THE HOLLOW VOW
Chapter Two: What the Pact Never Promised
The bread was still warm when Elodie broke it open, steam rising from the torn crumb in a pale curl, and she held it to her face the way she had done every morning of her life without once thinking about it, and smelled nothing at all.
She told herself it was the cold. She told herself her nose had simply gone numb from the frost that had settled over Thistlewick in the small hours, the same frost that still rimed the shutters, and she pressed the bread closer, breathed in harder, until Rosalind looked up from the pallet where she sat wrapped in a blanket, cheeks pink with returning health, and asked what on earth she was doing.
Nothing, Elodie said. Eat your breakfast.
She went through the whole of that morning testing herself in small, secret, increasingly desperate ways. She uncorked the vinegar jar and held it beneath her nose until her eyes watered from proximity alone rather than scent. She knelt by the hearth and pushed her face nearly into the smoke until Rosalind scolded her for it. She crushed a sprig of the rosemary that grew in the cracked pot on the windowsill, the one their mother had planted before either of them was born, and rubbed it between her fingers and held it an inch from her face, and there was nothing there, no green sharp bite of it, only the flat grey fact of its absence, as if someone had reached into her and quietly removed a room from a house she had lived in her whole life without ever learning to properly value it until it was gone.
She looked at her wrist. The mark had settled into her skin overnight, no longer raw, a dark spiral traced just above the pulse point, the lines of it fine as a hair, and when she touched it, it was warm in a way that had nothing to do with her own blood.
It had begun small, he had said. She understood, now, sitting on the cold floor of her own kitchen with a useless sprig of rosemary crushed uselessly in her palm, that small was a matter of scale she had not been permitted to negotiate, and that whatever had been taken was not coming back.
Rosalind noticed something was wrong by midmorning, the particular wrongness of an older sister gone quiet in a way she was not built for, and pressed until Elodie told her some of it, though not all. Not the Threshold. Not the man who was not a man. Only that she had asked a favour of someone dangerous, and that the favour had cost her something already, and that it would likely cost more before it was through.
You did this for me, Rosalind said, and it was not a question.
I would do it again, Elodie said, and meant it, though saying it aloud made the meaning of it settle heavier into her chest than it had when it was only a thought.
By midday word had reached her that the surgeon, Master Aldous, had been seen leaving the magistrate's hall with his face the colour of old tallow, and Tamsin Wick, who copied manuscripts two benches down from Elodie in the bindery and who had a talent for hearing things she was not meant to hear, found her at the well and told her, in the low urgent voice of a friend delivering bad news out of kindness rather than malice, that Thorne had summoned Aldous to ask, very precisely, what poison could cause a fever such as the one Rosalind Marrow had suffered, and whether such a fever could reverse itself overnight without physic.
He's asking because he already knows the answer, Tamsin said. He wants to know if anyone else does.
Elodie thanked her and walked home with her basket of undyed thread swinging emptily against her hip, and did not tell Tamsin that she already understood exactly why Thorne was asking, because it was Thorne's own poison that Aldous had failed to name, and Thorne needed only to be certain that no one had discovered a cure he had not authorized before he decided what to do about the girl who had somehow found one.
In the hour before dusk, unable to sit still with her fear any longer, Elodie walked to the western edge of town where Mabel Fenn kept her crooked little house pressed up against the old boundary stones, and found the old woman exactly where she always was, seated on an upturned barrel shelling beans into her lap as though the world had not shifted at all.
You went to the crossroads, Mabel said, before Elodie had opened her mouth. I can see it on you the way I can see rain coming in a bad hip. What did you trade.
Elodie told her, in a low voice, glancing at the empty lane as though Thorne's men might already be crouched behind the boundary stones listening. Mabel's hands stilled over the bean pot only once, at the mention of the mark, and then resumed their work as though steadying herself required exactly that much effort and no more.
