Location: Thinblood, Kell Vor
Date: Firstclaw 9, Yr 76 of the Still Flame, evening
POV: Aeryn Veyra
Wool against her cheek, and under the wool the give of the cot.
She had gone down on the boards.
Aeryn came up out of it like a swimmer finding the surface further off than expected, and the first fact reached her before her eyes worked, and it was the wrong fact.
Wool.
Cot.
Her head on the folded end of the blanket rather than on wood, and the blanket over her, and her arms laid down along her sides in a way that arms do not arrange themselves.
Somebody had picked her up.
Lying absolutely still, she did the only thing available, which was to inventory herself without moving.
Armor still on and still fastened, every strap where she had left it.
Boots on.
Nothing bound.
Nothing sore in any place that would say hands.
The pressure of a full bladder and the ache of a body that had not turned over in a very long time, and under all of it a flat, scoured emptiness in the middle of her that she recognized and did not like.
Her soul power was the next thing to check, and checking it took no time at all.
Empty.
Not low.
Empty, and she stopped looking before the looking made her sick.
Days before any of it comes back.
The last of it had gone into the band, and she had been carried out of the spot where she spent it, on a day she could not account for.
***
The light through the fill port was going.
Evening, and the wrong evening.
The canteen lay on the boards a pace and a half from the crate, on its side, with a dark stain gone into the wood around the mouth of it.
Getting her head up cost her something, and she looked at that for a while.
So the trap had worked exactly as designed.
Something had come through the door with force enough to shift a canted crate; the canteen had gone off the corner and down onto bare boards from hip height, and it had made the noise it was built to make.
And she had not heard it.
That was worth knowing, and it cost nothing to know now, and the part of her that wanted to be sick about it could take a number and wait.
Getting upright took three attempts.
On the third, she sat with her back against the wall plate and her hands in her lap and looked at the room, and made herself read it before she started explaining it, because the difference between those two things had killed better officers than her.
***
The crate stood square against the wall where it lived in the daytime.
Not shoved aside.
Moved back, deliberately, by somebody with time.
The lamp had been lit and had burned out.
There was a ring of black around the wick that had not been there when she put it out.
Her blanket was on her, and she had pulled it off the cot herself with her teeth and one elbow, and she remembered doing it, so somebody had picked her up out of it and put her on the cot and put it back over her afterward.
The bowl from Vekka sat on the crate.
Empty and washed.
It had been full and unwashed when she went under, because she had not eaten it.
And beside the bowl, a second bowl, covered with a cloth, which she had never seen before.
***
Neither of them got touched yet.
Dawn, then.
He had come at dawn, the way he came every morning, and found a door that would not open, and pushed it, and the canteen had gone down.
Any man hearing that from outside a door he was already pushing would come through it hard.
What he had found was a woman face down on the boards in armor with her hands cold and her breathing slow and nothing wrong with her that he could see.
Following it the whole way was the only version worth doing, because there was no point stopping at the comfortable part.
He would have gone to the throat first.
Then the hands.
He would have found the pulse she had been listening to for four days, the slow, heavy one, and it would have told him exactly nothing, because it was the same pulse she had had yesterday when she was walking.
He would have said her name.
That would have failed.
He would have tried whatever a man with two years on a survey crew tries next, and that would have failed too, and then he would have been standing in a metal box at dawn with a woman he could not wake and no cause for it anywhere on her.
And then he had lifted her onto the cot, and put the blanket back, and lit the lamp.
And stayed.
The lamp had burned out, which meant it burned a long time, which meant somebody was in this room long enough for a lamp to run dry.
He sat with me.
***
The bladder decided the order of the next part.
Standing worked.
The four paces to the wet end did not, quite, and she went the last of it with a hand flat on the partition, and afterward she stood over the drain with her forehead against the cold plate and waited for the room to stop its business.
Whoever had built this thing had built it for somebody who was never going to be seen.
Wet end behind a half partition, the sunken bath, the recess, everything running to a single drain in a floor that sloped a finger’s width across its width and took the water away into the ground under the village.
In her own service it would have been a two-day fit-out, and nobody would have remarked on it.
In Thinblood it was the reason a woman with no legs and no voice had kept the one thing she had left.
Sluicing the recess out of the tank meant counting what it cost, because the tank held what a boy had carried up a hill in four pails and would hold nothing else until he came again.
Then the eight paces to the door, which was worse than the four had been, and she got there with a hand on the plate and stood in the open with the cold coming up off the gravel.
The communal fire was lit.
