The Alpha Threw Me To The Hyenas

Chapter Four: Do Not Clean It

What I remember about the next few minutes is mostly furniture.

Chairs going over. A whole row of them at the front, because everybody in it stood up at once and half of them tried to go in opposite directions. Somebody's glass went off a table and broke and nobody swept it up for two days, and I know that because I was walked past it twice.

There were about eleven people trying to get to Kael and about four hundred trying to get to the doors and everyone else standing in the middle deciding which of those two things they were, and above all of it the ventilation kept going, calm and even, the way it always did.

A man I had brought coffee to for six years grabbed a woman by the collar to get her out of his way.

Then hands closed on both my arms and I went down onto my knees on the floor.

It was done properly. That was the first thing I noticed, in a distant way, as if I were assessing somebody else's work. There was no wrenching. Whoever had me had come in from behind, taken both arms above the elbow and put me down in one motion, and the floor came up hard but nothing tore and nothing broke.

I turned my head and it was Ilyas.

He was crouched behind my left shoulder with his weight forward, and he had my arms folded back in a hold I could not have got out of if I had trained for a year, and he was not looking at me. He was looking up and out at the room, tracking it, the way you watch a road.

"Don't struggle," he said. He said it the way you would tell somebody the time.

"I'm not."

"I can see that. Keep not doing it."

That was the whole of our first conversation.

Somebody was shouting. It took me a second to place him, and then I had it, a heavy man in his fifties from one of the cousin branches who had been at the front table. He was shouting about the law. He wanted her put down. That was the phrase he used, put down, the way you say it about a dog with something wrong in its head, and he said it four or five times and each time it got a little more agreement around it.

That is the thing about six hundred frightened people. It takes about ninety seconds.

I was on my knees on the stone with my arms locked behind me and blood still coming steadily off my fingers, and I listened to a room full of people I had served food to for two decades work their way round to killing me, and I want to record that I was not frightened. I have thought about why. I think it was because I had already spent the entire evening being terrified, and there is a point past which the body simply stops paying for it.

"Enough," Halvard said.

He did not shout either. I never once heard that man raise his voice.

"Sir, the law is clear."

"The law is clear," Halvard agreed. "You are not. Sit down, Odren."

Odren sat down.

Halvard came forward and stood over me. From the floor he looked considerably larger, and I understood for the first time that this was probably why he had rebuilt the hall with a dais in it.

He did not look at my face. He looked at my hands, and then past my hands, at the floor.

There was quite a lot of blood on it by then. It had run off my fingers while I was standing and gone on running while I was kneeling, and it had spread out along the seam between two of the slabs in a long thin line about the length of my arm.

"Nobody touches this floor," Halvard said.

There was a pause. One of the house staff, a boy of about seventeen with a cloth already in his hand, stopped where he was.

"Sir?"

"Do not clean it." Halvard turned his head. "Get four people and stand them round it. Nobody comes inside that line, nobody walks through it, and nobody puts a cloth on it. When Vantry gets here he takes it up himself. Is that understood."

"Yes, sir."

"Say it back to me."

The boy said it back to him. The whole room listened to a seventeen year old repeat an instruction about a floor, and I think that was the moment when the last of the shouting went out of everybody, because whatever they had all just watched happen, the head of the house was not treating it as a crime.

He was treating it as a sample.

Kael had got up. He was on his feet against the base of the dais with one hand still on the stone behind him and blood at his temple running down into his collar, and he was shaking his head slowly at something nobody had said out loud.

"Father."

"Not now."

"She didn't do it."

Halvard did not answer him.

"She didn't do it," Kael said again, louder, and there was something raw coming up in his voice that had not been there when he was saying the binding words. "I had hold of her. I had my hand on her the entire time. Whatever came up that line she did not send it, she did not know it was there, I felt her not know."

"I said not now."

"You are going to hold a tribunal on a girl for something she cannot do."

"I am going to hold her," Halvard said, "which is a great deal more than the room wanted five minutes ago, and if you would like to help her you will stop talking in front of six hundred witnesses."

Kael stopped talking.

In the second row Ivette Sarn had come forward as far as the aisle and gone no further. She was standing with one hand on the back of a chair, and she was not looking at me or at Kael or at the old man. She was looking at the thin line of blood along the seam of the floor with an expression of complete, careful concentration, the way you look at a page of figures that has come out wrong.

Then Halvard crouched down in front of me.

He did it easily, for a man of his age. He put his forearms on his knees and brought his face level with mine, close enough that I could see the pale scar under his jaw and the grey coming in at his temples, and he looked into my eyes for a long moment with the whole hall watching.

And he said a word.

It was not long. Two syllables, maybe three, with a sound in the middle of it that does not exist in anything I had ever heard spoken in that house or that city or on any screen in my life. He said it quietly, and he said it directly to me, and he watched my face while he did it the way a doctor watches a pupil for a reaction to light.

I did not react. I did not know how to react. I did not know what he had said.

But I want to be clear about something, because of everything that came afterwards.

I heard it. I heard every sound in it. And without deciding to, without understanding one thing about why, I put that word away somewhere at the back of my head and I kept it there, whole, for a hundred and forty-four days.