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nikkilbook · 12 days

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Where's the Line?

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Isabol passed him his plate from where she’d finished filling it, and he joined her at the table. Breakfast wasn’t anything too fancy, but it was nice enough. The newlywed cottages were always stocked with enough staples to get the couples started, though most would also have some extras, like a chicken or goat, covered by the dowries.

Though usually, the families of the couples had a few days beforehand to finish stocking the cottage. No one but he and Isabel had been up to theirs in the five days since the handfasting. All they had was a basic root cellar with what excess could be spared since the last young couple had been married. Some grain, since the last growing season had gone uncommonly well. Dried spices and herbs, though more of those could be found in the forest without too much trouble. Some preserves and other canned fruit. Sugar, salt, though not too much. Those were usually shipped in from towns in the mountains, and it wasn’t often that someone would just buy extras unless it was specifically meant for a young relative’s dowry.

So they’d made do with porridge’s and stews for the last few days, along with some apples they’d been able to gather from the forest on their visit to their tree. Isabel had done her best to make some biscuits the other day, and they tasted all right even if they looked a bit unappetizing. She’d talked it over a bit, and she seemed pretty sure she knew what to change for the next batch.

“What are you thinking about?”

Tristan blinked, and realized he’d been staring blankly at the cabinets for however long it took for his eyes to start feeling this itchy. He had half a biscuit in his hand, and a mouthful of food he’d stopped chewing. He jerked his head back to center, fixed his eyes on his plate, and swallowed as fast as he could around a noticeably dry throat.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, trying very hard not to end up with a fistful of crumbs. “Didn’t mean to get distracted.”

“You don’t have to—you didn’t do anything wrong? We were just eating?” Isabol’s voice which he’d always associated with a sense of firmness, of steadiness, and a kind of knowing he’d never felt anywhere else in his life, felt brittle around the edges. “You just seemed like you... went away, in your head, just a bit. Like you were thinking really hard about something, and you stopped eating. Should I not—do you not want me to do that in the future?” Her voice was smaller than he’d ever wanted to hear it. “Am I supposed to let you come back on your own time, and not interrupt?”

Tristan had never been asked that before, and both the asking and the question were entirely too much to deal with. So he decided not to.

“It’s market day,” he said.

Isabel blinked.

“I was thinking. About market day.” He hadn’t, exactly. He’d been very carefully thinking around it, but it was where his thoughts were always going to end up. “So we can get different food. And the dowries.”

“Oh, um.” Isabel looked over at the cabinets he’d been staring through, and nodded. “That’s a good idea. Since nobody’s come up yet, they probably aren’t... going to....” Her brow drew down, a single furrow forming directly in the middle of her forehead, and the line of her mouth distorted as she bit the inside of her lip. She’d just started doing that back before they’d stopped seeing each other, back when they were kids. “Do you think we’d need to talk to someone from the family directly, or do you think we could get away with going to the counting house and talking to one of the clerks? That would be faster, I think, but it would mean having someone else know our business, as well as know that our families didn’t stock things.” Her nose wrinkled. “Half the town would know by the end of the day, and the other half would learn about it over the dinner table. Which I cant say I’d enjoy, and it’d surely aggravate my uncles.”

Tristan very carefully didn’t say that he suspected most of them already knew. The town had always loved any gossip that painted his family in a bad light, for all they were still willing to do business with his father and uncles. He looked at the frustration on Isabol’s face, and the knot of very-carefully-unsaid things grew a little larger in his throat. If he said he’d prefer the counting house, would that frustration swallow him? Last night, when she’d convinced him to sleep in the bed with her, she’d been softer and kinder than anyone he’d spoken to in a long time, and she’d said they were a team. That she believed what he’d said back when they were kids, even if she’d stormed off as a child.

It was one thing to believe what he’d said; it was another to expect her to sit through it with him.

This was where he should offer to go by himself to their families and collect the dowry gifts. Let her give him a list of what to pick up as well as any personal effects to collect from her parents’ home. This was where he should be an adult and represent his new household to the community. That was how this was supposed to go.

Tristan hooked one thumb over the other and squeezed hard, twisting and pinching until the skin darkened to a dull red and he idly wondered if he’d break his own thumb. He did not want to try and walk up to her father’s door, especially not alone and especially not trying to pretend like he had a right to be there. He knew what they thought of him, he was beginning to understand why they thought it of him, and for all that the legal debs had all been squared, now he, the son of a liar and a cheat, had effectively stolen one of their best and brightest. He could see no reason why they would hate him any less than they had 5 days ago.

He didn’t want to face her father and uncles; what did it make him that he wanted her to be there to see it when he ultimately would?

She had been kind to him, and seemed not to mind living and working together. She’d invited him into the bed. She had apologized. And yet a part of him, one that had burrowed deep where grabbing hands and stomping feet couldn’t reach, one that had gnawed is way out of a trap and knew who had set it, wanted her to see. To really understand what it was to be him.

Another part, backed into the burrow of his skull and blocked from sight by the other, hoped that maybe if she were there, nothing would happen.

“If,” he whispered, his voice pitched a little higher and riding on the sigh escaping his lungs, “if we go to. The counting house. We can pick what we want instead of taking what they give us.” Could make sure things were quality, and that they got their full dowries’ worth.

Isabel nodded slowly, her eyes focused on whatever was going through her head. “I think—yeah. That’s probably best. I’d like to go by my family’s place at some point, just to pick up some of my own things, but for the dowries, the counting house is our best bet.” She got up and went over to the door to the cottage, moving things around a bit before returning with a slate and a bit of chalk. Nudging her breakfast to the side, she sat backdown and started making notes, her head resting on her off-hand. Most of her mouth was covered, but he could still hear her muttering fairly clearly.