There were more people round it than she had ever seen at this hour, standing rather than sitting, in the arrangement people take up when something has been brought in.
What, she could not make out.
Her eyes were not doing fine work yet.
The walk back was worse than the walk out.
Sitting down on the edge of the cot, she put her head between her knees.
Ten, against fourteen the day before, and the wall and the partition between them had done four of those.
Tomorrow it would be fewer than ten before it was more.
Into the column.
She did not enjoy it, and she put it in exactly as it came.
***
Vekka arrived while she was still deciding whether to look under the cloth.
Up the slope without the hesitation she usually spent at the doorway, in through the door, took the empty bowl off the crate and put a hand flat on the covered one to feel it through the cloth, and only then looked at Aeryn properly.
“Well,” she said.
“There you are.”
How long.
“You want it from when, is the question.” Vekka sat down on the crate uninvited, which nobody had ever done.
“Snake came for me before it was properly light.
I’ve seen him move quick twice since he came here, and that was the second one.”
And.
“And I came down and had a look at you and told him what I thought, which was that you’d worked yourself flat and gone somewhere your body wanted you to go.” She said it without any particular softness.
“He didn’t like it.
He wanted a reason.
Men do, when they’ve had a fright.
I told him a woman who does what you did on that gravel three days ago and then walks about in leathers is a woman who’ll fall over eventually, and that when she does you let her lie.”
He stayed.
“He sat there,” Vekka nodded at the boards by the door, “from before light until midday, and then I sent him off because he’d two men wanting him, and he’d have argued about it if I’d asked instead of told.
He came back twice after.
He’s up there now.”
Aeryn sat with that.
Being found had been planned for.
She had planned, in the ninety seconds she had spare before she went under, for a man arriving and making of it what he made of it.
What she had not planned for, because it had not occurred to her as a category, was that being found would take up an entire village’s morning and that a woman who counted the whole of Thinblood for a living would be sitting on her crate at dusk telling her about it.
I did not want that.
“No.
I don’t imagine you did.” Vekka examined the roof seam for a while.
“You’ll not get the choice.
That’s what a household is.
You’d know that if you’d had one long enough to get sick of it.”
***
The other bowl.
“Aye.
That.” Vekka took the cloth off it.
Meat.
Dark, in a broth gone almost to jelly with the cold, cut small, with liver in it, and something in the smell that was not any animal she had eaten on this world or the last one.
Her mouth went dry, and her stomach turned over so hard she had to put a hand on the cot frame.
Where from.
“Blackspine’s what’s in it.
The rest of what came in is hanging.”
Who brought it.
Vekka looked at her.
It was a plain look, and it went on slightly too long, and there was something behind it that Aeryn could not read, and she filed the not-reading rather than guess at it.
“It came to the fire,” Vekka said.
“Things come to the fire, and I hand them out.
That’s what the fire’s for.”
That is not an answer.
“No.” Vekka put the cloth back over the bowl.
“Eat it while there’s some warmth left in it.”
***
Then she ate it.
Working out where it had come from was supposed to happen first, and she got about four mouthfuls into intending that before the body took the decision away from her, and she went at the rest of it with both hands and no dignity whatever, and it was the first thing she had put into herself since she woke on this world that her body actually wanted.
Halfway down the bowl, her hands were shaking, and she noticed that and understood it was not weakness this time but something on the other side of weakness, and kept going.
Afterward, with the empty bowl in her lap, the arithmetic happened whether she invited it or not.
Somebody had gone into the Raw.
Nobody in this village went into the Raw for meat; they went for stone, and they went in company, and they went to the shaft.
Blackspine came out of low ground under the second shoulder, which she knew because Vaelith had told her the shape of this place three days ago while explaining the tithe, and low ground under the second shoulder was outside the wall by a long way.
A man had been gone since Firstclaw 7, and two days ago she had put him down in her own column as a sentinel walked off a post to settle a public account, and had been irritated about it, and had moved on.
The two facts sat down beside each other and would not be separated.
So that is where he went.
And the shape she had built on Firstclaw 7, a sentinel moved off a post to correct a public balance, came apart in her hands.
She let it go.
A reading that cannot survive new information was never a reading.
Wrong again.
Fourth time this week, and the biggest of the four.
***
But she did not go all the way, and the place she stopped was the one place she should not have stopped.
Because she had it as an arrangement.
Vaelith had said I will send Ashkar out on Firstclaw 6 and she had written I do not need it and he had said I will see him tonight, and she had watched him say it and had thought at the time that it was a man managing his household in front of her.
