Longwind

Chapter 6: Everyone Can See What You Want

Chapter 6: Everyone Can See What You Want

Everyone Can See What You Want

He dreamed the road first.

Two lanes at night, the wheel steady under one hand, the radio down so low it was a shape instead of a sound. Then a corridor, fluorescent, a light at the far end of it that hummed. Then the road again, and the dream-sense that the corridor and the car were the same errand, and that he had been running it a long time.

Then there was a man on the road in front of him.

Blood on the face, all of it, hairline to collar. Not running. Walking, straight at the hood, coming the wrong way at a walked pace with his mouth open.

"Give it back."

Aren put his foot on the brake. The pedal went down through the floor and kept going, and the car kept going, and the man came on.

"Give me my body back."

There was nothing wrong with the face. That was the part that got in and stayed in. Under all the red it was a young face with nothing wrong with it, and it was a stranger's face, and it was his own.

"I hate you," the man said. "Hate. Hate. Hate."

The word came in through the vents and filled the car, the way water comes into a boot.

"Hate. Hate. Hate. Hate. Hate—"

Then it was coming out of his own mouth too. He heard it start and could not stop it, and could not tell which of them had started it.

"You should die," he said. "You should die. You should die, you should die—"

***

He came up with his mouth open and his heart going, lay still, and let the ceiling put itself back together.

Early light. The rain had stopped sometime in the night. Past the shutters the world smelled washed—wet stone, green, and under both a sweetness that came up off the garden after rain and that he still did not have a name for.

He ran the inventory. That had stopped being optional around hour one.

Ten fingers, when asked. Ten toes, when asked. He brought a hand up in front of his face and put it through a short program, because there was nothing more useful to do with it: the seal that starts an Attunement, which he could perform and could not use; the two-handed thing photographs want, thumbs and forefingers meeting; a thumbs-up, old and ironic; two fingers off the eyebrow, a salute to nobody.

Everything moved when he told it to. He put the hand back down.

[DEUCE]

[What are you doing.]

"Checking the lease," he said. He did not bother keeping his voice down. Tobias had stopped looking up for that on the first day, which was one of several things Aren liked about him.

[DEUCE]

[Logging it anyway.]

[SEAL]

[RESERVES: SIX DAYS.]

He did not look at that one either.

***

Outside, bells. Not a bell—a whole town's worth of them, thin, overlapping, nobody keeping a schedule. Up the hill past the shutters, the Skyvault Tower had its banners out: long red-and-gold streamers, moving on the wind coming down off the river.

"Is there a war," he said, mostly to the ceiling.

"It's the holiday, my lord. The Rite of the Pole. Every house in the March keeps it. The Tower lights at noon, there's a procession, and everybody pretends not to drink until after." Tobias had been standing beside the bed long enough to have gone into the wallpaper. He pulled the curtain.

"Come to think of it." Aren let that sit a moment, because he had been holding it since before he was awake and was tired of it. "There's something else."

"Go on."

"The Lantern." Tobias never said the name without stopping first, as though the two words had to be lifted off something hot. "I put him in the west court, in the lotus bed, like you said. I looked in on him this morning. The cuts are closed. The burns are mostly gone. The ribs have knitted."

Aren said nothing. There was a crack in the ceiling he had not finished with.

"But he doesn't wake up." Tobias's hands worried at each other in front of his belt. "Head's fine. Heart's fine. Everything's fine, my lord, except the spine, in the middle—broken across, snapped like somebody took a stem and turned it until it let go. That's where the roots seat. He won't mend that on his own."

The Borrowed stood at the foot of the bed where it had been stood, holding a folded robe.

The hand on the folded robe stopped.

Alive. Closing. Not waking. He set it down somewhere inside himself and left it there. It would matter, or it would not.

"Maybe he's sleeping," Aren said.

"Since yesterday afternoon."

"Then he's sleeping."

"That's what I keep telling myself, my lord." Tobias looked at his own hands. "It doesn't take."

Aren had not put his face on yet. Tobias had seen it happen twice before and was loyal and would not say so, and this morning there was a lag between what came in at the window and what arrived behind Aren's eyes, and he lay there with his mouth a little open, working through the morning. By the time he sat up, the other face was on: thinner, colder, the one that made servants hand things over and leave.

