23. Valerian #2
“Half open,” Mircea corrects gently. “And there we arrive at the unpleasant part, little queen, because a door sealed by a summoner’s covenant wants the summoner’s blood to open fully.
Yours. Not all of it,” he adds, generous, a merchant announcing a discount.
“I’m not an animal. A cupful. You’ll wobble for a day. Consider it a toll.”
“No,” I say.
“I wasn’t asking you, cousin.”
“No,” Posy says. And then, because she is who she is, because even now the librarian runs the reference desk: “Not like this. You could have asked, Mircea. Days ago. You could have sat down at that kitchen table at midnight and told me the truth, and maybe I’d have bled for you willingly, did that ever once occur to you? People help people who ask.”
A look crosses his face that on any other man I would call shame.
“People help people who ask,” he repeats softly. “Little queen. I’ve been alive four centuries, and I promise you: they don’t.”
“They do out here,” she says. “You’ve just been asking the wrong species.”
Mircea sighs, and the light behind him swells, and his regret, I will believe until the end of my existence, is real, and it changes nothing.
“Then I’m sorry,” he says, “about this next part.”
He moves.
He was always faster than me, and I’m bled hollow and half-healed, and he crosses the basement in a blink, one hand already gloved in black driving leather, the other closing on her wrist, and everything after happens in the space between two beats of her heart.
I see the silver before I see the blade’s shape.
Silver dust circles, silver light, and in his gloved fist, silver worked into an ornate handle I last saw going into the earth wrapped in her dish towels, and there is garden soil still caught in the filigree.
Her grandmother’s letter opener. Posy wrapped it in dish towels and buried it under the dead oak to keep it from ever touching me, and my cousin walked the grounds some quiet night with a spade and patience, and dug her kindness up, and dressed for handling it.
The thing she hid out of love has spent a week waiting in my own garden.
The blade drops toward the soft inside of her captured forearm, a cupful’s worth of cut, surgical, survivable.
It never arrives.
There is no decision. There is nothing so slow as a decision. There is her heartbeat, and the silver, and my body already slamming between them with everything the crossing left me, and a blade positioned for a shallow, careful cut meets a king arriving at full desperate speed instead.
The letter opener takes me under the sternum, angled up, driven deep by my own momentum, and punches through the starburst scar over my silent heart.
The world goes white.
Silver in the flesh is acid; I told her that once, in a sunlit library, with the thing lying harmless on a coffee table between us.
Silver through the anchor is a language pain hasn’t previously had words for.
The seal carved into me a century ago convulses around the metal, and I feel the binding, the whole vast architecture of my prison, stutter, and through the stutter, behind me, I hear the doorway moan wider.
I’m on the stone. I don’t remember arriving there.
The basement has gone strange at the edges, sound arriving through water, the pulsing light smearing, and the only fixed point in the failing world is her face above me, wet and furious, and I think, with the operatic uselessness of a dying mind: there she is. The only fixed point. There she is.
“No, no, no.” Posy. Her hands on my chest, around the handle, hovering. Afraid to touch it, afraid not to. “Valerian. Valerian. Look at me.”
“Do not,” I get out, “pull it. Not yet. The bleeding…”
Above us, Mircea stands very still, staring at his own empty hand as if it belonged to someone else. Whatever he is, whatever this was, that blade was never meant for me, and for one long moment, the true face and the mask are the same face, and both of them are appalled.
“You absolute fool,” he says softly. “It was a cupful. She’d have lived.”
“Get away from him!” Posy is screaming, one hand pressed around the wound, the other thrown out at Mircea, mortal and interposed, guarding a dying king with a librarian’s bare hand. “Get away from us!”
She has no weapon. She has a cardigan and a head wound and a pamphlet’s worth of first aid, and she plants herself between an immortal and his door with her chin up, and if I had breath to spare I would tell my cousin the truth of it: he was never going to win here.
Kingdoms have fallen to less than what’s kneeling on this stone in bloody sneakers.
Mircea looks at her. At me. At the doorway straining wider behind him, drinking the power he’s already siphoned, at the manor above us and the world beyond it that never believed in kings.
“Half-passage has a price,” he says, and for once there’s no performance on it at all.
“The door takes everything I siphoned as the toll, and it takes the way back. One direction, no returns, arriving with nothing but my name. I knew the rates before I ever knocked on your door.” His eyes move over us both, the bleeding king and the woman guarding him barehanded.
“For what it’s worth, cousin, and I’m aware of its current market value: with her blood, I’d have opened it wide and brought you both through.
After. There are thrones on the other side with our names still carved in them. ”
He steps backward into the seam of light.
“Mircea!” I don’t know what I mean to say. His name is all of it.
He pauses, half in this world, edges already unraveling into the gold.
“Look after the waffle enthusiast,” he says, and is gone.
The doorway swallows him and slams to its half-width and hangs there, pulsing, an unclosed wound in the middle of the air.
Silence, except for her heartbeat, and her sobbing, and the wet sounds of me failing to heal.
“Okay. Okay. You’re okay.” Posy’s hands are everywhere, my face, the wound, pressure and shaking warmth. “Tell me what to do. Blood? You need blood, take mine, take all of it, tell me what to do, Valerian.”
“Posy.” Her name costs a full breath. I spend it gladly. “The silver. It will not… I cannot heal around it. And the anchor…”
I feel it as I say it. The binding, anchored in flesh that’s failing, stutters again around the metal.
And behind her, patient as everything old, the half-open door begins, very slowly, to widen.