CHAPTER 33
Amara
◆
I sit on the edge of Gael's bed with a curved suture needle in my fingers and count his pulse without letting him see me do it.
Four days after Greywater, Sokol House is full of the kind of quiet snow makes — the forecourt gone white and stayed white, the Sound below the cliff pulled close and flat pewter, a sea that has decided for once not to make any noise about itself.
Snow does to a house what a good lining does to a coat.
It quiets the seams, lays something soft over the hard edges so you forget, for a morning, that there's structure underneath holding the whole thing up.
Old habit, that. You learn it patching a man who lies about how he feels.
You set two fingers to the inside of his wrist like you're only steadying his arm, and you keep your eyes on your work, and you count the beats against the snip and pull of the thread.
His is strong. Slower than it was the night the wall came down at Greywater, slower than the gray, ragged thing it had been on the floor with Mateo's hand over mine and the snow coming in through the broken glass to dust the blood.
Strong and even now. Reyes told me the blade had gone through the meat of his side and missed everything that mattered by the width of a basting stitch, and that he'd be cursing her by Tuesday, and that I was not to let him lift anything, including his own ego.
"You're counting me," Gael says. Eyes still shut. Auburn hair a wreck on the pillow, four days of stubble going copper at his jaw, that wide mouth set in the smile he uses to convince a room he's fine. "Trouble. I can feel you counting."
"I'm tying off a hem," I say. "Hold still."
"You already tied it. That's the third time you've checked it."
"It's a nice hem. I'm admiring my work."
He cracks one green eye. Finds me. The smile shifts into the one he keeps for me when no one's watching, the bare one with no armor on it. "You're tending the knife," he says, soft, "and the knife is telling you he's fine."
"The knife is a liar. " I smooth the edge of the dressing down over his side with the flat of my thumb, careful of the bruising that has gone the colors of a storm sky, green and yellow and a deep furious plum. "Lucky for him, I read liars for a living."
I have done this before. That's the thing catching in my throat all morning, soft and sharp at once.
Six weeks ago I sat in this house with my sewing scissors — the good steel ones, meant for thread, for the bias of a skirt, for the clean diagonal cut that lets a fine nap fall the way it wants to fall — and I used them on this man's split eyebrow while he bled on my floor and told me nobody patches the knife, they just sharpen it.
Nobody's nobody, I told him then. I meant it like an argument.
Now it's a fact with a needle in it, the argument long since settled in his favor.
He caught a blade for me at Greywater — caught the thing that had been coming for the soft middle of me, the way at nineteen he caught one for Mateo and called it Tuesday.
This time he went down silent, robbed of the quip he'd have made of anything cheaper, which is how I know it cost him everything, and I was the one on my knees in the snow with my hands red and useless, learning what it does to a body to watch the person you love bleed for you on a cold floor.
"Hey. " His hand finds my wrist now. Turns the count around. Two of his fingers on the inside of mine, reading me back. "I can feel you doing it. The thing where you go somewhere bad in your head and keep your face nice so I won't notice."
"I don't have a thing."
"You have a whole closet of things, velvet. Color-coded. " His thumb moves over the needle-scar on my finger, the thin silver line that's marked me since girlhood, since the night I learned what a machine needle does to a careless seamstress. "Where'd you go just now."
"The floor at Greywater," I say, because somewhere in the last four days I decided I was done dressing things up for these men. They earned the unhemmed truth. "You went down and didn't make a joke. That's how I knew it was bad."
His face does something complicated. The grin tries to come up — widest grin, deepest hurt, I've learned to read that the way I read the grain of a cloth — and then he lets it go, lets it just be his face, tired and green-eyed and alive.
"Yeah," he says. "Well. Couldn't think of a good one in time. First time in my life. " He brings my scarred finger to his mouth and kisses the silver line on it, slow. "I'll have one ready for next time."
"There's not going to be a next time."
"Trouble. " Tender. Wrecked. "There's always a next time. That's the job."
"The job changed," I say, and tie off a thread that doesn't need tying, just to have something honest to do with my hands.
