Going Under Varnish

Marguerite has just walked into her ward.

The sentence lands the way a solvent lands when you have mixed it one part too strong and brushed it on before you tested it on the corner, which is to say it does not sit on the surface and wait to be wiped, it goes straight down through everything you thought was sound and finds the wood, and the worst of it is what it does to Renata's face. I have spent nine days watching ancient creatures be afraid in the careful, costumed, nine-hundred-year way they are afraid, which is to say not afraid at all, only calculating faster. This is not that. The curator's calm has gone off her the way varnish goes when the solvent finally bites, all at once, in a slow ugly bloom, and what is under it is a woman who has kept one secret thing safe for forty years and has just felt the door of it open.

"Where," I say. It is the only word I have room for.

"You do not need the where." Even now, even with her face come apart, she reaches for the keeping, the management, the kind hand on the back of the neck that has been steering me since before I had a spine to steer. "You need to be somewhere Marguerite is not, and the only place I can put you that she cannot reach in one night is under. Lio. Listen to me. I can put you under varnish."

The grain, on its own ground, glad, goes very still at the word, the way a thing goes still when it hears the name of the thing that has always been done to it.

"Under," I say.

"It is what we are." She says it fast now, the cafe-table voice, the kind-woman-from-the-council voice, the one she used on my mother across a table thirty years ago to talk her into a heartbeat. "When the world becomes a thing we cannot survive awake, we go under, we sleep like a painting under a coat we have laid down ourselves, and we wake decades later with the colours wrong and the danger long dead. You are not one of us, but you are close enough to her now, close enough to the grain, that I can lay the coat over you instead. You sleep. Marguerite finds an empty studio and an old woman who knows nothing she did not know forty years ago, and you wake when it is over and there is nothing left of tonight but a bad surface I will spend a century fixing. It is the only mercy I have. Let me put you under."

And it is so exactly the shape of every kindness anyone has ever done me that for one swaying breath I want it. That is the trap of her, I understand, standing on my own grave with my own bones cold under the lid. Marguerite's trap was a blade and a sister's throat. Renata's is gentler and therefore worse: she offers to make me safe by making me not here, the same offer the scholarship made, the same offer the quiet careful unapplied-for job made, the same offer the bench made when someone built it under me and called it my life. Go to sleep, little restoration. Let the people who love you handle the part where things happen.

I press two fingers to my own sternum, the working posture turned in on myself, and I hold the warmth there against a gratitude that is not mine and was never going to be, and I think, flat and clear and entirely my own, no.

"No," I say out loud, so the room has it.

Esteban, by the threshold, with his case still unopened at his feet, makes the small sound again, the one that is almost approval and almost grief. "She means it as kindness," he says. "She always does. That is the thing about the gentle ones. The coat they lay over you is still a coat over your face."

"You do not understand what is in that ward." Renata rounds on him, and her voice has lost the cafe-table smoothness entirely now, it is bare and old and frightened, and a creature nine hundred years old being bare is a worse thing than a creature nine hundred years old being cruel. "Marguerite does not want the old woman. Marguerite wants what the old woman holds. I split the doorway across two vessels so it would never be whole in one body, so the child could be raised soft, so there would always be a piece of it I controlled. If Marguerite takes the grandmother's piece and brings it up, she does not need the studio. She does not need to wait for the girl to surface. She has half the doorway in her hand and the other half standing on its own grave being stubborn at me, and she will simply reach across and finish the joining herself, the wrong way, by force, and there will be no Lio left to refuse anything, only Camila, woken in two rooms at once and stitched into one."

I feel it then.

I want to say I feel it through the grain, through the line, through some clean instrument I have learned to read, but the truth is more like the truth of a draught, the way you feel a window open three rooms away before you know why the candle leaned. Somewhere that I have never been, in a quiet room with a garden she cannot leave, an old woman who heard music no one taught her is being asked, very gently, by a patient creature in a coat the colour of dried blood, to come up. And something in me that has been asleep my whole life under someone else's careful coat leans toward her the way one flame leans toward another, and recognises her, and aches.