So a man had been sent for meat, and had gone, and had brought it back, and the whole of it was a household discharging an obligation that had been decided over her head and against her stated word.
Which was irritating, and expensive to her in ways this village could not see, and it was going to have to be answered.
It did not occur to her to ask what it had cost him.
The men were here because they had been sent here.
The boy hauled water because he was paid in food.
Vekka fed her because Vekka fed everyone, and the fire was the fire, and things came to it.
The bowl went back on the crate, and with it a note to find out what he had bought the meat with, and the note was about coin.
***
Vekka had been gone a while when the gravel came again, and it came slowly, which was somebody announcing themselves to a woman who could not call out.
Vaelith stopped in the doorway with the dark behind him instead of the light.
“You are sitting up.”
Since the light went.
He came his two paces.
There was no sitting on the crate, because the crate was against the wall and she was on the cot and there was nowhere in the geometry of the room for him to be except standing, and he stood.
“Your hands.”
She put them out.
He took them at the wrist, both at once, which he had never done, and held them long enough to be doing something other than looking at her fingers, and put them down.
“Cold.”
Yes.
“They were cold at dawn as well.” He straightened up.
“They were cold in the middle of the day, and they are cold now, and there is nothing wrong with your circulation, because I have had my hand on your neck and everything above the shoulder is warm.”
Bracing for the question was the thing she had been doing since Vekka left, and she went on doing it, and it went on not arriving.
“The Long Count says you worked yourself flat.”
She is likely right.
“She is not right,” Vaelith said it without any heat at all.
“A person who works herself flat sleeps.
You were not asleep.
I have woken men out of three days of fever and out of drink and out of a beam coming down on them, and every one of them surfaced far enough to object.
You did not object.”
Then what was I.
“That is the difficulty,” he said.
“You were not anything I have a name for.
Your pulse was the pulse you have had all week.
Your breathing was a healthy woman’s breathing.
And you were not in there.”
Then he let it stand, and did not ask.
She watched him not ask, and understood that she was going to have to decide something before the silence ran out, and had already decided it before she knew she had, which was that he was going to get exactly what he had given her three times in four days.
I do not have anything for you.
“No.”
That is not the same as nothing happened.
“I am aware of the difference.” Something in the set of him changed and did not resolve into anything she could name.
“I would rather have that sentence than a better one that was not true.
You may keep the rest.”
Which she had not expected, and had no move ready for, and it sat in the room with them for a moment while she failed to produce one.
“One thing,” Vaelith said.
Say it.
“Whatever this was, if it is going to happen again, it will happen again in a village of fifty-odd households at the bottom of a mountain, in a box with a door that opens outward and nothing on it.
I am not asking what it is.
I am asking to be told the day before.”
She thought about that for longer than she wanted him to see her think about it.
She could not give it.
The next time she went into a band would be a night she chose because it was the night the reserve came back, and telling him the day before meant telling him there was a thing to be told, and a man who knows there is a schedule starts keeping the schedule himself.
No.
He took it standing, without moving, and it cost him something she could see the edge of and not the middle.
“Then I will come at dawn,” he said, “and I will keep coming at dawn, and one of these mornings I will be wrong about which kind of morning it is.”
***
The lamp was out, and she did not light it.
She set the crate against the door on its long edge, canted, and it took her two goes and left her sitting on the floor beside it with her arms hanging.
The canteen went on the corner with its finger of overhang.
Then she sat there and looked at it.
A trap tells you somebody is already through the door.
She had known that when she built it and had written it off as the cost of a thing that was better than nothing.
What she had not priced was this morning, in which the trap had fired exactly as designed, into a room where the only person it could warn was not available to be warned, and had then gone on to do a second job she had never asked it to do.
It had brought a man through the door hard, at speed, expecting the worst.
The canteen got a long look.
Then she took it off the corner and put it back in its place by the cot, and left the crate where it was, because the crate was still a wedge and a wedge was still worth having.
Somebody was going to come through that door in the morning.
She would rather he did not run.
***
Down on the cot, in the dark, in her armor, in a room that had been full of people she had not consented to while she was not in it.
Nine boxes.
No reserve.
Ten paces.
Yesterday had gone on making the empire believe she was a dying woman, and the empire would go on believing it without ever looking again, which was the entire reason for doing it.
The village had spent this morning deciding she was a woman who falls over.
That was survivable and in some ways useful.
And the one man on this world standing close enough to check had spent the same morning arriving somewhere else altogether, and had come down after dark to tell her so at her own door, in a flat voice, holding both her wrists at once.
Three different things believed about her in one day, and only one of them was the one she had built.