CHAPTER THREE
?
SEREN
“Seren. Take the stool, not the end cot.” Ilyan Frost said it to the kettle, with his back to the room, before I had three steps of the infirmary behind me.
I had come in along the wall and my chin was going with the count. Two doors. The one at my shoulder and the one at the far end that goes through to the still room.
Twenty feet by thirty of limewashed stone, six cots, and the floor sandstone scrubbed so often it has gone smooth and stays damp. It slopes to a gutter. Water was going into that gutter one drop at a time, slow as a man thinking.
Crushed yarrow and boiled linen. Steam off the kettle with something bitter in the back of it.
Four white slots of north light came down the far wall and there was no warmth in any of them.
I had not slept. The back of my neck was raw where the collar sits.
Ilyan lifted the stool with one hand and set it down again a foot to the left, so that it faced the door I had come in by, and then he went back to the linen and did not look up.
He did not say anything about it. He has never said anything about it.
I sat on it.
“There’s tea in a minute,” he said. “It’s yarrow and it’s not good.”
“It’s never good.”
“It’s medicine. If it were good you’d drink it when you weren’t ill and then it would stop working.” He shook the linen out flat.
“You’ve had nine hundred winters to put honey in it.”
“I have.”
“And you’d sooner have the shelf tidy than the tea drinkable,” I said. “That’s you all over, that is.”
Ilyan’s mouth twitched at one corner and he took it off his face before it could turn into a smile. “And what’s out there this morning?”
That is the only question anybody at Ravensgate has ever asked me that I like being asked.
I put my hands on my knees and took the room’s air and let the rest of it come.
“There’s a mouse under the third cot and she’s had young in the wall behind it.
Whoever scrubbed this floor did it at five and he’s a smoker and he’s hiding it from you.
Rhodry’s at the kennels and he hasn’t been to bed.
Nettle’s asleep over the whelping box again, and there’s a bitch about to whelp in there, tonight or tomorrow. ”
“Go further out.”
“The Warden’s on the tower stair and he’s been up all night as well.” I did not say the rest of what I had off him.
The herald’s near horse had gone lame in the traces on the Gullet road. I hoped he suffered on the way down and I did not take it back. “The forge is cold. There’s nobody at the Winter Gate but the two on it, and nothing of this Court’s is moving on the north road.”
“Further.”
So I went out past the walls, out over the frost that had not lifted since noon yesterday, and I found the Rimewood line and walked it.
Everything alive leaves a trace. It goes into the ground and the stone and the water and it stays there.
I am the best there has ever been at this.
I gave him more than he asked for. I liked it. I like being the one thing in this fortress nobody can replace.
“Eleven miles out, four hounds and two horses, moving west along the line since about four. They’re not Ravensgate hounds. They’ll cross at the deadfall, because it’s the only place the wind lies down.”
Ilyan’s hands went on folding, and something about the fold changed.
“Not ours,” he said.
“No.”
“How sure are you?”
“I’m not sure. I’m right.” I turned my empty hands on my knees. “There’s a difference between those and it’s the only thing I own outright.”
“Ravensgate hounds have been eating the same meal for six seasons. These have been fed on the road out of the south. And there’s a man with them who’s been carrying paper against his chest long enough to sweat into it.”
“You get all that at eleven miles.”
“I get it at thirty. Eleven’s nothing.” I hooked one finger in at the worn side of the collar and eased it out where it chafes. “I could do it from inside a bath.”
Then I did the thing I do about once a season, when I am tired and I have stopped guarding myself against it.
I turned it on him.
The room came back to me. The mouse, the smoker, the yarrow, the wet stone, the iron in the kettle. Ilyan Frost was standing four feet away with linen in his hands and there was nothing there at all.
Nine hundred winters of him, brown eyes, a white stag with six points that I have watched come out of the Rimewood at first light, and to my nose he is a hole in the middle of a room.
He has none. He never has.
I have stood ten feet from that stag with the wind coming off it into my face and taken nothing away but cold air.
“I can find anything alive on this side of the Rimewood. I can’t find you at all.” My breath had gone short and I let it. “Why can’t I find you?”
Ilyan turned his left forearm inward, against his own body, where the burn goes wrist to elbow, and set the folded linen down on the table with his right.
“And would it help you if I told you?”
I waited. He squared the pile to the table edge.
He did not tell me.
?
Ilyan crossed the infirmary floor and stood over me with the cup. “Drink that,” he said, and put it in my hands. “The Council isn’t sending another herald.”
“It sent one yesterday.”
“It sent one and the Warden made him look small in front of forty people, which was a fine evening for everybody but us.” He came back to the table for the jars.
“A herald brings paper. A Hand comes when the paper’s finished with.
The Warden can refuse a herald all winter and it won’t buy him one hour against a Hand. ”
“What’s a Hand.”
“A person.” He said it while his hands were busy and the jar went on turning in them.
“Not a rank and not a writ. A person the Council sends when it has stopped arguing. There’s an old right in this Court that lets a Warden hold his own marches against any authority that comes onto them.
It’s four hundred years old and it works on heralds and it does not touch a Hand. ”
The cup was hot and I could feel where my own pulse was going against it.
“And when it gets here.”
“Then it takes what it came for and it goes back down the Salt Road, and there’s no man in this fortress who can put a hand out and stop it.”
