CHAPTER 22
Avery
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The card came under my door at four in the afternoon, face down, with the service stair drawn on it in pencil.
Above the drawing he had put the Cage and his own name and nothing else.
I turned it over twice looking for a sentence and there was none.
He had carried it up four flights and gone away again without knocking.
The service stair dropped past the kitchens and then kept going.
Fine snow came at the landing window without settling on the sill or on the drive below, which had been scraped down to gravel and salt.
My palm found the block wall at the last turn and the cold in it ran up my arm to the elbow.
Gun oil at the bottom of the stair, heavy and clean, the smell of a bench where somebody works.
The bag’s chain was moving with nobody near it.
He had dragged the mats off the north wall and left them in a heap by the door.
Four iron rings were set into that concrete at ankle height, and three of them were under the mats and one was bare.
He was standing on the bare one in his boots with his sleeves shoved past the burn on his right forearm.
One caged bulb had gone out. Half of him had light on it and the rest was the color of the floor.
I came down the last four steps and stopped where the mats ended.
“Left shoulder. It does not go above here.” He lifted his left hand to the height of his own belt and held it there, and then the arm came down again on its own.
“How long does it stay like that?”
“The tear is small and it heals slow, and it heals wrong if I work it.” He turned the hand over and let it hang against his thigh.
“So I am not working it.” He brought the good hand up toward my right cheekbone and stopped it short of my face.
“That is going yellow at the sides. It will be gone before anybody at that table has to look at it.”
“You brought me down four flights to talk about your shoulder.”
“I brought you down four flights to talk about the ice.” Nothing in his face moved to make the words easier. “You said no. I picked you up anyway. That was not fine.”
The chain kept swinging on nothing. I put my hand back on the block wall because the cold gave me something to do.
“Everyone in this building has explained you to me since,” I said. “Julian did it from a doorway with his coat on. Alistair did it in a sentence with three clauses and no verb I could get hold of.”
“They were not out there.” He rolled the shoulder that worked. “I would carry you off that ice again tomorrow. Both things are true. Saving you does not erase the fact that you said no.”
“Tell me what does.”
“Nothing settles it tonight. You set the consequence. I keep my hands off you until you ask. I answer what you ask. I put a lock on your door and give you the only key. You do not owe me forgiveness, touch, or a bed because I kept you alive.”
Somewhere over our heads a door shut and the sound came down the stair and died in the concrete.
“I am not going to hit you because you ordered me to.”
“Then do not.” He did not shift his weight or fold his arms or give me one thing to push against. “I do not get to write the terms of repair. I stand here and listen.”
The bulb that worked had a tick in it. I counted that tick up past forty while my fingers went cold on the wall, and he waited on the ring with his palms turned toward the floor.
I crossed the distance and hit him open-handed, badly, high on the cheek, because the anger still needed somewhere to land. My wrist rang with it. His head moved and came back and his hands stayed where he had put them.
“That is not a repair,” I said.
“No,” he said. He left the next choice with me.
I made a fist of my left hand with the thumb on the outside and put it into his cheekbone because I chose to, not because he had asked.
The bone split my knuckle open on the way through.
He took it standing. His hands did not come up off his thighs, and the lit half of his face gave me one moss-green eye and no expression to hang it on.
Blood came up out of the split and I closed my hand on it so it would have somewhere to go.
“Is that the account settled?” I said. “Is that what this was for?”
“No.” He had the word out before I finished the question. “The account does not close because you broke your hand on my face and I had the manners to stand there. I asked for it because I owed it to you. I am not asking you to call us even.”
He looked at the heap of mats by the door before he came back to me.
“You did not have to come down,” he said. “You could have left that card on the floor and let me stand here until both bulbs went out.”
“I stood in the kitchen a long time working out what it would cost me,” I said. “That is the only way I know how to decide anything. I will read you the list.”
