Chapter 22
Nyxiana
I’m out in the yard before the sun clears the ridge. My hands aren’t steady, haven’t been since we got back. Valen is standing at the corner of the nearest cabin where he can see the whole yard. He’s been there since I came out. He isn’t going anywhere until he watches me leave.
He crosses the yard to me. “I’m going now,” I say.
“Is it worse than usual?”
“Yes.”
He looks like he slept badly, gray under his tan, his hair disheveled where he’s run a hand through it.
His eyes go over me once, top to bottom, before he says anything else.
He takes the cloak off my arm, holds it open for me.
It’s the plain dark one I keep for these runs, heavy wool, long enough to go past my boots.
He settles it over my shoulders and lets go.
He’s close enough that I could lean my forehead against him.
I do up the clasp, pull the hood up over my head instead.
“I’ll be here,” he says.
One vessel. That’s what I buy every time I go down there, every three or four weeks.
It holds me until the next one. I walk to the treeline and step into the shadow under the pines.
The dark comes apart around me before it closes.
It goes through in pieces, like something dragging, and then it takes.
I come out in the lower reaches of the quarter.
The moon here sits low and red over the roofs.
It doesn’t rise and it doesn’t set. Everything under it comes out the same shade of red.
The street is black stone. It’s wet under my boots.
The buildings on both sides are four and five stories of the same stone, narrow, with the upper floors built out over the street until there’s a strip of red sky left between the roofs.
A carriage comes down the far end and the horses balk before the driver gets them turned.
They don’t like the smell down here either.
Nobody in this row looks twice at a covered face.
Half of them have one too. I can see my hands, the gray in them is worse than I’ve ever let it get.
My vendor is at his stall. In thirty years I’ve never come down here and found him anywhere else.
He’s never asked me for a name or given me his.
I set the cruor out on the board between us.
Six coins. Two of them old enough to be worth the other four together.
He takes the oldest one, puts it between his teeth, bites down, then he holds it under the lamp and looks at the crystal where his teeth went in, reading how old the blood was that they pressed to make it.
He puts it with the others, reaches under the board and sets a vessel in front of me.
It’s live. I can smell it through the glass from where I’m standing.
I drink it at his board. All of it. It’s warm going down and the hollow under my ribs starts to close.
My hands quit shaking while I’m looking at them. The gray goes back out of my fingers.
Then it stops andt he hole isn’t full. What he sold me went in and got used up on the way.
“More,” I say.
He shakes his head. “That’s all I’ve got.”
“You’ve carried more than that before.”
“Not the kind you drink.” He takes the empty vessel back off the board. “That kind doesn’t come through here in any amount. What I put in front of you was the best of it.”
“When does more come through?”
“When it comes through.” He shrugs.
I’ve never needed a second vendor. I come down, buy from this man, go home.
Wolf blood does nothing for me. There are one or two at Ash Hollow who aren’t wolves, and either of them would open a vein if I asked for it.
I don’t feed on anyone I know and I’m not starting today because I let myself get low.
So, I go further into the quarter than I’ve ever had reason to.
The street narrows past his row, lamps stop and there are no stalls down here.
There are men standing next to what they’re selling.
They aren’t the same men from one week to the next.
Blood changes hands out of coat pockets and off the backs of handcarts.
Down here I’m a woman on her own, with cruor still on her.
Anyone watching long enough could work out both.
I walk up to a man with a handcart. “What are you after?” he says.
“The enchanted kind. Whatever you’ve got of it.”
He takes his time looking at me before he answers, then names a price that takes most of what I have left on me.
I pay it. I’m too far down to argue anything.
He hands it over. The vessel is smaller than the one I just emptied and he knows that.
I drink it standing in the street. as fast as it will go down.
My eyes are already back up the row toward the lamps before I’m halfway into it.
Somebody comes up on my right while I’m drinking.
What he wants is in my hand. He’s looked at a woman standing in the open swaying over a vessel and decided he can take it off her.
He gets both hands on the glass and hauls.
I haul back. The vessel gives out between us with a crack that runs the whole way around the middle of it.
Then he gets a fistful of my cloak at the shoulder.
The seam lets go from the collar to halfway down my arm.
I shove him. There isn’t much left in me but there’s enough for that.
He goes into the wall across the street hard enough that the back of his head knocks against the stone.
He slides down and sits in the wet with his legs out in front of him, not looking at anything.
I don’t stay to find out whether he gets up.
Blood is running out of the cracked vessel, over my wrist, down inside my sleeve.
I drink what’s left, tip the broken glass up until there’s nothing in it but red on the inside.
