Burned Bloodline

CHAPTER EIGHT: Hands Are Questions

I did not sleep, and somewhere around the second hour I stopped pretending I was going to and sat up against the wall with the blanket round me and did what I should have done six days earlier, which was I think.

Here is what I had. Nine years of a false name. A tin of dust. A roll of bone-setting tools. Six days of a house that had decided I was Alpha's next bad idea. A standing instruction that tethered me to a man I had come to kill, and a second line under it in a small upright hand, and a woman doing cuff-work by a window who had been hunting me by post since before I knew I was being hunted.

Here is what I did not have. Anything at all.

And somewhere in the third hour I got hold of the one useful thought available to me, which was this: being Halla's reader is a slow death. Every ninth bell, another hour in that room, another column, another chance to slip away. She would get me eventually. She had eleven years of patience written into a ledger in her own hand; she could afford to wait and I could not.

What I needed was to belong to something else. Not to Kell — that tether was already round my neck and pulling. To the house. Houses protect what they need, and they need very few things, and one of them is a person who can put a joint back.

I had told Mira. Mira had gone off at speed to do something about it and had not been given the chance.

So, at the fifth bell, I got up and went down the west stairs to find her, and that is why I was on the stairs at all, which is something I have never decided how to feel about.

Garr was on the turn.

He was sitting on the wide steps where the stairs double back, with his boots on the tread below and his back against the wall, and he had been there some time, because he had the settled look of a man who had chosen a spot.

"Morning," he said.

I went down two more steps and stopped, because he had put a boot across.

"Excuse me."

"In a minute." He did not move the boot. "Question first."

The stairwell was empty. That was the thing I noticed, and it was not luck: it was the sixth bell in eleven minutes, and everybody in the house was either asleep or in the kitchen or in the yards, and the west stair between the fifth bell and the sixth is the emptiest place in Torr Hall. He had worked that out. He had worked it out and came and sat down and waited, and that is a different sort of man from a man who corners you in a temper.

"There's a note about you on the board," said Garr. "Stays in the house. Whose are you?"

"I'm a tithe. I'm the house's."

"No, that's twelve of you. The twelve are the house." He was looking at me steadily, and there was nothing hot in his face at all, which is what frightened me. "You're the thirteenth. So whose?"

"I don't know."

"That's the trouble," he agreed. "Nobody knows. So the way we find out —" and he took hold of my forearm.

He did it quite gently. That is the detail nobody believes when I tell them. He did not grab, and he did not squeeze; he closed his hand round my arm above the wrist and held it, the way you'd take hold of a gate, and he watched my face while he did it, and he said:

"— is we see who comes."

Let me tell you what nine years in a bone-setter's shop actually teaches you.

It does not teach you to fight. I have never learned to fight, and I never did learn, not properly, not in all of what came after. What it teaches you is joints. It teaches them in the only way anybody ever really learns them, which is with your hands, on people, three or four hundred times, while they scream at you. You learn what a joint will do and where it stops. You learn that the human body has a great many hinges and that every one of them has a direction it does not go.

And you learn — this is the part — that it is not about strength. Setting a shoulder is not about strength; if it were, Odd could not have done it at seventy with a chest like a wet sack. It is about knowing the exact line, and getting your weight over it, and being unhurried.

His little finger was lying along the outside of my forearm.

I took it in my left hand and turned it dorsally past its range, which is about ninety degrees for most people and was rather less for him, and I did it in one unhurried motion with my weight coming down through my shoulder and not through my arm.

It came out of the joint with a sound like a knuckle cracking in a quiet room.

He let go. Of course, he let go — that is the whole point of the little finger; it is a handle, and everything above it comes with it. He came up off the steps and hit the far wall with his shoulder and made a noise that was mostly a surprise, and I went down three steps and turned round, because you never, ever turn your back on the stairs.

"You—" said Garr.

"It's out, not broken," I said. "Dorsal. Keep it still and don't let anybody pull on it."

Which is, I have since been told, an extraordinary thing to say to a man you have just crippled, and which was at the time the only sentence I had.

Somebody laughed.

Bran was at the bottom of the stairs with a heel of bread in his hand and an expression of undisguised delight.

