Chapter 66: The Saintess Asked Me to Open Her Position Myself

Calista found me at dawn in the kitchen garden, where I was losing my usual argument with a rice plant.

"You’ve drowned it," she said.

"Miralys said drown it."

"Miralys is teaching you her country’s rice. That pot is my garden’s rice. Different water, different lies."

She crouched beside me and moved soil aside with two fingers, sleeves already rolled from wherever she’d come from.

"Why did you buy the plot?"

Straight to it, then. Calista Bloom does not open with weather and has never once pretended otherwise.

"The well field behind the hospice," I said. "Forty graves and one fig tree. The Church deeded it to the diocese eleven years ago and forgot it existed. As of yesterday it isn’t forgotten anymore. It’s yours. Paper’s in the house, your name on it, no order attached, no see attached, no crown attached. You can sell it, plant it, or be buried in it, and none of those require asking anyone’s leave."

She was quiet for the length of ten breaths. A bee worked the rosemary behind us and gave up.

"That’s the second gift."

"It’s a deed, not a gift."

"It’s the second time you’ve done something for me, and both times you refused to count it afterward."

She wiped her hands on her apron and turned to face me fully.

"I want you to understand what you’re actually refusing, so I’m going to speak plainly, and I need you not to interrupt, because I rehearsed this twice and interruptions cost me the words."

"I’m listening."

"Your System keeps my line unopened because you have never calculated me."

Her chin came up.

"You think that’s a compliment. It isn’t. Everyone else in your portfolio has a return column. Numbers. Proof of what they’re owed and what they’ve earned. I have no record at all. Do you understand what that means, in a house full of accountants? To be the position with no record?"

"Calista..."

"I said no interruptions."

The reproof landed soft.

"It means when people argue about who matters to you, there is no page to point to. It means your System, which sees everything there is to see, has never once been able to tell you what I’m worth. So you guess. And guessing is just hoping in better clothes."

Her hands flattened against her apron. "I lived twenty-three years as a woman the Church priced at fifteen years old and sold accordingly. I will not spend the rest of my life as the unpriced thing in your books. Price me."

The morning got very quiet. Somewhere past the wall the city started its first carts.

"You’re asking me to make you a number."

"I’m asking you to look at me the way you look at everyone else you kept."

Her voice cracked once, and she rode it down without slowing.

"Lunara got a ledger entry she thinks about at every guard change. Miralys got her war back with her name on the first line. You even priced Roderic Alden, and he arrived four months ago. I have been here since January, Vaelion. I am asking for the same arithmetic as everyone else under this roof. That is the whole prayer."

[DING]

[Investment tracking: negative.]

[No action registered.]

[Note to file: HERO. She has stood in your portfolio for eighty days with empty hands. I have no protocol for this. Neither do you.]

I looked at the fig tree for a while, because some purchases you make facing away from the seller, so they can’t watch you flinch at your own price.

"Here’s my counteroffer," I said. "The position opens today. But the valuation happens after the act, never before, and you don’t hear the number until the System writes it down itself. Because the day I price a woman before doing the thing is the day I’m back to buying wives, and this body has done enough of that for six lifetimes."

"And the act?" Calista asked. "What’s the act?"

"That part I had backwards for eighty days."

I stood and brushed off my knees and took both her hands, soil and all.

"You’ve been waiting for me to do something grand enough to count. But your capital went up when I served you a plate without meat. It went up again when I bought you dirt. The System was never grading my gifts, Calista. It grades whether I finally understand the invoice runs both directions." I held on when she would have pulled back.

"So here is the act. Marry me properly. Not the treaty version, not five houses and thirty witnesses. Just us, in this garden, under a fig tree, with whatever god you stopped taking orders from standing witness. Say yes, and I’ll spend the rest of both our ledgers proving whatever number comes back was too low."

Calista Bloom looked down at our joined hands. Then up.

"You absolute..." A laugh broke out of her, short and wet. "You’ve turned a proposal into an audit."

"I’m told I’m consistent."

"Yes." Both her hands closed around mine hard enough to matter. "Yes. Obviously yes. Now open the window before I lose the nerve and start blessing things."

The screen opened between us, gold, and for the first time in eighty days it drew a new line while we watched.

[DING]

[Investment Detected: you asked her to be counted, and meant it more than the deed.]

[Evaluation: SSS. Sincerity verified... 100%.]

[Calista Bloom ...... Position: OPENING...]

[Return calculation requires full account history.]

[Compiling: eleven years. One hundred forty patients treated by name. One jar of honey left anonymous. One plate served without meat. One fig tree.]

[WARNING: return exceeds existing scale.]

[Recalibrating columns.]

[Integrity: 48% â–¼ 46%]

"Exceeds existing scale." Calista read it twice, lips moving. "What does that mean? What comes after your scale?"

"I don’t know." I was still holding her hands, and had no immediate plans to stop. "Nobody’s ever filled one of mine either."

She looked at our hands, then up, and did the thing she does when she has decided to be brave about a small thing instead of a large one.

"When?"

"When what?"

"The wedding. The proper one."

Pink climbed her ears, and she spoke faster to outrun it.

"You said a garden and a fig tree and a god who’s stopped giving me orders. That requires scheduling, Vaelion. I’ve organized four hundred funerals. Weddings are just funerals where everybody cries happier and nobody checks the body first. Give me a date."

"After Friday."

"Because of the dinner."

"Because if I marry you before I’ve settled with Ansel Vosk, then he owns a hostage situation instead of an invitation."

I brushed a thumb across her knuckles.

"And every one of you would spend the whole ceremony doing threat math instead of watching me put a ring on the best hands in this palace."

Calista considered that with her head tilted, a physician triaging an argument.

"That’s the correct answer," she admitted.

"I hate that it’s the correct answer. Fine. After Friday. But you’re telling Lunara yourself, because she has been standing post outside my door for six nights running pretending it’s a coincidence, and I am not delivering that news to a sword saint on an empty stomach."

She paused. "Also tell Zelina separately, and let me be in the room. Not for protection. For the show."

"Calista Bloom. Are you asking me to start gossip so you can watch Zelina Flintstone lose composure?"

"I’m a retired holy woman with eleven years of listening to other people’s confessions." Her smile was small and entirely unrepentant. "Let me have this. It’s the only sin left that doesn’t cost me days of life."

The System, which had been hovering patiently through this entire exchange, added one line in smaller letters than usual.

[Note: for the record, I intend to attend.]

"You’re always at everything," I told it.

[I know. Nobody ever sets a chair.]

We might have stayed in that garden until noon if the west bell had let us. It began hammering instead, the pattern that means fallen, and Bren Olvar’s roar went up through the courtyard ahead of any runner.

"THE HERO’S DOWN. Somebody get HER MAJESTY. The hero’s down and he won’t wake."