The Rules of the House

By dawn the physician had gone to Nell, and by noon my sister's fever had broken for the first time in nine days. The girl who brought me that news, a quiet bonded thing named Tace who had been in the house longer than she looked, watched my face when I cried and said, gently, like a warning, "Don't thank them out loud. It costs more when they know it matters to you."

I learned the rules the way you learn the shape of a dark room: by walking into them.

I could not leave the wall. The bond would let me to the edge of the grounds and no further, and past that line it would tighten in my chest like a fist closing around the heart, a leash with no hand on it. I had my own rooms, finer than any I had slept in, with a lock that worked only from the outside. I was fed well and dressed better, in deep wine silks that someone had chosen in my size before I ever arrived, which I noticed and filed away and did not understand yet. And on the schedule the contract set, Lucian came to take what I had signed away.

The first proper tithe was the second night. He came to my rooms after the house had gone quiet and stood just inside the door as if the threshold were a thing he respected.

"It's easier sitting," he said. "Come here."

I made myself walk to him slowly, made myself meet his eyes the whole way, because the one thing I had left was the refusal to look afraid. He drew me down beside him on the low couch and lifted my hair from my throat with two fingers, and even that, even the cool brush of his knuckle along my neck, sent a thread of heat down my spine that I despised.

"This isn't the place from last time," I said, because talking was armor.

"The throat is closer to the bond." His voice had dropped, gone quiet and even. "It will be more for you. If you want the wrist, I'll take the wrist."

"Why do you care what it is for me."

He paused, his mouth a breath from my skin, and I felt the question land somewhere he hadn't expected it. "I don't know," he said, which was the first true thing I believed out of him. Then his lips found the curve of my neck, and his teeth, and the world narrowed to a single bright point and then opened.

I am not going to pretend it was only horror. That is the part no one tells you about the bond. The pull caught the thread at the center of me again and drew, slow and deep and rhythmic, and every draw of it lit something lower, warmer, until I was holding the lapel of his coat with both hands and breathing in time with him and my whole body had tipped toward his like water finding its level. His arm had come around my back. His other hand was spread warm against my ribs, holding me as though I were precious, as though I were his, and for the length of that feeding I could not tell where my pulse ended and his hunger began.

When he eased back I was boneless against him, my face turned into his collar, and I felt his mouth press once to my hairline, not feeding, just resting there, before he caught himself and went still.

"That's enough," he said roughly, and set me upright with more care than the words.

I hated that I missed the weight of his arm the second it was gone. I hated it more the next morning, when I caught myself counting the hours to the next night before I was even fully awake.

I went looking for the matriarch instead, to remind myself what I was inside.

I found her in a glass solarium with the curtains drawn against a sun she could not bear, a woman who looked forty and felt like a cathedral, beautiful and vast and cold all the way down. Ysolde Carrow. She did not rise. She looked at me over the rim of a cup that did not hold tea and she smiled, and her smile had patience in it, the worst kind, the patience of something that has already won and is only waiting for you to notice.

"So," she said. "Three winters we have kept that door open, and at last a Lessard walks back through it on her own two feet. Tell me, child." She tilted her head. "Does your sister thank you, in her dreams? She should. You have no idea yet what you've given."

"A year and a day," I said. "It says so on the paper."

"The paper." Ysolde laughed, soft and indulgent, and drank. "Yes. The paper says a year and a day. How very comforting, to have it in writing."

I went back to my rooms and looked at my own arm in the lamplight, at the place where it had begun, and for the first time I let myself be afraid of the right thing. Not of him. Of what they both kept seeing in me that I could not see myself.