Longwind

Chapter 9: Nine Given Bones

Chapter 9: Nine Given Bones

The Borrowed had set him down in the chair on the platform and gone back to its station, and the hall was still making the noise it had made about the door.

[DEUCE]

[So.]

"Don't."

[DEUCE]

[I didn't say anything.]

***

The Rite of the Pole took the first hours of the evening: a great deal of upright language, a great deal of smoke, and not one person in the hall giving the light a thought.

Afterward the March went up the tower to be entertained.

The Skyvault Tower stood nineteen tiers of pale stone, and the tier they had been given was the third, which had a gallery along the front of it and a screened box at either end, so that the guests of the March could watch the round below without having to watch each other.

Aren sat in the left-hand box, in the chair, with a cup of tea going cold at his elbow, Tobias Sallow at the screen, and the borrowed man standing behind him in the place he had been told to stand.

Gareth Voss, Lord Provost of the Greywater March, sat across the tray with his hands folded.

"A pleasure to have you at our Rite, Your Highness. In your day the realm's fortune came off your fingers every year, and I never heard that you read it once wrong."

Aren drank his tea. It was mostly dust.

He said nothing, because he did not know what the man was talking about, and the first days here had already taught him that guessing cost more than silence.

Voss went on, pleasantly. "The Sage-King called you the man who knew the hour. We were proud of that in the March. We are proud of it still."

Then it came through the screens, in the voice of a young man who does not believe he can be heard.

"Knew the hour. Where's the hour-keeper now?"

"Retired." A second voice. "You didn't hear? Aldric took the Augur's seal off him. His own brother."

"Which brother?"

"The one in the chair, you idiot."

Laughter, three or four of them, and the sound of a cup being filled.

"Without the Crown Prince behind him, what is he? A man with opinions about the weather and a chair to sit in."

"It's Aldric I feel for," said a third voice. "A shining man with a twin like that on his name."

Aren heard all of it. None of it landed anywhere.

[DEUCE]

[Huh.]

He watched the panel until it went out. He did not like that, and he put it away with the rest of what he did not like, in the part of him that kept the account.

Voss set his cup down on the tray, not hard, and the next box went quiet.

"Gentlemen. The Crown Prince's name is not a thing to be handled in a public box."

A pause.

"Your Highness will forgive them," he said. "They hear a rumor in the morning and believe it by noon, and there is nobody at home to take it out of their hands."

*Your Highness.*

Aren turned the cup a quarter turn on the tray and set it down again. He had been listening to a description of himself for a quarter of an hour and had not recognized one word of it. The Augur. The hour. The seal his brother had taken off him. It was all his, and he had not done any of it, and there was nobody in the box he could ask.

"It's nothing, my lord," he said. "Mouths belong to the people they're attached to."

[DEUCE]

[You are just going to sit there.]

Aren let the panel sit until it faded, which was the only discipline that had ever worked on it, and put his hands in his lap.

His right hand moved against the palm of his left, thumb over the fingers, twice, three times—the way a man counts coins he cannot see. The tea had left a bitter coat on his tongue. Below, on the round, the priests were still walking their circles and singing their line.

He said, at the volume of a man remarking on the weather:

"Blood on that side of the screen."

Voss looked up. "I beg your pardon?"

"Blood," Aren said. "On that side of the screen."

Nothing in the box moved for a moment. Then Tobias said, in his ordinary voice, "To the death, Highness?"

"Only to the floor," Aren said.

Tobias went out through the screen and shut it behind him with its soft, well-built sound, and the door of the next box gave up all at once.

"Who the—"

A body hitting the boards.

"Do you know who my father—"

A wetter one.

"Get him off—get him *off* me—"

Aren sat with his right hand inside his left and closed his fingers one at a time, unhurried.

"The Lots," he said. "It isn't difficult."

Voss's smile stayed exactly where it was for one full second, which is a long time for a smile, and then went back to work.

"Your Highness will excuse me."

He bowed and went out to see to the young men, which was going to take him a while.

The screens were shut. Tobias was next door, and Voss was next door with Tobias, and the gallery below was empty, and the priests had not come back out.

There was nobody in the box but the chair and the two people who belonged to it.

Aren did not turn his head.

"You were told to hold the chair."

The borrowed man said nothing.

"When I tell you to put me down, you put me down." Aren's voice stayed where it was, low and even, the voice he used for terms. "When I tell you to stand, you stand. You don't do the thing beside the thing. You don't decide for me what I meant. If you move on your own again, I'll have you broken down and mixed into mortar, and I'll build a wall with you in it, and you can stand in that wall for a hundred years and think about the difference."

Silence.

"Answer me. What do you say?"

Nothing. So Aren moved his fingers once, in his lap, the way a man taps a page he has finished reading, and under the collar of the servant's coat the covenant mark came up through the skin and pulled.

The borrowed man went sideways a step and caught himself on the frame of the screen. He made no sound at all.

"Answer me."

Corrin got himself upright. His face had gone gray and he did not appear to notice. He stood in the shut box and looked at Aren for a while before he answered, and then he said, mildly:

"Thank you, master. Was that the reward?"