Grandmother. The word arrives in me with no English around it, in the language of the lullaby, and it is not a fact I have learned, it is a hand I have held.

"She is pulling her up," I say. My own voice has gone strange in my own mouth, lower, older, certain. "I can feel her going under to come up. They are the same motion, aren't they. To bring the original up you put the living woman down. She is putting my grandmother under to wake the thing she carries, and it feels, from in here, exactly like the coat you just offered me." I look at Renata, and I do not entirely choose the next sentence, the grain offers it and I let it through because it is true. "You taught Marguerite that move. A century ago. You showed her how you put your own people under, and she watched you the way she watched everything, and she kept it."

Renata's face does the worst thing it has done yet. It agrees.

"I did not know she was watching," she whispers, and the cafe-table voice is gone for good now, there is only a tired frightened ancient woman who has just learned that the gentlest cruelty she ever invented has been turned against the one piece of the world she was trying to keep. "I taught her how to lay a soul down to sleep so it would not suffer. I did not teach her to lay one down so she could rob the body while it slept."

"Then teach me how to stop it." I am off the lid-stone now, off my own grave, and I do not remember standing. Sabre has come to my shoulder, near, not touching, the coin of his penance spent again without a word. Esteban has crouched to his case at last and his ordinary mortal hands are working the buckles. The grain in me, glad, on its own ground, leans north toward a room I have never seen and a woman whose name I have only ever known in a dead language, and it is no longer the worst thing in me, because it is afraid too, it is afraid for her, and a thing that can love is a thing I can stand to share a body with. "I am not going under. I am going to her. Tell me how to reach the part of her Marguerite is reaching for, and reach it first."

"You cannot reach it without using the craft," Sabre says, low, and there is the ash in his voice, the frayed-clean register he cannot costume. "And the craft surfaces Camila. You go toward your grandmother with the only tool that will get you there, and every step of the way there is that much less of you. Lio. That is the road Marguerite has been trying to put you on since the drive. She does not have to force you up if she can frighten you up. If you reach for the old woman, you do her work for her."

"Then it is a very good trap," I say, and it comes out of me flat and north-lit and entirely mine, the restorer's voice, the one that does not care how I feel about the panel, only what the panel needs. "Because the alternative she has left me is to go under and let it happen, and I have spent my whole life going under and letting it happen, and I am done. I would rather lose myself reaching for someone than keep myself by lying down." I turn to Esteban, who has the case open now, who has gone very still over whatever is inside it. "You. You watched this house ten days. You knew about the ward. Your order has been protecting these women for a thousand years. Tell me there is a third way. Tell me there is a tool that is not the craft and is not the coat."

And Esteban looks up from the open case with his ordinary brown eyes, and the calm he has carried since he walked up out of the smoke goes out of his face, he is a man who has rehearsed a sentence his whole life and finds it heavier in his mouth than he expected.

"There is," he says. "But it is the one your blood was bred to do, and the one your order swore it would never let you learn until the very end, and the moment I hand it to you, you stop being a woman they are fighting over and become the weapon itself." He lifts out of the case a small flat thing wrapped in old cloth, the size of a panel, the size of a door laid down. "I was sent to keep this from you for as long as I could bear to. I cannot bear it any longer." He sets it on the bench, on the bench someone built under me and called my life, and begins, with a forger's care, to unwrap the corner. "This is the other half of the lullaby. Not the part that wakes her. The part that lets you go and bring her back without going under yourself, and it has a price, and the price is the thing Marguerite has wanted you to pay since the night she walked up the Founder's drive."

He folds the cloth back from the corner, and I look down at what is under it, and the grain in me makes a sound I have never heard a soul make, half homecoming and half scream, because I know it, I painted it, I know every brushstroke of it the way you only ever know your own hand, and it is a thing that cannot exist, and it is signed.