Longwind

Chapter 4: Yes, Master

Chapter 4: Yes, Master

Tobias brought the medicine at midmorning in a covered bowl, the way he had brought it every morning.

Nobody in Ashvale or Crowngate or anywhere else the money had reached had been able to find a physician who could mend what this body had been born with. So the bowl was the treatment. It cost more in a month than the house paid every servant in a year, and Tobias carried it in the way other men carried a crown. He had once come within a bad month of selling his own service to a moneylender to keep the supply coming, and he could be steered into mentioning it about once a week.

While it was coming up the stairs, Aren did something he would not have explained to anyone. He opened his right hand. He closed it. He pinched at the air. In this body the hands did what they were told, and he kept checking them anyway.

The door opened. He stopped, and arranged himself back against the cushions — hair out, wrists turned up, chin at an angle — the whole tableau of a very well-born invalid taking his ease.

"My lord. Your medicine."

He took the bowl and got one spoonful in.

There was bile at the front of it. Behind the bile sat a smell like the bottom of a well, and under both of those, the taste of blood that had been standing too long. It went down like something that had come up out of somewhere else and meant to take a piece of him with it.

[VITALITY −1]

He put the spoon back in the bowl and took a second mouthful, and his face did nothing the whole time.

"What is this?"

"Boiled down from blood, my lord. You have it every day."

The spoon stopped.

"Whose."

"The bloodstock, my lord." Tobias had looked pleased to be asked. He looked less certain now. "The physician's standing order—"

"Whose blood, Tobias."

"The Lantern's. From the strong-room."

Aren set the bowl down on the tray.

He had been drinking him. Every morning, with a silver spoon, in bed, in a robe, while the man lay chained in the strong-room with his chest open and a hole in him that would not close. He had been keeping him alive on one end and drinking him on the other, and the account had been sitting in a bowl in his hands since he woke up in this house.

He did not want it in him. Not out of anything owed to the Lantern. Out of the price. Nothing had ever been handed to Aren without a price, and he had learned young to read the label before he swallowed.

"No more blood in the medicine."

"My lord—"

"Nothing in that bowl that came out of him. Not from tonight."

"My lord, the dose can't just be cut. It's written into the physician's order, it's been in it for years—"

"No."

Tobias opened his mouth, closed it, and bowed, which in him was the whole of an argument.

"Say it back."

"No more bloodstock in the medicine, my lord."

"Say it in the kitchen, where people can hear you say it."

Tobias bowed again and went.

The door shut. Aren got both hands on the basin and rinsed his mouth until the taste was only water, and then lay back and let go of everything at once. His hair went out over the whole bed like something spilled. It was the first time since he had woken in this world that there had been nobody in the room but him.

[DEUCE] How far along are you?

He said it to the ceiling. "Are you asking how much longer you have before somebody wipes you and reissues the license? Ask me twice more and I'll give you the date."

Deuce went quiet, and stayed quiet, which for Deuce passed for an apology.

[SEAL — AT CURRENT RESERVES: SEVEN DAYS]

He raised his arm and looked at the inside of his wrist. The closed bud was still there — he could feel it under the skin when he pressed it — but it had drawn down since yesterday. What had been a bud the size of a grain was a line now, one thin dark thread lying along the bone. He pulled his sleeve down over it.

Three things were wrong with his life, and he kept them in order. There was a flower in his wrist that would kill him when it opened. There was a man under the house who was going to wake up, and whose feelings about him were not in any doubt. And there was a Lord Provost in Greywater who had stolen the one light in the world that was keeping the flower shut.

He was working up a remark for Deuce — purely for the pleasure of it, the system had earned one — when something small sounded at the edge of the room, a note like a spoon on a rim with no spoon anywhere near it.

Wind came in past the shutter. On the desk, the brass instrument turned through three of its rings at once. Then the outer door gave, and a tall shape came out of the dark of the front room into the light of the lamp.

Aren lifted his eyelids. The Borrowed.

[DEUCE] Nobody sent for that.

"I noticed."

The thing came to the side of the bed. Its shadow went up the wall and over the whole mattress, and its sleeves were still dark to the elbows with rain, and its gloves were wet, and it stood over him the way a wall stands over a man who is about to be behind it.

"Door's behind you," Aren said. "Try it."

The hand came down over his mouth.

For a second he was lying in a new coffin with the lid just gone on, and the smell of the wood in his nose was the smell of the lid. The weight of the thing came down on his chest and the back of his head hit the pillow, and the hand over his mouth was bigger than his face, and under the wet leather there was nothing but bitter wood.

