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.

Two things show, one on each side of a bond. Paying turns your hair silver. Being paid for turns your eyes gold. Nobody here ever looks old. Your face, your hands, your whole body stay young until the day you die, but the payer's hair goes silver-white and the receiver's eyes go pale gold, and those are the two visible marks of a love with a price. Silver says you paid. Gold says someone paid for you.

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. A young face with gold eyes was loved at a cost, and you can never tell whether it was love or a debt or a lie somebody was forced into.

The whole city is built on this.

The high houses keep their dark hair into old age and wear gold eyes to match, because someone else always pays for them, and dark hair with gold eyes worn late is aristocracy announcing itself, proof that you were loved at a cost your whole life. 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 hair and eyes 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.