CHAPTER FIVE: The Only Person Who Wants Nothing

The morning, Nadira said. It ran to dusk.

Eleven feet of floor between his chair and mine. Six boards and a seventh that had been put in later out of something paler, and I know that because I counted them, and then counted them again, and by the fourth time I was not counting boards.

I was doing the other sum.

Nobody told me what I was for in that room. I was put in a chair at the end of a long table and left in it while men came in with papers and went out without them, and twice somebody asked me a question about the Lowmarch that I answered in under nine words.

Marek did not speak to me once. He looked at me three times and none of the three lasted.

He was eleven feet away for nine hours. That was the day.

I know the rooms I sit in. It is not a talent. It is what you do instead of being spoken to.

Two doors, the long one to the corridor and a small one behind the hearth that a boy used twice, carrying wood. One window, painted shut. Halden Marr at the far end with his back to the wall, where he always puts himself, and a habit of setting his hand flat on a paper before he reads it.

When a page went to Marek he took it and read it. Every other man in that room brought the page up toward his face first, the way you do, without knowing you do it. He did not. I noticed it the way you notice a clock that has stopped, and then I stopped noticing, because I had arithmetic.

By the third hour the warmth was in my wrists.

By the sixth it had gone off them, and what was underneath was bare.

By dusk I was in a room full of noses on the seventh day of a seven-day schedule, with the back of my neck already gone and the rest of me going faster than it has any right to.

xxx

I did the wrists twice that night.

That is waste and I knew it was waste while I was doing it. The second pass does nothing the first one did not. I did it anyway, because a thing you can reach is a thing you can still do something about, and I wanted ninety seconds of being a woman doing something about it.

Then I put my back to the mirror and tried the three ways.

Over the shoulder. Up from the waist. Sitting on the boards with my arm hooked round behind me like somebody fastening a dress that does not exist.

Two inches. Two inches. Two inches.

On the third one my elbow went into the jar.

It did not shatter. It went over and rolled and something in the glass gave with a small sound like a knuckle, and the mouth turned down before I got a hand to it, and what came out went onto boards nobody had washed since the day I came.

I want to put down plainly what I did next, because I have thought about it a great deal since and I would like it in my own words.

I got down and took it up with two fingers and put it back in the jar.

All of it. The grit as well. There was a hair in it and I took the hair out and left the rest, because I could not afford to be a woman who used only clean oil.

Then I held the jar to the lamp and found the crack. A hairline, from the wax down toward the base, and a jar with a line like that in it does not keep. Whatever was in it now had to be on me by morning or it was on the floor for good.

Eighteen, and a part of one, with grit in it. That is not a number you can count.

xxx

Two knocks. Then a wait.

Servants knock twice and wait. That is what I had time to tell myself, and it was wrong, because a servant does not stand there holding a book.

I put the jar on the sill, because I did not want anything in my hands, and said come.

The man in the door was not the Alpha and had the Alpha's jaw, which is a hard thing to be shown twice in one day.

Ink to the second knuckle on his right hand. A flat place on the middle finger where a pen sits. No ring.

"You left this," he said.

I had not left it. I had never seen it. It was a small brown thing about grazing rights and I could not have told you which end opened.

I took it.

"Emory Thorne. The Alpha's brother. I have been trying to get to this end of the house for six days."

Six days. I put that somewhere and said nothing. He stayed in the doorway and did not come in, which I noticed, and did not trust, which I also noticed.

"There is a silver ring at the outside of your eye," he said. "In strong light. I thought you would want to know somebody can see it."

I have been still in rooms since I was four and I know exactly how much stillness is too much. I went past it by about two seconds and could not get back.

"Lamplight does that to brown eyes."

"It does." He agreed with it at once, which was worse than arguing. "It did it this morning when the Beta put his hand on the paper. It did it in the hall yesterday, when a boy was sent back for his boots. Both times you were watching something and had stopped being careful."

So he had been watching for six days, and he had just handed me that, and the handing over was the point. Not the silver.

"What do you want."

Eighteen years of not asking anybody for anything, and that is the sentence that came out of me.

"Nothing." Too quick. He heard it himself and did what a careful man does when he has been too quick, which is slow down and make it worse. "There is no price is what I am. I am not saying it as a, there is nothing you would have to."

He stopped.

"You said that too quickly," I said.

"I did."

"Men do not come to the far end of a house with a book I never owned and want nothing."

He looked down the corridor for a moment. Then he told me the truth, and it was not the one I had braced for.

"I can smell the lamp," he said. "I can smell the wet coming up the north stair, and the ink on my own hand, and what they burned in the kitchen tonight, which was onions and something they should have thrown out. I am standing in your doorway."

He let that sit exactly as long as it needed.

"There is nothing there. You give off less than the chair."

Nobody had ever said it out loud. Eighteen years, and my father's whole arrangement, and the word he gave me for it, and not one person had ever stood in a room and simply described the result.

"I have spent three years on why that happens to people," he said. "It has never once happened in front of me."

"And you want to watch."

"I want to be in the room." He turned his head to the corridor rather than to me. "And you cannot reach your own back. I worked that out on the third day. You keep your left side to every wall in this house."

That went in under the ribs and I let it.

"You would rather go bare than ask," he said. "I have met that before."

He was wrong. I would like that written down as well. It was not that.

Then he turned round. All the way. Facing the corridor, hands loose where I could see them, the back of a stranger's coat still square in my doorway.

"Say no and I go, and I do not mention it again, to you or to anybody." He said it to the corridor. "Say yes and I would rather start tonight, because whatever you have on is going tomorrow, and I have watched you count."

I stood there with a cracked jar on the sill and a stranger's spine in front of me.

I thought about the eighteen in the trunk, and the part of one with grit in it, and the two inches.

And I did not think about whether he was lying. That is the part I have gone back over most.

I reached up and took the pins out of my hair.

There were four. I set them on the sill in a row, the way you do when you mean to find them again, and the whole time my hands were doing that, my head was doing the only sum it knows.

Not whether he would.

What it would cost, and when he would come for it.