It was going for his throat. He was almost sure of that. It was going for his throat and its hand would not do the last part of it, so the hand stayed where it had landed, flat over his mouth and his jaw, and pressed, and the whole weight leaned in behind it.

Aren got one hand on its wrist and shoved, and the shove went into the wood and came back out of it as nothing at all.

[DEUCE] I told you the mouth would do it. Even the furniture has a limit.

"Do something," he said. It came out mostly through fingers.

[DEUCE] I'm an auxiliary. I report on the story. I don't touch it.

[DEUCE] Tobias is forty feet out.

"Then when he walks in here," Aren said into the palm, "I hope you've got an answer for what you are."

His wrist went hot.

The gold bangle had been on his arm since he woke up in this world, and he had never once looked at it as a thing that had opinions. It went hot, and then it was not a bangle at all, it was a source, and a hard violet flare came off his arm and went into the shape on top of him and took it apart.

Whatever the sound of that was, it woke the house.

[VITALITY −1]

[CRITICAL — VITALITY −10]

He could see both lines stacked at the edge of his sight while he lay pinned under a piece of furniture, and that was a thing he and the panel were going to be discussing for a long time.

Lamps came up all over the house at once, from the front doors to the kitchen. The shutter swung wide on its hinge and the wet night came in over the sill.

Ten feet from the bed, the Borrowed lay in pieces in a garden of its own vines.

Aren got his fingers inside his sleeves before he made a sound, and coughed, and put his voice back down where he kept it.

"It," he said, to Deuce or to the room, it made no difference. "What is it doing now."

Then Tobias was in the doorway with a lamp, and then he was at the bed, and his face had gone the color of the bowl.

"My lord. My lord, are you hurt."

"No."

The panel had a different opinion. The panel was not going to be introduced to anybody.

"It hasn't been sworn to you, my lord." Tobias was kneeling by the wreck with the lamp held out, and the vines were already drawing back into the pieces, slow, like fingers closing. "It can't hear an order from you. What it can do is finish the last one it was given. Yesterday afternoon I told it to see you into bed, and it stood in the yard all night with the rain going through its seams and did nothing, and I did it myself. Tonight it remembered. It read you as a man asleep, my lord. Or worse than asleep. It came in to check your breathing, and the bangle read it first."

"That was not a check on my breathing."

"My lord?"

"It put its hand over my mouth." Aren straightened the front of his robe, which the thing had crushed. "A man checking whether I'm breathing doesn't have to stop the breathing while he does it."

Tobias looked at the floor. Then he looked at the floor a little longer, which was what Tobias did instead of disagreeing with him.

"Is it going to stay in pieces?"

"It won't." Tobias was up on his feet again, and proud, and he had decided to be proud out loud. "That body is kestrelwood, my lord. Four hundred cut shards the ounce in Crowngate, and the College has to sign off on the buyer's name before a single ounce moves. The channels in the limbs are cut in gilder's ink, two hundred cut the drop, and there are seven drops in it. A piece like that doesn't break. Wood is born of water: leave it one splinter and it comes back."

"Watch," said Tobias.

And it did come back. It came back out of the heart, and it was fast. The vines lay down and the wood ran up over them and the whole body stood up out of the floor, and Aren watched the viscera come into it in the right order and the channels cut themselves and two hundred and six bones seat themselves one after another, every one of them in the right place, nothing subtracted, nothing invented. It stood up like a real man.

Its gray stone eyes came open, and for a moment there was something in them that Aren did not have a word for and did not like.

"Up," Tobias said.

The Borrowed took a step.

The sound its face made on the floorboards came up through the frame of the bed into the soles of Aren's feet. Then again. Then again twice more, quick, and on the fourth attempt it achieved one knee, and its nose put out a green thread where it had hit, and the thread lay the injury closed.

Tobias said, "It's newly woken, my lord, the glyphs are unsettled, it will be—"

Aren applauded.

"One of a kind," he said. "Casimir Vellum's reputation is safe."

Tobias did not answer that.

Somewhere near the line of his sight, Deuce put up a panel with nothing on it, which was how Deuce laughed.

[DEUCE] Tobias has known this body since he was a boy. He knows what the voice is supposed to do when it's tired, and what it's supposed to do when it's lying. Say three more things like that and he'll work it out, and then he'll kill you for it, and he'll be correct.

"And you think there's that much in his head to work with."

[DEUCE] I think you're getting comfortable.

Aren let that sit. It was, in fairness, the first useful thing the system had said all day.

Then, out of the wreck, the Borrowed got to its feet, and Tobias got a hand under its arm and straightened it, and stood back and looked at it with the particular satisfaction of a man who has paid for something expensive and now believes he has it.

