Longwind

Chapter 5: The Mark Says No

Chapter 5: The Mark Says No

The Mark Says No — "Considerate of You"

The bowl came in with the morning, and he smelled it from the bed: salt, iron, and under those the sourness the ginger had been put in to cover.

Two days in this house had taught him the smell. One night of it had taught him the price.

"Set it down," Aren said.

Tobias set it on the chest at the foot of the bed and stepped back with his hands behind him. Steam went up off the surface in one slow curl.

"It was drawn before the order went out, Your Highness. Last night." A pause exactly long enough to be a suggestion. "It'll go to waste either way."

"Then let it."

[DEUCE]

[TREATMENT SUSPENDED.]

[VITALITY: FALLING. ON SCHEDULE.]

He read it and put it away with the rest. He disliked being billed for things he had already chosen.

"Your Highness has eaten nothing since yesterday."

"I've had half a cup of a man." He got himself up against the headboard, which his arms had opinions about. "There's a kitchen in this house. Use it."

"I'll bring bread." Tobias did not move. "The physician's book says the blood."

"Then the book can drink it."

"Your Highness has been getting whiter since the night you swore that thing in. The instruction is the blood. All the rest of it is broth."

Aren looked at the bowl for a while. It was a good bowl — glazed, footed, the kind of thing that got carried upstairs on a tray by a man who had been carrying trays up those stairs since before either of them was born.

"Fine," he said. "Then let's do it properly, if we're doing it. Why a cup? Cut the heart out and bring it in on a plate, raw. Crack the long bones and boil them down with mushrooms and I'd get a thousand years out of it. Blood and meat. What do you take me for — something that lives in a yard behind the kitchen and eats what it kills?"

Tobias turned that over. Then he said, with terrible gravity: "A thousand years."

Aren waited.

"To the death," Tobias said.

Aren did not correct him.

"You said to keep him," Tobias said. "The other night. You said the man in the other room had a use."

"He does."

"Then it's the blood."

"No."

Tobias waited. He could put more doubt into a silence than most people could get into a sentence.

"Every draught I have swallowed for years was written out in Gil Voss's hand," Aren said. "You know it better than I do. You signed for the powders."

"I did."

"Two days ago he stood where you're standing and told me to let the Pole-light body go. He has a draught-body picked out for me." Aren laid his head back against the board. "Kept sweet, he said — fed on honey and white poppy and nothing else, so the soul goes in clean. He put it to me as an improvement."

Tobias's face did not move, which was answer enough.

"So the medicine is medicine," Aren said, "written by a man who wants me out of my body and into one of his. Do you see it now?"

"Yes."

"Do you believe it?"

"I believe you, Your Highness."

"Then take it out of the book. Not today's line. All of them, every day of it, as far back as the book goes."

"Yes."

"Gil Voss is one man," Aren said. "What about the other one?"

Tobias brightened. It was a thing he did at strange moments. "Gareth Voss. Best Attunement in the March, on paper. There's nothing left of his root, though, and he eats draught-vessels to keep from sliding, and has for years. He's not a problem, Your Highness. Worst case, I put my arms around him and the two of us go down together." He laughed.

Aren went over that for any part of it that was funny, and found none.

"Then hear the order." He sat up as far as the headboard allowed. "Nobody kills anybody. Not Gil, not Gareth, not the man in the other room. And nobody takes his blood again — not a cup, not a finger dipped in it, not in a tea for the cough. Say it."

"No killing. No blood."

"Say it in the kitchen."

"Yes, Your Highness."

"And Tobias." Aren let a moment go by first, because orders given in a hurry get obeyed in a hurry. "You will kill for me the day I tell you to. Not the day before."

Tobias stood there and worked it through, and then something in his face settled, as if he had been handed a present he had been wanting for years.

"Yes, Your Highness."

"Then take the bowl out and pour it somewhere I won't have to look at it."

He went.

The door shut. Aren sat with his head back against the board and did the sum, as he always did.

The Pole-light: gone, and a name written against the loss, and the name was Voss. Gareth Voss, Lord Provost of Greywater March — the man who ate draught-vessels to keep from sliding, and the elder brother of the man who had been writing out his medicine in a careful hand for years. He put that on the page and did not like where it sat.

The mark on his wrist: folded down to a black thread under the skin, seven days on it at current reserves. He had not said that number out loud to anybody and did not intend to.

And under all of it, the new line: one bowl of medicine, thrown out by his own order, which had been the only thing in this house keeping his heart moving.

The small gray line of text arrived at the edge of things, where it always arrived.

[DEUCE]

[ORDER LOGGED. NO KILLING. NO HARVEST.]

[REPLACEMENT MEDICINE: 0.]

He didn't answer it.

Bread came up an hour later and stood on the chest at the foot of the bed, and cooled, and was not eaten.

***

The Borrowed stood at the end of the bed and watched. Corrin believed none of it.

The man had taken the blood wearing that face and had not blinked once. Corrin had put his hand through that chest two years ago; the face had been the last thing he saw after it, close up, and two years had gone over it since and left nothing on it.

