Black water swallowed the lanterns first.
The procession moved through Mournhold at the crawl of the drowned, each footfall swallowed by the canal that had once been a boulevard. Aelis Vorath walked where she was pushed, and she was pushed by the shape of the morning, which was the shape of a hand around her wrist. The grip belonged to a tax-collector whose name she did not care to learn; the hand was cold and smelled of peat and something sweet beneath the peat, the way that brackish wells sometimes smelled sweet in summer. She cataloged this because cataloging was the thing that kept her upright. Cataloging was the scribe's reflex, and the scribe's reflex was the only thing she owned that no one in this city could take.
Above her, the sky was the color of an old bruise. Below her, the canal licked at the cracked paving stones and the procession's reflection walked beside it, faint, rippling, a procession of ghosts stitched to the procession of bodies by a single ribbon of black glass. Thirty-three tributes. Thirty-three children of the inland vassal-houses, dressed in mourning-white and bearing no torches, because torches would have invited the dead to follow, and the dead were not permitted to follow. They had been told this. They had been told this by the chained singers who flanked them at every crossroads.
The chained singers wailed their Litany of Teeth. The sound was not beautiful. The sound was a craft, a thing assembled from older sounds the way a corpse is assembled from older corpses. The singers had iron collars, and from the collars hung lengths of chain, and from the chains hung small bones that clicked and clattered as the singers swayed. The bones were not musical. They were meant to drown something out. When the wind shifted, Aelis heard, beneath the Litany, the faint and arrhythmic knocking of doors underwater, the kind of knocking that does not come from a hand.
She did not flinch. She had been told that flinching was permitted but unbecoming. She had also been told that flinching would be punished later, and that later was not a metaphor in Mournhold. The tax-collector's grip tightened. She did not look at his face. She had looked once, at the start of the procession, when the gates had opened and the drowned city had exhaled its morning breath into hers, and she had seen that his face was a careful mask of courtesy. Courtesy here was a kind of architecture. It was built to be looked at, and to be relied upon, and to collapse at the right moment.
Ahead, the canal widened into what had once been the Plaza of Eleven Fountains. The fountains were gone now. In their place rose the Feeding Stage, a long black dais of bog-iron and old oak, draped in moss-colored cloth. The Crown's stewards stood upon it in a row, each wearing the small silver mask of his office. They did not move. They were waiting for the procession the way a mouth waits for a morsel, which is to say with attention, and with patience, and with no particular mercy.
Aelis was not the first tribute to mount the stage. She was the seventh.
The first six stood in a row, barefoot on the cold oak, their white mourning-clothes soaked to the knees by the water that seeped up through the planks. The water was not stagnant. It moved. It moved in the small, deliberate way that water moves when it knows it is being watched. Aelis took her place at the end of the row. The tax-collector released her wrist and stepped back. The absence of his grip felt, for a moment, like a kind of amputation.
"Children of the vassal-houses," said a steward, "the Crown receives you."
The steward wore a mask of beaten silver shaped into a serene, almost maternal face. The face was a lie. The face was the kind of lie that wears itself so comfortably it has forgotten it is wearing anything. Aelis stared at a point just above the mask, at the small brass bell that hung from the steward's hat by a ribbon of black silk. The bell did not ring. She listened for it anyway. Listening was the other thing that kept her upright.
"The Crown receives you," the steward repeated, "and the Crown thanks you for the gift of your names."
A child's name was spoken. A child stepped forward. The name was Yara of House Felk. Aelis did not know her. Yara of House Felk was nine years old, perhaps, and small for nine, and her mourning-clothes had been hemmed twice. She walked to the lip of the dais. A clerk in the shadows of the stage wrote her name into a ledger that was bound in something that was not leather and was not paper and was, in any case, already wet. The clerk's pen made the sound of a beetle crossing a windowpane.
Yara of House Felk did not come back.
The next child stepped forward. The next child's name was spoken. The next child did not come back. Aelis counted them. She counted them because counting was the third thing that kept her upright, and because she had promised herself, somewhere on the road into Mournhold, that she would remember the order in which the names were taken. She had also promised herself that she would not cry. The second promise was harder. She broke it twice, very quietly, into the sleeve of her mourning-clothes. The sleeve absorbed the small, hot proofs and gave nothing back.
