CHAPTER ELEVEN
?
ILYAN
“Ilyan.” Vaughn Ironmere said my name once from the open half of the smithy and came no further in. Two in the morning, no wind, a rind of ice on every standing thing in the yard behind him.
“Warden.”
He looked at the forge. He looked at the rail at my shoulder, where the season’s stock of open collar blanks hung on separate nails, every seam of them open.
“The gate’s shut,” Vaughn said. “Everything else is yours.”
“Thank you.”
He went. Nine words between us and the whole of it said. He did not ask why I was there, and I had no answer ready if he had.
I had no business on that floor.
At Hollow Ash I have a forge of my own. Nobody comes into it. Here the two trades do not stand in the same room. The smith worked metal. I heard bond.
That smith kept clear of me. He had gone to bed before I crossed the yard. I had come anyway, with food in my coat.
The cinder floor was warm through the boot, the only warm floor in the fortress at that hour, and it held until dawn.
The forge was banked and breathing on its own, red from underneath, throwing the light up so that everything in the bay had its shadow on the wrong side.
Scale and quenching oil and hot iron. It is a smell very like blood and it is not blood.
I put my hands on the anvil horn and said it out loud to an empty building.
“And I don’t put the forge on a living thing. That’s the only rule I’ve got.”
A man says a thing that way when he has broken it.
The words went up into the roof and came back off the boards. I turned my left forearm in against my ribs, where the burn runs wrist to elbow. There was nobody there to look.
I went down the rail with my fingers on the blanks.
Thirty-nine on the smithy rail. The fortieth had gone across to Rhodry’s desk. Council stock under a quota writ, each a strip of iron bent round and left open a finger’s width at the front. The seam would be riveted shut at a fitting.
They rang under my nails as I went, all the same note, until the last two.
Two had been cut down yesterday to the same small measure. One of them had gone across the yard to Rhodry’s desk in the tally shed. This was the smith’s sizing pattern, kept to prove the measure. Only the one on Rhodry’s desk was meant to close.
I took it off the nail.
It came into both my hands cold except where my palms warmed it. Ordinary iron. Nothing in it would spare the child who wore it.
I did not alter it.
I put it back on the nail and squared it true with the others. I did not ask, and there is a writ with a seal on it that says I should have.
?
Seren came in out of the dark on the open side without a sound, which is the only way she arrives anywhere. She crossed a yard of standing ice at two in the morning and I heard none of it.
“I didn’t smell you. I saw the light. I’ve never smelled you once in three years and I’ve stopped expecting to.”
“And does that bother you?”
“Everything alive leaves something. You don’t.”
Seren stopped at the edge of the fire-throw, weight on the foot nearest the yard, chin moving twice while she counted the ways out of a shed with one wall missing.
Her hair was wet at the ends. She had been lying awake somewhere cold.
“There’s bread on the anvil.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“And is it still warm, or have I carried it too far?”
She unwrapped the cloth and ate the bread standing, fast, in about nine bites, and I gave the bellows two strokes they did not need, just for the sound in the room.
I carried bread and dripping for one person in that fortress, and she was standing on my warm floor eating it.
“You’re the gentle one,” she said, with her mouth full. “Rhodry says so. He says of the three you’re the one a person can talk to.”
“And what does that make the other two?”
She wiped her hands down the front of her coat. “Loud and louder.”
“I’ve a reputation for gentleness and I’ve done nothing to earn it. It’s a very restful thing to be handed.”
“And how’s the girl tonight?”
“Asleep. She’s got the Warden’s knife under the blanket with her and she showed it to nine people before Rhodry got her lain down, and she told every one of them he handed it over himself.”
I looked at the rail instead of at her. “He did hand it over himself.”
“He did. That’s the part she can’t leave alone.” A breath went out of her. “If they come back for her in the spring I’ll...”
“You could correct Rhodry. About you being gentle.”
“And why would I do that?”
“Because it’s not true,” she said, and went on chewing.
She put the cloth down on the anvil and did not put it in her pocket, which she would have done at nine years old.
“Ammon called a figure off that caliper and the other one wrote it on the wax and neither of them looked at me once all evening,” she said. “Not one time. I counted. There was a fresh notch cut in the tally post and the resin was still bright in it and I stood forty feet off with my hands down.”
“And that’s the piece you’ve come out in the cold about.”
“That’s the piece I keep going back over.”
I set my hand flat on the face of the anvil. “And there’s a rest of it.”
“The frame went up at noon and they had eleven through it before the relay came in. They cut two blanks to her measure. One went on Rhodry’s desk. I’d like one of you to stand in front of me and tell me that isn’t a plan with a date on it.”
“And you had that worked out before the trestles were down.”
“About then. I had it by the time the second trestle came down, and I’ve done nothing with it since but walk it up the yard and back.”
I gave the bellows nothing. The forge went on breathing by itself.
“There’s a written order come north about you,” I said. “Nobody puts a glass on your collar. No reason set under it.”
“Rhodry’s over the moon.”
“Rhodry’s over the moon, and so is the Warden’s own clerk, and so is every man behind this wall who’d otherwise have had to stand there and hold the lamp for it.”
She slid a knuckle in under the front of the collar and drew it along as far as it would go. “And you?”
“And I’ve read it four times tonight.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It isn’t.”
She turns her head to smell before she turns it to look. There was nothing of me to smell, so she came the whole way around to see.
