Everything Kept

The faces came at the edge of sleep, the way they always had. There were only ever a few, close together, looking down at him the way people look down at someone sleeping, but he could never make them out. They were blurred past any recognition, and their voices, when they had voices at all, were too muffled to understand. But he knew them somehow. That much he knew, even if he couldn’t have said a single thing about them.

So he reached.

He would try every time, but it never worked. He could lean his whole mind against them, the way he’d lean on a stuck cask lid, and feel nothing give. And it came with a cost. It began as a pressure behind his eyes. Then came the headache, and the white light crowding in at the edges of his vision, and then the blood. More than once Dareth had found him on the floor in the morning, cold and weak, with blood dried under his nose and in his ears. Dareth would send for a Mender, sit by the cot while the Mender worked, and plead with him, quietly, to leave it alone. And every time, lying there under the Mender’s hands, he promised. They both knew he would try again.

This harvest the faces had come more nights than not, and he had reached for them every time.

On the night before the inspection, he lay on his cot above the cellar, and below him Dareth was still awake, walking the racks. The faces came, but not the same. They were laughing, warm and easy, the sound of people glad of something, and it was meant for him. He was sure of that too. He reached for it.

He pushed harder than he ever had. The pressure came, and the pain behind it, but he kept on, past the heat building in his skull, past the first warm thread from his nose. He pictured his mind as a pair of hands going out into the dark toward them, and the hands closed on nothing, and he reached again. The laughter thinned. The faces began to draw back, the way they always did, and the dark came up around him, and he knew he had lost them again.

Then, just before he went under, one voice came through perfectly clear.

“Ansel.”

Then nothing.

* * *

Ansel woke with a start, as though someone had jolted him from sleep, but he was alone. The pillow under his cheek was stiff with dried blood. Then he remembered.

“Ansel.”

Not muffled. Not a trick of the pain. His name, in a voice he almost knew. He lay very still, afraid that if he moved it would slip away. Outside, the shift bell rang across the ridge. Not the first bell. The second.

He was late.

He jumped out of bed, scrubbed the blood from his face, threw on yesterday’s clothes, and rushed downstairs. The gallery had to be ready for inspection before the Opening, and every cask had to be in order. Everything had to go perfectly. The voice would have to wait.

In the kitchen, he found Dareth as he always did. By the look of him, he hadn’t been to bed at all. He was at the counter, stirring vine syrup into his blackpress, which he only drank when his mood needed improving. Ansel winced. Not a good sign, today of all days.

Without looking up from his cup, Dareth said, “I could hear you last night.”

Ansel’s stomach dropped. He and Dareth got along in nearly everything but this, and this season had been short on easy mornings. He braced himself before replying. “Did you?”

“I did,” said Dareth, stirring his blackpress all the more vigorously. “Every time I hope it’s a trick of the wind, but we both know better.”

Ansel quickly thought of three or four lies he could tell, but none that would land as true, so he said nothing. Dareth set his spoon down on the counter and took a long sip before turning around to face him.

“I trust you understand the importance of this day? Twenty-one years that vintage has kept in the dark for Selvane, and tomorrow it opens.”

Ansel nodded.

“Can I not be spared one day, boy?”

“But, Master, I…”

Dareth raised his free hand to stop him. “Not today. You know my thoughts well enough. I’ve said them before. It is a reckless game you play, chasing the ghosts of things that never were. You have a good eye, best keep it for the truth.”

He turned back to the counter. Ansel looked down at his hands. There was still blood under his nails.

“You heard me,” Ansel said quietly, “and you left me there?”

“I turned your head so you wouldn’t choke,” Dareth said without looking back. “The rest you’d earned.”

No Mender, then. After a night like that, there had always been a Mender. It was harsh, but Ansel knew where it came from. He should have let it go, but the words were out before he could stop them.

“They said my name.”

