CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
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SEREN
A turnkey had his hand in the back of my shirt when I came off the last step of the under-cell stair onto raw rock with nothing on my feet, and out of the dark on the lower run a voice said my name. The man on the lower run had not said my name since the cart took him.
“Seren.”
For one second it was Ilyan, and everything under my sternum went toward it at once.
It was not Ilyan.
“Boots off at the step. It’s the procedure, it isn’t a punishment.”
“It’s both. You can write down that it’s both.”
“I’ll write down that you were compliant,” the turnkey said, “which is the kind thing to write, so let’s both enjoy it.”
“Where do they go?”
“On the shelf. Paired, labeled, and nobody’s ever lost a pair out of my block.” He said it the way a man says a thing he is proud of. “I’ve been on this stair a long while.”
“And when they aren’t claimed?”
“They get claimed.”
They had taken them off me at the stair-head without asking and set them on a shelf with other people’s, paired and neat, and I could see mine from where I stood.
Rock at six in the morning takes the skin off a heel in four steps and I had eleven steps to walk.
The lower run gave six by nine to a cell, doors of pale metal, a drip channel worn along one wall, deepest at our end. I breathed water that had come past everybody above us first.
They walked me to an open door and stopped.
I found him with my nose before my eyes were any use at all.
I can stand thirty miles off a man in a crosswind and tell you what he has eaten, what he is frightened of, and whether the thing he is riding is sound.
At six feet, through an open door, in still air, with nothing between us, I got wet rock and old wool and a body.
Under that, where the rest of a person keeps, there was nothing.
“There’s nothing coming off you. Do you understand what I’m telling you? I can smell a mate-bond dying at thirty miles and there’s nothing coming off you at all.”
He did not answer.
A bond going out leaves a trail a tracker can follow across a county. The cell put out nothing, and the seam of fae-light under the next door did not reach in far enough to show me why.
“Bel. Bel Arrowood. Look at me.”
He had his back to the door and his face to the wall. He was sitting with his knees up and he had his own left elbow held in his right hand, the way a man holds something that belongs to him and might get taken.
The drip found the channel. He turned his head toward it a beat after it happened, the way an old dog does, and then turned it back.
His collar was Council iron, his own, cut through at the front and closed again after, because a collar is a record, and a record has to keep.
“They’ve had you in the white room.”
Nothing.
“There’s a stool in there. Exactly one. She told me why.”
Nothing.
So I gave him the kennels, because that is what we have.
“Rhodry’s knees went again in the spring. He blamed the frost. He blamed the frost all spring and then he blamed the hook rail, and then he had the boys move the hook rail.”
Nothing.
“You caught me at that rail when we were fourteen. I bled on the tally sheets and he made you scrape the stained sheet clean. You worked at it till dark, and told me afterward you liked a quiet job.”
Nothing.
“Tally’s bitch dropped nine and he kept the runt and named it after you, and it’s the worst dog in the north, and he won’t hear a word said against it.”
The drip found the channel again.
“It bites him. He says that’s loyalty in a young dog and the rest of us don’t understand dogs.”
“Bel, if you can hear me at all, and you can, because I watched your head come round on that drip—”
I ran out and started again.
“The stalls smell the same. Wet leather, and the barley they burn when the rats get in. I thought I’d never miss any of it and I’ve had three nights down here and I’d take a lungful of it over—”
I stopped and let the corridor have it.
“Say something rude. That’s the whole of what I want. You’ve been rude to me since we were both nine and you never needed a reason for it.”
Bel Arrowood laughed at everything. He laughed when he was hurt and he laughed at Rhodry’s knees for our whole lives, and he laughed at me, constantly, from the day we were both nine and the same height.
He sat with his face to the wall while I told him about the dog.
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The first turnkey stepped into the cell and picked up Bel’s water can off the floor.
“That’s his.”
“It’s the block’s.”
“He isn’t going to argue with you about it. That’s the reason you’re doing it and we both know that’s the reason.”
“Then it’s not wasted, is it,” he said, and drank it standing over Bel, and set the can back down where he had found it.
He did that because Bel would not object, and every man in that corridor knew it before he did it.
The second one took my left wrist. He did not ask for it. There was no version of that morning where I did not give it.
The rope burn was open to the meat across the front of my wrist, and he set his thumb in it and turned my hand for the cord. I kept talking to Bel through that, and Bel kept his face to the wall, and neither of us stopped.
“Tell me if I’m wrong,” I said, to the turnkey with my wrist in his hand. “You want to know what’s above us.”
“Do we.”
“You do. There’s a man on the ninth who’s going to be a problem for you and there’s a child on the fourth who’s gone quiet, and by tomorrow morning neither of those is going to be my fault.”
“Go on, then.”
The cord went slack in his hand. He kept his thumb where it was and did not ask for the rest.
