CHAPTER FIFTEEN
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VAUGHN
Corvin had one boot up on the seat of the anteroom bench and the rest of himself on the arm of it, which is how Corvin sits and has always sat.
“Ten to four, Vaughn. You’ve been at that window a quarter of an hour and the yard’s finished changing.”
The rain had stopped at noon. Low cloud sat down on the ridges and everything in the courtyard below was dripping without any sun on it.
I put my palm flat on the sill and left it there.
Ilyan stood against the frame of a door he had opened and not shut, which is what Ilyan does with doors now, and he had his left forearm turned in against his ribs.
“He’s brought his own clerk up from the hall,” Ilyan said. “The man’s been in and out of that room twice.”
“He’s brought his own clerk up from the hall. Of course he has.” Corvin turned his hand over and looked at the ink on it. “A stag would have noticed that an hour ago and said nothing, which is why I keep one.”
“A stag’s a predator.”
Corvin stopped with his mouth open, which is worth seeing.
“Of what?” Ilyan said.
“Of me. Twice.”
“Twice,” Corvin said. “He’s counted. Ilyan, he has counted, and in a moment he’s going to give us the two dates, and the unbearable part is that he’ll be right and I’ve read the roll.”
“A stag comes at a wolf on open ground in the fall, and comes at him again the next fall,” Ilyan said. “That isn’t hunting. That’s an opinion, held annually.”
“It’s twice.”
Ilyan laughed once, low, and put his head back against the frame. Corvin made a sound that was going to be a whole speech and then decided against it, and the three of us stood in a small paneled room and did not say the thing we had all come up two flights to be near.
“Let me come in. I’ll sit at the back and be ornamental—”
“You’re staying here.”
Corvin put both boots on the floor, which he does not do.
“I’d be very quiet. I’d be a lamp. I’d be the least useful object in that room and I’d come out with every word he said and every word he went around, and you would never have to carry any of it.”
“You’d be a witness.”
“He’s spent yesterday and today being charming to the kitchen,” Ilyan said. “Men don’t spend two days on a kitchen for a treaty.”
“Men don’t spend that long on a kitchen for a treaty. Men do that when they’ve already got the thing and they’re waiting on the paperwork to catch them up—”
Corvin heard himself and shut his mouth on the end of it, which he also does not do.
Corvin’s hands went still on his own knee. Ilyan turned the burned forearm further in against his ribs, so that the scarred side of it was out of the light, and he did not say anything at all.
I did not ask him about it. I do not ask.
The clerk came out of the treaty room, went past the three of us with his eyes down, and the boards took no sound off him at all.
?
Aurelian Sarn stood at the far end of the table with one hand flat on the back of a chair nobody had offered him.
“Vaughn Ironmere, Warden of the Hunt. Sit, or don’t. I’ve never once got you to do either.”
The treaty room at Hollow Ash was eighteen feet by eighteen and low, ash panels pegged, no nails in them, boards laid on sand. Nobody in that room has ever been heard walking.
I stayed where I was, one pace inside the door.
Sarn looked at me for a while with the six-wick lamp making an even light on both of us and no shadow anywhere to put anything in.
“Winter-blue. The Court still says a man can tell an Ironmere across a hall by the eyes. It’s the only part of you that’s ever been easy to read.”
The clerk came back in with the treaty case, set it on the table between us, and went out again. He did not open it. Nobody had sent for it.
That case lives in the muniment press two floors down and three men in this Court hold a key to it. None of the three had been asked. It had come up the north stair in a stranger’s arms while I stood in an anteroom arguing about a stag.
I took the leash on my belt between two fingers without looking down at it.
“Give me the tracker and the thing on her throat, and you keep your treaty. That’s the whole of it, and I won’t dress it up.”
He had asked for the collar by name. He asked for it the way a man asks after a horse he has been told is for sale.
Four people have named that thing out loud in front of me in nineteen years, and three of them draw pay from him.
I put my palm flat on the table and left it there, and it did not move again while he talked.
“You’re going to want me to be a monster about this, and I can’t be.
” Sarn folded his hands and looked down at them while he spoke.
“Half-bloods with a fae bond open in them die at forty. Half-bloods without one bury their own grandchildren. I’ve watched that be true for a very long time and I didn’t invent it and I don’t enjoy it. ”
The panels gave his voice back a beat too fast, so that every sentence arrived twice.
“She’s twenty-eight. She has three of them open in her chest, Warden, and I can hear the arithmetic in that even if you won’t do it. I don’t want you to hand me a woman. I want you to stop being the reason she goes early.”
“You’ve heard the Severance Law called mercy and you spat on the floor. Everybody spits. Then they stand in the Unmaking one afternoon and watch a woman of thirty-nine who’s been carrying two open mate-bonds since she was a girl, and they come out of there quieter than they went in.”
He moved his hand half an inch along the chair back and stopped it there.
“I don’t want her dead. I’ve never wanted any of them dead, not one, and that’s the part your Blade leaves out of whatever he keeps on me.”
He was not lying.
That is a good case. He believes it and it is not entirely wrong, and I have known men who were entirely wrong and they were easier.
“Say what happens to my marches.”