The cup stopped halfway to Dareth’s lips. For a moment, no longer than a breath, he didn’t move at all. Then he drank, set the cup down, and turned around, his face perfectly calm. Ansel had seen the pause. He wasn’t sure Dareth knew he had. Dareth didn’t miss things. Not usually.

“Dreams say all sorts of things,” he said. “Eat something. There’s much to do today. The gallery must be readied. And tomorrow you carry the cutting.”

He said it as though Ansel could have forgotten. In every cellar in Hushvault, the cellarer carried the cutting in until his apprentice had seen a cask through, from its first mark to its Opening, and plenty of apprentices never stayed long enough. Tomorrow’s cask had been Ansel’s first mark. He had been waiting for this one longer than he cared to admit.

“I’m going,” Ansel said, and turned for the gallery door.

“Not this time. I’ll do it myself.”

Ansel stopped with his hand on the latch. For a moment he was sure he’d misheard. For as long as he could remember, Dareth had never readied the gallery without him. Every inspection, every Opening, the two of them walked the racks together, Dareth tapping each cask and listening while Ansel chalked the marks behind him. A cellar was only as good as the hands that knew it, Dareth liked to say, and he had spent years making sure Ansel’s knew this one. On the day before an Opening, of all days, he didn’t want him?

Ansel turned around. “The inspectors…”

“Have seen a cask before.” Dareth had his back to him again. His spoon was going round and round in the cup, though the syrup must have dissolved long ago. “I will see to it myself. The cutting wants fetching from the groves before last bell. Take Ferra with you. It’s hers to lay, after all.”

Ansel waited for more, but more didn’t come. There was only the scrape of the spoon. First the pause, and now this. He couldn’t make the two fit together, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that they did. Still, a day on the Steps with Ferra was better than a day on his knees between the racks. Perhaps it was a small kindness after the tension of the morning.

“If I find her, I will.”

* * *

It was a short walk from his cellar house through Hushvault, past the galleries other cellarers kept for Dunmarrow, Ravelle, Corriden and Morwal, each door clearly marked and kept as tidy as Dareth’s own. At the main gate, Hushvault opened onto the head of the market road. Ansel came out into the daylight and squinted against it until his eyes could ease. The air coming up from below was already warm, and it smelled of crushed fruit.

At harvest the market was the busiest ground on the Veylan Steps, and with an Opening tomorrow it was busier still. Beside the gate, coopers were knocking together the trestles for Selvane’s share casks, and the high line cages were already swinging out of their station toward Auvren. Overnight someone had hung red banners from every post along the road. Opening banners. Ansel had seen them go up for other vintages, but never this many, and never this early.

From the gate the road switched back and forth across the upper terraces, between the vines, and for its first few legs, all the way down to the bend where the lifts went down to the lower terraces, it was all market. Stalls lined both sides. The bakers’ ovens were already going, and the smell of warm bread rolled up the road to meet him. Estate stewards were setting out glasses on tables backed right up against their own vines, so a buyer could taste a vintage and see the rows it came from. The buyers were out already in their pale traveling coats. Ansel could tell the new ones by the way they kept stopping at the wall to look down. Every one of them would be at the Opening tomorrow.

On the third terrace, two below the gate, lay Selvane’s reserve rows, the estate’s oldest vines, still cut by hand. Every cask in Dareth’s gallery had started here, one for every harvest. While most estates had long since turned their lower terraces over to machines, Selvane swore no machine could judge fruit the way a picker could. Buyers paid as though they believed it. Somewhere among those rows a crew was singing, badly but with great conviction.

His stomach growled. Eat something, Dareth had said. He hadn’t. He’d been too busy wondering about Dareth to think of it. He heard Maudry before he even reached the third terrace.

“Look who the cellar finally coughed up!”

Maudry ran the hand crews on the reserve rows, and she ran them loud. She stood at the end of the third terrace with a basket on her hip and her sleeves rolled past the elbow, broad-shouldered and brown from the starlight. Half the crew looked up and grinned. The other half didn’t bother. They’d heard it all before.

