The Memory Market
I left the palace an hour before the violet hour turned, while the corridor outside my room was still watched by only one guard instead of two, and while Kael was still, as far as I knew, somewhere in that vaulted throne chamber pretending to the Council that nothing between us needed explaining.
I told myself I was looking for Mara. That was true. It was just not the whole truth. The whole truth was that I could not spend one more hour in a room I had not chosen, being protected by a man who had called me a key in front of a circle of hooded strangers and then let another woman kiss his hand not twenty feet from where I stood. I needed air that did not belong to him. I needed, for one hour, to be a person who made her own decisions again.
The guard at my door was young, or looked young, which in Noxara I was learning meant very little. He startled when the latch gave under my hand rather than under his key, and I did not wait to find out whether that was a failure of his or a mercy of mine.
"You are not to leave without an escort," he said, already reaching for something at his belt.
"Then escort me," I said, and kept walking, because I had learned exactly one useful thing about this world in three days, which was that hesitation read as permission.
He did not follow far. I do not know if that was fear of me or fear of what Kael would do to him for losing me, and in that moment I did not particularly care which.
◆ ◆ ◆
The black colonnades gave way, eventually, to narrower streets, and the narrower streets gave way to noise, which was the first true noise I had heard since arriving, a low, constant murmur like a hundred conversations happening just behind a wall. I followed it the way you follow anything unfamiliar when you are angry enough not to be careful, and it led me under an archway carved with faces mid-scream, and into the Memory Market.
I want to describe it properly, because nothing anyone tells you about Noxara afterward prepares you for the market. Imagine a bazaar built entirely from want. Stalls without walls, built instead from suspended light, each one holding something that was not quite an object and not quite a picture, a shimmering, moving fragment, someone's wedding day, someone's last winter, someone's hand closing around another hand for the first time. Souls moved between the stalls in slow, hungry currents, some whole and coherent, most frayed at the edges the way cloth frays after too much washing, and every one of them turned, as I passed, the way a field of grass turns toward wind.
They could smell me. Kael had told me that, and I had believed him the way you believe a warning you have never personally needed, which is to say, badly. Now I understood it the way you understand a fire, which is only ever by standing too close to one.
"Living," one of them said, close enough that its breath, if it had breath, stirred the hair at my temple. It did not have a face so much as the suggestion of one, features arriving and leaving like weather. "So warm. So full."
"Get back," I said, and my voice cracked in a way I did not like.
It did not get back. Three more turned toward the sound of me, then five, then more than I could count, all of them drifting closer with the specific, patient hunger of things that had been waiting a very long time for something as rare as a living pulse.
I do not remember deciding to run. I remember the market blurring past, stalls of stolen light smearing into ribbons of color, and I remember the moment the current of souls around me thickened into something with intent instead of drift, and I remember thinking, with a strange, detached clarity, that I was going to die in a market built out of other people's happiest days, which struck me even then as a particularly cruel kind of poetic.
Then the crowd broke apart in front of me the way water breaks around a stone, and Kael was there.
He did not look like a man who had walked calmly through a door. He looked like something that had arrived the way weather arrives, sudden and total, his coat moving as though a wind existed for him alone, and the souls nearest him recoiled before he had so much as raised a hand, folding back into the dark the way I imagine anything folds back from the thing that rules it.
"Do not touch her," he said, and the market went, very briefly, entirely silent.
Then his hand was around my wrist, not gentle this time, pulling me against him and out of the current in one motion, and we were moving, fast, back through the archway of screaming faces, until the noise fell away behind us into something more like the ordinary hush of the black streets, and he finally stopped, rounding on me with an expression I had not yet seen him wear.
He was furious.
"What," he said, very quietly, which somehow frightened me more than shouting would have, "were you thinking."
"I was thinking that I am not your prisoner."
"You are not my prisoner. You are, apparently, someone who walks unescorted into the one place in this entire city built specifically to feed on people exactly like you."
"I was looking for Mara."
"In a market that trades in memory, not souls kept for ransom." His voice had not risen, but something under it had gone very taut, like a wire pulled to the point just before it sings. "You could have asked me where to look. You did not have to find out what happens to the living in that place by nearly becoming a lesson in it."
"Maybe I didn't ask," I said, "because the last time I trusted you to tell me the truth, you called me a key in front of a room full of people who wanted to chain me to a throne."
That landed. I watched it land, watched something flicker and then shutter behind his eyes, and for a moment neither of us said anything at all.
"I said what kept them from trying again," he said finally, quieter.
"I know what you said. I want to know what you meant."
He did not answer that. He looked away instead, toward the archway behind us, toward the low hungry murmur still leaking out of it, and I understood, in the silence that followed, that I had asked him something he either could not or would not let himself answer standing in the open street.
◆ ◆ ◆
It was on the walk back, cutting through a quieter district lined with shuttered stalls that had gone dark for whatever passed as night here, that I finally asked the question I had been turning over since the corridor outside the binding chamber.
"Who is Seraphine, really."
Something in his shoulders changed, a fraction, barely visible.
"Someone I knew a very long time ago."
"That's not an answer. You keep doing that. Giving me the shape of an answer instead of the thing itself."
He stopped walking. When he turned to face me, the ordinary careful blankness he wore like armor had thinned, just slightly, enough that I could see something older and more tired underneath it.
