Lord of Small Debts

He read it the next morning. Or rather, he had already read it — the Ledger, I learned, shared everything it swallowed with the lord of the House the instant the ink dried — and so when I was brought before him I was not bringing him news. I was bringing him a face to attach to a debt he had already decided how to use. The lord of the Thornwood Court was called Calloran, and I had braced myself, on the long sleepless night in the guest room, for something monstrous. The tales prepare you for monstrous. They do not prepare you for a man perhaps thirty in mortal seeming, lean and dark-haired and dressed with the severe plainness of someone who has nothing left to prove, sitting in a cold bright room reading correspondence and not, for an insulting length of time, looking up at me at all. When he did look up his eyes were the grey of a knife left out in winter, and they went over me once, quickly, the way you read a label. "Sefa of Greywell," he said. "Your sister has the wasting with no name." "Yes." "There is a cure. There is always a cure; the fae did not become rich by curing things for free, we became rich by owning the cure and renting it out." He set down his letters. "The House can lift your sister's wasting. Entirely. She will be well by the next moon and stay well. That is what you came for and the House can give it to you. Now I will tell you the price, and you will not like it, and then you will pay it, because you have already proven you will pay anything, which —" the smallest pause, "— was a foolish thing to prove to me so early." I made my hands be steady. "Name it." "Seven years of service. Here. To me." He watched my face do whatever it did. "Not labour. I have grey-folk for labour. I have a use for a mortal, specifically, and specifically one with steady hands and a tongue that lies well — and you lie well, Sefa, you have lied to me three times since you entered this room and thought I did not notice. Your hands are not steady. You are making them steady. That is a more valuable thing than steady hands; that is a liar's discipline, and I am a lord surrounded by rivals who would skin me of my Court if they could only out-talk me, and I cannot lie. None of us can. It is the one law of our nature we cannot bargain our way around." That stopped me. I had known it, the way you know a tale — the fae cannot speak a false word — but I had never stood in a room and felt the weight of what it would mean to be the only one present who could. "You want me," I said slowly, "to lie for you." "I want a debt-keeper. Someone to sit at my shoulder in the Ledger-room when my rivals come to bargain, and read them, and tell me what they are not saying, and when the moment comes — say, on my behalf, the useful untrue thing that I am forbidden to say myself." He almost smiled. It did not reach the winter in his eyes. "Seven years. Your sister wakes well tomorrow. Refuse, and she does not, and you go home to watch, and the House keeps your name regardless. That is the price. I did mention you would not like it." I thought of a great many things to say. I am proud of which one I chose. "Five," I said. The room went very quiet. Behind me I heard the courteous grey woman draw a small breath. Calloran of the Thornwood looked at me — really looked, this time, the label forgotten — and something moved behind the winter that was almost, not quite, interest. "You are standing in my House," he said softly, "having signed your blood into my Ledger, with your sister's life in my hand, and you are haggling with me." "You just spent five minutes telling me my best quality is that I don't pay more than I have to," I said. "Five years. And my sister is cured tonight, not tomorrow. You want a liar who'll hold her ground. Watch me hold it." For a long moment the lord of the Thornwood Court said nothing at all. And then he laughed — once, short, surprised, a sound I would later learn almost nobody alive had heard — and I knew, with a cold drop in my stomach, that I had just done the genuinely dangerous thing. Not signing the Ledger. Not crossing the hedge. Making him want me to stay.