***

"Get me dressed."

Tobias brought the Borrowed around.

The Borrowed put him in the robe, and then the sash, and then, with the even, inoffensive competence of a chair, it put the sash around his neck and pulled.

Aren wheezed.

"Belt," he said, when he had air for it. "Sash. Collar. In what country does this go around the throat?"

The sash came off his throat. The robe, apparently, was finished being put on.

Aren looked down at himself. The front of it stood open from collarbone to belt, the belt had given up somewhere around the hip, the silk crossed his thighs and stopped there, and his ankles were doing the rest of the work, each of them with a gold ring on it in plain view.

He looked at Tobias. Tobias looked at the wall.

[DEUCE]

[So that's a look.]

"That's not a look."

[DEUCE]

[Reference. Vellum's made-things carry a false soul, and the false soul renders the host's hidden character. Preferences. Appetites. Anybody who looks at your Borrowed is looking at the kind of man you are.]

"I've heard this."

[DEUCE]

[You heard it from Tobias. Tobias has it as a theory. I have it as a manual.]

"Burn the manual."

[DEUCE]

[I'm the manual.]

He pulled the robe shut over his chest with his own hand and held it shut and did not look down.

[DEUCE]

[Additional data point. Your assignment was matched to your profile. We are running at 92.97% compatibility.]

[DEUCE]

[A number like that is a warning label.]

"Then why are you still here."

[DEUCE]

[Because the alternative is the other seven percent.]

"So my type is idiots," Aren said. "Revise the number up."

[DEUCE]

[Revised.]

[One hundred.]

The trouble with the false soul was not that it existed. It was the direction it pointed.

Because there was a thing his body had started asking for in the small hours, the way a dog asks at a door, and it was not pain, and it was not blood, and it was not anything he could afford to have named out loud in a house full of people who had already decided what he was. His tongue had tasted iron and ash for four days. What it wanted now, specifically, was

candy.

A piece of candy. The cheap white kind they cut into blocks and kept in a dish beside the medicine, for the aftertaste. That was his hidden character. That was the man the Borrowed had spent the whole morning modeling to the room while he stood there in an open robe.

He held the robe shut and said nothing about it.

***

Tobias had been keeping something warm on the little stove since before dawn. He brought it over in the good bowl.

"Drink it while it's hot."

Aren looked at the bowl. Steam coming off it, dark as paint.

"Not blood," Tobias said, before he could be asked, which meant the question had been sitting on the man's face all morning. "The apothecary's. Nothing off him. To the death."

"Take it away."

"It won't keep, my lord."

"Then it won't keep. Take it out."

Tobias's mouth shaped something else and let it go. He carried the bowl and the tray out, and did not shut the door behind him, because he never did.

***

Corrin had been a month inside the wood, and the wood had learned the house better than he had.

It had hands that could hold a tray and a face with nothing written on it, and the house walked around it the way a house walks around a coat stand. He had stood where he was stood all morning, and now he heard Tobias set the bowl down out in the gallery, harder than it needed to be, because Tobias was angry and was not allowed to say so.

What the room could not see, and what he had instead of a free hand, came up over the man's shoulder when the man wanted something: a small pale thing, hung out to dry, no face in it but two red eyes. It could not lie. Nobody had ever asked it whether it wanted to be looked at.

This morning it had hung over the bowl and stared down into it and said, in the voice of something that had gone a long time without:

[Want. Want. Want.]

And the man had said no. Twice, and had not looked at the bowl either time.

The body wanted the medicine. The mouth was refusing it. Those two had been arguing in this room for a month, and Corrin knew which one won, and roughly how long it took. The bowls had stopped yesterday, on the man's own order. A body given a month of anything does not take a polite no. Let him go two more days and he would come to the bowl himself, hands first, face open, and Corrin intended to be standing there when he did.

He had decided to wait. He had decided it that morning, while he stood in the room putting a prince into his own appetites one sleeve at a time, which had been funny in the first week and was not funny now.

Then the man did it.

