Chapter 6: The Covenant Has Teeth
It hatched at dawn on the third day, and Delary did not see it happen, which she would regret for the rest of her life.
She woke to heat and the smell of scorched lacquer. Her dresser, the one from her grandmother's room, had run down its own front like a candle left in a window. In the middle of the floor sat a thing the size of a hunting cat, still wet, wings folded wrong, looking at her with two amber eyes and the specific resentment of a creature that had been born awake.
It opened its mouth and made a sound like a kettle deciding to become a bonfire.
"Right," said Delary. "Rules."
The covenant did not come with a manual. It came with an appetite.
She learned the rules the way she had once learned the rules of a household: three at a time, by watching what happened instead of asking what should.
Rule of the creature one. It could not be reasoned with, but it could be trained, and the difference is not that one is dignified. A creature that can be reasoned with will sometimes choose you. A creature that can be trained will always, in the end, do what it was taught, and will do it to you first if that is what it learned.
Rule of the creature two. It answered to heat, not to words. Every command she had ever given a servant in her life had been language. This thing had no language. What it had was temperature, and the only way to make it understand was to become, briefly, almost as warm as it wanted to be.
Rule of the creature three, learned on the second evening when it put out every candle in the east solar and sat in the dark looking pleased. It did not need to burn things to be a danger. It needed only to decide that the room should be different.
By the second day the curtains in the east solar were gone. By the fourth she had learned that the creature ate what she could spare and burned what she could not, and that it slept only when she was quiet inside. Not calm. Quiet. Which meant she had to learn to put down her own fear on command, twice a day, with a beast asleep on her ribs.
She had been a woman who could not stop turning a problem over. Now every time she turned one over, something in the room caught fire.
It was, she admitted to the wall, a fair punishment.
Spencer came three times on the first day and never crossed the threshold.
Once at noon. A nod, a long look at the burn marks, and a word as he left. "Feed it less."
Once in the evening. He watched her hold her hand steady while the creature tracked it, and said nothing, and left.
Once at night, when it was asleep and she was not. She felt him in the doorway before she heard him, because the pull in her chest had gone quiet in a way it only did near him. He stood there a while without saying anything. Then, "You held your hand steady. Today."
"And?"
"Yesterday you would not have." He left. The doorway stayed empty a long time after.
On the eighth day she took it into the old orangery, where the glass had gone cloudy and nobody went, and began what she privately called the ledger of the thing.
Column one, what it could do. It could hold heat without releasing it for the length of a slow count of twenty. It could track a moving hand without following it. It could put out every candle in a room at once, which it did, twice, unprompted, and seemed pleased about.
Column two, what it could not do. It could not be corrected. It could not be coaxed. It could not be made to understand that the tapestries were not for burning even after four separate explanations, one of them delivered at volume.
Column three, what it cost. Two hours of Delary's sleep a night. One curtain. One dresser. Eleven candles. One pair of gloves. Her ability to sit still in a room and think, which she had not realised until it was gone was the single thing she had built her whole life around.
It was, she wrote at the bottom of the page, a remarkably expensive employee.
By the fifth day the household had reorganised itself around the fact of the thing, which is what households do with facts they cannot remove.
The kitchen sent up twice as much meat. The steward quietly moved every tapestry out of the lower corridor. Two maids resigned. Three asked to be reassigned to her rooms specifically, because girls who work near a power tend to want to be standing next to it when it becomes one.
Delary noticed all of this and wrote none of it down, because what she wrote she kept in a book, and the book was for the things that were true and that would be denied by the people in charge of the truth.
On the seventh day, in the long gallery, she found the creature with its head against a wall of portraits. The whole line of Aurelians, four hundred years of them. It was making a sound she had not heard it make before.
Not a chirp. Not a hiss. A low, flat, mourning note, held.
"What do you see?" she asked.
Empty rooms.
The voice in her head was the same voice from the hall. Delary had thought, on the first two days, that the creature in the room and the voice in her chest were the same thing wearing two shapes. Standing in the long gallery with its head against the painted faces, she understood for the first time that they might be the same thing becoming each other, and that the direction of that becoming had not been decided yet.
"Whose rooms?"
It looked back at her the way it had looked at her from the ceiling of the hall. As a record. Not as a girl.
Yours. When you are done.
Delary walked out of the gallery and did not run. Down three corridors, through the door of her own rooms, and then she sat on the floor with her back against the bed and understood, in a way she could not explain to anyone, that she had been given a companion in exactly the way a debt is given to a man who has already spent the money.
She took out the book.
Rule two. The covenant is not a gift. It is a lease, and it knows the term.