Nothing on My Neck
Linnet
The Council came to Lowmere eleven days early, and I was standing in the middle of the street with my hand on a horse when it did.
It was the reeve’s gray mare, and she hated the farrier with her whole body. I had my palm flat on the warm side of her neck and I was humming to her, low, no tune in it, the way I hum to everything with four feet. Her ears had just come round to me. Her weight had just started to settle.
Then the bell on the south road rang three times, and every door in Lowmere stopped moving.
Three rings is the measure.
“That’s not right,” said old Ebba from her step. She had a bowl of peas in her lap and she did not drop it, because Ebba has never dropped anything in eighty years. “It’s not the dark of the year yet. They come at the dark of the year.”
“They’ve come now,” I said.
My mouth was dry. My hand stayed on the mare. If I took it off she would go up on her hind legs, and the farrier would lose a tooth, and people would turn to look at the noise. The one thing I have learned in twenty-three winters is this: never be the noise.
They came up the south road out of the white. Two horses and a cart, a boy walking at the cart’s tail, and four long gray hounds on leads in front of him. Council hounds. They are bred lean and bred quiet, and they do not bark when they find a thing. They sit down beside it and wait for a man to come and write it down.
The first rider was tall and narrow in a long gray coat, with a small brass glass pinned at his collar. The glass told the whole street what he was. A measure-reader. The man who holds the seeker-glass a thumb’s length from every throat in a village, and reads what lights.
His hair was white-silver and tied back at his neck, though his face was not old. His gloves were gray. He rode the way a heron stands in water, very upright, very still, looking at everything without turning his head.
I took my chin down.
Lowmere is two hundred and eleven people on the south shore of the Mere, which is a lake for half the year and a road for the other half. We cut ice and send it south on sledges to the warm Courts. Every winter the Council comes to read our throats. Every winter they find a few of us with fae blood in the neck, and they measure those ones for collars with a little iron caliper, and in the spring the collars come.
Every winter, I hide.
Not one person in this village has ever written my name down. Not the midwife who caught me. Not the reeve who keeps the tally. Not my mother, who died when I was nine and made Ebba swear on her bowl of peas. I have never once seen the word Linnet written on anything. I have never worn anything on my neck but my own scarf.
It has been a good life, mostly. It has also been a life spent in other people’s cellars.
“Linnet,” Ebba said, very quietly, without looking at me. “Walk away from the horse.”
“If I walk away from the horse, the horse makes a noise.”
“Then let her make it.”
The hounds came past the well.
The boy at the cart’s tail could not have been more than fifteen. He had four leads wrapped around one fist, and he was cold and tired and not watching them. Behind the ice-house, Oswin Brack’s two big yard dogs heard strangers and set up their bawling, the way they always do.
The lead hound turned her head toward that sound.
Then she turned it toward Tam Gorse’s little girl, who was four, and who was sitting in the snow by the well with a red wooden horse in her hands, and who had just stood up and run toward the pretty gray dogs with both arms out.
The lead slid out of the boy’s fist like a wet rope.
I did not decide anything. My body went before the rest of me. I left the mare. I crossed eight yards of packed snow. I got between the hound and Tam’s girl, and I went down on my knees, and I put my bare hand flat on the side of that long gray neck as it came past me.
And I hummed.
There is something in my hands. I do not have a word for it. My mother called it the quiet. Ebba calls it my trouble. When I put my palm on a beast and let the hum come up out of my chest, the beast goes still. Not frightened still. Easy still, like a tired child against a shoulder. Horses, oxen, a bull once that had already broken a man’s leg. I have never found an animal it does not work on.
The Council hound stopped as if she had run into a wall of warm water.
Her legs folded. She lay down in the snow with her chin on my knee. Her eyes went half shut. Her tail moved once against the ground, slow, and then lay still.
Tam’s girl stood behind me with her red horse and said, “Oh.”
The whole street was silent. I could hear the boy breathing hard, and the creak of saddle leather as the man in the gray coat turned his horse, at last, and looked straight at me.
I kept my eyes on the hound. I kept my hand on her neck. If I let go, she would remember what she was.
“Arno,” said the measure-reader. His voice was soft. It carried anyway. “Take up your lead.”
The boy came running and took up his lead. He was white to the lips. He did not try to pull the hound off my knee.
The reader got down from his horse and walked over. His boots stopped a yard from me. I looked at them because I would not look higher. Good boots, salt-stained to the ankle from the Gullet road.
“She has never lain down for anyone but me,” he said. “Not in six years.”
