Location: Thinblood, Kell Vor
Date: Firstclaw 6, Yr 76 of the Still Flame
POV: Aeryn Veyra
She woke late, and the first thing she noticed was an absence.
Nothing hurt.
Not nothing at all.
The finger throbbed under its dressing, and the deep muscle along her spine had the flat, dull ache of a thing worked past its limit and rested badly.
But the low wrongness that had sat under every waking minute since the morning she woke was gone, and she lay still a while trying to work out what had been taken away.
Nothing had.
A body had stopped sending distress and started sending nothing, which is what a body does when there’s nothing urgent to report.
The light through the high window had gone long and gold and lay on the far wall.
Late afternoon, then.
She’d gone down at first gray and slept most of the way round the clock, and she hadn’t slept twelve hours since a hospital ship a long way from here, in a body that was her own.
Then the second thing, which arrived a good deal less pleasantly.
Under the blanket, she was naked.
That got a moment, and the accounting she always did, and she didn’t enjoy the result.
Out of the bath, unable to move, six hours of the sequence, the cot at first gray, and a blanket dragged over whatever it reached.
There’d been nothing else available, and none of it had been a lapse in judgment, because judgment hadn’t been involved.
That was the problem.
A room with an unlocked door, on a world where she’d counted the risk twice, and she’d lain down in it without deciding to.
A door I could not have reached, in a state I could not have done anything from.
She got the blanket round her and sat up.
The sitting worked the way it works for a person, and that was what stopped her.
No stages, no elbows, no hip.
It held.
After a moment her legs went off the cot, and her feet went on the boards, and she stood.
The room didn’t go anywhere.
Her knees took it.
She stood in the middle of a shelter pod, holding a blanket round herself and breathing, and nothing in her collapsed.
Then the length of the pod.
Eight paces, end to end.
She walked it, turned, started back, and four paces into the return, the legs began to go.
Twelve paces, and the legs go.
She put it in the column and didn’t decorate it, because it was a real number, and the first she’d been able to record about this body that wasn’t a measure of damage.
Then the thirst arrived, all at once, the way it does when a body has been too busy to mention it.
The canteen was on the low table.
She walked to it, which was the whole point, and sat on the edge of the cot and drank most of it without stopping.
Then a ration pill out of the ring and swallowed.
Ninety-six left.
Hunger came in behind the water and didn’t go when the pill went down, which was new.
A ration pill is engineered to close the question.
This one closed it for hardly any time at all.
The mirror was where she’d left it, face down.
She turned it over.
The face was the same face and still not hers, and that part hadn’t improved, and she hadn’t expected it to.
What had changed was underneath.
The skin had evened.
Not healed and not good, but the dull gray flatness had gone out of it, and the faint discoloration she’d recognized because she’d found its cause in the marrow was fainter, and in places gone.
The cracking at the mouth had closed.
The dark under the eyes had lifted enough to stop reading as a bruise.
And the hair had changed, which she hadn’t expected at all.
Still dry, still cut wrong, still growing out uneven.
But it lay differently, and a piece of it between two fingers didn’t come away in her hand, which it had done every time she’d been careless with it since she woke.
Black at the scalp running out into silver, no line anywhere in it, and now that it wasn’t dying she could see that the silver had always been the color and never the damage.
She looked at that for a while.
One stage.
Skin and hair.
The outermost thing the body owns, and the least useful.
Which was correct, and which was also the point.
A system repairing itself works outward from what it can spare, and the marrow would be last, and the marrow was the whole reason for the exercise.
Nine stages to go, and the first one had bought her a complexion.
The mirror went down.
Then she opened the ring and took out the armor.
The pieces went onto the cot in order, and it was the first time she’d touched any of it since the night she went through the ring and couldn’t lift the spear.
Leather, worked and layered, the runes cut on the inside of every piece where nothing showed.
Self-cleaning, and nothing else.
No plate, no weave, no field.
