Page 29

“Done.”

Riwal’s hand comes off the ladder. I come down it.

He goes up to his study. I stand in a hall that is one man quieter than it was and count it on my fingers. He came last night, so not tonight. Tomorrow, then.

In two nights, I said. I said it myself, out loud. It is tonight I want, and I do not like finding that out with a hammer in my hand.

The next night he knocks, and I have the door open before the second knock.

No candle. I do not need one. He fills the doorway and I take him by the front of the coat and bring him in, and this time I do not take the coat off him and fold it on the chair. I get my back against the door and pull him down to me and he comes.

It is nothing like the first night. The first night I undressed him like stock.

Tonight he has my shift up round my waist with one hand before the door has finished shutting, and his mouth is on my throat, and his other hand is under my knee, lifting it, opening me to him against the wood, and I have to grip his shoulders to stay standing.

He goes down. There is no slow about it. He is on his knees on the cold flags with my leg over his shoulder and his mouth on the inside of my knee, and then higher, and then on me.

The door is at my back and his hands are holding my hips to it, and the noise I want to make has his name in it, so I bite my own forearm instead and make it there.

He feels me come against his mouth. He does not stop until I push at his head.

Then he stands. I get his trousers open with shaking fingers, and he lifts me, and it is the wall this time and not the bed, my back against the stone and my legs round him and the cold of him everywhere at once.

He pushes into me standing and it is fast and hard and not careful, and I am glad, and I hold the back of his neck and let him, and when he breaks it is with his face in my hair and his whole weight pinning me to the wall. Not one word from either of us.

Afterward my legs do not work. He carries me the four steps to the bed and puts me down and stands there in the dark, breathing.

“In two nights,” I say, before he can ask.

He goes.

I lie with my forearm against my mouth where my own teeth went in and I think: that was him. The same hands. The man who answers one question in four at a table. That was him.

Two mornings later he is at the end of the table with his face doing nothing at all, and I am a woman with her sleeves pushed up telling him about drainage. Neither of us mentions that two nights ago he had his mouth on the inside of my knee.

I am doing it to him as much as he is doing it to me. I know that. I talk about the culvert under the north wall until I run out of culvert.

At noon I finally ask him.

“I want to go and see Corentin.”

He is by the fire with the ledger open on his knee, and he does not look up.

“No.”

I did not expect that. I rehearsed this all morning, and I never once rehearsed no.

“Malo can drive me. It’s a day there and a day back, and he’d be with me the whole way. I’d be back well inside the month, so nothing is ended and the Order keeps its note. You wouldn’t even have to notice I was gone.”

“No.”

“Give me a reason.”

He shuts the ledger on his finger.

“There is a thing in the fen towns that I cannot see and cannot feel. It has killed eight people. It is in the towns you would drive through to get to him. I will not leave the fen for three days while it is doing that, and I will not put you on that road without me.”

I had an answer ready for no.