CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
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SEREN
Sunday was almost over when the turnkeys brought someone into the cell beside mine. I had been back from the second failed attempt since noon. I counted the bolts and waited for the steps to go.
“Seren.” One word, at some hour of the night I could not have put a number on.
The voice came through the pale metal grille in my door and found me in the corner where two walls meet, my back in the angle of them and the drip channel running past my heel.
I knew the voice. I could not smell the man. That was how I knew it was Ilyan.
Something under my sternum turned over and I had no part in it, and my face went hot in a cell with no light in it at all.
Under the prison linen my nipples drew tight. There was nobody in the block to see it, and I hated that worse than I hated the rock.
“Again. Say my name again—I want to know which wall you’re in.”
“Seren.”
It came off the wall on my left, low down.
“You’re the next cell over,” I said. “Same wall as the channel. Your voice arrives a foot off the floor, so you’re sitting on the ground with your back against it.”
“I’m on the ground,” Ilyan said. “You haven’t lost a thing.”
I opened my nose on the whole block, slow, the way I take a wind coming off a ridge.
Nettle, two doors up, twelve years old, breathing through her mouth the way she does when she has been crying and has stopped.
Wet wool in her cell. A turnkey at the stair-head who’d eaten mutton and hadn’t washed after it.
Below us, low and to the right, one man breathing slow and even who hadn’t answered a single thing all night.
Forty doors in the block, and I had every one of them in three breaths.
And one rock wall from my shoulder there was a hole in the world where a man should have been.
Three years of putting my face into every wind between Ravensgate and the Gullet. I have followed a white stag’s hoofprints across open snow and lost him when the wind covered them.
“I’ve got a child’s wet wool and a turnkey’s dinner and a man two floors down who won’t talk,” I said. “Off you I’ve got nothing. You’re a hole in my nose.”
“I know what I am,” Ilyan said. “You don’t have to keep proving it to me.”
The rock took his voice and gave it back a half-beat late, so that he sounded further off than a wall.
“And your wrist. The left one. Is it still open?”
The rope had gone through to the meat at intake. The dressing had been changed after the first attempt, but the new wrap was stiff with blood.
“It’s open,” I said. “Wrist to the base of the thumb. Weeping, no heat in it yet. Ask me tomorrow.”
“I’ll ask you tomorrow,” he said, and he meant it, and that is the whole trouble with him.
The air in the cell was air I’d breathed twice already, and it tasted like licking a wall.
“They took me at Hollow Ash,” Ilyan said. “In the hall. The glass read the completed thread on me. I went with them because their relay could bring me here before any road of ours.”
“They changed horses every twelve miles the whole way. Two nights, and I never stood up in that cart.”
“That’s the Council’s relay,” I said. “It doesn’t stop and it doesn’t care what it kills getting here.”
“No. It doesn’t.”
“The Hunt’s on the Warden’s relay. That’s a slower road, and it’s the only one he’s got.”
I put that down between us like a stone set on a map. There are men on it who don’t know which door I am behind, and the road is not here.
“Why can’t I find you?” I said. “I can put a dead fox under a foot of snow at thirty miles. I’ve never had you. Never once in three years, and you’ve let me try in front of witnesses.”
“You cannot find me because half of what I am went into the forge with it.”
“With what? Half of what you’re made of went in with what, Ilyan?”
He didn’t answer that. A silence carries down these grilles better than a whisper does, and I sat in his and got nothing.
Then a bolt went back up the corridor, and boots came down it, and a key turned in my own door.
The grille swung in over the sill. A hand came through and lifted the blanket off the rock, and went out, and came back for the water can, and the shutter dropped. Nobody said one word while it was being done.
They strip a cell the night before the procedure. I have watched it done to other people from the safe side of a yard, with a leash on my belt and my mouth shut.
“That’s for the morning, then,” I said to the door. “You couldn’t have left me the can.”
The boots went away up the stair and left the corridor to the drip.
