Burned Bloodline

CHAPTER TWO: The Thirteenth Line

The beetle got away clean. I want that on the record. Whatever else happened in Tanners' Row that morning, one of us finished the day exactly as we'd started it, and it wasn't me.

They didn't take us there and then. That's not how the Tithe works, and it took me some years to understand that the not-taking is the point. If they dragged you off the street in front of your neighbours it would look like a raid, and the Iron Moon are not raiders, they are administrators, and so instead a man came down the line with a book.

He was small and neat and about fifty, in Torr black with no pine-and-hammer at the shoulder, which meant clerk rather than wolf, which meant human. His name was Ivo. He told me so, pleasantly, as though we had run into one another at a market.

"Sena," he said, writing. "Of Halloran's, three doors down. Bone-setter's apprentice."

"Assistant."

He looked up. "There's no line in the book for assistant."

"Then the book's wrong."

Ivo considered me over the top of the page with the expression of a man who has spent thirty years being told the book is wrong and has never once found it to be so. Then he wrote something, and closed the book, and said, "Bell House. Dawn. Bring one bag."

"And if I don't?"

"Then a great many people will be very put out," said Ivo, "and I will have to write it down."

He went on to the Verrick doorway to ruin somebody else's decade.

I stood there. The street was starting to move again in the careful way a street moves after the Iron Moon have gone, everyone talking a little too brightly about nothing at all, and I noticed that nobody was looking at me, and that this was a different sort of not-looking than I'd had for the last nine years.

Make it thirteen.

Twelve is the number. Twelve has been the number since the Treaty of Bells, and the Treaty of Bells is four hundred years old and has survived two famines and a war, and it says twelve.

He'd changed it in the street, out loud, for me.

Odd got the box out from under the floor.

I hadn't known there was a box under the floor, which annoyed me, because I had lived on that floor for nine years and I make it my business to know where things are.

It was a poor box, as boxes go. Elm, badly jointed, with a lid that had swelled and had to be persuaded. Inside was coin in three sizes and a small quantity of silver wire, which is what you keep instead of coin when you don't trust coin, and a woman's ring that he put in his pocket without comment and which I have never asked about to this day.

"Three years," he said.

"Odd—"

"Three years and a bit. The bit's the wire." He was breathing badly. He'd gone up and down the stairs twice and his chest didn't forgive that sort of thing any more. "Buy-out's legal. It's written. Fourth clause. You pay the house what six years of your labour's worth and they take somebody who wants the coin instead, and there's always somebody who wants the coin instead, and everybody goes home happy and the number stays at twelve."

"They didn't stop at twelve."

"Fourth clause," said Odd, as if I hadn't spoken, "is four hundred years old."

I looked at the box. It was a great deal of money and it was also, laid out on a table, an extraordinarily small amount of money, and both of those things were true at once in the way that money is.

"You'll need that," I said. "Your chest. Come winter you'll need a fire in the shop as well as up here and you'll need—"

"Girl." He got the lid back on with the heel of his hand. "Sit down."

I didn't sit down.

"Nine years," Odd said, "you have set bones in this room for people who couldn't pay, and you have never once taken the second cup of anything, and you have chewed a root that is turning your teeth the colour of a rain-cloud, and in nine years you have not told me one single true thing about yourself." He picked up the box. "I am not spending three years to be kind to you. I am spending it because I am seventy-three and I would like to die in this house with my own opinion of myself intact. Now open the door."

So I opened the door.

The Bell House sits where the Low Quarter stops pretending it isn't a slope. Grey stone, wide steps, four hundred years of boots wearing a dip into each one, and up above, the bells themselves — six of them, hung in an iron cage, silent now and looking absurdly like six upturned cooking pots when you get close enough to be unimpressed.

The queue was longer than I expected. That was the thing nobody tells you about the Tithe: on the afternoon of it, half of Vaur turns up to sell somebody in.

Ivo had a table and a lamp and the book, and beside him sat a wolf.

I could tell from twelve feet. It isn't the size — plenty of humans are large. It's that a wolf in a chair sits like something folded rather than something seated, and doesn't shift, and doesn't look bored, and watches the whole room at once without appearing to look at any part of it. This one was a woman, maybe forty, with a grey streak and a very good coat.