“She was frightened,” I said to the boots. “She wasn’t going to hurt the child. She was going to the dogs behind the ice-house. She only wanted to see them.”
“You can tell that.”
“I can tell it with my hand on her.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“What is your name?”
There it was.
I always have something ready for that question. I opened my mouth to say Ebba’s girl, or the farrier’s niece, or any of the small easy lies I keep in my apron like nails.
A shadow came over me from the left, wide as a door.
“She’s my ice-girl, and she’s late.”
Oswin Brack does not walk up to a thing. He arrives at it, the way weather arrives. He is the biggest man in Lowmere by a head and a half, red-brown beard going gray at the chin, shoulders that block the light, and the top of his right ear gone where a bear bit it off three hundred years ago. He was a bear himself at the time. He says it was a fair fight and he started it.
He smelled of pine tar and cold water and the inside of the ice-house. He put one huge hand on my shoulder. The hound under my palm did not even twitch.
“Sorry about the dog,” he said to the reader, cheerful, as if he were sorry about the weather. “She’s soft with dogs. She’s soft with everything that bites. Up you come, Linnet, the north blocks won’t saw themselves.”
He said my name.
Oswin has never once said my name in front of a stranger in fourteen winters. He said it then, loud and easy, as if names were nothing, as if I were nobody worth hiding. I understood a beat later. A name shouted across a street is a name nobody is afraid of.
I lifted my hand off the hound.
She stayed down. She looked up at me with her chin on the snow. I did not like leaving her there. I liked the reader even less, and he was watching my hands.
I got up. My knees were wet through. I went with Oswin’s hand on my shoulder, across the street, past Ebba and her peas, and I did not look back once.
I felt the reader’s eyes on the back of my neck the whole way. Right where a collar would sit.
The ice-house at Lowmere is dug into the bank above the shore, half under the ground, with a roof of turf a yard thick. Inside it is always the same cold. The blocks stand in rows as tall as a man, packed in sawdust and barley straw, and the light comes in blue through the cracks around the door.
I have spent every measure of my life inside it since I was nine years old.
“Back row,” Oswin said. “Behind the big north blocks. You know the way.”
“I know the way.”
“Then why are you standing there?”
Because my hands were shaking, and he had already seen it. He sees everything. He pretends he doesn’t because it is kinder.
“He looked at me, Oswin.”
“Everybody looked at you. You laid down a Council hound in the middle of the street. Tam’s going to name his next goat after you.”
“He asked my name.”
“And he got it from me, and it’s a name like any other name. There are Linnets all the way down the Gullet road. I’ve met three.” He pulled the straw back from the hole behind the north blocks. “In you go.”
“He saw what I did.”
Oswin stopped.
Other people freeze. Oswin settles, like a great animal lying down, and the air around him gets heavier.
“I know he did,” he said. “So you’re going to sit in the straw, and you’re not going to hum to my dogs, because they’ll sing back to you, and he’ll hear them. The measure’s tonight in the reeve’s hall. He’ll read every throat in Lowmere. He’ll count two hundred and ten. Then he’ll go.”
“He’ll know it should be two hundred and eleven.”
“He’ll know nothing. He’ll have a feeling. Council men have feelings all the time. They get over them on the road home.”
He took off his coat. It is a huge sheepskin thing with the wool turned in, and when he put it around me it came down to my boots and smelled of him all the way through.
His hands stayed on the collar of the coat. On my shoulders. A beat too long.
Something under my breastbone turned over.
I mean that plainly. Under the bone, a little to the left, something with weight. Like a smooth stone I had swallowed without noticing, and only now could feel. It had not been there that morning. I was sure of that, the way you are sure there was no pebble in your boot until there is.
I put my hand flat on my chest.
“What?” said Oswin. His voice had gone low.
“Nothing. Something. It’s cold.”
He looked at my hand on my chest. His own hand moved, very slightly, toward the same place on his own body, and stopped, and came back to his side.
“Into the straw,” he said, and his voice was rough. “I’ll bring you supper after the measure.”
I went into the straw.
Night comes early at the dark end of the year. By the time the reeve’s bell rang for the measure, the light through the door cracks had gone from blue to black.
I sat with my knees up and Oswin’s coat around me and listened to Lowmere walk past toward the reeve’s hall. Two hundred and ten pairs of boots. Somebody laughing too loud, the way people laugh on measure night.
Later, out in the yard, wheels.
