The Claim Adjusters Guide to the Apocalyse

Part 1 - On The Road

Emrys had spent his life at the edge of the countryside, where it had been mown and walled and arranged to be looked at. He had not, it was turning out, been remotely prepared for the middle of it.

They had left the city four days ago, the carriage carrying them east and out exactly as far as a carriage could decently be asked to go, which was the last village with a name and an inn, and from there they had gone on with two hired horses, a borrowed tent, and an enormous quantity of his discomfort, into country that grew steadily less interested in being convenient to anyone.

It was, Emrys was discovering, an extraordinary amount of outside. He had spent his life in rooms built to hold magic and money at a carefully removed degree from weather, and out here there were no rooms, only the enormous indifferent everything, and a man could feel himself to be a very small and recent idea in the middle of it. He found, to his surprise, that he did not entirely mind. He found, to rather less surprise, that the part of it he minded least was the company.

Which was the trouble. The whole and entire trouble.

He had told himself, in the library, that he would do something about the claims adjuster, and he had then done the thing he always did, which was nothing, at length, with great internal eloquence. And now there was no library to hide in, there was a tent, and a horse, and Valka Harrow, four days deep into the discovery that she was funnier on the road than she allowed herself to be in a city, and his resolution to feel nothing was holding up about as well as the good roads had.

"I'm going to wash," she announced, swinging down off her horse with the grace of a sack of apples, "while there's light and a river. And before you attempt to build a fire and fill the whole valley with smoke. Don't follow me, don't shout for me, and if anything with teeth comes out of the gorse, you're on your own. I've seen you try to make fire on purpose." She unbuckled a saddlebag, extracted a frankly tragic scrap of soap, and pointed at the treeline. "Firewood's that way. Be useful. Take your time."

"I am perfectly capable of being useful," said Emrys, who had set fire to a great many useful things in his time.

"Take your time," she said again, with feeling, and went off downriver toward the bendl.

He went to find firewood.

This was, he wished it noted, the correct and gentlemanly thing to do, and he did it with his whole heart, gathering deadfall along the treeline with the focused diligence of a man determined to be exactly where he had been told to be and nowhere else, thinking about nothing, thinking very loudly and deliberately about nothing, until he had a respectable armful and turned back toward the camp by the shortest line, which took him up over a low rise of gorse above the river's bend —

— and the world rearranged itself, permanently, in the space of a single step.

She had not heard him. The river had taken the last of the sun full on its face, and the whole bend of it had gone to beaten gold, and Valka Harrow stood in it up to her hips with her back half to him and her terrible clever armour gone. All of it, the cardigans, the layers, the grey municipal nothing she wrapped herself in so the world would agree to overlook her. Gone, dropped on a nearby stone, and what stood in the water in their place answered to nothing Emrys had been taught to want, and for a moment his mind simply declined to accept it as real.

Because Emrys knew beauty. Emrys had been raised among it. The beauty of his world was a cold and cultivated thing, ethereal and exact, a surface polished to hold the eye at a distance and never once invite it closer. Like Sabine's beauty, the beauty of the women of the Houses, marble that had learned to walk. He had spent his whole life being shown beauty that meant do not touch.

And here, in the gold and the river-cold, was the opposite of all of it. She was soft where his whole world was hard and warm where his whole world was cool and round where his whole world was edged, lit head to foot in dropping amber, unaware and unguarded and entirely herself, and the thing that went through Emrys was not appetite, or not only, not first, it was grief, almost, a sudden ache of recognition, because he was looking at warmth in a register he had not known a person could be made of, and understanding in the same instant that he had been cold his whole life and had simply never been shown the alternative closely enough to know what he was missing. She did not look like the women of his world. She looked like something a person would be welcomed into. She looked like a lit window on a freezing road. She looked like the thing his entire glittering magnificent life had never once thought to offer him.

He was, he understood with perfect clarity and far too late, in a very great deal of trouble.

He should have turned at once. He did, in fact, turn. A half-second after the half-second in which a better man would have, and in doing so put his boot squarely onto every dry stick in the river valley at the same time.

The noise was tremendous.

Valka came round in the water like something defending a nest, saw the wizard frozen on the rise with an armful of kindling and the expression of a man who has walked into a glass door he was assured was open, and made a sound that no claims adjuster had any business being able to produce: a short, furious, full-throated shriek that startled a quantity of birds out of the gorse and very probably out of the next valley as well.

"Turn around!"

"I am turned!" Emrys was already plunging back down the rise, scattering his hard-won firewood across half an acre, his face doing something he could feel and could not stop, somewhere between horror and a heat that had nothing to do with shame. "I am extremely turned, I am the most turned a man has ever been, I saw nothing —"

"You saw everything, you giant blond menace —"

"— and in the interest of fairness," he heard himself announce, at volume, to the gorse, having entirely lost command of the proceedings, "I am perfectly willing to remove my own shirt. To make it even. As a — a matter of equity —"

There was a silence from the river of a quality he would remember for the rest of his life.

"If you take off one single item of clothing," said Valka Harrow, in a voice gone flat and dangerous,"I will drown you in this river and tell the High Mage it was wolves."