When her turn came, she walked to the lip of the dais because her legs carried her, and her legs had been trained by older griefs to carry her when her mind would rather have stayed where it was. She stood where Yara had stood. She looked down at the water. The water looked back. She did not recognize the face it returned to her. The face was thinner than the one she remembered.
"Name," said the clerk.
"Aelis," she said, and then, because her grandmother had taught her that names were not to be given whole to strangers, "of the line that is no longer spoken."
The clerk's pen hesitated. The clerk looked up. The clerk was a small man, and the small man had the kind of eyes that notice the size of a thing before they notice its nature. He saw that she was older than the others. He saw that her mourning-clothes had not been hemmed at all. He saw that her hands, when she held them at her sides, were the hands of a scribe. He saw all of this in the time it took a beetle to cross a pane.
"Line," the clerk said.
"The Vorath line," she said.
There was a silence. The Litany of Teeth continued beneath the silence, the way a river continues beneath ice. The chained singers swayed and clicked. The clerks at the ledger looked at one another in the small, furtive way that clerks look at one another when a name has been spoken that is not in the columns they have prepared. Aelis held her face still. Holding one's face still is a kind of magic. Her grandmother had taught her this too.
The serene-faced mask turned toward her. Beneath the mask, the steward's mouth opened and closed twice. The mask did not smile. The mask did not frown. The mask was the face that Mournhold wore when it was deciding whether to eat a thing.
"The Vorath line," the steward said, at last, "is not a vassal-house."
"No," Aelis said.
"The Vorath line is the line that was," the steward said.
"Yes," she said.
"The line that was is not permitted to give tribute."
"No," she said. "And yet here I am."
Another silence. The Litany clicked beneath it. Somewhere in the drowned city, a door knocked underwater. The clerk's pen waited above the ledger like a small black bird. The steward tilted his head. The motion was precise, courteous, and very dangerous.
"Here you are," the steward agreed. "And the Crown receives you. The Crown, child, receives everything."
He raised one gloved hand. The hand did not signal. The hand simply rose, the way a moon rises, with a kind of slow inevitability that does not require an audience. At the top of its arc, the hand paused. Aelis saw, for the first time, that the steward's glove was not empty. There was a thing in the palm. The thing was small and round and wet, and it caught the bruise-colored sky in its small wet surface.
It was an eye.
The eye did not blink. The eye was not looking at anything, because the eye was no longer attached to anything that could look. It was a payment. It was a tax. It was the kind of thing that the swamp-priests accepted when a name was spoken that did not belong on the page it had been spoken onto.
"Name," the steward said, "in full."
Aelis looked at the eye in his palm. She looked at it for three heartbeats. Her grandmother had told her, once, that the swamp-priests kept the eyes of the disobedient in jars of vinegar and brine, and that the eyes watched the brine the way prisoners watch the wall of a cell that has no windows. She had not believed her grandmother. She believed her grandmother now.
"Aelis Vorath," she said.
The clerk's pen descended. The pen made its small, dry sound. The steward lowered the hand. The eye, whatever it had been before it became an eye, was set down upon the edge of the dais like a coin offered in tribute to a god who collected coins.
"Welcome," said the steward, "to the Crown."
Aelis did not move. She was told, then, that she was permitted to descend into the water. She was told that the water was a kindness. She was told that the water would carry her where she needed to be carried. She was told this by a clerk who did not look up from the ledger. She was told this in the small, indifferent voice that clerks use when they have written a name they will not need to write again.
She descended.
The water was not cold. She had expected it to be cold, the way that deep wells are cold, the way that grief is cold when it is first put on. It was not cold. It was the temperature of a living mouth. It received her with the small, sucking hospitality of a mouth that has been waiting to receive. She felt it climb her mourning-clothes. She felt it find the places where her sleeves had been dampened by the proofs she had given to the cloth. It found them and did not refuse them. It took them in, the way a confessor takes in a confession, without judgment and without forgetting.
She walked. The procession of skulls was waiting beneath the surface. They had been arranged, she realized, by some industry that did not belong to the living. They had been arranged in rows. The rows had been arranged into aisles. The aisles led, with the patient geometry of a cathedral, toward a small square of standing-room where a girl was waiting.