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I sat on the floor of that cell with nothing left in it except me, Ilyan on the other side of the door, and the thing on my throat, and the thing on my throat was warm.
It has been warm since I was nine. One finger wide, one pale seam across the front, and it does not come off. Severance metal burns a full-blood fae. It has never burned me.
“What is it, Ilyan? What’s on my throat?”
The drip found the channel. It found it again.
“Nineteen years, Seren.”
“Don’t do that,” I said. “Don’t hand me a number and leave me standing in it.”
“I’m giving you the when first, because you’ll want the when. Once you’ve got the rest of it you won’t be able to hear anything else.”
Under the door there was a blue seam of light and nothing else in the world.
“We made it. Vaughn and I. Nineteen years ago, before you had ever seen our faces.”
The drip found the channel.
My hands came open on my knees. I heard myself take a breath and lose it and have to take it a second time, and I didn’t answer him.
“You don’t put a forge on a living thing,” I said. “You told me that in your forge the winter I was twenty-five, and I believed you.”
“And I did it twice in one night, on two men who were standing up, and I’ve never said it out loud until this wall.”
“Two,” I said.
“I had one hand in the metal and the other flat on Vaughn’s chest, and he never made a sound the whole time, and when it came out of him he just—”
He stopped there. I let him stop.
“You asked me what went into the forge with it,” Ilyan said. “I did. The half of me a nose like yours could have found. That’s why I’m a hole to you, and I’ve been a hole to you since the night I met you.”
“Your arm.”
“My arm. It’s from that night and nothing else.”
“And the healing?”
“What I had left could still quiet a fever. The hammer stored what the forge could spare. I stretched it for nineteen years. Its core failed before we went south.”
“Vaughn’s hand.”
“Yes. I knew why I couldn’t close it. I let you think I didn’t.”
“The left one. Wrist to elbow. You told me a bar rolled on you and you’d been slow that day.”
“A bar didn’t roll,” Ilyan said. “I had that arm in it to the elbow, holding the shape while it took, and I couldn’t let go until it was finished, and it wasn’t quick.”
I have had that scar under my nose for three years and read it as an old accident in a hot room. It’s one night, and it has been one night the whole time I have known him.
“There was a glass out on the villages that autumn,” he said. “A glass doesn’t look for a bond. It looks for the room to keep one in. You had room for three at nine years old.”
“Room for three.” I said it to the dark and it sounded like somebody else’s life. “I hadn’t met one of you.”
“There’s a quota roll for Cold Harrow with your mother’s house on it,” Ilyan said. “A half-blood child carrying that much room lights off a roll like a struck match. Any Council man on that green would have had you inside the hour.”
“So what’s a collar make me read as?”
“Dull. Half-blood, empty, holds nothing, not worth the cart fare south. That’s all we asked the metal to do and it’s all it’s ever done.”
I sat and looked at a blue seam under a door and thought about a girl on a green with wet boots.
“They found me at nine,” I said.
“They found you at nine. We didn’t get there first.”
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“There’s one more thing in this,” Ilyan said, with his mouth close to the grille in the cell door. “You’re going to hate the shape of it. I’m telling you in here, tonight, because in here nobody can get at you for knowing it.”
“Then tell me. I’m not going to like anything about tonight.”
“Corvin brought us your name. He filed a writ on the child and buried it before another claim could be entered, and he’s stood in front of you for three years and said nothing.”
The rock behind me was rough enough to take skin off a shoulder, and I put my shoulder into it and held it there.
Twice in three years a seeker-glass has come down a line of trackers and slid off me like water off a rail. Both times Corvin was standing at the end of that line, and both times he let a breath go that he never explained to anybody, and I put it down to the cold.
“He keeps his own ledgers,” I said. “Eleven hundred winters in his own hand, every hour of it accounted for. I’ve had that book open in my lap. There’s a place in it where the years go quiet, and I turned the page and thought the ink had run.”
“It didn’t run,” Ilyan said.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think it did.”
