Page 25

“Tell me when to come back,” he says.

He is leaving it to me.

I could say never. He would go and I would hear him go along the corridor and down into that hall and out into his fen, and it would be finished and I would be the one who finished it.

“In two nights,” I say. “Not tomorrow. The night after.”

He does not argue.

“And if the bell goes, the bell goes. I’m not an idiot.”

He goes.

I lie in a bed in a house on four miles of water, in the dark, with my whole body humming and the smell of rain on stone in the sheets, and I do not say one word out loud. I sleep like a stone.

RIWAL

Itake the mask off in the corridor, before I have gone three steps from her door.

The window at the end has the fen in it and the first grey coming up off the water. I stand in front of the glass and lift the gold away. The mouth under it loses its color. The jaw goes long. The eyes fill in black. It takes no time at all, and it does not hurt. The wood comes away and the man goes with it.

I wrap it in the sailcloth and put it behind the burying linen and shut the press, and I stand with my hand on the shut press longer than the job needs.

In two nights, she said. I am already counting the hours.

At breakfast she is at the far end of the table with her hair wet, eating standing up again, and she says good morning to me twice because the first one does not come out right.

“You look tired,” she says.

“I do not need to sleep. I still do, sometimes.”

“You look as though you ought to.” She points the heel of the loaf at me.

“I was out.”

“Was there a bell? I didn’t hear the bell.”

“There was no bell last night.”

That much is true. The lie was the part before it. I was not out. I was at the other end of the corridor, in her bed. She looks at me down the length of the table, and I watch her decide not to ask again.

Last night she took the man in the mask into her bed without one word, and held her hand over his mouth so that he could not speak either. This morning she gives me the heel of a loaf, pointed down the table like a weapon.

I am jealous of myself in a mask. It is a stupid thing to be, and I am.

I cannot even tell what she feels about me. The sense I read the dying with finds sickness and damage and nothing else, and she is the least damaged creature I have ever stood next to.

“There’s something I want to ask you,” she says, “and you’ll say no.”

“Then ask.”

“Come and stand in the hall with me for ten minutes this afternoon while I hang the second one.” She is pulling her sleeve down over her wrist and pushing it back up again. “Not to hold anything. I want to hear a room with a person standing in it. A room’s different with a body in it and you’re a large body and I can’t do it on my own because the moment I’m up the ladder I’m not where the sound is.”

“Why does it matter?”

“Because I live here now.” She says it flatly, and goes back to the bread. “For the rest of the month, at least. And I can’t live in a room I can’t hear.”

I say yes before I have finished thinking about it.