Prologue
AUGUST 1994
CHLOE
The boy's arm was broken in two places.
He would not let me look at it.
He was six, perhaps seven. Nobody knew. Nobody had brought papers with these children, only the children themselves: nineteen of them delivered to the east wing with whatever clothes they had been wearing when they were taken.
He had wedged himself into the gap between the wardrobe and the wall. It was a good choice. The space was perhaps nine inches wide, enough for a thin child to turn sideways and disappear into it, but too narrow for an adult shoulder.
He had learned to look for spaces adults could not enter.
He had learned that here.
"I am going to sit down," I told him. "My legs hurt."
That was true. I had been on the ward since five that morning.
I sat on the floor with my back against the wardrobe. Close enough that he could see my hands resting open on my thighs. Far enough that I could not reach into the gap and take hold of him without moving first.
Then I waited.
Radius and ulna, from the way he carried the arm.
A fall, most likely. A direct blow tends to displace the bones differently, and there was no bruising where I would have expected the point of impact. He had been carrying the injury for at least a day. The swelling had already gone past the tight, glossy stage into the dull, heavy puffiness that comes after. His fingers were swollen too, but still pink. Blood was reaching them.
That was something.
"It is going to keep hurting," I said to the wall. "It hurts one way at first. Then you think the worst part is finished. Then it begins hurting differently."
Nothing.
"I can make the second part shorter."
Outside, the cicadas were working themselves into a frenzy in the heat. Down the corridor Marguerite was singing to the little ones, badly, because she was changing a bed, feeding somebody and trying to keep two toddlers from climbing into the washbasin at the same time.
A scrape came from behind me.
One bare knee appeared beside the wardrobe.
Then a foot.
Then the rest of him.
He stood in front of me, thin and filthy, holding the injured arm against his chest with the other hand.
"I have to touch it."
He nodded.
That is the whole of my discipline.
You have to touch it.
There is no working at a distance. No clever movements of the fingers across a room, no whispered word that puts a body right without getting blood under your nails. If I cannot reach an injury with my hands, it is not mine to fix.
My entire profession is persuading frightened people to let me near them.
I put two fingers against the inside of his wrist first and found the pulse. Strong enough. Then I moved upward.
The first fracture was several inches above the wrist. Both bones. Displaced, but not badly. The second was farther up the radius, a thin crack I could feel more easily with magic than with my fingertips.
He made a sound when I found the first break.
Not a cry. Just air pushed sharply between his teeth.
I did not stop.
Bone is easy.
It is the easiest thing in the body.
Bone wants to knit. Even while it is broken, the body is already laying down the beginnings of repair. All I have to do is put the pieces where they belong and tell the process where to go and how quickly.
The difficult parts are soft.
Blood vessels. Nerves. Tendons. Fascia. The things that can fail quietly while everybody is looking at the obvious injury.
I held the bones aligned and gave him several days of healing in approximately two minutes.
The swelling began to soften under my fingers.
"There."
He stared at me.
Then at his arm.
He flexed his fingers once.
Again.
Turned his wrist carefully.
Then he looked at me in the way they all eventually looked at you: a child trying to decide whether an adult was safe.
"Am I going back?"
"No."
He watched me for several seconds longer.
Then he climbed onto the nearest bed and sat with his healed arm tucked against his stomach.
Marguerite told me later that it was the first thing he had said in four days.
He did not say anything else that week.
There were nineteen of them in the east wing that summer.
They were the children of the other coven.
My coven killed their mothers and fathers in the spring. All of them. It took approximately nine days.
Then they went back for the children.
Nobody says that in this house.
In this house we say ‘the settlement’.
Or ‘the reorganisation’.
Or, if somebody has been drinking, ‘the trouble in the spring’.
I have heard four different men refer to it as a ‘regrettable necessity’.
Nineteen children arrived here in June in three vehicles, in daylight. Some walked inside. Some had to be carried. One bit the man carrying her hard enough to open his hand to the bone.
The word ‘regrettable’ has been doing a great deal of work ever since.
I was assigned to them within the hour because nobody else wanted them.
They sorted themselves according to damage.
Four screamed. Not constantly. Thresholds did it. Doorways. A door closing behind somebody. A lamp going out. Once, thunder.
Six did not speak at all.
