Longwind

Chapter 8: Carried Over the Threshold

Chapter 8: Carried Over the Threshold

His hand was already out.

He watched it from a long way off—fingers half open, palm up, angling for the rim of the bowl before he had told it anything at all. That was the part that got him. Not the want. He had made his peace with the want, or with the fact of it, or with the place it sat in him. The part that got him was that his body had already decided.

He took the hand back.

"Master."

"Don't."

"Drink." The Borrowed did not move the bowl, and did not move its feet, and did not raise its voice. "The vessel is in our hands. As much as you want. Whenever you want it."

"That's the problem."

"There is no problem, master."

He looked at the thing standing over his bed with a bowl in its hands. The room was very quiet. He could hear the rain in the court. He had not heard the rain in days.

Then he sat up.

The motion was too fast, and the room bent at the edges, and for a second the floor had to be found again. He held on to the headboard and breathed through it. The Borrowed saw. The Borrowed saw everything; that was what it was for. Its face did not change.

He put his fingertips on the rim of the bowl.

The Borrowed's fingers tightened, very slightly, on the underside.

And he pushed.

"Take it out of here."

The bowl did not move. The hand holding it did not move. Past the thin wall of the room the rain came down steady now—not the gray sideways rain of the courts, but the flat heavy rain that had settled in and did not stop—and in the middle of all of it, sitting on the edge of a rented bed in a secondhand body, he was having an argument about a bowl.

"Master is unwell."

"Master is fine."

"Master is shaking."

"I noticed."

"Master has been shaking for an hour. I have been here for an hour." The thing's voice was level. "I am not counting to three, and there is nothing to count. Drink."

Something in the back of his skull went thin and bright, and for a moment he thought it was anger, and then he thought it was the room, and then he understood that it was the smell. It had reached the middle of the room while they were talking. It was going for the corners now. By morning the room would be nothing but the smell. That was how it worked.

He did not intend to spend the whole night in a room that smelled like this.

He reached out and took the bowl.

There was a pause—a very short one, less than a breath—in which the thing holding it did not let go. Then it did. Its fingers came away from the underside one at a time.

He held the bowl for a second. Then he tipped it.

Half of it went over the side and hit the floor.

The smell came up off the boards in a wave, thicker than the smell that had been standing in the room, hotter, spread out over the whole floor now instead of trapped in a bowl. Every corner of the room turned sweet at once and stayed sweet.

The Borrowed's face did something.

It was a small thing. It was the smallest thing. The eyes did not widen—they were not built to widen; the wood held them the way the wood held everything—but the mouth went down half a hair, and the free hand came up and stopped in the air.

"What is master doing."

"Taking it out of here," Aren said. "The way I said."

His voice had cracked on the first word. He heard it. He had spent a month learning to hate the sound of his own voice in this room, and he hated it now, and he used it anyway, because there was nobody left to use it on but the thing in front of him and himself.

"A point is being made," he said. "I'll get to it."

He looked at the floor where the blood was. Then he looked at the bowl in his hands, half full, steam still coming off it. Then he looked at the thing standing over the bed.

"I was told," he said slowly, "that the false soul shows what a man wants. Under everything else. The part he doesn't say."

The Borrowed was still.

"You'd know. It follows me around. You watch it. You keep watching it, and Tobias thinks it means something, and neither of you will tell me what you see."

The thing did not answer.

"It brought me this bowl. Nobody asked it to. It knew." He stopped, and started again. "So either Tobias is wrong, or I have been telling myself something for a month that isn't true, and whatever is sitting over my shoulder has been watching me do it."

He reached out over the bowl and tipped it a second time.

Not all of it. Less than the first—a rope of dark blood down the inside lip of the bowl, into the mess on the boards, spreading. But it was the second time, and he had done it with the thing's face right there.

The smell came up again, worse, and he stayed sitting up through it.

"There," he said. "Get me a basin."

The Borrowed took the bowl.

It did not look at the blood on the floor. It did not look at him. It turned and walked to the small table at the head of the bed and set the bowl down on it, dead center, the way a man puts down a thing he means to come back for.

