Uncle was weeping softly. Aunt wore a face of stone, cold and forbidding as she stared at the personage with a force that would have congealed a lesser man.
The old man sang under his breath, but the power of the whispered words made the air hum. With a wordless shout, he flung the ball of thread into the mirror while holding on to one end. With a sound like a latch opening, the uncoiling thread penetrated the mirror and at once could be seen as glittering links in an unrolling chain. As it rolled, I began to see the shadows of another landscape, the hills and forests and rivers of the spirit world. All our weak images faded to nothing as the mirror turned smoky with power as he chanted words in a language I did not know. Ghostlike sparks spinning off the eru could still be distinguished, but even these sparks were blurred as the chain of binding was fixed and the mirror became opaque.
What were they doing to me?
“In this world, one hand is given into another, one house opens its door to a stranger who will enter and become no stranger. In this world, one hand is given into another, and the other house opens its door to a stranger who will enter and become no stranger. This is the chain of obligation bound into the family of Hassi Barahal in payment for what they have owed the House of Four Moons. As it was agreed in the year… The eldest daughter is the payment offered in exchange for…”
The words flew too swiftly now for me to understand them. It took all my energy to not collapse to the floor and start in on a screaming fit that would put Bee’s tantrums to shame. It took all my energy not to drop to the floor and sob with choking fear.
In this world, one hand is given into another.
There are three kinds of marriages legally recognized in the north: a flower marriage, which flourishes while the bloom is still on it and dies when it withers, which no respectable northern woman in these days could ever consider contracting; an ink and vellum marriage, hedged about with provisions and obligations and mutual agreements and legal and economic protections; and the binding marriage, more common in the old days and retained almost exclusively, according to my academy masters, among the Housed because of the raft of legal and magical complications at risk when two children from different mage Houses seal a betrothal.
We Barahals were assuredly not members of any of the thirty-six mage Houses, nor did we suffer under their patronage or owe anything to any House. Or so I had always believed, until now.
“Dua! Dua! Dua!” The old man tugged on the thread, and suddenly there was a click like a door closing. A ball of perfectly ordinary yarn nestled in his hand, and the mirror reflected nothing but the landing and the people standing there in various stages of impatience, grief, boredom, and shock. All the magic woven into the mirror had been sapped out of it by the grip of the spell, so even the eru appeared as a perfectly ordinary man with black skin, black hair tied back in a dense horse tail, and the distracted smile of a person whose thoughts wander elsewhere.
Or maybe I had dreamed that vision in the mirror. Maybe I hadn’t seen an eru at all. Maybe Bee was right, and I was seeing only what I wished were true because it was easier that way than accepting what I didn’t want and could not understand: that the world was cruel and had ripped my parents from me just because it happened that way sometimes.
The personage rapped his cane twice on the floor. The house seemed to groan, and there came a shout from upstairs, like a girl waking from a nightmare.
“Now, Catherine, Four Moons House has taken possession of you,” said the personage to me. He produced a large envelope from his jacket and held it out.
Aunt snatched the envelope from his hand. “You make it sound as if she’s your slave, but she is your wife. That was the agreement.”
He regarded her with an expression very like contempt. “What difference these hair-splitting words make to the truth of the matter I cannot see.”
Uncle burst into wrenching sobs. “Please forgive us, Cat.”
“Enough! We knew this day might come!” snapped Aunt with such anger that even the personage startled and took a step back, bumping into the railing. If only the railing might give way and he plunge over… but it held fast.
The coachman and the footman sprang up the stairs to grab the trunk between them as Shiffa backed away. They clattered past us, down again to the front door.
“Aunt Tilly?” My voice trembled.
“Yes, dear one.”
Still sobbing, Uncle hugged me.
“Come along!” said the personage.
What was his name? I hadn’t even heard it.
Aunt extricated me from Uncle’s despairing sobs and, clasping my hands, kissed me on the forehead, then on either cheek. She was still not crying, but that was only because—I could see—she refused to release precious tears. Give away nothing that might give them a further hold on us.
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked, and my voice was more the wail of a hurt child than that of a young woman accustomed to twisting out of any fall so she landed on her feet. But the world was twisting away under me, and I couldn’t find the ground.
She released my hands, as dying people release their soul when death arrives. She let me go, and the personage took hold of my wrist in an unyielding grip.
“Go with your husband,” she said.
9
Flakes of spinning snow burned my cheeks as I stumbled down the steps, remembering at last to twist Bee’s bracelet onto my right wrist, as though I were daughter to her mother, embraced by her heart and her protection. I had no bracelet of my own.
At the coach, the cold mage offered me an elbow to balance on so I could mount the stairs into the interior like a respectable person, but I grabbed the handles and clambered up gracelessly without touching him. We Cats are particular, don’t you know? I wanted to hiss at him, but I knew I must not. I must not dishonor the Barahal name. I must give him no further hold over me, beyond the fact that I was now the property of his house.
As Bee would say, “Don’t kick unless you can really hurt them.”