Chapter 98

“You speak,” Saskia said.

“Again,” I said. “Not well yet.”

She looked at me a moment longer. Then she slid the sword home into its scabbard without looking at it, the way other women put a comb into their hair, and shut the door behind her, and set her back against it.

“Saskia,” said Lucien from the floor, “this is my cousin.”

“Yes,” said Saskia.

He stared at her. “You knew?”

“I guessed. At the mirror, in Vaelmoor. She turned her head and the lamp caught her hair.” She did not take her eyes off me. “I had seen that colour once before, when I was young, in Ellisar. On a woman on a white horse.”

It was more words than I had ever heard her say together. I found I had stopped breathing. I made myself begin again.

***

She laid a silence before she told it. She walked the room with her hand out flat, murmuring under her breath in the language like water over stones, and the shop went away under the floor, and the river went away