Then it looked at him.

"You keep it," it said.

"I don't want it."

"You keep it. It will be there in the morning."

"And I'll pour the rest of it out in the morning."

"That's what you'll do."

Neither of them said anything for a moment. Then the Borrowed turned and went out. The door closed behind it. The smell stayed. There was a bowl sitting on the small table at the head of the bed with the rest of the night's blood in it.

He sat there for a while with his hands on his knees, looking at the door. Then he looked at the bowl. Then he lay back on the quilt and set his jaw and stayed awake with it.

***

The false soul had been shouting, two doors away, all the way through it. Then the man tipped the bowl, and it stopped shouting.

It came in low over the floor afterward and crouched down at the edge of the spilled blood and stuck a finger in it. It was shaped like something small left out to dry. It had no face, and two red points where a face would go, and it drew a line through the blood, and then another line, and looked up at the bed.

[Want,] it said. [Want. Want. Want.]

The man on the bed did not move.

Corrin stood against the wall and looked at the false soul for a long time. A month of this room, this bed, this bowl. A month of the thing, and it had not once lied about the man. It was not lying now.

Then it stopped saying it.

That was new. It crouched there with its finger in the blood and grumbled down at the boards instead.

[Go on, then. Drink it and die. Don't. Don't.]

Corrin looked at the man on the bed. The man's jaw was set, and his eyes were open, and he was not looking at the bowl, and he did not go to sleep.

Corrin picked the bowl up off the small table and carried it to the door.

He stood there with it for a while. Then he came back and set it down on the small table again, dead center, and did not take it away.

He watched the man not-drink until the gray hour before the rain let up. He did not sleep.

***

The rain stopped by mid-morning.

Tobias came up the corridor with the tray and the morning draught and the two loaves and the small jar of sugared ginger the physician had said to give him if he would take it, which he would not. He stood outside the door with the tray and listened, and heard nothing.

That was wrong.

There was usually something—the prince awake and arguing with the system, or asleep and fighting the sheets, or the Borrowed going in and out with the covered basin. This morning there was nothing. The corridor smelled of stone and rain and woodsmoke from the braziers at the far end of the hall.

He knocked twice. Nothing came back. He tried the latch.

The door was not locked. He went in.

The prince was sitting up. He had dressed himself, which he could not always do, and he had done the fastenings wrong in two places, and he was sitting against the headboard with the quilt up to his waist, looking at the far wall. The wall had nothing on it.

The bed was a wreck.

Tobias did not have a better word for it. The sheets were twisted into ropes. The corners of the blankets had been dragged down and crushed. In the middle of the bed a handful of the linen had been torn through in several places by something that was not a knife—fingers, most likely, or the heel of a hand—and there were dried smears in the rips. Not a lot. Enough.

There was also the smell.

Tobias knew it. He had spent a month keeping that smell out of his own clothes by washing them twice a week in the outer court. He looked at the floor and found what he expected to find, and did not spend long looking at it. Then he looked at the small table at the head of the bed, and the half-full bowl on it, sitting dead center on the wood with the rim clean.

He looked at the bowl for a while.

Then he looked at the prince.

"Whose blood."

"Not mine."

"Whose. Prince."

The prince moved his head about an inch, which was as much of an answer as he was going to give, and looked at the morning light in the window.

Tobias set the tray down on the side table and came over and looked at the rips in the sheet and the dried marks in them, and then at the prince's mouth. There was a thin scab on the lower lip, freshly closed, the kind a man got when he chewed on himself in the night and did not know he was doing it.

The prince's color was bad. Worse than yesterday. His left sleeve was pushed up to the elbow, and the wrist showed the black line on the inside that Tobias was not supposed to look at, and Tobias did not look at it.

"Did you sleep at all."

"I'm awake."

"That's not what I asked."

"It's the answer I've got."

Tobias stood beside the bed with the tray and did not know what to do with his hands, which happened to him more often than he liked in this room. He had been handed this post in a hurry a long time ago and nobody had ever told him what the post was, and he had gone on doing it because the prince was the only man in this house doing the same.

