Chapter 6: What If I Said Yes

What If I Said Yes

“Someone to see you, Your Grace.”

Cassian put the heel of his hand against his brow and left it there. “Not tonight. Tell him the morning.”

“It’s me.”

Alaric Moray came around the screen with his hat still in his hand, which was wrong by itself. His uncle hung his hat on the peg inside the door the way other men shrugged out of a coat, without looking at it. This one he set down on the table instead, crown to the wood, and left it sitting there.

Cassian took his boots down off the fender and stood up. “Uncle.”

“So you do remember the word.” Alaric turned the second chair out from the table and sat down in it, uninvited, which was worse than shouting would have been. “Nine days.”

“Nine.”

“Nine days in this city. The house your mother grew up in stands directly across the street from that door, and you have not put your hand on the gate once.” Flat, with the number in it, and no place in the sentence for anybody to argue. “I have eaten nine dinners with that gate in my window.”

Cassian went to the sideboard and poured wine into a glass and set it down in front of him, and stood with his hand still on the glass until his uncle picked it up. It was as close to an apology as either of them was willing to stay in a room with. Alaric looked at the wine, then at the wall, then drank, which counted as yes.

“How is my grandmother?”

From the shoulders down, his uncle stopped. Not his face — his face had been the same tired, precise, unimpressed face for as long as Cassian had known it. But below that he went still, all at once, and stayed still a beat longer than the question was worth.

Then he turned his head and looked up. Cassian was already looking at him.

“She’s an old woman,” he said.

He moved on before either of them could sit with it any longer. “Your mother is dead. I’m not opening that up tonight, so don’t brace yourself. She’s been gone a long time, and the Morays are clerks. We get chairs with our names painted on the backs, and we sign what’s put in front of us, and there has never once been a thing this family could do for you.” His voice went out on him in the middle of the sentence. He took the glass back up and drank and set it down and looked at the table.

Cassian watched the smoke stand up off the lamp on the sill.

“None of it is your fault,” he said.

Alaric looked at his face for a while, as he had since Cassian was small, and got nothing off it, the same as always.

Then he put both hands flat on the table. “Cassian. Answer me one thing and I’ll go home and leave you alone.”

“Ask.”

“That seat.”

He did not have to say which one. “The boy is ten years old and asleep in his father’s chair,” Alaric said. “What do you mean to do?”

Cassian took his time with it. “You want to know whether I want it.”

“Do you?”

Cassian laughed. One short sound, and not much behind it.

“What if I said yes?”

The cloud had come up over the moon sometime while they were talking. The room went dim by a degree, and quiet enough that each of them could hear the other breathing, and neither of them said anything for long enough that the quiet started to look like an answer.

Alaric sat with his fingers on the glass. The fingers loosened and closed, loosened and closed. Then he stood up. His back was very straight, and he turned around so that he was talking to the fire.

“Come by the house tomorrow,” he said. “Your grandmother would like to see you.”

He picked his hat up off the table on his way out, and the door shut behind him, and Cassian sat where he was and listened to the steps cross the flags, and the gate, and a horse go off down the street.

Wind had gotten up outside. It came around the corner of the house and in over the courtyard wall and brought the blossoms down off the tree at the wall with it, a few and then a great many, until the wet flags by the steps were covered, and the yard looked less like a courtyard than like a painting of one.

Cassian drank what was left in his uncle’s glass, standing at the window, which he would not have done in front of anybody.

Across the street there were lights in three of the Morays’ windows. He had spent nine days on this side of that street.

He laughed once, at nothing. Then he rang for the man and told him to have the carriage at the door at seven, and to tell the kitchen he would not be eating in.

The morning came wet. He stood in the Great Hall with the rest of them while the king’s business was read out — four women dead, and seven days to find who had done it — and said nothing, which he was good at. Then the day went by, and by dark he was on Cannon Row.

The lamps had just been lit and they smelled of oil. There was a cart selling flowers at the corner and a printer’s boy going along the wall with a pot of paste, and clerks going home, and carriages standing three deep at the curb, because at that hour half the city was either going out or coming back.

He had come out in a dark coat and no hat. He went up the street the way he went anywhere, straight through whatever was in front of him, and the crowd sorted itself out around him about half a step late and never once looked up to see who it had moved for.

The Primrose took up most of the block. Three stories, three doors, a lamp above each one, and girls in the doorways with their wraps pulled up to their chins against the wind, calling out to the men going by.

One of them came off the step toward him with her hand already out, then got near enough to see his face, and let the hand drop, and said something to the girl beside her instead, and the girl beside her laughed.

He kept going. The middle door stood open, and he could smell the house from the street — powder, and wine, and under that something sweeter.

He went as far as the corner at the end of the block. There was nothing at the corner. He stopped there anyway, with his back to the house, long enough that a man coming along with a barrow had to work his way around him and told him what he thought about it.

Then he turned around and walked back down the block the way he had come, past the doors and the lamps and the girls, and he was a hundred yards off before one of them thought to call after him.