Longwind

Chapter 11: The Lotus Pond

Chapter 11: The Lotus Pond

The Lotus Pond

Aren was feeding the water snake.

In the water it was a carp, an arm's length of white with orange down the sides, and it came in to the boards for the food with its mouth open, the way a dog comes to a fence.

Out of the water it was a different animal. It came up through the surface a coil at a time, each coil as thick as a barrel; the head came up last and took the light off the boards with it; the tail came out after and lay down on the water and pushed it flat from bank to bank. Then it hung over the boards and opened its mouth at him for the same reason the carp had.

Nobody had ever told him who put it in the pond. He had asked twice.

He threw the last of the jar out in pinches. The coils went down after the food, and the water came back together over them, and by the time the reeds had stopped moving there was nothing out there but a carp's back and the ash.

Corrin came up the boards behind the boy with the full jar and stopped at the rail and did not come any closer, and did not offer it.

Four boards short of the chair, the boy was still standing where he had been left.

"Your Highness," he said. "Thank you."

Aren turned the jar over and looked into it. He had known it was empty before he turned it. "For what."

"For the beast's blood." Aren looked at him a while. The gratitude on his face looked like the real thing. "It is poison. You kept it out of me. That is a debt. I pay my debts."

[DEUCE]

[Folded cloth, blood on the inside of the fold, right hand.]

[If you are still in the chair when it goes off, it takes your throat.]

[Malice, Lennart Greywater: 200%.]

[Sallow is off the grounds.]

There was a bowl of warm water on the rail where the tray came out of the house, and a square of silk beside it. The boy went and got them. He passed within an arm's length of Corrin at the rail, and Corrin let him, and he came back along the boards and went down on one knee beside the chair.

Aren gave him the hand.

He did the fingers one at a time, down the sides and between and under the nails, with his head down and his breath even, and the fish food came off in a gray smear on the silk. He did all of it with the left hand. The right one stayed closed against his thigh.

Aren looked at the top of the boy's head. Washed, and a little oil in the hair, and a shirt that fit him better than the one before it.

Somebody had fed him and dressed him and sent him up the boards to do this, and he was doing it politely.

A drop of honey with something hard and bitter at the center of it. Sixteen years old.

"Three minutes," he said.

[DEUCE]

[Starting a clock.]

He took his hand back and dried it on his knee.

"I was born wrong," he said. "Early and small, and I would not eat. There was a week when I was six months old and I was not going to see seven, and my master brought your father in to look at me."

The boy sat back on his heel, the silk hanging out of his left hand.

"He stayed a month and I lived," Aren said. "So the College has owed your father since I was six months old, and it hates a debt that old. A debt that old is a bill that has learned to talk."

The boy's eyes came up and went down again. "Your master has always been like a father to you, Your Highness."

"Voss is a different arrangement," Aren said. "That one keeps something wet living behind his eyes. If you asked the College for help from behind my chair, they would be here inside the hour, and they would not have the option of saying no. Do you understand what I am telling you?"

The boy wiped the last finger. "My uncle has been good to me."

"He put you on a list and had you walked over here with a form," Aren said. "That is not a man being good to you. That is a delivery."

"There is also a thing you know," he went on, "and have known since you were old enough to be told it. A man who loses the given bone has half a month left in him. The Five Failings, one at a time, and the last of them is the soul letting go of the body it has been using."

The silk turned over once in the boy's hand, and then it was still.

Aren reached down over the arm of the chair and broke off the lotus that had leaned in over the boards that afternoon, and turned it in his fingers. It was heavy with water and its petals were shut tight, and it smelled of cold water and green stems, and under both of those a sweetness that did not belong to a flower.

"You have a sister," he said to the lotus. "Willa."

The silk stopped.

The boy's right hand came up off his thigh and kept coming, and stopped one hand's width behind the back of Aren's neck. The cloth in it had gone red through the fold, the red a coal takes when somebody has been blowing on it. He could feel the cold of it from where he sat, and the width of the gap it had left.

A line came off the rail, white and thin as wire, and took the boy's right wrist and put the hand down on the boards, and what had been folded twice inside the hand slid out and lay by the corner of the chair with the blood on the inside of the fold going brown. Corrin was standing over him with his foot on the back of the boy's hand before the silk had finished leaving the boy's fingers.

"He was reaching for the back of your neck, Your Highness," he said. "Do you want the arm, or the hand?"

Aren looked at the two of them for a moment. Then he lifted his fingers off the arm of the chair.

