Rejected Luna, Stolen Mark

I Promised

She sat back down and poured for both of us and did not drink hers.

"Three things," she said, "and then you can go and be angry at me, and I would ask you to do it quietly, because I have a bad arm and a sick girl and no help."

"Three."

"One. The number is nine. It has always been nine. You were nine when it happened and you are eighteen now and that is nine, and if anybody in this valley tells you fourteen they are reading it off a page."

I sat with that.

"Fourteen is what the book says," she said. "The book is kept by the keeper, and the keeper writes what the council tells him to write, and twenty-six years back some clerk in that room put fourteen on your mother's entry and ten under the girl's number, and it has been fourteen ever since, and every soul in this valley has said it so long they think they counted it themselves."

"I said it."

"You said it." She looked at me and did not soften it. "You have said it in my kitchen. I have heard you."

That went in somewhere and stayed there.

"Two," she said. "The night it happened, your mother came home at dawn, and she could not thread a needle. Her hands were going that badly. I threaded it for her. I lit the lamp and held it while she did you, and I am the reason she did it at all, because she came through that door and stood in the middle of this room and said she could not, and I told her she could, because the other thing was a man at the door and no answer for him."

I looked at her arm. The one with the dead man on it.

"You held the lamp."

"I held the lamp," she said. "And I am going to tell you the rest of it now, because if I do not tell it now I never will, and then you will spend the rest of your life making up something worse than the true thing."

"Then tell it."

"She did it fast." Hessa had both hands flat on the table and she was looking at them and not at me. "That is what I remember most, and it is not a comfortable thing to remember. Four minutes, and she never stopped once, and she talked the whole way through. About the fence. About the wood for the winter. About how Hessa would take you and you were to do as you were told. And I stood there holding the lamp over her hands and thinking, God help me, that I had never in my life watched anybody work that well."

There is a thing that happens when you have been told something you already half knew. It does not land like news. It lands like a bill.

"You watched her do it," I said.

"I watched her do it. I have watched it every night for nine years, and I do not want your pity about that, and if you give me any I will put you out in the lane."

"Three," she said, before I could answer. "Your mother went to the Vane house first. That is the order of it. She took the thing off you in the shop and rode over the ridge with it in her coat and did the girl, and she was there from dark until the small hours, and then she came home and did you. And the man at your door that night came from the council and not from the Vane house, and that is all I know about him, because I was told the front of the house and nothing else."

"The man in the green."

"What man in the green."

"I remember his sleeve. It was green."

Hessa was quiet for a moment.

"It was green," she said. "I remember that too. But Vane wears green and the ridge wears green and half this valley wears green, and I have never in nine years got any further with it than you have."

She turned her cup around on the table.

"Now ask me the rest," she said.

"What did they want it for."

Hessa did not answer.

"You said three things."

"I said three things I could say. That one is the one your mother made me promise." She turned the cup again. "The night she died she made me say it out loud in this room with her hand on my wrist. She said, whatever happens, you do not tell the girl what they wanted the half for, not while I am alive and not after. And I gave her my word, and she went out the door and up the hill and into that house, and she was dead by morning."

"So the promise is nine years old and the woman who took it is dead."

"It is nine years old and I have kept it," Hessa said, "and I am going to keep it, and you can hate me for it and I will still keep it, because it is the last thing your mother ever asked me for."

I sat with my hands flat on the table and made myself count to four before I said anything, which is a thing I do, and it did not work that morning, and I said it anyway.

"Then I will find it somewhere else."

"You will try." She stood up and took the cups. "There is one other thing, and then I want you out of my kitchen and doing something useful."

"Say it."

"In three days they read every mark in this valley out loud. It is the clearing, and it is the law, and it has not been done since before you were born." She put the cups in the basin and did not turn around. "And when they come to you, girl, they will not read it off your neck. They will read it off a page. Off a page that says fourteen. And you are the only person alive who knows that page is lying, and you will be standing in front of them with no name and no standing, and if you say one word about it, you will be telling two hundred people that the council keeps a false book."

She turned around.

"Now go and carry water, and think about what you are going to do with that, because I have been thinking about it for four days and I have got nothing."

I carried the water. Then I sat on the step in the cold with the yoke beside me and did the thing she had told me not to do, which is that I thought about it.

There are two ways to answer a page that is lying.

You can stand up in front of the valley and say that the book is wrong. That is the honest one. It also ends with a girl who has no name and a dead mother and a mark that came off a corpse telling two hundred people that the council has been lying to them for twenty-six years, and there is no version of that where the valley believes the girl.

Or you can say nothing at all, and at the reading, when they come to the Luna's wrist, you can open the seam in front of everybody and let the whole valley read the truth off her own arm.

The first one ends with me on the hill. The second one ends with everyone.

I sat on the step until the cold came up through the wool, and then I went in and put the closing needle under the mattress I slept on, which is not a place that anybody looks, and that is where it has been ever since.