Burned Bloodline

CHAPTER NINE: Three Days Upriver

By evening there were four ovals and a thumb on my forearm, exactly where he had said they would be.

I looked at them for a while by the window at the end of the servants' corridor, turning my arm in the last of the light. They were not bad bruises. I have given worse to patients by holding them still. What interested me was that a man who had never once put his hands on me had known, at six o'clock in the morning, precisely what my arm would look like at eight o'clock at night — and had said yet, and had said it in a voice with nothing in it at all.

That is a thing you know about bruises if you have spent your life looking at bruises.

Or if you have spent your life making them.

I pulled the sleeve down and went to supper.

Bel came and got me at the sixth bell the next morning.

She stood in my doorway with her hands twisted in her apron and her chin up, having clearly rehearsed, and said: "Nell's done her wrist on the well-rope and Mira says come, and also I'm sorry, and I'm not going to say it twice so don't make me."

"You don't have anything to be sorry for."

"I sat six places down."

"Bel—"

"Six places," said Bel furiously, "and you'd only just got here, and I'd have gone the other way if it was me, and I know that because I thought about it all night and I couldn't get round it." She let go of the apron. "Right. That's done. Nell's wrist."

Nell's wrist was a Colles' fracture, which is what happens when a woman puts her hand out to stop a well-rope going and the rope does not stop, and it is the single most common break in the world and I have set perhaps two hundred of them.

I set it on the kitchen table with Bel holding the elbow and Sabe holding the shoulder, and I talked the whole way through it about nothing at all, which is the entire trick and which Odd taught me in my first month: they cannot brace against your hands if they are listening to your voice.

When it was done, Nell cried a bit and then laughed and then said the thing they always say, which is is that it?

Mira was in the doorway.

"Right," she said, and went off to the board.

The board, when I saw it that afternoon, had three lines under the twelve names.

The thirteenth stays in the house. — black, fast, pressed too hard.

The thirteenth attends me. Ninth bell. H.T. — small, upright, beautifully even.

And under both, in Mira's chalk, in letters about twice the size of anybody else's:

PHYSIC — SENA. ANY BELL. ANY FLOOR. COME AND GET HER.

"That's not a duty," I said. "That's a proclamation."

"It's a trade," said Mira. "A trade goes on the board. Sixty people are going to read that before supper and the ones who were wondering what you're for are going to stop wondering, and the ones who were feeling sorry for you are going to stop that too, and by the end of the week you will be something this house has rather than a thing it is doing." She dusted her hands. "You want to be furniture, girl. Furniture doesn't get looked at and furniture doesn't get moved."

"And the other two lines?"

Mira looked at the slate for a moment.

"They're still there," she said.

Halla sent for me on the fourth day.

I had been braced for it from the stairs. I had gone through it a dozen times in the dark: the cold voice, the question about why I had not come to the ninth bell, the sundries page waiting with its standing quarterly order in it.

What happened was that I came in, and she said, without looking up, "Sit down, you must be exhausted," and pushed a cup of something hot across the table at me.

I sat down. I did not drink it.

"Nell's wrist," she said. "And the Ostry boy's collarbone, and I hear you've done something clever to Wick's knee that has stopped him complaining about the first time in four years, which is more than any of us have managed."

"Yes."

"You've made yourself very useful in eight days."

"I was useful before. Nobody had put it on the board."

"Mm." She turned a page. "It's a rare thing, a trade like yours. You'll have noticed. A bone-setter goes into every room in a house. A bone-setter is sent for at the third hour of the morning and nobody asks what she saw on the way. A bone-setter puts her hands on people and they tell her things, because pain makes people talk and because you have a very restful way about you, which I imagine you know."

She looked up then and smiled at me with great warmth.

"It's exactly what I would have chosen for you," said Halla Torr. "Ninth bell tomorrow. We'll do the sundries."

I did not sleep well that night either. I was beginning to think of it as a permanent arrangement.

But here is the thing about being useful, which Halla knew and which she was kind enough to explain to me: it runs both ways. She was quite right that a bone-setter goes into every room and that people tell her things.