“Forty stalls above you, eleven of them full, and there’s a child in the fourth one from the stair. She’s been crying and she stopped, which is worse.”
The cord stopped moving.
“There’s a man in the ninth with a chest wound going bad, and you’ll smell that yourselves by tomorrow. And there’s a stag in the block, up two levels, and I’d stop pretending you have a stag in the block.”
“The fourth one. Again.”
“Fourth from the stair, left side. She’s twelve and she’s stopped, and a child who has stopped is a child somebody has already been in with.”
The first turnkey came out, got his tablet, and wrote the cell numbers down.
“Book her as told,” he said, over my head, to the other one. “She’s the fourth mark and she doesn’t need telling twice.”
Nobody showed me the page.
That was what it cost. I wanted them to know what I was, and now the Council had another piece of me in writing before the next morning’s work. I had meant to frighten two men. I had given their office a record.
I have never been able to stop myself doing that.
Then the corridor was quiet and I stood on the rock and looked at Bel Arrowood holding his own elbow.
Here it is.
For one sick second I wanted the doorway empty. I could not look at him and keep believing this only happened to people I might still save.
And when he said my name, what went through me came down all at once and stayed down.
He said my name, and I remembered him at nine, breaking a heel of bread with both thumbs so I would not see which half was larger. I had been trying to find the man I remembered. He was still trying to find me.
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Ilyan’s whisper came down the stair the way it comes, because these grilles carry a whisper the whole length of a block and swallow a shout whole.
“And are you still there? That’s all I want. Are you still down there?”
Nine hundred winters of a voice, and it arrived the size of a moth.
I had not answered him since midnight. He had told me what the metal around my throat used to be and whose it was, and I had put my back against the door and said nothing for six hours, and he had gone on saying my name into stone anyway, at intervals, like a man ringing a bell in fog.
“I’m here. I’m not talking to you yet.”
Stone does not carry a breath out. It carried his anyway.
“And is the one on the left still warm? Don’t answer that if you don’t want to.”
He had asked it the way he asks everything, which is as a question he has the answer to already, and I stood on the rock with my mouth shut and let him have it.
That was the first thing that had been warm since the stair, and I noticed it, and I want that written down somewhere too.
Then I turned back to Bel.
I put my hand flat under my own breasts, over the bone, where the marks are.
Three of them, clustered left of my breastbone: Vaughn on the right of the cluster, Corvin beside him, Ilyan below. I knew them by weight before I knew them by place.
I did that before I had decided anything. The hand went first and the rest came after.
“Three of them. Right here, under the bone. I can tell them apart in the dark and I have.”
Bel’s shoulder did not move.
The one on the right sat heavy and low and had not shifted since the horn. The left one talked. The lower one was warm and told me nothing, and it was the one I had turned my back to all night, and it pulled hardest under my hand.
“They lied to me for nineteen years,” I said. “I don’t know how to forgive that yet. I still want them. You’d have said those two things could both be true, and made me hate how sensible you were.”
Bel held his elbow.
“You’d have said it out loud and I’d have hit you for saying it and you’d have been right anyway. You’re not saying anything, so I’ll do both halves. I want them. I want all three of them, I knew what they’d done before that sentence came out of me, and it came out of me regardless.”
I know how that sounds. I heard it come out of me on raw rock in a cell block with a severed man in front of me, and I let it stand.
I had been saved without being told. Bel had been taken without being asked. Neither of us had ever been allowed to name the price. I meant to get us both out before anybody decided what either of us ought to be grateful for.
My hand stayed where it was. I did not take it away, and nobody in that corridor was going to make me.
“What do you think you can do about any of it?” the second turnkey said.
“Right now? Nothing. Ask me on the other side of that door.”
“There’s no other side of that door for you.”
“There’s a side I’m on and a side I’m not on, and about two inches of pale metal in between. That’s all a door has ever been.”
He worked on that for a while and could not find anywhere to put it.
At the stair-head a clerk was chalking the morning’s severance order on the board, and I cannot read, and I do not need to. I can count. There were nine doors listed and mine was the fourth mark down, and a fourth mark is a fourth mark whatever the letters beside it say.
“That’s your time,” the first turnkey said. “Up the stair.”
“One more thing and then I’ll walk up it myself.”
“You’ll walk either way.”
“I’ll walk either way,” I said. “One of those is cheaper for you.”
They started walking me back.
I got my heels dug in on the rock for one more breath and I used it.
“I’m coming back for you, Bel Arrowood. You don’t have to say anything to earn that.”
Where I come from you give a person the whole of their name when you mean it. I have watched that yard go quiet for it with him standing in it.
The drip found the channel. Somewhere above us a door went and somebody shouted and the stone ate it.
He did not move and he did not speak, and the turnkey put a hand between my shoulder blades, and I turned to go, because there was nothing left to stand there for.
“Don’t,” Bel said, with his face still to the wall, and that was the second word.