CHAPTER FIVE
?
SEREN
The wind had been out of the north since before noon, dry and strong enough to lean on, and it pulled across the head of the chimney and held one note up there, the way a finger holds a string.
Vaughn and Ilyan had been at each other across the top room of the tower for a quarter of an hour, and neither of them had said my name once.
“Seren’s in the room. Seren’s been in the room the whole time, in case either of you wants to try the next part with her face in front of you.”
Corvin said it from the table. He was sitting on it, one boot hooked on a chair rail, and he put my name in twice on purpose and looked at neither of them while he did it.
Vaughn’s palm was flat on the wood beside Corvin’s knee, and it had not moved since I came up the stair.
“We were getting to her,” Vaughn said.
“You were getting to her. I was watching you get to her. She can smell it from where she’s standing, and she’s been able to since she came through that stair-head.”
That room is thirty feet across, gray granite five feet thick. Centuries of woodsmoke have gone into it, and the taste of that is in the room before a person is through the door. Green pine was popping resin out of the fire.
The firelight threw upward. All three of them were lit from the jaw and dark above the eyes.
I stood on the cracked flag. It runs corner to corner and rocks under a boot heel, always that one, never the others, and I put my weight on it to hear where the sound went.
“Then somebody tell me what a bond is,” I said. “Plain. Nineteen years of people talking around it is enough.”
Ilyan was at the fire with two green logs and a hand axe. He stood one on end and did not swing.
“It sits under the sternum, a little to the left, and it has weight. It carries pain and it carries direction. It doesn’t carry words. And four hundred miles won’t thin it by a hair.”
“Weight like what?” I said.
“Like a swallowed coin.” Ilyan turned his hand over and looked at the palm of it. “You stop noticing it and you never stop having it.”
“And finished?” I said.
“The first pull can wake without your asking. Completion cannot. Both ends have to open to the same promise. A bed doesn’t make it happen by accident.”
He set the axe into the log. “Once it’s finished, pain can cross as hard as touch. You can learn to soften what you send. Fear makes that harder.”
“A fae bond can be a pledged kinship or a vow of service,” Ilyan said. “A mate-bond is a different promise. The Council takes them all from a half-blood. The hook does not care what name you give your love.”
I got two fingers in under the collar and lifted it off the skin. The place he had named answered before I gave it leave to. Three separate pulls, left of center, at three different depths, one of them older than the other two.
“How far can it read?”
“It doesn’t read. It isn’t a signal.” Ilyan turned the log a quarter and set the axe in it. “It’s a shared organ. Distance means nothing to it, and that’s exactly why the Council wants them.”
“Say the rest, Songkeeper,” Corvin said. “She asked for plain and you’ve stopped at the part that doesn’t frighten anybody.”
The axe went through the log and the green wood came apart wet and loud.
“You stopped in the infirmary too,” I said. “You got as far as the hook and then you found something else to do with your hands. So finish it here, with these two in the room, because the third time I won’t come to you for it.”
Ilyan put the halves on the fire before he answered. The resin caught and spat.
“Severance is a hook,” he said. “They go in under the sternum and they take the bond out whole, because a piece left in is worse. It doesn’t kill you. That’s the whole trouble with it. What’s left over walks around.”
“Walks around doing what?” I said.
“Eating. Sleeping. Answering to a name. There’s a woman entered in the Unmaking’s book forty years ago and nobody has recorded her death. The people who saw her afterward all said the same thing about her eyes.”
Something in me wanted to see her. Not to help her. To stand in front of that woman and find out what was left in there.
The chimney went on holding its note, and past the arrow slit the wind took a sheet of dry frost-rime off the kennel roof and carried it across the yard, three stories down, without dropping any of it.
“She’s in a ledger somewhere,” Corvin said. “Since we’re being plain. Somebody wrote her in forty years ago and nobody has ever written her out of it.”
“Corvin—”
“She asked for plain, Songkeeper. Plain has ledgers in it.”
