Two Cups

Ilse woke before light on the twenty-first day and knew, before she was properly awake, what she wanted.

It was not a feeling. She had braced for a feeling. It was more like finding a figure at the bottom of a column that she had been adding for a long time without admitting what it would come to: quiet, exact, and entirely hers. She lay in the dark of the tower room for a minute and checked it, the way she would check a sum, and it came out the same.

She got up and washed her face in water with ice on it and went down.

· · ·Scene break

The kitchen was dark except for the hearth. The maids were not down yet. The rota on the pantry door said, in Wenna’s hand, that Col’s boy had the four o’clock fire, and Col’s boy had evidently done it and gone back to bed, because the fire was high and nobody was there.

Nobody except Casimir, on the bench by the hearth, with his arm in its sling and a teapot beside him, and two cups.

“You’re supposed to be in the sickroom,” Ilse said.

“I’m supposed to be in a great many places.” He looked up. In the firelight he looked less grey than he had the day before, and very tired, and more awake than she had ever seen him. “I made tea.”

“Badly?”

“Worse than last time. I’ve been practising.”

She poured herself a cup and drank some, and it was terrible, and she sat down on the bench beside him, not a step away. Beside. Her bag was on her shoulder with her mother’s ledger in it. She took it off and put it on the table, out of reach of both of them, because she did not want anyone to be able to say, later, that there had been a book in anybody’s hand.

They sat for a while. The fire moved. Outside the kitchen window the valley was still black, and the glass had a skin of frost on the inside of it, as it had every morning for twenty-one days, as it had every morning for eleven years.

“I’ve been sitting here an hour,” Casimir said eventually, “trying to think of the right way to ask you whether you still want to. And every way I think of sounds like asking.”

“It is asking.”

“I know. I’d like it not to feel like pressure.”

“Then don’t ask,” said Ilse. “Let me.”

He stopped, entirely.

She turned on the bench so that she was facing him, properly, in the firelight, and she took her time, because she had decided in the tower room that she would take all the time in the world over this and not one second less.

“Casimir,” she said. “I’d like to kiss you. Not for the winter. Not for the march or the truce or my mother or your brother. Because I want to, and I’ve wanted to for three years, and I’ve written it down so often I’m sick of the sight of my own handwriting. May I?”

He looked at her for what felt like a long time. She watched him do the thing he did before he answered anything that mattered: think about it, properly, honestly, all the way to the bottom.

“Yes,” said Casimir. “Please.”

So she did.

· · ·Scene break

It was not like anything she had imagined, which was a relief, because she had imagined it a good deal and all of it had been too careful.

It was simple. His mouth was cold and then it wasn’t. He made a small sound, as if something that had been braced in him for a long time had set down its weight, and his good hand came up and very lightly touched the side of her face, and stayed there, and she put her own hand over it, as he had once put his over hers on a frozen latch. For a moment, or several, she stopped counting anything at all.

Then the window cracked.

It was not a loud sound. It was the sound of frost letting go of glass. Ilse opened her eyes and saw over his shoulder that the skin of white on the inside of the kitchen window was running, in long clear lines, all at once, like a page coming up out of a book.

Somewhere outside, very far away, there was a sound she had never heard before in the march. It took her a moment to know it. It was water: dripping, off every eave of the keep at once, a hundred small taps in the dark, and then under that a longer, deeper sound, a groan and a rush from down the valley that she would learn later was the Hallow ford, running for the first time in eleven years.

Casimir gasped.

It was not a romantic sound. He pulled back and bent over his left arm in its sling with his teeth set, and Ilse had her hands on his shoulder before she knew it.

“What—“

“It’s my hand.” He was laughing, or something close to it, through his teeth. “It’s warm. It’s warm, Ilse, it hurts like the devil, I can feel it, I haven’t felt it in—“ He stopped. He sat up, slowly, with his eyes wet and the firelight on his face, and looked at the window, where the valley was beginning to grey towards dawn and every surface in it was running with water.

Down the valley, in Lowcross, somebody began to ring the chapel bell. Not the fire alarm. Not three long and three short. Just ringing, all of it, over and over, like a wedding, like someone who had got hold of the rope and did not know what else to do.

On the table, the ledger lay in its oilcloth where she had left it, out of reach.

Ilse did not go to it. She did not need to. She knew, the way she knew a debt, that if she opened it to the blue ribbon now there would be nine words on a page with a scorched corner, and no thread coming off them at all.

· · ·Scene break

Rurik came into the kitchen in his shirt and boots with a lamp and stopped in the doorway.

He looked at the window. He looked at the water running off the sill onto the flagstones. He looked at the Lord Warden of the march sitting on a kitchen bench with his face wet and his arm in a sling, and at the Reader from Brennock beside him with her hand on his shoulder, and at the terrible teapot.

“Hm,” said Rurik Bane.

He set the lamp down on the table, very carefully, and went out again, and they heard him take the stair faster than Ilse would have believed a man of his age could, shouting for Maud.

Casimir turned to look at her.

“It doesn’t prove anything,” Ilse said. She said it quickly, because it mattered, and because she wanted it said before the whole keep came down the stair. “I want you to know I know that. It doesn’t prove I love you or you love me. It doesn’t prove anything about us at all, except that nobody made us.”

“I know,” said Casimir. His hand came up, the left one, out of the sling, shaking and pink and alive, and touched her hair. “That’s the only thing I ever wanted proved.”

· · ·Scene break

The keep came down the stair. The whole of it. Maud, swearing, with a bag of salves; Wenna in her nightgown with her slate; the cook, the maids, the soldiers from the wall with water pouring off their helmets; and behind them all, in her furs, with her reading glasses pushed up on her head, Justice Ada Kellow, who looked around the kitchen once, at the running window and the Warden’s hand and the Reader beside him, and said, “Well. I suppose that’s the matter closed,” and asked whether there was tea.

There was a great deal of noise after that, and it went on until the sun was fully up over a valley that had begun, within the hour, to turn from white to a thousand shades of wet grey and brown and, here and there, where the snow had slid off a south slope, a green so astonishing that Wenna cried.

The day was very long. Ilse would remember it in pieces. Varro, on the east wall, watching the Gap through a glass, reporting every hour in a flat voice that the cold had lifted off the Gap, that forty feet of snow had begun, very slowly, to slump, and that Oster’s camp was striking tents. Tove’s grandsons at the gate with a cart. The ice-house door propped open to the air for the first time in eleven years, and Casimir standing outside it, not going in, just standing, with Rurik beside him.

And the evening, which came late, with the whole march still out in the running dark celebrating; and the door of Casimir’s rooms at the top of the west tower, which Ilse had never seen; and the moment on its threshold, lamp in hand, when he asked her again, and she answered again, and they went in.

What happened after the door closed is not in any ledger.

For the first time in her life, Ilse Rooke kept no record of it at all.