Aren's hand came up and took him by the chin.

"You're a borrowed soul in a wooden man," he said. "Nothing about that keeps my hands off you. And shut your mouth. It isn't as clever as it thinks it is."

The false soul was at Corrin's shoulder, burning like a struck match, and it said the answer for him twice, at a volume no one else in the world could hear. *Yes, master. Yes, master.* It had never told a lie in its life and had no notion how, and it wanted whatever the man in the chair wanted, and it burned with it.

Corrin looked at the man's face instead.

There it was. A month in this country, in this body, doing this work with these hands, and there was exactly one thing in all of it that answered him when he pushed it: the man in the chair, going still and cold and enormous with rage. It was the second face under the first one, and it did not come out for anybody but him.

He had a hundred years of practice in not saying what he thought. He took his time with it.

"Yes, master," he said.

Aren tapped his cheek twice with the backs of his knuckles, idly, and pushed him back to his station.

"Good," he said. "Stand there."

Aren sat with it and let it come down. It had been a long time since anyone had made him this angry. Laughter through a screen, a threat in a rented room, a bowl of blood on a small table that he had poured onto the floor in front of the man who had poured it—none of it had got under him. The first thing that did was a wooden man with a borrowed soul in him, standing behind his chair again with his hands at his sides as though nothing whatsoever had happened.

He did not have a column for that yet.

Tobias came back first, with blood drying on the scabbard of his sword, and took his place at the screen without a word about the door.

Voss came back after him, and his face had been put on again properly, though it sat a half-size small on him.

Below, the priests finished. They came off the round in a line, singing something in a language the tower had never wanted to teach anybody, and the last of them put out the lamps at the four corners and left the round to itself.

Then the round was not empty.

It came out of the dark at the far side of it: the size of a plow horse, long in the body, built wrong, more ribs than a thing ought to have, the hide coming off it in wet pieces. It opened its mouth and let the drool run off its jaw, and the drool ate a hole in the stone the size of a plate.

"Last year," Voss said, "a town a thousand miles east of here took a Condemnation. That is what the Condemnation left standing in the middle of the market square. Every Rite, the March puts one of them on the stone and kills it, and the priests read the next ten years out of the kill."

Aren watched the hole in the stone get bigger.

He did not need the Lots for the next ten years. He could have told them for nothing.

A door opened on the far side of the round, and a boy came out with the temple's sword in his hand, and it was too long for him.

He was in the temple's robes, which had been cut for a bigger man, and his face was covered to the eyes with a mask painted into the likeness of somebody who had never lived.

Aren sized them up: the boy, the beast, and the stone between them.

A sacrifice. Whose?

The beast smelled him.

It threw its whole chest forward and crossed the round in three strides, and the boy got the sword up in time to be hit rather than cut. He went off the round with the beast's shoulder, and came down, and rolled, and the mask broke on the stone in four pieces and showed a young, good, furious face underneath. The sword was out of his hand and turning in the air, and he put his boot to it on the way over, and it went into the beast's back up to the guard.

The beast screamed and ran a full circle with the sword standing out of its shoulders like a nail.

Aren looked away.

[DEUCE]

[Restricted content ahead.]

[Your account carries a supervision flag. Restricted material renders through the filter on a flagged account.]

[Filter: 1 Charge.]

[Decline?]

"No."

[DEUCE]

[Recorded.]

[A flagged account does not get to decline.]

[Engaging.]

[Charge: −1.]

[Filed against your account. You're welcome.]

The tower came back in flat cheerful colors, and everything on the round was made of soft things.

The beast was a wide woolly animal with its tongue out and its eyes shut in a happy line, and the sword in its back was a wooden spoon. The boy had gone soft and round and pink, with two black dots where his eyes had been and a fixed curve of a smile, and he bobbled in the air over the beast's head and came down on his back with his boots up, and the tier laughed, delighted, all the way around.

Aren made a short noise through his nose before he could stop it.

Across the tray, Voss's glance slid over him and away again.

The boy got up in the flat colors and dusted himself off, and then he wiped two fingers along the back of his neck, and there was gold on them.

The gold went off his hand in a line across the round and into the sword standing in the beast's back.

The beast came off its feet.

The light went up the blade and stayed there, and the beast's head came off in the air with the body still traveling, and the body went down on the stone and rolled, and the head rolled the other way, and the March came up off its seats and cheered.

"Take it off," Aren said.

[DEUCE]

[Off.]

The flat colors went out of the round. The blood came back, and the boy with it: standing in the middle of the stone in the temple's robes, with the beast's blood down the front of him and one drop of it running from the left eye down his cheek like something the tower had put there on purpose.

He did not wipe it off. He turned his head, slowly, and looked up at the third tier, at the box.

Aren was fairly sure the boy was looking at him.

Across the tray, Gareth Voss settled back in his seat with the small satisfied movement of a man who has been looked at.

"Lennart Greywater," Voss said. "The last Lord Provost's son. His father and I came up through the College of the Pole together, and by the roll of the College the boy is my nephew, and by the same roll he is yours, and he would have to call you uncle. There is a thin thread of the Sage-King's blood in him that the College has never been able to account for and has never once stopped writing down."

