The Fortieth Night

She does it again.

Twenty seconds this time. Then a full minute, her fingertip resting on your pulse while the clock on the mantel ticks and the canal slaps quietly at the water steps below. Then, very slowly, as if she's lowering herself into cold water, she lays her whole palm flat against yours.

Skin to skin. Her hand is smaller than yours, long fingered, warm. She stares down at your two hands like they belong to strangers.

"Nothing," she whispers. "Nothing's happening to you."

"I could have told you that."

"You could have been wrong." Her fingers slide, tentatively, between yours. They fit. She makes a sound you've never heard from her, a short helpless huff of breath, and you realize it's a laugh. It surprises her more than it surprises you. She puts her other hand over her mouth, gloved, as if to catch it.

"When did you last do that?" you ask.

"Laugh?"

"Hold someone's hand."

She thinks about it. That's the worst part: she actually has to think.

"I was nine," she says. And then, before you can ask anything else: "Come to the garden. I can't do this in a bedroom. It feels like a trap."

The nightglass is open.

At night the whole garden glows, rows and rows of pale bells giving off that soft blue light, so that you walk through it like walking along the bottom of the sea. The air smells green and faintly sweet. Ginevra walks ahead of you down the gravel path barefoot, robe trailing, one glove on and one glove tucked into her pocket. Every few steps she looks back to make sure you're still there.

At the dry fountain she stops and turns around.

"I keep waiting for it to happen," she says. "Some delay. A slow poison. You'll be fine for a day and then you'll go to sleep and not wake up, and it'll be my fault, the way it's always my fault."

"I feel fine."

"So did the cardinal's nephew, until he didn't." She looks at your mouth. She looks away. "The canal. Do you know what you did?"

"I breathed for you."

"You kissed the Garden Daughter on the mouth on the first night of your marriage and lived." Her voice is very quiet. "Nobody in this city will believe it. I don't believe it."

You take a step closer. She doesn't step back.

"Can I kiss you?" you ask. "Properly. Not because you're drowning."

She goes still. The blue light moves on her face.

"Say it again," she says. "I need to know you mean it, Ethan. I need to know you know what I am."

"I know what you are. I watched a man die on my floor. I'm asking anyway. Can I kiss you, Ginevra?"

For a long moment she doesn't answer. Then she nods, once, and closes her eyes, as if she can't bear to watch what happens next.

You kiss her.

Her mouth is warm this time. Soft and still, at first, like she doesn't know what to do with a kiss she isn't drowning in. Then she makes that sound again, the laugh, except it's not a laugh now, and her bare hand comes up and touches your jaw, and she kisses you back.

She kisses like someone who's read about it in every book in the palazzo library and never once been allowed to try. Hungry and careful at the same time. Her fingers slide into your hair. She tastes like the garden smells. Somewhere behind you a night bird starts singing and stops, as if it's embarrassed to interrupt.

When she pulls back, she doesn't go far. Her forehead rests against yours. Her eyes stay closed. You can feel her shaking.

"Are you dying?" she whispers.

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Pretty sure."

"Tell me if you start."

"I'll text you."

She laughs, really laughs, a startled sound that bounces off the garden walls, and then she sits down hard on the edge of the dry fountain like her knees have stopped working. You sit beside her. Her bare hand finds yours on the cold stone and holds on.

Then her face changes.

You watch it happen. The laughter goes out of it first, then the color, until she's sitting there pale as the nightglass, staring at the gravel.

"I have to tell you something," she says. "And when I've told you, you're going to want to leave, and I'm going to help you."

"Ginevra..."

"Do you know what the Quarantena is?"

You do, vaguely. Every child in Veravecchia learns about it in school, along with the plague years and the founding of the harbor. An old law from when the city closed its port for forty days against the sickness. Some of it is still on the books.

"Something about forty days," you say.

"Forty nights. A marriage in Veravecchia isn't complete until forty nights have passed since the vows. Before that, if one of them dies, the marriage never happened. Everything goes back where it came from." She's not looking at you. "After the fortieth night, if one of them dies, the other inherits. Everything. Houses. Ships. Charters."

You understand before she says it. You feel the cold come up through the stone.

"The Old Mole," you say.

"The Old Mole. The Right of the Chain. The only quay in Veravecchia my family doesn't own, the only lantern that looks into their ships." Her voice doesn't shake. You almost wish it would. "My mother didn't buy your father's debt to be kind, Captain. She bought a husband for me so that I'd inherit him. And on the fortieth night, after midnight, when the law says I'm a widow and not a bride, I'm supposed to kiss you goodnight."

The garden is very quiet.

"Those are your orders," you say.

"Those are my orders."

"And you were going to do it."

"No." She turns and looks at you now, and her eyes are bright and fierce and furious. "No. I decided that the night I met you, when you didn't cross the street. I decided it again at the altar. But it's not only my mother who knows about the Quarantena, Ethan. If you die before the fortieth night, the marriage is void, and the Mole goes back to the Harbor Council. And somebody in this city would very much like that to happen."

"The man with the knife."

"Ruggero Pezzente. And before him, at our wedding feast, the cook. Pippo Murra. He put something in your wine. I saw his hands shake when he carried out the jug, and I switched the cups, and afterward I found him on the kitchen stairs and asked him who paid him." She looks down at her bare hand, still holding yours. "He wouldn't tell me. So I took off my glove."

Your mouth has gone dry.

"Two men have been sent to kill you since yesterday afternoon," Ginevra says quietly. "I killed them both, Captain. I'm the only reason you've lived this long."