Longwind

Chapter 10: Both Endings End with You Dead

Chapter 10: Both Endings End with You Dead

Simulation: You Die Either Way

The lamp in Augur House had gone out in the night, and Aren had not troubled anybody to light it again. He sat in the chair in the dark with his left wrist in his lap and turned the gold bracelet there a quarter turn. He did that when he was counting.

He kept a ledger, because a man with no Degree in him, in a chair, five days from the end of a curse he had never been given the terms of, needs one. Out: a heart, and there was one heart in the world that would do, and it was in the chest of the Borrowed. In: nine bones, out of a boy of sixteen. Time: five days.

The bracelet had gone dull at the hinge, where the light in it had been spent.

[DEUCE]

[You have been awake a hundred minutes.]

[There is a page.]

[Do you want it.]

Aren said, after a while, "Say that again."

[DEUCE]

[There is a page.]

"Not that part." He turned his wrist over and back. "The part where I asked you for something and you handed it to me. I want that on the record."

The page came up in the air over his knees, low and thin, the color of a lamp behind a curtain.

[DEUCE]

[CHARGE 22/100]

[SUSTAIN MODE. YOUR ACCOUNT IS RATE-LIMITED.]

[SYSTEM ID: —]

[FORMERLY KNOWN AS: ——]

[HOST: AREN AURELIAN, THIRD PRINCE OF AUREL]

[BYNAMES: SNOWWATER. THE AUGUR.]

[ACHIEVEMENTS ON FILE: 4]

[— Made a grown man want to stab out his own ears. (1)]

[— Ranked last in the world for sweetness of tongue. (5)]

[— Data anomaly. Pending review. (1)]

[— First kiss with the person this body was promised to. (INCOMPLETE)]

[NOTES]

[Face: top percentile. Offsets the tongue.]

[Sweet tooth: severe.]

[Habits: under review.]

Aren read it twice. There was too much of it to be angry about in the correct order.

Below the list the page was a grid of squares, and every one of them but the last was the color of wet ash.

[— Inventory. Locked.]

[— Market. Locked.]

[— Map. Locked.]

[— Full simulation. Locked.]

[— Announcement protocol. Ready.]

"'Announcement protocol,'" he said. "Who is coming up the stairs."

[DEUCE]

[Someone.]

"You have been ready five days."

[DEUCE]

[Six.]

Aren looked at the grid a moment longer. Then he said, "Run the simulation."

[DEUCE]

[Two results available.]

[Loading. Animation borrowed from another account.]

[ACCOUNT: ACE 017. FORMERLY: THE JOKER.]

The light turned over on itself and a small flat goose came up in it, wings back and neck out, fixed on a man's face. The man put his arms up. The goose came over the arms and got him in the eye and held on, and the man went down on one knee in the middle of the page and stayed there.

Aren watched it to the end. "Whose account."

[DEUCE]

[Ace 017. He does not use it.]

"You are borrowing a stranger's cartoon."

[DEUCE]

[The good ones cost Charge.]

Then the endings, one under the other.

[ENDING ONE—HEARTH AND HOME]

[You keep the boy.]

[The price is the heart out of the Borrowed. The Lord Provost takes it, and pays what he promised, in the hall, in front of witnesses, and the account between you closes.]

[The heart comes out. The shell does not fall down. It stands where it is put and stays standing, for as long as somebody has a use for a man standing up, and nothing that was ever inside it goes into anything else.]

[In three years the boy is a man. He comes back through Greywater and kills the Lord Provost for his father and his mother and his sister, and takes his time about it.]

[When the man who bought the heart is dead, the shell can be built again.]

[It remembers the price. It spends three years looking for you. Then it burns Augur House with you inside it, and breaks two hundred and six bones, one at a time, and scatters what is left on the road.]

[ENDING TWO—TILL DEATH DO US PART]

[You keep the Borrowed. The boy keeps nothing.]

[He walks the road the book laid out for him. The left eye is poisoned at the Rite and nobody in the province looks at it in time, and he wears glass in it for the rest of his life. His sister dies.]

[In the Rebuke he is handed a shard of the Skyvault, the first thing anybody ever gave him that nobody took back, and it carries him up the whole way.]

[You have already had the Borrowed's memory taken off him by then. Fool's Dream. The account between you is closed, and he does not know there was one.]

[The boy climbs to the peak of the Eighth Degree. He finds out what his mother and his father and his sister were to the Lord Provost—arithmetic—and he kills him for it, and on his way out of the hall he takes your head off your shoulders the way a man pulls a weed on his way to the carriage.]

[No remains.]

[DEUCE]

[Both endings end with you dead.]

