Burned Bloodline

CHAPTER SIX: A Second Line

By the sixth bell, sixty people knew.

I have thought about the mechanics of it since, because it interested me professionally — I have made a study, in the years after, of how a thing travels through a house — and the answer is that it was not gossip. Gossip is slow. Gossip needs somebody to tell somebody.

What happened was that a wolf woke at the fifth bell, came down the west stairs, went into the kitchen, and stood still for a moment with an expression of mild surprise. Because black stone carries sound, and lamp-oil carries smoke, and a room where two people have stood at opposite ends of it for four minutes at midnight carries both of them, and any wolf in the north can walk into that room eight hours later and read it off the air like a page.

Then he told somebody. That part was gossip.

They had moved down the table.

Not far. Not so far that you could point at it and be told you were imagining things — which is, I have found, the exact distance people move. Sabe was at the end nearest me and had turned herself a quarter-round so that she was mostly facing Ruck. Bel, who two days ago had crossed a hundred yards of road on stage like a cat to talk to me, was six places down with her head bent over her bowl.

I ate my breakfast. It's a discipline. You eat breakfast.

Halfway through, Ruck picked up his bowl and his bread and came and sat down opposite me, filling the entire space with his shoulders and his enormous apologetic face, and said, "Morning."

"Morning."

"Bread's better today."

"It is."

That was the whole of the conversation. He sat there for the rest of it and I have never in my life been able to repay him for it.

"You'll want to hear it from me and not from them," said Mira.

She had walked me down the corridor behind the great hall, the one with the square openings at chest height, and she was not walking backwards, which frightened me more than anything, she said.

"They think I've been in his bed."

"They think you're going to be in his bed. There's a difference and the difference is that, at the moment, they're still deciding whether to be sorry for you." She stopped at one of the openings and looked down through it into the hall. "Four years back there was a girl called Pell. Kitchens. Very pretty, very quick, and one of the Torr cousins took a fancy, and she was clever enough to know what that was worth and she used it. Got herself off the roster. Got her mother off the roster. Had a room with a window."

"And?"

"And nothing. That's the point I'm making. He got bored, she went back to the kitchen, and it was three years before anybody would sit next to her again." Mira turned round. "Not because of what she did. Because of what she was for a while, she was somebody who cost you something to be friendly with. People are not cruel down here, girl. They're tired. There's a difference, and it doesn't help you at all."

Below us the great hall was being swept. I could see the tops of the banners from that angle, the poles and the iron rings, nine of them along the north wall, and the fourth from the end.

"I haven't done anything," I said.

"I know."

"I went down for water."

"I know," said Mira, with the first real heat I'd ever heard in her, "and it doesn't matter, and that is what I brought you up here to tell you, because you look like anyone else who thinks that if she gets the facts straight it'll come right. It won't. This house doesn't run on what happened. It runs on what it can smell."

He did not speak to me for six days.

I want to be exact about this, because I counted, and because the counting is the whole of what I have to report about that week. He did not speak to me, and he did not avoid me either, which would have been something. He came through the west stairs while I was on the banister and went past. He was at the high table at supper while I carried plates to the sideboard and he did not look up. Once, on the third day, we came round the same corner from opposite sides, and he stopped, and I stopped, and there was a moment about a second and a half long in which neither of us said anything at all, and then he went on.

A second and a half.

I stood in that corridor afterwards with my hand flat on the black stone and my heart going like a bird in a sack, and I said to myself, quite reasonably, that this was fear. That was the entirely rational response of a woman standing eight inches from the man who burned her mother, and that it would pass when I had a plan and a room with two doors in it.

Nine years of being right about myself, and that was the week it stopped working.

Mira set me to the north banister on the fourth day.

"That one's longer."

"Yes."

"You know I could actually be useful," I said. "I set bones. I've done it nine years. There are sixty people in this house who fight for a living and I have watched two of them come in this week with hands they were not holding properly."

Mira paused with her hand on the door.

"Say that again."

"Which part?"

"You set bones." She came back into the stairwell. "You set bones, and you've been polishing a banister for four days, and you didn't think to lead with that?"