Not the Council cart. Something lighter, with a rattle in one wheel, and the clop of two small animals that were not horses. Mules, by the sound. Somebody whistling a drinking song from the warm Courts, and whistling it very well.
The wheels stopped outside the ice-house door.
“Oswin Brack,” said a man’s voice, bright and pleased with itself. “You old mountain. I’ve come four hundred miles in a month because you sent me a letter with two words in it, and one of them was spelled wrong.”
“Keep your voice down,” said Oswin, close by. I had not heard him come back.
“This is me keeping it down.” The voice dropped anyway. “Is it tonight? I passed the Council cart on the south road this morning. I thought you said the dark of the year.”
“They came early.”
“They never come early. It’s the one good thing about them.” A pause. “Where is she?”
The door opened. Cold came in. A lantern came in after it, and a man after the lantern.
He was slim and quick, in a patched red coat and a fur hat pushed back off rust-colored hair. A fiddle case hung on his back. He had a gap between his two front teeth and gold-brown eyes, and when the lantern found me in the straw behind the north blocks those eyes went wide and then crinkled at the corners.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, she’s not a child.”
“I never said she was a child,” said Oswin.
“You said a girl. You said hide a girl. I brought a basket. I brought a little blanket with ducks on it.” He came closer and crouched at the edge of the straw. “Hello. I’m Jory Sorrell. I’m a fox, a fiddler and a liar, in that order, and I’ve come to take you north.”
“I’m not going north,” I said.
“Everybody says that.” He held out his hand. “Everybody says that right up until the morning they go.”
I did not take his hand. He took mine anyway, very lightly, and turned it over, and looked at the white scar across my left palm where an ice-saw jumped when I was fifteen. Then he lifted it and pressed his mouth to my knuckles, quick and warm, as if we were at a dance in a warm Court and not in an ice-house on measure night.
The stone under my breastbone turned over again.
No. Not the same one.
A second one. A second small weight, a little lower, a little to the side of the first, waking up like a cat in a patch of sun.
I pulled my hand back. Jory let it go at once. He was not smiling anymore. He had a hand pressed flat against the middle of his own chest, and he was staring at me, and Oswin had gone very still behind him.
“Well,” Jory said softly. “That’s new.”
Above us, on the turf roof, something landed.
It was not loud. It was a soft heavy sound, like a folded blanket dropped on a bed. Then claws, settling into frozen turf. Then nothing.
Oswin turned his head toward the roof.
I put my eye to the crack between the door and the stone, where the cold comes in. The moon was up over the Mere. The whole lake was white and silver, flat to the far shore. And there on the ridge of the ice-house roof, black against all that light, sat a great gray owl as big as a child.
It turned its head all the way round and looked at the door.
Its eyes were amber. They were not an owl’s eyes. They were his.
The Glass Lights Three Times
Emeric
I take off my right glove for the glass and for nothing else. I have done it that way for two hundred years of measures. The glove comes off, the glass goes into the bare hand, and the hand does not tremble, because a reader whose hand trembles reads a lie into every throat he passes.
The reeve’s hall at Lowmere was long and low, with a fire at one end and a table at the other, and two hundred and ten people standing between them in a line that bent twice around the benches. They had their scarves off before I asked. A village learns the measure the way it learns the weather.
“Next,” I said.
A woman with flour on her sleeves stepped up and lifted her chin. I held the glass a thumb’s length from her throat. Nothing. Clear as rain in a cup. No fae blood in her at all.
“Thank you,” I said. “Next.”
That is the measure. A glass, a throat, a word. Clear means nothing. A dim green reading means fae blood in part, and then the caliper comes out of my case, and Arno writes down a number, and in the spring a collar comes up the Gullet road with that number stamped inside it. A bright reading, like a candle held close, means a full-blood of a Court, and full-bloods are no business of the Council’s.
The ice-master read bright. I had expected that. A man that size, with that weight to him, could only be a bear of the Winter Court. He stood in front of me with his huge arms folded and his chin up and looked at the wall over my head while the glass burned gold in my hand.
Then I saw the thread.
It ran around the rim of the glass, very fine, the color of new copper. A bond. Freshly woken, so new that it still trembled. Its far end ran out of the glass and out of sight, the way the far end of every bond does.
“You have something new,” I said quietly.
“I have a great many things,” said Oswin Brack. “Most of them are ice.”
“It’s not my business. A full-blood’s bonds belong to his Court.”
“Then we agree.” He did not unfold his arms. “Are we done, reader?”
“We are done.”