“So the kennel,” I said. “The leash. The shed. Every hour of me being nobody’s. That was the three of you, keeping me.”
“Yes. That’s the whole of it. We were responsible for keeping a child alive before you knew our faces. That gave us no right to keep the woman ignorant.”
“Who paid Rhodry?”
“I did. From the forge account. A courier took the first instruction under Vaughn’s seal; the payment was entered as collar maintenance after that.
Rhodry was told to certify the work and leave the smith’s witness blank.
Corvin knew I had arranged a cover. He did not know which account, or what I put into the metal. ”
I pressed my shoulder harder into the rock. There had never been a stranger hiding behind that empty column. Only the people I already knew.
“You could’ve told me. Any night in three years, any one of you could’ve—”
Bolts, up the corridor. Two sets of boots, and between them a lighter, quicker step that stopped and started and stopped again.
They walked Nettle past my door. I got off the rock and got my face to the grille and there was a hand on the shutter before I had my eye to the gap.
“Seren—”
“Face the wall. She’s not yours tonight.”
I did not get one word back to her. Twelve years old, going up a stair at midnight, and all she got from the best tracker alive was the sound of a woman breathing on the other side of a piece of metal.
The boots went. The block closed over the place where she had been standing.
“Seren,” Ilyan said.
“I’m here,” I said, with my forehead on the metal.
“And when did you last eat? Don’t lie to me through a wall. It’s the one place I can hear it.”
“Yesterday after the white room,” I said. “Half a loaf. I kept most of it.”
“Try again. That’s not an answer and you know it isn’t.”
“Sunday’s a bad day for the kitchen.”
“Seren.”
“Nothing since they brought me down tonight.” My thumb stopped across my knuckles. “I couldn’t swallow the supper. I tried.”
“You’ve never got one past me.”
“Nine hundred winters of craft,” I said, “and you made me a necklace.”
He laughed. It came through the rock as a shape more than a sound, and I felt it land where the bonds sit, whole and intact and no use to me in here.
The grilles of our doors were set close to the dividing pier. With my shoulder against mine and his arm stretched through the next, there was less than a hand’s width between our fingers.
“Give me the wrist. The left one. Through the bars, and don’t argue with a man in a box.”
His arm came out of his own grille and mine came out of me. His fingers came up at me from underneath, never down across my throat from above, the way each of the three learned to reach me after the year I stopped being able to stand a hand near my jaw.
His hand closed around the ruined wrist, under the burn, on the good skin, and it was the first warm thing that had touched me since the white room.
“It’s the only warm thing in this building and you know it.”
“I know it. It’s yours as long as I’ve got an arm.”
I held on. And with his hand in mine and my mouth two inches off cold metal I thought the thing I am never going to say to anybody living.
I wanted him to understand what nineteen years had cost me. Not to explain it back to me. To feel the winters, the hooks, the times I had thought nobody would come if I vanished. I held his warm hand and wanted him hurt by the truth of it.
Then I felt how carefully he was keeping his thumb off my wound. Knowing what he had done did not take away what he was doing. It made holding him harder.
The Winter Court is nine hundred miles of frost and I was never anybody in it. Every worthless hour of that was theirs. They built it, and they hid me inside it, and they stood and watched me live in it, and they let me believe I was nothing, because nothing is the one thing a glass cannot see.
“I would save that child again,” Ilyan said. “I would not leave you asking at the forge. Those are two different things, and I used one to excuse the other.”
I sat with that. The frost was in the rock by then and the rock was in my back.
“Whose was it?”
“What?”
“The metal.” I had his knuckles under my thumb and I stopped moving it. “Nobody forges severance metal out of a hill. It comes out of somebody. Who did it come out of?”
The drip found the channel. Two floors down, the man who doesn’t answer went on not answering.
“She was his,” Ilyan said. “Four hundred years ago the Council cut her out of him, and what they left of her has been on your throat since you were nine.”