“Second bell,” she called. “Second bell, and he strolls down like a buyer. Did Dareth finally lock you in with the casks, or did you forget which way was up?”

“Good morning to you too,” said Ansel, hopping down onto the terrace.

“Morning was an hour ago. You missed it.” She jerked her chin at the vines. “Third row in. She’s been at it since first bell, practicing. Don’t let her tell you she isn’t.”

He found Ferra halfway along the row. She was small and quick, a head shorter than Ansel, with a mass of dark curls tied back in a scrap of twine that was losing the fight. A whole harvest under Vya and Veo had freckled her nose and forearms, and her fingers were stained purple to the second knuckle. She was cutting clusters with a hooked knife and dropping them into the basket at her feet. Her lips were moving. Every few clusters she stopped, frowned at nothing, and started over.

He crept up behind her. “Is it ‘I bear the labor of the year’ or ‘I bring’?”

Ferra spun with the knife up, saw who it was, and didn’t lower it right away.

“Bear,” she said. “And if you ever do that again, I’ll bear your ears back to Dareth in a basket.” She looked him up and down. “That’s eleven.”

“Ten. The time with the lift doesn’t count,” he replied.

“The lift was your fault, and it counts.” She went back to cutting. “What was it this time?”

He opened his mouth to say he’d overslept, but she had already stopped cutting. She was looking at the side of his head. Ansel touched his ear. His fingers came away with flakes of dried blood he’d missed at the washbasin. Ferra didn’t say anything for a moment. She knew about the reaching. She was the only one besides Dareth who did, and the only one who never lectured him about it, which was somehow worse.

“You did it again,” she said.

“I heard something this time.”

She waited. He found he didn’t want to say it out loud on a terrace full of pickers, with Maudry laughing at the end of the row. Not yet.

“Later,” he said.

Ferra studied him a moment longer, then licked her thumb and scrubbed the rest of the blood from his ear before he could duck away.

“Have you eaten?” she asked.

“I…”

“You haven’t.” She dug into the satchel at her hip and pushed a heel of oil bread and a twist of dried fruit into his hands. “Hopeless. Go on.”

“This is your lunch.”

“It was my lunch. Now it’s your breakfast. Eat.”

He ate. The bread was still faintly warm from the bakers on the market road, and halfway through it he realized how hungry he’d been. Ferra watched him the way Dareth watched a cask he didn’t trust, and only went back to cutting when he’d finished.

“Dareth sent me for the cutting,” he said, brushing crumbs from his shirt. “He said to bring you since it’s yours to lay.”

The knife stopped.

“Today?”

“Before last bell.”

“But that’s…” Ferra looked down at the basket, then up the mountain, toward the high country where Auvren’s groves sat dark against the sky. “I’m meant to receive it. From the keeper. There are words for that, Ansel. Different words. I’ve only been practicing the ones for the cask.”

“So practice on the way,” Ansel said.

“What if I get them wrong?” she asked, mournfully, as though she already had.

“Then the keeper will tell you the right ones. The keeper’s heard every wrong version there is,” he replied.

“What if I drop it?” she asked.

“You won’t be carrying it. I will.”

She narrowed her eyes. “What if you drop it?”

“Then you’ll have something much more interesting to say at the Opening,” Ansel said, grinning.

That got a laugh out of her, small and startled, and some of the stiffness went out of her shoulders.

“Carys would pay good money to see that,” she said.

“Carys would pay good money to be the one carrying it.”

“She’s still telling anyone who’ll listen that it should have been her. Morwal’s cask came of age this harvest too, she says, and it’s every bit as good as Selvane’s, so she ought to be the one walking the court tomorrow.” Ferra stuck her nose in the air, the way Carys did. “Not some cellar boy who can’t find his way out of bed.”

“Only one cask opens in the light,” Ansel said, “and it’s always been Selvane’s.”

