Longwind

Chapter 7: Waiting for Him to Beg

Chapter 7: Waiting for Him to Beg

Waiting for Him to Beg

Gil Voss came up the back stairs at the end of the morning and stopped at the top of them, and bowed from there.

It was a good bow. That was what Aren noticed about it—the arms out at the sides, the head down at the exact angle, the hold. The bow they drill into a boy once at the College and never let him forget. He had walked it across an entire landing so he could deliver it from there, with a whole house between himself and the man he was bowing to, and the turn down to the west court at his back.

Nobody in Augur House went past that turn who didn't have to.

"Your Highness."

"Master Voss." Aren didn't get up. Getting up was not on the list of things this body had agreed to do today. "You've come a long way to talk to me."

"I was told Your Highness wanted his pulse read."

"I did." Aren looked past him down the gallery, where Tobias had gone out to meet him and had then stopped, and showed no sign of bringing the man any further in. "And you'll read it from there?"

Gil Voss's jaw worked.

***

Corrin stood in the wood at the foot of the bed with his hands folded and watched the room.

A month in this body now: sound joints, gloved hands, and about as much expression as a chair. The house called it the Borrowed. The man in the bed called it furniture. Both of them were wrong, in ways he had long since stopped bothering to name.

There was one thing in the room that neither of them could see.

It came up over the man's shoulder as the physician opened his mouth: a small pale thing, hung out to dry, no face in it but the two red eyes. It crossed the landing at Gil Voss and hung there at his cheek, close, all eagerness, and would not be quiet about it.

It played out what the man wanted. It had never once asked him first, and it had never lied about it either.

Then it brought its hand across Gil Voss's face—one stroke, through the cheek and out the other side, and the man never felt a thing—and came back over the shoulder and hung there and complained.

[Want to hit. Want to hit.]

Corrin looked at the man's face. There was nothing on it. Whatever the soul wanted, the mouth had not been told.

***

Aren's right hand moved once, on its own, and he put it under the coverlet.

"Come here," he said. "You'll need longer arms."

Gil came down the gallery and through the door and stopped at the foot of the bed, where Tobias had taken up position and did not move out of it.

"Both wrists," Gil said.

Aren gave him both.

Two cold fingers settled on the inside of one wrist and ran a thin thread of Attunement up through the arm—the proper way, the way that reads a body from the inside out. The man was thorough. He went up the arm and around the ribs and took his time at the heart, and some of that thoroughness was for Tobias, who stood at the foot of the bed with his arms folded and his eyes on the physician's hands the whole while.

Then he stopped. Something crossed his face that a physician's face has no business doing at a bedside, and it did not cross it fast enough, and underneath it, for about the length of a breath, Gil Voss looked pleased.

He covered it. Not quickly, and not well.

Aren put the look away. He had spent the morning not asking the obvious question, and it was almost a relief to have the answer walk into the room on somebody else's face.

"You're pleased," he said.

"I beg your pardon."

"Don't. It's been a while since anything in this house pleased anybody." He shifted his weight off his left shoulder, which had begun, unhurried, to be the loudest thing in the room. "You look like a man who's been asked to read the eulogy."

"That's an unlucky thing to say, Your Highness. Your health is not in danger."

"Of course it isn't. I intend to outlive every one of you." A beat, and then: "I was talking about the vessel. He's the one who's dying. What did you take me to mean?"

"Nothing, Your Highness."

"Good. Then tell me about my property."

Gil's report was short, and pitched lower than the room, and delivered in the flat voice of a man who had already decided what he thought of it.

"The spine is broken through the middle. Five of the nine bones gone. The husk looks whole. There's nobody in it—nothing in it at all. One breath holding the door shut, and there is no medicine in Aurel that opens it."

"Nobody in it."

"Nobody."

Aren looked at the ceiling and did sums.

"That's inconvenient," he said. "I was counting on his blood."

"Then let me take him off your hands."

It was out of him before he had finished deciding to say it, and once it was out he kept going, because stopping would have been worse. "My brother will find you another. Fresh. Whole. Better than this one, and you'll never taste the difference in the cup. You keep your health, and I take a broken body out of a prince's house. A fair exchange."

"A dying man for a living one." Aren tilted his head. "And you come out of it at a loss. That's not a trade a provost makes out of charity."

"Your Highness's health is what matters."

Aren kept the smile where it was. "You're carrying off the one thing in this house a man might weigh a city against, and you're paying for it with a body I could buy at any gate in Greywater. Do you take me for a fool?"

"I meant no such thing."

"No. Nobody ever does."

He wasn't ready to break with the Vosses over one physician's bad manners, and he had opened his mouth to let it go—and the light in him moved before he told it to.

