Longwind

Chapter 14: Not Afraid of Water

Chapter 14: Not Afraid of Water

Not Afraid of Water: "Crown Prince!"

It did not put him down.

For a while it stood at the edge of the spring with the arms locked around its neck and did nothing at all. Steam came up off the water and went out into the cold. The shaking came through the robe in slow waves and did not stop.

Then it turned back toward the house.

A hand got into the collar of its robe and hung on.

"What are you doing."

"You're not afraid of water," it said. "Are you. Master."

The answer took long enough coming that the waiting was an answer by itself.

"You think I'm made like you? All root and no sense—soak up a little water and it all goes to your head. Water can't eat a man. What would there be to be afraid of."

"Mm," it said.

It wanted him to say it out loud. A man who says a thing out loud hands it over, and there was not that much left in this body to hand over.

It stepped up onto the bank with him, and its foot went out from under it.

Half a step. No more. Its weight came back onto the rear foot and it stood there.

The body in its arms did not know that. The arms around its neck closed hard enough to hurt, and the voice came up against its throat shaking.

"You—!"

Its master's face had gone the color of his robe.

"Mm," it said again. "My master isn't afraid of water after all."

Nothing.

"Put me in."

It took the robe off him without hurry, without touching more than it had to, and bent and set him into the water to the chest. Heat came up through its forearms and wrists at once, unpleasant, like carrying a kettle with no handle.

It had not straightened yet.

The hand that came out of the water had no strength in it. That was the thing. He had spent the night on his back and had nothing left to spend, and he found the Borrowed's throat anyway, and pulled.

Water came over the rim and slapped the stone.

It did not fight it. It went in whole, and the spring closed over its head.

The water was too hot. Ironwood comes off the tops of the Kestrel Range, where the meltwater stands in the shade at midsummer and stays cold, and heat does this to it: the grain lifts, the surface goes into fine ugly wrinkles like the skin of something boiled, and the heartwood in the chest clenches and lets go, clenches and lets go, far too fast to be a heart.

Under the skin, the wood was close to cooked.

A hand came down on the back of its head and pushed it under.

"Hideous thing," its master said, above the water. "You're in my way."

Its eyes were stone. Stone sees through water as well as through air, so it lay under there and looked up: black hair floating out like kelp, a pale length of body above it, one arm braced on the rim.

The sick man looked calm from up there. Under the surface his feet were working the bottom of the pool, hunting for a grip, and losing.

He got two shoves out of that arm, and that was the end of it. The little weight he had came off the stones, the water got under him, and slid him out of the shallows into the deep.

His mouth went under. His nose went under.

Something came into his eyes that he would not have let another living soul see, and both hands clawed at whatever was nearest.

The Borrowed came up out of the water and got an arm around his waist and put him against the wall of the pool, and held him there.

He hung on it and breathed. It let him.

"Well," it said. "The water nearly ate my master."

His palm hit it across the face, wet, no weight behind it at all.

It did not duck. It laughed—a short, dry sound, out under the open sky, which it was not entitled to make.

Then it got him up out of the spring over his protests, which were not words yet, and dried him off with the hem of its own coat, badly, and went to the roll it carried and pulled out its own spare robe.

The robe was black and cut for a body a good deal bigger than his. On him it could have held three of them. The Borrowed put him into it, then wrapped what was left of the cloth around him, arms bound inside, until he was a bundle with a head on one end, and picked the bundle up.

"Put me down," he said.

It did not.

"I said—"

It tucked him against its chest and walked.

"I'm going to take it apart," its master said, to the air. "Slowly."

The air had something to say to that.

"Fever," its master said. "I can have a fever and still take it apart."

The air said something else, longer.

"You and the other one both," its master said. "One to hold me up and one to hold me down."

The air tried again.

"It can send me to sleep," its master said. "A sleep service." A pause. "Put a man under and call it sleep, and there will never be a better hand at it in the world than you. Put that on a sign."

It heard one half of that conversation. It had heard one half of that conversation many times. The sick man argued with something that was not there, and got answers it could not hear, and it had long ago decided that this was not its business.

He stiffened once, all the way down, when he understood that he was being carried through his own back court like washing, and then he stopped struggling, and arranged his face into the exact dignity of a man being crowned.

Under the eaves, the fetch came up out of his chest.

No one in the world could see it but the Borrowed. It had never shown itself to anything else.

It pressed its nose against the Borrowed's cheek and screamed at it.

"Insolent! Insolent! How dare you—! How dare you—!"

Then the screaming broke in the middle and went small and wet.

The Borrowed's mouth curled, and it took its time about it. The fetch had no weight and almost no substance, and pressed in this close, the only part of it there was to see was the eyes—fat, wet, ridiculous, and impossible to hide.

