She woke to him already up. She surfaced and found the room grey and the sense of him at the stove — no, not the stove; he was standing by the table, dressed, doing nothing at all, and the stove was cold.
"Get dressed," Rhevan said.
She pushed up onto an elbow. "What's happened?"
"Nothing's happened." He was already turning for the door, taking his coat off the chair back. "I'll wait on the landing. Wear the cloak."
"Aren't you—" She looked at the dead stove. "There's no breakfast."
"No," he agreed, and went out, and pulled the door to behind him.
She lay there a moment in the warm with her heart going, and then got up and changed, fast, the way you did in a cold room — the soft things folded and smoothed flat on the end of the bed, the day dress over her head, the cloak on and fastened at the throat. She had no idea what this was. She bound her hair back with her fingers because there was no time to do it properly, and opened the door.
He was leaning against the wall on the far side of the landing, hands loose at his sides, waiting.
It went through her sideways — the whole of the first night, the wall opposite the tavern door and a man who'd been there some while by the look of him, unhurried, in no rush to be anywhere. He straightened off it exactly the way he'd straightened off that one.
"Come on," he said.
He walked her down. Not ahead of her, not behind — beside her, at her left as always, down the two flights and the worn dish of the stairs and out through the dark slot of the doorway into the Tradeway, and the morning came up around them cold and grey and already loud. He didn't explain. He didn't say a word about where they were going, and she didn't ask, because asking would have meant admitting she'd guessed, and she had guessed, she'd guessed the moment he'd said wear the cloak and she was terrified she'd guessed wrong.
They went up the street through the early crowd. He kept the pace easy. Once he put a hand at the small of her back to steer her past a cart being unloaded and took it away again, and she felt the place where it had been for a good twenty paces after.
Then he stopped.
They were perhaps a hundred yards short of the haberdasher's, at the mouth of a cross-lane where the crowd thinned, and he stopped and turned to face her.
"Go on, then," he said.
She stared at him.
"I've an hour," he said. "I'll find you when I've done."
And he went — off up the cross-lane into the crowd, unhurried, the grey coat visible for a few paces and then not, and he did not look back once.
She stood in the middle of the Tradeway on her own. It took her a long moment to understand what he'd done.
He'd walked her down. And then he'd left her there — no coin pressed into her hand at the stall, no standing at her shoulder while she chose, no this one, I think. He'd got her to the street and taken himself out of it, and now she was alone on a public road with a fold of money at her waist and nobody in the world watching her, and whatever she did next would be a thing she'd done.
She started walking.
She saw the stand from thirty yards off, and her feet slowed all on their own — the table, the stack of folded plain clothes, the woman behind it with her mending in her lap exactly as she'd been the day before. Lyrwen's stomach turned right over. It was all there again in a rush, every bit of it, the quarter of an hour with the cloth between her fingers and the sums coming out, yes, and her ears roaring as she walked away.
It isn't your money.
She stopped. She actually stopped, in the middle of the street, ten paces short.
And then she thought: if you stand here you'll talk yourself out of it again, and you'll have to live in that room tonight knowing you did it twice.
She went forward fast.
"The grey-blue one," she said, before she'd properly arrived. "On the table. If it's still there."
"It's still there." The woman didn't look up from her mending. "Told you it was a good one."
And then it was happening, and it was over almost before she could feel it — the cloth was in her hands. She was counting coins out onto the table, more coins than she had ever handed to anyone at once, and the woman took them without ceremony and folded the dress and wrapped it in a bit of coarse paper and passed it back over the table as though it were nothing at all, as though women did this every day of the week.
"There you are," she said. "Wear it in health."
Lyrwen stood on the Tradeway holding a paper parcel.
She didn't put it on. She'd thought she might — there'd been a moment, watching the woman fold it, where she'd nearly asked — and then she hadn't, because the thought of standing in this street in a new dress with her hair bound back anyhow and no washing done was more than she could hold. It could wait. It was hers; it would still be hers tonight, and tomorrow, and it was not going anywhere ever again.
She held the parcel against her chest with both arms and started back down the street, and about fifty yards along, she realized she was walking oddly and made herself stop.
He found her by the cross-lane.
She felt him first — the great banked stillness sliding in from somewhere off to her left and coming up through the crowd toward her — and turned, and he came out of the press of people with his hands full.
Pastries. Two of them, wrapped in paper, still steaming faintly in the cold; she could smell them from four feet away, that warm sweet fat smell that had been coming off a woman's tray under a lifted cloth yesterday morning while she walked past it. And in his other hand, in a twist of paper, the fruit. The pale gold one. Three or four of them, whole.
He'd been listening.
