Burned Bloodline

I had been dead for nine years, and it had gone very well until the morning the greyroot ran out. I knew before I opened the tin. You learn the weight of a thing you touch every day at dawn; the tin had gone light in my hand sometime in the last week and I had chosen, in the way you choose not to look at a wound, not to notice. Now I sat on the end of my cot with the lid off and the last root lying in my palm like a dead finger, grey and hairy and dry all the way through, and there was no way left to not notice it. Greyroot should be damp. Greyroot should sting the cut on your thumb and make your eyes water. This one crumbled at the edge when I pressed it, and it smelled of nothing at all. Downstairs, Odd was coughing his morning cough, which had four parts and always ended in a word he wouldn't say in front of customers. I put the root in my mouth and chewed it anyway. It tasted like a floorboard. I chewed until my jaw ached and the fibres went to string and my mouth filled with the ghost of bitterness, the shape where bitterness used to be, and then I swallowed and sat very still and waited to feel the cold come up under my tongue. It didn't come. "Sena." Odd, from the bottom of the stairs. "They've hung the bells." I looked at the tin. The tin looked at me. "Sena!" "I heard you," I said. The bells of Vaur only ring for three things: fire, flood, and the Tithe. It had not rained in eleven days and the Low Quarter had not burned since I came here, so I dressed in the plain brown thing I wore for setting bones and went downstairs to be counted. Odd was in the doorway with his shoulders up around his ears, which meant he was frightened, which meant everyone should be. He had been a bone-setter for fifty-one years. He had a face like something left out in weather and hands like the roots of a tree, and in nine years he had asked me exactly one question about where I came from, which was: can you keep your mouth shut? "You'll stand at the back," he said. "I'll stand where the rest of the street stands." "You'll stand at the back, girl, behind the Verrick boys, they're broad enough for three of you—" "Odd." "—and you'll keep your eyes down and your teeth behind your lip, do you hear me, because I have seen what you look like when you're angry and it is not the face of a person who sets bones for a living." "It's a Tithe," I said. "They take twelve. There are four thousand of us. I've been through two." "You've been through two with a full tin." I didn't answer that, and Odd, who missed nothing, went still and looked at me the way he looked at a break he suspected was worse than it presented. "Ah," he said. "It's fine." "How long since the last good one?" "It's fine, Odd." He said the word he wouldn't say in front of customers. They came down at the ninth bell. You always hear the Iron Moon before you see them. Not because they're loud — they're not, they've never had to be — but because the street goes quiet in a wave that runs ahead of them, shop by shop, voice by voice, like a hand smoothing a cloth. By the time the first grey horse came round the corner of Tanners' Row, the Low Quarter of Vaur was as silent as a held breath, four thousand people standing in their doorways with their eyes on their own boots. I stood behind the Verrick boys and looked at my boots and thought about a house upriver with green shutters. I do that. It's a discipline. If you don't give the memory somewhere small to live it gets out and walks around the whole of you. There were nine of them on horses and perhaps twenty on foot, and they wore the Iron Moon black with the pine-and-hammer at the shoulder, and none of them were in wolf-shape because wolf-shape in the Low Quarter would have been a breach of the Treaty of Bells, and the Iron Moon are very careful about the Treaty of Bells. They burned my family to the foundation stones and they did it, I am told, entirely within the law. The counting started at the top of the street. It is a simple thing, the Tithe. Every ten years the Alpha's house takes twelve from the Low Quarter into service. Six years of your life for the privilege of living under the terraces, and at the end of it you come back down with a bag of coin and a way of walking with your shoulders forward, and you don't talk about it much. Most people go. Some people fight. The ones who fight go anyway. I had watched it twice. Both times I had stood exactly here, smelling of nothing, and the Iron Moon had passed over me the way your eye passes over an empty chair. The line came closer. I could hear it: boots, a word, boots, a word, a woman starting to cry two doors up and stopping herself, boots. And then the sound changed, because the man on foot at the head of the line stopped walking. I didn't look up. That was the discipline and the discipline was nine years old and it had never failed me. I looked at my boots and the cracked stone between them and a beetle going about its morning, and I heard the whole street stop breathing at once, and I understood, in the abstract way you understand a thing that is happening to somebody else, that he had stopped in front of me. "Move," he said. The Verrick boys moved. I have thought about that moment a great deal since, and what I keep coming back to is that I could have kept looking down. He hadn't told me to move. I could have stayed a brown shape in a doorway with my eyes on a beetle, and possibly he'd have walked on, and possibly the last nine years would have gone on being a life instead of a countdown. But I had spent nine years building a person who did not flinch, and it turns out you cannot build a thing that well and then ask it not to work. I looked up. He was younger than the stories. That was the first insult. In the stories he was enormous and old and made of something like slag, and instead here was a man perhaps five or six years past me, dark-haired, unshaven, with rain still on the shoulders of a coat that had been rained on somewhere else, because it hadn't rained in Vaur in eleven days. His eyes were the grey-brown of river water in spring. There was a white seam of scar through one eyebrow. He had a good mouth. I noticed it and then I was so angry with myself that my ears went hot. He was looking at me the way Odd looks at a break. "What's your name," he said. Not a question. He hadn't the manner for questions. The Low Quarter breathed out around us, very quietly, in the direction of don't. "Sena," I said. "Sena what." "Sena nothing. I set bones for Odd Halloran, three doors down, and I've been here nine years and paid the bell-tax every one of them." Behind me somebody made a small despairing noise. He didn't move. He was standing close enough that I could see a muscle go in his jaw, and he was breathing — deliberately, slowly, in through the nose — and I felt the cold come up under my tongue at last, nine years too late and about ninety seconds too slow to be any use to anybody. Green wood, I thought. Green wood and rain. Oh, you fool. You absolute fool. "You smell like something," he said. "Everyone smells like something." "No," said Kell Torr, Alpha of the Iron Moon, who had watched my mother's house burn from the outer ring when he was seventeen years old. "They don't." And he stood there in a street gone silent as a grave, with the bells still ringing over the river, breathing in the last thing left of the family he had killed — and not knowing it, and not being able to stop. Then he turned his head, not taking his eyes off me, and said to the man behind him: "Add one. Make it thirteen."