Chapter 1
Pain was the crucible of Atonery.
So the Lorekeeper had always said, and so he said again, under his breath as his fingers worked the ropes around my wrist. Twice. Then thrice. Then once more, because he did not trust the knot, and had never, in all our years together, trusted me.
This had always been the part I hated most, though to name favorites in the hours of the Rite seemed a child’s game, and I was no longer a child, if I had ever been.
The slab was cold. It was always cold, for no season softened it, and no hour warmed it. I had decided long ago that the old Houses had chosen this stone for precisely this reason. Stone did not flinch, nor did it pity. Stone did not pretend, either, as men pretended, to feel what it did not.
I did not resent it for that. I had, over the years, come to prefer it. Indifference was at least an honest country.
My hair fell forward across my cheek, and I wondered, as I sometimes did, what color it was now. It had been dark once. I remembered a hand lifting it from my shoulder. I remembered a voice saying like river silt, and laughing, because the man who had said it had meant it as a compliment and realized too late that it was not one. That hand and that voice—I could touch them still, in the dark behind my eyes, the way you touch a bruise to see if it is still there.
It was still there.
It was always still there.
But wondering what color my hair was now was a kind of wanting, and wanting was not permitted to me, so I let the thought go and listened to the water falling into the ravine below—drop after patient drop. The water did not know what happened in this room. The water had never known. I liked it for that.
Then came the footsteps.
I did not need to see him to know him.
I had seen him, once. A hundred years ago and more. I had seen him in rooms full of light and rooms full of smoke, seen him asleep and seen him at a window with the dawn catching on his jaw, seen him as he must have looked to no one else. I had held his face between my hands. I had told him things I would never tell again because the mouth that had told them was no longer mine.
I had seen him. And I would never see him again.
This was the cruelty of what he had done to me, and the cruelty of what he had let me keep. I remembered the man. I could not look at him. The Veil would not permit it, and even if it had, the man I remembered was not the man who entered this room. The man I remembered was somewhere inside the one who walked toward me now, buried, and I was forbidden to dig.
His treat was his own. Heavier than the Lorekeeper’s and slower. Once, I had known that walk for its eagerness—he had come toward me, in whatever room we had been in, as though rooms were only the distance between us. Now the walk had settled. Now it was a Sovereign’s walk.
He came to a stop a few paces behind me. I heard him breathe out, long and hard. Then the small sounds of him arranged themselves around me: the sigh of cloth, the accusation of silver at his collar, the faint tick of a chain against itself where it hung at his chest.
I had built him, over the years, in the dark behind my eyes.
Not the man I remembered. The other one. The Sovereign. I had given him a coat cut close to the shoulders, black as a shuttered window. I had given him a collar pinned with an old house sigil, some heraldry worn down to symbol. I had given him hands that were soft, and uncalloused, because it was I who’d inherited his pain.
The man I remembered had calluses. A ridge along the side of his writing hand. A small pale scar at the base of his thumb from a dog, he had said, that had bitten him as a boy. I had kissed that scar. I had kissed it more than once.
I seldom felt his hands now.
What I felt, as I had always felt, was the stone.
“Are you ready to confess?” the Lorekeeper asked. His voice was without weather, neither warm nor cruel, only ritual, the way a bell is only a bell. “Are you ready to pay your debt?”
He breathed out once. The Lorekeeper’s robes moved against the stone with the dry sound of something long dead.
“I am,” he said.
The voice was not his. I mean this exactly. It was the voice of the throat I had once pressed my ear to, and it was not his. Something had moved into it. Something meaner and colder.
What came next, I could not see with my eyes. I had not seen with my eyes since the night he had veiled them, which was a night I remembered and could not approach, as a burned child remembers the fire without the burning. But one did not need sight to know what was happening in the confession hall. My body had been long educated on the way of the Rite.
I knew what came next.
He would kneel before the Lorekeeper, as only a Sovereign can kneel, which is to say badly and with great ceremony, and he would confess. He would confess what he had done. How many had died at his order. How many had been unmade at his word. How many houses had bled thin at his discretion. How many of his own he had called threats and so vanished, or broken, or disappeared into the mouths of his quieter rooms. These were the things that could damn a man, for Atonery demanded honor among its beloved, and what Atonery demanded it demanded still, and would demand forever, for Atonery did not forget and Atonery did not tire.
