Burned Bloodline

CHAPTER ELEVEN: One Key

Here is the difficulty with searching a house you are not permitted to be idle in.

You cannot wander. A wandering servant is a servant with nothing to do, and a servant with nothing to do gets given something to do, and in a house where sixty people know each other's business by smell, you cannot be on the fourth floor at the third hour with an empty basket and a vague expression.

What you need is a reason to be anywhere, at any hour, without being asked.

PHYSIC — SENA. ANY BELL. ANY FLOOR. COME AND GET HER.

Mira had written that on the board to make me furniture. I have never told her what I actually did with it, and she is not here to be told now, and I think about that more than is useful.

I gave myself the three days he was gone.

That was the arithmetic: the Alpha's ride was the only reliable hole in the week, and I did not know how many more of them I would get. So I made a list on the floor with the chalk stub, and rubbed it out, and made it again in my head, which took longer and was harder and was very much less likely to hang me.

Where do you keep two years of dried root?

Not damp. That is the whole of it, really — dried physics is the fussiest cargo in the north. Damp and it moults and goes to mould in a season, and Halla Torr had not spent eleven years' worth of wire on something she intended to let rot. So, no cellars, and Torr Hall has a great many cellars, all of them cut into the hill and all of them running with water in a wet month. Out.

Not warm, either, and not anywhere near a flue. Out went the whole kitchen range, the bake-house, the two chimney-stacks and everything backing onto them, which took the second level, west, off the list in the afternoon.

Not anywhere with traffic. Sixty people go through the kitchens and the stores and the linen presses and the yards, and any one of them might open a box, and Halla is a woman who does not leave a thing where somebody might open a box.

And — this was the one that took me longest, and I got it in the end from watching Mira and not from thinking — not anywhere the servants' floor has a duty for. Because the servants' floor cleans everything. There is a rota, it is two hundred years old, and every room in Torr Hall is on it.

Except the ones that aren't.

I asked Mira for the rota on the second day, and I asked her for it in front of four other people while carrying a basin, which is the only way I have ever found to ask for a thing without it being remembered.

"What do you want that for?"

"I keep getting sent to places I don't know. I've been up to the third level twice and got lost both times."

"You've been in this house a fortnight, and you're asking for the rota," said Mira, with an expression I could not read at all. "There's a girl who'd have got somewhere in life."

She gave it to me. It is four sheets, pinned, and it is very beautiful in its way — two hundred years of somebody's grandmother working out how sixty rooms get swept by eleven people, adjusted and re-adjusted and written over in eight different hands.

I took it back to my room and read it the way I had been taught to read a ledger, which is to say I did not read the entries. I read the gaps.

There were four.

The muniment room on the second level, south, is opened twice a year and swept by Ivo himself because he does not trust anybody with paper. The Alpha's own rooms, which are done by one woman, always the same woman, and have been for thirty years. The chapel under the north stair, which nobody has used since Kell's grandmother and which is full of pigeons.

And the strong room.

"It's not a room," said Bel. "It's a hole."

We were doing the well-buckets, which is a job you can be given for hours and which nobody supervises, and which I had begun to think of as the single most useful institution in Torr Hall.

"You've seen it?"

"Everybody's seen the door. It's off the north passage, past the arms-store, and it's — " she made a shape with her hands, small — "it's about that wide and there are three feet of stone round it and my aunt says it goes back into the hill. It's where the plate is. And the coin. And the treaty."

"The treaty?"

"The actual one," Bel hauled a bucket. "There's only one, and it's got all nine halls' marks on it, and it lives in there, because if it burnt there'd be no treaty. That's what my aunt says. She says that's the whole reason the strong room's a strong room and everything else in it is just — sharing."

I put my bucket down.

Dry. Cut back into the hill above the water-line, three feet of stone, no flue, no rota, no traffic.

And a woman doing the household accounts by the window, who wanted somewhere to put a thing she never intended to be found, and who had, sitting in her own house, the single most secure room between the ford and the sea.

Of course.

I want to record that I was pleased with myself for most of that afternoon, because it is the last time in this story that being clever was enough on its own.

I found Mira in the linen press at the sixth bell and I did the thing I had been avoiding for a fortnight, which was to ask a direct question of the only person in that house who had been kind to me without wanting anything.

"The strong room. Who opens it?"

Mira did not stop folding.

"Why?"

"Because there are four rooms in this house that aren't on your rota and I have worked out what three of them are for."

She folded another sheet. Then she put it down and turned round, and she looked at me for a good while, flatly, with twelve years behind her face.

"You're going to be a great deal of trouble," she said. "I knew it on the board, and I'd been hoping I was wrong, and I'm not, am I?"

"Mira—"

"Don't. Don't tell me anything. I want to be able to say I don't know, and I want that to be true, because I'm not a good liar, and I've got a sister on the third terrace." She picked the sheet back up. "The strong room takes one key. Not two. There's no second, there never has been, and there's no locksmith in Vaur who could cut one because the ward's a Verrin pattern and Verrin died out with the man who made it."

"Then who has it?"

"The Alpha has it."

"In a — where? A box, a drawer—"

"On him," said Mira.

I stood in a linen press smelling of lavender and old cotton and felt something go through me that I could not name at the time and can name perfectly well now, and which was not fear.

"On him."

"On a cord. Round his neck." She shook out the sheet. "His father had worn it the same way for thirty-one years, and it came off his father's neck in front of the whole hall the night he died and went straight onto his, and he has not had it off since, and I would know, because the woman who does his rooms is called Nessa and Nessa has been doing them for thirty years and Nessa has never once seen that cord on a table."

The bells went for the seventh hour.

"Two years," said Mira, "you'll be in this house. Six, if they keep you. And in that time you will see that key exactly as often as everybody else does, which is when he takes his shirt off in the yard in August, and I would advise you to be somewhere else."

He came back at dusk on the third day.

I was not waiting for him. I want that understood; I had a cook's burn to dress, and I was in the passage by the yard door with a jar of honey and a roll of linen and I had entirely sound reasons to be exactly where I was.

But I had known for about two hours.

Not heard — known. The stone had handed me nothing at all; there had been no hoofbeat on the terrace road and no shout at the gate, and I had simply been kneeling over a woman's forearm at the fifth bell when something in the middle of my chest went quiet and easy for the first time in three days, like a held breath let go by somebody standing behind me.

I had spent those three days sleeping badly and eating nothing and putting it down to nerves, because I had a great deal to be nervous about and it was an entirely reasonable diagnosis.

It was the wrong diagnosis. I had made it eleven times before, and would make it eleven times again.

He came in through the yard door with the reins still in his hand and Toft behind him saying something about the horse, and he had three days of road on him and a week of not sleeping under that, and he looked — I had no other word for it then — emptied. Like a man who has been carrying something and has just put it down and cannot yet remember how to stand without it.

He stopped when he saw me.

Just for a moment. Long enough for Toft to walk into the back of him.

And I stood there with a jar of honey in my hands and looked at Kell Torr in a doorway at dusk, and what I was looking at was not his face.

It was the cord at his throat, gone dark with wear, disappearing under the collar of his shirt.