“You could tell me why an order like that gets written. Never mind what it does. Why did a man in Hollow Ash sit down with a pen and—”
“I can tell you what it does. It keeps a Council hand off your throat for a whole winter. It makes one Warden answerable in his own person for a thing he won’t put a reason to. It’s the best bit of paper anybody’s laid down in your favor since they collared you. Every word of that’s true.”
Her hands went open at her sides. “And none of it’s why it was written.”
“No.”
She let it go, the way a tracker leaves a cold line, which is not the same as leaving it.
I have wanted this woman for three years. She is not mine and I have decided that is a technicality.
She has never seen it.
I have made certain of that the way a man makes certain of a weld. It holds.
I have thought about her in words this Court keeps a punishment for. Possession is the mildest of them.
There is a reason I have no right to it. I am not going to set that reason down.
Four feet of warm floor between us, and I wanted her the way a man wants a door he is not allowed through. I said this instead.
“Corvin has had the tally book open since Saturday.”
“Corvin’s system isn’t a system.”
“And I’ve been saying that for two hundred years.”
She got her shoulder against the post where she could keep the yard in view. “He’s got a coat with paper in it.”
“He has a coat with paper in it, and he’ll die before he lets a clerk file it for him, and one day the coat’s going to go into a river and he’ll have nothing at all.”
She smiled. It went as fast as it came and I have very few of them.
“Your jaw,” I said. “Will you tip it up for me?”
She did it. All three of us come at that throat from below the jaw and never above, and none of us has said why in front of her.
I put the back of my hand under her jaw. She did not move the half inch she could have moved.
Then I put two fingers under the front of her collar. It was not a request and she did not treat it as one.
The back of her neck chafed every winter. It was cracked open again. That was a true reason and it was not my reason.
I shut my eyes.
I turned my head half an inch to the left, the way a man does at a door.
I held the fingers there and listened. Heat came up out of my own palms hot enough that she must have felt it on her skin.
I counted to nine. I knew what I was doing to her and I chose it anyway.
Nobody in the world knows what I heard in the Ravensgate smithy at two in the morning and I have not said it since to any living creature.
“And the back of your neck’s cracked open again. It always does in this cold.”
Her chin stayed where it was. “It always does.”
I took my hand away.
“You could have asked me before you put a hand on that collar,” she said.
“I could have.”
“And you didn’t.” Her weight had not come off the foot nearest the yard.
“And I didn’t,” I said, “and I’d do it again tonight, and you would let me.”
“Your hands are hot,” she said.
“They are.”
“That’s not the forge. I’ve stood at that forge and it doesn’t—”
“And you’d know the difference.”
“I’d know it at thirty miles,” she said, “and downwind, and through a river. I’m the best there’s ever been at it and I’m not being modest, I’m being accurate. And I’ve got nothing on you at four feet.”
“No.”
“You could say a longer word than that.”
“And which one would help?”
Her feet had not moved. Planted, both of them, square to the yard and not to me. Her thumb had gone across her own ruined knuckles twice while I was counting, and she does that when a thing is decided and the room has yet to catch up.
“And what were you going to do about that blank on Rhodry’s desk?”
She looked at the forge.
She did not answer, and I had no need of an answer. The thing stood in the bay between us with the shape of a shield in it, and we left it standing.
“I’m going to bed.”
“And you don’t have to go out the cold way.”
“I do.”
She went out the cold way, across the ice, without her coat done up.
She is afraid of wanting me.
Of the three of us I am the one she goes out the cold way to get clear of. I stayed where I was. I have taken every refusal she has ever given me in the second she gave it, and I took that one before she was past the water butt.
And here is the thing I would not say to Vaughn, or to Corvin, or to her.
I am glad she cannot track me.
She reads a trace through stone and weather, and the one creature she cannot find stands at her elbow. Her blindness to me had once felt like shelter. Now she stood within arm’s reach and still had to ask whether I was there. I had made that distance myself.
?
Seren went out across the yard the way she had come into it. Alone again, and the second half of it to do.
I took a strip off the bench and set it on the anvil and did not strike it.
I held both hands out over the banked forge, palm down, close enough that the red came through the webs of them, and kept them there until they stopped shaking. It took longer than I would tell anybody.
Then I stepped back.
One rule. I have said one rule out loud about myself in nine hundred years, and I said it in this building tonight, over this anvil, and then I went ahead.
Nobody was ever going to know I was in here.
I put the tongs down on the bench and they went off the edge, and the ring of them on the cinder floor went on and on and on.
Two fingers came off the door frame in the dark on the open side.
Nobody else in the world touches a door frame on the way through it.
Corvin Ash touched the frame on the open side. He had not followed a scent. He had followed the same empty witness column I had spent nineteen years refusing to name.
My hands stopped where they were. I looked down at them, which is what they do.
“Two in the morning,” Corvin said, “and the Songkeeper’s standing in a smithy, and I’ve had that tally book open all night, and I’d love to know who’s been paying Rhodry to keep one throat out of it.”
He saw my left hand on the rail and stopped looking for a stranger.
“What did you put in it?” he said.
“Enough to keep the glass out.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“No.”
His eyes went to the smallest blank. “Then answer the other one. Will it still hold when she finishes us?”
“I believe so.”
“You believe so.” For once he did not repeat himself a third time. “We’ve been making a life out of what we won’t tell her. We are going to run out of room.”