He went out into the dark without looking back. I wrote nothing about the thread. It was his own affair, and I told myself so twice while the next throat stepped up.
There were five dim greens that night. A blacksmith’s son of twelve. Two sisters who cut ice on the north reach. A young man who would not look at me. A girl of fourteen who looked at nothing else.
I measured all five with the caliper. Arno wrote down the numbers. Nine and a half. Ten. Ten and a quarter.
The girl of fourteen said, “Does it hurt?”
“The collar does not hurt,” I said.
That is true. I have said it four thousand times, and every time it was true. I had never before heard how much it left out.
“Next,” I said.
The reeve was called Wilmot Crabbe, and he was a small round man who smiled with his whole face and none of his eyes. When the line was finished he brought me a cup of hot ale I had not asked for and stood too close while I wrote.
“Two hundred and ten,” he said, looking at my book. “That’s the tally, reader. Right to the head. I keep a good tally.”
“So I see.”
“Five greens. Same as last year, near enough.” He rubbed his hands together. “Is it still forty silver, reader? For a finder? If a man found one that wasn’t on the tally, say.”
I set down my pen.
“It is still forty silver,” I said. “Have you found one?”
“Me? No, no.” He laughed. “It’s only, a man likes to know the law. A man in my position.”
“The law is forty silver. It’s written on the board in every relay post between here and Vaeloth.”
“So it is.” He smiled again. “So it is.”
He went away. I looked at my book for a long time. Two hundred and ten names in Arno’s careful hand, and the reeve’s tally beside it, and the two lists matched to the last soul.
The young woman in the street was not on either of them.
I knew what I had seen. A Council hound does not lie down for strangers. Thistle came from six generations of Vaeloth hounds bred to sit beside half-bloods and wait. And that young woman had put one bare hand on her neck and hummed, and Thistle had folded up in the snow like a dropped coat and put her chin on the woman’s knee.
That was not a trick. That was blood, and something more than blood. Something I did not have a word for.
And the ice-master had come across the street and said her name very loudly, and taken her away, and then stood in front of my glass an hour later with a brand-new bond trembling around the rim.
I closed the book.
“Arno. Go to bed.”
“Yes, reader.” He hesitated. “Are you going out?”
“I am going to think.”
“You go out when you think.”
“Go to bed, Arno.”
The owl lives behind my breastbone. When I let it go, it comes out of me the way a held breath comes out, all at once and with a kind of relief. It costs. It always costs, a pulling ache through the long bones of the arms. Then the arms are wings, and the cold is no longer cold, and the whole night opens up below me like a page.
I went up off the reeve’s roof on four slow beats and turned over Lowmere.
Owls do not see in the dark as people think. We hear in it. Every sound in that village came up to me sharp and placed. A child coughing in a loft. A cow shifting in a byre. A mule stamping in the cold, outside the ice-house on the bank above the shore.
I had not seen a mule in Lowmere that afternoon.
I came down in a long slow circle over the ice-house. Through the smoke-hole in its roof, the one that lets the damp out, I could hear voices.
A woman’s voice. Low and steady, with a crack running through the middle of it like a split in ice.
“I’m not going north.”
I knew that voice. I had heard it from a yard away, saying that a hound only wanted to see the dogs.
Then a man’s voice I did not know, light and quick, from the warm south. “Well. That’s new.”
I landed on the ridge of the roof as quietly as I know how, which is very quietly. The turf was frozen hard under my claws.
I sat there in the moonlight and did not move for a long time.
Twelve miles across the ice, the relay post at Ketch Bridge had a board on its wall with the Severance Law painted on it in red. I had read that board a hundred times. Being fae in part, and carrying an uncompleted bond, and having no mate at law to speak for them, they shall be given to the Unmaking. In smaller letters under that: forty silver to any finder.
I did not know yet if she carried a bond.
I knew a bear of the Winter Court did. A new one, still trembling, with its far end out of sight.
I knew that a young woman with no name on any tally had stood beside that bear in the street.
I knew I should fly back to the reeve’s hall and write down what I had heard.
Instead I came down off the roof and let the owl go back behind my breastbone, and I stood in front of the ice-house door in my own shape, and I knocked.
The ice-master opened the door. He filled it completely. Behind him a lantern swung on a hook, and a red-haired man in a patched coat sat on a block of ice with a fiddle case across his knees and a look on his face like a fox who has heard the henhouse door.
“Reader,” said Oswin Brack. “You’re out late.”
“I am. May I come in?”
He looked at me for a while. “You’re asking.”