In her own era it had been what a cadet wore for the first two years, and it had been thought barely adequate then.
Here it was the only thing she owned that would turn a claw.
Getting into it took a long time and most of what standing had bought her.
And it didn’t fit.
That much she’d known in the abstract, the way a person knows a fact about their own body without having tested it.
The chest closed and hung.
The shoulders sat out past where shoulders should be and shifted when she turned.
The waist strap came round and kept coming, and went to the last hole and was still loose, and she stood holding the tongue of it two fingers past the end of its own range.
There was nowhere further for it to go.
The armor had been cut for a woman who ate.
She stood in a shelter pod in a set of leathers hanging off the frame they’d been built for, and had a moment she didn’t enjoy at all.
I woke up feeling like myself, and it took one hour and a set of straps to correct it.
Twelve paces walked.
Twelve hours without pain.
A face with the gray gone out of it, and something allowed on the strength of all three, and here was the measurement, in leather, with a number on it.
Six years of the agent’s weight, and one stage doesn’t put it back.
The armor stayed on.
That wasn’t defiance, and it wasn’t comfort.
A thing that hangs badly still turns a claw.
She’d decided what being seen in it was worth on the night she woke, when the knowing told her what Covenant women wore and why: lace, because nobody expected a woman ever to be in danger.
+++
Vaelith came with the light already going, and stopped in the doorway with his back finding the frame, and stood there long enough that she turned round.
The lamp wasn’t lit yet.
What was left of the day lay across his face, and the black mark under his left eye sat in it like something put there on purpose.
“You are standing,” he said.
Yes.
Then nothing for a moment.
He looked at the leathers, and at the waist strap hanging past its last hole, and back at her face.
“Why are you dressed like a male?”
It is more comfortable.
He waited to be given more than that, and wasn’t.
“It will be talked about.”
Yes.
He came in then, and didn’t sit, and did the thing she’d come to expect of him, which was to check a fact rather than react to one.
“Give me your injured hand.”
She held it out.
The dressing came off, the nail got looked at, the joint moved, and a new dressing went on without a word, all of it over in less time than it would’ve taken her to write the question.
“It is closing,” he said.
“That does not surprise me.
You standing there does.”
Then he straightened.
“I came earlier.
You were asleep, and you needed it, so I left you.”
Everything in her went cold and stayed there. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
The band came up, and she cleared it before the first word was finished, and put the arm down.
There was nothing to ask him.
He’d given her the whole of it in one sentence, and every word of it was reasonable, and the part that mattered wasn’t in any of them.
She’d slept through a man opening her door.
Five days awake.
Four of them spent counting, one spent doing something no physician on this world could account for, and in the whole of that time the only real security she’d had in this pod was that she was too frightened to sleep properly.
That was gone now, and stage one had taken it.
Then, with no preamble at all: “You are not eating enough.”
I eat what is in the pot.
“The pot keeps a village alive.
It will not put back what has been taken out of you.” He wasn’t looking at her.
“The damage is severe, and you are trying to mend it on mash.”
The band waited.
“I will send Ashkar out.”
No.
“You need beast meat.
Something with strength still in it.”
I do not need it.
“You are standing in armor you cannot tighten,” Vaelith said, “and telling me what you do not need.”
That landed, and she let it land, because there was no answer to it that wasn’t a lie.
“It is what he is for.” No heat in it anywhere.
“He has carried water and stood in doorways since we came down.
Let him hunt.”
What else.
“They are already talking.”
About the boy.
“About all of it.
The room.
The boy.
The state of you.” A pause.
“A woman with two sentinels does not go hungry.”
And what do they say instead.
“That we cannot manage it.”
And that shames you.
“Yes.”
She looked at that for longer than the band needed.
A man of her house, shamed in front of a village on her account, saying so in one word because she’d asked.
Then see him.
Vaelith looked at the doorway a moment.
“Tonight.”
He sat down on the edge of the table.
“I have been thinking since yesterday about what I would tell you,” he said.