Corrin took his foot off the hand and went back down the boards, and the boy stayed where he was, one knee down, breathing through his nose.

The scrap of cloth lay where it had slid, by the corner of the chair, and the light came off it into the wood in a hair. It went out along the board, and along the next board, and kept going, and nobody looked at it.

"Your Highness," the boy said. He was not kneeling anymore; he had gone the rest of the way down with his face half against the wood and his open hand flat on it. "You want the bone. Take it. I will hold still for it. I will hold still for anything you want. Give my sister a road out."

Aren lifted his hand again, and Corrin stepped back off the boards entirely, and stood at the end of them with his hands behind him.

"Now I understand," Aren said. "Four times I have offered to take you out of that house, and four times you went sideways out of the room like a cat. I thought it was manners."

[DEUCE]

[You bought him yesterday.]

"Yesterday," Aren said, "which is longer than anyone else in this kingdom has managed."

The boy's head came up an inch. "What?"

"Voss gave you a disease to be afraid of. He told you I wanted the bone." Aren spun the lotus stem between two fingers and let it drop. "You know who I am. My father is the Sage-King. My brother is the Crown Prince. He is the only man in the world standing at the Eighth Degree; one more and he goes up out of it, and the world does not get him back. He was fifteen when he took the title, and the first thing he did with it was put men on every road in the world with one thing to look for."

"He has had them out there ever since. Not one of them has ever come home with a bone. When they come home at all, they come home with paper: three pages of somebody's handwriting, and no bone."

"So. If there were a bone anywhere that would go into me, would he still be looking? He would take his own out of his chest and put it into mine before the tea went cold. He would do it in an afternoon, and he would not ask anybody's permission, and the College would hear about it afterward."

"So I will ask you again. What do I want with yours? Am I going to boil it for stock? Am I going to nail it to a pole and carry it at my funeral?"

He reached inside his coat and brought the stone out and held it over the arm of the chair. Gray, the size of a hand, one word cut into it, Lennart, and past the last letter nothing. Smooth stone for the width of two fingers, and then the edge, as if somebody had sanded it on purpose.

"There is a piece of this still missing," he said. "I meant to have it back for you tonight and hand you the whole of it. Hold it in the meantime."

The boy took it in both hands. He did not look at it at all. His fingers were shaking, and he held it, and he looked at Aren, and then at the boards, and then at the stone.

[DEUCE]

[Malice, Lennart Greywater: 500% → 100% → 0%.]

He cried. He did it quietly, with his jaw working, the way a boy cries who learned early that noise costs something, and the tears came off his chin onto the gray stone.

[DEUCE]

[Time on the clock: 02:58:59.]

Aren bowed a small bow at nothing in particular, and waited a moment for something that did not come.

Then, small and dry, from under the chair, something went crack.

A board under the seat gave, and the arm of the chair moved under his hand a finger's width, and moved again.

Aren put his hand flat on the arm. "Is the ground moving?"

The boy came up out of the tears the way a man comes up out of water. He looked at the boards in front of the chair, and then at what was lying on them.

"Out of the chair," he said, and came up off his knees and got both hands on the chair.

It went off.

The bangle on Aren's left wrist rang once, a dull note with no ring in it, and went gray, and the fire went around him instead of through him and took the boards, which went out from under him in four directions at once.

[DEUCE]

[DANGER. TAKING THE BODY—]

There was no chair under him and no boards under that, and the water came up over his head like a lid going down on a pot.

The pond was a hand deep at the edges. You could see the sand through it, and the leaves lying on the sand, and the little fish working over both of them.

Ten feet out, that stopped.

The shape going down was small and pale and had one shoe on. It went down past the reach of the light and did not stop, and the coat came loose and floated up over its head and hung there, and the water kept taking it down.

Something closed on both its ankles. Gold, and warm, and even on both sides, the way a good pair of cuffs is warm. It was not the bangle. The bangle was gray and spent on his wrist, with nothing left in it.

It did not let go.

Above, the surface was a torn lid of light, and a man stood over the tear with his feet on something and his face down.

The carp came past. Down at that depth the carp was not a carp. It went by the pale shape without hurrying and kept going, and the water had been pushed a long way out of place by the time the tail was done with it.

A lotus came apart up at the surface. The petals went down past the pale shape and past the gold on its ankles, one and then another, turning as they went, and on down into the dark that had no bottom in it.

The boards had burned down to the waterline in the middle of the pond and were still burning at the far end. Two stakes were left standing, and Corrin stood on one of them.