That was the part he was never going to get used to. The body did things ahead of him, the way a horse takes a step before you have asked it to. The light came up under his ribs—not his, never his—and went out across the room as a hand, and took Gil Voss by the collar, and hauled.

Gil came off his feet and got most of the way to the bed in one pull.

Aren put the back of his hand against the man's cheek, unhurried, twice, the way you knock on a door you own, and this close there was something in the smile that made the physician forget, for a moment, to pull away.

"Let me say it again, since you seem to want the repetition," Aren said. "What I've given away, I don't ask for back. But a man who puts his hand out for what's mine goes down on his knees, and asks me for it, and hands it up to me with both hands."

The sentence cost him. He got through it in three pieces of breath and hated every one of them, because a man in good health says a thing like that in one.

At that range Gil got the smell of him whole: the blood under it, and the lotus over the top of that, the west court in every thread he was wearing. Gil, who had not been this close to the man in a long time, went very still.

He let go and smiled again, and did not fix the collar he had wrecked.

"You were born under a high fortune, Your Highness. A hundred years, and nothing out of reach."

"Don't trouble yourself over my hundred years. I've stopped asking for it." Aren let his eyes close, briefly, and opened them. "Seven will do. Seven days is enough time for the man with his eye on my things to go down on his knees and hand them back to me, and then make amends for it the only way a man in his position has left. And on the seventh day I'll die with a smile on my face, and the house can keep what it would have spent on mourners."

Under his ribs, where nobody could look, the seal read six. It had read six since he woke. He had said seven out loud, and enjoyed saying it, and would now be carrying the difference around for exactly as long as he had left to carry it.

Gil did not argue. He said something polite instead, in the tone men save for the very old and the very sick and the very far gone, and the polite thing was worse than the truth would have been.

Then he reached into his sleeve.

"Then there's this." He held it out. "The Rite of the Pole is tomorrow night, at the Skyvault Tower. The Lord Provost asks that Your Highness do him the honor of attending."

Aren took it.

It was heavy card, gold along the edge, and it had lived in a sleeve long enough to take a bend at one corner. The line at the top was set in the Sage-King's own hand, copied out letter for letter—THE POLE'S WILL—and under it, pressed in red and wide enough to cover the corner, was the Crown Prince's seal.

Aren turned the card over once, looked at the back of it, and set it down on the quilt.

"Tell your brother I'll come."

Gil got as far as the head of the stairs before he turned around, which was about as long as he could hold anything.

"Your pulse says you didn't take the blood yesterday. Whatever anyone has told you, don't stop. If you want years, don't stop."

"Noted." Aren did not look up. "And Master Voss—don't hand out advice, and don't flatter yourself that anybody asked you for any."

The stairs took him.

"Deuce."

[DEUCE]

[Yes.]

"What did he find?"

[DEUCE]

[Bonebloom. That's the name. He had it in three breaths, and most of that was spent getting past the light in front of it.]

"And the rest?"

[DEUCE]

[That's a purchase.]

"Then keep it."

Tobias stood where he was for a moment, looking at the door as though the door had said something.

"'Fresh, whole, better than this one.'"

"I heard him."

"Gareth's been in his bed two weeks, my lord, and he still found the strength to send his brother up here after a body. Whatever he's planning, he's been planning it from a pillow, and tomorrow he'll be at the top of the hall with his own men around him and half the house between us and the door."

"You're telling me not to go."

"I'm telling you what the room will look like."

Aren looked at the card. Staying in this bed, with the shutters shut and Tobias at the door, was not going to tell him one thing about what the two brothers were playing at.

"Then have a chair made up for tomorrow," he said. "Something I can be carried in. I'm not walking into a trap on my own feet."

"My lord."

"Deuce. Any interest in a wager on tomorrow night?"

[DEUCE]

[No.]

"Not even odds?"

[DEUCE]

[I've read the book.]

He laughed once, which hurt.

"There's no such thing as a sure thing," he said, and picked the card up again, and read the top line once more. "The book's first arc was called the Calamity Rite."

[DEUCE]

[It was.]

"And the Rite is tomorrow."

[DEUCE]

[The Rite is tomorrow night. The fire lands at midnight.]

He had read the book twice. He knew how the shape of it went.

Once a year the crown's light went up the Tower and sat on the stone, and the ward that hung over the city drank it and held the sky off for another year. Every march on the crown's border kept the same stone and the same light and the same bargain, and slept through its summers on the strength of it.

And on the night of the Rite in Greywater March, the first shard came down out of the dark and went through the ward like a fist through wet paper.

Skyfire. Wall to wall, the whole city, and a thousand people in it who had gone to bed expecting to wake up in the morning. Most of what came after belonged to one man: Lennart Greywater, the March-Heir, whose parents had been killed by the same kind of weather when he was a child, and whose sister was in the city that night. Willa Greywater. She had not done anything to anybody. She was one of the thousand.

