Burned Bloodline

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Something Happened Three Weeks Ago

On the twentieth day, the house said something I could not read.

I had got rather good at the walls by then. I could tell you when the Verrin post had come in before anybody announced it, and I could tell you from the yard at the fifth bell whether Toft was going to be difficult, and I had learned — this took a fortnight, and it is the single most useful thing I know about wolves — that a house of them is never quiet by accident.

But on the twentieth day, the kitchens started with three geese and a fish pie, Mira put four extra people on the second-level rota, and Nessa was carrying linen up the north stairs at the sixth bell, and nobody said one word to me about any of it.

"Somebody's coming," said Bel, hauling.

"Who?"

"Nobody'll say. Which means everybody knows, and it's not the sort of thing you say to us." Haul. "Sabe reckons it's the Verrin, on account of the letters."

It was not the Verrin.

She came up the terrace road at the eighth bell with four horses and no wagon, and she came in through the yard gate at a working trot with mud on the thigh, and she got down off the horse herself and handed the reins to Toft and said something to him that made him laugh out loud, which I had not previously believed him capable of.

She was perhaps twenty-five. Dark, like all of them. Not tall. She had a good plain face and a nose that had been broken at some point and set slightly wrong — badly set, in fact, I could see from thirty feet that whoever had done it had not got the septum back, and I had to physically stop myself walking over to look at it.

"Vey," said Bel, at my elbow, with enormous satisfaction. "That's Vey. She's been at Verrin two years."

"Who is she?"

"Halla's daughter," said Bel, and then, in a different voice: "Oh."

They announced it at supper.

Not formally. There was no speech, and I have come to understand that in the north there never is; a thing of that size is done in about nine words, at a table, and everybody has been told beforehand except the people who do not matter, and the announcement exists so that the people who do not matter can be told in a way that does not require anyone to speak to them.

Kell said: "Vey's back. We'll be married at the turn of the year."

And forty wolves banged on the table, and the hall went up like a fire in a chimney, and Bran shouted something obscene from the far end and got a boot thrown at him, and Halla Torr sat at the Alpha's left hand with her fingers laced and her chin down and did not smile at all, which frightened me more than a month of her smiling had.

I was at the sideboard with a dish of parsnips.

Here is what I want to set down honestly, because I have been honest about a great many worse things and there is no sense in stopping now.

The hall was very loud, and I stood at the sideboard with a dish in my two hands and I felt something go through the middle of me like a hand closing.

It was not a surprise. Everyone had known; I had simply been at the bottom of the house where the news arrived last. It was not fear, and it was not the cold, calculating drop that changed my position, although that came about four seconds later and was entirely correct.

It was the other thing. And I stood there with the parsnips and watched myself have it, the way you watch your own hand start to shake.

I want to be precise. I had known that man for twenty days. I had spoken to him perhaps six times. He had ridden with the outer ring on the night my mother died in a house with green shutters, and I had come up that hill with the intention of putting a blade on him, and I had stood over him nine nights ago with my fingers on a cord and my only reason for not finishing it had been logistics.

And the sound the hall made when he said married at the turn of the year went through me like something being taken.

I put the parsnips down and went out through the servery and stood in the passage with my back against the black stone.

Twenty days. Six conversations.

I have met a great many people since who wanted to tell me what that feeling was, and most of them were wrong, and the two who were right did not tell me for a very long time.

What I knew, standing in that passage, was only this: I had spent nine years building a woman who wanted exactly one thing and would not be diverted from it. And she had just been diverted, in a serving passage, by a dish of parsnips and nine words, and I did not know who was standing in her place.

Vey found me the next morning, which I had not expected at all.

She came into the still-room without knocking, in the same mud-thick riding coat, eating an apple. They all eat apples in that house. I have never understood it.

"You're the physic."

"Yes."

"Look at this." She sat down on the bench uninvited and turned her face up and pointed at her own nose. "Two years ago. Verrin horse, Verrin ditch, Verrin fool, who set it up. Everyone says it's fine. Is it fine?"

I put my thumbs either side of it before I had decided to.

"It's not fine."

"Thank you," said Vey, with enormous feeling.

"Whoever did it, got the bone straight and didn't get the septum back, so it looks nearly right from the front, and it's bent to your left inside. You'll be breathing about two-thirds on that side. Do you get headaches?"

"Constantly. I thought that was Verrin."

"It's your nose."

"Can you fix it?"

"Not now. It's two years set; it'd have to be broken again and re-set and it would hurt a great deal more the second time and there's about one chance in four it comes out worse." I took my hands back. "I'd leave it. Sleep on your right and don't let anybody else near it."

Vey looked at me for a moment with the apple halfway to her mouth.

"You're very good at that," she said. "Nobody's told me the truth about my own face in two years. They all go oh, it gives you character."

"It doesn't give you character. It gives you headaches."

She laughed, and it was a real laugh, loud and unlovely, and I stood in the still-room and thought, with complete clarity: I am going to like her, and that is going to be a problem.

I want to say what Vey was, because there is a version of this story where she is a beautiful obstacle and I would be ashamed to have written it.

She had been at Verrin for two years because Verrin is where the border trouble is, and she had been sent as a hostage in the old sense — the polite sense, where you live in the other hall and eat at their table and everybody's behaviour improves. She had come back with a broken nose, four horses, an obscene vocabulary, and a great deal of information about the Verrin succession that nobody in Torr Hall thought to ask her for until it was much too late.

She knew exactly what her marriage was.

"It's a treaty with a wedding on it," she said, when I asked her, later, much later, and far too directly. "Kell knows it too. We've known since we were about eleven. It's not a tragedy, it's just arithmetic — eleven Torr by blood and a pack that needs a Torr child, and me on one side and him on the other and my mother holding the pen."

And she was fond of him. That was the worst of it. Not in love — she was extremely clear about that, in the flat way that family is clear about family — but fond, the way you are fond of a cousin you have been climbing walls with since you were nine, and she had come home to marry him with good grace and no illusions and, as far as I could ever tell, no unhappiness at all.

It would have been so much easier if she had been cruel.

She was at the door with the apple core when she stopped.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Yes."

"How long has he been like this?"

I had a jar in my hand. I put it down on the shelf where it lived, which was two shelves up, which was wrong, and which I did not correct because correcting it would have meant moving.

"Like what?"

"Like that." She gestured with the core, back over her shoulder, at the whole of Torr Hall. "He's wrong. He's been wrong since I got off the horse, and I've been trying to put my finger on it for a day and a half." She frowned. "It's not the not-sleeping — he's always done that, he did that at fifteen. It's — he waits now. He wasn't use to wait. You'd say a thing to Kell, and he'd have the answer out before you finished, and now there's a —" she made a small gap with two fingers" — and he's somewhere else in the gap."

I said, "I've only been here twenty days."

"That's what I mean." Vey turned round properly and leaned against the door frame, and there was nothing in her face but honest puzzlement, and that is why I remember it so exactly, because there was nothing in it at all. "I was here in the spring. I came down for the thaw and stayed a fortnight, and he was completely himself, and if he'd been like this I'd have noticed, because I've known him since we were nine and I notice."

The still-room was very small. There was a jar in the wrong place on the shelf above my head.

"So it's not the spring," said Vey.

"No."

"No." She took a bite of the apple core, which is one thing she only did, and looked at me with her head on one side. "So something happened about three weeks ago."