Burned Bloodline

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Ribs Seven and Eight

He was gone four days on the Verrin border and came back on the fifth, and nobody sent for me, and I did not think anything of it for a day and a half.

That is not true. I thought about it a great deal and I did not admit to thinking about it, which is a different activity and takes more energy.

What I had, in the way of facts, was this: he came in at dusk on a horse he was riding oddly, and he went up the north stair rather than the west, which is nine steps longer and has a handrail. He did not come down to supper. He came down the next morning and did the yards and heard the post and sat at the high table at noon, and he did all of it correctly, in order, exactly as he had done in the week of not sleeping, and I stood at the sideboard and watched him not turn his upper body once in an hour and a half.

Twice that day I was very close to going up there.

Both times I did not, and the reason I gave myself was that I am on the board and the board says come and get her, and a physic who invites herself into the Alpha’s room is a physic who has stopped being furniture.

The reason underneath was that I did not trust what my hands would do, and I knew it, and I had known it since a dish of parsnips.

Vey solved it, in the way she solved most things, by walking into the middle of them.

“He’s cracked something,” she said, arriving in the still-room at the second hour without knocking, which had already become a habit.

“Left side. He’s holding his elbow in.”

“I know.”

“You know.”

“I’ve been watching him not turn round for a day and a half.”

“Then why — “ Vey stopped. She had an apple, of course. She put it down, which for her was a considerable statement. “Right. I’m going to say something and you can tell me to mind my own business, and I will, because I’ve been at Verrin two years and I’ve learned. There’s a story in this house about you.”

“I’m aware of the story.”

“It’s a stupid story and I don’t believe it, and I want you to know I didn’t believe it before I met you, because Bran wrote to me about the finger on the stairs and Bran does not write to me about anybody.” She picked the apple up again. “But it’s why you’re stood in a still-room while he goes green at the high table, isn’t it.”

I did not say anything.

“Yes,” said Vey. “Thought so. Well, I’m going up there anyway, because he’s my cousin and I’m going to marry him and I’m allowed, and I’m going to tell him to send for you. That way it’s him sending and not you going, and nobody can say a word about it, and if anybody does I’ll break their nose and they can come to you about it afterwards.”

I have thought about that a great deal since. It cost her nothing and she did not know it cost her nothing, and she did it in about forty seconds, standing in a doorway with an apple.

He sent for me at the fourth hour.

“Vey,” he said, by way of explanation, when I came in.

“She said you were holding your elbow in.”

“She’s been back six days and she’s already—”

“Are you?”

There was a pause.

“Yes,” said Kell.

“Then take your shirt off and sit on the end of the bed with your feet on the floor and your hands on your knees.”

I want to be businesslike about the next part, because I was businesslike about it at the time, and because being businesslike is the only reason I got through it.

There is a way you examine a chest and it does not vary. You look first: colour, shape, the way it moves, whether both sides are doing the same work. Then you listen, with your ear or a rolled cloth, top and bottom, both sides, and you make them breathe in deep enough to hurt because the thing you are frightened of is the thing that does not hurt. Then, last, you touch.

I looked.

The left side of his chest was not moving the way the right side was. It was going about two-thirds of the distance and coming back early, which is what a man does when he has decided, without deciding, that the bottom of the breath is not worth it. There was a bruise below the n****e line, three or four days old and gone through green into yellow at the edges.

And the cord.

It lay in the hollow of his throat and went down over the sternum, and at the end of it, resting against the breastbone about two inches above the bruise, was a key.

I had never seen it. Twenty-six days in that house and I had seen the cord perhaps four times and the key not once, and here it was in the afternoon light: iron, black with handling, about the length of my thumb, with a ward at the end like a small clenched hand. Verrin work. There is no locksmith in Vaur who could cut another and the man who made it has been dead a hundred years.

It was six inches from my face.

“Breathe in,” I said.

He breathed in. It got about two-thirds of the way and stopped.

“All the way.”

“That is all the way.”

“That is not all the way, that’s where it starts hurting, which is a different place. All the way. I need to hear the bottom of it.”

He looked at me with an expression I could not read and then he did it, and I heard it, the whole bottom of the breath, clean on both sides, no crackle, no catch, air going all the way down into both lungs and coming back and something in my own chest let go that I had not known was holding.

“Again.”

He did it again. He was white round the mouth by the end.