“That’s what I told her.” Ferra grinned. “She liked it even less from me.”

She wiped the knife on her apron, slid it into her belt, and hoisted the basket. Maudry met them at the end of the row and took the basket from Ferra without being asked.

“Go on, then,” she said. “I’ll find someone to fill your row.” She swept Ferra a bow so deep her braid brushed the dirt. “Your Witnessship.”

Ferra went red to the ears. “Don’t.”

“Your Most Gracious Witnessship.” Maudry straightened, still grinning, and turned to Ansel. “And you. Mind you’re back down before the high line fills up. Auvren’s a long ride, and the keeper likes to talk.”

They climbed back up through the market toward the high line station at the gate. In the short time Ansel had been on the terraces, the crowds at the market had become noticeably thicker. Fruit carriers shuffled between the stalls, the bakers shouted their prices over one another, and the buyers had multiplied, tasting at every table and pretending not to care about the noise. Ferra caught his sleeve so they wouldn’t be separated, still muttering her words under her breath. For no reason he could name, he thought of the faces. All too often his mind would drift to them. And now the voice. He wanted to tell Ferra everything, but her mind was on the words.

Halfway up, Ansel saw the woman. Behind the Dunmarrow estate table, a block of old vines ran right up to the low wall along the road. She was among them in a picker’s smock like a hundred others on the Steps, doing nothing anyone would look at twice. She walked slowly along the first row with one hand trailing over the leaves. But Ansel saw, and once he had, he couldn’t see anything else.

Everyone else on the road was exactly what they seemed, flat and ordinary. But she had a second shape beneath the first, warm and deep, and the vines knew it. Where her hand passed, the leaves turned toward her, and the grapes hung heavier than they had any right to. Farther down the block, Ansel could see frost scorch on the posts from the last long dark. These vines should have only given half a crop, but they were clearly full.

He didn’t have to reach. He didn’t have to do anything at all. He simply saw it, as plainly as he saw the wall.

“She’s a Quickener,” he said.

He hadn’t said it loudly, but the market chose that moment to fall quiet between shouts, and the man behind the table heard. He was broad and thick, with a Dunmarrow estate mark stitched on his collar, and he set down the jug he had been pouring from.

“What did you say?”

Ferra’s grip tightened on Ansel’s sleeve.

“Nothing,” Ansel said. “I only…”

“Quickener?” The steward laughed, loud enough for the buyers to hear. “Already had too much of the new wine, this one.” The two buyers at his table had stopped tasting anyway. Then he came around the table, and when he bent close his voice was low and not laughing at all. “Whose boy are you?”

Ansel understood, too late, what he’d done. Every estate on the Steps swore its vintages were made by weather and soil and nothing else, and every buyer paid for that promise. Half the estates probably hired Quickeners anyway, but nobody ever said so. Not on the market road, and definitely never in front of buyers.

“Ansel!”

The voice came from behind them, warm and delighted, and a hand landed on his shoulder. Ansel turned to find Tolliver smiling down at him. Tolliver came to Tiravel every harvest to buy for houses offworld, and always looked as though he’d stepped out of a better-kept world: a long purple coat with no crease in it, silver at his temples, a ring on each hand. He still smelled faintly of ship air. Cellar agents like him were always first off at the port, and Tolliver made sure to be the first among them.

“Dareth’s boy,” Tolliver told the steward pleasantly, “and the best eye on the Steps, which is why I listen when he talks. He’s right, you know.”

The steward’s face darkened, but Tolliver went on before he could speak.

“Those rows came in quick, after a frost like that. I said the same thing myself on the way up from the port.” He let his gaze travel down the block, admiring. “Whatever you’re feeding that soil, Steward, I’d like a word about your allocation before the other houses hear of it.”

For a long moment the steward looked from Tolliver to Ansel and back again. Behind him, the buyers had gone back to tasting, though more slowly than before. Whatever the steward wanted to say, he couldn’t say it without saying the rest.