There was a mask in his hands. Flat, pale, its whole face covered in writing that had gone soft at the edges. He turned it over, and over, and watched the shape in the water get smaller.

The mark under his sleeve was quiet. It had been quiet all day, and it stayed quiet while the man in the water went down.

He had not killed him. He had come up the boards and found a boy with a folded cloth in his hand and blood on the inside of the fold, and he had taken the cloth off the boy's hand and put it down where it could not reach his master's neck. Whatever the boards had done afterward was the boards' business. There had been nothing in the words he had sworn about boards.

Service. He had served.

He turned the mask over, and watched the shape get smaller, and let it be good.

The law came down on him.

It came without noise, the way a hand comes down on a table. Gold chains out of the air, running over his face, over the jaw, up under both eyes, closing at the temples, and the mask was in his hand and his hand was on the stake and he could not move the one off the other.

The water at the end of the boards broke.

It came up in no shape that had a name: a column of black water standing on the surface of the pond as though the surface were a floor, and there was a face coming up through the black, and the face was the face of the man in the water.

"Help me," it said.

He turned his back on it and started for the shore.

"This is a command."

The law took him before the second step. It came down through the top of him like a spike through a plank; his knees went out and hit the wet wood of the stake, and he stayed down with his chin on his chest and the water working under him.

"No," he said.

"This is a command."

The blood came up out of him and went down his chin onto the wood, black with one red thread in it, and the chains kept closing, and something inside the body came apart along a line.

He had never hated the men who took the body. He had lost, and losing was a thing that happened to men who were not good enough that day, and one day he was going to take it back out of the world in the order it had been taken out of him, the middle first and the rest after, and then the account would be closed and he could put it down.

But they had opened him for the heart. And when they had it, they had put this in his place, this soft thing that could not hold a cup, and that was not losing. That was being made into a joke in front of people, and he was still in the middle of it.

"This is a command." There was almost no voice left in it.

Something in him cracked. It was a small sound, the sound a bowstring makes, or a beam in a cold house at night.

"This is a command," it said, the fourth time.

And then the string went.

There was nobody in the body at all. It went down onto the stake on its side and lay there with its eyes open, and the mask stayed in its hand.

The black shape came off the water and crossed the boards and went into the body through the crown of the head without a sound, the way water goes into wood that has been left out in the rain.

The body sat up.

The eyes that opened were gray.

Then it went into the water.

Down in the pond the water began to move. The tail took it and pushed it aside, and the pale shape at the end of the gold came loose of what was holding it and went toward the rock.

[DEUCE]

[AREN—]

The cold had got in behind his eyes and there was nothing left in him that was still arguing. He could not see the rock. He could feel it.

Hands came in out of the dark, one at the back of his head and one under his arm, and turned him over in the water the way a man turns a fish, and the gold let go of his ankles, one and then the other, and then they were going up.

He came out of the surface into the air, and the air went into him and hurt the whole way down. He coughed, and water came with it, and he coughed again.

He could not hold himself up. He got part of the way and slid off what was holding him, and what was holding him held on.

Then the Borrowed took the glove off its right hand with its teeth.

He was still working out what that was for when the bare hand came over the lower half of his face and closed his mouth and his nose.

He fought it. Everything in him that was still running fought it, and there was no air to fight with, and he fought it anyway.

"Your Highness," the voice said. "Do not move."

The voice was gentle. He had never heard it be gentle. It had said maybe eleven things to him in six days, and not one of them that way.

The smell came off that hand, off the wood of it: sweet, and thick, and warm, syrup boiled down past the point where it is still food. It went into him whether he wanted it or not, down through his mouth and his nose and into his chest, and it loosened him breath by breath.

The coughing stopped. The fighting stopped.

Five breaths, six, and the hand came off his face, and the fingers of it went over his head, front to back, once, twice, the way a nurse's hand goes over a child's head when the fever has turned.

"There now," it said. "There now. Breathe."

Down the shore, the boy was on his knees at the burned edge, still calling into the water. He had one sleeve soaked to the shoulder, and the voice had been going a long time.

On the pond, the ash went over the place where the lotus had come apart.

The hand on Aren's head was wood, and warm, and did not move.

Author’s Note

The boy kneels down and washes Aren's hand one finger at a time, and he does it well — head down, breath even, careful around the nails. He uses his left hand for all of it. That's the beat I kept returning to while revising: the courtesy is real, and it costs him something to give it. Did the washing scene read that way to you, or did your eye go somewhere else?

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