Burned Bloodline

CHAPTER TWELVE: A Rule About That

A wolf who is not sleeping does not look tired. That is the first thing, and it took me four days to work out why the whole house had gone wrong when nothing visible had changed.

He was up before the fifth bell, and he was still up at the second hour and in between he did everything he was supposed to do, correctly, in order. He heard the Verrin letter and answered it. He went round the yards. He sat at the high table and ate what was put in front of him.

And the house came apart quietly around him all week, because forty-one wolves lived in a building with a man whose temper they could smell, and what they could smell was a man holding one.

Toft dropped a bridle in the yard on the second day and went white. Two of the young ones had a fight about nothing at all behind the bake-house and were pulled apart by four others who were, I noticed, relieved to have something to pull apart. Renn's shoulder — which was healing beautifully — started hurting again, which is the thing shoulders do when their owner is sleeping badly, and Renn was sleeping badly because the Alpha was, and I could have drawn you the whole chain on a slate.

Mira put the fourth-level rota back to twice a week and said nothing about why.

And on the fifth day, Bran came and found me at the well.

"You'll want to say no," he said, "and I want you to know I've thought about that, and I'm going to ask anyway."

"Ask."

"Off the board." He looked at the bucket rather than at me. "Not written down, not by Mira, and if it went wrong, I asked you and you refused. Can you make something for sleep?"

"Yes."

"Will you?"

"For who?"

"You know for whom."

I did know for whom. I put the bucket down.

"He's not on my list. Nobody's put him on my list."

"No, because he'd have to put himself on it, and he won't, and that is the entire problem, and I have been the entire problem's foster-brother for seventeen years." Bran rubbed his face with both hands. Up close, he looked nearly as bad as Kell did. "Renn's shoulder's gone off. Toft's dropping things. Ada bit her own tongue at supper because Garr looked at her. Do you know what happens to a pack when the Alpha doesn't sleep?"

"I'm learning."

"You're watching. That's different, and it's worse, because you're watching from the bottom." He dropped his hands. "Nine days, near enough. He was three on the road, and he hadn't had an hour since he got back. I know because my room's next to his and the stone carries."

I nearly laughed. I have never been so close to laughing at the worst possible moment.

"All right," I said.

Valerian, hop, and a little poppy — a very little, because a wolf goes through poppy like water and because a wolf who wakes up thick-headed will never take a second cup off you as long as he lives. Honey to make it drinkable, which it is not, and a splash of the yellow spirit out of Mira's cupboard which does nothing medically and a great deal otherwise.

I made it in the still-room at the ninth hour and I made it well, and I want that written down, because a great many things I did in that house were performances and this was not one of them.

You cannot half-make a medicine. You can decide not to give it. But once you have started weighing the hop out, you are a bone-setter and not anything else, and the thing in your hands has to be right, and if that is a weakness, then I have never been able to find the bottom of it.

His door was the fourth from the stairhead.

I had known that for three weeks and had gone up that passage perhaps twice, both times on errands to Nessa, both times without looking, and now I stood in front of it at the ninth hour of the night with a cup in my two hands and could not make my arm work.

He said, "Come in," before I knocked.

Of course he did.

The room was smaller than I expected and colder. No fire — the grate was laid and not lit, and I found out later that Nessa laid it every morning, and he let it go out every night, and neither of them had ever mentioned it to the other in six years. There was the map with the weights on the corners. There was a chair, a bed, a chest, a rack of clothes and nothing else at all. It was a room like a man standing in a doorway with his coat still on.

He was at the table in his shirtsleeves with the letter from Verrin in front of him and his hand flat on it, and he had clearly not read a word of it in some time.

"Bran," he said.

"He asked me at the well. He said if it went wrong I refuse."

"That sounds like him." Kell sat back. "You can go and tell him you did."

"I could. He'd know."

"He would."

I put the cup on the table, a good arm's length from his hand, and I did not sit down, because I had not been asked to and because there was nowhere to sit but the bed.

"Valerian, hop, a little poppy, honey. It'll work in about a quarter of an hour, and it'll take you six hours, and you'll wake up clear because I've kept the poppy down. That's all it is. It isn't a kindness, and I'm not doing you a favour; there are forty people downstairs who can't sleep because you can't, and Renn's shoulder has come off two weeks of healing this week."

