The Moon Keeps No Oaths

The silver said I had promised to love Dain Mercer.

It had even kept my handprint.

I stood on the public side of the archive counter, where I had spent six years telling other people not to touch the glass, and resisted the urge to put my fist through it.

"This is the original?" I asked.

Nerys Holt adjusted the page beneath its lamp. The chief archivist wore her keys on a narrow chain at her waist. I had once wanted a chain like that. I had mistaken access for authority, which was an embarrassing error for someone who repaired records for a living.

"You recognize the seal."

"I recognize my hand. I'm asking about the page."

The scar across the heel of my palm had left its tiny interruption in the silver. A white line. I had earned it at seventeen, trying to catch a falling engraving blade because the blade cost more than my week's wages.

It was difficult to look at that familiar mark and hear what they were claiming I had done with it.

Winter moon. Eight in the evening. Witnessed consent to a mate registration.

Forty-two days ago, at eight in the evening, I had been four hours from this hall with a stranger's blood drying on my sleeves.

"Your notice was posted yesterday," Nerys said. "The clerk delivered the copy this morning."

She touched the folded paper on the counter. Not my hand. Not the glass. Nerys never touched anything she didn't mean to leave a mark on.

"The review period is already running, Liora."

Behind me, a door opened.

I knew Dain was there before he spoke. Cedar oil, expensive wool, the faint sharp scent of the winter apples he kept in his office. Once, that smell had made a room feel less lonely.

My body remembered before I could stop it. My shoulders loosened. I hated that small, hopeful movement more than I hated the silver.

"I asked them to wait for me," he said.

He came to my side in his dark trading coat, the one I had mended at the cuff. He had let a tailor replace the stitching. The thread was finer now.

"Why?"

"So you wouldn't have to do this alone."

I looked down at the notice.

The claimant's name was his.

Dain followed my gaze. "I didn't want a public proceeding."

"Then you must be very disappointed in whoever filed one."

Nerys folded her hands. At the far end of the hall, a pen stopped scratching. I had lowered my voice. Apparently that made people listen harder.

Dain placed a second sheet beside the notice.

"There's still a simple way to settle it."

I didn't pick it up. He turned it so I could read.

Acknowledgment. Return to the registered household. Withdrawal of dispute.

The words occupied less than half a page. How considerate, to make the surrender brief.

"I withdrew our engagement," I said.

"You were upset."

"In writing."

"And we could have discussed it."

"We did. You didn't like my answer."

He glanced toward the clerk at the end of the counter. The clerk bent over his book again.

Dain leaned closer. "Your mother's house is held in trust. You know what a broken-oath finding could do to your position. And your witness work—"

"You included that in your complaint too?"

"I included what the form required."

There it was, that mild, patient voice. Dain used it with merchants who couldn't pay on time. I had admired his restraint when the debts belonged to strangers.

He put his hand over mine.

Warm fingers. Familiar pressure.

"Come home," he said. "We can protect what matters."

For one humiliating moment I wanted to let him protect something. I wanted somebody else to stand at this counter and find the correct words. My shop rent was due in five days. Three customers had left irreplaceable work with me. My mother's house had a kitchen window she had never got around to fixing, and I could already imagine another person's curtains behind it.

Then his thumb moved over my scar, and I pulled my hand away.

"I have a home."

Nerys opened a drawer.

"If you intend to dispute the entry, you'll need the review application."

She set it down without looking at Dain. He moved his acknowledgment sheet out of the way, slowly, as though he were still leaving me time to change my mind.

I read the application twice.

"Does filing suspend the property petition?"

"Until the hearing."

"And the workshop seal?"

"The disputed materials remain secured pending an inventory. That's separate."

I nodded. I wanted to argue, but an argument wouldn't retrieve my customers' work. First I needed the suspension in writing.

"I'll require a stamped copy."

Nerys pushed the ink toward me.

My hand shook when I picked up the pen. I set my wrist on the counter, just as I would before engraving a fine line. There was no benefit in pretending it didn't shake. There was only the task of making the letters legible.

Name: Liora Fen.

Basis of dispute: I did not attend, sign, or consent to the stated registration.

I stopped there. I did not write the stranger's name, because I didn't know it. I did not write where he was hiding. I did not know whether he was still there.

I knew the torn blanket beneath his shoulder. The way he'd apologized when fever made him grip my sleeve. The effort it had cost him to loosen his fingers when I'd said I needed my arm free.

Dain had never needed fever to make letting go difficult.

"Think carefully," he said.

I signed.

The scratch of the pen seemed indecently loud.

Nerys checked the form, entered its number in the daybook, and stamped both copies. I watched the whole process. When she slid mine across the counter, I checked the date and number against the book before folding it.

"The tenth day, at sunset," she said. "Your evidence must be entered before then."

"I understand."

I looked once more at the silver under the glass. The ordinary lamp showed the surface, the familiar print, the beautiful lie. It told me nothing about the layers below. A proper examination would need a witness, a calibration sample, and a reason for the archive to let me close enough.

Not today. Today I had stopped the first door from closing.

Dain stepped aside as I turned. He had always been careful about appearances.

"Where will you go?" he asked.

It sounded almost like concern.

"To collect my evidence."

I walked out with the stamped paper held flat beneath my coat, protecting it from the rain that had begun beyond the doors.

Anwen would have the delivery receipt for my withdrawn engagement. That was the first thing. The simple thing.

After that, I would have to find a man whose face I remembered more clearly than I wanted to—and ask him whether saving his life had earned me the truth.