CHAPTER FOUR: Day Six

My arm stops two inches short of the middle of my own back.

I found that out kneeling on the boards of a room that was not mine, in my shift, with my right hand up over my shoulder, touching nothing but hair.

I tried the other way, up from the small of my back, and got somewhere under my shoulder blades and stopped, because that is where an arm stops.

I did it again with the dress lower.

Same place. Same two inches.

The nape and the spine under it are where it matters most. Thinnest skin. First place it comes through.

Eighteen years, every Sunday of my life, and somebody else had always done my back.

That had never once struck me as a fact about my life. It was where the jar went and who put it there.

xxx

That was the evening. The morning went like this.

I was awake before the house, which is not discipline, it is habit. I pressed my thumbs into the insides of my own wrists in the dark and went over myself the way you check a wall for cracks.

That is where it goes first. That is where I have always known.

The sixth morning. I had counted.

Nothing yet. Close, though. There is a warmth that comes into the skin a day before the oil gives up, the way a room changes an hour before rain.

Six days of cover. A seventh where it thins, and you put it on again before the thinning finishes. If you are late there is an eighth day, and on the eighth day everybody knows.

My father set that when I was four. I have never once been late.

The jars were in the bottom of the trunk under folded linen, because a trunk is the first place anybody looks and the bottom of one is the last.

I counted them, which I did not need to do.

Nineteen.

I count things I do not need to count. Stairs. Candles along a wall. The words I am allowed at a table. It is what you do instead of being asked anything.

Grey glass, wax over the lid, small enough to close a hand around. You would think honey, or ointment for a horse. Enough in one to keep a woman invisible for seven days.

Eighteen would be left after tonight.

I put the linen back corner over corner, because in a house like that somebody notices linen, and went down, because a bride who does not come down is a bride people talk about.

xxx

Ashvale eats early and eats together. Four hundred people in a hall built for six hundred, and the noise comes off the stone at you like weather.

I sat where I was put. I ate what was in front of me. I said the eleven words required of me and no more.

The woman in grey ran that room without appearing to. Nadira Vale. I had her name by then.

She stood at the end of the long table with a list, and in the time it took me to eat she moved four people, cancelled something, approved something else, and sent a boy of nine back to put his boots on properly.

Somebody had told him. That was the part I watched.

Nobody argued with her once.

She has good hands. Square, short-nailed, entirely still when she is not using them.

I notice hands the way other people notice faces. I could not tell you what my father looks like when he is thinking. I could draw you his hands from memory, at any age I ever saw them.

She looked at me twice. Once coming in and once going out, the same look both times, and it was not unkind. It was the look you give a cart left standing in a yard.

I went out by the north corridor because it was empty.

It was not empty.

xxx

Marek was at the window at the far end with his back to me and his hands behind him, and he did not turn round, and I could have gone back the way I came.

I did not.

The reason I give myself is that the corridor was the shortest way and I wanted my own door. That is not the reason. It is close enough to live with.

"You were at the north end of the table," he said.

I stopped. He still had not turned.

"I was put there."

"By whom."

"The Gamma."

"Mm." As if I had confirmed something already written down.

I came level with him because the corridor gave me nowhere else to be, and for four seconds we stood at the same window looking at the same black hill, near enough to smell the cold on his coat and the iron under it.

He turned his head.

I have described his hands. I have not described being looked at by a man working out what is wrong with you and getting no help from his own nose.

"You do not eat much."

"I ate what was there."

"You ate the bread and moved the rest of it round the plate."

It was out of me before I had decided anything.

"You were looking at my plate."

He did not answer that.

He did not deny it either. He looked at the hill and let the silence run on past the length a man lets it run when he has an answer and has not bothered to give it.

To the window: "Somebody taught you to do that. I would like to know who."

He did not dismiss me. He stopped, the way a door stops.

He wanted a name. I did not have one to give him.

I walked the rest of that corridor with my back straight and my hands loose and got round the corner before I put my palm flat on the wall.

Eighteen years of eleven words at a table, and I had answered him back inside four seconds of being looked at properly. That is what it does. It opens your mouth before it asks you.

My wrists were hot.

Not warm. Hot, in a way they had not been forty minutes earlier in the dark.

xxx

I sat on the edge of the bed with the jar in both hands and worked it out myself, because nobody had ever told me this part. Nobody had told me any of it. My father gave me a schedule and a word for it and no explanation.

But I have spent my life reading things nobody explained.

Six days of cover, every week, since I was four. Sundays, in front of a mirror, without incident. And then four seconds at a window with a man I had met once, and it going out of me like heat out of an open door.

So he does it. Standing near him does it.

And if he does it, and he is the Alpha, and I am here to be his, then every hour I spend doing what I was sent three hundred miles to do is an hour off the end of my own life.

Nineteen jars was never nineteen weeks.

xxx

Which is how I came to be on the floor at dusk with my dress round my hips, finding out about the two inches.

Wrists. Both, thumbs in circles, grey and warm and smelling of nothing at all.

Throat. Fine. Behind the ears. Fine.

Then the nape, and nothing.

I sat back on my heels and made myself finish the thought, because a thought you have not finished can still be got round.

My father did my back when I was small.

Then a woman in the kitchen did it. Eleven years. Every Sunday of eleven years, her hands on the back of my neck for about ninety seconds, and I could not tell you her name.

I have counted her since. That is the part I keep going back to. I counted the jars I did not need to count, and the days, and the eleven words at a table. I never counted her once. She did that for me five hundred and seventy-two times.

Then Cassia's maid, the last year, sighing about it every time.

I lifted my hair for all three of them and never once thought about it, the way you never think about the floor. Now I needed one of them, and there was not one I could name.

Which gives me until it thins tomorrow, and then a few hours, and then the back of my neck starts telling four hundred people exactly what I am.

And there was nobody in three hundred miles I could ask.

Somebody knocked.

Not a servant. Servants knock twice and wait. This was one knock and the handle turning.

I got the dress up over my shoulders with the jar still open on the boards behind me and my hair down over my neck, and the door came in, and the woman in grey was standing in it with her list.

"The Alpha wants you at the north table," Nadira said.

I said something about the hour.

She did not look up from the list. "First light. It will take the morning."

I stood in that doorway trying to put a face to the woman in the kitchen and got nothing.

A morning. Eleven feet from the man who burns it off me.

And two inches of my own back still bare under my hair.