Chapter 3 Vows That Cannot Lie

They had laid out a grey dress. It waited on her bed at dusk, spread like a body, with a long grey veil beside it. Six women had walked down an aisle in that veil. Elowen studied it for a while, then folded it carefully and put it in the wardrobe. She wore the dress, because it fit, and because she had already sewn two pockets into the lining. She did not wear the veil. If she was going to marry the Devil, she wanted him to see exactly who he was getting. Before she left the room she took Tobias's river stone from the lining of her trunk and held it until it was warm. It was smooth and grey and no bigger than a quail's egg, with a white ring running around its middle like a collar. He had found it in the shallows behind Marrow Hall the summer he turned seven, and he had announced that it was lucky, in the grave voice of a boy who believed the dead taught him such things. So you remember to come back. She turned it over twice, then slid it into the pocket she had sewn that morning. It sat against her hip, small and ordinary and entirely out of place in a palace of black glass. At the window, where the dusk made a poor mirror, she practised the vow aloud. I bind my word to yours. Her voice came out steady. She tried it again, quieter, and heard how much it sounded like a prayer, which she did not believe in, and a contract, which she did. "Eleven months and twenty-eight days," she told her reflection. It did not answer. She had not expected it to. She had only wanted to hear the number said in a room where no one else could weigh it. The Chapel of Cinders lay at the bottom of three hundred steps, and no one came to walk her down them. Odalys had not troubled to attend. Her cousins had not troubled to write. She took the steps slowly, because a bride who arrived out of breath arrived afraid, and she meant to arrive as neither. The stair spiralled down through bare rock rather than glass, and the lamps along it had been lit by someone who disliked wasting oil: one flame to every twenty steps, so that she walked through bands of dark and light like a woman crossing a river on stones. At step ninety she heard it again. A second set of footfalls, light and quick, a few paces behind her own. She stopped. The footsteps stopped a moment later than they should have, as though someone had hesitated to follow her lead. "If you mean to kill me," she said to the empty stair, "I would be grateful if you waited until after the wedding. I have gone to such trouble with the dress." Nothing answered. But the nearest lamp, a small steady flame in a niche, leaned toward her, the way a candle leans toward an opened door. Then it righted itself, and she went on down, and told herself that a draught was a perfectly adequate explanation and that she was not a woman who needed a better one. Dorian met her at the chapel doors with an expression of such strained cheerfulness that she almost felt sorry for him. "You could still run," he said. "Where?" "Anywhere. I'd count to a hundred." "Dorian." She lifted her chin. "Open the door." He did. The chapel was long and narrow and built entirely of black glass, so that the candlelight inside it multiplied into a thousand small flames, reflected in every wall. In the gallery above sat the Seven Dukes of the Infernum, in black, silent as carved saints. One of them, a heavy man with eyes like wet coins, smiled at her as she passed. She smiled back, and made a mental note of his face. She counted the rest, because counting was what she did. Seven seats in a gallery of black glass, and seven faces tilted toward her like birds on a wire. A tall, thin one in silver-grey who studied her mouth rather than her eyes, as though planning how it would look afterwards. A woman so small and so old that her chair swallowed her, in a cloak of crow feathers that rustled whenever she breathed. A broad young duke with a rash of gold rings who yawned openly. They did not look like the lords of a court of demons. They looked like men and women who had been bored for centuries and had finally been given something to watch. Along the front pews stood seven candles. Six of them were unlit, their wicks pale and dusty. The seventh burned. She understood what that meant, and kept walking. Lucan waited at the altar in a black coat as plain as the one he had worn the day before. He did not look at her as she approached. He looked at a point somewhere over her left shoulder, with the fixed attention of a man standing on a gallows platform who has decided to admire the rafters. Beside him, a thin figure in a clerk's robe unrolled a long scroll. Its hood was empty. Not dark, but empty, a smooth hollow where a face should be. When he lifted his hand to turn the page, a drop of black ran from a cut on his finger and fell onto the glass. It was ink. "Magister Quill," he said, in a voice like paper being folded. "Keeper of Contracts. I will be witnessing, recording and, if required, enforcing." The hood tipped toward her. "You have declined the veil." "Yes." "There is no clause for that." "Then I'm in breach of nothing." The Magister made a dry sound that might have been appreciation. "We begin." The vow was older than the palace and shorter than she expected. "I bind my word to yours," read Quill, and Lucan repeated it, flatly, like a man reciting a sentence. "No lie shall pass my lips to your face. What I hide, I may keep. What you ask, I will answer true. This binding holds until one of us is dust." Elowen's heart did something unpleasant. She had read the contract three times, and the clause had been there, a single line buried in a paragraph of formalities. She had assumed it was a protection. A bride's right to the truth. A courtesy, perhaps. She had not understood until now that it bound her too. No lie shall pass my lips. She thought of the vial against her ribs. She thought of eleven months and twenty-eight days, of Tobias, of a library she meant to ransack, of everything she had decided never to tell this man. She had come to Ashfall with a hundred secrets, and she was about to swear on her own tongue that she could not lie to the person most likely to ask. "What I hide, I may keep," Quill reminded her gently, as if he had followed her thoughts. "The vow forbids falsehood, not silence. But if you are asked, my lady, you will answer. The tongue does not permit otherwise." "What happens if I try?" "It burns." His hood tilted. "Quite thoroughly." She looked at Lucan. For the first time that evening, he looked back. There was nothing in his face. No cruelty, no curiosity, not even the flicker of calculation she had seen in the Hall of Ash. He might have been carved. But his hand, resting at his side, was clenched hard enough that the knuckles had gone the