“...enough to last the season, or...? Need tools as well, for… depends on how… subsistence or trade?”

Tristan felt kind of floaty, like the edges of himself that touched the chair, the table, the floor, were starting to dissolve, leaving him suspended. He should be participating, right? He should have answers to the questions she was asking. Or did she want to do it by herself? Did she want to take the lead when it came to interacting with the village? That would probably make things easier. Would give her a chance to keep some of her reputation intact, too.

The back of the slate scrape a bit on the tabletop as Isabol spun it around to face him. “What do you think?”

The spark that lit up the back of his neck didn’t even have time to catch before he got a good look at what she’d written. Tick marks, clusters of letters that didn’t spell anything, curved lines that crossed over one another in what seemed like nonsense, but that he knew neatly represented entire words or sentences.

He knew what merchant shorthand looked like.

He looked down at the table, closing his eyes just enough to turn the slate blurry. There was a pain in his chest, just behind his ribs, that felt like something was pulling his bones out of alignment, collapsing them inward into his lungs. “It looks good,” he whispered, hoping it wouldn’t seem like he didn’t care.

“Is there anything else you want to look for? And did I guess your dowry amount right?”

Tristan bit his lip, not able to hide it this time. “It’s probably fine. We can check it again at the counting house.”

“But if—” Isabol’s voice cut off, but Tristan still didn’t look up. It was getting difficult to concentrate, because his mind was playing back the expressions of every person who’d ever handed him something in shorthand, or who’d snatched it from his hand from across a counter. Superimposing those faces over Isabol’s felt uncomfortable and surreal, but he couldn’t make himself look up. He didn’t want to know what her face looked like when she finally got disgusted with him.

A hand slowly pushed into his vision, stopping just shy of where Tristan was white-knuckling his sleeves. It bent up at the wrist a bit, like it was getting ready to touch him, but it just stayed there.

The memory of the night before, of her hands on his face and the tight hug she’d wrapped him up in, joined the other echoes in his head, and he slumped a little, letting her hand come in contact with his.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t read what you wrote down. I never—I’m sure the list is good, I just don’t—I can’t read it.”

Her hand felt tighter where it gripped his wrist. Not uncomfortable, not tight enough to bruise, but enough to be noticeable. Her thumb moved across the heel of his palm, leaving little static-like tingles on the surface of the skin that sunk deep into the muscle.

“Did… I use the wrong script?” She asked, but her voice sounded like she didn’t believe it. “Does your family use a different version?”

Tristan shook his head. They both knew there was only one version—the whole point was to be able to communicate almost universally with other merchants, regardless of origin. None of the variations that did exist would have rendered a message incomprehensible.m”I recognize the shapes and some of the patterns, but I don’t —I can’t read. Shorthand, I mean. I can read regular books or lists, just not… not that.”

She was confuse. Or maybe frustrated? She was something, he could tell by the way her hand tightened around his, going stiff but keeping her thumb moving across his palm in an attempt to seem casual. He was just adding fuel to the fire—there was a breaking point, there had to be, but he didn’t want to find it, no matter how stressful it was to never know how close he was cutting it. He shoved the words out past his teeth and hoped they made enough sense when they landed to pull everything away from the edge.

“No one ever taught me how to read it. I tried figuring it out myself from the lists and what people gave me, but eventually I figured out that the orders didn’t always match no matter what kind of list it was, so I couldn’t find the patterns. I don’t know whose idea it was, my father or my uncles or somebody else, if they didn’t think I was fit to join the company, or if they wanted me to be a bad m-match for you, but I can’t read it, I’m sorry, I’m sure it’s a good list, I promise I tried, I just can’t read it.”

“Do you want me to show you how?”

Tristan held his breath.

“It’s okay if you don’t want to, or—or don’t want me to, I guess. I can rewrite the list in script, that’s fine, I only wrote it like this to save space and work out my thoughts. Or I could go by myself, if you want? I just thought it would make the most sense to do it together, but I didn’t know—I can tell you what’s on the list? So you’re still part of the decision. I didn’t want to leave you out—but I guess I already did, I should have talked it out while I was writing. I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean to cut you out or anything.”

He missed some of what she said as just noise, his brain following certain threads a few stops further before realizing she was still talking, but even if he didn’t catch every word, her voice was still… comforting. She sounded a little stressed, and her words were quicker than normal, but she kept doing this—trying so hard to reassure him even if she didn’t think she knew how. Even last night, when he’d started panicking, he’d eventually been able to see what she’d been trying to do.

She hadn’t tried to hurt him yet.

He really wanted it to stay that way.

“Maybe you could just point things out as we pick them up for now? If you still want me to come with you?”

“Okay. Okay, okay.” Isabol nodded, repeating the word under her breath and setting the flats of her hands solidly on the table in front of her. “Is there anything you want to do before we go, or should we just get this over with so we can have the rest of the day to ourselves?”

Tristan breathed in and let it out as deliberately as he could, furrowing his brow and staring down at the table as he piled his utensils onto his plate. “Let’s go.” He focused very, very hard on the image of he and Isabol under their tree spending their evening away from everyone and everything, and not the next several hours. It didn’t matter what happened in the market, because the tree was on the other side.

Isabol joined him in standing, tis late in the one hand and the remains of her breakfast in the other. She brushed past his shoulder and looked up at him as she scraped the rest of her food into the compost pail. “Let’s go. Together, okay?”

Dishes on the counter, he took the hand she’d reached out to him, and nodded. The tree’s on the other side. “Okay.”

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