Three could not be put down. They had to be carried, held, or at minimum kept in physical contact with somebody at every hour of the day. One of those was nearly nine. She was far too heavy to be carried for long, her knees hanging below my hips when I held her.
I carried her anyway.
Eleven wet the bed.
Seven hoarded food.
Two vomited whenever they ate too quickly, which was almost every meal during the first week.
One would only sleep beneath a bed.
Almost all of them flinched at hands.
That was the practical problem, because my hands were the entire job.
So I spent that summer learning to be slow.
I learned to sit down before asking them to come near me.
I learned to keep my palms visible.
I learned to tell them every single thing I intended to do before I did it.
‘I am going to touch your ankle’.
‘I am going to lift your shirt’.
‘This will hurt’.
‘I am going to stop when you tell me to stop’.
Nobody taught me that.
I learned that a child who flinched away from a hand near the face would often still surrender a foot. Feet were far from teeth, throats and eyes. Feet were safer.
And if I could have the foot, eventually I could have the ankle.
Then the knee.
Then the rest.
I got good at it.
There was one I thought about more than the others.
He was four.
He would not give us a name.
Marguerite tried assigning him one because she needed something to call across a room. He simply did not answer to it. Not stubbornly. He did not glare at her or shake his head.
He behaved as though she were addressing somebody else.
She persisted for five weeks.
So did he.
Eventually she gave up.
He was not a screamer. He ate whatever was put in front of him. He slept when he was told. He washed when someone brought the basin. Every afternoon he stood at the east window and watched the trees.
He talked to somebody.
Not to himself.
I know the difference. Every clinician does.
Children narrate. They keep up a commentary while they play. They do voices. They argue both sides of an argument. They ask themselves questions and answer immediately because both halves of the conversation belong to them.
This was not that.
He would ask a question.
Then wait.
His head would tilt slightly, his eyes fixed on a point beside or above whoever else was in the room.
He waited for exactly as long as an answer takes.
Then he would nod.
Sometimes he said, "All right."
Sometimes, "I know."
Once, "She doesn’t mean it."
Then he would listen again.
Two members of the Circle came down to look at him.
The first stood over him for ten minutes, asked six questions and established nothing.
The second was quicker.
After that, nobody asked again.
I did not push him.
It was not mine to push.
I made sure he ate.
That is the closest thing to a defence I have.
I fed nineteen children.
I set their bones. Closed their cuts. Treated infections. Sat on floors. Changed dressings. Kept my hands visible.
It is not very much against what was done to them.
I know exactly how much it is.
I stopped believing in this coven in May, in approximately four hours.
Not in magic.
Not even in the coven's right to exist. I have never had much of an opinion about the large things, and I do not think seventeen-year-olds should be trusted with them.
It was smaller than that.
I stopped believing that the people running this house had ever once done anything except what suited them.
You cannot start believing again after that.
You can only get very good at your work and very quiet at meals.
Nobody has noticed.
My mother has sat across from me at dinner every night without once looking at me long enough to see it.
There was a knock against the doorframe. Two knuckles. Twice.
My mother does not knock so much as give notice.
"Chloe."
I was sitting on the floor with the nine-year-old asleep against my shoulder. My left arm had stopped being an arm some time ago. It was furniture. I could feel the weight of the girl on it and very little else.
"Give her to Marguerite."
I eased the girl onto the mattress.
Her eyes opened halfway.
I kept one hand flat against her breastbone, not restraining her, only giving her a point of contact. I left it there until her breathing lengthened and her eyelids stopped moving.
Then I went to the washbasin in the corner.
Soap.
Water.
Palms, backs of the hands, between the fingers, beneath the nails.
I wash my hands before I do anything.
Also after.
My mother put that into me when I was four, for reasons that had nothing to do with medicine.
She waited while I finished.
She is very good at waiting.
My mother is tall. She has excellent posture and wears her hair in exactly the same arrangement every day of her life: drawn back from her face, pinned at the base of her skull, not a strand permitted to make an independent decision.
When she enters a room, the room reorganises around her without anybody consciously deciding to move.
"The Circle is convening the young ones tomorrow morning. You are to be there."
"For what?"
"The treaty." She said it the way she says the laundry. "The bayou pack. They are taking a witch."
I dried my hands.
Here is what a treaty means in a spring where we killed everybody on the other side.
The other coven had been marrying into that pack for sixty years because that is how shifters get children at all.
Two wolves cannot make one.
A wolf and a witch can.