“And if the Warden puts himself in front of—”
“Then it goes through him and there are two names on the roll instead of one.” Ilyan did not lift his voice at all. “He knows that. It hasn’t changed his mind and it isn’t going to.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“Because nobody else here will.” Ilyan put the lid back on a jar and turned it till it sat. “The Warden won’t, because he’s decided he can stop it and he doesn’t explain himself. The Blade won’t, because he’d sooner have you angry than frightened, and he’s wrong about that as well.”
“And you?”
“If it were mine to pick, neither. And you knowing what’s coming up the road.”
“And then Vaeloth.”
“And then the Unmaking.” Ilyan set a jar down. “Severance doesn’t kill. What it leaves behind is—”
“Is what?”
He closed his mouth. He picked the jar up again and squared it to the edge of the table, and the only sound in that room was the gutter taking water a drop at a time.
I did not push him. I have found out more from what men will not finish than from what they say.
“Turn your head. The back of this is raw.”
“It’s raw every year.”
“Turn your head.”
I turned my head. He came around the stool and put the back of his hand against my jaw first, which is what he does before he touches anybody, and then he looked at me instead of at my neck.
“You haven’t slept and you haven’t eaten. And you’re not going to tell me which of those you did on purpose, are you?”
There was a cloth on the table with bread in it and half a cold bird, and it had not been there for him, because Ilyan Frost does not eat in front of people either.
“I don’t want it.”
“And it’s there if you don’t.”
I ate the bread and the bird. I ate standing, and fast, and he turned his back and did things with jars the whole time and talked about the bitch in the whelping box, and neither of us said one word about what I was doing.
Then I looked at his shelf, because I was not going to thank him.
“Sixty numbers on that shelf and forty jars. You people can hear a bond and you can’t count.”
“Twenty of them are for what I haven’t made yet.”
“You’ve had nineteen years.”
“I’m unhurried.” He set the linen down. “And the Songkeeper is meant to be gentle, which is the most expensive thing I own, so I’d thank you not to spend it all before noon.”
“You’re not gentle. You’re slow. Everybody in this fortress has got the two of them mixed up.”
“Everybody in this fortress is fae and stupid,” Ilyan said, “and I stopped correcting them about the time you were born.”
“You could put the numbers right in an afternoon.”
“I could. Then the shelf would be finished and I’d have to start on the room.” He picked the linen up again. “Sit down and drink the rest of that. It works better inside you.”
“And the gate,” I said.
“Bolted against you since the seventh bell. The Warden’s word to Rhodry, not mine. You’re not allowed onto the north road without him, and nobody sent for you to say so.”
?
“Sit down and turn on the stool. All the way round.” Ilyan said it from the table by the door without turning round himself.
I turned all the way round on the stool, which put my back to him and my face to the door, and he did not remark on that either.
He got a finger inside the front of my collar and gave my throat back its half inch, exactly the way I do it myself, and I have never told anybody that I do it.
Then he took the back of my shirt in his other hand and drew it down off my neck. He did not ask. He has never once asked, and I have stopped waiting for it.
His hands were hot. Hotter than a hand has any business being in a stone room in the cold.
“This is warm under my hand. And you’ve felt that before, haven’t you, and told nobody?”
I looked at the stone over his shoulder until the question went cold.
His palm went flat on the back of my neck, over the raw place, and the heat went down through me and out along my ribs, and my breath came apart in the middle.
My nipples went tight under the shirt and the cold in that room had nothing to do with it.
I put both hands flat on the edge of the cot beside my stool because my body leaned back into his and had not asked me first.
His thumb came up under my jaw and tipped my head over, which is a healer’s grip, and it was a healer’s grip for about two breaths.
Then it was not one.
“That’s not the sore side and you know it,” I said.
“And you’d have me stop, would you.”
He did not stop. His thumb went down the side of my throat and stayed there over the vein, and I could feel him counting what he found under it, and it was going hard and fast and had nothing to do with a raw neck.
His hand went on down. Over my collarbone. Over the shirt to the top of my breast, and then under the shirt, and his palm was hot enough that my skin came up to meet it before I had decided one thing about any of it.
His thumb went across my nipple, once, going somewhere else, and did not come back to it, and I sat there wanting it back. I should not have wanted it back.
I was wet. I had been wet since his thumb went under my jaw.
There was an ache low between my thighs, in my cunt, a heavy pulling one, and it kept time with the drip going into the gutter, and I sat there on a stool in an infirmary and let it happen to me.
My cunt clenched on nothing at all and I put my knees together and that made it worse.
Then his mouth came down open on the raw place at the back of my neck, once, and stayed.
Bel was somewhere south of here in a cart. I thought about him with another man’s mouth on my neck, going to Vaeloth to have the bond cut out of him, and I did not take my hands off that cot.
I knew what this was and I stayed anyway.
I wanted that mouth to keep going. I did not say that either.
“Don’t stop.”
Ilyan made a sound against my skin that was not a word, and his hand came off my breast and took me by the throat below the collar, from underneath, never above, the way all of them come at me.
I turned on the stool.
I got a fist in the front of his shirt and pulled him down, and my hip came against him, and he was hard through his trousers, and his cock came up against my hip, and he let it lie there.
I pressed against his cock with my hip on purpose, once, and heard what it did to his breathing, and did it again. For the length of that breath he was mine and I took what I wanted off him.
“Ilyan, if you take your hand off me now I’ll—”
The latch went, and the north light came off the frost through the open door in one white slab, and I heard the Warden’s voice out of it before I ever turned my head: “Say that again. About the deadfall.”