The Statue's Gaze

MADISON

Jul, the island. The last week of the thaw. Ninety days to midsummer.

On Jul a dead man's debts pass to his eldest child at twenty, and the island had argued for a week before deciding that Madison's father, who knelt in black glass at the top of the town, was dead enough to count.

So she'd turned twenty in the winter and got the lot: his collar that wouldn't lie flat, four silver on his slate at Ossery's, unpaid since the pension stopped, and a sword nobody in the house would touch.

Ossery said so. She heard him from the street.

"There's the Colonel's sword, Mistress Elane. Begging your pardon. A dealer in Haze would clear you of me ten times over, with change for the—"

"No."

Her mother said it before he'd finished the word change. Madison stopped in Ossery's doorway, two doors down from her mother's lamp shop, with herring scales dried silver to her elbows.

Elane said no as she cut bread: once, after measuring.

Inside, among Ossery's rope coils and oil barrels, Elane stood at the counter in the funeral dress, the good blue one, laying coppers on the wood one at a time, slowly, hoping slowly might breed them. In her other hand she held a small cloth purse with a darn on one corner, tied shut. The midsummer purse, thirty coppers by the sag of it; Madison had been weighing purses by eye on the fish quay since she was eight. Her mother held it like a gull's egg and didn't open it. On the counter, the coppers made a heap you could have covered with a hand.

"Then it's coin, Mistress," said Ossery, and rolled his sleeves up over faded blue anchors. Numbers needed forearms. "Four silver, if you please." His eyes went past Elane to the door. "And I'm obliged to say his name went to the girl at winter. It's hers in the book now."

"I know whose name it is."

Madison's purse held a hundred and sixty coppers: two years of mending nets at night, a copper a net. It was the road to Haze. She'd meant to be gone in a week and tell nobody until she was on the water.

She stood there long enough for a gull on the doorframe to lose interest in her.

If she kept walking, the road was hers, and so was the magistrate, because the slate was. If she went in, the road was gone, and her mother kept the midsummer purse shut, and nobody sold the sword.

She went in, held the purse one breath over the counter, and turned it out.

The coins ran across the wood and stopped against her mother's. A brown heap on a brown counter. Two years, and it might have been a handful of buttons.

Ossery counted with his lips moving, by fives. "Two hundred. Two silver. Half, to the copper." He wrote it, blotted it, and looked up. "The other two by midsummer, Mistress Madison, or I'm obliged to take it to the magistrate, and the magistrate takes the lamp shop. I'm sorry. It's in ink."

"You should not have," her mother said, without turning round.

"Too late to unsell it."

Elane put the midsummer purse back in her pocket, thanked Ossery for his patience, and walked out past her daughter's shoulder without looking at her.

Madison's collar had flipped up on one side again. She flattened it. It popped back.

Ossery closed the book gently. It might bruise. "Midsummer, Mistress."

She walked to the net sheds fast, because she was angry and walking was what she did with angry. Ninety days. Herring wouldn't do it. She'd done that sum on the gutting line every day since the slate came to her name.

There was one man on the island with a boat going across in three days.

Thorne had been at her naming, so she called him Uncle. He sat on a coil of rope behind the sheds with his bad leg stuck out straight and a torn net across his lap. When he bit the thread his lip pulled back over the gap where his left eyetooth had been, and he didn't look up for her. He looked up for weather.

"It's gone," she said. "All hundred and sixty. Ossery's counter."

"Your road money."

"Was."

"So. No road."

"You cross on the Gull's Luck in three days."

"Not you." One thick finger came up. "Puli and Tyba, paid, and the fish. Not you. I gave your mother my word the week the barge came in, standing on that plank. Feet, she let me teach you. Feet. Not the boat."

"Then one line in your hand. That you trained me two years and I can fight. They take a soldier's word in Haze."

"My word goes on paper for soldiers. Not for girls I promised to keep on a dock."

"I put you on your back on market day."

"I was being kind on market day."

"You've never been kind on a market day in your life."

He looked at her for the first time. Then he took his ash stick off the shed wall and stood, one hand flat on the boards. "Win this one and I'll write your line. Lose and you stop asking. Both of them. Boat and line."

Hers hung next to his, a hand shorter, the grip worn dark.

For a while there was only the crack of ash on ash and the gulls over the mud. Thorne fought like a man with a shield still on his arm. He gave her nothing. He drove her back along the plank toward the water, a step, two, her heels at the edge, and said, "Feet," and "Reaching," and "That's the sea behind you, girl."

She let him have the next one clean across the ribs. It hurt the way a slammed door hurts. And while he was pleased with it she stopped her feet dead, and he came on a half-step too far, and her stick tapped the back of his good knee.

He sat down on the rope.

"You took that one on the ribs on purpose."

"Seemed fair. You were trying."

He looked at the water a while. Then Thorne pulled a scrap of sailcloth out of his coat, licked the stub of a pencil, and wrote on it in big square letters, slowly, and handed it to her.

She can fight. I trained her. Thorne, Sergeant.

"That's your line," he said. "The boat's still no."

"She was wrong to make you promise."

