Location: Thinblood, Kell Vor
Date: Firstclaw 12, Yr 76 of the Still Flame
POV: Aeryn Veyra
Steam off the water, and the sachet already in it and going, and the plate of the fill port too hot to keep a hand against.
Aeryn stood at the rim with the tin cup in both hands and did not get in.
The wet end of the pod was a half partition, the sunken bath, a recess with the drain in it, and a floor that fell a finger’s width from one wall to the other so that everything went the same way in the end.
The lamp was lit and set on the partition where it would show her the water and not her own face.
The stone sat in the tank with the heat still coming off the plate above it.
The open box was on the crate with its lid turned print upward, where she could get at it without standing.
The lid said hot.
It said it in the same flat print it used for the ratios, and it said hotter was better, and she had read the line three times tonight because the first time she read it she had been working under a lamp that was going out.
Vaelith had given her the same instruction out loud in her first week, in front of a witness, without any idea what he was authorizing.
The whole sachet, then, and all five vials, because the lid had assumed a tank from the beginning, and tonight there was a tank.
Box one had gone in halves out of a pail and a pot and a hollow in the floor.
This was the first time one of these had been given what it asked for.
Which left the cup.
A hundred and twenty drops in it.
Six days at twenty a day since the night she emptied it into the first bath, and not one drop taken back in the mornings, and the mornings had been what they were because of it.
Every flat gray hour since the freeze had been bought and paid for out of this cup, in advance, by a woman betting that the bath mattered more than the day.
She poured it in.
One bath.
Six days of mornings, for one bath.
***
The heat took the breath out of her before her second foot was down.
She went in anyway, all the way, to the collarbone, and got her hands on the rim and set her heels against the far end so that going under would take a decision rather than a slip, and started counting.
Counting had held the last time.
There was nothing else to hold.
Going under meant going under the water, and the water stood a hand deep over her chest and would not care either way.
Staying up was the task.
Everything else about the next hour was going to happen whether she attended to it or not.
Somewhere past three hundred, her blood began to boil.
That was the word.
She looked for a better one afterward and did not find one.
Not heat in the water and not on the skin.
Heat in the lines of her, moving, every limb at once, building to nothing and stopping for nothing, and she lost the count and started again from one, and the second count held.
The beads came up on her forearms while she was counting, and they were not sweat.
She watched them stand and break and go into the water, and went on counting, because stopping to look at them would not have helped.
The first bath had turned the water dark.
This one turned it a color she had no name for.
Near the end, with nothing left to do but hold on, something in her that had always pulled toward one place let go of it and went somewhere else, low and central, and settled, and did not come back.
She noted at the time that she was frightened.
She noted afterward that the noting had not slowed her down.
***
Out, onto the boards, with more in her than the body had any idea what to do with.
That was the state the first bath had left her in, and she had taken it at the time for the back end of a procedure.
It had not been the back end of anything.
It had been a warning, and the sequence was the only route out of what she was carrying by then, and it does not start until the bath has finished taking.
She began at the third movement.
The first two had done nothing the first time except use up minutes she had not had.
It went all the way through without a break in it.
Stage two.
Sitting up took the rest of her.
She got her back against the rim with the water still steaming behind her head and worked out that she had about four minutes.
Two of them went on the crate against the door.
The third got her most of the way to the cot.
The fourth she spent on the floor beside it, on her side, pulling the blanket after her by one corner, and there was a moment while she went under in which she was aware of having managed all four in the correct order, and of being pleased about it, and then was not aware of anything.
***
Not eighteen hours.
Daylight, and the grain of the boards printed on her cheek.
Aeryn ran the check before she moved and got numbers that made sense: hands cold, arms working, and somewhere behind the eyes the beginnings of a reserve rather than a dry line.
Six hours.
Perhaps seven.
The band had cost eighteen and a full night after it.
The bath had cost a morning.
And then she sat up, and she was hungry.
Not the flat animal want of the last four days.
Hungry as a body is hungry when it has decided to build something and is waiting to be handed the material, all the way down through her, and she sat on the floor with one hand on the cot frame and had to wait for it to stop being the only thing in the world.
Then she looked at the crate.
It was off the door.
Not pushed aside and left, but moved and set back down, a hand’s width to the left of where she had wedged it, by somebody who had wanted it near enough to be a courtesy and had not been willing to make it a lie.
***
Inventory went into the plate of the fill port, which was the only reflective thing left to her since the mirror went back.
The hollow under the cheekbone was less of a hollow.
The skin around the eye had come up out of the socket, so that the eye sat in the head rather than in a pit.
Everything else was where it had been.
Skin dull.
Lips cracked.
Hair coming apart at the ends when she moved it.
Up off the crate, then, and to the far plate and back.
Again, with a proper sit between, and got nine, and the ninth was a stagger she declined to count, so eight.
A cheekbone and an appetite, for a night like that.
Anger was available, and she watched it come and did not take it, because being angry at an inventory is a thing done by people who wanted the inventory to be something else.
Eight sealed boxes out of ten, and nothing anywhere in the ring said what any one of them did.
There had never been any paper.
That was not an oversight, and nobody had lifted it.
A man who moved things that were not sold, a name he swore was the finest alchemist working, ten years of lots gathered one at a time, and a career of merit spent down to the boards for a promise about an outcome and not one word about a method.
The outcome was to have been a girl brought up level with a designed body, after a natural conception and a natural birth had left her paying for both since the day she drew breath.
The girl had never been told what any of it cost.
That had been the arrangement, and the arrangement had been Aeryn’s, and nobody had ever argued with her about it because there had been nobody to argue.