So they marry witches.
Half the pack's wives and husbands had come out of the other coven. Some had been living with wolves for twenty years. Some had children. Some had grandchildren.
It is how our world works.
So when my people went through the other coven in May, some of the witches they killed were not living in coven houses.
They were sitting at wolf tables.
Sleeping in wolf beds.
Raising wolf children.
Then my people took the children who had two witch parents, because that is what the rule allows.
The half-wolf children stayed with the pack.
Nobody can test those before twelve. A mixed child gives you nothing reliable before adolescence. You cannot know which blood has taken until the change begins to declare itself.
So they are left where they are until they show.
Then, if they show wrong, they are collected.
Which leaves the pack.
What remains is approximately fifty wolves living in a bayou, many of whom buried their own spouses in the spring, holding a grievance against the new coven, us.
That is who my father is treating with.
Not out of respect.
They are simply the only ones still standing.
And the price of peace is a witch.
Naturally.
Since we took theirs.
"Fine," I said.
My mother looked at me for a moment.
I do not know what she was looking for.
Fear, perhaps.
Or its opposite. Enthusiasm. Some girls have it. That would be useful to her.
"Eat something first. In the morning. You go grey when you do not eat. It does not show well."
Then she left.
That was affection.
That is my mother at the very top of her range: telling her daughter to have breakfast before being inspected for a treaty.
I did the arithmetic on the way back to the mattresses because arithmetic is what I do instead of feeling things.
‘The young ones’ means sixteen to twenty-four.
In this coven that is approximately thirty women.
Perhaps twenty are unattached.
‘Useful to a pack in a bayou’ narrows the field considerably.
Sanguis, like me, for injuries and illness.
Verdants for crops, medicines and the plants that grow in waterlogged ground.
Terrari for the land.
Ondari for the water.
Sensari — empaths — because fifty wolves living on top of one another with half of them grieving and the other half furious will need somebody to stop them killing each other by autumn.
Twelve of us.
Of those twelve, I am a flesh witch of middling strength with a proven tolerance for unpleasant work.
I am also the head's daughter.
Which means I will be in the room for appearances and will not be chosen.
You do not spend the head's daughter on a bayou when a merchant's daughter will do.
The conclusion was comfortable.
I settled into it.
The thing I felt, standing in the doorway of the east ward afterwards, was shame.
Not about the treaty.
About the fact that nineteen children were asleep in the room in front of me, my coven had murdered their parents, and I had just been informed that I might be sold to pay for what was done to them.
And the strongest feeling available to me was mild interest.
I had thought for a three months that I had only stopped believing in the coven.
I was beginning to suspect I had stopped in some larger way as well.
In a way that was going to become a problem.
There is nobody in this house I can ask about that.
The room they used was on the north side of the house, where the sun only reached the windows obliquely and the plaster stayed cool until afternoon.
For the last coven it had been a music room.
There were eleven of us. I had been wrong after all.
Nobody wept. Nobody had to be dragged inside.
There were no guards at the doors.
It was nine in the morning. The shutters were open. Somebody had put a pitcher of water on a side table with slices of lemon floating in it.
Eleven women stood around in their underwear waiting to be told what to do.
The overwhelming atmosphere was boredom.
Sixteen to twenty-four is the window.
After twenty-four you are no longer worth breeding at the scale anybody wants.
Every woman in that room had known that about herself since she was old enough to be told.
Camille, who was nineteen, had done her hair.
"He's twenty-six," she said to nobody in particular, which meant all of us.
"Who is?"
"The Alpha. Twenty-six. That's not old at all."
"My cousin saw him at the spring signing," one of the Thibodeaux girls said. "She says he's handsome."
"They're all handsome. They're wolves. Have you ever seen one that wasn't? It's the shifting. You can't be a wolf with a bad body—"
"That is not how it works."
"It absolutely is how it works."
I stood beside the window with my arms crossed.
I did not say anything.
They were not stupid.
Camille has a better mind than mine for almost anything that is not a body. The Thibodeaux girl can hold a working for four hours without a break. I have never managed more than two and a half.
They were doing the only sensible thing available to them.
They were looking at a future none of them had chosen and identifying the portions of it a person might be able to want.
Twenty-six.
Handsome.
A house of her own, perhaps.
They were constructing footholds.
I could see exactly why they were doing it.
I could see how much it would help.