"She was right. I'm a liar who keeps half his word." He picked up the needle. "Ask her what she'd sell before she'd sell that sword."

On the way home, on the post at the foot of Harrow Lane where the boatmen nailed news from the mainland, there was a new sheet: gold tower on red.

Hegal's Guild. Open trials outside Haze at the new moon. Steel, bow, or fire. Pass and you're paid from the same day. And under it, small: Contracted by leave of the Council.

She pulled it off the nail and took it up the lane.

Puli and Tyba were already in her kitchen. Of course they were. Puli looked up as she flattened the poster under Xot's inkpot, his nose bent left from the two times he'd broken it on his own enthusiasm. "New moon's in seven days. Thorne crosses in three. I don't believe in signs, but that's a sign."

"Boatman says one in twenty get in," said Tyba. He was turning a half-carved wooden fish in fingers as thick as barrel staves. He carved when he was worried. The fish already had a lot of scales.

"One in twenty-two," said Puli. "Second boatman was sober. So you need an edge." He jerked his chin at the hearth. "And there it is."

"Paid from the same day," said her brother Xot, fourteen, from behind his copybook, with ink to the second knuckle of both hands. "That is, I think, the operative clause."

"Hegal's Guild," said Elane.

She was in the doorway with her shawl still on and the shop keys in her hand. Puli whipped his finger off the poster.

"They collect the Council's taxes, Puli. You stood in this kitchen last autumn when two of them took my mother's candlesticks off that mantel, with a receipt, and looked at the sword, and left it." She hung the keys on their nail, folded her shawl in four, and only then looked at her daughter. "No."

"Haven't opened my mouth."

Madison stood. She put Thorne's scrap of sailcloth on the table beside the poster. "So I'm asking. With a soldier's word."

Elane read it without picking it up. "He wrote you a line. He did not give you a boat. Nor will anyone. I let Thorne teach you to stand up," she said, so quietly that the kettle was louder. "I did not let him teach you to leave. And who pays Ossery at midsummer?"

"Me. It's my name," Madison said, flat and fast, a buyer reading off a scale. "A Guild name gets the outside contracts, at double and triple. Nobody hires a fishwife at triple."

Elane took a letter from under the bread crock and laid it open beside the poster. Council-blue wax clung to one corner.

Pension, paid this year past pending inquiry, now suspended on clerical review, the Colonel having quit his post without leave. Any claim to be heard in Haze within the twelvemonth, and not later than the first new moon after the coming thaw, after which the review is closed.

And under that, in a clerk's small tidy hand, the line nobody on the island said to Madison's face:

His company was found on the hill above the town. The Colonel was found alone.

Three signatures at the bottom, Council scrawls you couldn't have read a letter of. Madison had sat with them all winter while her mother was at the shop, learning their shapes as she'd learned the rocks off the north point, without ever knowing what to call them.

Her eyes went to them now, and her mother's hand came down flat on the paper before she could look at one. Elane turned it face down and pressed it there, and looked once at the dark window, as though the names could be read through the glass.

"I'm not him," Madison said. "I'd have come home."

"He would have," said Elane. "That is the part you never think about."

"Then tell me what happened to him. You know something. Count it out for me."

For one second her mother looked at the hearth. Her mouth opened.

Then it closed.

Madison put one finger on the poster. One in twenty-two. She moved it to Thorne's scrap. A line, no boat. She moved it to the face-down letter. Alone. And she looked up at the long, nearly black blade on its two pegs.

"I'm going," she said. "You don't have to like it. Just don't make me go without a goodbye."

She crossed the kitchen.

"Madison."

She reached up and closed her hand on the hilt.

It was warm, as if somebody had just put it down.

Then she wasn't in the kitchen.

She was on the harbor front at Southport. Gray sea, gray sky, wet cobbles under her boots, and the smell of hot iron so thick she could taste it. Black rock stood up behind the town in a steep hill. Somebody was shouting Up the hill, all of you, up, that's an order, and it was her mouth shouting it, a man's voice in her mouth. A shield on her arm. Something hit the shield, thock, short and hard, from the wrong side. From the town. From behind. Not claws. And then the sky went red and enormous and fell toward her, and she raised the sword—

—and the sword came off the pegs and swung, because her father's arms had swung it, two years ago, on a harbor front, and her arms were doing it again.

It went round on its own weight, past the dresser, the window, Xot's open mouth, looking for the nearest thing that moved.

Her mother. In the doorway to the stairs. Both hands on the back of a chair.

Madison hauled.

She closed both hands until the bones of her fingers ground together and threw her whole weight down and sideways, the way you throw it against a full net when the boat rolls and the sea wants the catch back. Her heels skidded on the flags.

The point went into the hearthstone a hand's width from her mother's shoes.

The stone split down its middle with one flat crack, and the two halves settled a finger apart. A chip opened her cheek. Her left hand had slid up off the grip onto bare steel, and it was hot, and then it was full of blood.

The harbor was still there, behind her eyes. The red sky. The thock from behind.

She breathed until the kitchen was the only place she was standing.

Xot was on his feet with the inkpot raised to throw, ink running down his wrist. Puli had both hands over his mouth. Tyba was standing between the sword and Elane, the wooden fish snapped in two in his fist, and she hadn't seen him cross the room.