“Right,” I said. “Nothing’s in the lung. That’s the thing I was frightened of and it isn’t there, so whatever else this is, it isn’t going to kill you in the night.”

“I could have told you that.”

“You could have told me a great many things and you told Vey you’d cracked something, which is not a diagnosis, it’s a shrug.”

Then I had to touch him.

There is no way round it. You cannot read a rib with your eyes. You put two fingers flat and you work along the shaft of each one from the sternum outward, pressing, and you watch the face and not the hand, and when you find it the face tells you before the bone does.

I put my hand on his chest.

I want to record what that was like and I have never once managed it in a way I was satisfied with, so I will put down the mechanical facts and let them stand. He was very warm. Wolves run hot; I knew that from a month of setting their bones and it had never once meant anything. His heart was going hard, harder than a man’s heart goes when he is sitting on the end of a bed. There was a scar under my palm that I had not seen because it was white and old, running down from the collarbone, and I did not ask about it. And the whole surface of my own skin, from my wrist to my shoulder, had become the only part of me that appeared to be receiving any information at all.

I found the break on the fourth rib I tried.

He did not make a sound. His jaw went, and his hands closed on his knees, and that was all.

“Seven,” I said. “And — “ I moved my fingers down one, and pressed, and his breath went out through his teeth. “Eight. Two of them, close together, both anterior. Cracked, not gone through; if they’d gone through I’d have felt it grind and you’d be on the floor.”

“How long?”

“Six weeks. Nothing to be done, you can’t splint a rib, and don’t let anyone strap you up because strapping stops the bottom of the breath and the bottom of the breath is what keeps you out of a fever.” I sat back on my heels. “Breathe deep four times an hour even though it hurts. Especially because it hurts.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Ribs are the most boring serious injury there is.”

The cord was in the way.

That is the mechanical truth of it. To get at the lower rib I had to bring my hand across the sternum, and the key was hanging exactly there, and there is no way to work around a thing like that with your knuckles.

“Can I move this?”

“Yes.”

So I took it.

I picked the key of the strong room of Torr Hall up off Kell Torr’s chest with my thumb and two fingers, and I lifted it, and the cord ran and it came up into my hand, and I held it.

It weighed almost nothing. That is the thing I was not prepared for. I had been carrying it around in my head for sixteen days as an object of enormous mass like the whole of my survival, two years of a woman’s patience, every scrap of root between the ford and the sea and it was a piece of iron the length of my thumb and it weighed about as much as a spoon.

It was warm from him.

I had it in my hand for perhaps four seconds. I could feel the cord where it went over his collarbone, taut, alive with the small movement of his breathing, running back to a knot at the nape of his neck that I could not see. His pulse was under my other hand.

He was watching me.

I laid it over onto his right side, out of the way, and put my fingers back on rib eight and pressed, and he swore, and that was the end of it.

“There’s no gravel in you,” I said.

I said it while I was rolling the cloth. I had not planned to say it and I have never been able to work out whether that is true.

“What?”

“You came back riding oddly and you’ve cracked two ribs on the left. Vey says horse. You’ve said nothing at all, which I notice.” I put the roll in my apron. “A man who comes off a horse at speed on the border road goes down on the ground, and the ground up there is flint. He arrives with gravel in his forearm and his hip and generally in his ear, and I spend a very tedious hour picking it out. There isn’t a mark on you anywhere but the ribs. Not a graze. Not a tear in the shirt.”

He did not say anything.

“And the bruise has an edge on it,” I said.

“Straight, about four inches, running up under the ribs. Ground doesn’t have edges. You weren’t lying down when that happened. You were standing up, and something came at you from the front and about level, and you saw it coming, because you’d turned into it.”

The room was very quiet. Down through the black stone somebody was going along the passage on the floor below with a full bucket, and I heard every step of it.

Kell put his shirt back on, slowly, and the key went under the linen and out of sight.

“Go on then,” he said. “Say it.”

“Say what?”

“Whatever you’re not saying. You’ve got that face. I’ve been watching you have that face for twenty-six days.”

And I stood in the Alpha’s room with a roll of linen in my apron and looked at a man who had been counting my silences since the third of them, and understood that we had arrived at a place I had not planned for and could not get out of by lying.

So I did the other thing.

“You came off a horse,” I said.

Something went across his face, very fast, and gone before I could name it, and I have spent a long time since trying to.

“Yes,” said Kell Torr. “I came off a horse.”

And that was the first thing we ever had between us.