Chapter 640: The Cut Page

The summons came for Isole in the afternoon, and it came the way everything in Aelstrom came, on the wind.

She was alone on the terrace below Valerica’s window, rolling bandages that did not need rolling, when the air beside her went still and a voice said, quite close to her ear, "Would you come up? I’d like to look at you too." Then the wind moved again, and there was nobody there.

She sat for a long moment with a half-rolled bandage in her hands.

Then she put it down, very neatly, and went to find the stair.

She did not stop at the six hundredth step. She stopped at the eight hundredth, because her legs were shaking and she was not too proud to admit it, and leaned against the cold stone with the wind pushing at her back until she could breathe again. Then she went on.

At the top, the old woman at the loom turned her head, and Isole saw her eyes.

Green and red. Emerald and scarlet. The same eyes that looked back at Isole from every mirror she had ever owned, and from no other face in the world. Not her mother’s. Not her grandmother’s. She had been told all her life that they were a flaw in the line, appearing once in a long while, never on anyone important.

"Ah," said Thessaly softly. "There you are."

Isole stood at the top of the stair and could not think of a single thing to say.

"Sit," said Thessaly. "Before you fall down. I said that to your young man this morning, and he didn’t listen either."

"He isn’t my..." Isole began, and stopped, because it was not true and the wind would know.

"No," Thessaly agreed placidly. "He’s not only yours. I’m aware. Five of you in one room, two nights running, and six breakfast trays." Her hands moved on the empty loom. "Everything is heard here eventually. I try not to listen. I’m very old and very bored, and I don’t always succeed."

Isole sat down on the stool with her face burning.

For a while neither of them spoke. The wind went through the open room, and through Isole, lightly and curiously, the way Samsara went through a patient. She felt it touch both halves of her, the light and the dark, and linger there, and move on.

"You know who I am," Thessaly said at last.

"I know your name. It’s in the margin of the family book." Isole kept her hands still in her lap. "Beside a page somebody cut out. Thessaly. Nothing else. When I asked my grandmother, she said it was a mistake in the binding."

"It was a mistake," Thessaly said. "Just not in the binding."

She stopped weaving.

"Three hundred and one years ago the sea came ashore, and I stood on it," she said. "With a great many others. When it went back down, the Church came to my mother and said that the Silver Wood had given the world its finest healer, and its bravest, and they’d like her to be the first High Saintess of a new line. To bless the shore. To stand between the people and the water, in white, forever." She looked at her own hands. "They meant me."

"And you said no."

"I said no. I had seen what stood on that shore. I didn’t want to bless it. I wanted to understand it." Thessaly smiled faintly. "So my sister said yes instead. She was a very good woman and a very good Saintess. Every High Saintess since has been her daughter, or her daughter’s daughter. Your mother is one of them." She tilted her head. "And they cut me out, because a family that produces Saintesses can’t have a woman in its book who was asked first and refused."

Isole found that her hands had folded themselves, left over right. She looked at them.

"Your mother wrote to me," Thessaly said. "Last week."

Isole’s head came up.

"Oh yes. The first letter from the Silver Wood in three hundred years. Four pages. It seems a girl with my eyes walked into a Church hall and unmade a blessing in front of the Emperor’s own seal, and the High Saintess would like the Palaces to understand that the Church considers it a grave offense, and that the girl is unwell, and that any Palace which shelters her will be making an enemy of the Eternal Light." Thessaly picked up a strand of nothing and laid it carefully across another. "I used it to light my stove. It’s a cold room."

Isole laughed. She did not mean to. It came out of her, sharp and helpless, and then she put both hands over her face and found that she was crying, and could not have said which had started first.

Thessaly let her. She went on weaving.

When Isole lowered her hands, the old woman was looking at her with an expression that nobody in Isole’s family had ever turned on her, not once in twenty years. It took her a moment to recognize it, because she had only ever seen it on Vane’s face.

It was pride.

"Do you know how long it’s been since anyone unmade a Church blessing?" Thessaly said. "Three hundred years. The last one was me. On the shore, the night before they asked me." Her hands moved again on the empty frame. "It’s not a flaw, child. It never was. It’s just the part of us they couldn’t use."

"I know," Isole said. Her voice shook. "I worked that out on the floor."

"Good. Then you don’t need me to tell you." Thessaly turned back to the loom. "I would like you to stay. I should say that plainly, since nobody else in our family ever says anything plainly. There’s a great deal I could teach you. About the shore, and the sea, and what I learned in three hundred years of not blessing it."

Isole thought about it. She thought about it properly, the way she would think about a diagnosis, because the offer deserved that.

Then she stood up.

"I’m going north," she said. "With them."

"I thought you might."

"I’m his healer." She hesitated. "And Ashe’s, and Valerica’s, and Nyx’s, and Mara’s. Someone has to be. They’re all idiots."

"So I’ve heard," said Thessaly, and for a moment her mouth curved in a way that made her look, quite suddenly, a great deal younger. "Come back when they’ve stopped needing you. Or when you want to know what’s under the ice." She did not look up. "I’ll still be here. I’m always here. That’s rather the problem."

Isole came down the thousand steps slowly, with the wind at her back the whole way.

At the bottom, Vane was waiting. He was sitting on the last step with his elbows on his knees, and he did not ask her anything. He simply stood up when he saw her, and she walked into him and stayed there with her forehead against his chest until her breathing had gone back to normal.

"She has my eyes," Isole said into his coat.

"I saw."

"She knows about the breakfast trays."

He was quiet for a moment. "All of them?"

"All six," Isole said, and felt him start to laugh, and laughed too, helplessly, against him at the bottom of the stair, while the wind went on singing through the whole of Aelstrom over their heads.