“Come by the house this afternoon,” he said at last, and went back behind his table.

“I will,” said Tolliver, and steered them away up the road with his hand still on Ansel’s shoulder. He didn’t let go until they reached the high line.

“Thank you,” Ferra said.

“Thank me by getting him off this road.” Tolliver turned to Ansel, and for a moment the pleasant look slipped into something more careful. “A good eye is a fine thing in a cellar. Out here, it’s best left capped. Not everything kept is yours to open.” Then the smile was back, as easy as before. “Give Dareth my regards. Tell him I came in early.”

He was gone into the crowd before Ansel could answer. The high line was nearly empty. Ferra waited until the cage had pulled clear of the market before she rounded on him.

“That was stupid,” she said.

“I know.”

“In front of buyers, Ansel. The day before…” She stopped and took a breath. “How did you even know?”

“I saw her.”

“Saw her what?”

He didn’t know how to answer that. People said he had a good eye, the way they said Dareth had a good nose, and Ansel had always let them. It was easier than trying to explain that some things simply showed themselves to him, whether he wanted them to or not.

Ferra looked at him for a long moment, the way she did whenever she was deciding whether to believe him. Whatever she decided, she didn’t say. She shook her head and went back to her words, and Ansel looked down at the market falling away beneath them. He hadn’t even tried. Last night he had reached until he bled, and all he had to show for it was a single word. Today, without lifting a finger, he had looked straight through a stranger as if she were made of glass. It worked on everything else. Why not on them?

Below them the whole of the Steps opened out. The market road zigzagged down from the gate to the bend, red with banners, and beyond it the lower terraces fell away toward the basin, each held up by a frost wall older than anyone who worked it. Harvesters the size of beetles walked the rows on jointed legs, stripping the vines in a single pass and tipping the fruit into carriers that marched it up the switchbacks. Farther down, the vines gave way to orchard stairs and then to the gray-green oil groves and the basin floor. The port sat at the very bottom behind its retaining wall, the ships in their berths no bigger than seed husks from here. Hushvault’s ridge slid past beneath them, and a string of cask cars was crawling along the freight rail on the ledge under its lip, bound for the cooperages. Above the basin hung Oranth, banded blue and gold, as fixed in the sky as the mountain was in the ground.

It was only later, with the groves rising ahead of them, that he realized Tolliver had never asked how he knew.

The high line let them off at the foot of the Groves. Up here the air was thin and cold enough to bite, and the wind came hard off the heights, combing through the windbreaks with a sound like distant water. After the noise of the market, the quiet felt almost rude.

The Groves climbed the slope above them in narrow terraces, each held behind its own frost wall. The trees were nothing like the tidy vines below. They were old, older than anything on the Steps, their trunks split and twisted and thick as a man’s waist, their branches propped on stone crutches where they had grown too heavy to hold themselves up. Water moved quietly through the channels between them and gathered in cistern courts so still they held the sky.

On the open terraces by the station, nursery agents and buyers moved between the open graft beds with ledgers under their arms. Above them, past an iron gate, the restricted terraces climbed toward the graft houses, long low buildings of gray stone with their shutters closed against the wind. Ferra stopped at the gate and smoothed her curls back under the twine, which promptly gave up.

“How do I look?”

“Like a picker,” said Ansel.

“That’s not helpful,” she said, fiddling with her twine again.

“You are a picker. That’s the whole point.”

She glared at him, but she gave her name to the warden at the gate, who swung it open without a word, as though they had been expected. They found Ruthe, the keeper, on the second terrace, standing with one hand flat against the trunk of an ancient tree and talking to it in a low, steady voice. Ansel couldn’t make out the words. He never had. Maudry hadn’t been wrong; the keeper did like to talk. Just not, as far as Ansel had ever seen, to people.

She was small and stooped, with white hair cropped close to her skull and hands as brown and knotted as the wood she tended. A pruning knife hung from a cord around her neck. She finished whatever she was telling the tree, patted it twice, and turned to look at them with pale, knowing eyes.