And then, at the door of the bedchamber, with its nose still against the Borrowed's cheek, the fetch stopped crying.

It turned. It circled. It went round the Borrowed's head, close to the ear, and began to talk to itself.

"Want a drink. Want a drink."

The Borrowed's mouth stopped curling.

Late. The craving had come back on him. It came back every night at this hour.

***

It was not yet midnight, and Greywater was a furnace.

Greywater ran south to the sea, and even in a good year the summer there lay on a man like a hand. Tonight there was no air in the garden at all.

Lennart had come up through the beds, the way he always came. It was the shortest way to the altar steps, and it was his mother's ground. Every summer of his childhood the whole back of the house had smelled like this—mint broken underfoot, rue, the grey-leaved things she never named. It was not that smell anymore. Some of the beds had been dug out since and put to another use. Things grew in them now that did not want company, and he did not walk that way.

He went on to the Pole-light altar at the foot of the Skyvault Tower.

Past the wall, someone had got a clapper going, and the beat was wrong—fast and flat, not the hour—a man hitting wood because there was nothing else to do with his hands. Then voices: one, then four, then a crowd of them at the gate.

"Get the Lord Provost! Is he up? Get him up—"

"Where is he? Where's Voss—"

"Get him out here! Look at it!"

Lennart looked up.

Above the wall, the sky was on fire. The colors had gone wrong in it—orange and green and a dull violet like a bruise going over—and it moved.

The acolytes of the Pole-light had the steps.

One of them put a hand flat on Lennart's chest. "And what do you think you are, to—"

"Enough."

Voss came out of the door of the altar house with his collar open and his face grey. He did not look at Lennart. "Let him up."

Dozens of men looked at each other. Yesterday the same ones had put the priest's vestments on this creature for the joke of it, to see a March-heir dressed up as something he would never be.

Tonight no one said a word while Lennart Greywater walked between them to the steps.

He was young enough that the eyes on him made his heart jump. He tightened his hand on the jade bead in his palm, warm now from being held, took one breath in through his nose, and went up the steps with nothing on his face.

The altar was carved all over with a lotus in full bloom. That was the Sage-King's sigil, and it had been cut into that stone before the March had a name. At the center of it stood a lamp cut from one piece of jade, shaped like the same flower, with a wick-pan at the heart.

A strand of Pole-light should have been burning there. The pan was empty, and had been empty for two years.

Lennart set the bead down on the jade.

It clicked once. Then it left his fingers—something lifted it, unhurried—and hung it over the dry pan at the heart of the lamp, and crushed itself to nothing. What came out of it was a thread of violet light that stood up and became a dragon, and roared at the sky, and drove down into the lotus cut into the stone.

Thunder broke over the roof.

White light came down and took the altar and the boy on it, and the men on the steps shut their eyes. When they opened them again, a thin sheet of light was rising off the lamp, fine as silk and no thicker, and running out—a mile, ten, a hundred, all of it in the time it takes to breathe—until there was a roof of violet over the whole March with a lotus pattern moving slowly across it like something swimming.

The heat went out of the air.

Then the fire came down. Stones on fire, and they came down on the thin silk of the ward and did nothing at all. Nothing cracked. Nothing gave. It went on until there was nothing left in the sky to fall.

When it stopped, the quiet was worse than the noise had been.

Voss's face had gone the color of tallow and stayed there, and he could count as well as anyone. Without the light that had just been spent on that altar, there would not have been a living soul left in the thirteen cities of the March tonight, and his house was one of them.

Lennart came down the steps.

The men made way for him, and no one looked at him as they had that morning. He stopped two paces from his uncle and inclined his head by the exact measure he had been taught.

"Uncle. The Rebuke's over. I should go back and report to His Highness."

Voss looked at him for a moment, and understood that the boy in front of him was not a boy he could pick up and put down anymore. "Mm. His Highness has an eye for you. That's your fortune."

Lennart gave him the smile he kept for this. "Then I have you to thank for it, Uncle. If you hadn't sent me to wait on His Highness, I'd never have come into a chance like this."

Voss had spent his life being seen as a man who loved his brother's family, and there was nothing he could do about it in front of a full flight of steps but stand there.

Lennart took what he had and let the rest go. "You'll be up all night over this. I'll carry back the thing His Highness left here when I go, and save you the trip."

Murder went through Voss's eyes and out again. His face stayed dark. "As you like."

Lennart had expected a treasure. A weapon, a scroll, one of the old things.

Voss brought it out of the strongroom himself, because he was not going to trust a servant with it, and put it in the boy's arms.

The Nine Crowns Censer. Nine dragons in gold had been worked around the sides, nose to tail in a ring, and it was heavy enough that Lennart felt it in his knees. Between the dragons, through the seams, he could see what was shut up inside.