"Seraphine and I ruled beside each other once," he said. "Before I understood what this throne required of the person who sits in it. She believed, and I let her believe for longer than I should have, that when the old king fell, the crown would come to both of us together."
"And it didn't."
"The throne does not share. I learned that the same week I learned everything else it costs." His jaw tightened. "She has never forgiven the throne for choosing me alone. I suspect, some days, that she has never forgiven me for accepting it."
"So when she said you always did enjoy dragging things out—"
"She meant that I once dragged out a decision that should have been simple, and it cost her something she has spent three hundred years finding ways to make me pay for." He said it flatly, like a debt tallied so many times it had stopped hurting to recite, which told me, more than any tremor in his voice could have, that it still hurt very much indeed.
I should have left it there. I did not.
"Did you love her?"
"I do not know anymore what I felt then belongs to the same word you're using now." He looked at me for a long moment, something unguarded moving behind his eyes before he caught it. "I know what I feel watching you decide, every single day, whether I am worth the risk of trusting. That much I can tell the difference on."
I did not have an answer for that. I was not sure I was supposed to.
◆ ◆ ◆
We were nearly back at the black colonnade when the ground under my feet did the thing it had done once before, in the tomb, the world tilting a half degree off true, and I would have gone down if Kael had not caught me by the shoulders.
"The market takes a toll on the living even when it doesn't touch you," he said, low. "You need rest, and you are not going to get it walking."
"I'm fine."
"You are gray in a way that has nothing to do with the light here." He hesitated, and something in that hesitation told me he was about to offer something that cost him more than the words would suggest. "There is a faster way back. It requires me to share something with you I would rather not, but it will pass in seconds, and it will get you out of this street before you fall in it."
"Share what."
"A memory. Mine." His hands were still at my shoulders, careful, steady. "It will let me draw you both through the space between one street and another the way I moved us into Noxara the first time. You will see something of me I have not shown to anyone still living. I am telling you that before I do it, because you should have the choice, even now, even like this."
I thought of the market, of the current of hungry souls, of the word key, of the sentence she belongs to the throne, nothing more, and I thought, with a tiredness that went all the way to the bone, that I was so far past the version of myself who made careful, informed choices that one more leap into the unknown barely registered as a decision at all.
"Do it," I said.
He did not warn me again. He simply pressed two fingers to my temple, gentle in a way his hands rarely were, and the black street dissolved.
◆ ◆ ◆
I was somewhere with sunlight, which should not have been possible, and for one disorienting moment I thought I had been thrown backward into my own life instead of forward into his. Then I saw him, younger somehow, though his face had not changed, standing in a doorway of warm gold stone with his hand pressed flat against it, and I understood I was seeing him as he had been before any of this, before the coat, before the cold, before the throne had finished carving him into what I knew.
He was saying goodbye to someone. I could not see her face, only the shape of her, a woman with her back to me, and I could not hear the words, only feel the shape of the grief in the room the way you feel heat off a fire without looking directly at it. He reached for her and she stepped back, and something in his young, unfinished face broke in a way I recognized because I had made that exact expression once, in a hospital corridor, over my mother.
Then the light guttered, and the memory folded in on itself, and I was standing again on the black street with his fingers still at my temple, my own face wet in a way I had not given permission for.
"That was not the memory I meant to show you," he said, and for the first time since I had met him, he sounded almost young himself, caught out, uncertain. "It surfaces sometimes. I do not always control which one comes when I open the door."
"Who was she."
"Someone I could not save, in the life I had before this one." He withdrew his hand slowly, as if it cost him something physical to do it. "It is the reason I understood, later, exactly what this throne would ask of anyone who let themselves love while wearing it."
I wanted to ask more. I did not get the chance.
◆ ◆ ◆
I woke, some indeterminate time later, in my own windowless room, in the same clothes, with no memory of how I had gotten from that street to this bed, and with a strange, specific gap in my chest where something used to be, the way your tongue finds the space of a missing tooth before your mind catches up to the absence.
Kael was sitting in the chair across the room, watching me with an expression I could not immediately name.
"What did you do," I said, before I had even fully sat up.
"I brought you home."
"That's not what I asked." The gap in my chest itched at me, insistent, wrong. I reached for a memory of my mother, a specific one, the sound of her voice the week before she died, and found only a smooth, featureless place where it should have been, like a photograph with the face scratched out.
"Kael." My voice was not steady. "What did you take from me."
He did not look away, which I would come to learn was, for him, its own kind of confession.
"A memory of your mother," he said. "One specific night. I removed it while you slept."
The room went very quiet.
"You had no right."
"I know."
"You had no right," I said again, louder, because the first time apparently had not been enough to make the sentence feel real. "You don't get to decide what stays in my own head."
"I removed it," he said, low and even, though something under the evenness had gone rough, "because if you remembered it, Seraphine would find a way to use it against you before the week was out. I did not have time to explain that to you and take it gently. I only had time to take it."
"Then explain it to me now."
He was quiet for a long moment, long enough that I thought he might refuse entirely.
"Not tonight," he said finally. "Tonight I only have this to give you: I did not do it because I thought you couldn't bear the memory. I did it because I could not bear what she would do to you if she found it first."
I did not know, staring at him across that small windowless room, whether I wanted to thank him or scream at him, and the terrible thing, the thing I would lie awake turning over long after he had gone, was that I understood, with total clarity, that I might end up doing both.