colour of bone. He is afraid of this too, she thought. And she did not know why that steadied her. "I bind my word to yours," said Elowen. The candles flared. "No lie shall pass my lips to your face. What I hide, I may keep. What you ask, I will answer true. This binding holds until one of us is dust." A ripple ran across the floor, as though the glass had briefly remembered that it had once been liquid. Above them, the Dukes shifted in their seats. "The seal," said Quill. He drew a thin ceremonial knife from his sleeve and held it out, hilt first. "Blood to blood. Palm to palm." Elowen took it. She cut her left palm with the steady stroke of a woman who had done it a thousand times, for a thousand worse reasons, and held out her bleeding hand. Lucan did not take it. He stood still, his own palm already opened and bleeding, and held his hand out to her, palm up, an inch from hers. Not touching. Waiting. It took her a moment to understand. No one touches me without asking. He had not forgotten. He was asking. Her throat tightened, annoyingly. "You may," she said. His hand closed around hers, warm, which she had not expected, and a great deal stronger than he needed to be, which she had. The chapel went silver. The light began at their joined hands, a thin, pale glow that spread outward in a ring across the floor, up the walls, through every one of the thousand reflected candles, until the whole place was the colour of moonlight on water. Not red. Not black. Silver, cold and clean and unbearably bright. Quill dropped his pen. In the gallery, one of the Dukes rose half out of his seat and sat down again very quickly. And Lucan, who had been carved from stone for the last twenty minutes, went white. Not pale. White, the way a man goes white when he sees something he buried and it has walked out of the ground. "No," he said, so quietly she barely heard it. "Not that. Not that." His hand tightened around hers, not cruelly but convulsively, like someone grabbing a rope as the ground fell away. She felt his pulse in his palm, fast and ragged, a mortal heartbeat in an immortal chest. Under her ribs, the vial beat in perfect time with it. Then the light faded, and it was only a chapel again, and two people holding hands because neither of them knew how to let go. They left her alone with him after that. The Dukes filed out in silence. Dorian lingered at the door until Lucan said, without turning, "Go," and then he went, glancing back once at her with an expression Elowen could not read. Magister Quill gathered his scroll in trembling hands. "I will record the binding," he said. "I will record the colour." "You will record nothing about the colour," said Lucan. "My lord, I cannot omit it. A bound vow is a bound vow." "Quill." "I will record it," said the Magister, with the stubborn courage of a man who has only one thing in the world he is good at. "That is the law." He left too. The chapel emptied. The thousand candles burned lower. Lucan released her hand, finally, and stepped back as though the contact had cost him, and wiped his palm on his coat with a small, strange gesture, as though trying to wipe something off. Elowen looked at her own hand. The cut had stopped bleeding. There was no scar. "Do you hate me?" she asked. He went still. It was the sort of question the vow made impossible to dodge, and they both knew it. "Yes," said Lucan. No hesitation. No softening. She felt it land in her chest like a blow, then, unexpectedly, like relief. Hatred, at least, she understood. Hatred was a currency she had been paid in all her life, by her grandmother, by her cousins, by the servants who crossed themselves when she passed the pantry with a basket of foxglove. It was kindness that had always cost her something. A man who told her the truth and hated her for it was a man she could do business with. She found, to her annoyance, that the rest of her was a little less steady than that. She had been prepared to be hated. She had not prepared to be hated so cleanly, by a man who had, a minute earlier, waited with his palm open to be given permission. "Good," she said. "I trust honest men." Something flickered across his face. It might have been irritation. It might have been the beginning of a laugh that had been dead a long while. "Do you intend to harm me?" she asked. "Not tonight." "That's not reassuring." "It was not meant to be." His jaw tightened. "My turn. Why did you come to Ashfall?" The question hung between them like a drawn blade. She could feel the vow waiting in her throat. Not a lie. She had sworn not to lie. But a truth can be cut into a thousand pieces, and she had been cutting them since she was a child. "For your library," said Elowen. It did not burn. "That," said Lucan, "is a door. It is not an answer." "The vow says I cannot lie. It does not say I must open every door." He was silent for a long moment. Then, slowly, he inclined his head, the way a duellist salutes an opponent he did not expect to be worth the trouble. "No," he said. "It does not." He turned and walked down the aisle, past the seven candles, six dead and one burning, and stopped at the doors without looking back. "Good night, bride." Bride, not wife. The contract made her the second. He could not make himself say it. When the doors had shut behind him, she tested it. It was the sort of thing a Marrow does: take a rule apart before it can be used against you. "My name is Odalys Marrow," she said, to the empty chapel, "and I am delighted to be here." Nothing. No burn, no tightening, no ink-black fingers rising out of the floor. The vow, it seemed, was a thing that lived between two faces. To the dark, to the glass, to the six dead candles, she could lie as freely as she liked. She filed that away beside the nine poisons. It was a very small loophole, but she had built whole fortresses out of smaller ones. Elowen stayed where she was, in the dim and glittering chapel, while his footsteps faded. Her palm tingled. Her wrist itched, as though someone had breathed on it in the dark. "My lady." She turned. Magister Quill had come back. He stood at the edge of the candlelight with his hood bowed and his ink-black fingers knotted together. "I should not tell you this," he said. "I am not permitted. But I have witnessed four hundred years of marriages in this palace. I have seen vows burn red, and I have seen them burn black. I have never, in all that time, seen one burn silver." He hesitated. "Except once." "When?" "Three hundred years ago. On a night the Devil does not speak of." His voice dropped to a whisper. "Be careful, wife of Ashfall. The last time that light was seen, someone died before the year was out." He was gone before she could ask whom. Behind her, the seventh candle guttered once, and went out.