I carried my plate out through the back passage, where the kitchen smoke met the cold.
My wrist hurt where his fingers had been. The marks were coming up in stripes.
Behind me, the hall started talking all at once.
I did not go to the kitchen. I went out the side door into the yard.
The cold took the sting out of my face. The glasshouses were lit up the way I had left them.
Nobody owns a glasshouse, I told myself. Somebody just has to keep the fires going.
The vault sat underground behind the glasshouse, with an iron door my mother's family had paid for.
I set the plate on a crate and checked the seed trays out of habit. My hands were not steady.
Three years of work sat in those trays in neat paper packets.
The outer door opened and let in a wedge of cold.
Darragh: You left the table.
He filled the doorway, and the snow on him was already turning to water.
Fiona: You moved me out of my chair. I finished eating.
Darragh: You embarrassed me in front of the elders.
Fiona: You had your hand up her dress at supper. I embarrassed you.
His jaw worked. I had never spoken to him like that, and my heart went like a bird in a box.
Darragh: I am not taking the vault from you. Or the glasshouses.
Darragh: You can keep running them. For Ilona.
Fiona: For Ilona.
Darragh: She is Luna. The seed contracts go under her name now. You will do the work and bring her the papers.
Fiona: You want me to feed your pack and hand her the credit.
Darragh: I want you to have a place. You have been useful here. That does not have to end.
Useful. He said it the way a man says a good dog.
The outer door opened again. Ilona came down the steps in a fur coat over her silk, one hand on her belly.
Ilona: It smells like dirt down here.
Ilona: Darragh, you said this would take a moment. I am not standing in a cellar all night.
Darragh: Go back up. I am settling things.
Ilona: I will stay. I want to hear her say yes.
She picked a seed packet off the shelf and turned it over like it was nothing. My hands closed on the crate.
Ilona: Three years in his bed and not a pup. Three years in this dirt and no heir. What are you good for, exactly?
Darragh: Our bond was never finished.
He said it plainly, as if it were a fact about the weather.
Darragh: That leaves a place. The vault, the glasshouses, this work. And when I want you, I will come to you.
There it was. Not a marriage. A place.
Fiona: So I keep the vault for her, and the bed for you when it suits you.
Darragh: You keep what I give you.
Fiona: I would rather be nothing than a place.
It came out of me so quietly that I surprised myself.
Ilona: Nothing is what you will be. Look at her, Darragh. She cannot even hold a plate without shaking.
I picked my plate up off the crate. It was mine, and the food on it was mine.
Fiona: The grain in this pack came through my hands. When it runs out, remember whose hands stopped.
He moved faster than a man his size should. His hand closed on my arm and he threw me sideways into the stone wall.
My shoulder hit first. My head came after, and the whole vault rang.
The plate went out of my hands and broke on the floor.
Then his hand was on my throat.
He pinned me to the wall and squeezed, and my breath stopped in the middle of my chest and would not come back.
Darragh: You will not talk to my Luna like that. You will not talk to me like that. Ever.
Darragh: I can walk you out past the fence line in your nightclothes and open your throat in the snow. Who would ask? A dry wife who went walking?
I believed him. That was the worst of it. I looked into his brown eyes and I believed every word.
My chest was burning. Black spots swam in front of the lamp.
He let go. I fell onto my knees on the wet floor and pulled air in, and it hurt all the way down.
Darragh: Keys. By morning. You bring them to Ilona yourself.
I nodded, because my body wanted to live more than it wanted to be proud.
Ilona stepped over the broken plate. Her slipper went into the wet bread, and she laughed.
Ilona: Clean that up before it draws mice. That is the work now.
The door shut. Their steps went up and away, and the vault was quiet except for the fires in the pipes.
I sat back against the stone they had put me against.
My throat was already swelling. When I swallowed, it felt like a stone in a sock.
My hope had been small and stubborn. It died there on that floor, without a fuss.
I had told myself that if I was good enough, patient enough, the bond would finish and he would see me. I had spent three years being seeable.
He had not given me a place. He had given me a leash and called it a home.
I got up, found a broom, and swept the plate into the corner, because I would not leave glass where I worked.
I was done asking to be chosen. The next choice was mine.
On my key ring there was one iron key that fit nothing in Greywater. It had come from my mother.
I closed my hand around it, and it was cold.
If Darragh could take my name inside this fence, then someone outside the fence could hear it.