The Ledger

On the fifth night I fainted.

It was my own stubbornness. I had refused the heavy meals because accepting them felt like agreeing to something, and I had not slept, and when Lucian came to take the tithe I stood up too fast and the room went to water around me. I came back to myself on the couch with his hand cradling the back of my head and his face above mine stripped of all its cold, and for one unguarded second he looked at me like a man looks at the thing he is most afraid of losing.

"I'm fine," I said.

"You're not." He hadn't fed. I realized it slowly: the schedule said tonight, the contract entitled him, and he had picked me up off the floor and not taken a drop. He held a glass of water to my mouth instead and made me drink it, and then a second one, and he did not leave when he could have. He sat on the floor by the couch with his back against it so that his shoulder was under my hand, and the silence between us was not the silence of a cage. It was almost the other thing.

"Why this house," I said, when I could. "Why do you do this. You hate it. I can see that you hate it."

He was quiet a while. "I was born into it the way you were born into the river district," he said. "You don't choose the room you wake up in. You only choose what you do once you're standing." His thumb moved, once, along the back of my hand, barely there. "Sleep, Cora. I'll send Tace to sit with you."

He went. And because I have never in my life been able to leave a locked thing alone, and because his unfed gentleness had frightened me more than any feeding, the moment my legs held me I got up and I went looking for the truth of this place.

The bond would not let me past the wall, but it let me everywhere inside it, and a house that has ruled for centuries keeps its records close. I found the bond-room behind the library: a long cold vault of shelves, and on a lectern at its heart, open, a great ledger bound in cracked black leather with the Carrow seal pressed into the cover. Every tithe the house had ever taken. Every name they had ever owned.

I found Lessard near the end. I found my own name in narrow black ink, and beside it the date it had been entered, and the date is the thing that stopped my heart.

It was not the night I signed. It was seven weeks before. Seven weeks before Nell's fever, before the cough, before any of it, my name had already been written into this book in someone's careful hand, as though waiting for me to arrive and make it true.

I turned the page with fingers that did not feel like mine. Under my name was a second entry, in a different hand, older, surer, the long downstrokes of a woman who had been writing the same word for two hundred years. Ysolde's hand.

On the turning of the year, it read, the Lessard tithe to be rendered to the Matriarch. In full. By the old means.

In full. I knew what a tithe in full was. Everyone in the river district knew the phrase the way they knew which bridges flooded. It did not mean a year and a day of careful sips. It meant all of it. It meant the last drop.

Behind me, soft on the cold stone, came the sound of a single footstep, and then Ysolde's voice, warm and delighted, as though she had caught a child at something sweet.

"There you are," she said. "I did so hope you'd find it yourself. It's ever so much better when they understand."