I cannot do it, in the same way some people cannot roll their tongue.
Then the women came in carrying brushes, pins, powder and small pots of colour, so the conversation stopped.
They dressed our hair.
They painted colour onto our mouths and cheeks.
Then they told us to remove the rest of our clothes.
Bras first.
Drawers.
Stockings.
Everything.
There was no examination, because it wasn’t needed right then.
The coven tests us every spring. All of us, beginning at thirteen. General health. Development. Menstrual regularity. Fertility. Evidence of disease or defect. The results are entered into a book kept in my father's office.
Every person involved already knew with certainty that every woman standing in that room was healthy and fertile.
We were undressed so that he could see what he was getting.
Nobody in this building would call that cruelty. They would call it diligence. You do not sell a man a horse in a blanket.
They arranged us along the wall in no order I could identify.
The mirror was opposite us.
It occupied most of the long wall: Venetian glass in a heavy carved frame, taller than a man and nearly as wide as three standing shoulder to shoulder.
It had not been there in June.
I knew that because there had been a door on that wall.
I had known this house for four months.
Camille looked at herself in the glass and checked a pin above her ear.
It took me approximately a second and a half to understand what the mirror was for.
Because of Odile.
Odile stood four places down from me with her shoulders back and her chin slightly raised.
She is the strongest empath this coven has produced in thirty years.
An empath has to see you.
Whatever else the discipline does — and they do not teach the rest of us very much about it — it cannot reach a man through a wall.
Put Odile in a room with an Alpha. Let her look directly at him for ninety seconds. She could make him choose whichever woman she wanted him to choose, and he would leave believing the preference had originated entirely inside his own head.
So they gave him the mirror.
Not an ordinary mirror.
One-way glass.
He could stand in the room behind it and see all eleven of us.
We saw only ourselves.
They were protecting the buyer.
I stood against the wall naked, my hair pinned up and my arms at my sides, and understood without much heat that we were not being permitted to influence the choice because the choice had to belong entirely to him.
We were not parties to the treaty. We were its contents.
Nobody standing against that wall was under any illusion about what we were.
I did not resent it. Resentment requires an expectation of something else.
I counted the tiles.
From my toes to the opposite wall: forty-one complete tiles and part of another disappearing beneath the mirror frame.
Women to my left: six.
Women to my right: four.
Then I counted the tiles again in case I had made an error.
I have always counted.
It is what I do with the part of my head other people appear to use for feeling things.
I cannot tell you when it started.
It is probably the most damning fact about the way I was raised.
A seventeen-year-old girl was standing naked in a line so that an unknown man could inspect her body and decide whether he wanted to take her home to bear his children.
And she had a reliable technique ready for the occasion.
Forty-one tiles.
Six left.
Four right.
We stood there for approximately fifteen minutes.
Then the far door opened. A woman stepped inside.
"Chloe."
Camille turned her head.
So did one of the others.
Their expressions were not sympathy.
Not envy either.
It was closer to ‘huh’.
Because it did not make sense.
This is not modesty.
I have an accurate, unsentimental understanding of my own body for exactly the same reason I have an accurate, unsentimental understanding of everybody else's.
That is the discipline.
I know exactly what I look like standing beside Camille Arceneaux.
I know what I look like beside Odile, who is beautiful in a way that makes people uncomfortable because they continue looking at her after they have decided not to.
I was not the prettiest woman in that room.
I was not among the first four.
My body is soft where the fashion is not soft. My hips are broad. My thighs are heavy. My breasts are larger than is convenient for most of my clothes. My waist exists, but not dramatically. My face holds still well, which is useful in a clinician and is not what anybody means when they call a woman pretty.
It took me approximately four seconds to construct an explanation.
He is a wolf.
Wolves are predators.
A predator does not necessarily look at what people look at.
A wolf reads a body in much the same way I read one.
For function.
What it can do.
What it can carry.
How much strain it can survive.
Whether it will remain useful after being put under load.
He is twenty-six years old.
His pack lost half its witches in May.
He wants children.
He is buying a woman to have them with.
Of the eleven women standing against that wall, I am the one built most obviously like something that could carry a wolf's child and then get up afterwards.
There is no wound in being selected as a serviceable animal by a man who requires a serviceable animal.
There is only information.
"Oh, Chloe," Camille said.
There was real warmth in it.
I could not tell whether she was disappointed or relieved.