Then tell me.
“Five days ago I could have told you when you would die.” He shrugged with one shoulder, which she hadn’t seen him do.
“I could not tell you now.”
The band came up, and she cleared it before the second word, because the first two had been the bath, and giving him that would’ve been giving him a thread to pull.
Then what is your explanation.
“The stories about your house are true, then.”
What stories.
“That the Veyra mend.” The roll of dressing went away.
“Faster than they should, and at the wrong moments.
A remarkable line, everybody says, and nobody can say why.”
And you believe that.
“I do now.”
She wrote it down, and marked it, and kept her face entirely still while she did.
Because he’d done it again.
Twice in two days a competent man had looked straight at the thing that would end her, found a name for it out of his own understanding, and put it away where it would stay.
He wasn’t going to look further.
He had a category now, and the category was the truth wearing a coat, and he’d put the coat on it himself.
He is going to be right about my house for the rest of his life and never once know what it is he is right about.
“Where do you want to start?”
The three in the Raw.
“No.”
The band came up sharply.
“You said in the order they happened,” Vaelith said.
“The three are the end of it.
None of it will mean anything if I start there.”
She held that a moment and found she couldn’t argue with it.
Then start.
“You are the eldest daughter of House Veyra.
You have a younger sister.”
Eldest.
“You would have been designated heir.
Nobody treated it as a question.” A pause.
“The assessors had you as one of the strongest females born in thousands of years.”
The band didn’t move.
Your source.
“Common talk, and a great deal of it.
I never read an assessment.” He was watching his own hands.
“Nobody was careful about saying it.
There was no need to be.”
Would have been.
“A daughter is not designated until she is an adult.
Twenty-five.” A pause.
“You went into seclusion at twenty-one.”
And then.
“For a breakthrough.
That is what was announced, and that is what everybody was told.” A pause.
“We were told it failed.”
She sat very still.
A Beast Core cut out cleanly by somebody unhurried who knew the anatomy.
Six years of an agent laid into the marrow at scheduled intervals.
Needle scars inside both elbows.
A body starved to a calculation.
And a story, put out and accepted, that explained an absence of exactly that length.
Nobody had come looking, because a woman in seclusion isn’t missing.
Go on.
“Your sister turned twenty-five this year.
Her cultivation is above what yours was said to be.” A pause.
“She was designated heir a few months ago.”
And then.
“House Veyra keeps one crown princess.
Every other daughter is exiled.”
On what grounds.
“None.
It is not a punishment, and there is nothing to appeal to.” A pause.
“It is simply how it is done.”
And six weeks ago.
“Six weeks ago you came down here, off a transport.” Vaelith looked up.
“The ten of us are your sentinels.
We came with you.”
For a while she wrote nothing at all.
The name in the household register on her band, one line above her own, that she hadn’t been able to place as a sister or a cousin or a woman who’d married well.
Twenty-five this year, designated a few months ago, and the transport after.
How old am I.
“Twenty-seven.”
She wrote nothing, and put the number where it went.
She’d taken it off the body herself in the first days, off the pelvis and the collarbones and the joint surfaces, and hadn’t been able to check it against anything since.
Twenty-one when the door closed.
Twenty-seven now, with the agent going into her for every year in between.
Six years.
Her sister had been nineteen when it started, and had turned twenty-five this year, and had been designated a few months ago.
The schedule hadn’t been built to kill her.
A schedule built to kill runs as short as it can.
This one had been built to hold her exactly where she was, for a length somebody had worked out in advance, and the length was the number of years it takes a girl of nineteen to become a woman of twenty-five.
Nobody had been waiting for her to die.
They’d been waiting for the other one to grow up.
Then the decree.
“Read out.
Not posted.” A pause.
“Bregg’s, not mine.
He had it off the man who read it.”
Meaning.
“Meaning, weigh it as third-hand.”
No.
The other thing.
He stopped, and she watched him work out that she’d got there ahead of him.
