Longwind

Chapter 3: The Borrowed They put him on the bed with the pillows stacked behind his back and shut the door, and left him alone with the house. [DEUCE] [VITALITY −1] "You're carrying a death-curse," Deuce said. "Does it hurt?" He had one hand folded over the other in his lap, the cursed wrist underneath, where there was nothing to look at. "I've had worse." "Huh," Deuce said. The bud kept time with his blood. Up. Down. Closed. In the book it was a flower, and the book gave it three months to open. He had done that arithmetic himself, standing on the walkway with his brother's light still warm on his hand, and he had come out of it with three months, and the panel had come out of it with seven days. [DEUCE] [SEAL — AT CURRENT RESERVES: SEVEN DAYS] "When you took it into your hand," Deuce said, "I spent ten points on you." "On me." "Ninety-five percent of the pain is gone. You will never feel it in that hand." Deuce let that sit, giving the rest of the sentence room to arrive on its own. "The other five percent you'll feel every minute of the day. Not as pain. It just leaves everything turned up. The sheet. The air. Whatever it is you're doing with your face." "I'm reading." "So the calm," Deuce said. "For whose benefit." He breathed in through his nose, slow, and let it out, and for a while the only other thing in the room was the sound of a large wooden building deciding to hold still. "Master. Boss. My good lord. I have a—" "Later." He turned his head on the pillow and looked at the room, because a man who is going to lie in a house for a week ought to know which house it is. Augur House had thirty-nine thousand pieces of kestrelwood in it and a Ghostlight cipher cut into the flat of every one, and every one of them answered to him. He had found that out on his first morning, when the whole building came apart over his head—the gallery, the rails, the two flights of stair and the three rooms he had not asked for—and put itself back together in the shape it believed its master would want. Nobody had consulted him. Nobody had to. The house had been built for a prince of the blood, and it had never asked which one. He looked at the window. Below, the water lay green all the way down to the river, two hundred acres of it, and the galleries stepped down to it on red-painted posts with green stone along the rails; and somewhere under all of it, in a strong-room with four chains on him, was the man who had tried to take the house and half the March down with him. The valley answered to him too, on paper. It had also been robbed before he got to it. The Pole-light that should have been burning in this body—three months' worth, by his own arithmetic, the light that comes down with the Sage-King's blood—was down to seven days, and the name Deuce had put on that was Gareth Voss, Lord Provost of Greywater March, who had taken it and left no note behind. He told the window to shut. It shut. He would tell his legs to hold him, when he was ready. They wouldn't. Boots came down the corridor, and then Tobias was in the doorway, collar dark with sweat and his hair stuck flat where the helmet had been, standing with nothing left in his hands to do. "Strong-room's set," he said. "Two on the door. Nobody in but me." "Good." "He hasn't moved. The wound's the same as it was." Tobias looked at the bed and at the wrist lying under the other wrist and said nothing about either. "There's a thing in the yard, Your Highness." "The yard is full of things." "Not like this one." Tobias crossed to the window and put a hand on the frame and leaned out. "That's one of the Borrowed." In the court, black-robed, a lacquer mask cut all over with characters, gloves on what would have been the hands of a man, it stood exactly where it had been standing since the afternoon. "Ghostlight work," Tobias said. "Casimir Vellum cut every joint of it with his own hands and sent it here for you. There's not another one in the world." In the book, the Ghostlight workshops were famous for one thing. You fed a puppet from your fingertip and raised it on your own Attunement, and in time it grew a made-soul of its own, fitted to the hand that fed it, until what you had was a servant that wanted to serve you—and the difference between one of those and a man who wanted the same thing came down to which of them you had to pay. Casimir Vellum and the man whose body Aren was wearing had been at school together, and could not be left in a room together. Vellum had sent this here anyway. There was nothing in the book about why. "Give it an order," Tobias said. "You give it one." Tobias leaned out of the window. "Come up." The thing in the gravel stayed in the gravel. [DEUCE] [NOTIFICATION: THE BORROWED — STATUS: NO RESPONSE] Tobias went down. From the window Aren watched him cross the court and come at the thing from behind, out of arm's reach, and hit it once, flat-handed, on the back of the head. The mask did not turn. The gloves did not close. Tobias stood there a moment longer, said something that did not reach the window, and came back up the stairs with his jaw set. "It isn't deaf," he said, from the door. "It's ignoring me." "Then don't ask it for anything this week." Aren settled back into the pillows and let his arm rest on his knee, over the sleeve with the bud in it. "Leave it where it's standing. If I need to be carried somewhere before the flower opens, I'll get there faster on my hands and knees." Tobias looked at his prince's legs, and at the yard, and added it up, and kept it to himself. "It'll stand out there in the weather," he said. "It's wood." Tobias went, and took the corridor with him, and shut the door against the sound of his own boots. "Right," Deuce said. "You said later. It's later." "Talk." "You have seven days and I have spent ten points on you today, and I can't spend points on a corpse." A pause, of exactly the length it had decided on. "So. The villain." "Corrin." "Corrin, the Lantern of the Nine Marches, in your strong-room with a wound in him that isn't closing. He's from the Nine Marches. Bonebloom is their invention, and they are the only people who know how to take it back out of a man. Wake him up and get it out of him. Threats. Coin. Whatever you like." "And if he doesn't care to be