He will not lie to you about the shape of it, Mabel said. That much I can promise you, for whatever a Threshold-keeper's promise is worth these days. The Wraith King does not deal in false comfort. He deals in exact accounting, which is a colder thing and, I have always thought, a more honest one. What he will not tell you, because I do not think even he fully knows it, is how much of yourself can be taken before there is no self left to notice the taking.
Has anyone ever paid the whole debt, Elodie asked. And kept who they were.
Mabel was quiet long enough that a bean rattled twice against the side of the pot before she answered.
Once, that I know of, she said. A long time before either of us was born, when the Wraith King himself was still counted among the living and made a bargain he had no right to make. I do not know how that story ended, only that it is the reason the throne he now holds exists at all. If you want more than that, you will have to ask the one soul in all the world who was there for it, and I would not count on him answering.
Elodie carried those words home with her like a stone in her pocket, turning them over, weighing what it might mean that the Wraith King's own law had once been broken by the Wraith King himself, and she was still turning them over when the air in her kitchen went still and cold and she looked up from her mending to find him standing just inside her own door, as though the door had never been an obstacle worth the trouble of using.
You should not be here, she said, more from fear for him than for herself, though she did not examine that thought closely enough to notice its shape.
I am not bound by the same doors as you, he said. I came to tell you what you have already begun to learn on your own. The Reckoning you suffered was the first of many. There will be no warning before the next, no season to prepare in, no bargain within the bargain to soften what is taken. I would not have you imagine otherwise out of some mercy I am not permitted to offer.
How many more, she asked.
As many as it takes to balance what your sister's life now costs the ledger of this world, he said. I do not set the number. I only carry the account.
She studied him in the candlelight, the ash-grey eyes that did not reflect the flame the way an ordinary man's would have, the stillness of him that was not the stillness of patience but of something that had simply stopped expecting time to move any differently than it already had for three hundred years, and asked the question she had been turning over since she woke that morning to a world gone silent at the nose.
Do you choose what it takes, she asked. Or only that it takes.
Something in his expression shifted, so slightly that she might have imagined it, a crack no wider than a hairline in stone that has stood a very long time.
I do not choose, he said. I have never been permitted to choose. I am told, and I take, and I have long since stopped asking whether that makes me any less guilty of the taking.
She had not expected an answer that sounded, even faintly, like grief, and she did not know what to do with the small unwelcome sympathy that rose in her at the sound of it, so she said nothing, and he took her silence as the end of the conversation, as he seemed to take most things, and turned toward the door.
Wait, she said, and he stopped, though she had not planned what came after the word. Does it hurt you. To be the one who takes.
He did not answer for a long moment, long enough that the candle guttered once in a draught that had not been there before, and when he spoke his voice had lost some of its formal edge, gone rough at the corners in a way she suspected he had not intended to allow.
It has not, in three hundred years, occurred to anyone to ask me that, he said, and then he was gone, the door closing on nothing, the cold air settling back into ordinary warmth as though it had never been disturbed.
She did not sleep well that night, turning the shape of him over in her mind the way she might turn over a stitch that had gone wrong somewhere in a seam, trying to find where the flaw had entered, and in the morning she understood why she had slept so poorly, because she woke to fists on the door loud enough to rattle the shutters, and opened it to find three of Thorne's men filling the narrow street outside with the particular unhurried menace of men who know they will not be refused.
Elodie Marrow, the eldest of them said, reading from nothing, the words already memorized. You are summoned to the magistrate's hall to answer for the unlawful recovery of your sister, Rosalind Marrow, from an illness the town surgeon has declared unnatural in origin.
Behind her, she heard Rosalind's sharp intake of breath, and felt the cold circle of the mark on her wrist as though it, too, had noticed the men in the doorway and was already calculating what this new danger might cost.
She did not run. There was nowhere in Thistlewick to run to that Thorne's reach did not already cover, and running would only confirm whatever it was he already suspected. She stepped forward instead, chin level, the way her mother had taught her to walk into any room that wanted her to look smaller than she was, and said that she would come, and prayed, with a fervency she had not managed even at the crossroads, that whatever silent thing had answered her call once before might be listening still.