[Charge 21/100.]

"Yes," Aren said. "I read them. Put it on the account."

He read them again, both pages, the way he read a contract, and did the arithmetic. One: the Borrowed paid, and in three years the Borrowed came back and took him apart in his own house. Two: the boy paid, and at the end of the road the boy came back and took his head off and left the rest in the road.

He died either way, and either way it was done by somebody he had paid in advance.

He looked at the last square on the page, the one that had never lit.

[FULL SIMULATION—LOCKED]

[REASON: RATE LIMIT]

[One reason on file.]

"One reason," Aren said.

[DEUCE]

[Yes.]

Outside, the dark over the yard had begun to come apart at the edge. He said he wanted his coat and he wanted to be moved, and the yard would do.

By the middle of the morning they had him back up the tower. The chair went up the stairs and along the gallery to the hall under the round, where the shrine was still half standing: the priests' gear stacked along one wall, the mask of the god on a trestle with its mouth still red, the grooves in the floor gone black at the bottom where yesterday's blood had run down and dried. Every quarter hour a bell rang somewhere overhead, and the sound came down the stairwell and out through the open doors with the priests' voices under it.

Voss came in with the light behind him. The boy came a step behind, in a robe that had been cut for a bigger man.

Voss did the courtesies. Aren did them back at half the length, which is the correct length for a man in a chair.

"I have kept to what I said to you last night, Your Highness," the Lord Provost said. "The boy goes into your household this morning. It is entered at the College as a placement. There is not a house in the March that will say one word against it. A Greywater in the service of the Third Prince of Aurel—write it down and show it to anyone you like."

"They will say I bought him."

"They will say the College placed him," Voss said, in the voice he used for clauses. "Nobody buys children in Greywater. There is a form for everything."

Aren let that sit. Then he said, "Nine bones."

"Nine."

"Out of a boy who killed a Condemnation beast in the round yesterday, in front of the whole March." Aren turned his hand over. "I would have asked for twelve."

"Then you would have asked for a number that does not exist. Nine is what is in him. I did not choose it."

Aren lifted two fingers, and the boy came. He came without hurrying and without dragging, and when he reached the foot of the chair he went down on one knee on the seam of the floor and put his head where it could be reached, and did it in one movement, the way a man sets down a cup he has been carrying for ten years.

Aren leaned forward and took his chin in two fingers and turned the face up into the light.

The boy went still, and it was not the small stillness of a person being careful. It was the other kind.

His left eye was dull as a coin that had been in water, and the pupil in it was opening on its own slow clock. Under it, across the cheekbone, the beast's blood had left a red seam.

In the book that eye was gone before the first chapter was out. Poison, then, and nobody had looked at it in time.

Aren held the chin a moment longer, then let go and sat back.

"Good," he said.

That was the deal.

The Lord Provost's face did something that would have passed for pleasure at court. Behind the chair, Corrin's hand closed on the wood, and whatever had been in his face went out of it. Aren did not look around. A man who turns every time a servant's face moves has no servants left.

"He is yours, then," Voss said. "He will keep your hours, and he will not be seen in the March without your leave."

"There are houses in this March that would trade a son for the place he is being given," the Lord Provost said, and he said it kindly, which was the practiced part. "Sixteen years old and at the table of the Third Prince of Aurel, taught by whatever master His Highness hires. He will want for nothing. And he need not spend one hour of his life worrying about his sister. Willa is in my house. Willa will stay in my house."

The boy did not move. Then he said, "Yes, my lord," without lifting his head.

"He will have a room here," Aren said, "and a doctor, and a chair at my table. I do not eat with people standing up."

"There is one thing left on the ledger," he said to Voss. "That borrowed man of mine."

"You do owe me."

"I did not take the blood this morning. It has to be drawn and it has to stand." He tipped his head, as if the day had already been a great deal of work. "Come tonight and take him off my hands. I do not like running a debt."

"Tonight." Voss's hands came together. "At what hour?"

The Lots did not give hours. They gave windows, and a window had to be argued with, and the arguing took a long time, which was the only part of the work anybody respected.

Aren laid two fingers across the palm of his left hand and closed his eyes. He kept them shut long enough to look like work. Then he opened them and said, "A quarter to eleven. At the house. The hour is good."

[DEUCE]

[That was not the Lots.]

He did not look at the panel.

"A quarter to eleven," Voss said.

The Lord Provost took the tablet out of his coat and set it on the table between them, face up. The boy's eyes went to it and stayed there.

"The stone goes with the boy, and the boy goes with you," Voss said. "I keep the end of it."