Odile, four places down, did not look at me at all.
My mother took me upstairs to pack.
My room was on the third floor. It had been a sewing room before it became mine. There was one window facing west, which meant the room began heating around noon and did not properly cool until after dark.
A bed.
A chest.
A washstand.
One shelf.
There were approximately forty books on it. Thirty were medical.
I packed the medical books and left the rest.
Every novel I owned stayed on the shelf.
I made that decision on the stairs.
I am the contract witch now. Nobody falls in love with the contract witch. There is no point reading about falling in love.
I packed two dresses.
My working clothes.
My medical kit.
The photograph of my grandmother.
I left the photograph of my parents standing on the shelf between two novels.
My mother watched me do it. She did not comment.
"Sit down. There are things you need to understand."
I sat on the edge of the bed.
She remained standing.
"It is not a marriage. Do not let anybody tell you it is, and do not allow yourself to think it. There will be no wedding. You will have no title. You will have a place in his house, a place in his bed, and a great deal of work. You will be treated well because it is in his interest to treat you well."
"All right."
"You are there for two things. The first is that they have had no healer since May. People are dying of injuries, infections and illnesses that should not kill anybody. That work is real. It will be constant. Do it well. It is the only currency you will have."
"And the second?"
"Children."
No embarrassment.
No hesitation.
"A treaty is a piece of paper. A child is not. A child is something neither side can walk away from. The rest is decoration."
I looked at my hands.
"Now." She shifted her weight. "The clever thing is to make him marry you. I am telling you outright because you are clever, and I would rather you did it deliberately than stumbled into it."
"You said there was no marriage in it."
"There is no marriage provided for. There is nothing preventing one."
She explained it the way she would explain a route through town.
"You will be in his house for years. He is twenty-six. From everything I hear, he is not a cruel man. Women in your position have been made wives before. It would be the best outcome available to you, to us, and to the treaty. So be pleasant. Be useful. Be in the room. Never be difficult with him about anything. In five years, perhaps eight, you may find the situation has changed shape."
"And if it does not?"
"Then it does not."
"No. Wait."
I stopped.
Then began again because I was working it out while I spoke.
"It ends when he marries? That is what you said? What happens if he marries somebody else?"
"Then it is discharged. You come home."
Something happened inside me then.
It was like the moment in a diagnosis when three symptoms that appeared unrelated become one disease.
‘You come home’.
She said it kindly. She meant it as the soft landing.
The part that made the rest bearable.
Nineteen children were sleeping in the east wing with no adults having come with them because there were no adults left to come.
That morning the strongest empath in three decades had stood naked in front of a one-way mirror so that she could not interfere with her own sale.
My mother had just described the probable remainder of my life without once touching me.
It was the longest conversation I had ever had with her.
And for months, nobody in this house had noticed that I had stopped.
"If he marries somebody else," I said, "can I go somewhere that is not here?"
My mother stopped. One of her hands was halfway towards the dress lying on my bed.
It remained there.
It was the way a person stops when they hear a noise in a house they believed was empty.
"You cannot make him send you away," she said finally. "I know how difficult you can be."
I did not move.
There is no reading of that sentence except the one it comes with.
She thought I was angling.
She thought her daughter had heard ‘you come home’ and immediately begun calculating how to be returned as damaged goods.
Sour enough.
Sharp enough.
Disobedient enough.
Difficult enough that a wolf would send me back within the year with a complaint attached.
She was warning me not to try.
She has known me for seventeen years.
I have never once been difficult. I took the ward nobody else wanted. I have gone where I was sent. I have returned when I was called. I have eaten what was put in front of me. I have done the work I was given and cleaned my hands afterwards.
Whatever person my mother was looking at when she said that, it was not me.
"I will be obedient," I said.
Her chin lifted slightly.
"I will be obedient. For as long as it takes. He will not have one bad word to say about me. Not one. Not to anybody. Not ever. Ask them at the end. There will be nothing."
She looked at me for a long moment.
Not surprised anymore.
Assessing.
Then her face changed into something very close to respect.
"Then you will sign an addendum."
That is the most respect I have ever had from her.
My mother does not love me less than other mothers love their daughters. I do not think so, anyway.
She loves me in the currency she has. Terms. Conditions. Useful concessions.
And that afternoon she gave me the best terms she had ever given anybody.
We did it in my father's study.