The girl was not chained. The girl was not singing. The girl was standing in the water up to her waist, and the water was not cold for her either. The girl was perhaps twelve, perhaps thirteen. She had the kind of face that does not finish drawing itself until late. Her eyes were open, but they were not seeing. They were not seeing in the way that a window is not seeing when the house behind it has gone out. They were clouded, but the cloud was not the cloud of blindness. The cloud was the cloud of a girl who had been made to look at too many things that did not return her look, and who had decided, at some cost, to stop looking back.
"You," the girl said.
Aelis stopped. The water moved around her knees.
"Me," Aelis said.
"You're the one who wrote her name down."
"No," Aelis said. "The clerk wrote my name. I only said it."
"Same thing," the girl said. "Names said are names given. Names given are names taken. Names taken are names put down. Names put down are not erased. Names not erased are what the Crown eats."
The Litany clicked faintly above them, as if to confirm this.
"Who are you," Aelis said.
"Ysolde," the girl said. "I taste lies."
"I have not told any," Aelis said.
"You have told many," Ysolde said. "You have told yourself that you are not afraid. You have told yourself that counting will keep you upright. You have told yourself that the cold of this water is a temperature and not a mouth. You have told yourself these things, and you have believed them, and that is the particular flavor of a lie that has been told so often it has forgotten it is a lie."
Aelis did not speak for a time. The water moved around her.
"You taste that," Aelis said, at last.
"I taste that," Ysolde said.
"Then why," Aelis said, "have you not drowned it out."
Ysolde tilted her head. The motion was not courteous. It was the motion of a bird that has heard a sound it did not expect.
"Because," she said, "it is the only flavor I have left."
Above them, the chained singers swayed and clicked. The Litany of Teeth descended through the surface in broken, brittle pieces, the way sunlight descends through cracked ice. Aelis stood in the water with the girl who tasted lies, and the water was not cold, and the water was not a mouth, and the water was a mouth, and the water was waiting, with the patient geometry of a cathedral, for them to walk further into it.
She walked. Ysolde walked beside her. The procession of skulls parted for them, and the procession of skulls closed behind them, and the sound it made when it closed was the sound of a door that has been shut by no hand.
The water received them like a congregation receiving heretics, with silence and the particular attention of a thing that already knew what would be said. Aelis felt the silt between her toes and thought of ink. The bottom of the drowned road was layered with it, black and patient, the sediment of a thousand processions that had come before.
Ysolde stopped where the water reached her sternum. Her breath made small clouds on the air, though the water was not cold. Her eyes were on the far wall of the chapel, where the altar had once stood, where the altar still stood, though the stones of it had softened into something that was no longer entirely stone.
"There," Ysolde said. "He will be there."
Aelis did not ask who Ysolde meant. She had begun to suspect that Ysolde's mouth and Ysolde's mind were not always in negotiation. The ferrywoman's tongue moved like a thing that had been trained to speak when the rest of her had been trained to endure. The words she spoke were often not the words she chose.
The procession of skulls lined the submerged nave. They had stopped their swaying. They had arranged themselves, with the silent industry of things that are very old, into something that resembled an audience. The eye sockets were dark, and the dark in them was the dark of a door that has been opened onto a room that has no floor.
Aelis walked. The water took her weight and did not give it back. She felt, beneath the silt, the bones of older tributes, and she did not think of Maren. She thought of the taste of dates in the Eastern markets before the Usurpation. She thought of the sound the wind made through the cypress rows at the Vorath summerhouse. She thought of anything that was not Maren, and the shard in her chest, which had been a dull ember since she entered the water, began to glow.
It glowed in the way a coal glows when breath is blown upon it. It glowed in the way a wound glows when the bandage has been removed and the air touches what was never meant to see air. The glow was not light. It was the memory of light, held in a thing that had forgotten how to let light go.
Ahead, in the space where the altar had been, a shape resolved through the murk. It was tall. It was bent. It wore robes that had once been white and were now the color of a thing that has been left too long in a pond. Its hands were visible, pale, long-fingered, holding something small and metallic at its breast. A breath. A mechanism. An apparatus of inhalation and exhalation that clicked with each cycle.
Brannoc the Leech-Lord turned to face them as they entered the apse.
"Ladies," he said. "You honor me."
