Soulbound by Three Beasts

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

?

SEREN

“Seren. Down here—Seren, he’s down the end, he’s been down the end the whole time.” It was still morning, eight floors under the Thronehall, on the lower prison run.

Rhodry stood halfway along the under-cell corridor with a turnkey’s lamp up in one fist and his own collar still shut on his throat.

I came at him over raw rock with blood dried brown into the creases of both my hands, and not all of it off a man who was still breathing.

A drip somewhere behind me found the channel worn along the wall, and found it again, and went on finding it while he talked.

“The doors run from the stair end, so the numbering’s off by one if you count them the way I counted, which I did, twice, and the second time I did it out loud—”

“Rhodry.”

His thumb went back and forth across the back of his collar the whole time he was speaking. He has done that since I was nine years old, and he has never known he does it.

“—and the turnkey’s dead on his own stair, so nothing’s been opened since midmorning, and I want that said plain. When somebody stands me up in a hall and asks what I did today, I want it said plain.”

He turned the lamp over, looking for the oil line, and did not find it.

“The lamp’s theirs. The oil’s low. I didn’t bring a second one down because I didn’t think, and I’ve had nineteen years of not thinking, so there it is.”

“Rhodry. Which door.”

He lifted the lamp and threw his own shadow up the rock. “End one. Left side. He’s been quiet since I got here and he was quiet before that, and you’re going in first, not me, and I’m not going to dress that up either.”

Twenty doors of pale metal down that side, and the last of them stood open no wider than my wrist on a room six feet by nine, hacked out of the rock, with no light in it at all.

My breath stopped somewhere under the collar and stayed stopped, and I was down on my heels on the wet stone and my knees did that, not me.

Bel Arrowood sat with his shoulder in the far angle and his face to the rock, his arm folded up into the grip I have known on him since we were children.

I did not touch him. I did not say his name twice.

He turned his head toward the lamp a beat after the lamp got there.

“Cold,” Bel said.

His right hand moved against his left sleeve. Two fingers working a fold, the beginning of the knot he used on wet leads. The small remnant that had passed through me had found him. It had not brought nineteen years back whole. It had brought him one movement he knew.

I let the quiet after it alone.

Nettle came as far as the door and stopped in it with both hands flat on the frame.

“Is that him? That’s him, isn’t it. He’s smaller than he was.”

“He’s been on this lower run since they cut him. Stand where he can see you and don’t crowd the door.”

“I’m not crowding it. I’m holding it open, which is different, and somebody in this building ought to hold something open.”

Rhodry came in as far as the frame behind her and no further, and the light shook on the rock because his fist was shaking.

“I signed the book. I’m after nothing off you, I just want it said where he can hear it.”

“Then louder. You’re mumbling it at the floor.”

“I signed the book!”

It came off the walls of that cell and died in the grilles.

“Every year of it. My hand, my ink, my name on the line under his. There. He heard it. That’s what I came down for, and I’ll go back up on my own legs after it.”

“You’ll go back up carrying somebody. That’s what you’ll do.”

I took the lamp out of his fist and went down the row opening doors.

Eleven of the forty were live. Two of them stood up on their own.

Nettle had the cold chisel out of the turnkey’s belt before any of us thought to look for one, and she carried it to Rhodry across the corridor holding it flat on both palms, like a plate.

“Hold the lamp, girl. Don’t watch this part.”

“Don’t watch this part?” Nettle set the lamp in against his shoulder and did not move it. “I’ll hold it. I’m not turning around. You can cut, or you can stand here arguing with a twelve-year-old about it while your hands go cold.”

“It’s not a thing for you to see.”

“I’ve seen a man’s whole face come off him this morning and nobody asked me about that. Cut, Rhodry. You’re wasting the oil.”

It took him three goes. The first slipped and opened the skin under his jaw, and the second bent the collar’s front lip outward, and on the third, with the edge braced against the door iron, the riveted seam went and the whole thing came off his neck in one piece into his hand.