The room smelled of paper, old leather and the river coming through the open windows. The house is far enough inland that the water should not smell as strongly as it does, but in summer everything in Louisiana smells faintly wet.
There were two witnesses. One was Odile's mother. The other was a man from the Circle whose name I knew but had never had reason to use.
Neither of them was there for me. They were there because documents require witnesses.
My father was not in the room.
He was in the house. I had heard his steps on the stairs perhaps an hour earlier, followed by his voice in the corridor.
He did not come in.
The clerk read the addendum aloud. Then he put it in front of me.
I read it myself because I read everything before I put my name under it.
Four lines.
‘Upon termination of the principal agreement by reason of the Alpha's marriage, the witch shall be released from the coven's charge and shall not be required to return to it—‘
Then the part that was the actual document.
‘—provided that no complaint as to her conduct has been lodged by the pack under clause twelve of the principal agreement.’
I read it twice.
The second time I understood exactly what I was buying and exactly what it would cost.
There is no part of it I misunderstood.
Clause twelve.
I had not yet seen the principal agreement. It was in the adjoining room waiting for signatures.
I did not need to see it to know what a clause like that meant.
‘Complaint as to her conduct.’
‘Lodged by the pack.’
Not lodged with me.
There is no version of that wording in which anybody is required to tell me a complaint exists.
There is no version in which I am asked whether it is true.
There is no version in which I get to explain.
So for however long the treaty lasts, every person in that bayou will be holding a switch. None of them will know they are holding it.
One remark to the wrong person. One month in which I am exhausted and answer sharply.
One wolf who dislikes me on sight. One patient angry because I tell him no when he wants a different answer.
One argument overheard badly.
Any of it could move upward through the pack, become a complaint, reach this house and remove the only door I have managed to put into the agreement.
And I do not know how long I have to avoid that.
There is no number.
It lasts until the Alpha marries.
That could mean two years.
Nine.
Twenty.
Never.
I did the arithmetic with the information available.
One outcome: eventually come back here, at some point I cannot see.
The other: never be difficult again, with anybody, ever, for however long it takes, and then possibly be allowed to leave.
I signed it.
The pen was heavier than necessary. Black lacquer, silver nib. My father's, I think. I had seen one like it on his desk before.
Walking out of that room, I had one thought I did not like.
I had bought myself a door I could not open for years.
And I did not actually know what years were. Not in that quantity.
At seventeen, five years is nearly a third of everything you remember.
Nine is more than half.
I do not think you can do arithmetic on this.
They brought me into the front room at four.
That was when I saw him for the first time.
By then I had been chosen, priced, discussed, contracted and amended.
I had signed a separate legal instrument concerning the eventual disposal of my own person.
All of it had happened before I laid eyes on the man around whom the entire arrangement had been built.
He stood by the window with his back partly turned to the room.
He was younger than I had pictured. That was strange because I already knew his age.
Twenty-six. Tall.
Broad through the shoulders, but not in the cultivated way of men who lift weights because they enjoy looking at themselves. His body had the density of somebody who worked with it. Back, shoulders, forearms. Strength distributed where repeated labour puts it.
His shirt was clean and ironed. His boots were not clean at all.
Mud had dried along the welt and lower leather, dark grey-brown, not city dirt. Wet ground. Marsh, perhaps.
He was tired. That was the first real thing I noticed.
Not sleepy. Tired.
There is a difference.
There was grey beneath his eyes despite his brown skin. The corners of his mouth were held too still. His weight sat slightly forward over his feet, shoulders carrying more than they should even while he was standing still.
That kind of exhaustion does not come from one bad night.
It comes from months.
A man who had not slept properly in a long time and had stopped expecting to.
Then I looked at his hands. Faces lie constantly. Hands almost never do.
His were large. The knuckles were scarred, old pale lines rather than fresh splits. Fighting, probably, but not recently.
There was a thick callus across the right palm, extending towards the base of the fingers. Rope, perhaps. An oar would do it too, depending on grip.
The ring finger on his left hand had been broken at some point.
Proximal phalanx.
It had healed with a slight rotation. Poorly set, years ago.
Nobody competent had been anywhere near it.
I thought:
‘That would take me four minutes.’
That is the entirety of what I thought on first seeing him.
I noticed a badly healed finger and estimated the repair.
Then he turned and looked at me.
I could not tell what was in his face.