Aren watched the boy stand in the blood.

He knew the name. He had read it in the other life, in the book. The boy on the stone was the one the book had been about.

"The College gave him a reading when he was nine. Before his sixteenth year, the Sixth Degree. After the Crown Prince, the first man in the realm. They were very pleased with themselves."

"A reading," Aren said.

"A pronouncement." Voss smiled at his own correction. "The College doesn't read. The College pronounces."

Down on the stone, the boy turned and walked off the round, carrying the temple's sword, and the March applauded him all the way out.

The next ten years had nothing to do with it. They had brought the last of the old Lord Provost's blood down onto the stone, in his father's city, in front of his father's old friends, and had him kill something for a room full of applause. That was the fortune they had come to read, and they had read it. The March-Heir of Greywater, doing tricks for the March.

"My lord," Aren said, "I don't take your meaning."

"No," Voss said, "you do. You are spending the last of something, and telling the room it costs you nothing. You did it on my step this evening, in front of the whole square."

"Nine Given Bones." The price had been settled before he opened his mouth. "Out of one body and into another. It is not a thing the College permits. It is also not a thing the College can undo, once it is done. Nine bones, and a man with no Degree in him could have a path. A man in a chair could have legs."

Aren said nothing.

"The old Lord Provost was your brother by the roll of the College," he said at last. "I've heard he put his life down for yours once. That boy is what's left of him."

"One of the two things left of him." Voss turned his cup a half turn. "Yes."

"And you'd sell him."

"Sell." Voss turned the word over as though it had been rude. "I would give him a patron. He was good to me, the best man I ever knew, and I have known a few. I have thought of the boy as my own since the day they carried him home in his mother's arms. That is why I want a road out of this province for him. There is no road for him here. His father is dead, the March looks at him and sees bones in a boy and no house left to hold them, and this city is going to eat him one way or another, slowly, in front of everybody."

"The bones come out of him," Aren said.

"The bones come out of him," Voss agreed, "and he has half a month, and then he has nothing at all, and nobody has to watch it. I won't pretend to you that it's generous. There are worse roads out of Greywater, Your Highness. I have walked two of them."

Then he took something out of his coat: a tablet of pale stone, the size of a palm, and on it, cut clean and filled with dark, a name.

*Lennart Greywater.*

"A name is not a courtesy," Voss said, and set the tablet on the table between them and turned it so that it stood the right way up for Aren. "A name is the second body. Every man who has ever held a Degree knows it, and not one of them will say it out loud. I hold his. One thought from me, and the boy down there is a body on the stone, and not a soul in this tower could say afterward what happened to him."

The bones are a price, he might have said, and the name is only the reason the boy will stand still while they come out. He did not have to say it.

Aren looked at the tablet and did not put a hand out for it. He knew the mechanism. He had read it in the other life, in the book, in a paragraph he had gone through with a lamp on and no particular interest, and at the time he had thought it the cheapest magic anybody had ever written down.

Then Voss reached into his coat a second time, and this time slowly, and laid what he had on the table beside the tablet, one at a time, in a row: nine of them, each about the length of a hand.

They were white, and they were clean, and they did not look like anything that had come out of anybody, which was the worst thing about them.

"Nine Given Bones," Voss said. "Is that a fair price for the heart out of that borrowed man of yours?"

Behind the chair, Corrin heard the sentence and had the whole of it before Voss finished speaking.

Heart out of the chest: the shell does not fall down. The shell goes on standing, and the blood stops, and the light behind the eyes goes out, and it never comes back on, and nothing that was in it can ever be put into anything else again. That was the whole of what was left to him, and the Lord Provost had said the whole of it out loud, over a table, without hurrying.

He looked at the back of the man's head.

Then he looked down at the boy on the stone, in a robe cut for a bigger man, with a dead beast's blood on his face and his father's city all around him.

The hand at his side closed. It had closed before, in this body and in the one before it, and always on his own account. It had never once closed for anybody else's.

Aren was still looking at the bones.

[DEUCE]

[Nine. Counted.]

[He is offering too fast.]

*Too fast for what?*

[DEUCE]

[For bones.]

[He wants something heavier. It is not in the data.]

Nine of them. White, and clean, and laid out in a row, and every one of them had been carrying a boy around for sixteen years, and there were exactly enough of them to put a man with legs on the other side of this tower.

A heart out of the thing that stood behind his chair, for nine bones out of the boy the book had been about.

In the book, that trade was a question a reader answered without putting his cup down. He had been that reader.

Aren did the sum in his head, slower than he had to, and did not answer.

Author’s Note

Voss sets nine bones on the table and explains, without hurrying, exactly what they'd cost — and the man standing behind the chair has the whole of it before the sentence is finished. What stays with me is Corrin's hand at his side. It has closed plenty of times, always on his own account. This is the first time it closes for anyone but him, and he doesn't say a word about it. Did you catch that moment at his side?

If you'd like to read ahead, there's more waiting for you on my p*****n: https://www.patreon.com/c/TranKhang