CHAPTER EIGHT
?
SEREN
The steward struck the board twice with the flat of his hand and read me into the room the way a clerk reads a line off a bill of lading. Vaughn was forty feet in ahead of me with my leash on his belt.
“Seren Vale. Of the Ravensgate kennels, in the Warden’s train.”
Nobody clapped. A hundred and eighty feet of stone took the name, carried it the length of the tie-beams, and handed it back smaller.
I went in along the west wall.
The flagstone pulled the heat out through my boot soles before I was twenty feet in. Rush underfoot, trodden green, giving up its smell at every step.
Roast fat came down the draft out of the buttery. The fire-troughs were banked low along both walls and their light gave out short of the roof, so the top of that hall was a dark I could not read.
Two hundred people were arriving late and saying so to each other. The noise came off the ridge in one piece.
I counted the doors. My chin moves when I do it. It has moved since I was nine years old and it will move at my burning.
“Nine doors. Two of them bar from this side.”
Nobody had asked me. Ilyan Frost was a step behind my shoulder and had come through the screen passage without shutting it.
He did not shut the next one either. Nor the buttery door, nor the low one under the stair, and he did not look at me while he was not doing it.
The high table stood on boards and trestles at the top of the hall. Dogs lay under it in the rush where the warmth pooled, and none got up for me.
Vaughn Ironmere was standing at the near end with one hand on the back of a chair.
He took the outside seat. That put his own back to two hundred people and nine doors, and it put me against stone.
He did it before I reached the table and said nothing about it. It was the wrong chair and he took it, and the dogs slept on, and the long tables went on eating behind a Warden sitting with his spine bare to a room. He did not ask me where I wanted to sit.
Vaughn Ironmere’s palm went flat on the trestle and stayed.
The lords came up in ones and twos and stood, because standing is politer than sitting when the subject of the conversation is at the table.
“The Council served its Writ on this Court’s Warden,” a thin lord said, to Vaughn, not to me. “The Council will come and collect. None of us wants it here looking at us when it does.”
“She’s a Ravensgate tracker,” said another. “The Court doesn’t spend treaty on a kennel.”
“It spends treaty on a Warden’s mate. A completed bond makes her Court-held, before the final claim vests, and then the Severance Law can’t reach into this hall. Uncompleted, she’s a collared half-blood standing in a fae Court with somebody else’s paper on her.”
“Does she understand what’s being asked of her?” the thin lord said, and he said it to me.
“She has no choice about the writ,” Vaughn said. “The bond is not yours to order.”
“Hand her over and be done with it,” said the thin lord. “Before the Council walks into this hall and reads us our own law while it carries her out of it.”
“Then let it be completed,” somebody said, cheerful, from further down.
“You can’t order a bond.” Corvin Ash was sitting on the end of a trestle the way something lands on a fence. “You can’t order a bond, you can’t order weather, and you can’t order me to stop talking, and two of those have been tried this week.”
“Nobody’s asking the Warden to like it,” Lord Vantry said. “We’re asking him to be able to count.”
Vantry was a big man gone soft in the front. He did not raise his voice once.
“There are nine of us here who’ll answer to the Nine Thrones if this goes wrong,” he said. “She’s one.”
“One what?” Corvin said. “One problem, one asset, one line in somebody’s ledger—”
“One collar,” Vantry said, and put his cup down.
Heat came up under my sternum and my hands went open at my sides before I had decided anything. Feet planted.
“Say the rest,” Corvin said. “You’ve dressed it. Undress it.”
“Gladly.” Vantry turned and looked at me for the first time, courteously, the way you look at a horse you are not buying. “Why does Ravensgate keep a tracker whose collar the Court’s own smiths have never put a hand on?”
The hall went quiet enough to hear the fire-troughs breathe.
My whole life had gone into keeping that question out of warm rooms, and a lord of the Winter Court had set it down on a trestle in front of two hundred people, politely, between courses.
“Never put a hand on.” Corvin was off the trestle and had not appeared to move. “That’s a beautiful way to ask a question you’ve already—”
“Ask me in the yard, Vantry,” Vaughn said.
“Here will do. The yard’s yours. This hall belongs to the Court, and the Court would like an answer in it.”
It did not work. Corvin talking past a question works nine times, and the tenth time everybody has heard the trick.
At the wall end of the nearest trough the ash was dead and gray. I put two fingers in it. It was cold to the hand in a hall warm everywhere else, and I let the lords go on.
?
They went back to their arguing and their wine. Vaughn was at my shoulder by the dead trough at the wall end of that hall. I stayed on my feet.
“They won’t send for me,” I said.
“When it comes, they’ll send for the leash. It’s on your belt. That makes it a thing this Court can order you to produce. A man refuses his own Court once. You’d be the first who did it twice, and this hall has just told me it means to ask.”
Two fingers went to the leather at his hip. He did not look down at it.
“On my belt it isn’t paper,” Vaughn said. “It’s on a body. Somebody has to come across a room and take it off me in front of everybody, and I’ve been counting all afternoon, and there aren’t the men in this hall to do it.”
Corvin had gone very quiet, which is a thing that happens perhaps twice a year.
“Why is it on your belt and not on Rhodry’s hook?”
Every answer he could give started with a reason, and the man does not give reasons; he had told the whole yard so. I let the trap sit open in front of half a Court.
Vaughn’s hand stopped on the leash and stayed stopped.
“Oh, this is lovely,” Corvin said. “He’s got three answers and every one of them’s a because, and he doesn’t do because—”
“Corvin.”