They told me things.

I learned in the first fortnight that the Iron Moon is forty-one wolves and not forty; that eleven of them are Torr by blood and the rest are sworn; that there had been a bad quarrel in the spring about the Verrin border which had not been resolved so much as abandoned. I learned that the Alpha's father had died two years ago of something in the chest that came on fast, and that people lowered their voices about it in a way they did not lower their voices about anything else. I learned that Bran had been fostered at nine and that nobody, including Bran, would say from where. I learned that everyone was frightened of Halla and that not one of them could tell me why, which is a particular kind of fear and the worst kind to be up against.

And on the eleventh day, I set a wolf's shoulder and learned where Kell Torr goes.

His name was Renn, and he was about my age, and he had come off a horse on the ford road, which is an embarrassing way for a wolf to injure himself and which he was extremely keen to talk about at length so that we did not have to dwell on the shoulder.

Shoulders take a while. You have to get the muscle to give up first, and muscle gives up on its own schedule and not yours, so you sit there with your hands on a man for ten minutes doing very little and he talks.

"—and it's not even a bad road. That's the thing. It's a good road, they keep it up because of the ford tolls, and I've been up and down it since I was twelve—"

"Turn your face away from me. Look at the wall."

"—and I've never come off it, not once, and now I come off it in front of Toft, who has never in his life let anything go—"

"What were you doing on the ford road?"

"Riding back. Three days out. We do the upriver run twice a month, marches and the marsh and the far side of the ford, and it's the dullest duty in the north because there's nothing up there." The muscle was starting to go. I felt it let a little under my thumb. "Nothing at all. Just the marsh and the burnt valley."

I kept my hands exactly where they were.

"The burnt valley."

"Ashlands. It's — you'd have heard, everybody's heard. It's nothing now. Grass and a lot of stone." He shifted, and I put my other hand flat on his back to stop him. "Sorry."

"Don't move. Does anyone live up there?"

"Nobody lives up there. Nobody goes up there. It's not forbidden, it's just —" he made a sound that meant, you know, and I did know, and I said nothing. "There's nothing to go for."

"Mm."

"Except him, of course."

The room was very quiet. Somewhere below us, a door went, and the black stone handed it to me, and I did not hear it at all.

"Him," I said.

"The Alpha." Renn's voice had gone easier, the way voices do when the muscle gives up, and I could feel the joint coming ready under my hands, and I could not have moved them for anything in the world. "Goes up every month. Three days, there and back, on his own. Won't take an escort, and Bran's had rows with him about it — proper rows, you can hear them from the yards — because you don't send the Alpha of a pack out alone for three days, that's just — well. You don't."

"Since when?"

"Always. Since I've been sworn, anyway, and that's five years." He laughed. "Toft says since the burning. Toft says nine years, every month, near enough, apart from the winter, he broke his leg and even then he tried."

"What does he do up there?"

"Nobody knows."

"Somebody must have asked him."

"Bran asked him," said Renn. "Once. In front of about six of us, which was a mistake, because Bran gets away with murder but not in front of six of us." He tried to look round at me and I turned his head back with two fingers. "He said: I count them."

"Count what?"

"That's the point. Nobody knows. He said it and he went out and that was nine— that was two years ago, and nobody's asked since." Renn breathed out. "He came back not having slept. You can see it on him for a week."

The joint was ready. I could feel it, the whole thing loose and waiting under my hands, and I sat there behind a wolf on a stool in the fading light and did not do anything with it for what must have been ten full seconds.

"Is it going in?" said Renn.

"Yes," I said, and put it in.

There is only one thing three days upriver.

You go out along the ford road and over the marsh and past the bend where the water goes shallow and loud, and then the valley opens on the left with the hills folding down into it, and there is a great deal of grass now, apparently, and a lot of stone.

The stone was a house. It had green shutters and a room at the back that smelled of apples on the second Tuesday of every month, and a hearth you could not stand a cart in but which was, I promise you, a good deal warmer than the one they have here.

Every month, for nine years, the man who burned it has ridden three days to stand in it.

And he counts them.