“The hounds run where the treaty says they can’t. Tear it and they can. I won’t order it. I won’t need to.”
There was no threat in it. He did not lean on any of the words and he did not look at me to see how it had gone in.
“There’s no malice in that and you’d be a fool to hear any,” Sarn said. “A hound goes where the ground is open. Your ground is about to be open, and I won’t be within four hundred miles of it when it happens.”
The wax reef along that table’s edge held four hundred years of seals, cool and a little soft, and my thumbnail went into it while he waited.
Marrow was three hundred and forty people in one valley, with a wall a man can step over and one road out. I counted nine more like it under my marches, and from that hour nothing stood between them and the Council’s hounds but ninety miles of bad road.
I put the number against the one throat while he talked, and the arithmetic took me no time at all.
I did it anyway. I have not been sorry since. I have gone back to the wall a man can step over the way a man goes back to a sore tooth, and every time I have come away having chosen her again.
I had put four hundred men in the Gullet for this. Not enough to guard every byre and crossing. Enough that Sarn would have to spend lives instead of sending paper. That was what my refusal bought the villages, and it was not enough.
“Take a day,” Sarn said. “Take two. Talk to your Blade about it, and your Songkeeper, and don’t talk to her about it at all, because you won’t, and we both know you won’t. I’m a guest here until Sunday and I’ve been enjoying the buttery.”
“No.”
“No is a whole answer, and it’s the only one you’ve ever given me. I’d love the rest of it.”
I crossed to the lamp.
Eight paces, on boards laid on sand, and not one of them made any sound. Four hundred years I kept that treaty in a locked room. It took me nine seconds to decide she was worth more than all of it, and eight of those were walking.
My thumbs found the two brass catches unlocked. His clerk had already been at them.
I took the treaty out with my own hands. I did not send for a lord of this Court and I did not ask one. Four hundred years of paper, folded in three, with the wax coming off it in flakes onto the boards.
I put it into the six wicks.
Heavy old paper does not burn well. It went brown from the middle out, and lifted, and the flame walked the fold and stopped, and I had to feed the corner of it down into the lamp with two fingers to make it take.
It took a long time.
The panels gave me my own breathing back a beat too fast, so that for as long as the paper burned there was a man breathing just off my shoulder, and the man was me.
“You’ll want to feed it the corner,” Sarn said. “It’s the size in the paper. They laid it on thick in those days, because they thought the thing was going to matter.”
I fed it the corner.
“Do you want a hand? You’ll scorch your cuff.”
“No.”
“No.” Sarn watched the fold go over. “You keep saying that, and I keep finding it restful, and I have been told no perhaps four times in my life and I remember every one of the faces.”
Sarn did not stand up. Sarn did not raise his voice. Sarn watched the paper the way a man watches weather come in over ground he owns.
“It’s done.”
“It’s a quarter past four in the afternoon,” Sarn said, “and I’ve been High Chancellor for a long time, and I’d like you to know that this is the first time anybody has ever done that in front of me.
I’m not angry. I want to be clear about that, because you won’t ask and you’d never believe the answer. I’m delighted.”
The room smelled of old ash panels and dust, and then it smelled of burning size and hide glue, which is what four hundred years of treaty smells like at the end.
Sarn set two fingers to the inside of his own wrist and held them there for a moment, counting.
I saw him do it. I did not know what it was.
“The treaty’s gone. She isn’t.”
He inclined his head at that, slowly, and got more courteous, not less.
?
The clerk went down the north stair ahead of us with his arms full of an empty case and made no sound doing it. Seren was coming up.
Her hair was wet at the ends and going dark against her collar, and she had come in off the yard and up two turns without either of us hearing her, which she does.
She comes to my collarbone. She had her weight on the foot nearest the downward flight, the way she stands in every room she has ever been in.
She stopped on the turn and put her back to the wall to let us pass.
“Mistress Vale,” Sarn said. “You’ve been out in it.”
“It stopped at noon, Chancellor.”
I wanted her, standing in a stairwell one foot from the Chancellor of the Nine Thrones, and my cock had made up its mind about it before the rest of me had come down the stair.
She looked from him to me and back, and she read the whole stairwell off one breath through her nose.
“You both came out of the same room.”
“Go up. I’ll come and find you.”
There was no version of that stairwell where she did not go up, and I had not asked her for one.
She went past me on the outside of the turn and her sleeve went over the back of my hand. I had two fingers on the leash and I did not look down at it.
“You smell like burnt paper.”
“Yes.”
Two turns below, a door opened and the wet came up the stairwell. Seren went on upward toward the anteroom. I kept walking down beside the Chancellor.
I kept walking. Corvin will find out at the far end of all this and Ilyan will find out with him, and she will find out from neither of us, and none of that was decided in a stairwell.
Her throat had been the price he named. She was two turns above me now, still waiting for an answer I had not given her.
At the lower landing, out of her hearing, Sarn stopped and turned around and waited for me to come level with him.
He was smiling and he meant it, which is the part of Aurelian Sarn nobody writes down.
“Ironmere, you’ve just spent four hundred years of other people’s safety on one woman’s throat, and I’d never have dared it. My hounds are south of your gate already. Do give her my regards.”