Page 38 of Broken Vow

I had dressed for hiding as much as for prayer. A plain temple robe, undyed, the kind no one looks at twice, and over it a deep hood I kept drawn low, because there was a streak of coarse frost-white run through my hair at the temple now that no comb would lie flat and no shadow would quite swallow, and I did not want it seen. My hands I kept folded into my sleeves. The nails had hardened and curved, and they caught the light wrong, and a woman with claws for fingers is a woman who gets noticed. So I went down hooded and sleeved and careful, a creature learning to carry its own concealment.

The palace let go of me by degrees as I descended. Tsuki went ahead of me the whole way down, a small silver shape flowing from rooftop to rooftop, dropping to a gatepost to be sure I was still with him, gone again before anyone below could wonder at a flying squirrel abroad at dawn. I would never have found the way without him. He knew the lower city the way he knew everything, from above and in the dark, and he led me through it turn by turn, down past the high terraces, where the air smelled of cut flowers and the lamps burned all night in coloured glass because someone could afford to burn them. Then the broad streets of the great houses, their gates worked in gold, their walls too high to see over. Then the merchants’ quarter, shutters still down, and then the streets narrowed and the gold ran out of them, and the stone went bare and the smells turned to woodsmoke and night-soil and the river, and the people I began to pass were people who had been awake for hours already, because the day does not wait on the poor.

I had thought, the first time I walked into that gilded court, that I had never seen anything so fine. Coming down out of it now, I saw the other half of what it was. The empire that could afford to burn lamps in coloured glass all night could afford it because somewhere a child went without. I had come from a poor village, and we had been poor, but we had not been this. No one had starved in our lane. No child had slept in a doorway with nothing over him. Whatever else my village had lacked, it had not manufactured this kind of want, and the city made it in heaps, at the foot of all that gold, and I understood as I went down through it that I had crossed an empire for a man who sat at the very top of this and called the keeping of it his sacred duty.

When the temple came in sight at the bottom of the hill, Tsuki dropped to a low wall beside me, and I told him, quietly, that I needed to do this part alone. He looked at me a moment with those luminous eyes that always seemed to know more than he let on, and he did not argue, and he did not make a joke of it. He only said he would not be far, and to call if I had need, and then he was gone up into the eaves and the grey light, and left me to walk the last of it by myself.

* * *

The temple stood at the bottom of all of it, where the streets ran down toward the water.

It was a poor shrine, the kind a great lord would not be buried from, the kind that lives on the coppers of washerwomen and the devotion of the old. The roof sagged at one corner. The red of the gate-posts had long since faded to the grey of bare wood. But a paper lantern still burned under the eaves, and a thick rope hung by the entrance with a bell at the top of it for waking the attention of the goddess, and a knotted line of colourful cloth strips, prayers tied off by hands that had nothing else to give, stirred along the rail in the dawn wind. Beyond the threshold the small inner sanctuary held its one treasure, a worn stone figure of Sera, who hears the grief of the poor when the grand gods are busy elsewhere, the goddess of mercy this place had been raised to a long time ago and kept for ever since on almost nothing.

A stone basin stood at the threshold, the water in it black and still in the lantern light, a bamboo dipper laid across the lip. I stopped and washed, because that is what you do, because my hands had known the rite before the rest of me could think it. I rinsed the left, the right, lifted a little water to my mouth and to my brow, and the cold of it ran down through me, and something braced in me since the garden eased by a fraction. My form steadied. The fox, for the first time in days, lay quiet under my skin instead of clawing at it. I knew only that I felt, for one breath, almost safe, and that the feeling was so unfamiliar it frightened me.

I had come to do a thing, and I could not do it.

I had come to find a man and work my way toward him, to be charming and curious in the careful manner Selene had drilled into me, to begin, by whatever small means, the long task of getting close enough to the heart of the court to save my own life. That was the plan. I had walked down the hill rehearsing it. Then I stepped through the gate into the lantern light and the old familiar hush of a shrine at prayer, and the plan went out of me like breath, and I could not have spoken a charming word to save my soul. I was too raw, and the place had its hands on the rawest part of me before I had taken three steps inside it.

So I did the only thing left in me. I knelt at the back, in the shadow near the wall, hood low, hands in my sleeves, and I held still, and I watched.

He was already there.

I had known he would be, because Selene had told me he would, and that was the whole reason I had come on this morning and not another. The fair one, she had said. Young, gold-haired, the gentlest of them, the one the court despises. His name is Auden. She had drawn me a man in words, over a cold hearth two nights before, and now I knelt in the shadow and watched the words turn into a living person in front of me, and the strangeness of it held me still. This was the man from the bright hall. The one who had gone down on a wet floor for a serving girl no one would miss. I had carried him with me out of that hall without meaning to, and here he was, and every line of him matched what I had been told and went deeper than anyone had bothered to say.

He wore nothing that marked him. No silver, no grey, none of the spare imperial cloth I had seen him in across the hall. Just plain dark clothes, the kind any labouring man might wear. I clocked the rest of him as I clocked everything since the garden, flatly, for the facts of it. The fair hair. The easy strength in how he carried himself, a body built for moving and doing rather than for being looked at. A face the eye stopped on and then had to make itself leave because the beauty of it made it hard to behold. I marked it the way I marked the exits and the shadows, a fact about the room, and let myself feel nothing about it, because the part of me that might once have felt something was bricked up behind a wall I had no intention of opening.