He said, without meaning to say anything at all:

"You look like hell, Prince. If you'll excuse my saying so."

"Noted."

"You want the morning draught."

"No."

"Prince—"

"No, I said." Then the prince turned his head, finally, and looked at him—a hard flat look, not angry, more like he had just noticed Tobias was in the room. Something in it shifted. "Actually," he said. "Yes."

Tobias brought the draught over.

He started to hand it across and stopped, because the prince's hand had come up and it was shaking. Not the fine tremor Tobias had watched for a week. A real shake. The prince looked at his own hand, and then he looked up at Tobias, and the two of them stood there in the middle of the mess.

Tobias reached out to push the cup into the prince's fingers.

Then his hand, without asking him, drifted up past the cup toward the back of the prince's neck.

He had not been told to do that. It was the thing he did at dawn on the mornings when the prince's hands shook and the physician was still two streets away—hold the back of the neck, steady, count to thirty—and it worked, and Tobias had started to think of it as part of the post.

The prince's eyes came up and pinned him.

"Tobias."

Tobias stopped.

"I am going to give you one sentence," the prince said, "and I want you to consider all of it before that hand moves another inch. If you put your fingers on the back of my neck right now, there is going to be a dish on the table at tonight's feast named after you, and I do not mean a dish I asked the kitchen for."

Tobias took his hand back.

He took it back fast, and both hands went to the tray, and he stood there holding the tray against his chest like a shield, which was, he realized a moment later, exactly the correct thing to do with a tray.

"Your Highness is in rare form this morning."

"Your Highness would like his medicine."

Tobias handed it across and did not touch him.

The prince drank it off in one long swallow—the whole cup, no sipping, no complaint, no pause for the system to say anything—and set the empty cup down on the tray with a knock of ceramic on wood, and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist.

"Go get my chair ready. And my coat. The one with the collar."

"Prince, the Rite is not until evening."

"Then we'll be early."

Tobias opened his mouth and closed it. The prince was looking at the far wall again, and his jaw had set in a way Tobias had learned in the last month to leave alone.

Tobias left the room to get the chair.

***

He was gone long enough for the Borrowed to come back in and stand in the doorway, and long enough for Aren to push his sleeve up off his wrist and look at what was under it.

The black line was where it had always been. Overnight it had put out a new thread from the end of it, fine as a hair, and the tip of the thread had begun to curl open.

[DEUCE]

[Outstanding balance: five days. Gareth Voss's position: unchanged. He has not sent word.]

"I know."

[DEUCE]

[He is not going to hand the Pole-light back to you politely. He has done the math. He knows what it is worth to you, and he knows what it looks like sitting on his desk, and he has decided.]

"Good."

[DEUCE]

[Good.]

"Tonight, before midnight, he is going to kneel down and beg me to take it back."

A pause.

[DEUCE]

[You have a plan.]

"I have a plan."

[DEUCE]

[You do not have a plan.]

"I have a plan to make a plan."

[DEUCE]

[Setting aside the matter of the plan—he is going to make you pay for it. Not with the Pole-light. With something else.]

Something in Aren's chest turned over. He did not let it onto his face. The Borrowed was in the doorway, and the Borrowed was not going to get this. He pulled the sleeve back down over the line with two fingers.

"I know."

[DEUCE]

[Just checking.]

The Borrowed came across the room and stopped at the foot of the bed and looked at the empty cup on the tray, and then at the half-full bowl on the small table, and said nothing about the bowl.

Aren pushed the quilt down and swung his legs off the bed. This was still work. It would be work for a while. He sat with his feet on the boards and his hands on his knees and let the room come up around the edges of his sight and waited it out. Then he put one hand on the bed frame and got himself into the chair, and sat back, and let out a long breath he had not decided to let out.

The Borrowed reached into the coat it wore and brought out something small and white.

It held it out.

Aren looked at the hand and did not take it.

"What is that."

"It was in my pocket."

"Why is it in your pocket."

"I have been keeping it for the morning."

