I straightened a shelf that didn't need it.
It worked, mostly. Discipline does, right up until it doesn't.
The pantry was a narrow stone box off the kitchen, a wooden bar dropping into two iron brackets to keep the damp out. Zarcal had laughed when I asked about it: a bull doesn't lock doors, hejust leans on whatever's bothering him until it stops. I'd called that charming. I called a lot of things about Zarcal charming.
He was good to me. He lifted me clean off my feet to see over a fence I was too short for, grinning like he'd invented muscles, and he'd built me a smaller bed of my own and never once pushed for me to leave it for his.
He wanted a wife and a house with the lamps lit and someone who laughed at his stories, and I could be all of that. I could absolutely be that woman.
I needed it to take. The rest of my life had narrowed to this one roof, and if it came apart the way the other two had, they would put me on the next ship out with no chance of coming back.
So I didn't think about the forge. And I tried not to think about the two things I'd started tucking away where I wouldn't look at them.
One was the nights.
Zarcal didn't really sleep. I'd pegged him for the type that's out the second his head hits the pillow. He wasn't. Twice now I'd woken in my own bed in the small hours to his voice coming low from somewhere in the house, even and steady, giving orders to a room with nobody in it.Hit them fast. Wait for my word.
I'd lain still and not gone to him; every animal part of me saiddon't.In the morning he was himself again, sunny, with no memory of it on his face.
I'd told Lorkin about it. The one thing I should've kept to myself, and I carried it across town and laid it on his workbench. He was one of Zarcal's oldest friends, and I'd told myself I was doing it for Zarcal's sake. Half true. The other half I wasn't ready to look at. He'd gone cold and told me exactly what to do if it ever came at me in the dark, and then he'd kissed me and sent me home to be glad of my match.
The other thing was the cider.
Zarcal couldn't sleep without two glasses, and his shoulders only came down off his ears once the second was in him. A nightcap, I told myself. And when some quieter voice askedthe edge off of what, exactly?I poured myself a glass too and stopped asking.
I was very good at not asking. It was practically my complete skill set.
The storm came in at dusk.
You feel them before you see them on Ceres-9: the static storms. The hair on your arms lifts, and then the light starts, no thunder to go with it, just sheets of purple and gold rolling soundlessly over the windows. Zarcal went out into the yard to watch. He liked them, a sky that put on a show and meant nothing by it.
He was quiet. That on its own was nothing. But I'd lived two weeks in his quiet by then, and it usually had a hum to it, a contentment that wanted, sooner or later, to turn around and say something. This one didn't. It had a stillness in the shoulders I didn't have a name for and didn't like, and his cup was already empty, and I hadn't seen him fill a second.
"You want the lamps up?" I called, light, the way you'd call to anybody. "It's getting dark in here."
He didn't answer. The light rolled gold, then purple, then gold again, and somewhere in the gold he came back inside, and I knew before he was through the door that something had gone wrong with him.
"Zarcal?"
He stood in the kitchen, and he wasn't there. His body filled the doorway, the cup still in one hand. But whatever lived behind his eyes had gotten up and left, and what looked out now was fixed on something a long way off, something that wasn't this room and wasn't me.
He said a name, flat and quiet, the middle of it broken. "Garrum."
I didn't know that name. But the way he said it put an icy finger down the middle of my back.
"Hey," I said, soft. "It's me. It's just me, it's Chloe."
He didn't hear me. He scanned the dim room, and his voice came again, low and even and certain, talking to people who weren't there. "The sand's already wet. Don't look at it. Hold the line." A pause. He listened to an answer that didn't come. "They want us to break in front of them. So we don't break. We rise on my word and not before."
The cup slipped out of his hand and didn't shatter, just rolled. He didn't react to it at all, and that small, ordinary sound was the worst thing I'd ever heard.
Get out of the room. Slow. Hands where he can see them. Don't touch him. Don't put yourself between him and the door.
I had it word for word. I'd lain awake with it more than one night this week, not admitting why. I lifted both hands a little, palms out, and started to back toward the side of the kitchen, sliding my socked feet over the boards so I wouldn't make a sound, leaving the path to the front door open behind him.
I did everything right. I did exactly what I'd been told.
And then his eyes found me, and they changed.