He moved through the shrine like a man moves through a thing that is his to look after. The old priest who kept the place was older than the building, bent nearly to the ground, and there were no maids and no acolytes, nothing the coppers could pay for. So he did the work himself. He swept the floor with a worn straw broom. He took down the paper lantern, trimmed and refilled it from a flask he had carried in, and hung it back. He carried water. He set the toppled offering-cups upright and wiped the dust from the low shelf where the poor left their poorer gifts, a coin, a bound stalk of rice, a single flower. He did the lowest work the place had, the work that in every house I had ever known fell to the people no one looked at, and he did it without hurry and without the smallest sign that he thought it beneath him, because plainly he did not.

He went last to the little sanctuary, to Sera in her worn stone, and from inside his coat he took something he had carried down wrapped with more care than the bread, and laid it at her feet. A single plum blossom, pale, barely opened.

The sight of it went through me like a flash. A small cold turn under the breastbone, and then the cold spread, a prickle up the back of my neck, my breath shortening before I understood it had, the body remembering something the mind would not hand over. A pale flower, white in moonlight, and a thing I did not want to look at standing just behind it in the dark. Then it was gone, slid back under before I could take hold of it. He bowed his head to the goddess of mercy with the flower of whatever was haunting me laid soft before her, and the pain in me eased without my understanding what had caused it or what had soothed it, and I let it go.

I watched him as the fox watches a field, measuring it for the harm in it, waiting for the thing under the kindness, the appetite, the angle, the price. The kindness of men had always turned out to be one of those for me. A bell hung over a snare.

I could not find it. I watched, and watched, and the harm I was braced for did not come, and not finding it unsteadied me worse than finding it would have. A threat I knew what to do with. A man who wanted nothing from me, I had forgotten how to stand in front of.

When the light had come up a little, the children came.

There were four of them, thin, quick, the kind that learn early where the food might be and how to be gone before anyone decides they are a nuisance. They did not edge in like that. They came in at a run, and one of the smallest went straight to him and threw both arms around his leg, and he laughed, low, and set down his broom, and got down off his feet to be among them at their own height. They had not come only for what he carried. They had come for him. It was in how they crowded him and talked over one another and showed him things, a found pebble, a loose tooth, and in how he gave each of them his whole attention as though it were the only thing he had to do that morning.

He had carried food down from the palace, I saw, more than one man’s breakfast and better than a poor shrine’s bread, wrapped quietly, the kind of thing a man takes when he is not strictly meant to take it. He broke it and shared it out among them, and that was not the moment that told me what he was. The moment was the smallest boy, who had a raw weeping scrape down one shin gone an angry colour, and how he drew the child a little aside and took from his coat a twist of waxed cloth with some pale ointment in it, and worked a little onto the hurt with two fingers, gentle, and pressed the rest into the boy’s grubby hand, and bent close and told him how to use it, when, how often, slow and clear, until the boy nodded that he had it. A man who knew this one child’s particular wound, and had thought of it before he came, and carried the cure down the hill in his coat. That is not charity. Charity is easy and public. This was the other thing, the patient unglamorous attention that no one applauds, given to a child the whole gilded city above us had decided did not exist.

Then he came toward the back of the shrine, where I knelt, and crouched a small distance off, not close, never close enough to crowd, and held out a portion of the bread to me.

He said little. Something low and easy, that I was welcome here, that there was more than enough. He did not ask who I was or why a hooded woman he had never seen knelt in the shadows of a poor temple before dawn. He held the bread out flat on his open palm, patient, asking nothing, the whole of the choice left with me, the offer a man makes to a creature that might bolt.

I had to bring a hand out of my sleeve to take it, and for half a breath I did not, because of what my hands had become. Then I reached, quickly, and kept the fingers curled under so the nails would not show, and took the bread, and drew the hand back into the sleeve as fast as I dared. He did not seem to notice, or if he noticed he did not let me see him notice, which amounted to the same kindness. I could barely shape the word for thank you, and what came out was rough and small, and he did not seem to need any more than that. He inclined his head, the same small courtesy he had given me once across a bright loud hall full of people who despised him, and went back to his work, and left me to eat in peace, and did not watch to see whether I did.

I ate the bread of a man I had come to use. It was the first food anyone had set in my hand from an open palm since I had been a fox in the cold, and my eyes stung, and I told myself it was the smoke off the lantern.

I sat in the shadow and watched the rest of the morning’s small work, and the strangest thing came over me, watching it. I knew this. Not him, but the work. The sweeping and the lamp and the water and the cups, the tending of a poor god’s poor house, this was the labour of my whole girlhood, the work that had fallen to me and the other temple-raised in my village while the men did the things men were given to do. I had done every one of these tasks a thousand times with my own hands. And here was a man of the emperor’s own elite doing them in the dark before dawn, not because anyone would see, not because it raised him, but because the floor needed sweeping and the lamp needed filling and there was no one else who would.

Watching him do my old work, I felt the thing come back into me that I had lost in a garden under a plum tree. Not happiness. I was a long way from that. But a kind of footing. A sense of being, for the length of one morning, among my own kind of work and my own kind of person, in a place that asked me to be nothing but what I already was. It was not him I was answering to. It was the place, the incense and the woodsmoke and the smell of plain bread, the bell-rope and the worn stone goddess, the whole spare devotional world I had been made in and thrown out of. The homecoming was to that. He only happened to be standing inside it. By the time the light came full through the broken roof, the calm had settled into me deep enough that I trusted my own shape again, and for a little while I simply knelt there and was a person, and it was enough.

* * *

That was when the woman came in.