"It's on Ivo's ledger. Trade: bone-setter's assistant."

"Ivo's ledger is downstairs," said Mira, "and nothing in this house that matters has ever been downstairs," and she said the word Odd wouldn't say in front of customers, which from Mira was extraordinary, and went off at speed to do something about it.

She did not get the chance.

The board was outside the stair-head, exactly where it always was, and at the ninth bell on the sixth day there was a second line on it.

I want to describe the board properly, because it is the most important object in this part of my life. Slate, about four feet by three, in a wooden frame worn pale at the bottom edge by two hundred years of hands. Twelve names in Ivo's brown chalk-hand, updated weekly. And underneath, in black, in a fast hand that pressed too hard and dragged at the tail of the a: The thirteenth stays in the house.

And underneath that, in a third hand — small, upright, beautifully even, the hand of somebody who has never once been in a hurry:

The thirteenth attends me. Ninth bell. H.T.

There were four of us in front of it. Mira, me, Bel, and a boy from the yards whose name I never learned and who had the good sense to leave.

Bel said, "Who's H.T.?"

Nobody answered her.

Mira had gone a colour I had not seen on her before. She reached out and touched the slate at the edge of the black line, not the writing, just the frame, the way you check whether a thing is hot.

"Twelve years," she said.

"Mira."

"Twelve years, I have kept this board and I have had Alpha's hand on it four times and his father's before him and in all of that I have never once —" She stopped. She started again, flatter, which was worse. "You do not write under a standing instructions. If you disagree with an instruction, you go to the man who wrote it, and you have the argument, and one of you rubs it out, and there is one line on the board because there is one house."

"And if you write under it?"

"Then there are two lines on the board," said Mira, "and everybody who reads it before the tenth bell knows there are two houses."

Halla Torr's rooms were on the second level, south side, where the light comes in over the river all afternoon and makes the black stone look almost brown.

She was doing accounts. That is what I remember: Alpha's aunt, the woman who had held my jaw in her hand at the seventh gate, sitting at a table by a window with a ledger and a small brass weight and an inkpot, doing the grain accounts for a house of sixty, which is exactly the sort of thing that nobody in a story ever does and everybody in a house always must.

"Sit down," she said.

There was a chair. That was the first wrong thing. Servants do not sit.

I sat down.

"You set bones."

"Yes."

"Where did you learn?"

"Odd Halloran, Low Quarter, nine years."

"And nine years ago, you were eleven or twelve, and living upriver behind a green door." She turned a page, not looking up. "Which is a perfectly ordinary answer, and I want you to understand that I know it's ordinary. Half the Low Quarter came down the river after the bad winters. There is nothing at all interesting about a girl from upriver."

"No."

"No." She made a small mark in the ledger. "What's interesting is that in nine years in the Low Quarter you never once caught anything."

I said nothing.

"River fever, four years back. It took eleven hundred people between the ford and the sea." Halla dipped the pen. "Bone-setters do rather badly in a fever year. They're in every house on the street. Halloran had it — he's on the parish list, I looked. And you nursed him, presumably, since he lived."

"I did."

"And you never took it."

"I was lucky."

"Yes," said Halla Torr, and looked up and smiled at me with enormous warmth. "You have been lucky an extraordinary number of times. I've been reading about you for two days, and it is the most consistent thing in the whole file."

The room was very quiet. Down on the floor, black stone handed me the sound of the yards, someone laughing, and a door on the third level.

"You'll attend me at the ninth bell," she said, "every day, and you will do the accounts with me, because I am fifty-two and my eyes are going, and I would rather have a girl who can read than a wolf who can smell. That is all it is. You may stop looking at the door."

I stopped looking at the door.

"Good." She turned the ledger round to face me and put the pen down on it. "Grain. Start at the top and read it out. I want to hear how you say numbers."

And I understood, picking up that pen with my hand entirely steady, that she had not brought me there to test whether I could read.

She had brought me there because nine years ago somebody had taught a child of the Ash line to keep a hall's accounts, the way every hall in the north teaches its heirs, and there is a way that they say numbers.