Odd put the box on the table.

"Fourth clause," he said.

Ivo did not sigh, but a lesser man would have. He opened the book. He turned it round so the page faced us, which I thought was decent of him, and he ran his finger down the list of names.

Twelve names in a neat hand, brown ink.

The thirteenth line was in black.

The hand that had written it was nothing like Ivo's. It was fast and it pressed too hard and it had dragged at the tail of the a, and the ink had spread where the nib caught, and somebody had written SENA and then, after a pause you could see in the spacing, — of no house.

"Fourth clause applies to the Tithe," Ivo said. "Twelve names, brown ink, Bell House ledger. The buy-out is against those twelve." He turned the book back round. "You may buy out any of them you like. It's a hundred and forty crowns and you appear to have a hundred and sixty."

Odd's hands were flat on the table.

"And the thirteenth?"

"The thirteenth isn't a Tithe," said Ivo. "The thirteenth is a summons. There's no clause for it because there's never been one."

"Then strike it out."

"I can't strike out the Alpha's hand."

"You can strike out anything, you're the one with the pen—"

The wolf in the good coat stood up.

She didn't do anything else. She stood up out of her chair with her hands loose at her sides, and every voice in that queue stopped as if it had been trodden on, and Odd — who has set the arm of a man twice my height while the man screamed in his face — went quiet.

"He's an old man," I said, "and he's finished."

"He isn't finished," she said. Her voice was mild. "But you are correct that he's old." She looked at me for what felt like a while, and I have replayed that look many times since, because I did not know then what she was, and if I had I would have run out of that building and into the river. "Sena of no house."

"That's what it says."

"It does say that." She smiled. It was a warm smile. That's the thing I most want to get across about Halla Torr, and I've never managed it properly: everything she did was warm. "Dawn, then. Bring one bag."

We walked home the long way, past the tanneries, because Odd needed to be furious somewhere with a smell strong enough to argue with.

"Fourth clause," he kept saying. "Four hundred years."

"Odd."

"They didn't even break it. That's what I can't—" He stopped and coughed the four-part cough, and I stood with my hand between his shoulder blades until it finished. "They didn't break it. They went round it. It's worse. A broken law you can point at."

The river was doing its evening thing, going the colour of hot metal. Three days upstream, past the bend and the marsh and the ford where the trade road crosses, there is a valley with nothing standing in it. Nine years and I have never once gone to look.

"There's something you should know," I said, "about the root."

"I know about the root."

"You don't know the—"

"There's none," said Odd. "In Vaur. Anywhere. I know because I've been asking since spring, which is a thing I did not tell you, and which I am telling you now because you are leaving in the morning and I have run out of good reasons to be quiet."

I stopped walking.

"Say that again."

"Ganny Wick had none in March. Said her trader hadn't come. The Marsh Road men had none in April and neither did the two brothers off the barges, and by June there wasn't a root between here and the ford, and I thought — well." He wiped his mouth. "I thought, a bad year. Wet spring. It happens."

"It doesn't happen to everyone at once."

"No," Odd agreed. "It doesn't."

The bells went for the twelfth hour and we both flinched, which was foolish, because they ring at the twelfth hour every day of the world.

"Somebody's buying it," I said.

"Somebody's been buying it for two years, girl. Ganny got it out of the barge brothers in the end because she got them drunk, which is the only method Ganny has ever had for anything. Standing order. Every root that comes down the river, bought at four times the rate, no questions, paid in silver wire."

I had a very cold and very clear thought then, standing in the tanners' stink with the light going: that for two years I had been running out slowly, and I had thought it was carelessness, and that a thing which happens slowly enough will let you believe it's your own fault right up until the moment it doesn't.

"Whose order?"

Odd looked at the river for a while.

"Pine and hammer," he said.

Which meant that somebody in the house I was walking into at dawn had spent two years buying up every scrap in the north of the only thing on this earth that made a person smell of nothing.

Which meant they were looking for someone.

Which meant they had been looking for a very long time, and were patient, and had just this morning, in the street, in a black hand that pressed too hard, got what they wanted.