“Why me, then,” I said. “Why three. You’re old enough to have watched it all happen and you carry one.”
“Half-bloods can anchor outward,” Ilyan said. “The gift varies. Some carry one bond. A few have room for three. Full-bloods like me usually hold a single living mate-thread.”
“Mercy,” I said.
“A full-blood who loses a bond has the rest of himself to fall back into.” Ilyan wiped the axe on his thigh, left forearm turned in the way he always turns it. “You wouldn’t. So they cut you before you’re worth cutting, and they write it down as kindness, and half of them believe it.”
Corvin came off the table onto his feet without appearing to have moved.
“And it’s been a weapon for nine hundred years,” he said. “A bond only carries what somebody does to the body at the other end. So there’s exactly one way to use one, and that’s to get your hands on the person, and the Severance Law is that with a statute built around it and a clerk to file it.”
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“There’s a door in the wall,” Corvin said. “I’m going to show you the door, and then I’m going to show you what it’s made of, and you’re not going to thank me for either half.”
“Show me both,” I said, and the flag rocked under my heel and went quiet again.
“Complete a bond before a final claim vests, and you become Court-held. Then no new severance writ can lawfully touch you. This one still has forty days to run. That’s the door in the wall. Here’s what’s on the other side.”
The wind leaned on the tower and the note went up half a step and came back down.
“The shield is the harvest. Same object. They want you cut because you’d be worth cutting, and the day you complete three you’re the best thing that’s come through their doors in four hundred years.”
Vaughn had not moved his hand off the table. Ilyan had stopped with a log in his hands.
“You could have left that second part in your coat,” Ilyan said.
“I could’ve. She’d have found it out for herself inside a month and then I’d be a liar to her, and I’ve got a use for not being one that I’m not going to spend on your comfort.”
“That isn’t what I meant and you know it.”
“It’s what you said, though. You want me to...” Corvin stopped and started somewhere else. “She’s standing right there, Ilyan. Ask her whether she’d rather have the half.”
“I want both halves,” I said.
“Why a half-blood at all? Why not one of you?”
“Ask me something I know.”
“That’s the first time you’ve ever said that to me,” I said.
“It won’t be the last, and it costs me more than you’d think.
” He rubbed the ink at the side of his thumb.
“I’ve got a clerk in the registry at Vaeloth who’d sell me his mother’s grave, and even he can’t tell me why the Chancellor’s office only ever asks for the mixed ones.
It’s the one question the file doesn’t answer. ”
There were three chairs at that table, two with their backs to the stair-head and one facing it.
Vaughn took the wrong chair.
He did not look at me while he did it or after. I sat in the one facing the stair. I did not say thank you.
I sat where he had left me nowhere else to sit. Owned is a quiet word when a man does it well, and I hated that I wanted the wall behind me to be him.
“She should sleep up here,” Corvin said. “Third floor, one stair, one door, and I’d hear anything on it.”
“She won’t,” Vaughn said, and his hand did not move on the table. “Her leash is on my belt and it stays on my belt. That was settled at the tally post and she had no choice in it.”
“She might, if somebody asked her instead of announcing at her.”
“I watched you sleep in that yard for a year before I understood why.”
The fire popped. Corvin’s mouth was open and stayed open.
“Why?” I said.
“You don’t sleep where you can’t see what’s coming. Somebody should have been the wall.”
Something went shut across my chest and let go, and my hands had gone flat on my thighs without being sent there, and I got them off again.
“That’s the worst thing anybody’s ever said in this tower,” Corvin said, “and I’ve been in it for six hundred years.”
Ilyan’s coat came off his shoulders. He put it over the back of my chair without a word about it, without touching me.
“And you’re cold. And you weren’t going to mention it.”
“It’s three in the afternoon and the wind’s out of the north,” I said. “Everything’s cold.”
“You haven’t slept two nights either.”
“That one’s yours. I’ll give you that one.”
