Page 17

“That,” I say, pointing. “That is hung on iron.”

“Yes.”

“Who did that to a bell?” The strap is iron, the stock is iron, the whole thing is bolted into stone like a door hinge. “Do you know what that does? It grabs the crown and it holds it while she’s trying to sound, so instead of a note you get a bang and a smear. There’s a real note in there and it can’t get out, because you’ve bolted its mouth to a wall.”

“You have been in my yard for twelve seconds.”

“Yes, and I’ve solved something already.” My hands are shaking and it is not about the bell. It is the black stone and the open shutters and him standing behind me, and I am frightened.

“I did not tell you to stop.”

The yard flags are green with weed and the weed is wet, and my foot goes out from under me on the second one. His hand is under my elbow before I have finished slipping. The cold of him comes through my sleeve and up into my shoulder. It is the same cold I laughed into last night with my forehead on his chest.

He lets go the moment I am steady, and I want the hand back.

The door opens and a man comes out, a human man of sixty in a coat brushed so carefully that I can see the lines of the brush in it.

“Malo,” Riwal says. “This is Enora.”

“Madam.” He takes my bag out of the cart before I can argue about it. “You’ll want the east room. It has the fire that draws.”

“You’re not frightened of him,” I say.

Malo looks at me for about a second and a half. “No, madam.”

“Why not?”

“He pays quarterly and he does not shout.”

“That’s the whole reason?”

“It is two reasons, madam,” he says, and goes inside with my bag.

I laugh. It comes out too loud for the yard. I am so relieved to have laughed at anything that I could cry.

I follow him in.

The hall of Kerlann is flagged, and it is clean, and it is the quietest room I have ever stood in. The quiet gets in under my ribs. I have been afraid of quiet rooms since the spring, and this one is the size of a church.

Stone walls, stone floor, high ceiling, nothing soft anywhere in it. Two chairs, a long table, a bench, one fire. My own boots come back at me off the far wall half a second late.

The table is one board. One. I have seen the inside of two cathedrals and I have never seen a single plank that wide, and somebody carried it across four miles of water to put it in a room nobody eats in.

A silver dish sits on it holding nothing, and the dish is old enough that the pattern has gone soft at the edges from being handled, and if I sold it I could keep Corentin in physicians until he was ninety.

A room this size, this much stone, should ring. It does not. There is too much of it and not enough in it, and every sound I make goes out across the flags and does not come back as anything I want, and I put my hand on the table to have something solid under it.

“Is there anyone else here?” I say.

“No.”

“Ever?”

“The physician from Trevern, for Malo, three times a year. The carter, with what the fen does not grow.”

“And Malo.”

I walk the length of the hall and back, listening to myself do it, and Riwal stands by the door and lets me. Courtesy, or study. I have known him for six hours and a night, and I cannot tell.