"Understood," said Emrys, to a birch tree, with enormous dignity. "The shirt stays. Forget I offered. Forgetting it myself. Already forgotten."

---

He built the fire while she dressed, with his back turned so resolutely that he gave himself a crick in the neck, and the fire, this was the part he noticed and did not let himself think about, caught on the first strike, instantly, eagerly, leaping up gold and tall the way his fire only ever leapt when something had gone wrong inside him, when he was frightened or ashamed or, in the old buried sense he had trained himself out of, moved. This one had all but lit itself out of his hands, warm and willing, the moment he knelt to it with his heart going like a hunted thing.

He banked it down with a care that had nothing to do with the wood, and told himself it was the dry summer, and did not believe himself even slightly.

She came back into the firelight wrapped to the chin in every layer she owned, damp-haired and ferociously composed, and sat down across the flames from him and accepted a portion of the unglamorous travelling supper without a word. For a while he managed to match her silence, and they ate. But it was not the easy quiet that had walked the valley with them all day; it was the other kind, the kind that could take one small shared embarrassment and set it, given enough time, into something neither of them would be able to chip back out.

He could not leave it alone. He had never in his life been able to leave anything alone, and besides, one of them had to speak before the silence finished hardening into a thing they would have to carry along with them.

"Tell me about your family," he said.

She gave him a look across the fire that suggested he'd asked to see her naked again. "Why."

"Because you've spent days finding out everything about me. My House, my file, my grandmother's desk, the precise architecture of all my failures. And I know nothing about you except that you are very rude to wizards and very kind to paperwork." He kept his voice light, the way you keep your hand still to coax a wild thing nearer. "It's a structural imbalance. I'm correcting it."

And then something in her eased. He saw it happen, a small giving-way at the jaw, in the shoulders, there and gone half-retracted, like a fist opening and thinking better of it. He had put the question as a matter of setting something straight, of correcting an imbalance, and that, he was learning, was the one shape of request she could not quite turn away. She gave him a little. Guardedly, the way she did everything, paying it out an inch at a time and watching his face for what he did with it.

Five brothers. All of them enormous, "I'm the small one, which tells you something," a loud warm baffled house full of men who loved her the way you love weather, without the smallest idea what she was actually thinking, ever. She did the voices. Her father, Roderic, rendered in a low granite rumble; a brother done entirely in long-suffering sighs. She made him laugh twice, properly, the helpless undignified kind that had gone quiet in him years ago, along with much else. Once with a borrowed cart and Roderic too large for it, the kind of story he knew he'd never be able to carry home intact. And once with nothing but the office. He said something — an outsider's observation, half-admiring, that it seemed a strange place to keep anything that mattered, a building full of forms and tea, and she'd considered it a moment. Then set it down flat as a closed drawer: "You underestimate us. Anything truly dangerous takes one look at the queue and gives up. We had a plague come through once. Sent it back twice for a missing signature. " He laughed before he'd decided to. She was, it transpired, exactly as funny as he had suspected behind the grey, and watching her decide to be funny at him, on purpose, by the fire, undid the last working buckle of his composure.

And then he asked the wrong easy question, he asked who'd taught her to do the voices, who'd been the funny one she'd learned it from, and watched the door he hadn't known was there swing quietly shut.

It was the smallest thing. A half-second's still water across her face. "My mother could do anyone in the village," she said, even and final, and reached to feed a stick to the fire, and the conversation simply went elsewhere, was steered elsewhere, with the practised invisible competence of a woman diverting a river around a stone she would not name. Could not. He noticed. He did not touch it. He knew, from the inside, exactly what it was to build your whole self around the shape of a person you could not afford to say aloud. He did it with a housekeeper and a kitchen full of flour-light, and he would no more have pried at her stone than let someone pry at his.

So he let her steer, and followed where she took it, and the evening went on warm and careful and full of the things they were both declining to say, and somewhere in it Emrys stopped pretending, even privately, even in the reasonable voice, that he was going to do something about the claims adjuster.

There was nothing to be done about her. That was the entire problem and he saw it now with the awful clarity of the genuinely lost. She had walked into his ruined life carrying a ledger and an accusation and a complete and total indifference to everything the world had ever valued him for, and she had wanted only the one part of him that worked, and made him laugh until it hurt, and turned out, when the armour came off, to be made of the precise warmth his whole frozen existence had wanted. And he was gone. Comprehensively. Past argument and past retrieval and past the reach of any reasonable voice. He had fallen the way his fire caught: all at once, far too easily, and entirely beyond his control.

The truly unbearable part, the part he carried into the tent and lay awake beneath the canvas turning over while the fire ticked down and the impossible warm woman slept four feet and one thin wall of nothing away, was that he could not read her. He could read anyone. He had read the whole grieving architecture of a thousand-year institution off a single warm page. And he could not, for all his ruined cleverness, tell whether the woman across the fire had felt a single thing tonight beyond mild homicidal irritation and the cooling of damp hair.

She had given him five brothers and a borrowed cart, and taken back everything else, and he had no idea, none, whether he was falling alone.

He suspected, with the particular dread of a man who has spent his life being valued for his name and wealth and never chosen for anything that mattered, that he was.