Not the face a man puts on for a bitter draught. Something small and quick, going out under the face like a light going out under a door, there and gone, never meant to be seen. Hiding it. A month of Corrin's blood in him, an order given in front of two servants, and still hiding the want, in his own bedroom, with the door open.

The waiting came apart in Corrin's hands.

He could not put his own hand on the man; the mark had settled that yesterday, thoroughly, and it did not care how the hand was meant. But the mark had nothing to say about a bowl. There was a bowl's worth of the man's medicine lying out in the west court in a bed of lotus, in a body with its spine broken where the roots seat, going quietly to ruin while the house waited for it to wake up and be grateful.

That body was his. That blood was his. The man had forbidden the house to touch it.

He went down and got it.

The garden was empty; the household was up at the Tower or watching the road for the procession, and the wet green smell of the lotus pool came up the steps before he was halfway down them. His body lay in the shallow water with its hands folded, put there neatly by somebody who had been careful about it, its burns closed, its chest going up and down without any help from him at all.

He looked at the face for a while. He had expected to feel something, and felt nothing in particular, which was its own answer.

He turned the arm over and opened a vein above the wrist and held the bowl under it. A body that will not wake does not bleed well. What came out was slow and dark, and it filled the bowl anyway.

He carried it up past the kitchen. Nobody stopped him, because nobody in this house counts the furniture.

The man had shut his eyes.

"Where did that come from."

"From the Lantern." He let the pause sit and spend itself. "Fresh."

"There's an order in this house."

"Yes."

He set the bowl against the man's lip. "Master. Drink."

"No—"

The bowl got there first.

He took the back of the man's neck with one hand—the hand already knowing the grip the way a hand knows a handle—and held the head still and tipped. The mark did not so much as warm; there was no killing in the hand, only a bowl, and a man who had spent the whole morning telling a room what he did not want.

The man got half of it down before his own hand came up. He fought it and lost it, and what was left went over the sheet, and he coughed until his eyes ran.

The face came apart exactly as Corrin had waited a month to see it come apart, wet and shaking, the same face that was under all the prince's talk—one mouthful of what the body was already begging for, and out comes the thing underneath.

He had waited for it. He had it.

It did not help.

***

Aren got his own hand up and got the bowl off his mouth, and most of what was left went over the sheet and some of it went the wrong way, and he coughed until he had to hold the mattress.

The taste stayed. It got into his sinuses and sat down up there and lectured, and the dark ran off the corners of his mouth and down into the collar of a robe he had just, painfully, been dressed in.

He knew the taste. He had known it since his first morning in this body. The bowls had stopped yesterday on his own order, and half of one was in him now, and the low animal part of him that had been asking for it since before dawn had just been paid in full.

"You," he said, when he had the air for it. "You—"

The Borrowed stepped back from the bed and looked at him from a polite distance, at leisure.

The bowl had come up from the west court. He filed that with the rest of what he could not currently stand up about, and turned his head on the pillow.

Tobias was in the doorway. He had come back at the noise and had not got past the frame.

"Tobias."

"My lord."

"You're looking at me."

"I—" Tobias's mouth worked. Something in him won, and what it won with was honesty. "It's a false soul, my lord. It only renders what's already there. Hidden character. Appetites. That's the—that's the theory of the thing."

"And."

"And it just did that," Tobias said, which was as far as he was prepared to go, and already further than his face had agreed to.

The bowl lay on its side on the sheet, and what was left of it was going down into the weave in a slow dark line.

He lay back and looked at the Borrowed, standing at the foot of the bed with its hands folded again. Whatever the false soul looked like, it was not for the room to see. The room had the robe and the sash and the hands—and the hands had just done the rest.

[DEUCE]

[So the thing you want is to be held by the neck and fed.]

He closed his eyes.

[DEUCE]

[Logging it as a preference.]

"Log it," he said, "and I'll find a way to burn you too."

Author’s Note

Aren turns the bowl away twice in this chapter, and the thing standing at the foot of his bed decides that a no from a man who's been hiding the want all morning isn't a no it has to respect. What stays with me is the end of that decision: the servant gets exactly the face he waited a month to see, and it doesn't help him. Winning and getting nothing. What would you have done with the bowl?

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