Aren looked at it a while longer.

"I don't want it."

"It isn't a request, master."

"Everything you do is a request. You are a piece of wood with a name on it." He straightened his back and put both hands on the arms of the chair and lifted his chin. "Take it away."

The thing did not put it away.

It came a step closer, and the hand came up, and five wooden fingers came down on the back of his neck.

Not hard. Spread, and steady, and heavy in a way that had nothing to do with strength. There was nothing to be done about it that did not involve making a scene with a tray in it.

"How many times are we doing this," Aren said. "I'll count to three, and then I'm taking the arm off at the shoulder—"

A finger brushed his lip, and something hard went in between them.

He pushed it back out with his tongue. His tongue caught the finger, and the finger stopped.

Then there was something bitter, faint, gone in the same instant—the smell of the wood it was made of, the smell that was on its coat and its hands—and under the bitter there was sugar.

He stopped.

The Borrowed had fed him a piece of white candy.

He sat in the chair with it in the side of his mouth, and it made a small hard lump in his cheek, and it kept making one. He reached up with two fingers and pulled a strand of hair down over that side of his face and let it lie there.

The Borrowed took its hand back and stood where it was and watched him.

"The Rite's at sundown," Aren said. "We're going now."

***

The Skyvault Tower stood at the north end of the long street that ran up from the Provost's house to the river, and it had been standing there for four hundred years, and the city had been built up around it.

Nineteen tiers of pale stone. Every tier had been wrapped in red and gold for the Rite—ribbons, bunting, banners six feet long—and there were braziers burning at every landing, and people on the steps and in the plaza and on the balconies of the houses across the street, because the Rite of the Pole came once every ten years and every man, woman and child in the March had come out to watch the great and the good climb the stairs, hours before there was anything to see.

The chair stopped at the bottom of the steps.

Six feet of dressed stone, and no ramp. The clerk in the green coat was already coming down with his hands folded and his face set.

"The Lord Provost sends his regrets, Highness. The Rite is very busy. He asks whether the Third Prince would—the side door is available. It is a short way. If His Highness would prefer it, we can have a runner go around and clear the side entrance."

The man in the chair said nothing.

He looked at the six feet of stair. Then he looked up at the plaque over the doors—gold, and wide, with the Sage-King's own hand cut into it and the Crown Prince's seal stamped in the lower corner. He looked at it for a long time.

Then the bangle on his wrist went warm.

Warm was not the word for it. His arm came up on its own, and the light came out of the bangle, first as a point and then as a line and then as something with a head and no eyes, and it went up the face of the tower faster than Corrin could follow.

It hit the plaque.

The plaque came off the wall the way a plate comes off a shelf when the house shifts, all at once and entirely, and it fell nineteen tiers and struck the steps, and it did not break, because gold weighs what gold weighs. It did not land flat. It came down on one edge and stayed there, leaning back across the six feet of stair, face up, the cut characters showing to the sky.

The plaza went quiet.

The corner of the man's mouth was up. Corrin had not seen that before.

The chair turned. The wheels went up over the Sage-King's hand and over the seal and left two dark lines in the gold, and came off the top step onto the landing.

***

Gareth Voss came out of the tower fast.

He was a good-looking man in the middle of his life, white coat, grey at the temples, the kind of manners that had been expensive to acquire. Corrin had watched a hundred men of that kind work a room and did not like any of them.

He came down the steps and stopped in front of the chair and bowed. Just low enough.

"Highness. I was told something this morning. I did not believe it. I have now seen it and I believe it."

"You weren't in a hurry."

"I was in a hurry the moment I heard." He spread his hands. "The servants. I am going to have a conversation with the servants. Highness, the ramp—we had planned for you. The scaffolding was up yesterday. Someone in the household took it down, and I did not know." He bowed again. "That is mine. It will not happen again."

"No," Aren said. "It won't."

Something moved across Voss's face and did not stay.

"Highness is direct this morning."

"Highness has a short life."

Now something stayed.

Something went past him. A breath, a draught with no door behind it, going around the chair once and then around it again, low, under the arms of it.

