CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
?
SEREN
Ottoline Crane said my whole name into her book without looking up, and went on writing while she said it. The white room was behind her with the doors off their pins.
“Seren Vale. The room isn’t ready. Nothing in it is.”
“It’s ready enough,” I said.
She wrote that down too. I stood in the doorway and watched the pen do it.
I had Vaughn’s blood dried into the webs of my fingers and his gray sword in my fist, and the doors were leaning against the corridor wall.
The table was cleared. One hook laid across the middle of it and nothing else.
Fae-light out of four corners. The corner nearest the drain was already dying.
“Show me the table,” I said.
“It’s cleared. There’s nothing on it but the hook, and I put the hook there myself an hour ago, which you can make of what you like.”
“I’ll make something of it,” Corvin said.
“I expect you will,” Crane said.
Neither of them looked at the other while that happened.
“No second operator,” she said. “Not since my sister. No straps either—somebody cut them and I haven’t reordered.”
Crane laid her pen down flat and squared it to the edge of the book. Then she told me the procedure the way she tells everybody, in a clerk’s words, in order.
“The hook goes to the seam at the front,” she said. “It doesn’t cut the metal, it cuts what the metal’s holding. That’s the whole of it and it takes about forty seconds.”
“How many have you done?”
“Thousands. Two hundred and six still feed the active northern circuit. I counted that roll again after your intake.”
Corvin came off the door frame with his left arm strapped flat inside his coat.
“That’s a horrible answer. I want you to know that was a horrible answer.”
“It’s the true one,” Crane said.
She squared the pen to the book again.
The drain under the table swallowed and then clicked.
“There’s a drain under it and it runs,” she said. “Don’t look at it and don’t listen to it. Everybody listens to it.”
“A full stomach would help and tomorrow would help, and neither of those is on offer, so we’ll do it now.”
I asked her the thing I had come down four floors to ask.
“Can it be run the other way?”
Crane looked up for the first time.
“Not with a living bond. The hook is made to draw out. With that graft reversed against the receiving channels—I don’t know.”
Her eyes are the color of the room she has spent forty years in, and they did not move off mine while she said it.
Corvin started then, and I want it written down that he kept it up until it was over.
“Absolutely not—no, I’m saying it out loud so it’s on somebody’s record—absolutely not, and I’m going to keep saying it the whole time you do it.”
His hand had stopped moving inside the strap, which is the worst thing about him.
“Look at you. Counting her hands like weather. There are four doors out of this floor and I’ve got three of them, and I’d have the fourth if somebody hadn’t taken my knives—”
“You’ve got no knives and one arm,” I said, “and I’ve got a sword I can’t lift past my shoulder. We’re doing this.”
“We’re doing this. Listen to her. We’re doing this, she says, like it’s a cart we’re pushing.”
He turned on Ilyan, who had come down the corridor behind us with one hand pressed flat under his own sternum, which is how he moves now.
“Ilyan. You’ve been through it, tell her what it’s like, tell her the part you haven’t told anybody—”
“It’s like a door closing in a house you thought was yours.”
Ilyan said that to the floor and not to me.
“That’s not helping. That’s the opposite of helping.”
“Crane. Ottoline Crane,” Corvin said. “You’ve had nineteen years of my filing and I’ve had none of yours, and here we both are in a room with a drain in it.”
“Here we both are,” Crane said, and wrote.
Ilyan came the rest of the way in. He asked it the way he asks things, which is quietly and already knowing the answer.
“And what happens to you if it takes?”
“Then you all learn to live with me the way we’re going to live with Bel.”
“Bel isn’t an argument,” Ilyan said. “Bel is a thing you’re afraid of.”
“He’s both. That’s why I’m using him.”
My thumb went across my own ruined knuckles and I made it stop.
I did not put it to the three of them. I want that on the record next to Corvin’s part. I took the decision out of their hands in a room with no straps in it and I did not ask one of them first.
Vaughn stood against the wall with both forearms bound off above the wrist and his shoulders back, and he had not sat down since the Thronehall.
“I can’t stop you. I’m not going to.”
It cost him more than the table had.
?
I took the two arcs out of the inside of my coat and fitted them around my throat, standing on the white room’s floor, in front of Vaughn and Corvin and Ilyan and Crane.
My thumb found the warm seam, the one two men put into it before I had ever seen either of their faces, and I turned it to the front where it belongs.
