Longwind

Chapter 13: He Fears Water

Chapter 13: He Fears Water

The dream had him sitting up straight for a change, and somebody was there to see it.

"Brother. Sit up straight. No leaning. No swinging your foot."

"Get lost."

He kicked out after the voice. His heel came down on something hard that had no business being there, and the shock of it threw him up out of the dark and into the room, awake, and annoyed about being awake.

He had been somewhere a long time. The earth had been over the sky and the sky under the earth, and in there the years had gone on with no end on them, and faces had slid past him the way sand goes through a hand. Here, the night had given him three hours.

The lamp on the desk was down to its last third.

The Borrowed stood against the far wall with its arms folded, as far from the bed as the room allowed. There was no mask on it. The lacquer face it wore in company had gone into the pond after him that afternoon and stayed there. Everything about the way it stood said the same three things in the same order. Don't touch me. Don't come near me. You're not clean.

It had been standing like that since an hour he hadn't been awake for. The Borrowed ran crooked some nights. Aren let it stand against the wall and hate him.

His feet had gone cold in the blankets. Somebody had been holding them, earlier, in the deep part of the night—that much had got through the fever—and had stopped.

He didn't have the strength to sort any of it.

Tobias Sallow was back. He was sitting on the edge of the bed with a cloth, working the sweat off Aren's face, and when the eyes came open he looked ready to cry about it.

"Highness. You're up. To the death."

The fever moved around behind Aren's eyes. He got the question out in two pieces. "What hour."

"Close on midnight."

Aren put the back of his hand against his forehead, which told him nothing, and asked the one that mattered. "Willa."

"She's here. Lady Willa Greywater—side court, fire lit, two of the maids on her. She's asleep, Highness. To the death."

"You said that."

"I mean it every time, Highness."

"Mm." Then: "Voss is here."

He wasn't asking, and Tobias didn't take it for a question.

"He came in ten minutes ago," Tobias said. "He's been burning to see you since."

"Bring him."

Tobias went.

Aren was dry down to the tongue. He got an elbow under himself and reached for the cup on the side table, and a hand came into the lamplight from his left and got there first.

Lennart Greywater. He had come in at some point without a sound and stood through all of it, and now he filled the cup and held it out, careful with it, the way you hold a thing you have been told not to touch.

Aren looked at him. "Well. Say it."

Lennart went down on his knees beside the bed, robe folded under him, hands flat on his thighs. "I was born cheap, Highness. I'm not worth what you've been spending on me. You don't owe the Lord Provost anything on my account. Don't give him the dosed man for me."

The Borrowed turned its head across the room and gave him a look with no warmth anywhere in it.

Aren didn't have the strength to fence. "Don't test me. I said I'd keep you breathing, and I don't take it back."

The color went out of Lennart's face. "I—"

That was as far as it got.

"Get up," Aren said. "You're in the way."

The cold came off him like a draft off a window, and Lennart felt it land. His eyes went red at the rims, and he got up to go the way a kicked dog gets up—low, watching for the next foot—and then Aren, not looking at him, said, "Stand over there."

Lennart's whole face changed. "Yes, Highness."

Footsteps in the corridor.

Aren never let the outside world see him weak. He got his back against the bolster, set his face, and closed his eyes, and by the time the steps reached the door he looked like a man sleeping through a dull evening.

Gareth Voss came in fast. All the loose ease he had carried in daylight was gone. He stopped inside the threshold and bowed to the exact degree. "Your Highness. You're well."

Aren lay against the bolster with the fever sitting along his cheekbones, and the fever made him laugh at things, and it came up in his throat now, soft and hoarse. "Lord Provost. So prompt. My dosed man must mean a great deal to you."

Gareth's eyes moved across his face and got nothing back. He took his time answering. "Your Highness is pleased to joke."

Aren coughed, lifted a hand, and said, "Len. Take the Lord Provost to fetch his property."

The Borrowed's fingers closed where they lay against its sleeve. Its disgust came off it like a smell.

Lennart didn't know where the dosed man was kept, or why the prince had picked him to lead the way to him. He bowed. "This way, my lord."

Gareth didn't move.

He stood a moment with his hands in his sleeves, and then he brought them out, and in both of them he held a chip of dark stone no longer than his thumbnail with a single letter cut into its face—the last piece of the boy's name, cut away and kept when the boy first came into his hands.

He held it out.

Aren's hand came out of the coverlet. Gareth walked it to the bed and set it in his palm, and stepped back.

"That your Highness should look twice at him is Greywater's good fortune. I spoke badly today. Whatever you want of him, it was never mine to take."

Lennart stared. He had never once seen the Lord Provost of Greywater lower his head to anybody, and he did not know what to do with the sight of it now.

Aren laughed into his own chest. "The Lord Provost is too good to me. Trade's trade, though. Coin for goods, both halves settled. I couldn't take your property for nothing—" and the cough took the end of the sentence.