A prince does not drink from a cup he does not want. He is the Third Prince; his twin is the Crown Prince; and nobody in this March can hold his jaw open and pour anything into him that he means to refuse. So the refusal was not mercy. His own body was somewhere he could not feel — chained, buried, or burning — and the man had been drinking out of it for years, and a cup that runs low is a cup you learn to be careful with.

That was the only accounting in it.

He had known beasts. Beasts never said a word over the meat.

***

"Come here," Aren said.

The Borrowed came. It came without hurry and without any question in it, the same as the first night, and stood at the side of the bed with its hands loose and its eyes on the middle of the room.

"Take me out to the water."

It gathered him up as a man lifts a coat off the back of a chair — one arm under his shoulders, one under his knees, no effort anywhere in it. Two days of being handled by people who were careful with him for reasons of their own had given him a fine ear for the difference. Wood didn't have reasons.

There was no heat in it and no cold either. It was carved smooth, and hard where a man's shoulder would have given, and being carried by something that could not be hurt was the closest thing to rest he had found in this world.

A heart beat in its chest anyway. Somebody had put a heart in there and given it a job, and it went on at his ear, steady, like a clock inside a wall.

Aren knocked on the chest with two knuckles.

"Don't."

It stopped. Whatever else this world had gotten wrong, the Borrowed still did what it was told.

Out through the back of the house, then down the garden, where the water terraces lay one under another in the flat light of a morning after rain, and it set him on the stone bench at the edge of the spring that came up hot out of the hill behind Augur House. Sulfur faint in it, and steam standing over the surface like breath on a window.

He sat a while with his feet in the water, which was the first thing in this world that had been the right temperature.

The gold bangle knocked against the stone when he put his hand down.

"Undress me," he said.

***

The ties were silk and the knots were knots a child could learn, and he undid them without hurrying, because a made thing that hurries looks like a thing that wants something.

The man's skin had not seen sun in years. Neck, collarbone, the long flat line of the chest, the waist, the hip. Corrin's eyes went over all of it and there was nothing in the looking but a list, and the list was in order of convenience. The throat. The hinge of the jaw. Under the fourth rib on the left, where a hand could go in and close.

He helped the man down onto the warm stone in the water. The man sat with his back to him and his hair loose on the surface, spreading where the water slowed. Then the man took his own hair in one hand and laid it over his left shoulder, and the back of his neck was bare.

The covenant sat quiet under the grain; it was quiet whenever he did nothing, which was nearly always.

He put his hand out, low, a handsbreadth at a time.

The man turned his head. A towel had been folded over the reaching arm since the bench, and the man took it out from under the hand as though it had been offered, and raised an eyebrow.

"Considerate of you," the man said, and turned back and went on washing the sweat off his face.

He reached again.

Slower, because slow is safer than fast, aimed at the place where the skull sits on the spine, which is a small target and needs no strength in it, only a thumb and half a breath.

An inch short, the pain came.

It did not come through the arm. It came up through every bone in the body he was wearing, all at once, from the toes to the hinge of the jaw.

He held the body still, because falling would be seen.

Then he let the wanting go. Not the picture of it — the wanting itself, the whole of it, the way a man lets go of a hot pot.

The threads under the grain loosened by degrees. The garden came back. Steam, sulfur, crushed green, water coming up out of the rock.

He tried a third time.

Not for the man this time. For the answer. He went fast, with his mind held carefully empty, so the hand would arrive before the wanting could get there ahead of it and be sentenced.

The mark took him two inches short and broke him by inches: the red threads under the grain ran bright the whole length of him, and for the length of three breaths there was nothing in the world but the contract, saying no.

He came back to himself standing exactly where he had been standing, in the same place, at the same distance, with his hands at his sides.

He had it, then. The mark answered the will, and it answered early: the hand that was still choosing cost him nothing, and the hand that had decided paid an inch, and then two. What he wanted had been settled in him for two years, and there was no speed in the world fast enough to get in under that.

He could not put his own hand on the man.

Somebody else's hand would have to do.

The man had stopped washing his face. He had his head tipped back and his eyes on the hand, and then on the empty stretch of air where the hand had been. Corrin stood still and waited to be told what to do.

"Considerate of you," the man said. He had the towel in his own hand now; he folded it once and put it down on the stone, and turned the wet hair off his neck with two fingers, and laid his head down on the stone, and shut his eyes.

The wooden fingers at his side went stiff, and stayed stiff.

The spring came up out of the rock and went over the lip of the stone and lay flat in the pool, holding the shape of the man's shoulders.

Author’s Note

Aren says no a lot in this chapter — to the bowl of blood, to the physician's careful instructions, and, at the end, to the idea that Tobias should be a killer a day earlier than he has to be. He pays for it: the one thing keeping his heart moving goes out the door on his own order. What I keep turning over is how calmly he signs for that. Would you have drunk it?

If you'd like to read ahead, you can find the next chapters on my p*****n: https://www.patreon.com/c/TranKhang