Page 10

“This is unusual,” I say. “I will go see what’s going on, but you’re tired, aren’t you? I will help you to bed first.”

I lift the dress from the chair and fold it over my arm. I pick up her shoes as well and carry it all to her room.

Her bed stands against the far wall. The boudoir next to it is crowded with the things she loves: combs, jeweled hair ornaments, perfume bottles, and gloves. I imagine she’d never part with any of it. I hang the dress in the wardrobe among the other gowns and smooth the skirt so it won’t crease. I take out a nightdress of soft silk and lay it across the bed.

“Goodnight,” I say from the door. “I won’t be long.”

I go down the steps to the dock, get into the boat, and light the lamp at the front. Then I push off and row.

In the lamp light, I can see a few strokes of black water ahead and nothing else. I hear the platform stop at the end of its rails. Then I hear something else on it, and I stop rowing to be sure. Someone is breathing out there in short, hard pulls. Between the breaths, there’s a sound that is small, high, and repeated. I take up the oar again and pull harder.

The light falls on the platform. This is no ordinary offering. A cage stands on the iron, and there is a person inside it. I make out a white dress first, and then hair so pale it looks silver, warm and gold where the lamp light falls on it. The sounds I heard earlier are whimpers, and they come from a young woman.

I bring the boat alongside until the hull touches the platform. She looks up and startles. The cage shakes with the force of it. She pushes herself into the far corner, wraps her arms around her knees, and shivers so hard that her teeth knock together. Tears run down her face.

The cage is too low for her to stand in, so she crouches there with her knees tucked in. She’s small and slender, with long, nearly white hair and large blue-gray eyes. Her face is fine-boned, with a gentle mouth. Burn scars cover the right side of it. They begin near her temple and her hairline, cross her cheek and her jaw, and run down her neck under the high collar of the dress. Some of the scarred skin is pale and glossy. Other parts are raised and uneven. The scars pull at one corner of her mouth and cut through her eyebrow.

I see all of it and think she’s the most beautiful creature I’ve laid eyes on. She’s alive, a breathing, warm body only a few feet from me. I haven’t been this close to a living person in a century or more.

She’s whispering, so softly that a human would’ve lost it in the sound of the water, but I hear every word.

“Please, please, please.”

I reach a hand toward the bars, but I stop with my black claws in the light. I can’t accept that she’s here. I’ve talked to Prima for a century, making up her replies in my head, imagining her laugh and her snide comments. Maybe I’ve created her so well that she’s come to me now. Maybe this is what happens to a mind left alone this long.

Then I see the envelope lying at the woman’s feet.

I reach for the lock. I have no key, but I don’t need one. I close my hand around the iron and crush it. The lock breaks cleanly, and I pull the door open.

The woman makes herself smaller in the corner.

“Please don’t hurt me,” she says. “I beg you. Please.”

A song rises in my throat, the one that soothes. I force it down. I press my lips together behind the mask and hold them shut. My hand goes up to the clasps at the back of my head, then to the grille over my mouth, the way it does when I need to know they’re holding. If she’s real, I need to keep silent. I decide that I will not speak.

I reach past her feet and take the envelope. She watches my hand go in and come out again. She doesn’t make a move. I open it. There’s a single sheet inside, and on it a fragment:

“…what is given in silence

the Voice cannot take…”

I know these words, because they come from an ancient song of my kind, one piece of the little that survives. I’ve never understood what they mean. I know the hand that wrote them too. This is Callum’s writing.

Anger bubbles up inside me fast. Callum, who leads every ceremony up there and lowers every gift, who has put himself deeper into this than anyone should. He’s sent me a woman in a cage, with a line of a song he probably understands even less than I do. I hold the anger for a few seconds, then let it go. Because it doesn’t tell me what he wants.

How did he get these words? Has he found more of the song than I have, or has he taken this one piece and made it mean whatever he needed? And what does any of it have to do with a frightened woman delivered to me in the dark?

I fold the note and put it in my pocket.

I look back at her. She’s still afraid. But she’s looking straight at me, into the black eyes behind my mask, and she doesn’t turn away.

She presses her lips together and takes a breath.

“I don’t want to die,” she says, “but maybe… Maybe I’m dead already. Maybe I’ve been dead since the fire, and I just refused to accept it. It’s okay. Please… But it’s okay.”

I don’t know what fire she means. I know what she’s doing. She’s telling me it’s all right to kill her, and she says it gently, so I won’t feel bad about it. I can’t keep silent through that.

I make my voice as small as it will go, smaller than I’ve ever made it, and I hope it’s small enough to be safe for her ears.