CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
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SEREN
They moved me to the presentation wing after dark. A clerk brought a chit with the Chancellor’s seal and a cough that kept the escort looking away from his face. He said my clothes were to be restored for the Nine. The word restored sounded obscene in his mouth.
At the property rail I found the chipped bracket, the second row, the fourth peg.
My own coat. My boots. The open iron blank was still inside the left pocket; the attendants had searched it into the inventory and then left it with the coat.
I held the coat against my ribs before anyone could think of separating them.
In the fitting alcove the clerk let me put the boots on myself. He bent as though checking the hem and said, too low for the guard, “The third board doesn’t squeak here. An appalling establishment.”
I nearly fell over with one boot unlaced.
He kept coughing. He kept being a clerk. At the storeroom he sent the guard back for a different form, and the door came shut between us and the corridor.
Corvin stepped into the gap between the stacked display stands, six feet off, and said my name into the dark. An hour before midnight, in a storeroom off the presentation hall, I had him to myself at last.
“Seren. Seren. Say something, because I’ve had four hundred miles of my own voice and I’ve gone right off it.”
He said my name again when I did not answer. The voice was the one I had kept listening for through the stone.
The only light came under the gallery door in a cold blue strip, and the black glass on the south side gave it back. The room smelled of beeswax.
Stone dust whitened the toe of my unlaced boot. My throat had nothing on it. I laid my coat over a stack of packing straw, with the left pocket turned toward the wall.
The stolen coat did not fit him. Nothing had hidden the ink under his nails.
“Where’s your book?” I said.
“I burned the index. The keys to nine hundred years, and every name in it, and the last page was Rhodry’s, and I’m not sorry about one line of it.”
The flat of his hand went to his own sternum and stayed there.
“I’ve been talking since the shale cut with nobody to do it at. My mouth’s tired, and my mouth has never once been tired in eleven hundred winters.”
“Whose coat is that?” I said.
“Ah.”
“Corvin.”
“He’s in the crate. He was a clerk, he had a name, I’ve got the name now, and if you want me to feel worse about it than I do you’ll be waiting.”
The crate was the long one against the wall, packed with white stone dust, the lid on and not nailed.
Four feet from where I stood.
“Did he see you first?” I said.
“He saw a clerk from the registry with a chit and a bad cough. He was very helpful.” Corvin’s hands worked the cuff of the dead man’s coat. “There’s a viewing in the morning, they’re short-staffed for it, and I’ve never had an easier week to be somebody else in.”
“How long have you been in the building?” I said.
“Since the light came up. I walked in the front. Nobody stops a man carrying a crate.”
His fingers found the door frame on the way through and stayed while he listened. Same as every doorway.
“I’ve got Nettle. Two doors down, under a stand, with my own coat on her. I didn’t ask her and I didn’t ask you and I’d do it again.”
My hands dropped open at my sides.
“She’s twelve,” I said.
“She’s twelve and she was in the block and now she isn’t. Shout at me tomorrow. I’ll enjoy it.”
I laughed, once, and it came out broken in the middle. Corvin heard it and did not make a joke of it.
“Rhodry followed on the baggage relay with the kennel records. They wanted a witness to your intake; he made himself useful until they gave him a work coat and stopped counting him. I found him carrying firewood. He knows which door I’m sending him to.”
“Does he know I’m here?” I said.
“He knows you’re in this wing. He’s holding two horses until the signal, then he opens the under-cell stair.” Corvin turned a key over in his palm. “And I open the White Shelf gate. The chit gets me the corridor and the corridor gets me the winch house.”
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“They took Ilyan out of me this morning,” I said. “At ten.”
Corvin’s mouth kept going on winches, then caught up with the rest of him.
“It’s a direction that isn’t a direction. I used to know where he was without looking and now there’s nowhere to look.”
He said nothing for a count of three, and I listened to a man who has not stopped talking since I met him not talk.
Then he started again, fast and in the wrong order.
“Four floors. Four floors down and I signed a chit at the desk above him and I’ve walked past that stair twice tonight, and I want you to know I’d have gone down it, and it wouldn’t have worked, and I’d have gone down it—”
“I know you’d have gone,” I said.
“You don’t know. Nobody knows what I—” He stopped himself with a hand over his own mouth, which I have never seen. “There’s a thing I have to give you, and I’ve kept it from you for three years, and I’m going to do it badly.”
