Chapter 16: The Truth

I didn't take it back.

I couldn't. It had rung, and he'd heard it, and that was that.

"It's half true," I said to Cassian.

"I know. I can hear that too."

I turned to face him properly.

"The first day," I said. "At the gate. When I untied my apron and walked down the path."

"I wasn't choosing you. I didn't know you."

"I was choosing anything that wasn't that kitchen. And anything that wasn't him."

I pointed at Florian without looking at him.

"He'd made me kneel an hour before. I'd have married a bear. I'd have married the green herald."

Silence. No bell. Cassian's face didn't change.

"That's all true," he said.

"Yes."

He nodded once.

Then he pushed himself off the wall and walked away down the corridor, barefoot, and down the stairs.

I heard the inn's front door open and shut.

Florian was still standing in my doorway.

"Clemence," he said.

"Go home."

"I'm dying."

"Then go home and do it somewhere I don't have to watch. I'll find you before the seventh day. I don't know what I'll say."

He looked at me with his frosted lip and his ruined slipper.

Then he went.

I went down the stairs after Cassian with my shawl around my shift and my feet bare too.

The rain had stopped. The street was black and shining.

He wasn't on the street.

I found him on the river steps below the inn, the stone stairs that went down to the water where the washerwomen worked.

He was sitting on the bottom one with his feet nearly in the river.

I sat down on the step above him.

For a long time neither of us said anything.

The river slid past, full of lamplight.

"He made you kneel," Cassian said finally.

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