The Craving (The Morrkai Chronicles #2)

1. The Empty Corridor

THE EMPTY CORRIDOR

Seraphine

The door stood open on an empty corridor, and I stood in the middle of my chamber and waited for the Untouched to tell me what to do.

She didn’t.

That was the first thing I learned that morning, in the grey light with the tea going cold on the window seat—Varek was gone, and the Untouched didn’t know what to do about it.

She always knew what to do. She kept a protocol folded and pressed for every circumstance the Pact could produce—every grievance, every council, every cooling framework that needed language to hold it together.

She had nothing at all for this. I reached for her the way I had reached for her ten thousand times in fifteen years, the way you reach for a railing in the dark, and my hand closed on air.

It wasn’t that I fell apart. I’ve heard people describe the moment a thing breaks them, and it wasn’t that—it was quieter, and considerably worse.

I stood in my chamber with a cold cup of tea and an open door and discovered that the woman I had spent fifteen years building had been built around a particular arrangement of the world, and the arrangement had just walked down a corridor and not come back, and she didn’t know how to stand in a room that no longer contained it.

So I closed the door myself.

It was the first thing I did. There was no one to do it for me—that was rather the point—and a door standing open is an untidiness, and I have never in my life been able to leave an untidiness alone.

The small ordinary click of it was the loudest thing I had heard since the single hard rap that had started all of this an hour before.

Then I had a session to prepare for. So I prepared for it.

? ? ?

The Emissary is not a feeling. This is the thing nobody understands about the role, and for a long time neither did I.

The Emissary is a set of decisions, made in advance, about how a body holds itself and how a voice lands and where the eyes go and what the face does with the things underneath it.

You do not feel composed. You decide to be composed, and then you execute the decision, and you keep executing it, breath by breath, for as long as the room requires.

I had fifteen years of the decision. I made it again that morning in front of the glass—spine, hands, breath, the particular stillness that reads as ease—and it held.

Of course it held. It would have held through a great deal worse than this, because that was what it had been built to do, and the only difference between this morning and a thousand mornings before it was that I could feel, now, the draught running through the architecture.

The cold spot. The place along my left side where, for thirty-eight nights, something very large and very warm had stood three strides away, and where there was now only the wall.

Zhori came in while I was pinning my hair.

She didn’t knock—Zhori never knocked. She considered knocking a thing you did for people you were performing distance with—and she didn’t say any of the things a person might come to say on a morning like this one.

She sat down on the edge of the unmade bed and watched me pin my hair, and after a while she said, “There’s a session at the second hour. ”

“I know.”

“You don’t have to be flawless in it.”

I met her eyes in the glass. “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

She held my gaze for a moment. Whatever she saw there, she didn’t argue with it—that was the thing about Zhori, the thing fifteen years had taught me to lean on without ever quite saying so: she knew the difference between the times I needed her to push and the times I needed her only to witness, and she had never once gotten it wrong.

“All right,” she said. “Then you’ll be flawless.

And I’ll be in the third row knowing you’re not, and you can fall apart at me afterward where it’s allowed. ”

“I’m not going to fall apart.”

“I know, Sera.” She stood, and on her way past she pressed her hand once to my shoulder—brief, warm, gone—and didn’t make it mean more than it meant. “That’s what I’m worried about.”

The new guard was waiting in the corridor.

He was perfectly adequate. None of it was his doing, and he performed his function without flaw; a Vordaan warrior of middle rank, broad, grey and correct, who inclined his head precisely the correct number of degrees and fell into step at the precisely correct distance.

Three strides. He even had the distance right.

He had clearly been briefed by someone thorough.

He was wrong in every way that could not be briefed.

I noticed it the way you notice a word in your own language pronounced by someone who learned it from a book—every sound in place and the whole thing somehow foreign.

His footfall was a half-beat off a rhythm I had stopped hearing because I had stopped needing to.

His stillness, when we paused at the chamber door for him to do the thing he did next, was the stillness of a man at his post, not the stillness of a man holding something carefully so it would not spill.

What he did next was check the door.

He stepped past me, professional and unhurried, and tried the bolt, and tested the frame, and satisfied himself that the Emissary’s chamber could be properly secured—which was correct, which was his job, which was very likely written in the same thorough briefing that had given him the three strides.

I stood in the corridor and watched a stranger’s hands move over the door that had stood unbolted for two weeks because the thing on the other side of it had made a bolt feel like an insult, and I said nothing, because there was nothing to say that the Emissary was permitted to say.

“Thank you,” I said instead. “That’s thorough.”

“Emissary,” he said, and inclined his head the correct number of degrees, and we went to the session.

? ? ?

I was extraordinary in it.

That is not pride—it is the most frightening fact of the whole day.

The Drath-Vorren framework had a follow-up to settle—the material terms Gorveth had needed to be seen to fight for, now to be set down in language that would hold once the heat of the emergency session had cooled.

It was delicate work. It was exactly the kind of work that goes wrong in the cooling, when everyone has agreed in principle and discovers in the particulars that they agreed to different things.

It did not go wrong. I didn’t let it.

Gorveth’s heir was there in his father’s place—a younger Morrkai, sharp-edged and watchful, carrying the specific wariness of a man who has inherited a seat he is not yet certain the room believes he deserves.