"My lord," he said. "Do you want it sworn to you?"

Aren looked at it and thought about it, and did not take long.

He could not walk. He could not stand being handled — there was nobody in this house he could be carried by without weighing every hand that touched him first, and he had done that his whole life and was tired of it. The thing had no opinions, asked for nothing, and did not sleep. And it had already tried to kill him once, which he counted as a kind of disclosure: whatever was behind the mask, he had seen the worst of it.

"Yes."

"Fingertip blood, on both eyes," Tobias said. "The glyphs take it and grow it a made-soul, and the made-soul is made out of its master, so it comes out shaped to your preferences." He dug a pouch out of his robe and set it on the tray. "Sap-stones, my lord. One every fortnight, or it goes stiff. And the mark runs with the blood, bone and joint — if it ever lifts a hand to you, it feels every bone in its own body break, by inches, and goes on feeling it."

"Take the mask off."

The Borrowed's own hand came up and took the mask off.

***

The order went into the wood, and the wood did it. Ten thousand glyphs had been cut into the body he was standing in, one patient little law each, and not one of them cared what he wanted. His hand had come up with the mask in it before he had decided anything at all.

He knew the face above him.

He knew the jaw. He knew the way the mouth went flat and pleasant when that man had decided not to say the thing he was thinking, and the hair gone loose over one shoulder, and the right wrist kept back inside the sleeve. Corrin had had both hands in him. Two years ago he had put a hand through the middle of that chest and felt the whole weight of him come up off his feet, and while the two of them were going down — because both of them had gone down, that had been the arrangement — he had opened the last of his own blood and set the flower in him. It was the last thing he had done with the body he was born in.

The flower had not opened.

The man was sitting up in bed. He was thin, he had a sick man's color, he was being fed at intervals out of a bowl and was careful about how he swallowed, and he was not dying. So either the flower had failed or the world had an arithmetic in it that Corrin had never been taught, and neither question was going to be settled from inside a servant's shell.

Where his own body had got to, he could not feel. He could not feel the road, or the Marches, or the ground. What he could feel was the man's eyes going over the mask in his hand, mild, working out whether his furniture was worth its price.

The man did not know him. That was something. A man does not watch his furniture.

So Corrin knelt, and let the mask hang at his knee, and said nothing, and the wood held him exactly where he had been put.

***

Aren leaned in with his cut fingertip and put two strokes of blood into the gray stones of its eyes.

The blood did not run and did not dry. It went into the wood the way ink goes into paper, and then it kept going — down out of the sockets, under the surface, opening along the grain the way frost opens along a window. He watched it make a net of fine red lines across the face and go on down under the collar, and when he pushed the sleeve back it had already gone into the arms, and into the legs, all the way to the toes, threading bone and joint, and there it stopped, and drew tight.

That was what a swear was for.

He took a sap-stone from the pouch and held it up.

"Open your mouth."

Nothing in the wooden face moved. The gray eyes watched him with no expression that anybody had ever carved into them.

Aren was patient. He had been patient in worse rooms than this one, with worse men, and the difference here was that he was not going to lose.

"This is an order."

The red threads jumped under the grain. The whole body shuddered once, hard enough to move the floor under it, and the jaw came open, an inch, then another.

He set the sap-stone between the lips with two fingers and let go. The cold of his own fingertip touched it and came away, and he noticed himself noticing that, and put it away somewhere he did not intend to open.

The throat worked and swallowed. The stone went down into the wood and turned into light, and the light went out through the limbs and closed the damage the bangle had done, and the whole body settled, and the threads in the grain settled with it.

Sweat had come up on Aren's forehead, and two strands of hair had stuck to his temple, and his arm ached from being held out. He did not put it down. He reached over instead and put the back of his hand against the wooden cheek and patted it twice, the way you pat a horse on the day you buy it, and looked down at it kneeling by the bed.

"You do what I say from now on," he said. "Understand?"

The face did not answer. The gray eyes watched him.

He was patient. He had all night. He tried it again, slower.

"Say it. Yes, master."

The red line in the grain drew tight, once, and then lay still.

One corner of the wooden mouth came up. It was not a thing the maker had put in the carving.

"Yes, master."

Author’s Note

For once, Aren turns down the easy thing — the medicine that keeps this body upright — because he can't stomach what it's made of. Then he does the opposite a few pages later and swears the Borrowed to him, pats its cheek like a horse he's just bought, and asks it to say the words back. That, to me, is Aren: he refuses to be owned, and has no trouble doing the owning. What stays with me is the corner of its mouth coming up at the end — something the maker never carved. What do you make of it?

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