“Dareth’s boy,” she said. “And the witness.”

Ferra opened her mouth, closed it again, and bobbed something that was almost a bow.

“Come,” said Ruthe. “The wood’s been waiting.”

The graft house was dim and cool and smelled of dirt. Racks ran the length of it, and on them lay bundles of cut wood wrapped in cloth, each tagged in a small, precise hand. At the far end, under a shuttered window, a single vine grew straight out of the stone floor. Its trunk was black and so twisted with age it looked more like rope than wood, and it climbed a frame to the rafters before spreading in every direction. There wasn’t a leaf on it.

“The mother vine,” the keeper said. “Every old row on the Steps came from her, one way or another. Most of them have forgotten it.” She ran her thumb along one bare cane, feeling for something only she could find. “She’s slept through the long dark. Sleeps through most things, now. But she knows when it’s time.”

She stopped at a cane no thicker than a finger, studied it for a long while, and nodded. The pruning knife came up. There was one clean cut, a soft click, and then she was holding a length of dark wood, knotted at the joints, no longer than her forearm.

She turned to Ferra. For a moment, nothing happened. Ferra stared at the cutting, and Ansel watched every word she had practiced all morning drain out of her face. The keeper waited. She didn’t seem to mind waiting.

“Who comes for the old wood?” she prompted gently.

Ferra swallowed. “The hands that bore the year.”

“And what will you give it?”

“A new… year.” Ferra winced. “No. Season. A new season.”

“Season,” the keeper agreed, as though Ferra had gotten it right the first time. She laid the cutting across Ferra’s open palms. “Then it’s yours to lay.”

Ferra let out a breath that seemed to go on forever. She held the cutting as if it might bite her.

“And who carries it?” said the keeper, and looked at Ansel.

He hadn’t known there would be words for him. He looked at Ferra, who looked back with wide eyes and no help at all.

“The cellar that kept the cask,” Ruthe said quietly, for him.

“The cellar that kept the cask,” Ansel repeated.

Ferra passed the cutting to him, and the keeper wrapped it in oiled cloth while he held it, her old hands quick and confident. That was when he saw it.

It came the way it had on the market road, without him asking. One moment he was holding a stick of dead black wood. The next, there was something folded tight inside it, small and green and patient, like a breath being held. Not dead. Not even close. Just waiting. He realized he had stopped moving. The keeper had stopped too. She was watching his face, not the wood.

“Most people see a stick,” she said.

Ansel didn’t know what to say to that, so he said the only true thing he could think of. “It’s waiting.”

Ruthe held his eyes a moment longer than he liked. Then she tied off the cloth and gave the bundle a small pat, the same way she had patted the tree.

“Everything kept is waiting,” she said. “The trick is knowing what for.”

The cage down was packed with buyers, just as Maudry had warned, and they rode in silence. Ferra kept glancing at the bundle in his arms, as though making sure it was still there. Ansel held it against his chest and tried not to think about Ruthe’s pale eyes, or Tolliver’s careful look, or the way Dareth’s spoon had gone round and round in the cup. Ferra left him at the head of the market road, where her way home led down the switchbacks. The ridge lamps were already dimming for the rest shift, and the red banners along the market road had gone the color of old wine.

“Tomorrow,” she said, and looked at the bundle in his arms as if she might never see it again. “Don’t drop it.”

“I won’t.”

“And you still owe me a later.”

He had forgotten. He opened his mouth, and for a moment the whole day crowded up behind his teeth: the voice, the woman in the vines, the green thing folded inside the wood. Then he remembered the way she had looked at him on the high line, deciding whether to believe him.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “After.”

She searched his face. Then she nodded and went off down the road, mouthing her words to herself, and the market swallowed her before the bend.

* * *

Hushvault was quiet. The cooperages had banked their fires, and the freight rail under the lip of the ridge had gone still. Ansel let himself into the cellar house and went straight through to see the racks.