“I would rather be let in than come in. I’ve found it ends better.”
“For who?”
“For everyone.”
The red-haired man laughed, softly. “Oh, I like him. I didn’t want to like him. Os, let me hate him for a while before you let him in. I’ve had a long month.”
“Be quiet, Jory.”
The ice-master did not move out of the door. I did not hold it against him. I would not have moved either.
“There is a woman in this ice-house,” I said. “She is not on the reeve’s tally. She is not in my book. I would like to read her throat.”
“There’s no woman in here but the one on the fiddle case,” said Jory, “and I’ll have you know she’s very shy.”
“There are four hundred blocks of ice in here,” said Oswin. “Read those, if you like. They’re all clear. I checked them myself.”
“Master Brack.”
“Ice-master.”
“Ice-master.” I took a breath of the cold. “Somewhere in the reeve’s house there is a man who asked me tonight whether the finder’s fee is still forty silver. I told him it was. He did not ask out of curiosity. If I do not read her, he will send a bird to the relay post, and the relay post will send a hound-master, and a hound-master does not knock.”
Oswin’s face did not change. His great shoulders did. They came up, very slightly, the way a bear’s shoulders come up before it stands.
“Then you read her,” he said, “and you write her down, and she gets a collar in the spring. Or worse than a collar. What’s the difference to her whether it’s you or him?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said. It was the truest thing I had said in a hundred years. “That is why I would like to read her.”
“No,” said Oswin.
“Yes,” said a voice behind him.
She came out from behind the north blocks with a sheepskin coat around her shoulders that dragged on the floor. It was his coat. I could tell by the size of it. There was straw in her hair, which was dark and cut short at the jaw, as if she had done it herself with shears. Her eyes were gray. Her chin was up.
“Linnet,” said Oswin, not turning around. “Go back.”
“No.” She walked past the fox on his block of ice. She walked right up to the ice-master’s back and put her hand flat between his shoulder blades. I watched him feel it. I watched all of that great weight of him go still under one small hand. “I’m tired, Oswin. I’ve been tired since I was nine. He knows I’m here. Wilmot knows I’m here. Everyone in Lowmere knows I’m here. Let him look.”
“He’ll write you down.”
“Then he’ll write me down.” She stepped around him, out of the door, into the snow.
She was smaller than she had looked on her knees in the street. The top of her head came to my chin. She stood in front of me on the trampled snow in the moonlight with the Mere white and endless behind her, and she unwound her scarf from her neck with both hands and let it hang.
Her throat was bare. There was nothing on it. No collar, no scar, no mark of any kind. A long pale line of skin with a pulse going in it, fast and hard. I have read more throats than I can count, and I had never once looked at one before.
I took off my right glove.
I took the glass from my coat.
Then I did something I had never done in seven hundred years of life and two hundred years of measures.
“May I?” I said.
She looked up at me. Straight at me, for the first time. The gray of her eyes had a ring of darker gray around the outside, like ice over deep water.
“You’ll do it anyway,” she said.
“I would still like to be told.”
The fox had come to the door behind the ice-master. Neither of them said a word. Out on the Mere the ice made one long groaning sound, the sound of a lake turning over in its sleep.
“Yes,” said Linnet.
I lifted the glass. I held it a thumb’s length from her throat, below the jaw, where the pulse was.
It lit.
Dim green first, the color of new leaves under water. Fae in part. I had known that. I had known it in the street.
Then, around the rim of the glass, a thread. Fine as a hair, copper-colored, trembling. Its far end ran out of the glass and away, out of sight, toward the door where the ice-master stood.
Then a second thread, beside the first. Gold, this one, quick and bright. Its far end ran toward the fox.
My hand did not tremble. It has not trembled in two hundred years.
Then the third thread came.
It woke while I watched. It came up out of nothing at the rim of the glass, silver-gray, the color of an owl’s wing in the dark, and the same instant something turned over beneath my own breastbone. Something with weight. Something that had not been there one breath before. Like a stone dropped into still water, and the rings going out, and out, and out.
Its far end did not run toward the door.
It ran to me.
I looked up from the glass. Linnet was staring at me with her lips parted and her hand pressed flat to the left side of her chest, and I knew she had felt it too.
Three threads. Uncompleted. A half-blood with no name, no tally, no mate at law.
There is only one word in the Council’s book for a woman like that. I had written it down many times.
The word is Severance.
The glass burned green and copper and gold and silver in my bare hand, and the woman in front of me waited to hear what I would do with it.
