CHAPTER FORTY
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ILYAN
“Ilyan. Sit down before you fall down.” Evening of the same day, and the room was warm for once.
Seren said my name from the doorway before she said anything else. She does that, and nobody has ever told her she does it, and I am not going to be the one who does.
I had my forehead on the glass. Real glass, in a south wall, in a requisitioned upper room above the Shelf, with the thaw running down the outside of it in sheets.
“The glass is cold,” I said. “And I am sitting. This is a sill, and I’m on it, and it’s holding.”
“It’s a ledge, and you knew that when you sat down on it.”
All evening the snow had been letting go off the roofs of Vaeloth, one slab at a time, and every one of them landed somewhere in the city and nobody went to look. The thaw made more noise than the assault had made.
She came across the boards. I had to look for her with my eyes, the way anybody in that room had to look for anybody.
“You’re holding a cup,” she said.
“I am.”
“It’s been cold for an hour. I watched you not drink it from the door.”
My hand had gone out for that cup the way it went out all day for lamp glass and stove. The hole under my sternum wanted warm things held past the point where the warmth was gone, and then it wanted the next one.
I had done it eleven times in that room since noon. I had counted, because counting is what is left when the other thing is gone.
Seren put the back of her hand against my jaw.
That is mine. That is a thing I have done to her at gates and in doorways since she was twenty-five, and she had it off me and never said so, and I felt my whole chest try to answer her out of a room that had nothing in it.
“Your hands are cold,” I said.
“Everything’s cold. It’s a city made of stone with the roof coming off it.”
“And is this what it was like for you? Those three years, with a hole in it?”
“Mine had something in it. That’s the difference.” She took the cup out of my hands and set it on the sill. “Mine was full of three men I wasn’t allowed to have. That’s not a hole. That’s a locked room.”
Corvin was on the table by the lamp with his left arm strapped flat across him and a sheet of somebody else’s paper on his knee.
“Eight Courts, one law, no Council, and a Warden who can’t sign his own name—I’ve had better weeks and I’ve had worse centuries.”
“Corvin signs,” Vaughn said. “I say the words.”
“That’s what I told them.”
Seren turned around. “Told who?”
“Their outriders have asked for terms. I drafted four lines. Your name belongs at the head, but it’s not there yet.” Corvin held the unsealed page where Seren could see the blank. “I thought you might enjoy disagreeing with me before I commit us to an international incident.”
“You left my name off.”
“This time,” Corvin said. “Read to you first. Changed if you say so. Signed after.”
“What terms.”
“The Law’s struck. The severance halls close. The instruments are surrendered. The records become public evidence, not titles to bodies.” Corvin turned the page on his knee. “Four lines. We burn the claims after people have their own histories in their hands. You may improve it.”
Nobody spoke for a moment. The lamp was ordinary oil behind blue glass, carried up from a kitchen. The old fae-light had died with the thrones. A brazier outside the door gave us what warmth the room had.
Bel Arrowood woke up in the corner under three coats.
“Warmer,” Bel said.
“It isn’t,” Nettle told him. “You’re just under three coats. There’s no fire in here. They used to heat the floor. Now somebody has to carry coals like everybody else.”
Bel shut his eyes again.
“He never said warm,” Nettle told the room, and nobody in it. “He said warmer. That’s a different word and he went and picked it out of all the words there are.”
Somebody came up the stair fast and stopped outside the door and did not knock, and Corvin was off the table before the boots had finished.
“Gate,” said Corvin. “Outriders on the shelf road. That’s the first of them, and the first of them is never the one you have to worry about, and I’ve been wrong about that twice.”
“How many?” Nettle said.
“Ask me in the morning. I’ll have counted them by then, and I’ll lie to you about the number, and you’ll know I’m doing it because you always...”
He stopped, because Vaughn had turned his head toward the door and not his body, which in that man is a whole sentence.
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“I’m still carrying somebody,” Seren said. The room had gone quiet for it.
She said it to me. Vaughn was three feet away and Corvin was at the door, and she turned her head and put it into my face, and my hands went out for the cold cup again before I stopped them.
“And do you know whose it is?”
“I’ve known since the stair.”
I have a lifetime of hearing what does not fit inside people. I could not hear this. There is no ear left in me for it, which is the joke, and I have had a long time now to think about whether it is funny.
“And will it take something out of you? Giving it back.”
“I don’t know.”
“You always know. You know the wind off a ridge thirty miles out.”
“I know spoor,” Seren said. “This isn’t spoor.
It’s got no weather on it.” She put both hands flat on her own coat front.
“Something goes out of me every time one of them leaves. I gave Crane her sister’s part.
The others went through me faster than I could count.
I don’t know what’s left in the jar, Ilyan, and I’m not going to stand here and tell you a number to make your face better. ”
“And that’s an answer.”
“It’s a bad one.”
“It’s the true one. You’ve never handed me a soft one and I’d have known.”
We did it on the floor by the hearth that has never had a fire in it, because the stone no longer heated itself, and because the floor was the only place I could be that I could not fall off.
She put her palm flat under my sternum, slightly left.
“Is this going to hurt you?”
“You’ve asked me that twice.”
“And you haven’t answered it once.”
“It’ll hurt me,” she said. “Everything today has. Stop asking and open your mouth and breathe out.”