Gareth heard the cough and watched the white come up under the skin of the prince's lips, and whatever went through him he put away before it could show. He rose and poured hot water from the pot on the tray and carried it over and held it out.

"Your Highness is kind. I came tonight to ask you for something."

Aren didn't take the cup. He looked up at Gareth with his eyes half shut and the fever bright in them. "Ask."

"You've felt it too. There's a disaster coming onto the March."

Aren waited.

Gareth's voice went lower. "The physic-gardens of Greywater have fed the crown for a hundred years, and there are better than a hundred thousand living strains in them. If the sky comes down on those gardens, they're gone in a night."

Aren looked at him for a while.

Then he laughed, and once he had started he couldn't stop, and the laughing turned into coughing, and the coughing turned back into laughing, and Lennart came half a step forward and stopped.

Gareth's hands were tight on each other inside his sleeve. "Your Highness—"

"Gareth Voss." Aren got the name out slowly, turning it over. "If the first thing out of your mouth tonight had been for the people in the thirteen cities, I'd have said there was a scrap of a man left in you after all."

Gareth's face changed.

"But you came in here about plants." Aren wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. "A man who has living people rendered down and eats what comes off them—that is not a man on his feet. That's a beast that learned to stand upright and never learned to mind it."

Gareth went very still.

Aren went on, and the fever had made his voice light, and the light was worse than a shout. "Since I came to this March I've kept to my corner. All I ever wanted out of you was a few more years of breathing. That's the whole of it. You told me to drink what would have killed a horse. I drank it. You told me to cut my medicine with blood and not ask whose. I did it. I suppose I was sweet about it long enough that you decided I'd swallow whatever you set down in front of me."

Gareth opened his mouth.

"And now the Rebuke is coming down," Aren said, "and you've remembered to be kind to me."

Gareth's head came up.

So he had cast the Lots. The prince had truly done it.

Aren laughed low with his eyes shut. "The ward won't hold. That's what's coming down on your March. And the great Lord Provost doesn't go home and put his accounts in order before it lands. He comes here for a scolding and a prize. That's a kind of nerve I don't see every year."

Gareth's throat worked. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them the last of the ease had gone out of them, out of his shoulders, out of his hands. "Your Highness. I know what I've done. Kill me or flay me, whatever's owed on it. Only the people of the thirteen cities never did anything to you."

"You want to talk to me about innocent. Did I bring the Rebuke down? Did I open the sky?"

"Your Highness!"

The smile went off Aren's face. He took the cup off the tray and threw it.

"You were the Lord Provost of thirteen cities and the first physician of the March, and you were meant to heal people, and instead you were afraid to die. You pulled the light out of your own city and fed it to yourself to keep your heart going. And now it's found out, and you've remembered the thirteen cities, and you're holding them up in front of you like a shield. You come to me at the last hour with your hand out and you can say it with a straight face."

The porcelain broke on the floor. One piece of it opened Gareth's cheek; the rest went down the front of the purple robe.

Gareth stood in the ruin of it, cursed to his face, and gave nothing back.

Aren was breathing hard, and the only color left in his face was at the corners of his eyes, red with fever.

"You held the seat and took the pay, and the work went undone," he said. "Bastard."

Aren's breath ran out. For a moment the room was the lamp and the sound of a man trying to get air.

Lennart took half a step. "Highness—"

Aren waved him off, and turned his head toward the far wall. "Come here."

The Borrowed looked at him for a while before it moved. Then it came, and got an arm around him and propped him back against its body, and put a palm flat on his back, and the ironwood in it went to work, and the tightness in him let go by inches.

Gareth could feel the hour going by him, and the sword that hung over him with it. He folded his robe and knelt where he stood, and put his forehead on the boards with a sound that carried.

"Have mercy on the Sage-King's people. Save them."

Lennart had gone still. He was quick; he had heard all of it, and the pieces had come together in him before the man's forehead finished hitting the floor. The March had no light in it. A ward over thirteen cities cannot be raised without light. And the one strand in this house that was easy to reach was in his sister.

Lennart's eyes went red. If he had been any closer he would have gone for the man's throat with his hands.

Aren looked down at Gareth, and didn't need anybody to tell him what Gareth was counting on. The Rebuke falls, thirteen cities go to nothing, and the Third Prince of the realm does not sit in his own house with a fire lit and let it happen. Gareth had walked in here holding that.

Aren curled two fingers.

Gareth came up the room on his knees and stopped at the bed.

Aren's body was a stove; when he leaned in close the heat came off him in a wave. He laid his open palm across Gareth's face, and it landed on the cheek the cup had opened, and Gareth's head went with it.

"Remember it," Aren said. "Don't reach for what isn't yours. Not again."

Gareth held the shame in his teeth. "Yes."

