I slept four hours with Darragh's keys under my pillow and woke before the bell.
The seed vault sat under the east glasshouse, cold as a well, and I had kept it three years.
Down there, nobody could tell me where to sit.
I had my hand on the latch when I heard heels on the stone behind me. Heels, in a vault.
Ilona came down with her brother behind her and Rurik carrying the lamp.
Ilona: Open it. I want to see what I own now.
I opened the door and lit the lamps along the wall.
The vault smelled of dry earth and cold iron. Forty crates of seed slept in the dark, sorted by my own labels.
Ilona: Rurik says there is a seed book. Every sack in and out for three years.
Rurik: The Luna kept it in her own hand, my lady. It is not a thing I can copy out by morning.
Ilona: Then she can hand it to me and I will learn it.
She took the seed book off the shelf and held it by one corner, like it might bite her.
Ilona: All this for peas and turnips. You must be very proud.
Fiona: Three thousand people ate out of this room last winter. Yes. I am.
Ilona: I am Luna now, and I want the counts in my hand, not yours.
Fiona: Then you will need to learn which crate is barley and which is rye. They look alike in the dark.
Rurik's pen stopped moving. He looked at the floor.
Ilona: Careful. You are not a wife anymore. You are the woman who carries my keys.
Halvor stepped behind me and closed his hand round my arm, above the elbow.
Halvor: Say that again to my sister and I will carry you up the hill by that braid.
His grip went tight, and he turned me where he wanted me, like a sack of grain.
Ilona: Let her go, Halvor. She bruises easy and Darragh hates a mess in the morning.
She laughed at her own joke. Rurik did not, and that was the only kindness in the room.
Ilona: Count them out for me. Every crate. I want it on the record that I did not lose a single sack.
Fiona: I will count them when the work is done. Not before.
Ilona: I did not ask.
Halvor's hand came back to my shoulder, and this time he pushed.
My hip hit the shelf. A jar of seed rattled off the edge and broke on the floor.
Halvor: You heard her.
Ilona: Somebody clean that up. The help has work.
She went up the steps with her brother after her. Rurik stayed behind.
Rurik: My lady. She is not cruel, only young. The counts will keep.
Fiona: Rurik. Are my seed contracts filed under my name or under hers?
Rurik: Under Cairn. They always were. I would not let that change.
When the door shut, I stood with the broom and looked at the far wall.
My mother's things came down here the winter she died. I had never opened them.
I knelt by the crate and lifted out my mother's ledger. The leather had cracked at the spine.
Inside the front board, the lining was loose. I felt something hard behind it.
I turned the cloth open in the lamp light. My breath went out of me and did not come back for a moment.
A silver seal, the size of my palm, with a mountain and a hare cut into it. The Cairn seal.
My mother had pressed it into every contract she signed. I had watched her do it a hundred times.
I sat down on the cold floor with the seal in both hands, and I did not cry.
I want to be honest about that. I had done my crying in the dark, where nobody saw.
This was different. Something in me stopped hoping and started working.
Darragh had told me the Cairn name was dead, and that I should be grateful he took me anyway.
He said it so often that I forgot my mother had a lodge, and a seal, and a seat at a court he had never once been called to.
I had let him give me a place. My mother had a name.
A Luna is not set aside in a kitchen. She is dissolved by public record, before the Sun Court.
I had said it to myself in the dark like a prayer I did not quite believe.
Now I had the thing that could make a king answer.
I put the seed book open in front of me, in case anyone came down, and wrote on a loose sheet underneath.
To the Keeper of the Rolls at the Sun Court. From Fiona of the house of Cairn, Luna of Greywater.
I asked for a public dissolution of an unfinished bond, before the court, on whatever day the court names.
I set my name to it, then my mother's seal, pressed in wax with the candle and the flat of my knife.
My hand shook once, on the seal. Then it stopped.
I wrote it twice. The first copy went into my apron pocket, folded small against my ribs.
The second went into my mother's ledger, in the lining, under the winter barley.
Rona came out from behind the barley crates with her apron bunched in her fists.
Rona: I was in the back, Luna. I heard the seal press.
Fiona: Then you know what it means.
Rona: It means you have somewhere to go.
Rona: I will not say a word. I swear it on the grain.
Fiona: Not Luna. Not after tonight. But thank you.
Fiona: If I am gone before the thaw, the crate by the wall is mine. Remember that.
I went up the steps with the seal in my pocket and my petition folded over my heart.
Darragh thought he had given me a place. He had handed me a list of everything he owed.
Let a king's court ask him to explain the cost.