Aren smiled at him. "Did you need something, Lord Provost?"

The draught stopped.

"Nothing, Highness," Voss said, and drew himself up.

They looked at each other over the top of the chair for three breaths.

"What are you going to do about the plaque," Voss said.

"About what?"

"About the plaque." He said it flatly. "The Sage-King's hand. The Crown Prince's seal. Every man on this street knows both, and both of them will hear about it before the sun goes down." He tilted his head. "The March is a small place, Highness. Word travels."

"It usually travels faster than it should."

"It usually travels faster than the houses it is about are ready for."

A pause.

"Highness is here on my sufferance," Voss said, in a voice that had not changed. "That is not a thing I have said out loud, and it is not a thing I would say on a good morning. But the thing about word traveling is that it goes in both directions. It can arrive at the palace. It can arrive at Crowngate. And Crowngate has been very quiet about Highness for ten years, which I have always taken as a good sign."

"You're warning me," Aren said.

"I am warning you, Highness."

"You're warning me that if I make a noise about this, you'll make the same noise in a letter."

"I do not write letters, Highness. I am a provincial official. I have people who write letters for me."

"You're right about one thing," Aren said. "It's a sign, and signs are cheap. The Sage-King isn't going to have my family killed over one." He smiled. "Probably. And I don't mind much either way."

Voss blinked once.

"I'll see you at the Rite, Lord Provost."

The chair began to move. Corrin took the handles and pushed it around the fallen plaque, and Gareth Voss stood where he was for three seconds too long before he moved to follow.

***

Then they were at the top of the steps, and there was the door.

The doors of the tower stood open. They were tall, and carved down both sides, and inside there was a hall with torches in it and a floor of polished stone, and the hall was full of people—merchants, minor gentry, clerks, every one of them turned toward the doors, because this was the neighborhood gossip of a decade and nobody in the March had had anything this good in years.

At the head of the hall there was a raised platform with chairs on it, and the chairs were full, and the men in them were looking at the doors too.

The threshold was one stone, polished by a thousand years of feet, and it was two inches high.

Voss lifted a hand, and two footmen in green came forward to take the chair.

"Don't trouble yourself, Lord Provost," Aren said.

He lifted one hand off the arm of the chair and made a small motion at the footmen. He did not look at the wood standing behind him at all.

Then an arm came under his knees.

The ground went out from under him. His hand closed on the collar of a coat that had no seam in the wrong place, and the hall turned, and he was off the chair and up against a chest that was hard and did not give, and the whole of the March was watching.

"Put me down."

"At once, master."

The Borrowed was already walking. It had the chair in its other hand, one-handed, and it carried the chair and the man and went through the door and over the two-inch threshold without any particular hurry at all, and the plaza behind them made a sound.

The man in his arms had gone rigid. Corrin felt it, the whole length of him, the sudden tension where there had been a curve a moment before. He felt the free hand take hold of the collar of his coat and hold there. He felt the man's breath, and the small shifts of weight a body makes when it is carried and has decided not to fight it out loud.

And he felt that the man was warm.

He had known this body for a month—the corners of it, the weight of it, the places that took a blow. He had been born in the cold and had died in it and had woken up in a piece of wood in a warm country, and the first thing he had learned about this man was that his hands did not feel cold. That had told him what he needed to know. The body was running. The body was doing its job. The body had not been told what was living in it.

A body that is not cold and a body that is warm are two different things.

He walked the man down the length of the hall, slower than he needed to, and set him down in the chair on the platform, in front of the whole of the March, and stepped back and stood at his station.

The man put both hands on the arms of the chair and looked straight ahead across the platform and said nothing at all.

He had known what the man was for a month. He did not know it this morning.

The man's ear was red.

Author’s Note

Aren doesn't drink it, and he doesn't hand it back either — he tips it onto the floor, twice, while the one thing in the room that can't lie to him watches. The second pour is smaller than the first, and that's the one I keep turning over. His hand was already out for the bowl before he'd decided anything; everything after that is him catching up.

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