helpful." "He'll care." Deuce said it too easily, and then, as if it had said one word more than it meant to, took the long way around the rest. "Besides. His name is still in your hand." He turned that over once and got nothing out of it. "Later," Deuce said, which was what it said when the arithmetic got longer than the answer. "And when it's off your wrist—when you're breathing on your own account with nothing growing in you—I'll spend the rest. All of it. Every point I have goes into one item out of the shop." "Which item." "Fool's Dream." Aren said nothing. "It goes into his head and it takes you out of it. Every word you have said to him, every order you have given over him, every hour of the fifteen days he has spent chained under your floor. Gone. He wakes in the morning with a gap in his life and a strong-room he does not recognize, and you walk down the road a free man with all your years on you and die old. That's the plan. Long life. Wasn't that what you wanted?" His hand had stopped on his knee. He had died once already, at thirty-eight, alone in a room, and the part of it he had never been able to swallow was the finish—everything built, nothing spent, a whole life cut off in the middle of the bill. He had lain in that bed and refused the shape of it. He was not going to die badly twice. "You're working very hard," he said. "Men work hard for two reasons, and you're not one of them. Say what you want." "Meaning?" "Say it." Deuce was quiet a moment. Systems, apparently, took a moment. "Three years from now the Judgment comes down," it said. "On the Marches, on Aurel, on the College of the Pole, on every soul standing on the roads between them. Nobody is standing in three years. Somebody has to stop it. That's what all of this is for." "Then I'll stop it." "...You'll what?" "Stop it." He pushed himself up on his elbows, which was as much as the ankle ring would give him, and looked at the empty doorway with his chin up. "I'll save the world. Why else would I be in this body." "No." "No?" "That's the March-Heir's job. Lennart Greywater. He's the one the story's about." Deuce said it flatly and let it stand. "Your job is to be alive in three years. Don't get in the hero's way. Don't touch the story. Do nothing, in the correct direction, for three years. That's all." Aren lay back down and looked at the ceiling, which had been cut and fitted by a man who never once had to live under it. The ceiling was a ceiling. Far off over the river, something turned over in the sky. There was no rain in it yet. By dark the heat had gone heavy and yellow, and the rain came in over the river in one piece and started on the roofs. The sleeping room had two candles and a lamp, and the lamp stood in the window with the shutter open two inches at the bottom, and it laid a square of honey-colored light out on the gravel of the court. The thing in the yard was still there. Rain stood on the shoulders of the black robe and ran down the lacquer of the mask and dripped off the ends of the fingers of the gloves. At the wrists, at the elbows, at the seams of the knuckles, small green shoots had begun to press out of the wood and unfold, the color of something in the first week of April, and the water ran over them and they held. Thunder went over the roof, close, and the yard came up white for half a second with lightning. The thing in the yard shuddered once, like a door in a draught. And then its eyes opened. They were gray and set with stones, and they blinked—once, slowly, the way eyes blink when they have not done it for a long time—and in them was a slack human confusion, the look of a man who has woken in a room he does not know and is not yet willing to say so. Nobody was watching. The court was empty. The wood servants had all gone in out of the weather, and the guards were in a corridor with a strong-room door between them and the rain. It stood still for a while, being alive, and then it tried its hands, one at a time, closing the right and then the left and then the right again. Then it tried to move, and the heel went down through the sole of the shoe into the wet ground under the gravel and put out roots, and the body above the foot kept going, and lost the whole of its balance, and went face-first into the court with a crack of wood on stone that nobody heard. The rain came down on the back of the black robe. It lay there long enough for the water to get in at the collar. Then it got its hands under itself, and pushed, and got one knee, and there it stopped again, and stayed. Then it stood up. It stood with no idea how long it would last, and it lasted, and it turned its head toward the window and the honey-colored light in it. Inside, the man in the pale-blue robe sat on the edge of the bed with his wrist tucked inside his sleeve, saying something to the guard who had come back to stand at the foot of it, and the lamp lifted and settled with the draught from the shutter, and his face was turned half toward the yard and saw nothing there. Whatever was in the thing in the yard knew that face. Not from the robe, or the height, or the shoulders under it. It knew the jaw, and the small flat set of the mouth when he was deciding to be polite, and the left wrist carried turned-in under the cuff, where nothing was to be looked at. It had seen that face from above. It had put a hand through the middle of that chest once and felt the whole weight of him come slack over its forearm, and it had been sure of the end of him. He didn't die. There was a hole in the gravel the size of a heel, with the rain standing in it. The thing in the black robe got both feet under it and stood, and looked in through the two inches of open shutter at the man in the pale-blue robe, and went on standing. Author’s Note Deuce offers Aren a clean exit this chapter: three years of doing nothing, in the correct direction, and a spell that erases him from the man in the strong-room. It's a good plan. Aren says he'll save the world instead, mostly because he can't stand being told the story isn't his. What I can't decide is how much of that is courage and how much is an old habit of refusing small lives. If you'd like to read ahead, you can find the next chapters on my p*****n: https://www.patreon.com/c/TranKhang