Ilyan’s hand came up and I did not let it get there.
“Don’t touch it. I put it on.”
It is mine. It has been mine since I was nine years old and not one clerk in that city had ever once written it down that way.
The cut edges met. The graft remembered the shape it had held for nineteen years and drew them shut, without any sound, and the whole front of my throat went warm across the old bruise, and my shoulders came down an inch before I had told them to.
“It’s still warm,” Ilyan said.
“Nineteen years that thing’s been on you and you’re the one putting it back,” Corvin said. “I want it noted that I hate this.”
“You’ll want your hair off the seam,” Crane said. “It catches.”
“It’s short.”
“Lie down, then,” Crane said.
I lay back. The stone of the table came through my shirt the whole length of my spine.
I laid the sword along the table edge where I could reach it without turning my head.
Vaughn came to the head of the table. He cannot hold anything now. He put his mouth at my ear instead.
“You come back. You come back to me.”
His breath came in at my ear and it was the only warm thing above that table.
“Yes.”
That was everything I had to give him, and he took it.
Corvin got his good hand into my hair at the crown and held it there and talked at me on purpose, because a room that is listening to him is a room I am not alone in.
“You’re getting up off that table,” Corvin said. “You’re going to complain about my coat, and I’m going to argue, and you’re going to win. I’d like you thinking about how tedious I’m going to be when we get home.”
“The tree. The fire. You said you were keeping all three of us. I’m holding you to that.”
I put my eyes on his face and left them there.
“Hold still. Your eyes came to my face by themselves and they’re not stupid. Best thing in this room, and you know it.”
“I’m going to open the seam now,” Crane said. “Tell me when your shoulders are flat.”
“Flat.”
My shoulders were not flat. I put them flat.
I wanted them to understand why I had to do this. Not because they had paid for me. Because Bel was still below us, and Nettle could not spend her life waiting to be next. There had to be something beyond another rescue.
Crane put the hook to the seam.
The metal did not cut.
The hook came off the seam and went back to it and came off again, and Crane’s hand stopped where it was.
“Severance metal cannot be severed twice. It can only give back,” Ilyan said from the wall, flat, the way a smith says what a metal does.
“The other face of the seam,” I said.
Ilyan nodded. “What I showed you in the forge.”
Crane put her fingers beneath the edge and turned the hook. A narrow line on the table went warm.
“Don’t draw against her body,” Ilyan said. “Seat the return against the receiving channel.”
“The channel goes to the vaults,” Crane said.
“To the thrones,” I said. “I felt it in his hall.”
She did not correct me. Her hand shook once before she found the angle.
Two hundred and six names on a roll that never changed its length. Bel out, Nettle in. A man who said bonded half-bloods died at forty, while something underneath his floor spent their lives keeping the light on.
“That’s why your figures come out right,” I said. “You’ve been measuring people while you drain them.”
Crane kept the hook where it was. “The tables measure what reaches them. They do not put the years back.”
The hook went the other way. I felt the seam open outward under Crane’s hand, not a cut, a mouth, and then the collar stopped being a thing that was being taken from and started being a thing that took.
It pulled. It pulled from the front of my throat down through my chest and out, four hundred feet down a corridor with a shallow channel in the floor of it, and the channel ran the wrong way.
“The seam’s opening outward, it’s opening the wrong way, I don’t have a word for—”
“That’s the failure,” Crane said. “That’s the second failure. I’m writing it down.”
She was writing. That is what Crane does when she is frightened, and I had never seen her frightened before.
“It’s going the wrong way down the floor,” she said. “The channel runs to the drain and it’s running away from it.”
“Two hundred and six living anchors on that circuit. If it’s giving back, it’s emptying the current roll—and the stores behind it.”
“To who?” I said.
“To whoever’s still alive to take it.”
I went looking for the ends.
Not across thirty miles of country. Along the thing already passing through me. It was spoor without ground under it, a thousand traces tangled into one warm current. I knew how to separate a frightened person from the people who had walked over her tracks. I had spent my life doing it.
Bel was in there. I knew the struck-match hurt of him. There was only a little left, worn almost through. I opened my hand instead of closing it.
The thread moved out of me toward its own body.
Then another. Then too many to count.
The empty place where Ilyan had been tried to close around them. If I kept what came through, I might have filled it. I might have made myself warm enough never to be afraid again.
That was what the Nine had done.
I let the next thread go.