Page 16

She is watching my mouth, because she is a founder and she reads the world by sound, and she is waiting to hear whether my voice carries.

If I say yes, then last night was a trick I played on her with a borrowed face. She will know it was. She will know the man she wanted was this one, hiding, and that she said yes to a mask, and she will go, and she will be right to.

If I say no, the night stays what she thinks it was: a stranger who was kind to her once. I would rather she kept that than had me.

“No,” I say.

It comes out in the voice from the table. Flat, low, no carry. She hears it. I watch her hear it, and I watch her let me have the lie.

I am ashamed. I would tell it again tomorrow to keep her one more day, and that is worse.

“Fine,” she says. “It was dark and everyone was in masks and I’ve been awake since yesterday.” She picks up her copy of the contract and folds it small and pushes it into her apron pocket, and then stops with her hand still in the pocket, feeling along the stitching at the bottom of it. Then she takes the hand out empty, and does not say what she was looking for.

“Ready?” she says.

Her token is in my coat, against my chest, where it has been since four o’clock this morning.

I found it on the floor where her dress had been, when I woke and she was gone. I had her name from the night before; she said it to the girl by the pillar.

“Yes,” I say.

I take her out through the fish market. I did not come to Morlac expecting to leave with a wife and a bag, so I hire a carrier’s cart at the harbor end and tie the grey behind it, and behind us the hall goes back to what it was doing, and somewhere out in the fen somebody is overdue, and I cannot make myself care.

ENORA

The driver has not looked over his shoulder once since the Ankou climbed in behind him. The grey is tied to the tailboard, walking with her head down.

He has a name. It is on my copy of the contract, under mine, in a hand as straight as a ruled line. Riwal. I have taken the paper out of my apron four times since Morlac to look at it. Nobody ever told me the Ankou had a name. I have not said it out loud yet.

Riwal could be on his horse. He is on the bench instead, across from me, with his back against the boards and his hands on his knees, and he does not fidget in five hours. I have never met a person who does not fidget. I have counted his blinks and given up.

I have talked at him about the axle, about the road, about the difference between the fen bells and the coast bells, about my palms, about Anna going to the chapter house at dawn with a carter who did not want to tell me his route.

I do not talk about his hands. Last night they were under the small of my back on a filthy table. Now they are on his knees, and this morning he looked me in the face and said it was not him. I want them back where they were. I also want to push him out of the cart. I tell him about the axle a second time.

He answers about one question in four, and he answers that one properly, so I keep going.

The fen starts after Trevern and it starts all at once. The hedges go down, the trees give up, and then it is reed and black water and sky, more sky than any person needs, and the road becomes a causeway with the water sitting a hand’s breadth under it on both sides.

Lapwings go up off the water. The smell is cold silt and rot, and it is not unpleasant, which surprises me.

Then the sun gets under the cloud out west and the whole fen shines like sheet metal. Four miles of standing water light up at once from the side. Every channel and every cut in it runs gold, and the reeds stand up black out of it for as far as I can see in any direction.

I stop talking. I am not aware of having stopped until I hear it.

It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and nobody made it. Every beautiful thing I know came out of a mold. I am being driven to the Ankou’s house and I ought to be sick with fright, and I am sitting in a farm cart with my mouth open.

“It does this about twice a month,” Riwal says, after a while. “In the spring more often.”

We come at it with the light going. Kerlann is not on a hill, because there are no hills. It arrives in pieces: a wall, then a roofline, then the gate. Grey stone gone black along the bottom where the water has been at it.

There are no towers on it and nothing lives on the roof, and it sits long and low on the only dry ground for four miles with all its shutters open.

The fright I ought to have had on the causeway arrives now, all of it. That is his house, and I am going to sleep in it.

And the bell over the gate is a disgrace.

I am out of the cart before it stops.