What Una Knows

The rosin cake had cracked down the middle, and Ishbel was the one who noticed, because noticing things before they became problems was most of what she did for a living, whether the thing in question was a diplomatic insult or a cracked block of pine sap.

Brennoch's welcome office had put them in single rooms this stop, a courtesy nobody had asked for and everybody was quietly glad of, which meant Ishbel had come down the corridor to Una's door instead of the other way around, carrying her own kit under one arm.

"You're going to lose half of that in your case lining," she said, holding it up to the lamp.

"I'm going to lose half of that in my case lining and then I'm going to cry about it," Una said, not looking up from the peg she was fighting. The harbor damp had gotten into her violin overnight, swelling the wood just enough to make the pegs stick and slip in the same breath, which she'd announced, loudly, was a design flaw in the entire concept of Brennoch. "Whoever built a city on a peninsula and then decided string instruments should tour through it owes me a new A string and possibly my sanity."

"The city's four hundred years old. I don't think they were thinking about your intonation."

"They should have been. Everyone should always be thinking about my intonation." Una got the peg to hold, finally, and drew the bow across the open string to check it, wincing at what she heard. "Flat. Still flat. I hate it here."

Ishbel laughed, and it came out steadier than she felt, which was the whole point of laughing on cue: you built the sound your face was supposed to make until the feeling underneath it either caught up or gave up trying to compete. She'd been doing the exercise for six years. Tonight it was taking longer than usual.

She set the cracked rosin on the dressing table between them and reached for the whetstone cloth for her own kit, though her kit needed nothing; she'd packed it perfectly this afternoon, the way she packed everything before a station like Brennoch, because a life built on being useful didn't leave room for being unprepared. Tomorrow at ten she would stand in front of two hundred people who had built an entire civic tradition around catching liars, and she would speak for the orchestra in three languages while men she'd never met tried, politely and then not so politely, to trip her.

She wiped a cloth over a case clasp that didn't need it and kept her hands moving.

"You've ironed that shirt twice," Una said.

"I ironed it once."

"You ironed it once tonight. I watched you iron it this afternoon too, through your open door." Una set her violin down across her knees, bow laid across the case beside her, and looked at Ishbel with the specific, assessing patience she usually reserved for a phrase she couldn't get to sit right. "You don't iron things twice, Ish. You interpreted Kinnoch's toast at the gala without blinking. You've done the Open Tongue's opening test already. Faskeagh certified you himself, on his own paper, in front of Dunmuir and everybody. So why do you look like you're about to walk into surgery instead of a press conference?"

There it was. Ishbel had known it was coming since she'd found Una's door propped with a bag of clementines set out on the sill like a lure. Una didn't lay out snacks unless she meant for someone to stay a while, and she didn't want company to stay a while unless she'd already decided to ask something.

The easy answer was sitting right there, worn smooth from use: nerves are nerves, Una, you know how I get before a big room. It was true enough to pass, vague enough to be unfalsifiable, warm enough that nobody ever pushed past it. She'd used some version of it on reporters, on hosts, on Brogan Dunmuir twice in the last two weeks. It was, she realized, reaching for it now, the exact same sentence shape she used on strangers who had no right to more of her than that.

Una wasn't a stranger. Una had roomed with her on every coach and in every cheap hotel for four years, had covered a missed cue once without being asked, had never once pushed past the door Ishbel kept half-shut between them — not because she hadn't noticed the door was there, but because she'd decided, on her own, that it wasn't hers to open.

That was a kind of gift too. Ishbel understood gifts. She was tired, suddenly and completely, of only ever taking them and never giving one back.

She set the cloth down.

"It's not the ceremony," she said. "Not only the ceremony."

Una went very still, which for Una was its own kind of loud. She didn't say anything, which was the second surprising thing. Una filled silences the way other people filled forms, automatically, without thinking about it, and Ishbel understood that this time she'd gone quiet on purpose, to leave room.

"There are things," Ishbel said, and heard her own voice come out lower and slower than she meant it, "that I can't afford to have anyone here ask me twice. Not tomorrow. Not ever, ideally, but tomorrow especially." She picked the cracked rosin back up, turned it over, set it down again, because her hands needed something to do while the rest of her decided how much further to go. "It's not that I'm hiding a body, Una. It's smaller and stupider than that, and it's mine, and I've been carrying it long enough that I know exactly how much weight it can take before it cracks."

"Like the rosin," Una said.

"Like the rosin."