Strands of violet-and-gold light. Hundreds of them.

Lennart ran a hand along the lid. Smoke came up out of the censer and took the shape of a dragon, and the dragon snarled at him, and threads of writing came out of the smoke, fine, following one another round the curve of the metal like water down a drain.

His Highness's own light. Every strand of it, and every strand carrying a prohibition.

Anyone who reached for that light brought the law that holds the world together down on his own head. Nobody laid a seal like that on anything except a Sage, or a man past the Eighth Degree.

So that was why Gareth Voss, who bowed to nothing, had gone down on his knees to a boy with no Degree at all. He did not dare touch what he had stolen.

Lennart's face went cold, which for him was rare. "Stealing the Pole-light. If the Crown Prince hears of it, it's death—and not for you alone. They won't stop at the man who took it. They'll take the name."

Voss said, cold, "And it's for a boy to teach me that?"

There was no use in arguing with this kind. Lennart swallowed it, and turned, and started for the door with the censer in both arms.

Voss watched his back. "You think a man like that keeps you for anything that's in you?" he said. "If he isn't waiting to cut the marrow out of your bones, then you're a toy he'll be tired of by winter. And you believe you've flown up in the world and come back a person."

Lennart's fingers went white on the censer. He turned around.

"What standing do you have to judge him?" he said. "If His Highness is a monster, he's a thousand times cleaner than a thief who can't stop stealing. Your seat—you know how you came by it. A man like you never changes. He only finds bigger things to steal."

"Insolent!"

Voss had him by the throat before the word was done, both hands, and lifted until his toes scraped the floor.

"When he's tired of you," Voss said into his face, "you come back to my hand. That's the one thing in this world I'm sure of."

Lennart could not get air. He stopped pretending. He laughed, short and dry and mostly a wheeze, and got it out through his teeth.

"His Highness had the right of you."

Voss's breath stopped.

The day a boy with no Degree had called him a thief to his face in his own hall, and he had apologized for it, and the apology had bought him a teacup across the cheek—that was the worst hour of his life, and this creature had stood in the corner and watched the whole of it.

The rage he had been holding down since the previous night came up all at once, and he struck.

The blow took Lennart off the floor and threw him backwards through the carved door, and he went through it and landed on the wet flags outside, and lay there.

His sight went in and out. He got a mouthful of blood up and coughed it onto the stones.

Voss came out over the wreck of the door and stood above him. "Lennart. Don't ever land in my hands again. If you do, I'll take a long time about it."

Lennart lay over the censer with his shoulders shaking, and for the length of one breath Voss thought it was fear.

It was not fear. The boy was laughing.

Voss's eyelid jumped. Something had gone wrong, and he did not yet know what.

Lennart wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist, like nothing worth noticing. The smile stayed on him, and under the smile, thin and cold, was something that wanted him dead.

A small sound came out of the censer, like a catch giving way.

Voss's eyes went down, and his face changed.

The lid had come open. He had thrown that blow to wreck the boy's Attunement and had put everything he had into it, and the edge of it had caught the censer square, and a strand of light that had been rising out of the opened lid had been scattered.

The prohibition was broken.

"Lennart—!"

Voss threw himself at the boy. Too late.

The broken pieces came back together in the air and became a dragon of violet and gold, and it screamed at the whole March and stood up out of the garden taller than the roof.

Then the weight came down—a hand laid flat on a table, and the world under it went still.

Rain had started over the yard, and it stood in the air and did not fall. The banners on the altar steps froze in the middle of a fold. An acolyte was fixed halfway down into a kneel. A moth hung in front of the lamp with its wings open, and not one of them was ever going to finish what it was doing.

Only two things in the garden could still move. One of them was getting up off the flags with the censer against his chest.

The dragon came down and put itself on the ground without any sound at all, and it took the shape of a man.

Black robes worked with gold, a whole ring of dragons round the hem. Tall, standing straight as a spear. Lennart knew the face. He had spent the last two nights standing in a corner of a sickroom looking at the same bones, the same mouth, the same cold line between the brows. It was His Highness's face, and it was not His Highness. The small red mark that belonged to that face was set elsewhere on this one, at the outer corner of an eye. The eyes were long and narrow-lidded, and the lashes lay flat like a knife edge, and there was nothing in them at all.

Voss's knees hit the stone before the rest of him had caught up.

"Your—"

He got it out on the second try.

"Crown Prince!"

Author’s Note

Nobody in this chapter says the thing they mean. The master won't admit he's afraid of water, so the Borrowed stands there and lets the silence say it for him. Then it goes into the spring when it never had to — one arm free, a sick man pulling weakly at its neck — and lets itself sink. It hauls him out, wraps him in its own spare robe, carries him home through his own back court, and takes a wet slap across the face on the way. And laughs.

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