Once upon a Lover

Chapter 8: A Debt Between Liars

She made him draw the east wing.

The lie had been told in front of two hundred witnesses, which meant it was no longer a lie but a record, and a record needed evidence. By midmorning the study doors were locked, a pot of ink stood open on the writing desk, and the surveyor of the lower palace sat cross-legged on the carpet with a drawing board across his knees, producing a plan of the east wing at a speed she found faintly offensive.

“You don't have to watch,” he said. “I'm not going to run off with the sketch.”

“I'm watching the hand.”

“It's an excellent hand. I'm told it's my only attractive feature.”

“By whom?”

“Nobody. It's a joke, Princess. You've missed the structure of it.” He didn't look up. “I'm making the corner towers wrong, by the way. Deliberately. You insisted on the stair.”

“I did not insist on a stair.”

“You will, once the Marshal starts asking questions.” He finished a line with a flourish and blew on the ink. “All right. Now that it's quiet, and nobody's pointing a sword, may I ask why you did that?”

She had known the question was coming. She had been rehearsing an answer since the Court of Lanterns, and she found, standing in her own study with her hands behind her back, that none of the answers she had prepared would do.

“Because you were going to be hanged,” she said.

“I might have been. But that's not why.”

“Don't tell me my reasons.”

“Someone has to. You've clearly forgotten them.” He set the pen down at last. “You don't know me. You don't trust me. You've caught me in your gallery, found something very strange in my book, and been given a writ by a man whose kindness you've begun to doubt, all within a day. A sensible woman would let the Marshal take me and learn what she could afterward. Instead you stood up in front of the whole court and ruined your own reputation.” His voice was not unkind. “So. Why?”

“Because of the name,” said Isaveth.

It came out smaller than she meant. She sat down on the arm of a chair, which she never did, and looked at the carpet. “I've lain awake all night with it. Nobody has called me that. Nobody could have. And yet when you said it, I didn't think how dare he. I thought,” she stopped, “I thought finally. As if I'd been waiting for it. And I don't know what that means, and I can't ask anyone, and you're the only person alive who might know.”

The study was very quiet. Beyond the windows a gardener was clipping the lime hedge, a small ordinary sound.

“I don't,” said Orin. “I've told you. I don't.”

“I know.”

“But I'd like to.” He said it simply, without any of the earlier irony. “I've felt for a long time that there's a room somewhere inside my head that's been locked, and everyone else has the key, and they're all standing in the corridor being polite about it. I came to Calderane because I'd heard there were plans here nobody had ever finished mapping. But I think,” he smiled faintly, “I think I may have meant something else by that.”

She looked up.

“So I'll make you a bargain,” he said. “A truce. You keep me alive and out of the Warden's hands, and I'll tell you everything I find. All of it, no editing. And you do the same.”

“Everything?”

“Everything that touches the book, or the name, or whatever's happening to us. We stay where the other can see us. We don't lie to each other.” A pause. “I mean, we lie to everyone else. We'll be very good at that. But not to each other.”

“A debt between liars,” she said.

“I'd call it a partnership. It sounds less like a prison sentence.”

She weighed it. She had signed treaties with less on the table, with men she trusted far less than she was beginning to trust this one, and she could not decide whether that fact was reassuring or appalling.

“Terms,” she said. “You tell me where you were last night.”

“Fair.” He drew his knees up and rested his arms across them. “I went down at midnight. The old kitchens first, then the cellars, then a stair that wasn't on any plan I'd been shown, which seemed like exactly the sort of stair I was hired to find. It was very dark. I was counting paces. Somewhere past the third cistern I heard a sound I couldn't place, a kind of slow, wet dragging, like someone hauling something heavy through shallow water.”

The back of her neck prickled.

“I put out my lantern. I followed. There was another light ahead of me, a small one, swinging. A figure, tall, walking with the careful gait of a man who knew exactly where every stone was. I couldn't see a face. He was carrying something over his shoulder wrapped in sailcloth. There was water running off the cloth, and salt, a thin white trail of it, crunching under his boots as though he'd spilled a sack.” His jaw tightened. “I lost him at a flooded passage. I'd have gone in, but I'm a good swimmer and a bad fool, and I haven't yet decided which of those I prefer to be. So I turned back. And then the bells began.”

“Thirteen.”

“I counted. I thought I'd miscounted. I thought the walls had taken a breath. And then I climbed up into the morning and found a dead man had been laid in a dry fountain, and everyone looked at me.”

Isaveth said nothing. She looked at the sketch on the carpet, the east wing with its cleverly mistaken towers.

“Now yours,” he said. “Why did your mother cry outside that door?”

It landed like a slap. She had not told him she'd known. But she had seen his face in the Blue Room, and she had not hidden hers. “I don't know.”

“That's a poor answer for a woman who's just promised not to lie.”

“It's the only answer I have. I've checked.”

He laughed, a short, startled laugh, and the sound of it did something to the room, loosened it. “I did say that, didn't I.”

“You did.” She almost smiled. “My mother has never cried in my hearing. Not once. Not when my father died. And yesterday she stood outside a door and didn't dare open it. I've been going over it all night. I can think of nothing in the world she'd be afraid of.”

“Except you finding out something.”

“Except that.”

“Well.” He reached for the pen. “That's two of us who want to know what we've forgotten. It's a start.”

They sat in the quiet. The ink dried. After a while she said, “The figure you followed. Was there anything else? Anything you might have noticed and not mentioned?”

He thought about it with the whole of his attention, the way he did everything. She noticed that, and wished she hadn't.

“He was humming,” he said at last. “I'd forgotten. The whole way down, under his breath. Not a tune I knew, but it kept going round and round in my head after I climbed out.” He hummed it, three or four slow notes in a minor key, rising on the third and falling away like a breath let out.

Isaveth did not move.

She had not heard that melody since she was seven years old. Her nurse had sung it in the dark when the storms came, a plain, wandering tune with no words that anyone could recall. It had never been written down. She had never heard it sung outside the nursery. She had never, in sixteen years, heard another living soul hum it.

“Princess?” said Orin. His smile had gone. “What is it?”

“Hum it again.”

He did. And for the second time in two days, the key was pressed into her palm, and her hand went cold.