He bled down the front of his coat and did not put a finger to it. He kept the cut collar in his fist, and he had it in his fist for the rest of the day.

?

Rhodry stayed with Bel while I went back up to the Unmaking’s corridor. Four hundred feet, a shallow channel in the floor, and a forge-fire at the far end. I called him when I found Crane.

I walked the channel because it was the only part of that floor that was clean.

Ottoline Crane stood at the fire with her back to the whole length of it. She has never been anywhere else in this building.

“Seren Vale. You’re holding something that isn’t yours.”

Her pen was in her hand and the roll was open on the table at her hip and the pen did not move, and I watched it not move.

“It’s your sister’s.” My hands came open at my sides. “Rhodry—come here. Stand where you can see her face.”

Rhodry came. He did not ask me why, which is the only good thing he did all day.

“There’s no procedure for this,” Crane said.

“There is now.”

“You don’t understand what you’re asking. There’s a form for a transfer and a form for a return and there has never in nine hundred years been a form for a thing coming back out of the Thrones by itself, and I’m the only person alive who’d know where to file it—”

“Then don’t file it.”

I put my palm flat on her sternum, slightly left, where a bond sits in a body, and I held it there.

Whatever the Court has told anybody about it, it is not fast. It took the length of nine breaths and I counted every one of them, and her heart went under my hand the whole time like something running downhill.

Then it was out of me and into her, and my chest was one room emptier, and the sound she made was not a word.

She got hold of the table edge. She stayed standing.

“It’s empty.”

“Yes.”

“She died of it, then.”

Crane looked at Rhodry, because Rhodry was where I had put him.

“I wrote—for forty years I wrote that she was transferred. I put the word in my own hand at every audit and set the seal on under it. There’s a line in that roll with her name and the word transferred, and I’ve read it more times than I’ve read anything else in my life.”

“I know. You read it to me.”

“I read it to you.” Her pen was still in her hand. “I wanted one other living person to have heard it. That’s all that was. I’ve had forty years alone in here with a word I wrote.”

“Now there are three of us,” I said. “You, him, and me. You don’t get to be alone in here any more, and I’m not doing that to be kind.”

I left what she said after that lying where it fell. I could have killed her at the fire and the only witness was Rhodry, where I had put him, and I have thought since about how easy the room made it.

I left her alive with it because alive with it is worse, and I picked that at her own fire with my hand warm off her sternum, and I have not been sorry about it once.

Nettle came past her with the blank in both hands.

I had taken it from my coat and given it to her. Cut for her throat, never fitted, the open ends still a finger apart. She carried it as though she meant to choose where it went.

“That one was mine,” Nettle said.

“It was.”

I put the blank in the Unmaking’s fire and watched it stop being a collar.

It went the color of the inside of a stove, and then it went soft at the seam, and then it was a bright nothing running down the fire-bed, and Nettle stood with her chin up and her hands at her sides and did not blink once.

“Is that all it does?” she said.

“That’s all it does.”

“Huh.” She put her head on one side. “I thought there’d be more to it. I thought it would go off, or scream, or—I don’t know. I’ve been frightened of that thing since the autumn and it’s gone in the time it takes to boil a pan.”

“Most things are.”

On the way past the white room door the bond-hook lay on the table where Crane had left it that morning, thin, hooked, the length of my forearm.

I took it and slid the shaft through my belt. Crane was close enough to see me do it, and she said nothing at all.

I carried it back toward the stair.

?

The Thronehall at noon had the ring broken open, the seats out of their sockets and standing crooked, and the stair-head open in the floor. Nettle was not in it, and that was the first thing I looked for.

Two hours since the snow quit. No wind to move the smoke off the city, so it sat over the roofs like something floating on water.

Aurelian Sarn was on the floor by the second socket, aged nine hundred years in a minute, and breathing. I walked past him without a word.

The last of the Nine still able to stand got up off his seat.