He put one finger on the last word of the name and drew it up off the stone. It came away the way a wet leaf comes off a wall, heavier than it looked, and lay in the crease of his palm, and the tablet, lying face up between them, read:

Lennart.

"A name is not a courtesy," the Lord Provost said. "The life stays on the stone. The rest of him comes with me. That way nobody does the boy a kindness behind my back."

[DEUCE]

[Partial name. Full hold.]

Voss closed his hand and put it away, and bowed, and took his leave with all the courtesy a man keeps for a house he intends to come back to. "Your Highness."

He went out through the open doors with his boots loud on the stone, and behind him the bell rang the quarter and let the sound down the stairwell after him.

The hall emptied. At a word from Aren, Tobias went and stood in the doorway. Two of the tower's men carried off the trestles and the mask, and one of them came back for the priests' bowl. The boy was still on one knee at the foot of the chair.

Aren took the tablet off the table. He did it in no hurry at all, and turned it over once in his fingers; the stone was cold, and it weighed almost nothing. Then he put it away inside his coat.

Behind the chair, Corrin watched it go, and watched the boy watch it go. The boy's face did not change. The hand resting on his knee did: the tendons came up on the back of it, the fingers went white at the knuckles, and then everything let go, and by the time the Lord Provost's boots had finished on the stone it lay flat on his knee again.

Aren took the pill out of his coat. It was small and brown and it smelled like honey and burnt sugar. An antidote.

"Take it."

The boy's head came up. He looked at the pill in Aren's fingers, and then at Aren, and his face did nothing at all. Then he took it out of Aren's hand and put it in his mouth and swallowed it without water, and his jaw worked once, and it was down.

And then he came off the floor.

There was no wind-up and no sound. One moment he was on one knee at the foot of the chair. The next he was up and at Aren, and Aren had one clear thought before any of the others arrived—a shakedown, and a well-timed one—and then the boy's legs quit under him and he went down hard against the wheel of the chair and lay on the seam of the floor, pulling air in short pulls. He coughed once, and the blood that came up onto his lip was black.

[DEUCE]

[Your heart rate is 130.]

Aren did not answer that.

Tobias came away from the doorway without being called, went down on one knee beside the boy, and put two fingers under his jaw. He held them there for the length of three breaths and did not move them. With his other hand he pushed his sword three inches out of the scabbard, and looked up at Aren over the boy's back.

"Not dead yet, Your Highness."

"No," Aren said, to the sword, and Tobias put the three inches back. "He is still of use. Take him back to Augur House and have a doctor with him before the hour turns."

"To the death," Tobias said.

They carried the boy out between two of them, one at the shoulders and one at the feet, and his left arm came loose of his own belt and hung down and swung with the walking. A girl came in behind them with a bucket and a rag and started on the black on the floor.

Augur House sat in water on three sides. By dusk the western pond had taken the last of the light and lay down with it, and the fish came up out of the reeds into the shallows and turned there, waiting to be fed.

Aren was at the end of the boards in the chair with the jar in his hand, throwing the food out in small pinches. The water worked at the place where it landed and did not settle.

The boy came out of the house at the near end of the boards. Somebody had washed him and put him in a shirt that fit him better than the robe had, and his hair was still wet at the ends. The left eye, which had been going out like a coin in water that morning, was clear, and the mark under it, where the beast's blood had burned him the day before, had gone the color of a bruise with three days on it. Medicine, then. Somebody in this house had done the work he had paid for.

He walked the boards carefully, setting each step down before he trusted it with his weight, and stopped four boards short of the chair.

Behind the chair, Corrin stood with his hands behind his back and watched the boy bow: feet together, hands together, head down. The mark under his sleeve had been quiet all day, which only meant it was waiting. While the boy's head was down, the boy's right hand went to the edge of his belt.

Something came off the inside of the belt into the palm: a scrap of cloth, folded twice on itself. The boy's hand closed on it, and then the bow was over and he was standing four boards off, waiting to be spoken to.

Corrin leaned down toward the chair and said, "I will get my master more food."

He went up the boards and past the boy at arm's length, close enough to touch, and said nothing. Then he was through the door at the end of the boards, and the door came to behind him.

The boy stayed where he was, four boards short of the chair, in the light that was left. The man in the chair did not turn around. The boy's right hand was closed at his side, and inside it the cloth lay folded twice on itself, and the lines drawn on the inside of the fold were wet against his palm.

Author’s Note

Aren takes the boy's chin in two fingers, looks at the eye the book swore he'd lose, and says one word: good. Then the antidote — and the boy swallows it dry and comes off the floor at him. That order is the whole chapter for me: kindness first, the lunge second. Do you read the pill as mercy, or as a man confirming a number he'd already done the arithmetic on?

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