CHAPTER THIRTEEN
?
SEREN
Ilyan Frost had his back to the open wall of the forge with both hands around a cup he had not drunk out of. Thaw water came off the shed roof behind him into the yard in a rope and hissed where it hit the apron stone.
I came in along the wall.
“Seren. There’s a stool by the wall where you can see the yard, if you want it.”
He had not turned around. He never does.
The shed is thirty feet square and sooted black to a ceiling I have never seen. One side of me went warm off the forge. The other side of me was wet through from the yard, because the wind was southwest and heavy and coming straight in at the open wall.
There was a plate on the anvil ledge. Bread, a wedge of hard cheese, cold mutton with the fat gone white on it.
“I’m not—”
I stopped. He hadn’t asked me anything, and he wasn’t going to.
“I’m not hungry.”
“And I didn’t bring it for you,” he said. “It’s been sitting there since noon.”
“You think I’ve been standing here since noon holding a cup?” he said.
“You have. It’s gone cold. There’s a skin on it. You’d have to chew it.”
Something in his face moved that is as close as Ilyan Frost comes to laughing, and he set the cup down on the frame rail, and I went and stood at the anvil ledge where I could see the one door.
I ate the bread and the cheese, rind and all. Neither of us said anything about the empty plate.
“The glass didn’t light on me,” I said. “It went over me twice. His man said passing again and wrote nothing down, and Corvin let his breath out behind my shoulder, and nobody in that hall told me what any of it meant.”
Ilyan picked a strip of worked metal off the bench, set it into the tuning frame, and squared it to the edge with two fingers.
“A glass doesn’t find a bond. It finds room for one.”
I waited.
“It’s a room-measurer. It goes down a hall looking for the shape of somewhere a fae bond could sit, and it lights where there’s space.”
“Then why put it on children?”
Ilyan turned the strip a quarter turn in the frame. “Because that’s the only thing it’s any good for.”
He took up a small hammer, no heavier than a spoon, and touched the strip with it. The note came up out of the frame and hung there, ringing on well after the strike, and the sound went into the roof and did not come back.
“A child’s got no bond in her to find. The glass finds room in her anyway, and a clerk writes a number by her name, and that’s what a quota roll is.”
The scale off the hot iron was in the back of my mouth like blood. I swallowed it.
“A half-blood who could anchor one lights like a lamp. A half-blood who could anchor three lights like a match going up.” He struck the strip again. “That. That’s what it would sound like, if you could hear it.”
Nettle is twelve, and Nettle has a number by her name since Monday’s measure, and I had my hand on the anvil ledge and did not know I had shut it.
“Tell me what severance does,” I said.
Ilyan put both hands into the quench bucket to the wrist and left them there.
“It’s a cutting. There’s a hook for it. Two of them, one straight and one turned, and a woman in the Unmaking who’s good with them, and it’s done in a white room in about the time it takes to boil water.”
“And then?”
“It doesn’t kill anybody. That’s the whole trouble with it.
” He took his hands out and shook them once.
“What you get back is a person with a hole in her where the bond was. She walks out. She eats. She lives a long time, and whatever she does after that, she’s doing it in a room with somebody missing out of it. ”
He did not soften one word of that and he did not apologize for it, and the left forearm with the burn on it was turned in against his own body while he said it.
?
“Songkeeper. Miss Vale. I’m told I’m not welcome in a forge, and it’s never stopped me anywhere else.
” Aurelian Sarn was in the open wall with the thaw coming down behind him and the wet yard past that, and no coat on.
There was a clerk in the doorway behind his shoulder who did not come in and did not speak the whole time.
Sarn came as far as the light and stopped there. He put a hand out and took the tuning frame off the bench, out from under Ilyan’s fingers, and turned it toward the glow to look along its edge.
“It’s a beautiful thing,” Sarn said. “I’ve never held one.”
“You’re holding it,” Ilyan said.