The gallery was ready. Every cask had been tapped and turned and chalked, the aisles swept, the lamps trimmed low. He walked the first rack out of habit, down to the Opening cask on its cradle at the end, and found the marks in Dareth’s heavy handwriting where his own should have been. It was a strange thing to see, like coming home to find the furniture moved an inch to the left.

He walked the far rack too, all the way down, meaning to check the last cask the way he always did. Then he was back at the door with his hand on the frame, and he couldn’t remember turning around. He looked back down the aisle. The far rack ran off into the dark: the last cask, the bare wall, nothing else. Of course there was nothing else. He had walked it a thousand times. By the time he reached the kitchen, he had forgotten it entirely.

Dareth was still up. There was no blackpress this time. He sat at the table with his hands folded in front of him and stood when Ansel came in.

“You’re back. After last bell.”

“Only just,” said Ansel.

Dareth held out his hands. Ansel laid the bundle in them, and Dareth unwrapped one end of the oiled cloth and looked at the wood for a long moment. Whatever he saw there seemed to satisfy him. He wrapped it again and set it on the shelf above the hearth and stepped back.

“Ruthe well?”

“She was talking to a tree.”

The corner of Dareth’s mouth moved. “Then she’s well.”

Ansel almost left it there. He was already turning for the stairs when he remembered.

“Tolliver’s here. He sends his regards.” He hesitated. “He said to tell you he came in early.”

Dareth didn’t freeze, not the way he had that morning. If anything, he went the other way, slow and deliberate, reaching up to straighten the cutting on its shelf, though it was already perfectly straight.

“Did he,” Dareth said. It wasn’t a question.

“You knew he was coming.”

“Tolliver always comes.” Dareth lowered his hand. “Was there anything else? Anything at the market?”

Ansel thought of the steward’s face, and the buyers who had put down their glasses, and Tolliver’s hand steady on his shoulder all the way up the road.

“No,” he said. “Nothing.”

Dareth looked at him for a long time. Ansel made himself hold still under it. Then Dareth nodded once, as though agreeing to something neither of them had said.

“Get some sleep. Tomorrow will be long.”

Ansel was halfway up the stairs when Dareth spoke again, more quietly.

“Ansel.”

He looked back.

“Don’t reach tonight.” A pause. “Please.”

Ansel stood on the stair with his hand on the rail and found he had no answer at all. After a moment, he heard Dareth’s chair scrape back from the table, and he went up.

Ansel knew it was a fair thing to ask, and he wanted to keep it. He lay on his cot above the cellar with his hands at his sides and stared at the ceiling and meant it with everything he had. Below him, Dareth was walking the gallery. Ansel could hear him going slowly down the racks, the way he did when he couldn’t sleep either.

He thought about the voice. He thought about the woman in the vines, and the cutting, and how neither of them had cost him anything at all. He hadn’t reached. He had only looked. He had never tried simply looking at the faces. He told himself it wasn’t really reaching. Then he closed his eyes.

They were there, the way they always were, blurred and close and looking down at him. This time he didn’t lean on them. He didn’t reach. He let them be, the way he had let the woman in the vines be, the way the wood had let him see what was folded inside it, and he looked.

There was no pain.

The faces didn’t sharpen. But for the first time, he could see the blur itself. It wasn’t fog, and it wasn’t distance, and it wasn’t some fault in him. It lay over them like cloth, close and careful, tucked in at the edges.

Someone had wrapped them, the way Ruthe had wrapped the cutting, so that whatever was underneath would keep.

Then it came. At first it was small, a prickle at the back of his neck, and he almost let it go. But it didn’t go. It grew, and settled, and he could feel that the faces weren’t the only thing looking. Something else was, and not at them. At him. It had seen him.

His eyes snapped open. The room was empty. It didn’t feel empty. Below him, in the gallery, the footsteps had stopped.