"That," her mother said, "is what it did to him."

Madison's voice came out level and cold, because that was how hurt came out of her. "That was Southport."

Her mother didn't answer.

"I was him. I had his voice in my mouth. I was on the harbor and they were shooting him from behind, and he didn't know yet." She looked at the blade. "That's the last thing it saw. It keeps the last thing."

"Every night he was home from the war, and every week of that last winter when they posted him to the Haze gate and he came home on the market-day ferry," said Elane, "it kept somebody's. I sat up with him." She let go of the chair and came forward and took her daughter's bleeding hand in both of hers, and didn't look at the sword. "You children slept through it. I made very sure you slept through it."

"Thorne carried it home across half the Empire."

"And slept sound the whole way, he told me." Her mother tied off the thought as she'd tie a thread. "It isn't Thorne's blood."

Tyba was looking at the hearthstone. "Split along the grain," he said. "That won't hold a fire again."

Madison worked the point out of the stone herself, a finger's width at a time, because nobody else in the room was going to touch it. Her mother tore a strip off her apron, bound the hand, and pulled the knot tight enough to hurt.

"Puli. Tyba. Thank you," Elane said. "Go."

When they'd gone, she put on her shawl and went out, and didn't say where. She left the letter face down on the table. Madison looked at it for the length of a kettle coming to the boil, and then folded it small and put it inside her shirt.

Madison sat at the table with the sword across her knees in the old brown scabbard Thorne had left in the press the night he brought it home. Every time she blinked the harbor came back. Bolts. Up the hill.

"If I may," said Xot, carefully, from the far end of the table. "He always sat with his back to it at supper. I had assumed, for years, that he disliked the fire."

Madison looked at the chair at the head of the table, with its back to the hearth.

"Well," she said. "I've always been a disappointment."

It came out as a joke. Her hands were shaking. Xot pretended not to see.

Near midnight Madison carried the sword up through the wet lanes to the square at the top of the town, to give it back.

He knelt on a white stone base with last week's flowers gone brown at his knees. Nobody had carved him. The fire had done it, at Southport, and Haze had shipped him home on a barge, glass and all, because he was from Jul, and the glass had kept everything: the scar through his eyebrow, two days of stubble, the split lip. Up close he didn't look brave. He looked like a man who's counted the catch and come up one basket short, and is about to count again. His hands curled in front of him round nothing, two fingers of the right one ending at the knuckle, sealed with black pitch.

She stood the sword in his hands. It fit the gap the two fingers had left.

"Yours," she told him. "Haunt me."

"Leave it there," said Thorne, from the grain-hall steps, his stick across his knees.

"Something hit his shield from behind. From the town. You were there."

He looked at the pitch on the glass fingers until the grain-hall bell had finished the hour.

"We were on the hill, like he ordered," he said at last. "We saw it come down on him. He put that up into its eye and held on. It had one fire left, dying, and it spent it on him with his hands still on the hilt. Steel came through. He didn't." A tap of the stick. "Nobody saw anything behind him. Nobody but you, now."

She put her hand back on the hilt. The harbor came up behind her eyes at once, Up the hill, all of you, and she held on through it, and took the sword out of her father's hands, and buckled it on her back.

"Somebody stood behind him," she said, "and somebody signed a paper. And the review closes at the new moon, the same week as their trials. If somebody in Haze hears it before then, his back pension pays Ossery twice over. Nobody's going to hear it from Jul."

Thorne got his stick under him and stood.

"Then I'm a liar twice over. Dawn, three days. One bag. That thing rides under the deck, wrapped." He stopped with his back to her. "And loosen your grip. You'll want it later."

The Gull's Luck hit the swell past the breakwater and threw spray over all of them, and Tyba said a word his father would have docked him for. Two nights to Haze, Thorne said, if the wind held. The sail was full and Jul was falling behind, and the sword rode wrapped in sailcloth under the little deck.

Puli was in the bow, pointing at things. Tyba had his eyes shut.

On the dock her mother had handed down the saddlebag, her father's old one, which Thorne had brought home with the sword. Elane had packed it herself with the door shut. Then she'd reached up and fixed her daughter's collar.

"Ossery's two hundred," Madison had said.

"Is my affair until you send it. Eyes open."

"Eyes open."

"Don't end up a statue," Xot had said, scowling at her boots. "One is, I think, sufficient."

Spray was cold on her cut cheek when she dug in the bag for the net-salve. Under the bread her fingers found a square of oilcloth, folded four times and tied with her mother's net-knot, the one nobody else on Jul could untie one-handed. She left it tied. Tyba was being sick over the rail, and her mother had packed the bag with the door shut, and whatever it was would keep until there was a wall at her back.

Under the oilcloth, at the very bottom, was a small cloth purse with a darn on one corner.

She weighed it in her palm out of habit. On Ossery's counter it had been thirty coppers, near enough. Thirty was Thorne's fare.

Empty. Her mother had paid Thorne her fare out of it, every copper, and put the purse back in the bag so she'd know.

She looked back at the dock. One small straight figure hadn't moved.

End of Chapter 1