The Tithe

I went to the house that let my mother die, and I asked them to save my sister.

The Carrow manor sat above the old river district behind a wall taller than memory, and I had walked past its gate a hundred times in three winters without once letting myself look up. That night I looked. Light burned gold in the high arched windows, the kind of warmth that costs more than a year of my wages, and somewhere behind that glass was the only medicine in the city that could pull Nell back from the edge I had been watching her slide toward for nine days. The houses kept it the way they kept everything. Close, and expensive, and behind glass.

A steward let me into a hall of black marble and older silence. I had rehearsed my begging on the walk over, every humble word, and then a voice came down the stair and took all of them out of my mouth at once.

"You're a Lessard."

He said it the way a man reads a name he already knew he'd find. He came down without hurry, and he was younger than I expected and so much colder, a tall pale line of a man in a dark coat buttoned to the throat, silver-grey eyes that did not blink the way living eyes blink. Lucian Carrow, the steward had called him. The heir. He stopped three steps up so that he looked down at me, and he looked at me for a long time, longer than a stranger should, like he was checking my face against something he carried.

"My sister has the wasting fever," I said. "The low kind. The kind your physicians cure with a thimble of your blood and a prayer. I can't pay what that costs. I came to ask what I can pay instead."

"You know what we ask instead," he said. "You wouldn't have come otherwise."

I did know. Everyone in the river district knew. The houses did not take money from people like me; they took people like me. A Tithe-bond. A year and a day of my blood, given on their schedule, into the body of whichever immortal held my name, and in exchange the house's protection extended over me and one named dependent. Food. The physician. A roof inside the wall. It was the oldest arrangement in the city and the cleanest cage ever built, and I had sworn on my mother's grave that no Lessard would ever kneel to House Carrow again.

"Three winters ago my mother stood where I'm standing," I said. My voice did not shake, which surprised me. "She had the same fever. This house sent her back out into the cold and she died of it before morning. So you'll forgive me if I don't thank you for the privilege of bleeding for you."

Something moved behind his eyes and was gone. "I remember," he said, very quietly, and I hated him for it, hated that he would even pretend to carry her.

"Then you know why I'd rather die than do this."

"And yet." He came down the last three steps. Up close he smelled of cold stone and something underneath it, smoke and iron, and the air around him was wrong, too still, the way a room goes still before snow. "Your sister has perhaps four days. The bond can be sealed tonight and the physician sent to her by dawn. Everything you hate about me is true and none of it will keep her breathing. So." He held out a hand, palm up, and on it lay a folded document and a pen. "Choose what you can live with, Cora Lessard."

He knew my first name. I had not given it.

I told myself it was for Nell. I told myself I would find the door out of this later, the way I had found the door out of everything. I signed my name on the line his finger touched, and the paper drank the ink like it was thirsty.

"It seals with the first tithe," he said. "It will hurt for a moment. After that it won't." He lifted my wrist as if it were something that might break, and turned it, and the last thing I saw clearly was the pale flash of his mouth before he bent to the soft skin inside my elbow.

It did hurt, a bright sweet line of it, and then it stopped hurting and became something I have no honest word for, a pull that went deeper than the vein, that found a thread in the center of me and drew it taut. I heard myself make a sound. My free hand had closed in the front of his coat and I did not remember reaching for it.

And then he went rigid.

He lifted his head so fast I swayed. There was blood, my blood, dark on his lower lip, and he stared at me over it with something that was not hunger and not satisfaction, something closer to fear, and to wonder, and to a terrible dawning certainty. He looked at me the way you look at a thing you have searched for so long you stopped believing it was real.

"What," I breathed. "What is it."

Lucian Carrow wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and did not answer me, and far above us in that bright burning house, somewhere, I swear I heard a woman begin to laugh.