Chapter 57 #2
It was the wrong answer. Or the right one, if his aim had been to be hit very hard by a man who outweighed him by half.
Ivan took a drink as the hauler’s fist came for him in a wide, obvious arc. He let it land.
His head snapped to the side. Copper bloomed hot across his tongue. The cup overturned on the table, spilling the last of the Vredian dark over the wood. Several patrons at the long bench by the window stood. The wiser ones sat down.
Ivan ran his tongue over the split inside his lip and tasted blood. For one brief, bright second, it was the cleanest thing he had felt in days.
Then he stood.
He did not move quickly. He had no need to.
The hauler had spent his one good punch and now stood flat-footed, wearing the satisfied look of a man who believed the matter finished.
Ivan let him enjoy that mistake long enough to step inside his reach, hook a foot behind his ankle, and drive his face into the table on the way down.
His nose broke with a wet crack. Wood splintered. Bowls jumped. The hauler hit the floor in a rain of broken planks, blood spilling through his fingers as patrons shouted and someone’s stew spread in a greasy brown flood.
The other three came at once, which Ivan considered the polite minimum. Vredians, in his experience, had a touching sense of fairness about these things.
The second man caught him across the cheekbone.
Ivan gave the blow back at his throat and felt cartilage yield beneath his knuckles.
The third seized his sleeve and pulled, which was foolish.
Ivan went with the pull instead of against it, turning past him and driving an elbow up beneath his chin as he moved.
Bone met bone. The man’s teeth clapped shut, and from the wet, strangled noise that followed, it sounded as though some portion of his tongue had not survived the introduction.
The fourth had drawn a knife.
Ivan would have been disappointed if he had not.
He fought well drunk. Sobriety had made him predictable. Drunk, he stepped out of formulaic ruts and into something less disciplined, less merciful, a wilder thing he might have admired if he had ever been in the habit of admiring anything in himself.
Ivan turned the knife aside with his forearm and paid for it with a thin red line he would not feel until later. He took the man down with a knee to the inside of his thigh.
Beneath his skin, the dark current stirred.
It had been stirring all night, low and hungry, as it always did when blood was up and mercy had gone scarce. Now there was only Ivan, drunk and grieving a dead stone he had no right to mourn aloud, forcing the thing back down because he had done so all his life and no longer knew how to stop.
The veins across the back of his hand darkened as the hauler came back up.
He had not, after all, been a tree. He caught Ivan from the side and drove him into the wall hard enough to empty his lungs.
A laugh came up instead of breath, bright and ugly, before Ivan brought his forehead down into the hauler’s already broken nose.
A wave of blood sheeted over the man’s mouth and beard. He reeled back with a sound too animal for words, both hands clapped to his face, and Ivan slid free with the loose-limbed grace of a someone made by war, punishment, and careful hands over many years to be exactly the thing he was tonight.
The hauler was on his knees. The man with the knife was groaning. The other two had lost interest in heroics. But several patrons at the bar had risen again, drawn by blood as small-town men were. Ivan took two steps toward them, lifted his hand, and let the dark veins show clean in the lamplight.
Three of them sat back down.
Ivan stood there a moment, swaying only slightly, before turning back toward his table, which was no longer a table. The cup lay on the floor. His coat was somewhere in the wreckage. He bent to retrieve it—and a force he had not heard arrive caught him by the back of the collar and hauled.
“You absolute, unparalleled, catastrophic cunt,” Tristan said in his ear.
“Hello,” Ivan said politely.
“Walk.”
“In a moment. I had a coat.”
“Leave the coat.”
“You called me a cunt. I don’t have to listen to you.”
“You are one,” Tristan snapped. “A tolerable one, on occasion. A useful one, against all odds. But this”—he gestured at the whole of Ivan—“is not the tolerable variety. This is the variety that gets one of us killed, and I will not have it tonight. Do you understand me?”
“I didn’t ask for your help.”
“No, you didn’t.” Tristan’s grip tightened on his collar. “That is rather the point of love, you ungrateful fuck. One does not have to ask.”
Tristan dragged him through the door by the back of the collar with the air of a man hauling a wet dog through a parlor. The cold of the street struck Ivan full in the face, and the world briefly came back into clearer focus.
“Where are we going?”
“Algernon’s.”
“I would like to be issued a new tavern instead.”
“You are not being issued anything except a brisk walk, a great deal of cold air, and a serious conversation with yourself in the mirror tomorrow morning, which I will attend, because you have lost the right to be unattended.” Tristan gave his collar another hard tug.
“Look at me, Ivan. Look at me. Are you looking at me?”
“I am attempting to.”
Tristan crossed to the low stone wall, where some stubborn soul had planted a tidy kitchen garden in defiance of the snow, and seized the bucket of meltwater from beside the gatepost.
Ivan narrowed his eyes. “What are you—”
The cold stole his breath. Water poured through his hair, over his face, down the back of his neck, slid beneath his collar, and ran under his shirt. By the smell of it, the water had also, at some recent and unfortunate point, been used to wash turnips.
Ivan sputtered. “Fuck. What the fuck, Tristan?”
“Listen to me.” Tristan dropped the bucket, caught Ivan by the elbow, and steered him out of the alley into the main street. Ivan went, because the alternative was standing in turnip water in the cold. “We are leaving for the Fold. Now. Within the hour.”
Ivan stopped walking.
Tristan did not. He made it three strides before realizing Ivan was no longer beside him, then turned in the middle of the icy street.
His breath plumed in the lamplight. His face had that almost manic hardness it took on when he was frightened and had decided not to show it.
It cut through the drink faster than the cold had.
“Within the hour,” Ivan said.
“Yes. Do try to keep pace with calamity.”
Ivan moved.
His hair dripped down the back of his collar, the cold seeping through the lining.
The grain spirit still burned in him, but he forced his mind through it, dragging himself back by ugly inches until he could feel his pulse in his hands again—which was precisely the part of himself he had been trying to drown.
They turned up the rising street toward the upper town. The houses leaned close on either side, and somewhere a shutter banged in the wind. Beneath it all ran the low murmur of a town that knew something was wrong but had not yet been told the name of it.
“What happened?” Ivan asked.
“A great many things. I will let Dominic do them justice. The short version is that Osin has moved.”
“Moved how?”
“North.”
Ivan said nothing for half a block. He was nowhere near sober—he was running on cold, turnip water, and the old, pitiless machinery that had carried him through worse nights than this one.
But he had been Osin’s blade for the better part of a decade, and there were some instincts drink could not dull.
“He’s drawing the rebellion off the Fold.”
Tristan nodded. “Dominic thinks there is an informant. So far, he has not named us.”
“How bad?”