Page 8 of Dark Mate

The lesson ends. The women scatter—back to embroidery, the garden, the library of approved books that fills the first-floor south wing. I go nowhere in particular. I drift. My feet take meeast before I notice where I’m walking, and I stop in the corridor outside the lesson room.

The east corridor again. The sweating stone. The cool heavy air. The smell of green things pushing through the wall. My feet brought me here without asking me, which is a strange thing to think in a place where I’ve never needed to ask, because I’ve never wanted a single thing the schedule didn’t already hold out to me.

I walk to the end of the corridor. The outer wall. I press my hand to the stone.

Warm. Warmer than yesterday.

I hold my hand there. The heat comes up through my palm in layers, first the surface, a flush that could be sun or pipes, then deeper, past the skin, into the meat of my hand, into the little bones of my wrist. This warmth has a pulse. Not a turn of phrase. An actual pulse, slow and deep, the beat of something with a huge heart going on the other side of two feet of stone.

My own pulse answers it. I can see it in the thin skin of my wrist, a blue vein jumping against the pale stone. Two heartbeats, a wall between them. His is slower. Much slower. The beat of something with nowhere else it needs to be.

A vibration.

Not a sound—a vibration, so low it lives under hearing. I feel it through the stone, through the flat of my hand, up into the small bones of my wrist, my forearm, my elbow. My teeth hum with it. The base of my skull hums. It travels my whole skeleton the way sound travels water, through everything, stopping at nothing. Steady. Patient. The kind of thing you could mistake for the building settling, for the pipes, for any of the dull ordinary sounds that keep the Cage running. Except I know what the pipes feel like. I’ve lived with them thirteen years. This isn’t that.

This is alive. This is breathing. This is choosing to be here, pressed to the other side of my hand with only stone betweenus, and the stone is not enough. The warmth comes through. The vibration comes through. Given enough time, given enough patience, the stone is not going to be enough.

My hand trembles on the wall. I hold it flat. Press harder, like I could push through, like the stone might soften under my palm the way the tea softens my mornings—a slow giving-way of the thing between what I am and what’s on the other side.

The vibration goes on, patient, patient, like it was here long before I put my hand to the wall and will be here long after I take it away. Like waiting is just the thing it does, the way the wall holds the roof, the way the fountain fills the courtyard with sound.

I stand there until my hand goes numb from the pressing and my forearm aches with holding it flat. The warmth stays. The vibration stays. Behind me the corridor’s empty. The lesson room’s dark. The other women are in the garden or the library or their rooms, tucked into the schedule the way the schedule tucks into the day. Nobody’s looking for me. Nobody’s wondering where I am. The schedule doesn’t have a slot for standing in a sweating corridor with your hand on a wall that’s warm with something impossible, because the schedule doesn’t admit the wall is warm at all.

I pull my hand away. The warmth stays on my palm for minutes after—a ghost of the touch the cool corridor air can’t chase off. I hold my hand up to the light from the end window. The palm’s flushed pink where it pressed the stone. The skin looks different. Not hurt. Awake.

At dinner my tea tastes different. Sweeter. Heavier. The floral note is deeper, almost too much, like somebody doubled the dose of whatever flower it’s steeped from. I drink it anyway. The warmth settles into my chest and the day’s edges go soft.

I sit at the long table with the others. Ireth hums. Neve’s quiet. Tessa watches her tea like someone counting.

The jasmine blooms in the garden. The fountain runs. The schedule holds.

And somewhere on the other side of the east wall, something waits.

4

ELLIE

Mora brushes my hair at night.

It’s our ritual. She comes after the evening meal, after the corridor lanterns have been turned down to the amber glow the Ordained use for the evening hours, not dark enough for sleep, not bright enough for reading, a color that sayssettle now, the day is closing.She comes with the wooden brush, the almond oil, the little leather case she keeps tucked in the pocket of her robes. She sits behind me on the bed while I sit on the stool, and she works the oil through my hair root to ends with the care of someone tending a garden.

I love this.

I’ve loved it since I was ten and Mora first sat me down and combed the tangles out of hair that hadn’t been brushed in two years. Whatever settlement I came from, and I don’t remember much—there was no almond oil there, no wooden brush, no one with time for this. I remember a woman’s hands in my hair once, pulling, impatient, working burrs out after a walk through dry scrub. That’s the closest thing I’ve got to set it next to.

Mora’s hands are the opposite of that. Her touch is patient. The little sounds she makes, soft hums, half-words, themuttered going-on of someone who finds the work soothing—are the sounds of real tenderness. The warmth of her palms on my scalp is the warmth of a woman who decided to take care of me.

Whatever else the Cage is, whatever else Mora is, this part isn’t an act.

“Your ends are dry,” she says. “I’ll put more oil in tonight.”

She dips her fingers in the oil—a little clay pot, warm from sitting by the lantern. The first touch of it on my scalp sends a shiver down my neck. She works it in with her fingertips, small circles at my temples, behind my ears, at the nape where the tightness sits. The tightness is always there. I never knew I was carrying it until Mora’s hands found it.

The oil smells like almonds, and under that, something faintly medicinal—a clean herb note I’ve always figured was just part of the plant. Tonight I smell the layers. The almond’s on top, warm and sweet. Under it, that other note, sharper, almost metallic, the smell of a thing built to do more than soften hair. I breathe it in and my scalp tingles where her fingers go.

The oil runs through and her fingers follow, parting the strands, easing out the little knots the day’s braid left behind. I feel each one give—the tiny pull, the let-go, the smoothness after. The oil makes everything slick, the hair sliding through her hands in long ropes that catch the lantern light. Dark when it’s oiled, almost black. The color of the earth outside the walls, though I’ve never been close enough to that earth to know for sure.

The brush comes next. Long strokes root to end, the wooden teeth finding each tangle and working it loose. The sound of it—the soft hiss of brush through oiled hair—is the sound of being safe. Of being tended. Of somebody else carrying the weight of holding me together for a while. My hair crackles faintly with the day’s static, and the oil smooths even that down to quiet.