He came prepared to defend three positions.

I gave him the first before he had to ask for it, which let him spend the standing he’d been hoarding on the second, which he won, which made the third—the one that actually mattered, the one I needed—look like a concession he was granting me rather than the thing I had walked in to obtain.

He left the chamber believing he had handled me.

He had not. But he would remember that I had let him think so, and there would come a day, I judged, when I would have use for a Morrkai who owed me a debt he didn’t know he’d incurred.

I did all of it perfectly. And the entire time, in the small back room of myself where the Emissary does not go, I was listening for a footstep three strides behind me that was the wrong weight and did not belong to the right body, and finding, every time I listened, that it was still wrong, and that I was still listening anyway.

That was the part nobody saw. That was the part the role was for.

? ? ?

The tea came at the seventh hour, when I had finally run out of rooms to be perfect in.

I knew before I lifted the cup—the colour a shade too pale, the steam carrying the wrong note.

Standard issue: the common blend the kitchens brewed by the cauldron, perfectly good and entirely correct, the tea you served a person about whom you knew nothing in particular.

He had found the other one in my third week—the dark bitter variety I had mentioned once, in passing, to a kitchen aide and never again—and put it in my cup the next morning without a word, as though anyone would have thought to.

I drank the standard blend anyway. All of it.

A woman who left her tea would be a woman about whom there was something to say.

Maerath had brought it herself, which was not a thing she did, and was the only comment she made on any of it.

She set it down and looked at me a moment with those steady, unsentimental eyes that had watched four Untouched manage the Ardenna in this stronghold and missed nothing in any of them.

“Drink that while it’s hot,” she said—which was the kindest thing anyone offered me all day, because it asked nothing of me and gave me a small instruction I could obey.

Then she left, and the door stayed shut behind her.

? ? ?

I bolted it that night.

There was no reason not to. That was the thing I made myself look at, sitting on the edge of the bed with my hand on the cold iron of the bolt I hadn’t touched in two weeks.

There was no longer any reason in the world to leave it open.

The reason had a name, and a rank he no longer held, and a posting at the eastern line; and the corridor outside held a man who checked the frame and got the distance right and was wrong in every way that could not be briefed, and against that corridor a bolt was simply sensible.

Simply correct. Simply what a careful woman did.

I slid it home. The sound it made was very small.

I didn’t sleep. I hadn’t expected to.

At the second hour past midnight I gave up the pretence of it and went to the window, the way I had gone to the window the morning everything changed—except that morning the light had been coming, and this was only the deep middle of the dark, the stronghold gone quiet around me, the Vardh peaks a blacker black against the sky.

The courtyard below was empty. Everything was empty.

That seemed, at the second hour, to be the organising principle of the entire world.

And I noticed, sitting there, that my fingers had found the inside of my own wrist.

I’d stopped doing that. Somewhere around the twelfth day I had stopped, without deciding to, the way you stop bracing for a step that is no longer there—Zhori had noticed before I had, the way she noticed everything, and had said nothing, the way she said nothing about the things that mattered most. And now, two weeks later, in the dark, my fingers were pressed to my pulse without my having sent them there, taking the measure of a heartbeat the way I had been taught to take it as a girl: for information.

For management. For the data a body gives you about a state that requires handling.

The pulse was exactly where it always was.

Steady. Even. Unremarkable. The pulse of a woman who had performed a flawless day and bolted her door and would perform another flawless day in a few short hours—a body running precisely to specification, with nothing wrong in it that any healer could find.

I sat with my fingers on my own wrist in the dark and could not decide whether that was a reassurance or the most desolate thing I had ever learned about myself.

Because the Ardenna had receded. The moon had gone.

The thing that had risen in me under the blood moon and stripped away every wall I owned had withdrawn back into whatever ancient place it came from, and it had taken its excuse with it.

There was no tide in my blood now. No ancient state, no overwhelming force, nothing I could point to and say: that is why, that is what moved me, that is the thing I could not have resisted.

There was only this. Only the plain, ordinary, unremarkable pulse of a woman alone at a window at the second hour, wanting a thing she was not permitted to want, with no moon to blame for it and no protocol to manage it and no end to it that the role could see.

I had wondered, in the grey of the morning, what I was going to do.

I still had no idea. But I had, at least, learned the shape of the question by the end of that first day, and it was not the question the Emissary had been built to answer.

The Emissary asked, what does the situation require.

I sat at the window with two fingers on my own steady pulse and asked, for the first time in fifteen years, the question underneath it.

What did I want.

The answer was three strides away and a half-day’s ride to the east and entirely, specifically, irreversibly forbidden.

I took my fingers off my wrist. I went back to the bed. I lay in the dark of a bolted room and did not sleep, and in the morning I rose and made the decision to be composed and executed it, breath by breath, exactly as I had been built to.

It was the most frightening thing I had ever done. I did it perfectly.

And no one knew but Zhori, who watched me do it, and Maerath, who had carried the tea herself and let the rest go unsaid, and the man at the eastern line—who was, I had to believe, somewhere under the same indifferent dark, learning the same thing I was—how to stand in a life with the wrong number of strides in it, and not let it show.