It does not come in as light. Nobody tells you that either.
It came in as weight, the way a thing with mass comes into a room standing open. The room took the load. The boards under the room took it. Every part of me that had been holding a space in the shape of a door found out at once what it had been doing.
It arrived. It was mine. It was the thread that had opened three years ago and completed in the oak. It had been cut through Seren in the white room; I had fallen four floors below, with a clerk recording the hour.
And there was not enough of it.
I knew that before it was halfway in. It came in and it kept not filling, and I could feel where it stopped, and I could feel her hand shaking against my shirt because she could feel where it stopped too.
“There isn’t enough of it,” Seren said.
“And if there isn’t?”
“Ilyan—”
“Would you take it first? Before I do.”
I did not ask her whether she wanted that. I had spent the whole of it telling myself I gave more than I took, and I did it to her, on a borrowed floor, in front of two other men.
Here is why. I have never once been able to put it into a sentence with a mouth, and I am putting it here.
I have been the one who is left. I was left when the forge burn happened, and I was left after it, and I have spent nine hundred years being the man on his feet at the end of a room.
If it went into her with nothing left over, then she was full and I was upright, and I know how to do that one. I looked for the other way in me and found none.
So I pushed it through.
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I went down. There is no better way to put it. My knees went and my shoulder took the hearth stone and the room came apart into pieces of lamplight and boards, and I heard Seren say my name.
Seren got under my arm. Corvin came off the table with one arm strapped and she put her shoulder in his chest and stopped him.
“Don’t move,” she said. “I’ve got you. Ilyan. I’ve got you, and I’m not putting you down.”
“You’ll drop him,” Corvin said. “You’re ten stone of tracker and he’s a stag.”
“Then I’ll drop him. He’ll be dropped by me.”
“He gave it away.” Corvin had stopped dead where she had put him. “He gave it—of course he did, he’s been giving things away since before I—”
He did not finish it. For once he let the unfinished sentence stay unfinished, and I would like it recorded that I was on the floor for it.
“It came back,” Vaughn said.
He was standing over both of us with his forearms bound to the elbow and his hands gone, and he said the three words and did not say any more of them.
Then he said, to the room, in the flat way he has: “The Courts come up the road tomorrow. We meet them in the hall. Nobody signs anything before she’s heard it read out.”
“And if they’ve come to keep the halls open?” I said.
“Then they’ve come a long way for nothing.”
Nobody argued with him. Nobody ever has.
It came back.
I do not know how long it took, and Seren, who counts, says a hundred and ten breaths. It came back down the same road, out of her, with her hand still flat on my shirt, and it seated.
Not the old reserve. Not the whole ear with which I had heard the world. What returned was our place in each other, bruised but living. I would have to learn the smaller reach of my hands. She would not have to wonder whether I was there.
A room in a chest with nothing in it and a room in a chest with something in it are not the same organ. That is all I will say about it. The second one was heavier. My body hung off the weight, and the ache under the sternum did not go, and I understood that it was not going to.
Her hand stayed against my shirt. I put my fingers over it and felt her pulse instead of reaching for the cold cup.
“And is that better?” I asked. “Your hands aren’t cold now.”
“They’re not.” She looked down at our hands as though she had to see it to believe it.
She put her mouth on mine. Once, unhurried, with her fingers spread on the side of my throat, and she did not hurry the end of it either.
There was a twelve-year-old at the window and a hollowed man asleep under three coats, so it stopped there, and I have wanted very little in nine hundred years the way I wanted it not to.
“If you two are going to do that,” Corvin said, from across the room, “do it properly or stop making the rest of us listen.”
“Mind your own business,” said Nettle.
“That is my business. I have a professional interest. I’ve had a professional interest for three years and nobody thanks me.”
Somebody had brought bread and a hard yellow cheese up from the lower hall. I put a plate down beside her on the boards, at her left hand, where she takes things, and I did not say anything about it and neither did she.
Hesk brought a count with the food. The prisoners from the lower run were out. So was Corvin’s missing rider, bruised and furious about his horse. Pell and his wife had gone north with Sedge’s remount party. Corvin shut his eyes while the names were read, and did not turn one of them into a number.
Rhodry had brought the confiscated property up with the first prisoners. Nettle’s knife lay on top, with a strip of paper tied around the handle. She took the paper off before she put the knife in her belt.
“He gave it to me,” she said. “They can keep the label.”
She ate standing up, fast, the way she does, with the plate in her hand and her back to the wall.
“Is he crying?” Nettle said.
“Mind your business, girl,” Rhodry said.
I was. I would like that recorded too.
The thaw came off the roof above us then, the whole slab of it, and went down four stories into the street, and the boards jumped under all of us.
Seren put her head up.
She turned it to smell before she turned it to look, which she has done since she was nine years old and which I will watch her do until one of us is dead.
Then she crossed the room, and put the catch up, and pushed the window open on the first air off the Shelf that anybody in this city had let in on purpose.
“Eight companies on the lower road,” Seren said. “All inside thirty miles, and all coming here.”
“Sarn’s guests,” Corvin said. “The invitations went out before we left the north. He wanted witnesses to the harvest.”
Seren kept her eyes on the open window. “Then he can have them.”