It went through her, standing there in the middle of the Tradeway with a parcel in her arms. She'd talked at him for five straight minutes last night about buttons and birds and a boy with a barrow, embarrassed the whole time, certain she was boring him — and he'd taken the whole of it in, every word, and gone out into the crowd this morning and come back with the two things she'd described wanting without ever once saying she wanted them.
"You got it," he said.
She looked down at the parcel. "I got it."
"Good." He held out one of the pastries. "Eat that while it's hot. It's not worth having cold."
She took it, and it burned her fingers through the paper, and she didn't care. It was flaky and came apart, and something inside it was sweet and dark, and she had absolutely no idea what it was.
She bit into it standing in the middle of the busiest street in the city, in a cloak, with a new dress under her arm, at seven in the morning, next to a man who was watching her face.
"Well?" he said.
She couldn't answer. Her mouth was full, her eyes had gone hot, and she was not going to cry on the Tradeway over a pastry.
"Mm," said Rhevan, and started walking, and she fell in at his left and followed.
At the top of the stairs he stopped and didn't open the door.
"Go on in," he said. "Try it on."
She looked at him.
"I'll be out here." He leaned back against the landing wall with the twist of fruit still in one hand, entirely settled, a man prepared to stand in a cold stairwell for as long as it took. "Go on."
So she went in, and shut the door, and stood in the middle of the room with the parcel in her hands and her heart going as if she'd run up the stairs.
She got the cloak off. She got her day dress off, and folded it, because folding it was something to do with the shaking in her hands. And then she opened the coarse paper on the table and lifted the thing out of it.
It came out of the fold and hung from her hands, and it was so much better than she'd remembered. She had spent a day and a night talking herself out of and back into a dress she'd held for a quarter of an hour. She'd been remembering it wrong — the colour was deeper than she'd had in her head, and the weight of it was real, and the hem was turned twice and stitched by somebody who had cared enough to do it right.
She put it on.
It went over her head and settled down the length of her, and she stood absolutely still and felt it. It fit. She had not expected it to fit; nothing had ever quite fit her, everything she'd worn had been let down or taken in or simply endured, and this came down over her shoulders and sat where it was meant to sit and hung clean from there to the floor without a single place where it pulled.
She smoothed her hands down the front of it, once, the way she'd smoothed a good dress on a line.
Then she went to the tin.
She had it propped against the wall on the table before she'd decided to, and crouched to get her face into it, and saw exactly what she always saw — the vague pale ghost of a woman, indistinct, green-eyed, red hair come loose and anyhow around her shoulders. She couldn't see the dress in it at all. The tin was four inches across. It had never in three years shown her more than her own face, and it did not show her more now, and she knelt on the floor of a rented room in the first thing she had ever wanted and could not see herself in it.
She stood up. She pulled the binding out of her hair and shook it loose down her back and had nothing to hand that would be quick, so she ran her fingers through it twice and gave it up.
Then she stood in the middle of the room with her arms at her sides and had no idea what to do next.
"You can come in," she said.
The door opened.
Rhevan came in, stopped just inside it, and looked at her.
"Well?" she said, and it came out with a crack in it.
"It's good work," he said. "The hem's turned twice, the way you said. And the colour's—"
He stopped.
She waited. He was looking at her, and he had run out of the sentence somewhere in the middle of it and did not appear to be in any hurry to go and find the rest of it. And she stood there and watched a man who had never once in five weeks been slow to speak — not in an alley with a thing coming off its crouch at him, not across a bar with her name in his mouth, not at a table with a captain lying to his face — stand in his own doorway with a twist of fruit in his hand and look at her, with nothing whatever ready to say.
"The colour's right," he finished.
"That's all?"
"That's all I'm going to say about it," said Rhevan, and went to the table.
She watched him go past her. And as he turned to set the fruit down, she saw the back of his neck had gone faintly red.
She stood in the middle of the floor in her bare feet with her hands open at her sides and something enormous rising in her chest.
Because she had spent five weeks being read, every conversation they had ever had, he had known more than she did — about the room, about the Bastion, about the thing in her own body, about her; he had watched her count coins from across a tavern and known her whole life off the back of it, and yesterday at that table he had heard a day of secrecy in the wording of a single question. She had never once had the upper hand of him for so much as a breath.
And she had just watched him lose a sentence.
She had done that. Standing in a plain grey-blue dress with her hair anyhow and no shoes on, having done nothing at all but let him in the door.
"Sit down," Rhevan said, without turning round. "Eat something. You've been up since before the light, and you've had half a pastry."
"Rhevan."
"Sit down, Lyrwen."
She sat down. She was smiling and couldn't stop, so she put her hand over her mouth to hide it, and he did not turn round to see it anyway, and she ate the pale gold fruit off a plate in a room over the Tradeway in a dress she had chosen with her own two hands.
Every so often she put her hand flat against the cloth at her knee, to check that it was still there.
