CHAPTER 10 #3
"If it ever goes bad up there, the kind of bad I'm not standing in front of, you don't go for the gate, the gate's where they'll be.
You come here. You take the skiff and you go out and around the point to the town quay, and you don't look back, and you don't wait for any of us. Malyshka. You hearing me."
She's looking at the skiff knocking the dock.
The fear's all the way up in her now, real and settled, no defiance left to dress it in, and I watch her understand the size of the thing she married into, that the walls of this house are walls in both directions, that there are men in this city who would put her on a board and sweep her off it without a thought, and that the only thing standing between her and them is three brothers and a boat.
"You're telling me how to leave you," she says.
"I'm telling you how to live. " I mean it as the opposite of leaving, two sentences that aim in different directions, and she catches both of them clean.
"And you?" She turns. Looks at the blood gone dark and drying through the muslin on my hand, the wrong hand, the one she keeps taking. "If it goes that bad. What do you do."
And here's where the real one almost gets out of me.
It's right there, behind my teeth, the whole stupid enormous thing — I love you, I have loved you since the aisle, I'd take a knife for you and call it the best day of my life, you're the first thing I ever wanted that wasn't an order — it's right there, and the boathouse is dark and the boat is knocking and her face is turned up to mine and for one second I am one breath from being a man instead of a blade.
I take the cover instead. I always take the cover. It's the only roof I've ever trusted.
"Me?" My grin comes up, wide, the widest I've got, and somewhere far back I feel it for what it is and don't stop it.
"Trouble, I've got the easy job. Somebody comes for you, I get to do the thing I'm actually good at.
You row a boat. I'll be the loud noise behind you.
" I tap the wrapped hand against her shoulder, light.
"Don't worry about me. Nobody worries about the knife.
They sharpen it and they point it and they sleep fine. "
She lets me have it. That's the gift of her, the thing I'll never get over — she sees the cover go up and she doesn't tear it down, she just stands there a second letting me hide inside it, the way you let a man keep his coat on in the cold.
Then she reaches up and presses her palm flat to my chest, over the heart that's going hard under the inked bird that picks one sky and stays, and she leaves it there until I feel the heat of it through the wet shirt and have to look at the boat so my face won't do something I can't take back.
She climbs the sea-stair ahead of me on the way up — I make her go first now, so I'm below her if she slips, so the drop's got me in it before it gets her — and I follow her up the wet black stone into the last of the rain, watching the careful sure way she takes the treads, this soft sovereign maddening woman in a bruise-blue coat who walked into the worst day I've had in a year and bandaged my hand in the street and wasn't afraid of me, only for me, and I think the thing all the way through for once, no cover on it, because she's above me and can't see my face.
She doesn't even know my real name yet. The one under the charm, the one nobody's used since I was small enough to be held.
Everybody in this city knows Gael Sokolov, the blade, the puppy, the loud noise behind you.
Nobody's met the other one in fifteen years.
I'm not sure he's still in there. But he came to the boathouse just now, his hand on the cover and his mouth half open, and she'd have heard him if I'd let him speak.
I would burn for her. Down to the waterline, gladly, and call it the best day.
And she's three steps above me not knowing a thing about it, and that's exactly how I want it, for now, because if she knew, she might choose, and I am the youngest, and I am the blade, and in thirty years no hand has ever reached past the other two and landed on me.
I'd rather keep the not-knowing than watch her hand close on one of the other two.
At the top she stops and waits for me, the gate lamps coming up gold in the mist behind her, the wet black stone of the arch watching us both.
"Bad goes down," I say, and my voice is steady, and I hate how much it costs to keep it there, "you take the skiff and you don't look back."
She looks at the blood drying on my knuckles a long moment. The wind takes a strand of her hair loose from the pencil and lays it across her mouth and she doesn't move it.
"And you?" she says again, like she's going to keep asking it until she gets the true one.
My grin is the widest she's seen it. She's learning what that means by now — I can see her learning it, even as it splits my face — that the wider the grin, the deeper the thing it's bandaging, and she watches it bloom and her eyes go soft and terrible with the understanding.
"I'm the one who makes the bad stop, trouble," I tell her. "That's all I've ever been good for."