Atonery did not speak, either. Not in any tongue I had ever learned. It only weighed and answered, weighed and answered, and left the speaking of it to men.
The Lorekeepers were those men: of mortal flesh, simply men, given the knowing of the magic and the use of its verdict.
A rustle. A soft metallic clang against the stone.
This was the part where he set down his signet, as Sovereigns were made to do in this chamber and in no other, laying it at the Lorekeeper’s feet in a gesture older than the stone slab at my back. I had never seen his signet. The hand I remembered had worn no ring. I gave it gold, and weight, and a small cold cruelty, because I found these cruelties were usually correct.
“Confess,” the Lorekeeper whispered, and his voice was spidery and thin, as though it had been spun rather than spoken. “Confess unto the stone what wrongs you had done. For the only road to balance runs first through me.”
He swallowed. I heard it. One heard a great deal, without eyes.
“My men,” he began, and his voice was thicker than I remembered, heavier in the mouth. I was his. I had always been his. I would always be his. The other Daughters did not envy me the arrangement—they had said so, in the low voices we used when the lamps had gone out—but no one had ever asked me where I envied it myself. I suppose they assumed I did not. I suppose they assumed I was numb to it, as the first of us, the oldest of us, the Daughter who had been a Daughter longest. I was not numb to it. I had only learned how to keep still inside it, which is a different thing and a harder one.
“They were sent to the house of Caha Unarith,” he went on, the words loosening as they came. “The house had shown dissent. My men were sent to show what dissent costs.”
“Who gave the order?” the Lorekeeper asked. “Was it you?”
“Yes.”
“And your men. Did they show what you had hoped?”
A rustle of skin against cloth. He was nodding.
“Yes.”
“What did they do?”
“They entered the eastern wing of the estate, where the dissent had been loudest. There was an outcry at their arrival. Among those present they found a man holding a mirror. He held it openly. Proudly, my men say. He showed no shame for it, no fear, and so they took him into the courtyard and paid him what is owed.”
The Lorekeeper made a soft sound in the back of his throat. A hum or a scrape.
“And what is owed, for such a crime, my Sovereign?”
“Death, Lorekeeper.”
“Ah. Yes. I see.” A click of the tongue, dry as old paper. “And so the man is unmade. That is one. Tell me what came next?”
“The household went mad. They set upon my men. Foolish. Meaningless to me. They were cut down where they stood, but my men did not stop there. They went room to room. They took the women from their chambers and opened their throats while their husbands watched. The children they carried to the courtyard and put to the sword, one by one.”
“And the men?”
“The men were left living.”
“Why?”
“To understand the cost of dissent.”
The Lorekeeper was silent a moment. I could hear him breathing, careful and even.
“Does it please you, my Sovereign? What your men have done at your word?”
He did not pause. He did not pause at all.
“Yes.”
No, I thought, and the thought came up so fast I did not know it was mine until it had already passed. No. You used to be sick at even the talk of it. You used to tell me—
The Veil closed on the rest. There was no warning. Only a blankness where the sentence had been, and a faint metallic ache behind my teeth.
I had learned not to finish such sentences the hard way, which is to say over and over, which is the only way Daughters learn anything at all.
“How many were killed?” the Lorekeeper asked.
“At least one hundred.”
“At least one hundred,” the Lorekeeper repeated, weighing the number in a hand I could not see. “At least.”
“Yes.”
The Lorekeeper stepped back. I heard the crack of his knuckles as he folded his hands together. “Is that the end of your confession?”
“There is one more thing.”
“Very well. Confess.”
“I took to bed a young woman. Her name was Gail. She was of fair hair and fine skin, but it was her youth I wanted. I am a greedy man. I understand that of myself. But I ask you this, Lorekeeper. Why should my blood have been favored of Atonery, if I am not to have what I want? And if I cannot have it by wanting, why should I not take it instead?”
I remembered her.
I had not known her name until this moment, but I had known her. Voices in the estate traveled through the walls, and mine was the chamber nearest to the one he used for such things. I had heard the grunts. I had heard the whimpers, small and stifled and apologizing for themselves. And I had heard, most nights, the long quiet afterward, which was not quiet at all, only filled with a girl’s weeping.
