Twice the Wound

Double

They did not throw me out of the hall. That would have been simpler.

At dawn I handed the archive keys to Delphine Karr. She came to the door herself, which I had not expected, and she counted the volumes against the index in a low clear voice while two of her cousins watched from the corridor. Thirteen shelves. Four hundred and six volumes. She found the error in the third section before I did.

"Two hundred and eleven is out."

"Elder Munn has it."

She wrote that down. Then she thanked me, and it was not a performance, and I have thought about that more than I have thought about anything else from that month. She took the post and she did the work well and she said thank you. There is no cruelty in any of that. I would rather there had been.

The second table was in the third section. I did not let myself look at it on the way out.

I carried my own things down to the kennels because nobody offered and I did not ask. Two shirts, a comb, a coat. A tin of pencils, eleven of them, all cut to the same length with the same knife. That tin is the only thing I own that has no purpose. I have never once needed eleven pencils. I take it with me everywhere.

The room over the kennels used to be the kennelmaster's. It has a window at knee height, a stove that smokes, and a floor the dogs can hear me walk on. Forty-one dogs underneath me, and every one of them knew what had happened in the hall before I got there, because they went quiet when I came in. Dogs are honest. They were embarrassed for me and they could not hide it.

I changed the dressing on my shoulder twice a day. It never closed. Three weeks, and the skin at the edge of it stayed raw and pale, the way a wound looks when a body has stopped trying. I went through the linen faster than I should have. I stopped lying on my back. I learned to sleep on my right side with my left arm across my chest, and I have slept that way since.

Toby Ash came once, on the fourth day. He stood in the door with his hands in his pockets and did not say the thing he had come to say, and then he said he was sorry about the post.

"The post is fine."

"You know what I mean."

"I do."

He stayed a while longer. He was the only one who never called me Half, and I do not think he noticed that he never did, which is why it counted. On his way out he stopped and said, without looking at me, that his brother had not been to the common hall in four days.

"Then who is feeding him."

"That's what I said," said Toby, and left.

I thought about that for three nights. I am not going to pretend I did not.

On the eleventh day they gave Bram the kennels.

He came down at the change of the watch with two others and made the dogs bark on purpose, walking past the runs slow, dragging a stick along the wire. Then he came up the stairs without knocking.

I knew the shape of it before he opened his mouth. A man does not come up those stairs to tell you the new arrangement. He comes up because it is permitted and he wants to see what permitted feels like.

"You'll keep the runs clean. Twice a day. And when I say the runs, I mean the runs." He walked the room. He picked up the tin of pencils and shook it and put it back down, and that was the thing that made my hands go cold, not the rest of it. "You'll speak when spoken to. You'll not go up to the hall."

"I have materials to return to the archive. Three volumes."

"You'll hand them to me and I'll take them up."

"I will not."

He hit me. There was no warning in his body, which is how I learned he had done this before. It caught me across the cheekbone and turned me into the corner of the table, and I put my left hand out to stop myself, and he took the wrist and twisted it.

One turn, and a small wet sound, and then a pain so clean and total that the room went white at the edges.

He let go. He looked at his own hands the way a man looks at a tool he has just used. Then he told me the runs, twice a day, and went back down, and the dogs started up again the moment his boots hit the floor.

I sat on the boards with my back against the wall and my wrist in my lap and did not cry, because he could hear me, and I would not give him that. It took a long time. When I could move the fingers I went down the stairs anyway and cleaned the runs, all of them, because the dogs had done nothing to anyone.

Bram came through the common hall at the sixth hour that evening and ate standing, the way he always did, and the room was full.

He got halfway across the floor.

He put his hand down on the bench and the bench was where it had always been, and he went down onto his knees, and the sound he made was not a word. He had his left arm out in front of him and he was holding it the way you hold a thing you want to put down and cannot. Two men got to him. He was still screaming when they got him outside, and the hall was quiet for a long time after, and every person in it was looking at the doors and nobody was looking at me.

The doctor came up from the low town. Both bones in the wrist. A third break up near the joint that he could not account for, and that one he kept coming back to, twice, out loud, in front of witnesses. Bram could not feel his fingers for six days.

Nobody connected it to me. I want to be careful here, because it matters that they did not, and it matters why.

They did not connect it because I was the Half, and the Half does not break men's arms.

They did not connect it because Bram had a history of fighting outside the pack, and the doctor said a break like that usually comes from a fall.

They did not connect it because it did not occur to a single person in that hall to look at me as a thing that could happen to a person. I had been sitting at the end of that bench. I had been sitting there the entire time, with my wrist in my lap under the table, and not one of them turned their head.

I connected it.

I sat on the boards that night, on the side I can sleep on, and put my wrist under the lamp and turned it. The swelling was down. Two days early.

Bram's break was three breaks. Mine was one.

Then I got up and pulled the collar of my shirt aside and looked at my shoulder in the tin mirror. The bite was smaller. I measured it the only way I had. It had been the width of my thumb. It was the width of my thumbnail.

I sat back down. I got out a pencil, one of the eleven, and opened a new page in the back of the household ledger, where nobody looks, because nobody looks at the back of anything. I wrote the date. I wrote what had been done to my wrist. I wrote what had been done to Bram's.

Then I wrote one word under it and underlined it twice.

Doubled.

And then, because I am not a fool and because I had been lying awake for three nights about a man who had not been seen in the common hall, I got up and put my coat on and walked to the back of the hall at the second hour, where the lamps do not reach.

He was on the gravel by the woodpile with his sleeve rolled. His left arm was turned to the wall and he had a strip of linen and he was trying to wrap it one-handed, and he was making a poor job of it, and it had clearly been going on for some time.

I could not see his hand. I could not see what was under the linen.

He heard me on the gravel, because he hears everything. He did not turn around. He went on with the wrap, and it came loose, and he started again from the elbow, and got it no better the second time than the first.

I stood there for as long as I could stand it and then I went back to the kennels, and the whole way I kept my left hand closed around my own wrist, over the joint, the way you hold something you are afraid of dropping.

I told myself it was the arm I was thinking about.