He had read that part twice. He had never once, in either read, been standing in the city it happened to.

"So I'm going to a party," he said.

***

The Borrowed had not moved from the foot of the bed.

It had been watching the man's hand since the physician left: a tremor in the fingers that had not been there at breakfast, small enough to hide in a closed fist—and the man had found it, and closed the fist around it, and gone on talking about tomorrow, and had not once looked down at the hand he was doing it with.

Two bodies in this house, and only one of them upright. The other lay in the west court under the lotus, on a bed nobody had made up for a guest. A month now, and it had not woken. Every bowl that had gone up to the mouth upstairs had come out of the arm lying under the lotus; yesterday's was the first he had carried up the stairs himself.

He knew what a mouth did when the cup came away, and what it did when the cup did not come.

He did the sum, and kept it, and said nothing.

***

He hadn't understood what Gil meant about the blood. Not at first.

He understood it at the top of the afternoon, flat on his back under a quilt he'd had no intention of sleeping under, when something came up through his middle—slow and hot and wrong, like a firework going up a chimney—and burst behind his heart.

Then it went everywhere. Out along the arms, down into the legs, and it did not stop, and his whole body went wet at once.

The room stopped agreeing with itself. He blinked, and the jade drop on the bed-curtain swelled until it was bigger than the ceiling, and the quilt pulled in until it covered his feet and nothing else, and everything in between went sideways.

He heard himself say something. He was never sure afterward what.

[DEUCE]

[Withdrawal.]

[DEUCE]

[You've had his blood every day for a month. That blood carries life in it, and life in that concentration doesn't leave politely. A month of tapering and you'd walk away clean. You quit it in a day.]

"Wonderful," he said, or tried to. "A world where men fly, and the answer to this is to lie here and sweat."

[DEUCE]

[Options: continue. Or block the pain.]

"Block it."

[DEUCE]

[It's already blocked. Ninety-five percent.]

"It isn't enough."

[DEUCE]

[I can take it to ninety-seven. It costs.]

"Then it costs. Do it."

It went to ninety-seven, and the change was not the change he wanted.

What was left was thin and bright, and it ran up and down every nerve he had with nowhere to put itself. A tickle that would not stop, from a hand that was not in the room and could not be hit. Ninety-five had been an ache he could lie on top of. Ninety-seven was a joke, and he was the joke.

"Take all of it," he said, through his teeth, "or give it all back. Don't leave me a strip to feel."

[DEUCE]

[Holding.]

It held. It did not move again, and he did not have the strength left to argue with it, which it probably knew, which was probably why it had stopped.

Then there was a smell in the room.

It came in under everything else the way water comes in under a door. He had smelled it a hundred times in this room and thrown up over it into a basin more than once, and he knew exactly what it was, and his body turned toward it before he did.

The Borrowed was standing at the side of the bed with a bowl in its hands.

"Where did that come from?"

The thing considered the question for as long as it wanted to, and then did not answer it.

"Fresh," it said. "From the vessel."

"Who told you to."

That one it let sit.

It came a step closer instead, close enough that the smell of it went over the whole bed, and held the bowl out—not the way a servant holds a thing out, but lower, and steadier, and patient, the way you hold something out for a child.

"Drink, master. You'll feel better. Blood or herb, the body doesn't ask the difference."

Its voice was gentle.

That was new. It had been furniture for a month, and now it stood at the side of a bed and kept its voice down, and the gentleness came off it like heat off a stone, and the hair stood up all along Aren's arms for reasons he did not have room to work out just then.

He looked at the bowl.

His hand lay on the quilt. It was shaking. It stayed where it was.

***

Over the man's shoulder the false soul came up out of the air and hung there with its two red eyes on the bowl, and stayed, and did not once glance at the man whose desire it was.

[Want. Want. Want.]

It could not lie, and nobody had ever asked it to. Whatever was under the man's face just now, the thing over his shoulder was holding it up where only the wood could see.

Corrin had watched men come down onto their knees for what came off his arm. He had watched them fight each other over the run-off, and lick the cup, and hate themselves in the morning, and come back in the afternoon. He had a month of this house behind him, and a month of this man, and he had spent both of them waiting for the same thing to happen here.

The man's hand shook on the quilt and did not move.

He did not know yet what to do with that.

The bowl waited. The room filled up with the smell of it. Neither of them said anything for a while.

Author’s Note

Aren never gets out of bed in this chapter, which doesn't stop him from picking a fight with a physician, handing out a deadline, and accepting an invitation to somewhere he should be running from. The beat I keep turning over is the lie underneath it: he says seven days out loud because that sounds like a future, and then carries the real number — six — around by himself. If you caught the difference, you're paying closer attention than anyone in that room.

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