“Every time that glass slid off you,” Corvin said, “I have known exactly why, and I have said nothing.”
I did not move.
“It was my hand on the filing. Mine. I wrote it, I buried it, I told the other two only what they needed for the collar, and I’ve stood in front of you for three years with that in my coat.”
“Are you going to make me say the rest of it?” he said, and he wanted the answer, which he has never wanted off me before.
“No,” I said. “Don’t ask me to finish forgiving nineteen years in this room. Ilyan told me what you made. You still have to tell me why you kept it from me after I was grown.”
“Because I was afraid you would look at me and see the man who signed you over.”
“I do.”
He took that without turning it into a joke. His inked fingers lay open between us.
“I also see the man who came through that door,” I said. “You don’t get one without the other. Neither do I.”
“Then you get both. Every page I have left, in order. Even the ones you’ll hate.”
“There are no pages left.”
“I remember them.” His mouth moved, but he did not smile. “That’s the punishment I’ve been keeping for myself.”
“I had a better speech than that,” he said.
“You can give it to me at home.”
Home stopped him. His hands went still at his sides, and for once his mouth did not hurry to cover it.
“Yes,” he said at last. “At home.”
The space where Ilyan had been still hurt.
Corvin could not fill it. I did not want him to. I wanted this man, with his crooked coat and his terrible choices and his mouth that had come four hundred miles to tell me the truth badly.
I crossed the packing straw to him. His hand rose toward my face.
He came at my jaw from below, and I caught his wrist.
I moved his hand up.
“Put your hand on my throat.”
“Above the jaw.” Corvin’s voice went down into somewhere I have not heard it go. “You want it above the jaw, and I’ve spent three years coming at you from underneath like a man reaching under a hot pan. Say it.”
“Above the jaw. On the front of it. On the bruise. I want to know what it’s like when it’s one I picked.”
He put his hand flat on my bare throat.
I did not flinch. I waited to and it did not come, and what came instead was my whole spine giving up at once.
I sat on the low stand and pulled both boots off. Corvin knelt to free the lace that had caught, and I put my hand in his hair before he could make a joke of it.
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Corvin had altered the room assignment on the presentation slate.
No attendant was due before first light; the corridor guard had gone to the record house for the missing form.
There was a little time before the signal at the gate.
Not safety. Time. I pulled Corvin back when he would have gone to the door again.
The dead clerk’s coat came off him first and Corvin did not look where it landed. He took my prison linen off my shoulders and it stopped at my hips.
The cold got at my ribs and my belly at once, and I stood in it.
“Look at you. Look at your throat with nothing on it. Nineteen years of that thing and underneath it you’ve had the neck of a duchess and nobody’s ever once said so.”
His hand stayed where I had put it. The other one came up over my breasts, unhurried, and my nipples were hard in the cold before Corvin got anywhere near them.
He got his mouth on one nipple and his thumb on the other nipple, and it never stopped being words.
“Three marks under the bone,” he said. “That one’s his. That one’s the Warden’s. That one’s mine. I know which is which and I’m going to tell you every time.”
“One of them’s a scar over nothing now.”
“Then I’ll talk over the top of it.”
His mouth came back up to my throat under his own hand. His fingers went down over my stomach and my hipbone and onto my cunt, and I was wet before he got there.
My body had gone on ahead and left me standing in the dark with nothing in my hands.
“Say more,” I said.
“More. She wants more. I’ve waited three years for a woman to ask me for more of me and here we are in a cupboard.”
His fingers went through the wet of my pussy before they went anywhere else, slow, once, twice, all the way from my clit to the back of me and up again.
Two of Corvin’s fingers went into my cunt and his thumb came down on my clit, and my hips came up off the straw without asking me anything.
That is where I lost it.
I know my hand was in his hair. A crate corner was against my shoulder blade and I did not care.
I have counted the doors of every room I have walked into since I was nine, and that room could have had six men in it.
His fingers kept going in my pussy and his thumb kept working my clit and his mouth never stopped.
“You’re tight around two fingers and you’ll be a great deal worse around my cock, and I’ve thought about that in four countries.”
“Don’t stop talking,” I said. “If you stop talking I’ll start thinking.”
His mouth went back to my nipples, then down my ribs and my navel to my pussy, and he kept talking the whole way.