Chapter 4: Two Kinds of Marriage

“You have to run,” Mira said, her mouth almost against her sister’s ear. “The Vosses will take the match. They want the crossings, and they’ll take it in whatever shape it’s offered. When the terms come back there’ll be a day written on them, and the day will be sooner than anyone in this house thinks, and you’ll be standing in the hall with your hands folded. If you don’t run, you’re the one who goes north.”

Ada drew back from her. The quilt had slipped off her shoulder; she pulled it up and held it with both hands and looked at her sister along the bed.

“Then I can’t,” she said. “If they take it and I’m gone, what does my father send north? He sends word that his daughter is dead, or lost, and they send a man to look, and then he has one more thing to explain and nothing to explain it with. It doesn’t stop being owed because I ran from it. I’m a Vale. When they come to this house for a daughter, I’m the one who’s here.”

She said it as a thing already settled.

Mira let her breath go and lifted her head.

“Then let me have it,” she said. “The match. Me, going north in your place. Would you let me?”

Ada stared at her. Her mouth fell open and stayed open, and she looked at her sister as if checking that it was still Mira.

“You’re marrying Auberon,” she said at last. “Next year. There’s linen in Nell’s room you’ve had out since spring, and a pair of shoes for Auberon’s father with the left one still bare because you can’t settle on the color, and now you sit up in the dark and tell me—“ She stopped herself. “Is this a thing you’re saying to make me feel better?”

“I’m asking whether you’d let me.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have tonight.”

Ada pressed the heel of her hand against her eye and left it there.

“There are two kinds of marriage,” Mira said. “There isn’t a third, whatever the songs say. In the first kind a woman gets the man. They’ve bread in the house and a cold room and a great deal of work, and she’s content — she’d tell you so herself and mean it, and I believe her. That isn’t a small thing and I won’t stand here and say it is.

“In the second kind she doesn’t get the man. She gets the place he can put her in. The keys, the accounts, the letters that come into the house before they come into anyone else’s hands. A word that weighs something when it’s said in a room. That’s what I want. I don’t want a husband to sit with me in the mornings and be kind to me. I want the second thing, and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise.

“Auberon’s a good man. He’s soft, and soft isn’t the same as weak, but he’ll have the East one day and he’ll be careful with it, and careful means giving way to whoever’s strongest that year. What does that make his wife? A woman in a fine house in a country that’s being cut up, where no writ runs past a lord’s own gate. In ten years there may be no East to be lady of, or there may be, and it’ll be somebody’s prize and not his.

“Voss is twenty-two and he holds the Northmark with the Vaskiri on one side of him and everything else on the other, and nobody has moved on him yet. They say he’s a hard man. Maybe he is. That isn’t luck, at his age, with that much land. The two houses are being tied together this winter whether anyone in this family likes it. I’d sooner be inside the knot than sitting at a window in the East, hearing about it a month late.”

She heard herself doing it. Most of it she was making up as she went — out of what she’d listened to at her father’s table, out of what she had turned over in the dark — and she put it in the order that would carry, and she did not stop in the middle to sort out which parts she believed.

Ada had her head down. When she spoke, her voice had gone flat and careful, which was worse than crying.

“Say it plainly. Is any of that true, or is it for me?”

“It’s the wrong way round,” Mira said. “You keep turning it round. I’m the one asking. I’m the one who wants something. Do this for me and I’ll owe you for it as long as I live.”

“You’d do this.”

“I’d do it for myself. I’ve just told you so.”

Ada laughed, one dry note, and then put her hand over her mouth as if she had been loud, and both of them went still and listened to the maid in the outer room turn over on her pallet and settle and begin, faintly, to grind her teeth.

“Could I?” Ada said then, very low. “Truly? If I went — my father would— and my mother—“ She stopped. “She’d think I was dead. She’d go on thinking it.”

“Then she thinks it, and in a year she knows better.” Mira took her sister’s wrist and held it. “I’ll be here. I’ll do the letters and the sewing and the standing where I’m put. I’ll be the daughter in this house, and they’ll be angry with you for a season and then they’ll be angry with me about something else, and that’ll be the end of it. And think what becomes of Bram if you go north as they’ve arranged it. You know what becomes of him.”

Ada’s face had gone pale, with two spots of color high on her cheeks, and she shut her eyes.

“I can’t answer you tonight,” she said. “Don’t ask me tonight.”

“I’m not asking.” Mira reached over her and put out the lamp. The wick curled and smoked, and the room came down to the gray of the window and the smell of the wick. She lay back and pulled the quilt up. “Sleep. Or don’t, but lie still, and don’t go out again.”

For a long while neither of them said anything. The cold came up out of the floor. The maid’s breathing went on its steady broken work.

“I dreamed about you once,” Mira said. “Before the frost. I never told you the whole of it.”

“Don’t.”

“You were married to a man. Not— not the man you’d have chosen. I couldn’t see his face and there wasn’t any need to see it, I knew what I was being shown. And you died early. Not old, Ada. Early, and there was a grave in a field somewhere and nothing else of you in the world, and the grass over it, and the wind coming across it.

“And he was living. The whole time you were in that field he was living — alone, not married, not anything. And at the end of it he came and found where you were, and he took you up out of the ground and carried you away with him.”

Ada made a sound and turned her face into the pillow.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t say any more.”

Mira lay still. She had called it a dream because a dream was a thing she could hand her sister; the rest of it she did not know, and would not have sworn to in the light. She lay on her back with her eyes open and listened to Ada cry, which she did without noise.

After a time the crying stopped. The window had gone from gray to the flat dead color that comes before a winter dawn, and somewhere past the stable a cock tried to crow and gave up in the cold.

“I’ll think about it,” Ada said then, into the pillow, so muffled that Mira could have pretended not to hear.

“All right,” Mira said.

She did not say anything else. She pulled the quilt up over the two of them and lay listening until her sister’s breathing went long and even, and the house creaked the way it did at that hour, and the fire in the outer room was nothing but ash.