Chapter 6: The Lake Register

She woke because the boat was cold.

The night was mild, the first mild night of the spring, with the frogs going in the reeds and the smell of wet willow coming off the bank, so the cold had to be the boat. The boards under her bedroll had gone chill, as they did in the winter when there was ice in the shallows, and the cold was coming up through the blanket and into her hip.

Mei lay in the cabin with her eyes half open and listened.

The town bell had rung the third watch a while ago. She remembered it ringing, and Liulang's voice going away down the current, and the prince sitting in the bow saying I'd forgotten, and then lying down and thinking about seventy-five coppers, and not liking what else she kept adding up. She must have slept.

The lamp was burning. Its light came in through the cabin door in a long gold slant across the boards. In the slant, at the far end, she could see the bow, and the prince.

He was standing at the side of the boat with his back to her. He had taken off the carter's jacket. He was holding his left wrist in his right hand, and as she watched he took hold of something on the inside of the wrist with his fingers and pulled.

He made no sound, but his shoulders locked and stayed locked, and when he opened his hand there was a scale in it, pearl-white, catching the lamplight.

He leaned out and dropped it into the lake.

Then he said something. It wasn't in any language she knew.

It sounded like water going over stones, like the noise ice made when it broke up in the shallows in the second month, and then like nothing at all. It went out over the lake and down into it, and the lake went flat. The frogs stopped. The ripples round the hull settled, one after another, in rings, as if somebody had laid a hand on the water.

Mei kept her eyes slitted and her breathing slow. Then, out at the edge of the lamplight, the water bulged.

Something came up. It came up slowly, the way a stone would come up if a stone could swim, round and dark and as big as a cartwheel, with moss on it, weed hanging off its edges and a single snail stuck to the top.

It rose until it was level with the surface. Then a head came out from under the front of it, a long, wrinkled, leathery head with a mouth like a pair of tongs and two small yellow eyes, and the eyes blinked at the prince, one and then the other.

It was a turtle. It was the oldest thing Mei had ever seen.

"Eighth Highness," it said.

Its voice was like a door that hadn't been opened in a hundred years. Mei could understand it. She decided it was being polite.

"Keeper," said the prince.

"It's the third watch."

"I know what watch it is."

"I'm nine hundred and twelve years old," said the turtle. "At my age you don't get up at the third watch. You stay down. You stay very far down. You think about kelp." It swam a little closer, slowly, and Mei saw that it carried something under one front flipper, flat against its plastron: a long book, bound in something dark and slick, like eelskin. "And I was given to understand," said the turtle, "that Your Highness was not at home."

"I'm bound."

"So I hear. So everyone hears. The whole lake hears. The carp are talking about it." The yellow eyes moved past the prince, down the length of the boat to the cabin door. "A ferrywoman. With a plaster."

"I didn't call you here to talk about the plaster."

"No," said the turtle. "You called me here with a scale off your own arm. You haven't done that since you were ninety."

The prince held his wrist against his chest.

"You wanted to know if the cook had been told to give you no more sweet bean cakes," said the turtle. "He had. What do you want, Eighth Highness?"

"The Register," said the prince. "The Hong line. This crossing."

The turtle didn't answer at once. It floated there in the gold of the lamp with the snail on its back and the eelskin book under its flipper, and its old mouth worked, as if it were chewing on something.

"You haven't the right," it said finally. "Bound princes don't read registers."

"Bound princes are still princes."

"Not on paper."

"Keeper Tan." The prince's voice didn't get louder. It got quieter, and colder, and Mei, lying in the cabin with her eyes almost shut, felt the boards under her go a little colder still. "When I was forty and fell off the east tower, who caught me?"

The turtle was silent.

"And when I was a hundred and tried to ride the spring flood to the sea, and came back with half my scales off?" said the prince. "Who hid me in the archive for a month so my father wouldn't know?"

"That was a long time ago," said the turtle.

"I'm asking," said the prince, "not ordering. I don't know how to ask. I'm learning. Please."

There it was again. It didn't seem to be getting easier. Mei's eyes came open in spite of herself.

The turtle sighed. It was a long sigh, and bubbles came up round it, and it sank a little lower in the water.

"That line," it said. "And you didn't see it from me."

It brought the book out from under its flipper and opened it, there on the surface of the lake, and the pages didn't get wet. They lay open on the black water like a lily pad, and on them, faintly, the writing glowed. Mei could see the glow from where she lay, but not the words. She wouldn't have been able to read them anyway.