Una considered that. Ishbel watched her do it, watched the quick, restless energy that ran under everything Una said or did settle, for once, into something closer to stillness, and understood she was being read in return, the way Ishbel read a room before she opened her mouth in it. Una wasn't stupid. Una had never once needed the whole story to know there was one.

"Okay," Una said finally.

"Okay?"

"I'm not going to ask you what it is." Una picked her bow back up, turned it in her fingers, not playing, just holding it. "I asked myself, about a year in, whether I wanted to know badly enough to make you tell me something you clearly didn't want to say. The answer was no. I like you better than I like being right about things. Most people have that backward."

Ishbel felt something in her chest come loose that she hadn't known was clenched, and she was careful not to let it show on her face, because if it showed on her face Una would see that too, and there was a limit, even tonight, to how much she could afford to spend.

"That's the most honest thing anyone's said to me in Brennoch," she said, meaning it as a joke, and heard, the second it left her mouth, that it hadn't come out like one.

Una didn't laugh either. "Then let me be useful instead of nosy. That's my actual talent, in case you hadn't noticed. Nosy's just the delivery mechanism." She set the bow down and leaned forward, elbows on her knees, all business now, the same posture she used when she was fixing a bowing for the second violins that nobody had asked her to fix. "Tomorrow. If one of them asks you something and you need three seconds you don't have — not to lie, just to breathe — I'm sitting front row, aisle side, same as always. You do the thing you do with your left hand when you're translating something you don't like the sound of. The little turn, like you're checking a ring you're not wearing."

Ishbel's stomach dropped a half inch. "You've noticed that."

"I've noticed everything about you for four years, Ish. I just haven't asked about most of it. That's the arrangement." Una said it lightly, but her eyes didn't match the lightness, and Ishbel understood she'd just been told, in the gentlest way Una knew how, exactly how much had already been seen without being named. "So. You do the hand thing, I stand up. I'll have a question for you — a real one, about the tour, something with an actual answer, loud enough that the room has to wait for you to deal with me instead of them. Buys you three seconds. Buys you ten, if I really lean into it, and God knows I can lean into anything."

"You'd do that in front of Faskeagh. In front of the cameras."

"I'd do that in front of the Trust, the cameras, and my own mother, who by the way would have opinions about my technique." Una shrugged, like it cost her nothing, though Ishbel knew better than most what it meant to offer somebody cover in a room built to catch exactly that. "You don't have to use it. I hope you don't have to use it. But it's there if the floor drops out."

Ishbel thought of Brogan yesterday morning, inventing a scheduling excuse for a lie he had no obligation to tell, and something uncomfortable and warm settled over the coincidence: the two people closest to her tonight had both, without being asked, built her an exit she hadn't requested and couldn't fully explain needing.

"Thank you," she said, and let it be plain, without dressing it in anything cleverer.

"Don't thank me yet. Thank me if it works." Una picked her violin back up, checked the A string again, made a face at what she heard, and tuned it down and up until it held. "Also you should sleep. You look like a woman who irons things at midnight, which, again, you are."

"I only did it once."

"You did it once tonight," Una said, and this time they both let themselves laugh, and it came easier than anything had all evening, because for once nothing underneath it needed to catch up.

·  ·  ·

Her own room was two doors down, cold in the particular way of a harbor city's guest rooms, where the sea got into the walls no matter how good the heating was. Ishbel hung the shirt she had, indeed, ironed twice, and sat on the edge of the bed with her travel bag between her feet, and looked at it the way she'd been looking at it, off and on, since Corrath.

She'd told herself there wasn't time. There had been time — the coach ride, the first night in Brennoch, the evening after Faskeagh's test — and she had spent each of those hours on something else, because a person could only carry so much at once, and she had needed her hands for other things.

That wasn't the whole truth. The whole of it was that she had known, the moment she'd found the envelope tucked into the outer pocket of her bag at the Corrath station four days ago, addressed to no one, in a hand that used no name at all, exactly what kind of letter didn't need a name to find her. She had put off opening it the way a person put off a doctor's call they already knew the shape of.

She unzipped the pocket now and drew it out. The paper had gone soft at the corners from four days pressed against her spare stockings and a phrasebook she never used. No postmark she recognized. No return address. Just her initials, faint enough that she'd nearly missed them the first time, in a hand she hadn't seen in six years and would have known blind, at midnight, in a room on fire.

She broke the seal before she could talk herself out of it a fourth time.

One line. No greeting. No name signed beneath it.

Someone came asking about you.