“I would lose a kitchen at eleven at night, and my brother calling me and being boring. I would lose Julian in a doorway waiting to be asked in. The lemon tree in the solarium that nobody will throw out. A card with a stair on it and no sentence. Gun oil on a sleeve. I have been costing things out since I was nine years old, and this is the first list I ever made where the items are people.”
He took that standing too, and it was harder on him than my fist had been. Then he crossed to the coat on the hook and went into the pocket with his good hand.
“I love you. You do not owe me a word back.” He came back with something small on his palm and turned it over so the bow faced up. “New core, bow filed square. Eleven minutes at a walk, and it opens the steel door and nothing else.”
The copper key had verdigris down in its teeth and a bow worn round by a hundred years of pockets. This one was bright and unworn and its bow had been squared off by hand, with a file, badly, by a man working one-armed at a bench. I put my thumb across the corners he had cut and they were sharp.
“You changed that core yourself,” I said. “You changed it, and then you sat down and made me a way back through it.”
“I changed it the night you ran and I have carried this in the coat since the ice.” He shrugged with the side that answered him. “It goes out. It does not go anywhere else in this building. What you do with it is not my business.”
The fourth floor gave a person away. The board outside the linen cupboard dropped under my heel and came back up, and the sound carried to the head of the corridor.
Full dark at the windows by then. The radiator under the sill had started ticking, and the two of them were standing at the corridor door where the hall turns.
Julian held his right hand out away from his coat. The knuckles had been taped and the tape had gone through at two of them. Alistair stood a pace behind him with his coat folded over his arm.
“The agenda came up from the Ledger Room before dinner,” Julian said. “Your name is on it, under an item I am not permitted to read out to you.”
“You are not permitted to read it and I am not required to wait for permission to hear it. The Substitution.”
Julian’s chin came down a fraction and stayed down. Alistair drew breath to say something, and I kept my eyes on the door frame and the strike plate and did not turn my head toward him.
“Twelve days to the winter table,” Rook said behind me. “The vote is the vote and I can count. What I want said out here in the hall is that he has known the shape of this since the leaves came down, and he has said nothing about it in front of her.”
“I do not know who is being canvassed,” Alistair said. “That is a true answer and a useless one, and I am aware of how it sounds.”
“Your silences cost her a night alone at Harrowgate,” Rook said. “Ask me at the table whether I trust the next one.”
“Ask me what I intend to do about my index and I will decline to tell you.” Alistair set the coat over his other arm without hurrying the motion. “That is the arrangement I have with her, and I am keeping to it tonight, which is the whole trouble with it.”
Julian looked at the drill hanging from Rook’s good hand, and then at me, and whatever he had been holding in his shoulders came down.
“The door is yours,” Julian said. “Nobody on this corridor will ask you for a copy, and if a man does, you send him to me.”
They went. The stair door opened and shut twice, and then the hall was ours.
He knelt to the mortise with a bit already in the chuck and the brass lock out on the boards beside his knee.
The first hole went in clean. The second one wandered, because the body of the drill wanted holding up and his left hand would not come up to hold it, so he put his chest against the back of the drill and pushed with his legs.
“Give me that.”
“You will set the plate crooked, and then it is crooked for a hundred years.” He got his weight over it again and found the line. “Hold the door.”
I put my shoulder into the stile and both hands on the wood and held it steady while he leaned. Brass came off the bit in bright curls and lay on the boards in a half circle around his boot.
It took him four times as long as it should have taken.
Twice he stopped and put his forehead against the wood and got his wind back, and I did not offer again, because he had asked me for the door and the door was what I gave him.
He seated the plate, tapped the bolt home with the heel of his hand, and ran it over and back, over and back, a dry sliding weight and no noise worth the name.
When he stood up his left arm hung and he let it hang.
“Try it yourself. Do not take my word for the throw.”
I turned the bolt with one finger and it went sweet, and the shavings under my shoe made a sound like sand. Then he put a key into my palm and folded my fingers over it with his good hand.
“This is yours. It is the only one, and it is not the other one.” His hand stayed around mine a beat past what it needed. “Nobody holds a copy. I cut it myself and I did not cut a second blank.”