Gail, I thought. Her name was Gail.
And then, because the Veil did not close on the thought fast enough, because some thoughts were too small for the Veil to see: I was kept, too. I was kept, and then I was kept differently, and the difference is that I am still here.
I was Echo. I was made for this.
“I had her until I no longer wanted her,” he went on, and his voice was lighter now, almost fond. “It was only recently I discovered she was with child. And only today did she give birth to a son. I would have let the bairn live, had it been a girl. But a boy is a claim to blood, and I shall not have my name smeared by a bastard.”
“I see.” The Lorekeeper’s voice was smooth. Stone. “What did you do with the child?”
“I had a man I trusted take it to the cliffs. They threw it into the sea.”
“That makes one hundred and two.”
“Yes.”
“And the mother?”
“She died of a hemorrhage after the bairn was taken.”
“One hundred and three.”
He did not answer. He did not need to. Silence, in the confession hall, was itself an answer, and it said: the confession is complete.
The man I remembered had once wept. I saw it now, uninvited. A room I could not place, a window behind him, the weight of him folded forward into my lap. He had wept over a dog. I could not remember whose dog, though perhaps it was his. I could not remember the year. I could only remember that he had wept, and that I had held his head, and that my hand had learned the shape of his hair that day, and had kept it.
The man on his knees at the Lorekeeper’s feet had just confessed to throwing an infant into the sea.
Both of those men had been him.
The Veil closed. The room came back. My teeth ached.
I heard the Lorekeeper’s knees meet the stone.
I felt, rather than heard, the water far below. It seemed to rise, or thicken, or draw near. He laid his hand against the stone where my back met it, and I felt the tremor pass from his palm through the slab and into me, the old shiver of Atonery waking to its work.
We stand between breath and bone. Tell us what must be taken.
Atonery, they said, answered only to Lorekeepers, and only in the space between one breath and the next, and only in a knowing older than the mouths that carried it. I could not feel it speak. I had never felt it speak. I had, in truth, come to doubt there was anything in that silence at all.
Even the water stilled.
Then the Lorekeeper stood.
“You have sinned against the balance,” he said to him. “Where you ought to have ruled with heart, you ruled with sword. You took the blood of innocents, and it served no purpose at all.”
The Sovereign scoffed. He tried, a breath later, to disguise the scoff as a cough. The stone, I think, was not fooled.
“And yet,” the Lorekeeper went on, “Atonery understands the price that must be paid in blood to hold a throne. You are a strong leader. A Sovereign who knows what must be done to keep what the Houses have built. The balance may be restored. You may yet be forgiven.”
Of course he was.
He was always forgiven.
This is what they do not tell you, about Atonery. They tell you it is the balance. They tell you it is just. They do not tell you that the balance has a thumb on it, and the thumb belongs to the ones who hold the Daughters, and has belonged to them so long that no one remembers the balance any other way. I had been a Daughter long enough to know this, and to know that the knowing of it changed nothing, and to know, further, that the changing of nothing was the oldest lesson of man.
He rose. He bowed. I was told, before the Lorekeeper, though I did not see him do it. Cloth moved against cloth. A signet was lifted from the floor and restored to the hand that had briefly set it down.
This was not the end. The end, in the confession hall, was never where one looked for it. The beginning had not yet even begun.
“Your penance has been assigned,” the Lorekeeper said. He laid his hand on the Sovereign’s brow, as he always laid his hand on a Warden’s brow before the sentence was spoken. “You will be hanged four times. Once for the man with the mirror. Once for the hundred on Caha Unarith. Once for the child, and once for the mother.”
“Yes, Lorekeeper,” said the Sovereign.
His penance.
But it was I who would hang.
For him, I always hanged.
I was the first. I had been his before there had been a word for what I was, and I was still his, and between those two truths a hundred years had passed without moving a single inch.
The other Daughters were traded. Loaned. Assigned. Their bodies were passed between Houses on the long quiet ledgers the Synod kept in its vaults. Mine did not. Mine had never left him. There had been a time, once, when I thought this meant something—when I had believed, in the way newly-bound believe many things, that his keeping me close was a kind of kindness. That it was what remained of the man I remembered.
I had been wrong about that for a long time now. But the arrangement persisted. The arrangement would persist. It was the oldest thing in this room, older even than the stone.