The Borrowed's brows came down and stayed down. It was looking at Aren and not at the man on his knees, and whatever was turning over in there tonight, it kept.

Aren untied the jade bead at his waist and let it lie in his palm. It held a strand of Pole-light, and the strand was his—the only thing in the March that answered to him and to nobody else.

Gareth let out a breath he had been holding since he came through the door. He put his hand out.

Aren tossed the bead over him and past him and across the room, into Lennart's two hands.

"Len. Raise the ward."

Lennart stood with the bead in his hands and did not understand.

Gareth's face went ugly, the way a man's does when he takes the second slap from the same hand, and the cut on his cheekbone flushed dark.

Lennart found his voice. "Yes, Highness."

The Rebuke was nearer now, and Gareth had nothing left to spend on shame. He bowed fast and turned for the door, and Lennart moved to go with him.

Aren, not loud: "Len."

Lennart stopped.

"Your uncle has been sick a long while, and his memory went with it. All these years he has been borrowing from me, and it slipped his mind to hand any of it back. You're going to his house tonight. Do your uncle the kindness. Bring it home."

It was plain on Lennart that he had not understood one word in five. But he watched the Lord Provost's face go the color of clay, and watched the man's body sway and nearly go over, and he understood that whatever it was, it was precious.

Lennart smiled, and it was not a warm smile. "I won't fail you, Highness."

Aren flicked the chip of stone across to him—the missing piece of his name—and it landed in his palm. "Come back early."

"Yes, Highness."

The door opened and shut.

The straightness Aren had been holding went out of him all at once. He folded over like a stalk cut at the root, and the Borrowed had him before he finished going.

"Water."

The Borrowed didn't do either of the things it usually did. It didn't stand off and let him fight the cup, and it didn't call him sweet boy and make him want to sink through the mattress. It poured, quiet, and got a hand behind his neck, and fed him, badly, and got about as much down his front as in his mouth.

[DEUCE]

[You're just letting Voss walk out of here.]

Aren shut his eyes. "He won't live."

[DEUCE]

[........]

[Noted. You're smarter than you look. Low bar.]

He got two swallows down—it was only swallowing—and it left him wet through and shaking, and he turned his face into the Borrowed's chest and let it stay there, half of it hidden, the other half showing.

"I want to bathe."

[DEUCE]

[You're running a fever and it's climbing. Bathe now and you'll cook what's left of your head. Don't make me log the cause of death.]

Aren didn't open his eyes. "Poor thing. So the fever is what did that to your head. That's on me. You've come as far as anyone had a right to expect of you, and I shouldn't have wanted more. Go and play in the mud."

[DEUCE]

[........]

The Borrowed, which would have liked nothing better than to say yes and let him cook in his own bath, opened its mouth.

What came out of it was: "...when the fever's down."

Aren didn't have the patience. "Command."

The Borrowed's mouth shut.

It bent, got an arm under his knees, and lifted him.

It carried him out through the back of the house, past the shut doors, into the night.

The rain had stopped an hour ago, and the ground still smelled of it. The body in its arms weighed what a coat weighs when there's nobody in it.

Under its palm, the whole way, a heart went on at its own slow pace—slower than it had any business being, and even, and nothing at all like the heart of a man who had spent the last hour taking a lord of thirteen cities apart with his voice and handing him back what was left of his face.

Something in its chest had turned over during that hour, and stayed turned.

It had come up in the Nine Marches, at the ragged edge of the world, where the only argument anybody ever respected was the body. You kept what you could hold, and you lost it the same way. All its life that had been the whole of the world to it.

Tonight it had watched a man too weak to lift a cup do the whole of it with his head, and for the first time in its life it had found a thing dazzling that had nothing to do with the body.

Under that, thin as a hair and about as welcome, the other thing. The bank. The water closing over. How long it had stood there before it moved.

It came around the corner of the house into the back court and stopped at the edge of the spring.

Steam came up off the water and stood in the cold air.

The weight in its arms changed.

The body that had lain slack against it the whole way went rigid all at once, and both arms came up and locked around its neck, and the face buried itself in the hollow of its throat and stayed there. The breathing went fast and shallow and rough. The shaking came up through the robe in waves, and it had nothing to do with the fever.

It stood at the water's edge and did not move.

It knew that shake. It had seen it in men it was about to kill, and in men about to kill it. It had never once seen it in a man standing at the edge of a warm bath.

He fears water.

Author’s Note

The Borrowed spends most of this book being very good at holding people down, and then Aren asks for water and it just... pours. No lecture, no sweet boy, no making him fight the cup. One hand behind his neck, and about half of it ends up down his front. I like that it's clumsy at it — that the first genuinely gentle thing it does goes badly. What did you make of the last page?

If you'd like to keep going past this chapter, there are more pages on my p*****n: https://www.patreon.com/c/TranKhang