Something moved behind his face.

"Renn's shoulder."

"Shoulders go when people brace at night. He's been bracing all week." I put my hands behind my back. "You asked me nothing, so I'll say it once and go. Nine days is what a man can do. Twelve is when he starts making errors he doesn't notice, and you have a letter from Verrin under your hand that you've not been reading for an hour."

He looked down at it.

"How do you know how long I've been at it?"

"Because the ink's dry and your cup's cold and the candle's down two inches."

"Ah," said Kell Torr.

And he almost smiled. It got as far as one corner of his mouth and then it seemed to occur to him that it was happening, and it stopped, and I have thought since that I would like to have seen what it looked like if he had let it finish.

"I don't want to sleep," he said.

He said it plainly, the way he said everything, and it took me a moment to understand that he had answered a question I had not asked.

"That's not —" I stopped. "That's not the same thing as not being able to."

"No."

"Which is it?"

"Both, mostly." He turned the cup a quarter-turn on the table with two fingers, not picking it up. "It goes: I can't for about six days, and then I can, and by then I've got out of the habit of wanting to, and I have a rule about not doing things I don't want to do."

"That's an idiotic rule."

The silence after that went on for about two seconds, and in it I discovered several things about myself, chiefly that nine years of keeping my mouth shut had apparently been a rented arrangement and the lease had run out in a cold room at the ninth hour of the night.

"Yes," said Kell.

"I only meant—"

"It's an idiotic rule," he agreed. "I've had it since I was seventeen, and I've never once got round it, and I've been told about it by a great many people, and you're the first one who's said the word out loud." He picked up the cup. "What's in it again?"

"Valerian, hop, poppy, honey. And a spoon of Mira's yellow spirit, which does nothing."

"It does something."

"It does nothing medically."

"Mm," said Kell, and drank it.

He did not go to bed. That is the part I did not expect and should have.

He drank it, set the cup down, went back to the Verrin letter, and read about four lines of it, and then sat back in the chair with the paper still in his hand and his head against the wall behind him, and about eleven minutes later, the paper went down onto his knee and stayed there.

I stood in the middle of that room and listened to Kell Torr breathe.

It changes. That is the thing I have never been able to explain to anyone who has not sat up with the sick: the breath goes long, and then it goes loose, and there is a moment — you can watch for it — when the whole architecture of a face lets go. His did. Nine days came off him in about four seconds and what was underneath was a man of twenty-six with a white seam through one eyebrow, asleep in a chair in a cold room, with his boots on.

And the collar of his shirt was open, and the cord lay across his collarbone, dark with wear, going down under the linen.

I have gone over the next two minutes for most of my life.

I crossed the room. I did that; nobody made me and there was no reason to. I stood on the chair close enough to feel the heat coming off him, and I put two fingers on the cord where it lay against his skin.

It was warm. Of course, it was warm; it had been against him for two years without once coming off. It was plaited leather, worn down to a shine on the upper side, and I could feel the weight of the thing at the bottom of it pulling very slightly against my fingers, and I could feel his pulse under the back of my knuckle, slow and even and entirely defenseless.

I could have had it off him in ten seconds. He would not have woken. I had made the draught myself and I knew exactly what it was worth.

I did not take it.

Because I had nowhere to put it and no way to get it back onto him, is the reason I gave myself then, and it is a good reason and it is true. A key that goes missing is not a theft, it is a hunt; the house would have been turned over by breakfast and the strong room emptied by noon and the first person they would have asked was the girl who carried up the cup. I did not know what was behind that door. I did not know how much root there was, or in what, or whether I could carry it. You do not spend a thing like that on a night you have not planned.

That is what I told myself, standing over him with my fingers on a cord and his pulse going against my knuckles, in a cold room, for rather longer than the reasoning required.

Then I took my hand back, and picked up the empty cup, and put the fire in.

Nessa had laid it that morning. It caught in about a minute. I stood and watched it take, and I told myself that it was for the pack, too — that a man who sleeps warm sleeps six hours instead of four, and that Renn's shoulder was two weeks behind, and that there were forty people downstairs.

Then I went out and shut the door very quietly, and went down two flights, and lay on my back on a straw tick in the dark, and did not sleep at all.