He came across the scarred floor at me and he was fast, and I was on the wrong side of the open stair-head with a sword in my hand I had never been trained on.

The wolf came over the top of the stair-head and took him off his feet in the air.

Black, with the gray ruff, at noon, in front of the whole Court of the Shelf.

The lost part of Vaughn’s life had come back through the current. The wolf could hold without the moon now. Its paws belonged to that shape; they did not grow his human hands back.

Vaughn Ironmere has no hands. He put his mouth on the man’s throat and closed it, and that was the end of the last of the Nine, and it took less time than the fall did.

Then he was a man again on the scarred stone, on his knees, with the bindings gone red through at both forearms where the shift had opened them.

I got there before anybody. My hands went red for the second time in one day and it was the same man’s blood both times.

I was glad. I want that written down somewhere with my name under it.

I was glad the way a body is glad of a fire, all through, with nothing in me arguing about it, and the part of me that was glad was not thinking about Bel, or Nettle, or the roll. It was thinking that a man had put himself into the air at me and there was nothing of him left on the floor.

“Wash your hands,” Vaughn said against my hair. “Not yet. Wait until I’ve looked at them.”

“They’re mine. I’ll wash them when I want to.”

“Later, then. Hesk. Bindings.”

“They’ll open again on the stair,” Hesk said, unwinding.

“Then bind them twice.”

I put my mouth at his temple where the hair was wet and stayed there while Hesk got the old wrappings off and started over.

He got up. He got up the way he does everything, once and completely, and he did not use me to do it and he did not pretend he was not leaning.

Rhodry came up out of the stair-head with Bel Arrowood on his back.

He had him high, arms hung over both shoulders, Bel’s face turned in against the side of his neck, and he carried him the whole length of that hall in front of what was left of the Court of the Shelf.

Nobody stopped him. Nobody stood up.

I walked beside him with a gray sword in one hand and the hook in the other and blood to the wrists, and every seat we went past was empty and crooked and going to stay that way.

“He’s not heavy,” Rhodry said. “That’s the thing. He’s not heavy at all. I’ve carried sacks of meal up that stair that fought me harder, and I’d like somebody to explain that to me, because I can’t.”

Corvin was on the north steps in the doorway light with his left arm strapped across him, his coat gone at one shoulder, ink still under every nail.

“There she is. There she is, and she’s brought the whole kennel up out of the floor, and one of them’s carrying the Warden’s sword, which I notice not one person in this hall has asked for back—”

“Corvin.”

“—and I want it on record, because somebody in this building ought to write something down today, that the moment we’re out of this city I’m going to lie down for a week and she can do whatever she likes with my cock, and I’d like that written on something with a seal on it.”

Bel’s head turned toward him. It came around a beat late, the way it comes around to everything now, and it came around anyway.

“He heard that,” Rhodry said. “You understand what you’ve done. That’s the first thing he’s turned his head for.”

“Then he’s got taste, and I’m the medicine, and neither of you is going to thank me for it.”

Rhodry laughed once, out of the top of his chest, like a man who had forgotten the shape of it. Bel’s mouth moved, not quite a smile, and did not last, and Rhodry’s arms came up tighter under him.

The snow in the square lay untouched and lit from nowhere, because there was no sun in it either.

Behind us, at the top of the stair, Ottoline Crane stood with both hands pressed over the empty bond beneath her sternum and her pen nowhere.

“Ottoline,” I said. “How much of a man comes off a table like that?”

Crane has never made a thing easier to hear and she did not start there. She looked at the hook in my hand before she answered.

“Seren Vale. Not all of it left you. Somebody’s still in there, and he’s owed.”

“You will give every surviving family its entry,” I said. “Out loud, with a witness. No transferred. No missing dates.”

Crane looked at the hook in my belt, then at the people on the stairs.

“Yes.”

Hesk put two riders at her door. Two more stayed with Sarn. Alive was not the same as free to begin again.