickly, efficiently, checking for damage the way he probably checked everything. He was still dressed, which confirmed what she had suspected about his relationship with sleep.

She held up the empty jar.

He looked at it. Something in his expression shifted.

“How long ago?” he asked.

“Ten minutes.”

He moved into the room without being asked, which she noted he had not done before, and stood before her and looked at her the way she was becoming accustomed to being looked at by him — with complete attention, no part of it performative. He reached out slowly, with a deliberateness that made the gesture feel like a question, and she answered it by not moving away.

His fingers touched the mark on her arm. Just his fingertips, light, tracing the new branches. His skin against hers was very cool, the cool of old stone or deep water, nothing unpleasant about it.

She felt his touch in her blood as well as on her skin and understood, with the clarity of the new power moving through her, that this was old. That her blood and his presence had a history she had not been alive for but carried regardless.

His jaw tightened. He had felt it too.

He dropped his hand and stepped back and put the appropriate professional distance between them with a precision that told her it had cost him something to do it.

“The power settled?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“No pain?”

“None.”

He looked at the empty jar in her hand. “Your grandmother sealed it inside a year after you were born,” he said. “She felt your power beginning to surface when you were an infant. She knew the jar would amplify and preserve it until you were ready. She wasn’t hiding it from you.” He paused. “She was keeping it safe until you could keep it safe yourself.”

Xanthe looked down at the empty jar.

She had spent fifteen years with a small private grief about her grandmother’s silences, the things she had chosen not to pass on. The inheritance that had felt, sometimes, like withholding.

It had never been withholding.

It had been love with very good strategic planning.

She set the jar down on the mantelpiece. Turned back to him.

“What do I do with it?” she said. “The power. Now that it’s—” she gestured at herself.

“You learn it,” he said. “It already knows you. That’s the advantage of blood inheritance over learned craft. It’s not foreign. You don’t have to negotiate with it.”

“And the thing below. It felt me open the jar.”

“I know.”

“It knows what I have now.”

“Yes.”

She nodded slowly, looking at the fire. The flames moved in her perception differently than they had an hour ago. She was going to have to learn a new way of reading the world, she realised. Or rather, she was going to have to accept that she had always been reading it wrong and start again.

“Etienne,” she said.

“Yes.”

She looked up at him across the room. He stood with the fire behind him and Duskholm’s cold sky in the window and he watched her with an expression that was careful and controlled and underneath all that carefulness, something she had no name for yet but intended to find one.

“Thank you,” she said. “For not lying to me. Tonight. When you could have.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“I don’t make a practice of it,” he said.

“Most people do.”

“I know.” Another pause. Something worked in his jaw. “Get some rest if you can. Tomorrow Morthane will want to see you.”

She felt the change in the room that the name brought. Not fear, exactly. Weight.

“What is he like?” she said.

Etienne considered this seriously, the way she had come to understand he considered everything.

“Honest,” he said finally. “Fair, in his way. Not gentle. But honest.” He moved back toward the adjoining door. “Sleep, Xanthe.”

“You said that already.”

“You weren’t listening the first time.”

She almost smiled. He was at the door before she said, quieter: “The thing below. When it smiled.”

He stopped.

“You felt that too,” she said.

He turned slightly. Not fully. “Yes.”

“You knew it would. When we left Solmere.”

“Yes.”

She looked at him. “And you came anyway.”

Something in him was very still, stiller than his usual stillness, and then he said: “Yes,” in a voice that was lower than he had intended, and went through the door, and she heard it close behind him.

She stood in the warm room of the underworld with the new power living in her blood like a second heartbeat and the empty jar on the mantelpiece and the cold sky full of sourceless light beyond the window, and she thought about a man who walked toward frightening things without hesitation.

She sat down at the writing desk.

She did not sleep.

But for the first time in a very long time, she did not feel alone inside the not sleeping.