“I’m saying it out loud so the room keeps up. Nobody in this Court has ever watched him lose anything, and I’ve waited a long while for it, and I’d hate to blink.”
Vaughn looked at me for the length of it. The fire-troughs breathed. A dog groaned under the boards and turned over.
“Then it’s yours to carry,” he said.
He unbuckled the leash and put it in my hand. It was warm from his belt and heavier than a thing that light has any business being.
His mouth did something I had not seen it do. The corner of it went and stayed gone, and he looked at me the way a man looks at weather he has bet money on.
I would have said, standing there, that he liked losing to me. The worst part of me wanted to watch him do it again.
Then I took two steps in, put my hand flat on his belt, and buckled the leash back onto it myself, in front of Corvin and half the Winter Court.
“It’s yours. I’m putting it back where I want it.”
Corvin made a sound like a man shot with something he had paid for.
“I’d like that in a book. I’d like it read out at things.”
“It’s a strap.”
“It’s a strap, she says. It’s a strap.” He had both hands up. “I keep my own ledgers, and I’m telling you that goes in tonight in my own hand, and the Blade has a beautiful hand, and when I take it to the roof afterward I’ll go up as something with a wingspan—”
“You’re a pigeon that reads.”
A dog lifted its head. Vaughn did not move at all, which from him is laughter.
“I’m a raven. I’m the raven—”
“You said that last time.”
“There’s a difference in the tail,” Corvin said. “There is an enormous difference in the tail, and nobody in this hall has the education to see it—”
“It’s a bird,” Vaughn said.
“It is not a bird. It’s a raven. I want that noted as well.”
Ilyan Frost came past with a plate and put it down in front of me. Mutton, bread, the fat still moving on it.
“And are you eating, or are we doing the other thing?”
“I’m not hungry.”
He went away and left the door behind him standing open. I ate the mutton and the bread and put the plate down empty.
I had been counting the Hunt since the doors. Eight at the low trestle. Four along the wall by the screen. Hesk at the end with his back to the fire and nobody either side of him.
Ilyan looked at the low trestle, then at me, then at nothing, and went to find something else to carry.
?
The stair against the west wall has a blind turn in it. Corvin’s hand went flat between my shoulder blades and I went up two steps because he went up two steps, and he did not ask, before or after.
The fire-trough light stops at the third step. The noise of two hundred people came over the top of us off a roof fifty feet up.
He pinned me back against the stone and came at me from below the jaw.
“You came into that hall along the wall, you counted nine doors, and you didn’t once look at me,” he said into my throat. “I counted that too.”
His hand went under my shirt, flat and cold on my ribs. My breath went out and did not come back the same shape.
“There’s the ribs. There’s the ribs, and then there’s the rest of it—”
His palm took my breast. His thumb crossed the nipple and my whole spine answered it before I had a position on the subject at all.
“That’s a nipple going hard under my thumb and that’s not weather, that’s me, and I’m telling you what I’m doing while I do it so you can’t tell yourself later that you missed it.”
He had both nipples between his fingers then, rolling them slow, and he put words on every part of it while he did it. My hips went forward.
“There it is. That’s your hips, that’s not me, and you’re going to want to argue about it—”
“Talk less.”
“No. Absolutely not. That’s the one thing you can’t have. You’re allowed to want something in a stairwell, it’s what they were built for, and I’ll be the last man alive who holds it against you—”
His mouth went along my throat, above the collar, never above the jaw. Then my mouth, and he was still talking into it, and I lost the shape of what he was saying and kept the sound.
His thigh came between my thighs. His cock was hard against my hip through his wool and mine, and he pushed it there once so there could be no polite arrangement about it.
“That’s my cock, that’s your thighs, and I’d have you on these stairs with a Court eating supper underneath us and you know it—”
I had a fistful of his shirt and no memory of taking it.
Then he stopped his mouth an inch off mine and said the useful thing, which is what he does instead of mercy.
“Do it tonight and you’re Court-held by morning, and not one of those men gets a vote on you ever again.”
“And?”
“And the Court will keep you the way it keeps a treaty.” His hands did not move. “In a locked room, in good condition, for as long as you’re worth keeping. I’ve never lied to you. I’m not going to start on a staircase with my cock against your hip.”
My hands came off him first.
“And then the Court owns the paper instead of the Council. That’s not a door. That’s a different room.”
He let go. At once, both hands off me and onto the stone either side of my head and then off it. The flat of one went to his own sternum for the length of a breath.
Then he went back to talking, and his voice was the same, and it was not.
I came down into the hall with the lords still at it and the dogs still under the boards.
I stood at the end of the high table and I did the arithmetic, and I will write it down because nobody made me think it.
If the Council came through the screen door tonight and said one of you, only one, we take one and leave the rest—I would have given them Vantry.
I would have walked him down the hall myself and put his hands in theirs and watched. I liked how fast the arithmetic came.
Eight at the low trestle. Four along the wall. Hesk alone.
There should have been four hundred more of them in this hall or the yards under it. I had counted twice, both counts came out the same, and both were wrong.
“Vaughn.”
His palm went flat on the trestle.
“Where have you sent four hundred men?”
The steward struck the board for the Court to sit, and two hundred voices came down off that roof all at once, and Vaughn’s mouth was moving and I could not hear one word of it. His hand did not lift off the wood for the whole length of it.
“Vaughn,” I said, into two hundred voices coming down off a roof fifty feet up. “Where have you sent four hundred men?”