10. Remmen
REMMEN
I knew the taste of Anne now. It was worse than being gored.
For that first day… after… I kept to my office and sent out Korfas to take care of anything that needed seeing to. On the second, I had to go outside and I ran into her within five minutes. We froze in the street and anyone who looked must have seen what we were, what we’d done.
But after a brief stumble, Anne gave me a polite smile and moved on.
I forced myself to do the same. We could be nothing more than polite smiles to one another. There were rules.
The days after were their own kind of torture.
I learned her hours. When Anne bought her bread. When she carried her kit down to Maisie’s borrowed buggy. Which streets put her on my path and at what hour. I built my whole day around not being where she was. None of it helped.
Six years I’d spent teaching bulls to want only what they were allowed, and here I was at a dark window after supper with no honest reason to be, waiting for her light to come on over on the counselors’ row. It came on, small and yellow. I stood there a while after it did.
It held the better part of a week. Then I came around the side of city hall with my head down over a tally of winter feed, and she was on the steps, and the top one had gone slick with the morning’s rain.
Her boot went out from under her.
I didn’t decide to move. I had her before the small sound she made was fully startled out of her, one hand closed around her upper arm, the other flat to her back, holding her up off the stone.
She weighed nothing. Her fingers had fisted in the front of my coat to catch herself, and her face tipped up to mine, close enough that I felt her breath stop.
She fit into my hands and I hated how well she did.
Up close she smelled like the salve from her kit and under it like herself, and the morning’s rain had stuck a few dark strands of hair to her cheek.
I wanted to move them off her face, and I knew exactly what my hand would want after, if I let it start.
Let go.
I didn’t. I held her there. Her heart was beating quick against my forearm, and mine had matched it without asking. Rain ticked against the street around us. I could feel her breath across the few inches I wasn’t closing. It would have taken nothing to close them.
Only when a bull called a good morning across the square did my hands remember whose they were. I set her on her feet. I stepped back, and it cost me more than it should have.
“Careful,” I said. Rough. It was all I had.
“Always.” Her voice wasn’t steady either. She went up the steps and through the door without looking back, and I stood in the road and couldn’t make my feet move for a moment.
Nezara found me two days later.
She came to the office with a folder under her arm, took the chair opposite mine, and waited.
She’d watched a lot of settlements try, and not all of them had made it, and she’d put her name to the paper that brought the counselors here.
I poured her the bitter root brew we all pretended was coffee before she said a word.
“The Agency has set a review,” she said. “End of the month. They’ll want to know the program is working.”
“It’s working.”
“They’ll want numbers, Remmen. How many men keep appointments. Whether anyone is getting better.” She slid a page across the desk. A single column, and a figure at the foot of it. “These are official sessions logged since the counselors landed.”
It wasn’t a lot.
But paperwork couldn’t show the true benefit of the program. “The work is real. I’ve watched Anne splint a break out at the steads with a man who wouldn’t say two words to Otho. Giles has one who won’t sit unless the door’s open. It’s real.”
“I believe you. But there are metrics that the committee needs. They will read the column.” She didn’t say it unkindly. Unkind I could have argued with. “Three counselors on a world that needs one is coin the Agency spends elsewhere. If the numbers don’t move, they redistribute.”
“Redistribute.” I gave the word back to her. “The posting was for a year. It’s been a month.”
“You signed for a year of the program, not a year of three counselors with empty books. We can send the extra where they’ll be used.
I’d rather you heard it from me now than from a transfer order.
” She turned her cup on the desk. “There’s Charter Day before then.
The town will be in good humor. Give them a reason to be proud. ”
She drank the bitter brew like it was a courtesy she was doing me. She’d spent capital to get these counselors here and did not enjoy being wrong in writing. “Move the numbers, Remmen, and I keep all three through the spring,” she said. “But if your men refuse to seek help, my hands are tied.”
She had no idea what she was threatening me with. Taking Anne away might kill me, and Nezara had no idea she had just unsheathed a blade.
I kept still. I’d stood across a pit from beasts who meant to open me up and given away less than I was holding back now.
It was simple, and it was vicious.
If the program failed, they took Anne and posted her to some other rock that would use her, and I’d have begged this whole thing into being only to watch it hand her back to the dark between the stars.
And if it didn’t fail, if she stayed, she remained forbidden, a woman I could stand beside in a doorway and never touch, and one slip in front of the wrong eyes cut the town’s lifeline and shipped her off regardless.
Every road ran to the same place. Her, gone.
I had to set my cup down before I spilled it. My hands weren’t shaking, but it was a close thing.
It was too big for what it should have been. I’d known her weeks. Men lost women all the time and stayed standing; I’d buried better men than me who’d done it. But I pictured a shuttle lifting her off this planet and couldn’t get past it.
I didn’t have a word for it. I didn’t want one.
I’d spent years telling bulls to want what they were allowed to have. I could have taken a bride off the next transport, a woman who’d crossed the stars hoping to be wanted.
Instead I’d gone and fixed on the one human on Ceres-9 it was a crime to touch.
Nezara let me sit in it a moment, then gathered her folder and bid me good day.
I sat with the threat, and then I got to work.
When Korfas brought the afternoon’s messages, I told him to ride out to the ranch and see the thing with his own eyes, the animal Rauf had sworn to me he’d put down.
Korfas set the messages on my desk, slow and deliberate. “You want me to go ask the Butchers whether they killed their vicious monster?”
“I want you to go look.”
“And if it’s still breathing?”
“Then you ride back and tell me, and you do not do one damned thing else.” He didn’t like it. I didn’t blame him; nobody with sense wanted to walk that yard and face what was chained at the back of it. “Use your eyes. You don’t go in.”
He blew out a breath through his nose. “They’ll lie to my face.”
“Then watch their hands while they do it.”
He was sour about it, but he went.
The other job was mine.
Nezara was right about the numbers, and I was finished waiting for the men of this town to walk through Anne’s door on their own. They wouldn’t. Not these men. They’d set a bone with their teeth before they’d sit in a chair and let a small human ask them how they felt.
Waiting on them was begging for failure.
I was done waiting. If the men wouldn’t go to Anne, I would bring Anne the men. Drag them if it came to that, one at a time, and I’d start with the hardest case I had.
Zarcal and I did not talk about the pit.
And we didn’t talk about that night a few months ago when he almost killed a bride while his mind was lost to his past. But Zarcal was the entire reason for the counselors.
I hadn’t forced the issue when they arrived, hoping he would walk into someone’s office on his own.
He hadn’t.
I put on my coat and went to find him.
Zarcal was tending to the edge of the fence in his yard. He didn’t look up when my shadow fell across his work.
“No,” he said.
“You don’t know what I’m going to ask.”
“You’ve got your asking walk on. I’ve known you too long.” He drove a staple home with one blow of the hammer. “Whatever it is, no.”
“We all need this. And if the others see that you’re trying…”
He was quiet a long time. The wind came across the pasture and pushed the dead grass around our boots.
“One hour,” he said finally, to the fence and not to me. “And you never raise it again.”
“That’s all I ask.”