Chapter 15
REMMEN
The ice had melted to nothing twice over, and I was wringing out the third cloth when I admitted the eye was going to do exactly as it pleased.
It had been a serviceable eye yesterday.
Then I'd put it between Lorkin's face and Zarcal's swinging elbow in the business of hauling the two of them apart, slept on it, and woken to a thing the color of a bruised plum that half the town had already strolled past the hall to admire.
The mayor of New Knossos behind the founding charter with a shiner like a dockside drunk.
Marvelous. A fine advertisement for the civilized life.
I pressed the cloth to it anyway and looked down the length of the hall.
It was quiet at midday, dust filtering through the air in the high window-light, the long room empty all the way to the dais.
A year ago I'd had it strung with vines and white blossom and star-figs glowing in the rafters, and stood at the front of it while Kazan put a ring on a human woman and half the hard cases in town shuffled about not knowing where to put their hands.
There'd been dancing. I'd been made to do some of it, badly, by a small determined human who laughed at my feet and never once apologized for it.
I didn't think about that. Much.
What I thought about, more and more lately, was whether I'd been a fool to sign us to the Agency in the first place.
It looked clean on paper. Everything did.
Bring the program in, give these men something to live toward, make the whole grim miracle official with a seal and a contract.
And it worked, which was the maddening part.
But the working came with a cost. A bride came, and a male nearly killed her in his own kitchen, reliving a war that was years over.
Two of my brothers put a wall and half a house into the street and put this into my eye.
And every match that took drew another careful glance from off-world, because nothing unsettles the Council quite like a frontier full of monsters finding out they can be happy.
A knock came at the doorframe. I knew the weight of it before I looked up. You don't come off the sand and ever stop reading a door.
"Nezara."
"Mayor." She came in without waiting to be asked, the way she always did, dusky gold and unhurried, and took a long inventory of the eye. "It's come up well."
"It has the whole town's compliments." I set the cloth down. "Tell me you're here about drainage. Or the grain levy. Anything a man can solve with money."
"Sit before you fall down. You look like you’ve had a bad week."
I was already sitting. I let it go.
Inwardly I groaned, because it was never drainage.
It was always more of this, more files and flags and the careful unpicking of other people's catastrophes, today of all days.
But I made myself run the sum I run whenever the program weighs too heavy, the one that comes out the same every time.
Kazan and Maisie, a year on, still looking at each other like the other one hung the moon.
A town full of killers trying to become men.
It worked. I knew it worked. I only wished it didn't keep handing me the invoice.
Nezara settled into the chair across the desk and looked at me, and I did not care for the look.
I'd watched her wear it for other males. It was the look of a woman reading a file that was also a person, weighing him against a list. She'd worn it at Kazan once, and look where that had gotten him.
"No," I said.
"I haven't said a word."
"You've got a face. You're about to ask whether the mayor's given any thought to his own situation. Whether a male in my position mightn't be steadied by the right, ah." I waved a hand. "Arrangement."
"And would he?"
"He's busy." I leaned back into it. "He's got a town held together with twine and good manners and a Council hunting for an excuse.
He hasn't the hours spare to be steadied.
" The practiced answer came out the way practiced ones do, frictionless, already worn to a shine.
"Perhaps when the term's up. When there's someone fit to take the chair and I can be a man with evenings again. We'll see, then."
She let it sit. She lets everything sit until you can hear for yourself how thin it landed.
"Mm," she said.
That was all. Mm. I've watched her gentle a male twice her weight down out of a standing rage with that exact sound, and here she was spending it on me.
"I didn't come about you." She drew a folder from under her arm and laid it on the desk between us. "I came because some things have to change. Before the next storm rolls through and we do all of this again with a worse ending."
I opened it braced for the usual information: a stack of hopeful women, ages and intake notes, and the quiet cruelty of being asked to choose among them.
They weren't brides.
I turned a page, and another, and not one of them was a bride.
Humans, yes, a whole file of them. But the notes beside the faces ran to training and letters after names, to clinics and case histories and the long Earth words for the work of putting a mind back together after something has taken it apart.
"Healers," Nezara said, when I didn't. "Of the mind. I want to bring three in to start. For the worst of them. The ones the pits left in pieces a wife and a warm house were never going to reach."
I knew the shape of it before she finished, because I'd heard it before, in this hall, out of a blacksmith who'd backed me into a corner and all but ordered me to find someone who could mend the part of these men that fists never could.
Put them on the town's coin, he'd said. Make it a thing a male can walk into with no one calling him soft for it.
I'd told him I'd look into it. I'd meant it the way I mean most things I say to Lorkin, which is to say I'd fully intended to forget it by supper.
And here it came back through my door in Nezara's hand, with a plan attached and that immovable patience of hers behind it.
"Three," I said.
"To begin."
I looked at the faces in the folder. Strangers, every one, names that hung off nothing yet, women and men who'd cross the whole dark to a town full of men who flinched at their own hands.
It was a good plan. It was, I was fairly sure, the plan that finally made the whole grim experiment worth its invoice, and I would sign it.
I'd known I would sign it since the second page.
I told myself the thing turning over under my ribs was only that, the ordinary weight of something this size coming down on the town. I'm good at telling myself things. It's most of the job.
One of the faces I held on a beat longer than the rest, and couldn't have told you why, and made myself turn past.
"Send for them," I said.
She rose, gathering nothing, because she'd brought nothing she meant to carry back out. At the door, she paused.
"Get a fresh cloth for that eye," she said, and left me with a folder full of incoming humans and a thing Lorkin had thrown at me weeks ago in this same hall, half in fury, that I'd filed under nonsense and that had chosen exactly now to surface.
Some small thing'd come off a transport one day, he'd said, no taller than my chest, and knock me clean off my hooves.
I shut the folder. My eye throbbed in time with my pulse. Down in the empty hall the dust kept turning, gold and slow, over the boards that had held a feast once and would hold whatever came next, whatever it turned out to be.
I really was going to need a fresh cloth.