His voice was the voice of a man who has learned to speak from the diaphragm and has unlearned the habit of pausing for breath. The apparatus clicked in counterpoint to his words. He smiled. The smile was the smile of a man who has been promised a thing and has come to collect it.
Aelis said nothing.
"The water has not been kind to you," Brannoc said. He did not move toward them. He did not need to. The chapel moved toward them instead, the walls contracting by fractions, the skulls in the procession turning their empty faces toward the two women as sunflowers turn toward a sun that has forgotten to set.
"We were told," Aelis said, "to walk."
"You were told," Brannoc agreed. "You have been told many things. You have been told to walk. You have been told to kneel. You have been told to give what is owed. And you have come, as all of them come, believing that you have come because you wished to come. That is the particular mercy of the Crown. It allows you the fiction of choice, until the fiction has served its purpose."
Ysolde's hand found Aelis's wrist beneath the water. The grip was not gentle. It was the grip of a woman who had held many wrists in many waters and had learned which grips were affection and which were instruction.
"Watch," Ysolde said. "Watch what he does. Watch what he takes."
Brannoc inclined his head. "The ferrywoman speaks. I had not thought the ferrywoman still had a tongue. I had thought the Crown took it, along with the rest."
"The Crown took many things," Ysolde said. "It did not take my tongue. It took the use of my tongue. There is a difference, my lord, and you know it well, for you have spent your life in the practice of it."
Brannoc's smile did not waver. The apparatus clicked. From the far end of the chapel, from the shadow behind the altar, another shape emerged. It was a tribute. A man, young, broad-shouldered, wearing the soaked rags of one who had walked the drowned road believing he was walking toward a judgment. His eyes were wide. His mouth was open. He was not screaming because he had forgotten how.
"Behold," Brannoc said. "The fullness of the flesh-tax."
He raised one long hand. The apparatus at his breast clicked once, twice, and then continued clicking at a rhythm that was no longer his own. The young man staggered. His chest caved inward by a finger's width. Then by two. Then by a hand's width. The sound it made was not the sound of breaking. It was the sound of pouring. The sound of a thing being poured from one vessel into another, from a place where it had been kept warm into a place where it was wanted.
Aelis watched. She had commanded herself to watch. She watched because Ysolde had told her to watch, and because the thing she had come to do required her to see what she had come to do, and because the shard in her chest was pulling at her gaze like a fish on a line.
The young man's chest deflated further. His knees struck the water. His hands clutched at the silt. The apparatus at Brannoc's breast clicked louder, faster, with the greedy industry of a thing that has been starved and has at last been seated at a table. Brannoc's color improved. The gray left his cheeks by degrees. The pallor left his lips. He became, in the space of a dozen breaths, something that resembled a living man.
The young man did not scream. He did not have the breath for screaming. What he did was worse. He looked at Aelis. He looked at Aelis with the full weight of his recognition, and the recognition said, I was you, and you will be me, and the only difference is the order.
The young man's eyes dimmed. The young man's chest stilled. The apparatus clicked on, alone now, sustaining the man who had taken the other man's last measure of air.
"There," Brannoc said, to the empty air. "The transaction is complete. The Crown has been fed. The Crown is pleased."
Aelis's knees did not buckle. Aelis's stomach did not heave. Aelis stood in the water and felt the shard in her chest flare from ember to coal, from coal to a small, insistent sun.
Ysolde's grip on her wrist tightened.
"Now," Ysolde said. "It begins."
The vision did not arrive. It erupted. It came up through the floor of her skull the way a diver comes up from a depth, all at once, with the violence of a thing that has been held down too long. The drowned chapel vanished. Brannoc vanished. Ysolde's hand vanished. The water vanished.
Fire.
The fire was everywhere and was not fire. It was the memory of fire, the afterimage of a conflagration that had burned a hundred years ago and had left its stain on the inside of Aelis's eyelids. She stood in a corridor of black stone. The stone was wet. The stone wept. The walls wept. The ceiling wept. Everything wept the same thick, slow tears, and the tears smelled of brine and of eels.
A figure walked toward her through the fire.
He was tall. He was bent. He wore a crown that was not a crown. It was a circlet of living eels, woven through hair that had once been black and was now the gray of a thing that has outlived its intention. His robes were the robes of a king, but the robes were soaked, and the soaking had gone on for so long that the cloth had begun to remember the shape of the water it had come from.