“She’s not going anywhere tonight,” Vaughn said, to Ilyan and over the top of my head. “Tell Rhodry the stair’s manned till the bell.”
Nobody in that room corrected him. I did not correct him either.
Somebody had left bread and cold mutton on the end of the table. I got up and ate standing, with my shoulder to the wall, fast, the way you eat a thing that can be taken off you.
Corvin stood up out of nowhere and ate standing too.
He talked the entire time. About a clerk in Vaeloth with nine fingers, and the price of good ink, and a raven he had once been mistaken for by a man who should have known better. None of it needed answering, and not one of the three of them was looking at my hands.
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“Here’s mine, and then I’ll shut up for a while, which none of you will believe.” Corvin said it standing at the fire end of the table with the last of the bread in his hand.
He put it down and did not sit.
“I lie to everybody, Seren. It’s the only talent I’ve got. I’ve never once spent it on you.”
My nipples drew up tight under the shirt and my face did nothing at all. He was six feet away with a crust in his hand. There had been no hand on me anywhere in it.
“So don’t take my word for the rest. Take it for that. Somebody in this room’s going to say it, and it’s going to be me, and I’d stand up and repeat it in front of the Court.”
Vaughn took it with his weight back on his heels and gave nothing back. Ilyan did not soften it. The wind held its note and the two of them let the words stand there.
“You’re all three of you insufferable,” I said.
“That’s the raven,” Ilyan said. “The rest of us are restful.”
“You’re a predator with hooves,” I said.
“And a stag’s a predator, is it?”
“It has teeth,” Vaughn said.
“It eats moss. Sit down, both of you.”
Neither of them sat down.
Vaughn has been fourteen hundred winters at this and had gone immovable on it, and Ilyan had put the axe down to argue properly, and Corvin had his arms folded and was enjoying himself in a way that would have got a lesser man bitten.
Vaughn was the one I looked for when a door opened. I did not yet know what to do with Corvin staying beside my plate, or Ilyan leaving his coat where my hands could reach it. Wanting one man had frightened me enough.
“There’s one tracker alive who can read a hound line at thirty miles through wet stone,” I said, “and she’s standing on the broken flag in this room. So when I tell you what’s coming up that road, it isn’t an opinion.”
“None of us said it was,” Ilyan said. “Not once, and I’d know, because I’ve been counting.”
“You’ve been saying it all afternoon. You’ve just been polite about it.”
Corvin laughed at the ceiling. Vaughn’s mouth moved about a sixteenth of an inch, which for him is falling out of a chair.
“Then read it for us,” Corvin said. “Read the tower. Read what we’re offering you.”
I put my hand under the collar again and let the air in and took my time.
“No. If I complete anything with any of you, I’ve cut my own throat and handed them the knife and thanked them for coming. That’s not a shield. That’s a shorter road.”
I had my own answer and I did not put it on that table. I had to find out what this thing on my neck is before the Hand came up that road. If I was slower than the paper, they would take the bond out from under my sternum and leave something in this yard that answers to my name.
“Seren—”
“I’m the best nose alive and I’ve read this one. It’s no.”
Ilyan looked at the fire. Corvin looked at Vaughn. Vaughn looked at me with his hand gone still, and none of the three of them opened his mouth.
They could have taken it. All three could have talked me in circles until the light went out of the arrow slits, and Corvin could have done it in the time it takes to lace a boot.
I had wanted one of them to try it. I liked watching three men that old decide not to.
Vaughn put his hand back on the table and left it there. Ilyan fed the fire. Corvin sat back down on the wood with his boot on the chair rail, and for once in eleven hundred years the man had nothing to add.
The cracked flag rocked once under my heel in the quiet, and not one of the three of them said a word to me about it, and that was how I learned what they were.
Then, beyond the tower, four strange hounds turned west. One of them found the track I had laid the day before.
I put Ilyan’s coat around my shoulders. “Tomorrow we go to the deadfall. I’m not waiting for them to learn the way home.”