I leave him sleeping — actually sleeping, the deep kind, with his switchblade closed on the nightstand instead of riding his fingers — and I go down through the house to see the thing Nadia stopped me in the hall to tell me about, the thing she said with her apron twisted in both fists and her old eyes bright.
Go and see, Amara. Go and see the glasshouse.
Katya would have wanted you to be the one.
The conservatory is cold the way it's always cold, glass on every side and the snow pressing white against all of it so the light comes in flat and blind and silver, no shadows anywhere.
Katya's orchids stand in their rows the way they've stood since I came to this house — frost-killed most of them, black stems, the brown curl of blooms that died years before I ever walked through that gate in a coat the color of dried blood and refused to be a pawn.
All of them dead. Save for one.
Emil showed it to me on a cold day in November, back when he still thought feeling was noise that corrupted the data, back when he asked me for my father's manifests like a man asking for a tool and I told him to earn it.
The single survivor. Waxy, blood-dark, stubborn, alive among all that death under the cold glass.
It carried a bud through the whole long autumn of this — through the storm, through the proof, through the war — a tight green knot at the end of its stem that never opened, that I'd stopped expecting to open, that I'd come to think of as the kind of promise the world makes and doesn't keep.
Now it has opened.
Sometime in these four snow-quiet days, while we buried the dead and stitched the living and learned how to breathe in a house that no longer has Lev's shadow in it, the orchid bloomed.
A single flower, deep enough red to be nearly black, the color of garnet held up to a low flame, petals laid open and unafraid against the snow-blind glass behind it.
The one living thing in a row of the dead, finally, finally open.
My fingers find the cold steel under my collar, the little dented thimble my mother left me, the one I reach for when I'm afraid — and standing in the silver cold with that impossible bloom in front of me, I understand the reaching has nothing to do with fear this time.
I touch it the way you'd close your hand around a hand.
Something true is happening, and I want my mother near it.
"Katya's," says a voice behind me, low and weighted and careful. "She kept forty of them and lost thirty-nine. She said the one that lived was the only one worth the trouble."
Mateo. He's come in quiet the way he does everything quiet, the Pakhan who goes still instead of loud, black hair gone more silver at the temples this last terrible week, storm-gray eyes on the flower and not on me, which is how he says the things that cost him.
He stops square beside me, shoulder to shoulder, the way we settled it weeks ago, on the cold stone of the cove with the stars coming out hard after the storm — stand behind me, no, then stand beside me, God help us both — and he doesn't make the mistake anymore.
He stands at my shoulder and looks at his dead mother's living flower and lets the silence do most of it.
"It picked the worst week of the year to bloom," I say.
He's quiet a moment. Somewhere past the glass the snow goes on falling without a sound. "It picked the first week it could grow without the frost getting it," he says. "That's not the worst week. That's the only week there was."
I turn to him. The careful man. The one who learned, this winter, to let someone stand on the far side of him.
"The house can grow again," he says. Plainly, like reading a manifest. "That's what Nadia means by it.
That's what she wanted you to see. " He turns the brass watch over in his fingers, Yuri's watch, the one he thumbs open and shut when he's deciding something — and I understand he's deciding something, right now, his thumb working the worn brass case against his palm. "Amara."
"Mateo."
"I have carried this since I was twenty-three.
" He holds it up between us. Old brass, worn gold, the falcon engraved on the case rubbed nearly smooth by his father's thumb and then his own.
"My father carried it before me. When he died I took it off his desk and I have not been without it since.
It tells the time badly. It loses four minutes a week.
I have never had it fixed, because if I fixed it, it would stop being his. " He breathes once, slow.
The snow-light makes his eyes the color of the Sound. "Open on the table, it told my brothers we were watched. Be careful. That was its whole language for eight months. Careful, careful, careful."
"I know what it means," I say. My own voice has gone unsteady. "I watched you lay it open like a vow."
"Then learn the last thing it means. " And he takes my hand — my right hand, the one with the needle-scar — turns it palm up, and sets the watch into it.
Warm. Warm from his skin, from his pocket, from being carried against a body that has carried the whole weight of this house alone for so long his hand has shaped itself to the holding.