He walked through the fire and the fire did not touch him. The fire parted for him the way the procession of skulls had parted for Aelis, with the silent, servile geometry of a thing that has been commanded to make way.
He stopped before her. His eyes were the eyes of a man who has seen his own death many times and has learned to be on speaking terms with it.
"Child of my line," he said. "I am Vorath. I am the Mireborn. I am the thing the Crown has made of me, and the thing the Crown has not made of me, and the distance between the two is the distance you must cross."
Aelis tried to speak. Her mouth would not open. The shard in her chest had grown so hot that she could feel it in her teeth, in the roots of her hair, in the small of her back where the skin meets the spine.
"You are wondering," the figure said, "why you were chosen. You are wondering what the shard is. You are wondering whether the choosing was ever yours."
He raised one hand. The eels in his crown lifted their heads. They regarded her with the patient, lidless attention of things that have been waiting since before the waiting had a name.
"The shard," he said, "is a piece of what I was. A piece of what the Crown took. A piece of what was returned to me in the moment of my drowning. The Crown eats, child. The Crown eats everything. But what the Crown eats, it does not always digest. Some things pass through. Some things are preserved. Some things are given back, in a different shape, to a different heir, in a different hour."
He stepped closer. The eels swayed.
"You are the different heir. You are the different hour. And the shard has remembered, all this time, what it was. And what it was, child, was a fragment of a king. And the fragment has been waiting, in the chest of my line, for the moment when the chest would be opened."
Aelis found her voice. The voice was a rasp. The voice was a thing that had been dragged across gravel.
"What," she said, "was the king."
The figure smiled. The smile was not Brannoc's smile. Brannoc's smile was a transaction. This smile was a ruin.
"The king," he said, "was a man who made a bargain with a thing that was not a god and was not a man. The king wanted a crown that could not be taken. The thing wanted a throat that could not be filled. The bargain was struck. The bargain has been kept. And the keeping of it has eaten my line, and will eat my line, until the line ends or the bargain is broken."
He leaned close. The brine of his breath reached her. It smelled of the drowned road.
"You," he said, "are the end. Or the breaking. I cannot see which. The eels cannot see. The Crown cannot see. Only you, child, can see. And you will see, soon, when the water closes over you and the shard finishes what it was placed in you to finish."
He stepped back. The fire began to close around him.
"Wait," Aelis said. "How do I break it."
The figure paused. The eels turned their heads. The fire roared. The walls wept.
"You break it," he said, "the way all bargains are broken. From the inside. With the thing that was given."
He raised his hand. The eels lifted. The vision tore.
Aelis came back to the water like a diver coming back too fast, the pressure of the chapel slamming into her ears. Ysolde's hand was still on her wrist. Brannoc was still at the altar. The young man's body was still in the silt. The apparatus at Brannoc's breast clicked on, faithful, tireless, fed.
The shard in her chest was no longer hot.
It was cold.
It was the cold of a thing that has been told what it is, and has remembered, and is waiting to be used.
It is a strange thing, to feel cold in a place where the water is warm.
Aelis stood at the altar's edge and did not move. The apparatus at Brannoc's breast kept its faithful rhythm. The young man's blood darkened the silt between her feet. Ysolde's hand remained on her wrist, the calluses pressing familiar, the grip tight enough to bruise.
"He spoke to you." Brannoc's voice came soft and solicitous, the Wetlands drawl curling the words like smoke. He had not looked up from the slab. His hands continued their slow work on the dead man's face, peeling it like a mask. "He spoke to you, child. I watched the whole of it. I watched you go away and come back. I watched your mouth move when no one else's mouth moved. I have seen this before. I have seen it many times."
Aelis did not answer.
"I have seen it," he went on, patient as a priest at a deathbed, "in every heir the Crown has taken. The water speaks. The dead speak. The eels speak. There is no one who does not speak to an heir of the Mireborn line, in the end. The line is a mouth. The Crown is a tongue. And you, child, are the throat."
She still did not answer. The shard in her chest sat like a stone at the bottom of a well.
Ysolde spoke instead. "Brannoc."
"Ferrywoman."
"The children."
"What of them?"
