What Casimir Remembers

She found him on the east wall, which surprised her, because nobody walked the east wall in a winter this long except the watch.

He was alone at the corner turret where the wall looked north up the valley to the Gap, with his coat collar up and both hands in his pockets, and he turned when he heard her boots on the ice and saw the loose sheets in her hand and went very still.

“You’ve read it,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Is it bad?”

Ilse considered the question with the care it deserved.

“It isn’t bad,” she said. “It’s large. I’d like to read it to you somewhere with a fire. And I’d like you to be sitting down, because I was.”

· · ·Scene break

They went to the library. Rurik, passing in the corridor, looked at their faces and at the papers and went and stood outside the door, and Ilse heard him tell a maid with a coal scuttle to go round the other way.

She read it to him as written. She had decided that on the wall. Not a summary, not the kind version. As written, in her mother’s words, oats and salt stripped away, in her counter voice, which was the only voice she trusted not to break.

She read him the first page, about his father, and watched his face change at Godric Vael kept his own accounts and they were perfect, and change again, more, at nothing happened, because he would not let it.

“He said that,” Casimir said, very low. “That a Warden’s a debt the march holds. He said it to me when I was fifteen and wanted to go to the university in Brennock.”

She read him the pay road, and Emeric knowing her mother’s initials from a drawer, and the eighth night in the watchtower, and Casimir is his father over again. He put his left hand over his mouth and kept it there.

She read him make it a price nobody can buy, and the thing Godric would never let himself take, and when she got to Oh, he’ll hate that, Casimir made a sound she had never heard a man make. It was a laugh and not a laugh, and he bent over in the chair with his arms crossed over his chest as though something there had been broken for eleven years and had just been set.

Ilse stopped reading. She waited. She did not go to him, because she did not know whether he wanted anyone to, and she had learned in this keep that you asked.

“Go on,” he said eventually, into his knees. “Please. All of it.”

She read him the sickroom.

I asked him if he would accept it. He laughed. He said, “Yes. Why not. Nobody’s ever going to.”

The fire moved in the grate.

Casimir sat up slowly. His face was wet and he did not seem to know it.

“I remember,” he said.

“You don’t have to—“

“No. I remember it now. You read it and it came back.” He looked at the fire, not at her. “It was dark. My hands were burning, they’d gone past cold into burning, and there was a woman beside the bed with a book, and she read something short, and I understood maybe half of it, and the half I understood was a kiss, and freely, and the winter. And she asked if I’d take it.” He swallowed. “And I thought, what a stupid, kind, pointless thing to offer a man like me. As if anyone would. As if I’d let them. And I said yes because it cost nothing, because nobody was ever going to pay it, and I laughed because I’d just been handed a key to a door with no one on the other side.”

“And then you forgot.”

“And then I forgot. And every year that winter’s cost me a little more and I’ve thought, well, that’s the account, that’s what it costs to have sent Emeric up that mountain, and I’ve been — I’ve been proud of paying it, Ilse. I’ve kept a count in the ice-house every week like it was something to be proud of.” He wiped his face with the heel of his good hand, roughly, as if it annoyed him. “And he’d already done this. Before the battle. He’d already sat in that tower and asked your mother to write me a way out, and I said yes to it in a fever to spite myself.”

Ilse put the pages down on the desk.

“Casimir,” she said. “I need to ask you something, and I need a true answer, not a kind one.”

He looked at her.

“Does it feel like pressure? Knowing this.” She made herself say the whole thing. “Your brother wanted it. My mother wrote it. They both wanted someone to — they wanted this for you. And you and I have both said, out loud, on the record, that we’re not going to. If knowing what they wanted makes you feel you owe it to them, or that you’re being arranged by two dead people who loved you, then I’d rather you told me now, so that I can say, clearly, that it doesn’t oblige you to anything. Not to them. Not to me.”

He didn’t answer quickly. She had known he wouldn’t.

“Yes,” he said at last. “For about a minute. While you were reading. It felt like being arranged.”

“And now?”

“Now it feels like being told that somebody was on my side before I knew there were sides.” He looked at the pages. “That’s not the same as owing them. I’m not going to kiss anybody for Emeric. He’d laugh himself sick at the idea.”

“Good.”

“And I’m not going to not kiss anybody to spite him either,” he said, “which I think, if I’m honest, is what I’ve been doing for eleven years.”

Ilse sat back in her chair.

“There’s one thing she got wrong,” she said. “She wrote that you agreed because you were sure no one would ever love you enough to pay it. The page doesn’t ask for that. It can’t. It only asks that nobody is made to. If it’s ever paid, it won’t prove anyone loved you. That’s her mistake, not the page’s, and I don’t want you carrying it.”

Casimir looked at her for a long moment. “Noted,” he said, quietly.

“She wrote,” she said carefully, “that she hoped whoever read it could tell the difference between a price and a gift. She said she never could. Neither could your father.”

“Can you?”

“No,” Ilse said. “Not yet. I’ve spent my whole life only wanting things I could put a number on. If it doesn’t have a price, I assume I haven’t found it yet, and I go looking. That’s my flaw. It’s my mother’s too, I think. She loved your father for six years and filed it as audits.”

“And mine,” said Casimir, “is that I’ll only take a thing I’m sure no one will ever give me. So I can say yes to it and lose nothing.”

They looked at each other across the library.

“We’re a terrible pair,” Ilse said.

“We’re a very well-documented pair.”

She laughed, which she hadn’t expected to be able to do, and he smiled, wet-faced, which she suspected he hadn’t either.

· · ·Scene break

She certified nothing that night. She would need to go up to the Gap and see the watchtower for herself before she put her name to place of striking. That was the rule, and she was not going to break a rule about this page, of all pages, because she was tired.

But she wrote the certification out in draft, at the library desk, while he sat in the chair by the fire with his eyes closed. Struck at the Gap watchtower on the eighth night of the war, by B. Rooke, Reader, at the request of E. Vael, who witnessed it in frost-ink. Read to the debtor and accepted at the frost keep, approximately one month later. She did not put in Godric. She did not put in the drawer of letters, or oh, he’ll hate that, or nobody’s ever going to. A certification wanted place, witness and acceptance. It did not want the rest.

The rest belonged to him.

When she had finished, she took the loose sheets of her mother’s plain text off the desk, squared them, and went and put them in his hands.

“These are yours,” she said. “Not the Registry’s. I’ve got what the law needs. This is the part it doesn’t.”

He held them the way Rurik had held the pay roster in the undercroft, as if they were something that could still be hurt.

“You thought no one would,” Ilse said.

“I was right for eleven years,” said Casimir.

She didn’t answer that. She had an answer. It was in a book in her bag with his name at the top of the page, and it went back three years, and she was not ready yet to read it aloud to anyone, least of all to him.

But she did not say you were right, either. She let the silence stand where the agreement would have gone, and she saw him notice that, and look up at her, and not ask.