The prince knelt at the side of the boat and leaned down over the book.

He read. She watched his finger move down the page, and stop, and move, and stop, and then stay stopped.

"Read it to me," he said.

"You can read."

"Read it to me, Keeper."

The turtle's old voice went down low, and the water lapped against the hull, and the frogs, which had started up again, drowned most of it. Mei held her breath to hear. She heard: "...Hong..." and then a run of creaking words that ran together, and then, clearly: "...the fifth of the fifth..." and then more, and then, at the end: "...Wang."

The prince's finger stayed where it was on the page.

Mei lay in the dark of the cabin with her heart going.

Hong. That was her mother's name, before it was ever hers. The fifth of the fifth. Fourteen years ago this spring, at the Dragon Boat Festival, with the whole of Willow Crossing on the bank to watch the boats. Wang. Liulang had been in the water that day. He'd told her once, years later, when he was drunk. He'd been there and he hadn't been able to do anything, and he'd never said more than that, and she had never asked.

He had looked her mother up. That was what this was. He'd heard Liulang say you'd better be quick, and he'd been curious, and he'd pulled a scale out of his own arm and woken an old turtle at the third watch, to read about her mother's drowning in a book.

She nearly got up. She had the blanket off her shoulder and her hand flat on the boards to push herself up, and the words ready, every one of them, That's mine, that's not yours, you don't get to read that, when the prince spoke again.

"Can it be changed?"

His voice was wrong. She had heard it cold and she had heard it furious and once, tonight, she'd heard it surprised. She had never heard it like this. It sounded like a man asking the price of something he already knew he couldn't afford.

"Moved?" said the turtle.

"The day. The name next to it. Any of it."

"I don't write them, Highness. I keep them." The turtle closed the book. The glow went out. "A written day can't be moved. It can only be balanced. You know that. Somebody else goes in."

Somebody else goes in. Eleven men had come out of the water that day. Mei had never asked herself what the river had taken in exchange. She began to think she knew.

Moved? Mei turned that over in the dark. Her mother had been fourteen years in the Hall. There was nothing left in that day to move. She put the oddity away with the rest of the night's oddities, because she was a good deal angrier than she was curious, and angry was easier to carry.

"And the name beside it? Who put it there?"

"That's not my book," said the turtle. "That's the Register of Substitutes. That's your brother's book. Third Highness keeps the substitutes. I keep the drownings." It began to sink. Its head drew back under its shell, slowly, until only the yellow eyes and the beak showed. "Go to sleep, Eighth Highness. Don't call me up again. And be careful," it said, and the water closed over the snail, "whom you start owing. It never ends well, in the water."

Then it was gone. The rings spread out where it had been, and reached the boat, and slapped once against the hull, and the lake was only a lake again.

The prince stayed kneeling at the side for so long that Mei's arm, propping her up, went to sleep.

She lowered herself back onto the bedroll, very carefully. She pulled the blanket back up over her shoulder. She didn't know any more what she was going to say to him. The anger was still there, but there was something underneath it now that she didn't have a price for. She shut her eyes and thought about eels.

She heard him get up, and then his bare feet on the boards, coming down the length of the ferry, past the stove, past the box of paper money. They stopped at the cabin door. The cold came with him and stood in the doorway.

She lay with her face to the wall, her eyes shut and her breathing slow, as she had when she was a little girl and her grandfather came to see if she was sleeping. She waited for him to say her name.

He didn't.

After a while she felt the blanket move. Not hers. His. The one she was charging him for, a copper a night, which he had been sleeping under in the bow. He laid it over her, on top of her own, carefully, starting at her feet and drawing it up to her shoulder, as if he'd never done it before and wasn't sure which end went where. His fingers didn't touch her. They came very close, at her shoulder, and she felt the cold of them through the two blankets, and then they went away.

She heard him sit down in the doorway with his back against the frame.

She meant to stay awake. She meant to lie there until he'd gone back to the bow, then lie there some more, and be angry with him properly in the morning, with a list. She started the list. Reading other people's books. Waking turtles. Pulling bits off yourself in the middle of the night like an idiot. She got as far as the third thing and lost the fourth.

When she woke it was gray dawn, and the frogs had stopped, and the lamp was guttering on its pole.

He was still in the doorway. He was sitting with his knees up and his arms round them, in the cold, without a blanket, and he wasn't asleep, he was looking out past the stern at the old ferry post in the shallows, and he didn't turn his head when she moved, and she lay there under both blankets and watched him watch it, and kept her mouth shut.