"You know what of them." Ysolde's voice was a blade wrapped in a rag. "There are four in the pen tonight. I counted them from the ridge before we came down. There were eight at the dawn count. There will be two at the dawn count tomorrow. You have been feeding well."
Brannoc paused. He set down the lancet. He straightened, the apparatus clicking and hissing, the green eye at his collar-bone fixing on Ysolde with the wet patience of a thing that has all the time there is.
"Ferrywoman," he said, "you speak to me of feeding, and yet you stand here on my floor, having eaten my salt, having passed through my door, having opened my chain, having drunk from my cup. You speak to me of feeding as though I were the only mouth in the room." He spread his long hands. "The Crown feeds. The Crown must feed. The bargain must be kept. And the keeping of it has spared the rest of the line, which is a mercy you have not considered, because you are a woman of the river and the river does not think of mercy, only of flow."
"The children," Aelis said. Her voice was hers again. It was thin. It was the voice of a woman who has just been told what she is by a dead king in a flooded chapel. But it was hers.
Brannoc looked at her.
"There are children," Aelis said, "in the pen. And tomorrow there will be fewer. And the day after that fewer still. And the day after that, when the barge comes again, there will be none, and you will need to find more, and you will go into the drowned roads and take them from the people who are already too few."
"Yes," Brannoc said. He did not look away.
"And the Crown will eat them."
"Yes."
"And the bargain will be kept."
"Yes."
"And nothing you have done," Aelis said, "nothing you have ever done, has been for the line. It has been for the Crown. You have kept the line alive because the line is the throat. You have kept me alive because I am the throat now. And when I am fed to it, you will find the next one, and you will keep that one alive, and that one will be the throat, and the Crown will eat, and the bargain will be kept."
"Yes," Brannoc said again. He did not flinch. He did not deny. He bowed, slow and theatrical, the apparatus sighing at his breast. "Yes, child. You see, at last, how it works. I had hoped you would not see until after. I had hoped it would be a kindness. But you are a Vorath, and the Voraths have always seen too soon. It is the family talent. It is the family curse."
He straightened. He picked up the lancet again.
"I will ask you once," he said, "and then I will not ask again. Will you walk of your own will to the chamber of the taking? Will you give yourself to the Crown, and spare the children, and end the feeding for this season, and let the river go quiet for one more turn of the wheel?"
The chapel was silent except for the water and the apparatus and the slow creak of the boards above.
Aelis looked at the dead man on the slab. She looked at his peeled face, at the soft white of the thing beneath, at the architecture of muscle and bone that Brannoc had laid bare with the patience of a man who has done this ten thousand times. She looked at the green eye at Brannoc's collar-bone, and she saw that it was not looking at her. It was looking past her. It was looking at something in the water at the far end of the chapel, something that was moving toward them through the silt and the dim.
Something that had been waiting in the silt of the altar since they came in. Something that the eels had been watching. Something that the apparatus had been feeding.
She did not answer Brannoc's question.
She looked at Ysolde.
"Ferrywoman," she said. "If I asked you to do a thing that broke your oath, would you do it?"
Ysolde's hand tightened on her wrist. "I have already broken it," she said. "I brought you here. The oath was to keep you safe. The oath is broken."
"If I asked you to break it again," Aelis said. "Further."
Ysolde was silent for a long time. The water lapped. The apparatus clicked. The dead king's face, half-peeled, half-yours, stared up at the rafters with the patience of a thing that has all the time there is.
"Further than I have already gone," Ysolde said at last, "there is no further. There is only the end of the road. Ask me."
"The children," Aelis said.
"Yes."
"How many are in the pen."
"Four."
"How many guards."
"One. The one you strangled. There will be another on the wall. There is always another on the wall."
"Then there is one," Aelis said. "On the wall. And four children. And the corpse-cart that goes down to the lower warrens at dawn."
Ysolde looked at her for a long time. Then she let go of Aelis's wrist. She stepped back. She bowed, low, the way she had bowed once before in a life that belonged to a different woman, the way she had bowed when the old lord of the line had ridden out to the drowned roads and she had been the youngest of his sworn-servants, and the road had been a road, and the river had been a river, and the oath had been an oath.
