Hinton is so pale the circles beneath his eyes look like bruises. “I tried to get help, but he wouldn’t let me. He asked me to sit with him instead, said there was nothing I could do.”
“He’s stubborn,” I say in a whisper. I can hear what Hinton is telling me, sense the huge, dark, terrible truth taking shape in front of me. But I can’t give voice to it myself, not yet. I look at him, waiting for him to go on. His full eyes are pleading.
“I sat with him, like he asked. I thought he was sleeping. Then I realized . . .” Tears spill down Hinton’s cheeks. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
Lora’s hand tightens on his shoulder. “That’s how my ma went too. All out of days and she didn’t tell a soul. Went to bed early and sometime in the night her time dried up and her heart quit.” She makes the sign of the clock, moving two fingers in a circle over her torso, then moves as if to embrace me, but I step back, shaking like a wounded animal.
“He had time left,” I finally manage to say. “He—he had a few weeks left at least.”
The both of them just look at me, Hinton’s face twisted in sorrow, Lora’s heavy with that terrible pity.
“I knew of your father, Jules,” Lora says. “Not well, but I know he was a sensible man. Still, if he had a go at the vault . . . And the last month is volatile,” she adds roughly. “You know it is. The mind flows from the vein as well as years.”
A common saying in Crofton. Too common. When you lose your time, you lose your sense.
I turn away from them, bringing a hand to my mouth, feeling like I might be sick.
“I covered him as best I could. They came by in the leather cart—said they’d see to him. I’ll show you, if you like.” He hangs his head. “There’s robbers on the road who’ll pick a man’s teeth out of his mouth to sell them later.” Hinton sounds absolutely miserable, miserable and guilty, and despite my grief I feel sorry for him: so young, and he’s seen so much already. “He had this with him.”
The air vanishes from my lungs. Hinton is holding Papa’s charcoal drawing of my mother.
My body bucks in a dry heave, but I don’t move to take it from Hinton. It can’t be true. It can’t be. And yet, looking at the two of them, I know that it is.
I turn and run.
By the time my legs give out, the sky has turned from black to a dull sword-metal gray. I find myself on a rocky ledge on the northern side of the Gerlings’ lake. In the half-dark, the lake looks like a mirror, reflecting nothing except the mist drifting over its surface, and the estate itself, from afar—like something that might blow away in the wind.
I fall to my knees before the water. Dimly, I realize that I’m still barefoot, that my feet are cut to pieces and so frozen I can’t feel them. My mind is full of thick fog, and beyond that yawns a terrible gulf of grief, threatening to swallow me up.
Something glints among the pebbles before me. Automatically I reach for it, and for a blissful second, thoughts of my father recede as I gape at the glittering thing in the palm of my hand.
It’s a coin. Gold and shining and big as a plum, with twelve notches around its edge.
A year of life.
A joyless, half-hysterical laugh rises in my throat. Only a Gerling could drop something so precious. What’s a year when you have centuries?
And why couldn’t I have found this yesterday, slipped it to Papa, and saved him?
I imagine the faceless Gerling who dropped this coin, who felt his silk pocket lighten and couldn’t be bothered to turn back. In his place, I would have scrabbled on my knees in the mud for as long as it took. I would have dug through the stones until my fingers bled. Until they were down to bone.
They would have called me mad, too. But they would have been wrong.
I refuse to believe that Papa is—was—mad. He knew something about the Queen. Otherwise he wouldn’t have told me to stay away from her—and he wouldn’t have spent his last day trying to break into the Gerling vault like a thief. But the stains Hinton described, where else could they have come from? I squeeze the coin in my hand so hard, I half expect blood to flow from it. The look in his eyes when we parted—mad, yes. But mad with grief. With good-bye.
The realization sinks into me. My father was saying good-bye, in the cellar.
This time, I do retch.
Don’t let her see you, I hear again.
He wouldn’t have thrown his life away for nothing. He had to have a reason for it, a reason for telling me what he did.
A reason for dying in the snow, outside Everless’s walls.
My sob finally breaks loose as I dash my fist against the rocks, my fingers tight around the coin. I stand up, blind with tears, and throw it as hard as I can away from me. It arcs through the morning, a tiny flash of gold, and vanishes into the dark water.
The fog burns away from my mind in a flash, leaving cold rage beneath.
My father died here. I will find out why—then, I will make those responsible pay for the pain of his loss, in any way I can.
I swear it.
9
There was a man in the village we called the Ghost, always with a shiver and a lowering of eyes. A gambler, he bled almost all the time from both himself and his small son, and beat Edwin Duade at a hand of poison—winning two hundred years, enough to restore his squandered time and more for the both of them. But when he arrived home, the heavy purse of blood-iron on his belt, the boy was crumpled on the floor. His heart had given out midbeat. For all his luck with cards and coins, the Ghost had misjudged—bled off too much of his son’s time in chase of fortune.
Now he sleeps in the streets, living every single hour of his ill-gotten two centuries in view of the public, as a kind of penance—a warning—for everyone to see.
I’d written this off as one of Papa’s cautionary tales until I saw the Ghost in an alleyway, a path lined with taverns and barkeeps who’d bleed your last hour, crudely, in exchange for drink—bodies appeared in the gutter every week. The wretched man looked up at me as I passed, and his eyes, sunken as the Gerling elders’, made me freeze midstep. They had lived too long; combined with his gray skin and skeletal frame, he truly looked like a ghost.
And the grief. The grief in his face threatened to swallow me whole. I never set foot in that alley again.
I feel his eyes follow me now as I stare up at an unfamiliar stone ceiling. For a blissful second after I woke, I didn’t remember where I was or why. I was content with the thick mattress beneath my back, rather than my usual pallet on the dirt floor of the cottage.