CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
?
ILYAN
“Ilyan. Ilyan—come and tell him a ledger is a system.” Corvin called down the Hollow Ash hall, where the Court had made us wait since dark for horses we should already have been riding.
Corvin Ash said my name twice down a hundred and eighty feet of it, with a cup in one hand and the other arm out at the shoulder, and half the Winter Court turned around to watch me walk the length of it.
We had reached Ravensgate after the carts were gone.
The northern families were alive. That was the work the Council had given us while it took Seren.
At each relay post south of the fortress our seals had been refused.
Corvin flew as far as the Gullet before coming back: three changes of armed escort, two prisoner wagons separated on the road, and no way to lift either woman out alone.
Now he was making the lords laugh while Hesk counted their remounts. His cup had water in it. Mine was untouched.
I came with my hands full. I set a cup down on the bench-end and squared it to the edge of the table without deciding to, which is a thing my hands have done for nine hundred winters and will do at my own funeral.
The fire-troughs were let down to embers. The benches had been dragged into a ring around the dead ash, and the quartermasters had opened a tun. Men argued over fodder and toll rights while the route south lay across the high table.
Rush underfoot, trodden green. Roast fat coming through on the draft out of the buttery. Wind and thaw against the shutters, loud, everything indoors dripping somewhere out of sight.
“It’s a system if you can find one thing in it,” Hesk said.
“I can find anything in it. Name a year.”
“That’s not the test and you know it isn’t.”
“Name a year.”
Hesk named one. Corvin gave him a shale contract, two names, a sum and the color of the wax without opening anything, and then gave him the weather that week for nothing.
“The wax was oxblood, because the good black went down the Gullet on a barge with a man I was fond of,” Corvin said. “You can have the barge man’s name as well, or we can agree I’ve made my point and you’re buying the next tun.”
“Anybody can memorize. A system’s a thing another man can read.”
“Another man reading my ledger is the failure state.” Corvin drank. “You’ve described a fire. You’ve described a fire and called it a filing method.”
“You’re a bird, Ash.”
“I’m a raven.” Corvin put the cup down on the table, precisely, so the base of it clicked. “You’ve had a hundred years of me and you’ve still have not got that right. A crow’s a committee. I’m a decision.”
The hall laughed, and went on laughing for a while.
I stood at the ash with my back to it and watched Corvin work. He was standing where the light was worst, and he had not let a silence open since the doors shut at seven.
At the end of the bench Vaughn Ironmere sat with his right palm flat on the boards.
Vaughn had said eleven words in two days. I counted them on the road down, out of a habit I am not proud of.
“Songkeeper.” Hesk turned on the bench. “Say the thing you were saying on the stairs. About the hook.”
So I said it, quietly, to three men, in a hall that was busy being loud.
“The hook won’t find anything to hold. It’ll slide the way a glass slides.”
“It’ll slide off what?”
“Off nothing. That’s the point of it. An instrument like that wants a surface to bite and a seam it can get under, and there’s a surface there and it’s a dead one.”
I turned my cup a quarter turn on the boards.
“Crane will put the hook to her throat and it’ll read a dead thing, and the severance won’t take. She’ll be on that table with the instrument doing nothing, and I know it the way I know my own hands.”
“And if she pulls?” Corvin said. “She’ll pull. She has pulled against every rope anybody has put on her since she was nine, and there is no version of that woman lying on a table being sensible about it, so tell me what happens when she pulls—”
“Then she gets hurt, and it’s a small hurt, and it isn’t the one that matters.” I heard how flat that came out of me and I let it stand. “The hook is the one that matters. The hook does nothing at all.”
“You’re certain,” Hesk said.
“I’ve been certain about one thing in nine hundred years.”
I have never in my life been more right than I was about that, and in the same breath I said the thing I was wrong about, and I said it in the same voice.
“And their procedure leaves an unfamiliar collar intact until the Chancellor authorizes its removal. It will buy us time. They will try the hook first.”
“Their own metal,” Corvin repeated. “Their own metal on a body they own.”
“Ordinary iron comes off at the annual forge. An unknown seam in the Unmaking is evidence. Crane will not destroy evidence on a clerk’s word.” I knew that rule. I wanted it to be the same thing as safety.
“Until we get there,” Vaughn said.
That was the first thing out of him since the horses at midday, and the hall did not hear it, and the four of us did.
“It holds until it doesn’t, and then we’re three hundred and forty miles behind a woman who—”
“The Hunt can be on the Salt Road by first light,” Hesk said, “and it won’t buy an hour. Their relay is two days end to end and there’s no gate in the Nine Thrones that shuts against it, and we’re not allowed a boot on the thing.”
“Then we take a boot on the thing, and we take it off somebody, and I’d rather it was somebody with a title—”
“Stop. Both of you. She isn’t a plan you two get to disagree about.”
Corvin’s hands stopped dead on the table. His mouth did not, for once, and the talking would have been easier.
?
Half past eight. Corvin was still talking at the top of the hall.
I had my left palm flat on the ash while it happened, and the dead ash in that hall is cold to the hand when everything else in the room is warm and it has been cold since before the Court was the Court.
A mate-bond carries feeling and direction. It has never carried a word.
What arrived was a line of white going through my left wrist, from the inside out, deep and wet and wrong, and it was not my wrist and my wrist knew it, and under my sternum the place where she sits opened like a door in a wind.
My legs went. The flagstone came up and took my knee and then my shoulder, and the herringbone of it was against my cheek, and the rush was green and cold and smelled of the outside.
Two benches down Corvin went off the table edge with the flat of his hand pressed to his own sternum and his eyes wide open and a sound coming out of him that had no shape in it.