It’s only three swallows, nowhere near what I need.
The man with the handcart has nothing else to sell me.
Nobody else down this row carries the kind I drink.
I’m out of the row before anybody who watched works out how easy it looked. I step into the dark of the first doorway deep enough to take me.
It fights me the whole way through. Going out it closed over me slower than it should have, but coming back it holds on.
I have to pull myself the last of the way through it instead of being carried.
I come out inside the pines at the edge of the Ash Hollow yard with my hand on the nearest trunk.
I keep it there until the yard stops tilting then I stand in the trees and take my time, push my hair back off my face, pull the torn seam up over my shoulder until the two edges sit together and the tear reads as a fold.
Then I let him see me. Valen is at the corner of the cabin, exactly where he was standing when I left. His eyes come to the tear first - gray in this light. - then they come up to my face and stay there.
“It’s done,” I say.
He doesn’t ask why I still don’t look like a woman who’s fed.
“We go,” I say.
He steps in. I put my hand on his chest, taking more of him under it than the crossing needs.
He lets me. The dark takes hold of us and he pulls against it the way a man twice his size would.
Today I have nothing extra. It comes straight out of what little I brought home.
We emerge on a green slope in Doria, in the long light of a fae afternoon.
I stop where I am. I’ve never seen country like this.
The grass runs downhill from us for the better part of a mile, coming back up the far side of the valley in a green so deep it looks wet.
There’s water at the bottom, moving fast, loud enough to hear from up here.
Wildflowers grow all through it in drifts; white, yellow, and a blue I don’t have a name for, thick enough in places that the grass underneath them doesn’t show at all.
The trees stand well apart from one another, every one of them is enormous, the way trees grow when nothing has ever crowded them.
All of them are in full leaf, nothing here looks tended but everything here looks cared for.
The light comes in low and gold across all of it, throwing our shadows out long behind us.
There’s a charge in the air that has nothing to do with weather.
This is a country with something awake all the way through it – it’s been awake a very long time.
There’s no one in any direction. No road, wall, track, nothing anybody built.
The land rises past the valley toward a long ridge with a notch cut in the top of it. Gleann na Sidhe is somewhere past that.
We start down the slope. The turf under my boots is deep and springy, giving back more than it takes, so walking on it is easier than walking anywhere at home.
It’s the first easy thing that’s happened to me today.
Birds fly up out of the grass ahead of us in a long, ragged line, dozens at once.
Not one of them makes a sound. They come down again fifty yards on and vanish into the flowers.
He saw the tear, knows I came back wrong, walks beside me and brings up neither one.
Last night I said I’d make him talk about that rock but I’m not going to.
I don’t have it in me to take something out of him when I came home like this, and he’d let me, which is worse.
I’ve been having the same argument with myself since the first time I laid eyes on Valen.
Telling him is a timing question, a decision I’m making on purpose.
I’ll make it when he’s steady enough to take it and not before.
That argument has come out finished every time I’ve run it.
When I run it here, walking down through the flowers with him beside me, it comes out the other side in pieces.
The land goes up out of the valley in one long steep pull.
Halfway into it my legs start telling me what the morning took.
Valen puts a hand under my arm above the elbow without breaking stride or looking over at me, keeping it there the rest of the way up.
I know he’s watching the top of the hill.
From down here I get the side of his face, his hair stuck to his temple, gray eyes narrowed against the low sun. He doesn’t look down at me once.
I lean on that hand harder than the hill needs me to.
He doesn’t say a word, doesn’t take it away either.
It’s closed most of the way around my arm above the elbow.
His sleeve is pushed back and I can see the muscle move in the forearm every time the ground pitches.
For the length of that climb there’s one thing in the world I’m not carrying on my own.
It was never about timing. If I tell him what he is I take away the only account of himself he has ever had, the one he built out of a whole life of being - the wolf who couldn’t so he made himself too useful to throw out.
If he ever works out that I knew the first time I laid eyes on him, that I stood there looking at exactly what he is and let him go on believing the other thing, he’ll be right to hate me for it.
He’d be right to put me down as one more person who handled him, could walk off this hunt, out of everything else before I’m anywhere near ready to lose him.
That isn’t a decision. It’s fear, it’s been my fear the whole time. I don’t say any of it out loud.
We reach the top and the land runs on ahead of us, green the whole way, toward the notch in the ridge with Gleann na Sidhe somewhere behind it.
His hand is still under my arm. I’ve never let anybody get near all of what I’m carrying.
He’s walking inside arm’s length of all of it and doesn’t know it’s there.
I keep walking. He keeps walking with me.