The Perjurer's Hand

Chapter One: The Line She Did Not Write

The carters' yard on Ferrier's Hill smelled of wet straw, axle grease, and the sour breath of mules. Isabel Rueda liked it. Nothing in a carters' yard pretended to be anything better than it was.

She sat in the tally-shed with the shutter propped a hand's width, because Guillen Sarra was a miser about candles and because the grey light off the snow was, if you were patient, enough. Forty-one years old, a woman with ink under one fingernail and a plain leather glove on her right hand that she never took off in company. Below her the lower city of Almaraz went down the mountainside in steps, roof over roof, smoke leaning east. Above her, far up where the streets turned to stairs and the stairs turned to processions, the cathedral of the Warden stood against a sky the colour of a knife.

The last two carts of the day came in at dusk, and with them a driver Isabel did not know, a thick-shouldered man with the border in his voice.

"Forty sacks," he said. "Count them if you like."

"I always count them," Isabel said. "It isn't personal."

She went out and counted them. Thirty-eight. The driver swore, then laughed, then paid the shortfall out of his own purse rather than have it written down, which told her everything about who he was carting for. Guillen came over with his thumbs in his belt and made the man swear the load was honest henceforward, and the man, wanting the contract, swore it.

Isabel looked away, and looked back, because she could not help herself.

At the driver's wrist, under the wool, a thread of light woke. Nobody else saw it. It was the width of a hair and the colour of a new coin held to a lamp, and it lay along the vein like something that had grown there. It sat quiet. It had taken.

That was a sealing. Every sworn word of any weight in Valdera left one: a small silver seam given to the flesh at the moment the vow closed, registered by a Witness, readable by the oath-locks that guarded any door worth guarding. The Warden held oaths kept. That was what the priests said, and Isabel had stopped arguing with priests a long time ago.

What she did not say, ever, to anyone, was that she could see them. Guillen's was a thick braid of them, six or seven vows knotted together at the wrist, a decent man's tangle. The yard boy had one, bright and thin, sworn to his mother. And the woman who came Thursdays to sell them lamp oil had a sealing gone the colour of a bruise under old brass, and around it a faint blur like breath on cold glass, and Isabel could smell it if she stood too close — a sweetish rot, the smell of a wound going wrong under a bandage.

That was a breach. Somewhere in that woman was a gap where a promise used to be, and through the gap the world leaked in the wrong direction.

Isabel knew the shape of it because she had one of her own.

She went back into the shed, wrote the shortfall in the day-book, and did not look at her own wrist, where there was nothing at all. Not a bruise. Not a thread. Smooth as a plate. Keyless, the courts called it. Stripped. No vow she spoke would bind her, no oath-lock could read her, no Witness could register a word out of her mouth. She could stand in the middle of the cathedral at midwinter and swear the sun rose in the south and the Warden would not so much as turn over in its sleep.

Under the glove, on the palm of her right hand, was the brand they had given her instead: a circle with a gap cut out of the top of it. Eleven years healed and still shiny, still the wrong texture, still catching on cloth.

She finished the day-book. Snow began, very light, ticking on the shutter.

And her hand went cold.

It always came the same way, and she always told herself the same lie, that she had imagined the last time. The cold started at the wrist and ran to the fingers like water finding a crack. The pen was in her grip and then it was not in her grip so much as travelling with her hand, and her hand moved with the smooth indifference of a shuttle on a loom.

Isabel watched it write across the bottom of the page, under the tally of forty sacks that had been thirty-eight, in her own neat archive script:

the queen's wrist is empty

The ink came out darker than the ink she had mixed.

The cold let go. Her fingers ached. Isabel sat back and listened to her heart go, and to the mules moving, and to Guillen out in the yard telling the border man where he could find a bed.

She had lived with the habit for eleven years. It was the other side of the brand. Where a sworn word is knowingly broken, the priests taught, the swearer's soul is left with a gap, and the divine leaks in through gaps as water leaks through a cracked crock — small miracles, small madnesses. Some breached men could not be burned. Some heard bees in empty rooms. Isabel Rueda's hand sometimes finished lines she had not intended, and the lines were always, infuriatingly, true.

Six years ago it had written a dead child's name three days before the child died. Four years ago it had written the word flood on a clear morning in a dry autumn, and the reservoir wall above the tanneries had gone out that night and taken nine houses.

She tore the page out along the stitching, opened the little iron stove, and put it in. It curled, blackened, and went to nothing, and she watched it all the way down.

Then she took a fresh sheet, ruled it, and recopied the day's tallies, because Guillen would want them and because she needed her hands to be doing something ordinary. Thirty-eight sacks. Two hides. Nine barrels of pitch for the Vellón contract. She reached the bottom of the column.

The cold came again, faster this time, greedy.

the queen's wrist is empty

Isabel put the pen down very carefully, as though it might go off.

Queen Serena of Valdera was twenty-nine years old and had worn the crown four years. She had a sealing that any beggar on the cathedral steps could tell you about, because it was the most important sealing in the kingdom: the Standing Word, the great public vow first sworn three hundred years ago by Queen Melisenda over her own unfinished tomb, and recited whole and new by every monarch since at midwinter. While the Standing Word held, the Needle Pass kept its promise. Armed men who crossed it meaning conquest forgot, within a mile, what they had come for. They stood in the snow with their pikes in their hands and could not for the life of them remember the name of the enemy. It had happened to Ordana twice, to the Sunward League once, and to a company of mercenaries who had afterward taken service as roadmenders.

One pass. One vow. One kingdom of terraces and goat-tracks and cold rivers that no army had ever managed to reach with its purpose intact.

An empty wrist meant a queen with no sealings. It meant a monarch who had broken a great oath.

Isabel Rueda sat in a tally-shed in the lower city with snow coming down outside and understood, with perfect clarity, that she had been handed a thing that could hang her twice over.

She burned the second page too.

When she got back to her room on Cordwainers' Stair — one room, a bed, a shelf of borrowed books, a jug — she lit no lamp. She sat on the bed with her glove off, thumbing the raised edge of the brand in the dark, and she said out loud, to nobody, "It isn't my business."

Her voice sounded exactly as convincing as it had eleven years ago, in a different room, when she had said, It's only one line.

Five weeks and four days later a boy from the Deed House came up Cordwainers' Stair with a summons, and after that it was her business, whether she liked it or not.