He didn’t ask. That is what a hand does when nobody has told it no in four hundred years.
“I am.” Sarn set it down where he had found it, squarely, like a man who is careful with what belongs to other people. “I came out into the wet to talk to you both, and I’ll be brief, because I’ve been told the Winter Court eats at eight and I’ve never yet been fed in this building.”
Nobody offered him anything. He did not seem to notice, or he noticed and let it go, which with him is the same shape from outside.
“Miss Vale, you’ve had a long afternoon and I’ve been the cause of most of it. Are you warm enough in that shirt?” He was already going on. “I’d like to put the honest case to you, because you’ll get the dishonest one from everybody else in these walls, and they love you, so they’ll do it well.”
The cinder shifted under my boot when I moved my weight to the foot nearest the door. There is one door.
He turned his palms up to the fire like a man warming them at somebody else’s hearth.
“An unbonded half-blood outlives a bonded one. That’s a fact and you can check it against any roll in Vaeloth, and I could give you the number of years, and I won’t, because it would be vulgar to stand in a man’s forge and price your life at you. ”
He said half-blood the way a man says harvest. Somewhere south of us there is a roll with a number on it that does not change, and every name on it was decided in a room the name was not in.
“You’re doing it anyway.”
“I’m doing a small version of it, and I’ll take the credit for the small version.”
He smiled. He has a good smile, and it isn’t a performance, which is the trouble with him.
“The Law’s a mercy and it’s badly named,” he said. “I’ve spent a great deal of my life doing a thing men spit at me for, and I go on doing it, because I’ve seen the other road and they haven’t.”
“And the ones who don’t want it?”
“They very rarely do. It isn’t theirs to want, Miss Vale. A half-blood’s bond is owned by the Nine from the day a glass finds room for it. I didn’t write that line. I only carry the hooks.”
“So you do it to them anyway.”
“I do it to them anyway. I’d love to tell you there’s a version where I don’t, and there isn’t one, and I’ve looked—” He stopped himself and folded his hands. “I’m not going to dress it up for you. I’d only ask which of us has said the word out loud.”
I didn’t answer him.
He was not threatening anybody, and that is the part I could not get around. He had done his arithmetic on people who were not in the room and come out of it certain, and certainty in a good coat does not raise its voice.
“A triple-bonded half-blood is the richest harvest in four hundred years.”
Under my sternum, slightly left, all three of them moved at once.
That was not a flutter and it was not a pain. It was three separate weights turning over together, the way three horses in a dark stable turn their heads at the same sound, and my hand went flat over the place before I had decided to lift it.
Aurelian Sarn watched me do it. He did not say one word about it.
I counted the doors of a shed that has one. My chin went with the count and I could not stop it.
“Well.” He straightened his cuffs. “I’ve spoiled a good fire. Songkeeper, thank you for the loan of your frame.”
On his way out he ran a knuckle along the strips hanging on the wall rail, the way a man rings a wine glass in somebody else’s house. Eight of them rang, one after another, up and down.
The ninth made no sound at all.
He stopped. He tapped it again, twice, with real curiosity in his face.
“Chancellor—” Ilyan said, and stopped.
“One of them’s dead. Charming. Do you keep it for the look of the thing?”
Then he was gone into the yard with his clerk shutting up behind him, and the thaw took the sound of them in about four steps.
Ilyan took hold of the edge of the tuning frame with both hands. I was standing four feet off and I felt the heat come up off him, the way you feel a wall that has had sun on it all day, and his knuckles went the color of the fire.
He was looking at the empty doorway when he said it, and not at me.
“They call it mercy because nobody who has had it done can still argue.”
I put my hand on the anvil to have something under it. The iron was warm. Everything in that shed was warm except the wind coming in at my back.
“The ninth strip,” I said.
“Ask it.”
“What is it?”
Ilyan lifted it off the rail and turned it over in the burned hand. Pale metal, close-grained, and there was a light in it that had nothing to do with the forge.
