The Lord Who Does Not Sleep

She agreed. Of course she agreed; there had never been any other ending to the morning, and they both knew it, and the only mercy he showed her was not pretending otherwise. The binding was done that night, in the room of breathing books, and it did not hurt the way she had braced for. It felt, instead, like a cold thread drawn through the centre of her, fastened at one end to something vast and grey and patient that she understood, without being told, was the river. From that moment she could feel it always — a low pressure behind her ribs, the held weight of a hundred years of water, leaning, leaning, and not falling because Wrenna of the drowning valley had decided it would not. "It will lighten," the Lord of Thornwood told her. "In a month you will forget you are carrying it, the way you forget you are carrying your own name." He was wrong, but she did not learn that for some time. They gave her rooms — too fine, with a window that looked out on the unfalling autumn — and the russet woman, whose name was Sessily and who served the Lord as something between steward and conscience, brought her food that Wrenna inspected with the suspicion of every valley child ever born. "It is only bread," Sessily said, amused. "Court food binds the unwilling. You are already bound, key-bearer. There is nothing left in you for the bread to catch. You may as well eat." So Wrenna ate, and slept badly, and on the third night, unable to sleep at all for the river's patient weight, she went walking in the dark house and found the Lord of Thornwood awake. He was in the long room, alone, no candle lit, sitting among the slow breath of the books and looking at nothing. "You do not sleep," she said, from the doorway. It was not quite an accusation. "I have not slept in a hundred years." He said it without drama, the way another man might mention a bad knee. "Since the weir began to fail. The Court is mine to keep, and a keeper who sleeps lets things in. So." He gestured at the dark, at his own stillness. "I sit. I have become very good at sitting." Wrenna stood in the doorway a long moment. She had come to Thornwood prepared to hate him for a year — had, in fact, been looking forward to it, because hatred was simple and warm and would have kept her company. But it is difficult to hate a man who has not slept in a century, who could not mend the thing he was blamed for, who had offered her the only bargain he owned and hated the offering. "I cannot sleep either," she heard herself say. "The river. It leans on me. You said it would lighten and it has not." He looked at her then, really looked, and the tired brown eyes held something that was almost an apology and almost, she thought, something else. "Then we will sit together," said the Lord of Thornwood, "you and I, and be the two things in this Court that hold the water back. It is poor company, key-bearer. But it is a year, and I find — I find I would rather not spend it being hated, if it can be helped." It could not be helped. That was what frightened Wrenna, sitting down at last in the dark among the breathing books, a careful arm's length from her enemy, the river leaning on them both. It could not be helped at all, and a year was such a very long time, and she had walked into the wood that morning wanting nothing, and was already, three days in, beginning to want.