Chapter 55

Aldara's house sits above Reykjavik on the eastern slope, one storey, dark timber, the sort of building that has decided the weather is a neighbour rather than an enemy. She opens the door before Veira knocks and looks at her for a long moment without any of the assessment Veira has become used to.

"You look like her," she says. "It isn't the face. It's the way you stand in a doorway."

"Like who."

"Come in. I have made too much coffee, which is a habit from a period of my life when I did not sleep."

The room is warm and full of books in four languages, and there is a chess position set up on a side table with no second chair. Aldara is small, seventy-odd, hands ruined by cold and time, and her attention has the specific pressure Veira has felt from exactly one other person, which was Joon-Ho on the first day, and which she now understands is what Kin perception feels like from the receiving end.

"Her name was Morna Croft," Aldara says, before either of them has sat down.

Veira does not move.

"Elder Croft's sister?"

"His younger sister. Born 1961. Hybrid configuration, confirmed by scan at eleven weeks, which in 1961 meant an elimination order as a matter of course." Aldara pours coffee for both of them. "Their mother hid the result. She bribed a Folklore geneticist in Aberdeen and buried the file. Morna grew up believing she was an ordinary wolf-blooded girl with a talent for finding things."

"Finding things."

"Money. Objects. People. She had no framework for it. She simply always knew which direction to look." Aldara sits. "You will recognise the description."

Veira wraps both hands around the cup because they want something to do. "When did the Vein come to her."

"October 1987. Within a week of Mireille's death." Aldara says the dates without hesitation, which tells Veira she has said them privately many times and never once aloud. "She was twenty-six. She had no idea what was happening. She thought she was dying. She spent three months in an Aberdeen psychiatric ward and the Kin Assembly knew where she was the entire time."

"And did nothing."

"We did something. We voted." Aldara's face does not change. "In February 1989 the Kin Assembly formally considered a motion to acknowledge the existence of an undocumented conduit and bring her under compact protection. The motion required seven of eleven. It received four."

"Why."

"Because acknowledging her meant acknowledging that a hybrid was holding the Vein, in a compact whose founding law defined hybrids as the threat that necessitated the compact." Aldara turns her cup a quarter-turn on the table. "Seven people in that room understood that the alternative to acknowledging her was leaving a twenty-eight-year-old woman to hold the entire supernatural order alone, without training, without support, without anyone ever telling her what she was. They voted for the alternative. So did I."

Veira sits with it.

She thinks about the version of herself who found the Florence minutes in a Tuscan kitchen with the light going gold, and how that had been five people in one room for one afternoon, and how she had packed two bags and left.

Morna Croft had no minutes to find. She had no cottage. She had nobody who could have told her the word for what she was.

"How did she survive it," Veira says.

"She didn't, in any sense that matters. She held the Vein for ten years and it took everything from her by degrees." Aldara looks toward the window. "The conduit function is not free. You know this. You have felt what it costs to carry six frequencies for three days. She carried five for ten years with no idea she was carrying anything, and the resonance had nowhere to discharge, so it discharged into her. By 1995 she could not read. By 1996 she could not recognise her brother."

"And Croft knew."

"Elder Croft petitioned the Kin Assembly eleven times between 1989 and 1997. He was thirty-two years old and he had no standing and no allies and he came to Reykjavik four times at his own expense to be told no by people who would not explain why." Aldara's voice does not rise. "He was not an Elder then. He became one specifically so that this could never happen again. That is his entire career. Every position he has ever taken descends from it."

Veira sets the cup down.

"He isn't trying to control me," she says.

"No."

"He's trying to make sure the function never rests on one person again, because he watched what it did to the last person it rested on."

"Yes." Aldara looks at her directly for the first time since the doorway. "And he is right that the current arrangement is intolerable, and he is right that you are unaccountable, and he is right that the compact has no mechanism to protect a conduit from what the conduit does to herself." A pause. "He is right about all of it, Ms Ashcroft. That is the difficulty. You are not opposed by a bad man with a bad case."

"Then what am I opposed by."

"A grieving man with a good case and a solution that will kill you," Aldara says. "Morna died on the fourteenth of September 1997. Would you like to know why that date matters, or have you already worked it out?"

Veira has already worked it out. She has been working it out since Aldara said the year, and the arithmetic has been sitting in her chest getting heavier for four minutes.

"That's my birthday," she says.