“A bond that’s been cut doesn’t go anywhere,” he said. “It goes hard. Pale, warm, heavier than it looks, and as dead as a doorstep.”
“And nothing reads it.”
He turned it flat to the light. “Nothing that reads a living bond reads through it. A glass goes over a piece of that the way your eye goes over a shadow on snow. It doesn’t stop, because there’s nothing in it to stop for.”
He weighed it in the burned hand and did not put it down.
“It’s the one thing on my frame I can’t tune.”
“Could you cut it?”
“With shears, yes. Shape isn’t the same as bond. Steel parts the metal. A severance hook can’t kill what is already dead.”
He turned the strip so the light ran along its other edge. For a moment the faint thread of warmth went toward his hand instead of away.
“Why did it do that?”
“Worked metal remembers how it was made.” He put it down before I could touch it. “A seam has two faces. Men who only mean to take seldom look at the other one.”
“They send it down to us out of the Thrones’ vaults twice a year—and you can’t sever it twice, there’s nothing in it to catch, so the vaults send it back scaled and somebody has to dress it before it’s any use to anyone.” He set it back into the frame. “Two hours with a rasp before I can hang it.”
“Hand me the small file,” he said, and I handed him the small file, and he took the scale off the edge of a strip with short strokes toward himself.
“He held your frame,” I said.
“He did. He’ll do it again.”
“Why does that make your hands hot and not your mouth?”
Ilyan went on filing for a while. The strokes got shorter.
“A Songkeeper hears a bond the way you smell a track. Not the person. The fit.”
He set the file down.
“A mate-bond that grew where it belongs sits flat. It’s one note, and it stays one note.”
“A bond that’s been taken off somebody and claimed by a man who was never built to hold it sounds like a string wound up onto the wrong peg,” he said. “It doesn’t ever stop sounding like that, and I’ve got to stand in a hall and be polite to it.”
“How many’s he wearing?”
“He’s wearing three. Not one of them fits him.”
“How can a dead thing fit anybody?”
“Not every stolen bond is allowed to die. They draw it alive into a receiving channel. The waste hardens. What is kept warm can be fastened to someone else.” His right hand closed on the file. “That does not make it theirs.”
The wind came in off the yard and the fire flattened and stood up again.
“Nine seats,” I said. “Nine hundred years. And a man in our hall wearing three that aren’t his.”
Ilyan came around the anvil to me. He put the back of his hand against my jaw from below, never above, and the forge heat and his knuckles landed on me at the same time and my nipples went tight through the shirt and nothing in me had agreed to it.
“Is that the collar,” he said, “or is that the heat?”
I could not have told him. My mouth had gone dry off the iron and there was a pull low in my stomach and he did not move away. He did not take the hand back and he did not ask me which it was.
I have had it in me since a man in a gray coat priced me in a shed.
Richest in four hundred years.
Nineteen years I have been a nose on a leash and a line in Rhodry’s book, owned in everything but the word, and somebody has finally put a figure on me, and some low animal part of me stood up in the dark and was glad of it.
Better to be worth cutting up than worth nothing. I hated how much I meant it. It did not go away when I looked straight at it.
?
“You ate all of it,” Ilyan said from the anvil, with the yard gone dark past the open wall.
“You said you didn’t bring it for me.”
“And I didn’t.”
“Then nobody’s lost anything.”
I went and stood in the open wall with the thaw coming onto my face and the yard going gray in front of me, and the snow came off the roofs in slabs with a sound like a slow, badly kept drum.
Nine seats. Three of them on one man’s back and not one of them his.
“Ilyan. What are they for?”
He was at the frame behind me with his hands on the edge of it. He did not answer, and I let the not-answering run, the way you let a track go cold rather than walk over it, and outside the wind came up the yard and turned over.
“Everybody asks what the Council wants with a half-blood,” he said. “Nobody’s ever asked me what nine seats have been living on.”