"Oh, marvellous," he said.

It stopped being marvellous in about four minutes.

I watched it happen on his face, which I came to know very well later: the delight of going off it on stage, replaced by arithmetic. He got Garr sat down. He looked at the hand. He looked at me. He looked up at the empty stairwell, and down it, and I could see him counting the same thing I had counted — sixth bell in seven minutes, sixty people about to come through here.

"Right," said Bran. "Both of you. Now. Before anybody sees, and I want to be clear that when I say before anybody sees, what I actually mean is at the exact speed of a man who has already been seen, so walk normally."

"Where?"

"Where do you think?"

The Alpha's rooms are on the third level and I had never been up there, and I did not look at the doors, and I could not have told you afterwards how many there were.

That is a lie. There were seven, and mine was three down from his on the floor below, and I knew exactly where his was because black stone carries sound, and I had known for six days, and I had spent all six of them not knowing it on purpose.

Kell was dressed and had been for hours. There was a map on the table with weights on the corners and a cup of something gone cold beside it, and when we came in he looked up, and his eyes went over Bran, and over Garr — over the hand, and I saw him register what had happened to him in about a quarter of a second — and stopped on me.

"West stair," said Bran. "Between bells. He had a boot across and a hand on his arm."

"That's not—" Garr began.

"It is, though," said Bran, not unkindly. "You know it is. You planned it, Garr, that's the bit that's going to do for you, because if you'd lost your temper I could have talked about tempers."

Kell had not said anything.

He came round the table. He walked past Garr entirely, which was somehow more frightening than if he had not, and he stopped in front of me at a distance of about four feet.

"Show me your arm."

"It's not—"

"Show me your arm."

I pushed the sleeve up. There was nothing on it. There was going to be, by evening — four ovals and a thumb — but at that hour it was nothing at all, just skin, and we both stood there and looked at my forearm in the grey light and I could hear my own blood in my ears.

"Nothing," I said.

"Yet," said Kell.

He turned round.

"Garr."

"Alpha."

"Whose is she?"

Garr's face did a great deal in a very short time.

"...I don't know."

"No," Kell agreed. "Nobody does. It's a fair question, and you're not the only one asking it, and I'd have answered it if you'd asked me." He picked the cold cup up and put it down again, which I recognised, six days late, as the only thing he ever did with his hands when he was angry. "You asked her instead. On an empty stair. Between bells."

The room was extremely quiet.

"There are two hundred people on this hill," said Kell Torr, "who could not stop you doing whatever you decided to do to them, and every one of them knows it, and the only thing between them and you is that I would take it badly. That's it. That's the whole treaty, underneath. Everything else is bells." He looked at Garr. "So you may sit down over there, and you may keep your hand still, and you may think about how badly I'm taking it."

Garr sat down over there.

And Kell turned to me and said:

"Set it."

I have wondered since whether he knew what he was doing. I have come to think he did — not all of it, not the way Halla would have, but the shape of it. Because there is a difference between a servant who is protected and a servant who is needed, and everybody in a house knows the difference, and he took me from one to the other in a room with three witnesses and one word.

I knelt down in front of Garr and put my roll on the floor and opened it.

"It's going to hurt going in more than it hurt coming out," I said. "That's normal. Don't pull away, because if you pull away we do it twice."

"Right," said Garr.

He was about thirty and had a jaw like a spade, and he had put a boot across a stair for me eleven minutes ago, and his hand was shaking in mine, and there is nothing on this earth so profoundly ordinary as a man's hand in your two hands waiting for you to hurt him.

I took the finger. I found the head of the proximal phalanx with my thumb where it had gone up over the joint. You do not yank. Everybody thinks you yank. You take it back further first, into the direction it went, which is the part they never believe, and then you bring it down and along, and it goes in almost by itself, and it makes a small sound, and it is over.

It took perhaps four seconds.

I looked up to tell him it was done.

And Kell Torr was standing where he had been standing the whole time, four feet away, and he was not looking at Garr, and he was not looking at Bran, and he had been watching my hands.

Eyes are fine, Mira had said, walking backwards down a corridor on my first afternoon. Eyes are polite.

Hands and mouth are questions.