Not because there was nothing there. Because I did not know him well enough to assign meaning to it.
Nobody introduced us. There was no reason to. It was not that kind of transaction.
The clerk put the principal agreement on the table. I went to it and read.
The room waited.
After perhaps thirty seconds, it began to wait impatiently.
Nobody had expected the article being transferred to insist on reading the paperwork.
Eleven pages.
I looked for the term first.
A term is a number.
That is what the word means.
There was no number.
The agreement continued until the Alpha took a wife.
I read that clause three times.
There was no hidden limit. No five years. No seven.
No maximum age.
Nothing.
I would discover the duration by living all of it.
Then consummation.
He was not permitted to touch me until I was eighteen.
There was a date written into the clause.
My birthday.
Middle of next summer.
The wording around it had been revised. A phrase struck through in one hand, replacement language added in another, initials beside both.
Somebody had argued about that provision.
I could see where.
I did not know which side had wanted the date earlier.
I decided I did not want to know.
Then the conjugal clause.
‘Not fewer than two nights weekly, for the purpose of issue.’
Something loosened in my chest.
Relief. Which was ridiculous.
But two is a number. You can meet a number.
Two nights. Not fewer than. Weekly.
A requirement has edges.
I had been afraid there would be language such as ‘at his pleasure’ or ‘as required by the Alpha’.
There was not.
So I stood in my father's front room and felt stupidly grateful to whichever lawyer had written the number ‘two’.
‘Service.’
I was required to medically attend any member of the pack who requested treatment.
I was not permitted to refuse treatment.
That was the only clause in eleven pages I would have signed by choice.
‘Protection.’
The pack owed me safety.
Physical harm done to me was to be treated as harm done to coven property.
That was the phrase.
Not person.
‘Property.’
They were also required to provide for my everyday needs.
Housing. Food. Clothing where necessary.
Medicines and materials required for my work.
The document called it ‘upkeep and maintenance’.
Those exact words.
‘Exclusivity.’
I was prohibited from taking any other partner.
Absolute prohibition. No exception.
There was no corresponding clause for him.
I went back three pages and checked.
Then forward again.
Then looked through the definitions in case the obligation was hidden under another term.
It was not.
He was free to sleep with whomever he wanted.
I was not.
At least the agreement was honest.
It told you exactly what kind of document you were standing inside.
On page nine, halfway through a long paragraph about issue, inheritance, pack status, coven status and the age at which a child's nature would determine which side could claim them, there was one sentence stating that I was not to prevent conception.
I read it.
I did not think anything about it at all.
Then clause twelve.
‘Complaint.’
‘Any grievance as to the witch's conduct shall be addressed to the coven.’
I stopped.
Read the rest.
Nine lines of procedure.
Complaint from the Alpha or another recognised pack authority.
Delivered through the designated liaison.
Reviewed by the coven.
Remedy to be determined according to severity and recurrence.
The wording was entirely reasonable.
Nothing in it sounded cruel.
I read clause twelve four times.
Someone behind me shifted from one foot to the other.
I did not care.
An hour earlier I had purchased my entire possible future against those nine lines.
I wanted to see exactly what I had bought it from.
Eventually I straightened.
"It's fine," I said.
It was the only thing I said in that room.
They signed in order.
My father first. He came in for that. He crossed the room, took the pen, signed where the clerk indicated and handed it back.
Approximately forty seconds.
He did not speak to me.
Head of the coven.
First signature.
Because this was an agreement between two powers, and he represented one of them.
Then the Alpha.
He read it before signing.
That surprised me.
He had drafted portions of it with our people. He already knew what was in it.
He read all eleven pages anyway. Not skimming.
He stopped twice and went back once.
The room began waiting for him the same way it had waited for me.
He did not appear to notice. Or he noticed and did not care.
I stood there watching a man be slower than everybody wanted him to be.
I thought nothing of it whatsoever.
Then he signed.
Then me.
Last.
My name went beneath his in the narrow space left at the bottom of the page.
It looked less like entering a treaty than signing for delivery of a parcel.
The clerk sanded the ink, waited, then blotted it. He turned the page over.
Said something to Odile's mother about the weather.
Outside, the cicadas began again, loud enough that I could hear them through the open windows.
My mother exhaled through her nose. I had heard that sound perhaps a thousand times. It means a difficult afternoon has concluded acceptably.
Somebody asked whether there was any lemon water left.
