Burned Bloodline

CHAPTER FOUR: No Line

She smelled of cedar and cold water and something underneath it that was not either of those things.

That is what I remember. Not the fear — I know the fear was there, I can reconstruct it, I have the shape of it in my memory like a room I have been in — but what I actually have, nine years of running and one breath from the end of it, is that Halla Torr smelled expensive.

Her fingers were dry and warm on my jaw. She was not gentle and she was not rough. She held my face the way you hold a cup you are not especially interested in, and she breathed in at the hinge of my throat, and the lamp made a small hot spot on my cheek, and somewhere behind me the north wind went over the top of the wall and made a noise like a held note.

She took over me longer than she had taken over Sabe.

She took over me longer than she had taken over any of them.

"Hm," said Halla Torr.

And she breathed in again.

I want to be honest about what I did in that second, because I have told this story to myself many times since with a braver woman in it. What I did was nothing. Not courage. My body simply stopped taking instructions — hands, lungs, the lot — and stood there with its face in a stranger's hand, and the only part of me still working was the part that counts exits, and that part said, quite calmly: there are none, there have never been any, there is a wall eleven feet thick behind you and a house in front and every gate on this hill opens downhill.

"Tanners," she said.

Ivo's pen moved.

"Tanners' line, Low Quarter," she said. "Put that."

She let go of my jaw and I did not fall over, which I count as an achievement.

I have thought about it a great deal since — what saved me, that first night. It was not the tin. The tin was dust and a memory of bitterness and it bought me perhaps an hour, and I'd spent forty minutes of that hour getting through a hole in a wall. What saved me is that Odd had wanted to be furious somewhere that smelled strong enough to argue with, and so we had walked home the long way past the tanneries, and I had slept in the clothes I had worn there, and I had walked four hours up a hill in them, sweating.

Nine years of discipline. A tin of dust. And in the end it was a bad-tempered old man taking a detour past a lime pit.

"You may go through," said Halla.

I went through.

I had got perhaps four steps when she said, in the warmest voice in the world:

"Child."

I turned round.

She was looking at me with her head very slightly tipped, and Ivo had stopped writing, and the lamp was between us so that I could see the whole of her face and she could see almost nothing of mine.

"How long have you lived in the Low Quarter?"

"Nine years."

"Nine years," she said. "And where before that?"

"Upriver."

"Where upriver?"

"I was a child," I said. "It rained a great deal. There was a green door."

Halla Torr smiled at me. It was, I want to stress, a lovely smile — the sort of smile that makes you want to tell the person things.

"There is always a green door," she said. "Good evening."

The servants' floor of Torr Hall is not below the house. That is the first thing that surprised me, and it kept surprising me for weeks.

It is inside it. Black stone, the same as everywhere, and the same too-many stairs, and a long crooked corridor on the second level that runs behind the great hall's west wall and has a row of doors on one side and, on the other, at intervals, small square openings at chest height that look down into the hall itself.

Twelve years is how long Mira had been walking that corridor. She was perhaps forty-five, square, grey-blonde, with the flattest voice I have ever heard on a living person, and she took us through the rules while walking backwards, which is a thing she did constantly and never once got wrong.

"Bells," said Mira. "Fifth bell you're up. Sixth you're fed. You go where the board says. Board's outside the stair-head and it changes, and if you can't read, you find someone who can before the sixth bell and not after, because 'I couldn't read it' has never once been accepted by anybody in this house in the history of this house."

"What if—" said Sabe.

"Second. Doors." Mira went round a corner backwards. "Every door in this hall is either open, shut, or shut with a wolf behind it. You will learn the difference by smell in about a month; until then, knock on all of them, including the open ones, and look like a fool. Being a fool in this house is survivable."

"And if there's a wolf behind it?" said Bel.

"Then you wait until you're spoken to and you do not look at their hands."

"Their hands?"

"Their hands," said Mira, "or their mouth. Eyes are fine. Eyes are polite. Hands and mouth are questions."

I filed that away with a feeling I could not name at the time and can name perfectly well now.

"Third. There are two people in this house you do not speak to unless spoken to first, and I will name them once. The Alpha. And Halla Torr."

Ruck said, "Which one's worse?"

Mira stopped walking backwards.

"That," she said, "is a very good question and I have been here twelve years and I would advise you never to ask it out loud again."

They fed us in the hall.

Not the great hall. The narrow one behind it, with two long tables and a fire that didn't draw properly, and the food was better than anything I had eaten in nine years, which was somehow the worst part of that entire evening. Bel cried into her bowl and then stopped and finished it. Ruck ate four times what any man needs and apologised for it.

Afterwards Mira took us through the great hall, because you have to know where everything is, and because — I understand this now — she wanted us to see it once with nothing being asked of us.

It is enormous. I had not expected the ceiling. Black stone going up into dark, and beams the size of barges, and a hearth you could stand a cart in, and at the far end a long table on a step with eleven chairs and one chair.

And banners.

They hang down the length of the hall on the north side where the light from the high windows falls across them in the late afternoon, and there are nine, and they are the nine halls of the north, and Mira walked us down the row naming them in her flat voice like a woman listing stock.

"Torr. That's ours, pine and hammer. Verrin — they're two days east, we're friendly. Cadden. Ostry, they hold the ford. Marn."

Green wood on grey.

It was the fourth from the end. It was smaller than the others because it had been cut down to fit, and somebody had done that badly, and the cut ran through the bottom of the tree so that the roots were gone and the trunk simply stopped.

My mother had one of those in her hands the last time I saw her.

"Ash," said Mira.

"Ash," I said.

"Gone. Nine years back. Broke the Treaty and the Iron Moon put them down." She was already three steps on, still walking backwards. "Barrow. Ilt. And that's the lot."

I did not stop walking. I want that written down somewhere, because there is no one else left alive who knows it: I did not stop walking, and I did not put my hand out, and I did not make a sound, and I walked the length of that hall under my mother's tree with my face doing nothing at all.

Bel said, "Why do they keep them if they're gone?"

"Because they're gone," said Mira.

The board was outside the stair-head, exactly where she'd said, and the twelve names were on it in Ivo's brown hand with a duty beside each.

Sabe — kitchens, lower. Ruck — yards. Bel — kitchens, lower.

And so on down, twelve of them, twelve places, and the roster made sense the way a thing made four hundred years ago and adjusted every decade makes sense, which is to say it fitted exactly and had no slack in it anywhere.

Because it was built for twelve.

Mira was standing at the bottom of the board with a lamp, looking at it, and I understood after a moment that she had been standing there for some time.

"You're the thirteenth," she said.

"I am."

"There's no thirteenth on this board because there has never been a thirteenth." She lifted the lamp a little. "So there's a note instead. There is a note on my board, which is not a thing that happens, and it is in the Alpha's own hand, and I have read it four times."

"What does it say?"

Mira looked at me then — properly, for the first time, the flat voice and the flat face and behind both of them twelve years of a woman who knows exactly how much trouble is presently walking through her corridor.

"It says: the thirteenth stays in the house."

"That's all?"

"That's all. No trade. No floor. No hours." She lowered the lamp. "Kitchens is a place. Yards is a place. In the house is not a place, girl, it's a — "

She stopped.

"It's a what?" I said.

"In twelve years," said Mira, "I have seen that instruction written once before, and it was for a hound."