“A posted decree is a record.
Anybody can copy it.” He waited a moment.
“Read one out and all you have afterward is what people remember.”
Say it plainly.
“There is no written copy of the order that sent you here that anybody on this world has seen.”
She wrote nothing for a moment.
Now the three.
“Rendal Orreth, Skoval Corvane, Lyral Sarn.
Nineteen days, if the weather holds.” He shifted.
“It never holds.
They have not once come back on the day.”
Condition.
“Orreth went out with a bad shoulder and would not let me look at it.”
Which shoulder.
“I would be guessing.”
Guess.
“No.”
She let that stand, because he’d said I do not know twice already that hour and hadn’t decorated either one, and a source who won’t guess is worth four who will.
The five.
“Daros Belloch keeps that shaft standing.
Without him it closes.” He rubbed the side of his jaw.
“And the tithe does not go down because a shaft closed.”
Who else.
“Nolek Gharn.
He still gives orders, and nobody has told him to stop.”
Go on.
“Drovan Marreth is the reason nine men are alive.”
And.
Vaelith looked at the wall for slightly too long.
“And that is where I would rather stop about Marreth today.”
The letters had begun to wobble somewhere around the fourth name, and she pushed it three lines further before he noticed.
When he noticed, he stopped mid-sentence and stood up.
“That is where I leave it.”
One more.
“No.”
Vaelith.
“That is the first time you have used my given name,” he said.
“It is a very good try.”
He got to the door.
“Tomorrow.”
He’d got as far as the gravel when her stomach answered the whole of the last hour for her, loudly, into a silence with two people standing in it.
Aeryn had commanded four thousand people.
She’d held a bridge together through a decompression with a hull plate through her back.
She stood in a shelter pod in armor that didn’t fit and felt her face go warm, and there was nothing at all she could do about any of it.
Vaelith had the decency to look at the doorframe.
“They will be at the pot within the hour,” he said.
“I am going that way.”
I am not being carried.
“I did not offer.”
+++
She took the mirror with her, because she wasn’t going to send a child across the gravel with somebody’s mother’s glass, and she wasn’t going to keep it a day longer than she’d said.
Forty paces.
She’d heard that number said about her by three different people and had never once been able to test it.
Today she tested it.
It took six stages.
At eight paces, her legs began the shaking she’d learned on the floor of the pod, and she stopped, standing, and waited it out, and went on.
She stopped five times in all.
Standing every time.
She wasn’t going to sit down in the open in front of fifty households, and she wasn’t going to be carried, and between those two refusals there was exactly one way across, and it was slow.
The mirror got heavier at thirty paces than it had been at ten.
The wind came down off the mountain face and went through leather that had been made to breathe on a warmer world.
At the third stop his hand came up, at her left shoulder, close enough to register as movement before it was a hand.
She turned her head and looked at him.
That was the whole of it.
The hand went down.
Vaelith walked the rest of it with both hands empty, at her shoulder and half a pace back.
It was plainly hard on him, and every household on that face could see it.
He can be stopped with a look.
The most useful thing she’d learned about him all day, and it wasn’t going to be true forever.
She reached the communal box still upright, and her legs were going to make her sorry for it before the night was out.
And the village watched her come.
Not one of them said anything.
A woman at the pot, two men on the apron, Nettik on the step with an empty pail between his feet and his tail curled round his ankles, and every one of them stopped what they were holding to watch a Covenant female cross the open ground in leather armor with a mirror under her arm.
Vekka came out, the iron-gray roped back with its cord, and took the mirror off her, and turned it over once, and looked at the wrap.
“You could’ve sent it with the boy.”
No.
The headwoman examined the ceiling of nothing in particular for a moment, because she was standing outside and there wasn’t one, and settled for the sky.
“No,” she agreed.
“I suppose you couldn’t.” She stood aside from the door.
“There’s food.
Sit down before you fall down.”
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Edited 07/10/2024