Corriveau

Love costs you years of your life. Actual years, taken off the end of the life you were given, on a date you were never allowed to see.

It only happens when you say it out loud. Quiet love is free. Longing is free.

A whole life spent beside someone, unspoken, costs nothing and holds nothing. But the moment two people swear the old oath and claim each other, the ledger opens, and years get poured out of a life to make the bond hold.

Swear shallow and the bond is thin, easily broken. Swear deep, the real thing, the unbreakable thing, and you might spend a decade or more of yourself into it.

Here is the cruelty. Only one of you pays.

The oath takes from whoever speaks the giving-words, and it takes from them alone. So every love story in this city is also a negotiation with loss, and underneath the tenderness there is always the same buried question.

Which of us.

You never learn what it cost you. Nobody knows how long they were meant to live. Fate seals the number at birth and hides it from everyone, including you, so paying is a wager made in the dark.

You give ten years off a life you assumed was long, and you never find out whether it was long at all, or whether those were nearly the last you had.

One thing shows, and only one. Paying turns your hair silver. Your face stays young, your hands stay young, your whole body stays exactly its years, but the hair goes silver-white, and that is the single visible mark that you loved at a cost.

A young face under a white head is the most charged thing you can see in this city, and you can never tell by looking whether it means devotion or whether it means somebody used that person up and threw them away.

The whole city is built on this.

The high houses keep their dark hair into old age because someone else always pays for them, and dark hair worn late is aristocracy announcing itself. The servant class goes white and young in the face, drained into their masters' bonds and dying early on a date no one can read.

Down by the water, the Unbound refuse the oath entirely and love free and unprotected, at the mercy of the world.

And two powers fight over the whole thing, the old sacred order that holds the true words and the new civic registry that files love as a legal contract, so you can be married in the eyes of the god and a stranger in the eyes of the ledger, or the reverse.

Everyone in Corriveau reads the hair the way other people read weather. Walk into a room and you know, without a word, who here has been loved at someone else's expense.

What you can never know is how much it cost them, or how much any of you have left.