Page 7

It goes through me like the strike note goes through bronze. One hit, and then the long low hum underneath, the one that will not stop when you tell it to.

“Nobody’s ever looked at me doing that,” I say, before I can stop it. “Not once. I don’t know what to do with it, and I’d like you to keep doing it.”

He does not look away.

The fiddles stop. His hand comes off the small of my back and my skin keeps the shape of it, cold through the silk, and I want it back on me so badly my thighs press together under the dress.

He’s close enough that I have to tip my head up to see his mouth. It’s the only part of his face I’ve got, and it hasn’t done anything all night, and I want to be what makes it do something. I want that cold against my throat. I want to know what the hands he keeps empty would do if I put them on me.

Over his shoulder the stair goes up into the dark. Anna goes at dawn and I go at ten. That’s nine hours. Tonight is mine.

My feet turn toward the stair before I’ve finished thinking, as they turned toward the gate when Katell said the word ball.

“There’s a stair behind the wine table,” I say. “It goes up to the counting room. Nobody goes up there because the door sticks, and I know which way to lift it.” Nobody stops a lot going up a stair, either. Until the hammer comes down tomorrow, I’m nobody’s.

“Why do you know that?”

“Because I’ve been coming into this hall since I was a girl, I’m nosy, and the acoustics up there are the best in Morlac, which is the least interesting reason I’m telling you about it.”

He is quiet for a moment. His hands are still empty.

“Yes,” he says.

I am already walking.

ENORA

The counting room door sticks because the frame has dropped. You lift the handle a finger’s width and put your hip into it, and it comes.

“There,” I say. “Nosiness. It pays.”

He shuts it behind us and the hall drops away to a hum through the boards, four hundred people turned into a sound like weather happening somewhere else.

Two windows with no glass in them, the harbor beyond, a gull screaming out on the roof slates. One long table with nothing on it but dust and mouse droppings. The air is cold and smells of old paper and pitch, and under that, faintly, of the torches burning two floors down.

We are alone. I know it in my skin before I know anything about the room, and my pulse is going in my throat, and I talk, because that is what I do with a pulse.

And the room takes my voice and hands it straight back to me, close and warm, no flying, no ghost.

“Oh,” I say. “Listen to that.”

“To what?”

“Say something.”

“Something.”

“You’re the most annoying man in this building.” I am grinning under the mask and he can see it, because the borrowed mask stops at my cheekbones and the rest of my face is doing this. “Do you hear how it sits? That’s what a room is supposed to do with a person. Down there you’re shouting into a bucket. Up here I could whisper at you from the wall and you’d get every word.”

“Whisper at me from the wall, then.”

“If you can hear it, you owe me an answer to one question.”

“And if I cannot?”

“Then I’ll ask it anyway and you can refuse me properly, out loud, instead of going quiet at me.”

So I go and put my back against the stone, which is freezing through the dress, and I say, “I’m being sold in the morning,” and it crosses twelve feet of dusty air and arrives at him whole, which is a stupid thing to be proud of, and I am.