CHAPTER FOUR Two Kinds of Blood #3
Kael came in and didn’t sit. He looked round the room once, the hearthstone with the nine things still on it, the dresser, the low beam. Then he leaned on the frame of the passage door with his arms folded, which put him between us and the way out. I saw Elias notice that and put it away for later.
Elias was at the table. He didn’t get up.
“Vale,” said Kael.
“You know me.”
“I know the family. There’s a mark on your wrist, and I’d not need it.” He tipped his head. “You’re not what I expected. I’d heard tall.”
“My father was tall.”
“Ah.” Something complicated went over Kael’s face and was gone. “Yes. I’d heard that as well.”
The kettle was coming up to the boil. Nobody did anything about it.
? ? ?
“Say what you’ve come to say,” Elias said.
“She’s to come down.”
“No.”
“I’ve not finished.”
“You haven’t started. You’ve made a statement about a woman standing in the room, in her own house, and you’ve made it to me and not to her. I’d like it noted that I was offended first.”
“I can be offended on my own account, thank you,” I said.
“I know you can,” said Elias, without taking his eyes off Kael, and Kael laughed. A real one, short, startled out of him.
“Fair.” He turned to me properly. “Madam. You’re invited below. Not taken. Not summoned. Invited, and I’d lean on that word, because I could name you three people who wanted it done the other way and were overruled.”
“By whom?”
“Still not telling you.” He looked back at Elias. “And he can’t come.”
? ? ?
“Why not.”
Kael weighed that. Then he did something I didn’t expect. He came off the doorframe, pulled out the chair across from Elias and sat, which put him below Elias’s eye line, and folded his hands on my table like a man at a hearing.
“Because it would kill him. Slowly. And because he’d go regardless, and you’d let him, because between the pair of you there isn’t the sense God gave a limpet.”
“Say the rest of it,” Elias said.
“You’ve the mark and you’ve the blood, and the blood’s nine hundred years thin.
” Kael turned one hand palm up on the wood.
“You’ll have felt it. Water’s never quite frightened you.
As a boy you held your breath longer than your friends and thought nothing of it.
Cold doesn’t take you the way it takes other men. ”
Elias said nothing, which was an answer.
“That’s the whole of it. The residue.” Kael kept his voice level and reasonable, and the reasonableness was what I couldn’t stand.
“Enough for her gift to slide off you. Not enough to breathe. A man like you goes down into the Deep and the pressure doesn’t kill him quickly, and that’s the cruellest fact in the whole business, because if it did, nobody would try. ”
? ? ?
Elias got up and went to the window.
He stood with his back to us a good while. I watched the set of his shoulders, and my stomach went slowly cold, because none of this was news to him. He’d got there on his own, somewhere in four days of ploughed field, and he hadn’t told me.
“How long,” he said to the glass.
“Depends on the man. Days. A fortnight, if he’s stubborn, and you’ve a stubborn look.”
“And then?”
“And then you stop being able to think in order, and after that it isn’t really you down there any more. I’ve watched it twice. I’d not watch it a third time for money.”
? ? ?
“Then I’m not going,” I said.
They both turned.
“Rose.”
“No. You’ve had four days, and you’ve had a morning on the reef, the pair of you, to sort out what you think, and not once has either of you asked me.
” My hand went out and found the dresser and held on to it.
“I’m not going anywhere he can’t follow.
That’s my whole position, and I’d like somebody to argue with it instead of looking at me like that. ”
Kael said, quite gently, “Madam, that isn’t a position. It’s a wish.”
“I know the difference.”
“You don’t, or you’d not have used that tone.
” He stood. “There’s a thing you’ve not grasped, and I’ll say it once and then leave you both to be miserable at each other.
You talk as though the invitation’s the question.
The invitation is a courtesy. It’s what gets offered before the other thing.
It’s offered because someone down there argued for it and spent whatever they had to spend to get it, and it won’t be offered twice. ”
“That’s a threat.”
“It’s a forecast. I’d not waste a threat on you, madam. I’ve seen what you did to that comb.”
And he let himself out by my front door into the lane and left the two of us eight feet apart in a kitchen, with the kettle shrieking on the stove.
? ? ?
Elias took the kettle off.
That was the first thing he did. He wrapped a folded cloth round the handle before he touched it, which takes four seconds and which nobody bothers with in a real hurry, lifted it off the plate and set it down on the hearthstone.
Then he stood looking at it. Then he picked it up again and moved it eight inches to the left, where the stone lies flatter, and set it down a second time, and straightened it, and took his hand away.
He did all of that with his back to me in a silent kitchen. It took the best part of a minute. There’d been nothing wrong with where the kettle was the first time.
Then he braced both hands on the edge of the stove and let his head drop.
“You knew.”
“I worked it out on Saturday.”
“And on Sunday you sat at my table and asked if I wanted my eggs turned.”
“Yes.”
“Elias.”
“Because I was a man sent to watch you for a season who never said so,” he told the stove, “and I’ve spent every day since September trying to be something else.
And on Saturday afternoon I sat in your yard and saw I’d found a new way of doing exactly the same thing.
” He straightened up and turned round, and his face was wrecked.
“I was going to tell you tonight. I’d decided.
I’d got as far as deciding on tonight. Then he knocked. ”
I didn’t go to him. I’ve wondered about that since, more than I’d like to.
“Say the rest.”
“Which rest.”
“The part you haven’t said. You’ve been standing in that yard for four days. You didn’t need four days for the pressure, you had that by Saturday. So what have you been doing since?”
Elias looked at me.
“Reading about how thin blood gets thicker.”
? ? ?
The fire had burned low. Neither of us saw to it.
“And?”
“And there’s a way. At least one. It’s in the books, in the part of the books that was cut out.
” Very evenly, as if he were reading me a list. “Three times, Rose. Every time the hand turns careful, the pages after it are gone. I’d assumed what they cut out was whatever the old watchers are.
I don’t think that now. I think someone in my family found a way for a Keeper to go down, and every generation since has taken it out of the record on purpose.
And I think they took it out because it works. ”
“You don’t know that.”
“No.”
“You’re guessing.”
“I’m guessing. I’ve been guessing in your yard for four days, because the other thing was telling you the only honest answer I’ve got, which is that I can’t come. And I find I’d rather guess.”
Somewhere down the lane a gate clicked. Someone else’s, not ours. The sound came up very clear on the cold.
“I’d have taken the honest answer.”
“I know you would.” He lifted the kettle again and looked at it as if he had no idea where it had come from. “That was never the part I couldn’t bear.”