"You are not the lord of the line," she said, "and I am not what I was. But if this is what you are asking, then this is what I will do. And if we are killed for it, then we are killed for it. And if the Crown comes for us, then the Crown comes for us. And if the line ends tonight, then the line ends tonight. But the children do not go into the silt."
Brannoc had stopped working. He was looking at them. The green eye was looking at them. His long hands were still on the lancet, but they were not moving.
"You would take the children," he said, "and you would run. And you would hide. And you would think that you have saved them. But you have only delayed the feeding. The Crown must feed. The bargain must be kept. And if the throat runs, then the Crown will find a new throat, and the line will be hunted to its last drop, and every child of the drowned roads will pay for what you have done here tonight. Every child. Every village. Every hamlet on the water. I have seen it done before, child. I have seen the line hunted. I have seen the rivers run red with the paying of it. And I am telling you, as a man who has kept the line alive for sixty years, that the kindest thing you can do is to walk to the chamber and lie down and let the Crown take what it is owed, so that the rest may live."
Aelis looked at him. She looked at the green eye. She looked at the apparatus at his breast, and the hose that ran from it into the water, and the water that ran from the water into the altar, and the altar that ran from the altar into the Crown. And she thought of the dead king in the vision, who had been the first of the line, who had made the bargain, who had set the eels in the silt and the shard in the heir and the apparatus in the priest.
"You have kept the line alive," she said. "You have not kept it alive because you love the line. You have kept it alive because you are the mouth that feeds the Crown, and without the line you would have nothing to feed it. You are the steward of the feeding. You are the belly that wants to be filled. You have dressed yourself in courtesy and you have spoken to me of mercy, but you are the mouth, Brannoc. You have always been the mouth."
Brannoc did not answer. His hands had gone still on the lancet. The green eye did not blink. The apparatus clicked and clicked and clicked.
"The bargain," Aelis said, "is kept by the feeding. If the feeding stops, the bargain is broken. If the throat refuses, the Crown must find another way. If the heir walks away, and the children walk away, and the line walks away, then the Crown will have nothing but the silt and the eels and the apparatus and you. And you, Brannoc, are not the throat. You are the mouth that wants to be fed. And if the throat goes, then the mouth has nothing to do but chew on itself."
She turned to Ysolde.
"The children," she said. "Tonight. Now."
"Now," Ysolde said.
They turned and walked toward the stairs. The water closed around their boots. The apparatus clicked behind them, faster now, the green eye tracking them across the chapel with the wet, unblinking patience of a thing that has been promised a meal and is beginning to suspect it will not arrive.
Brannoc did not follow them.
His voice followed them instead, soft and solicitous, curling up from the altar like smoke.
"Child," he said. "Aelis of the line. Heir of the Mireborn. Throat of the Crown. You may walk out of this chapel. You may take the children. You may run to the drowned roads and hide in the warrens and think that you have won. But the shard is in you. The shard is what I planted in you when you were a baby in the basket in the rain. The shard is what I fed for sixteen years in the silt of the river, in the altar of the chapel, in the apparatus at my breast. The shard is the Crown's tooth. And the tooth," he said, "does not let go of the mouth."
Aelis did not turn around.
She walked up the stairs with Ysolde at her side, and the water ran from her boots in dark streams, and the shard in her chest sat cold and patient and waiting, and the chapel below them began, very quietly, to scream.
It was not a human scream. It was the scream of water in a stone throat, of eels in a silt that has been stirred, of an apparatus that has been fed for sixty years and has just felt its meal begin to slip away. It rose through the floor of the upper hall as Aelis and Ysolde came out into the torchlight, and the guard at the door turned his head, and the four children in the pen looked up with the wide, hollow eyes of things that have learned not to hope.
The guard was young. He was half-asleep. He had a chain across the door of the pen, and a knife at his belt, and the dull, uninterested gaze of a man who has stood watch over too many of these nights and has stopped believing that any of them will be different.
Aelis took the chain from her belt. Ysolde stepped behind the guard. The children watched.
It was quick. It was quiet. It had to be.
They bound the guard with his own chain. They gagged him with his own scarf. They left him in the corner of the pen with the lantern still burning beside him and the knife still at his belt, because they did not have time to take the knife, and because Ysolde said, later, that the kindest thing they could do for him was to let him keep the one weapon he had left.