Vaughn went down without a sound at all.
That was the worst of the three, and I want it written that I saw it from the floor: the Warden of the Hunt on his hands and one knee on his own Court’s stones, breathing long instead of fast, making no noise whatsoever.
From knee height a hall is a forest of legs and it does not move.
Two hundred people stood where they had been standing. An overturned bench. A dropped tray with the meat still steaming on the flags beside it. The rush trodden black in a smear from the north door to the ash.
Nobody helped for a beat too long. Nobody in that room had ever seen the Hunt on the ground.
“Get up, Warden,” Hesk said. “Everyone’s watching.”
“Somebody get the Songkeeper off the floor.”
“Nobody touches him.” Corvin had his back to the table leg and his hand had not come off his own chest. “Nobody touches any of us. You’ll want to remember tomorrow that you kept your hands to yourself, all of you, because I’ll be asking.”
I did not get up.
I lay on the stone with my hand on the ash and I took a bearing, the way I have watched her take one a hundred times, and the thing in my chest had a direction on it as plain as a road.
“That’s south,” I said. “That’s the Shelf. That’s her.”
“Ilyan—”
“Three hundred and forty miles. The Shelf. She’s alive and something has gone through her wrist.”
Corvin turned his head to follow where I was pointing without any hand out to point with. Vaughn was already up on one knee with his face turned to the south wall of that hall as though the wall were a window, and I have never seen a man point at anything so hard while standing perfectly still.
“Three hundred and forty miles,” Hesk said. “You’re on the floor of this hall telling me you felt a thing three hundred and forty miles off, and I’ve been in the Hunt a long while and I’ve never heard anybody claim that with a straight face—”
“A bond doesn’t travel. That’s the whole of the mistake everybody makes about it, and it’s the mistake the Nine Thrones have been making for a thousand years.”
I got an elbow under me. The hall stayed where it was.
“There’s no distance inside the thing, so there’s nothing for distance to slow down, and whatever happens at one end is at the other end in the same instant, and it arrives as feeling and direction and never as words.
That’s why the Council cuts them out of people, and it’s the only reason they have ever bothered. ”
Three hundred and forty miles away a woman I love made a sound, and three immortals went down in the same hall in the same second, and not one of us was ashamed of it.
?
Corvin got out of my way. I got my hand onto the edge of the high table and I got up off the floor, and the edge went black under my fingers.
There is a heat in me that belongs in a forge and has no business in a hall.
I have spent all of it keeping it where it lives.
I stood in front of the Winter Court with my palms on four-hundred-year-old oak and I let it come up into my hands until the varnish went brown and lifted and the whole hall could smell it.
“I’ve been the reasonable one for three years and it hasn’t bought her a single hour.”
“She’s mine. I have never said that out loud in this hall and I’d like every one of you to have heard it.”
“Songkeeper.” Hesk was looking at the table and not at me. “Your hands.”
“I know what my hands are doing.”
“That’s the first honest sentence you’ve given anybody in this hall since I’ve known you,” Corvin said, “and I’ve been listening to you be careful for three years, and on any other evening of my life I’d have paid money to hear it.”
Nobody else answered me. Two hundred faces, and the nearest of them belonged to fae lords I have eaten with since their grandfathers were boys.
I looked at all of them and thought that if the Council would take the hall instead I would give it to them, by rank, starting at the front, and go and sleep afterward. I am putting that down because it is true and because I have decided to stop pretending about what is in me.
Vaughn came past me and went straight out of the ring of benches to the yard door.
“Every horse in the stable,” Vaughn said, to nobody who owned them. “Saddled. Now.”
Somebody said something about the Court’s own beasts and the Court’s own leave, and Vaughn did not turn around, and the man stopped talking on his own.
Corvin came up off the floor and took a signet off the table in front of the Court lord who was sitting behind it, and put it inside his coat, and did it slowly enough to be watched.
“That’s my seal.”
“It is.”
“Ash. That’s my seal, and half this hall has seen you take it.”
“You’ve said it twice and it was true both times.” Corvin’s hands were busy now, and precise. “Here’s the whole of your evening. I’ll bring it back or I won’t, and in either case you’d rather be the man who didn’t make a scene about a ring in a room where the Warden of the Hunt was on the floor.”
I went out through the buttery passage to my forge. The cracked hammer lay where I had left it. I touched the head once. Cold. Nineteen years of stored heat had run out, and it would not help her to carry the empty weight.
There is a boy who sleeps in that doorway and he was awake and watched me leave the hammer behind.
I did not ask him. I have not been sorry about anything since the flagstone came up and took my shoulder.
When I came back into the hall the noise had changed, and I was turning toward the north door before I understood why I was turning.
The north door was open onto the wind and the thaw, and there were two Council men standing in the wet of it with the rush going black around their boots, and there was a third man between them who was not wearing a sword and did not need one.
“The Songkeeper of the Winter Court is required at Vaeloth. The glass is entered on the record.”
“Required,” Corvin said. “That’s a beautiful word, that one. Is he required the way a tax is required, or required the way a man’s required to hold still while somebody with a writ goes through his—”
“He’s required the way it’s written down. He’ll walk out of this hall or he’ll be carried out of it, and the record reads the same in the morning either way.”
The relay is the fastest thing in the world and the Winter Court may not set a boot on it.
I stood in my own hall and did the arithmetic, and the arithmetic was very short.
I wanted them to have come for me. I had wanted it since I got off that floor, and what came up in me when he said required was not fear. I know what that is. I did not put it down.
Corvin said my name. Vaughn turned from the yard door and opened both his hands and did not come.
The Hand came in under the tie-beams with a glass in his hand, and it was lit, and it was lit for me.