CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT #2
My back lifted off the table. Corvin’s hand stayed in my hair; Vaughn put his forehead against mine. The two living bonds held while the dead metal opened a road the hooks could not close. I did not have to own what passed through me. I only had to keep the way open.
The fae-light failed in the drain corner, and then in the corner behind Vaughn, and the room went down to two corners and then to one.
“That’s not the room,” Corvin said. “That’s the whole quarter. Every glass in this city has gone out.”
“Keep talking,” I said.
Above us the ninth bell began. Its second stroke broke in the middle. The light failed before anyone on the stair could close a door.
“I’ve never needed telling.”
He kept it. It is the only promise he has ever made me that cost him nothing.
It took most of the next hour to empty the passages beneath the room. I let the threads find their living ends. A few would not leave me: faint, damaged things, and one warmth I knew better than my own hands. I could not find their way without a body to guide them into.
Above those passages, the nine great stores were still holding. I felt their weight through the collar. The road led up.
?
We came up the under-cell stair into the Thronehall at ten in the morning with the cover thrown back on the floor behind us, Vaughn’s boots on the step under mine. I kept the seam open inward, holding the last of the current until I could reach the ring.
Me first, on my feet, collar closed, Vaughn’s sword in my hand. Vaughn behind me. Corvin behind him. Ilyan last, one hand flat under his sternum.
The ring of nine thrones was pushed out of true. Somebody had stood up in one of them for the first time since the ring was set and the whole ring had gone crooked with it.
The great north doors stood wide onto the snow, and the snow had stopped. The light came in off it flat and white, and there was no sound anywhere in that city.
Nettle was at the east wall with Rhodry’s hand on her shoulder.
“Her hands are shaking,” Nettle said.
“Leave her be, girl.”
Rhodry did not look at me while he said it. His thumb was at the back of his own collar.
The Court of the Shelf stood in its nine wedges. Nobody asked them for a lane.
“Make a lane. Now,” Hesk said from the doors.
“Nobody’s asking,” Corvin said. “Stand where you like and get walked through.”
We walked through them. They came apart in front of us the way water goes around a post and closed again behind us, and not one person in that hall put out a hand.
Sarn was at his own low table with both palms on it. There was blood on the pale metal that nobody had washed off, and it was his hall and his table and his morning.
I stopped eight feet from him with his Court behind me and the Nine seated on either side.
“You’ve come up my own stair with a sword you can’t lift and a collar you put on yourself,” Sarn said. “I’d call that theater.”
“It’s a demonstration. You’ll know which one it was by the time I’m finished.”
Then I said the rest of it to him in front of every one of them.
“You have spent nine hundred years eating what other people loved. Open your mouth.”
Four hundred people heard me. None of them moved, and the dome gave the words back half a breath late.
“Seren Vale, not like this—”
The room obeyed me whether or not he did.
It came up out of the thrones. It came up the way water comes up a shaft when something heavy goes down it, all nine at once, and the thrones let go of what they had been holding.
“Look at your wrists,” I said.
“That isn’t—”
“Look at them.”
I did not raise my voice. I have never had to.
He looked. The skin at both his wrists went first, where three stolen mate-bonds had sat, and it went the way paper goes when it is left in a window, and it kept going up his forearms and into his face while four hundred people watched.
I watched every part of it and I did not make my face do anything. I have been told since that I should not have enjoyed it. I enjoyed it, and I would stand on that floor and watch it again.
“Nine hundred and thirty,” Ilyan said.
The years had been delayed, not destroyed. They came back to Sarn in the skin of his hands and the joints of his knees. He tried to hold the table. The table took no more from anyone to help him.
Four words from the wall, and the number Aurelian Sarn has declined to say aloud for five centuries came out of his own hands instead.
The Nine had not been ruling for nine hundred years. They had been eating.
Sarn went down beside his table with his ruined wrists turned up in front of his face. He was alive. Some of the Nine were alive and some of them were moving.
My knees went, and Vaughn got his forearm across my back above the belt and held me up on it, because that is all he has left and he used it.
“She’s still standing,” Nettle said. “Rhodry, look, she’s standing.”
Ilyan came in under my jaw with his palm, from below, the way all three of them come at me, and turned my face up out of the light.
“Breathe out. It goes easier out.”
His hand was steady, and it had nothing to do with the room.
“Count it, then,” Corvin said. “You’re good at counting. Count it out loud for me.”
“I can’t. There’s too much.”
“There it goes. There it goes, north, all of it, and I can feel it in my teeth.”
What came up out of the nine seats went through me on its way north, and it was warm, and there was so much of it that I lost count.