Two steps in, then, and no way of saying which of the eight held a leg, and no way of getting at it if she had known, because the boxes do not open out of order.
The first had taken six years of poison out of the marrow, put skin back on her, and given her the eight paces she had just walked twice.
The second had given her a cheekbone.
And the first had been run wrong.
Halved, twice, out of a pail, by a woman who could not sit up unaided and was guessing at a ratio.
The second had gone in at full volume in water she could barely stand, in the order the lid gave.
Three figures, and no two of them agreed.
It had hurt worse than anything ever done to her or by her.
It had come out of the reserve cheaper than the first.
And it had bought a cheekbone.
So it went somewhere.
She left that open rather than closing it, because a finding built out of three numbers that disagree is not a finding, and she had been confidently wrong twice this week on better evidence than this.
What she could price was time.
The reserve had come back in two days after the band and in a morning after the bath, and only one of those had been a box.
Call it three days a box, allowing for a bad one, because a bad estimate she knew was bad still beat working with none.
Eight boxes at three days was twenty-four.
She had thirteen.
Four boxes, then, and at the far end of the thirteen, three men walking in off a mountain to a woman who could cross a floor.
***
Vekka came up before midday, which she did not do, and had a bowl with her that had been made up rather than ladled, and put it down and looked at Aeryn’s face for longer than she ever had.
“You’ve eaten.”
Not yet.
“That’s not what I said.”
Aeryn let that sit and did not fill it.
“Right.” Vekka looked up at the ceiling of the pod and went along the seam of it, corner to corner, and came back down in her own time.
“You’ll be wanting more than that inside a week.
I’ll tell the fire it’s the meat working.
Nobody’ll ask.”
Will they not.
“Not about that.” She nudged the bowl an inch toward her.
“You’ve had blackspine and liver and four days of it.
A woman who’s been on nothing for six weeks starts eating like that, and every one of them will nod and think about their own.
That’s a story with a hole the right shape in it, and it’ll take whatever you put in there.”
Thank you.
“Aye,” Vekka said.
“Don’t.”
***
The boy came in the afternoon and stopped in the doorway.
“Four.”
Four.
“You’ve gone a different color.”
Have I.
“Bit.” He considered her, entirely without embarrassment.
“Ma went a color like that when she was carrying my sister.
Da says you’re not to be asked about anything at all now, not just the one thing, so I’m not asking.”
That is not asking.
“No,” he agreed, pleased, and went and did the port.
***
He came at dark and came in without stopping in the doorway, and he did not sit and did not ask her to, and he stood in the middle of the floor with his hands behind his back and let a silence go past that was not the kind he usually used.
When he spoke, it was in the voice he used for figures, and it was the wrong voice for what he said.
“At first light I could not wake you.”
No.
“For the second time in three days.”
Yes.
“I stood in this room for eleven minutes with my hand on your neck and counted a pulse I have no explanation for.
Then I put your crate back and sat down outside it until the sun cleared the shoulder, and then I went up to the timber and worked a full day.” He said it flatly.
“I did not go and get the Long Count.
You should understand what that cost, because I do not think anybody has told you.
She is fifty-odd households, and I am one man in her village on sufferance, and I have carried a thing about a woman on this face since first light and not given it to her.
If she learns it from anybody but me, I lose the only standing I have here.”
Why did you not tell her.
“Because you did not want it told, and I am not able to work out whether that is a reason or whether I have simply started doing what you want.” He let that stand.
“I would rather say it out loud than find out later that I did not notice it happening.”
Aeryn sat very still.
No subordinate had ever said that to her, and no superior had either, and she went looking for the category it belonged to and did not find one.
You asked me for a day’s notice.
“I did.
I have thought about that for three days, and I have decided you were right to refuse it.
A day’s notice tells me a thing is coming and gives me nothing to do with the knowing. New chapters come out on g.com first.
It would have made me feel consulted.”
Then what do you want instead.
“Nothing you have to give me.”
He turned and looked at the doorway rather than at her, and she understood a fraction of a second before he said it that she was not going to be able to stop this.
“I am moving down.
Tonight.
I will sleep outside that door until you stop doing this or I stop being able to stand up.” He said it without any weight on it at all.
“I am not asking.
I am telling you so that you are not surprised by a man on your step at midnight, because you have a crate against that door and a reason for it, and I would rather you knew it was me.”
***
She went at it as an exchange, because that was the instrument in her hand and it had worked on every world she had ever stood on.
Then take something for it.
“There is nothing to take.”
There is.
Name it and it is yours.
Time, information, the cloth, my word on anything you want my word on.
The whole of it was out before she understood how it was going to land, and she watched it land, and it landed nowhere at all.
Vaelith read the band and then read it again, and something went across his face that she had seen twice now and had not been able to name, and this time she got close enough to see the edge of it.
“You are offering to pay me,” he said.
Yes.
“For sleeping on your step.”
For the cost of it.
There is a cost.
I can see it from here.
“There is a cost.
It is not the sort that gets paid, and I am going to leave that where it is tonight.”
Then tell me the thing you promised me last night instead.
“Ask it.”
What does a man sleeping on a woman’s step say to fifty households.
Vaelith did not answer straight away.
“I did not think you would get to that tonight.”
Answer it.
“There are two readings, and the village will not choose between them; it will hold both.
The first is that her house has closed.
That a woman who was asked about at the fire two days ago has men who heard it and answered it, and that the answer was a man on the step.” He said it evenly.
“That one is good for you and good for me, and it costs Ashkar something, because there is one step and I will be on it.”
Then he should be on it.
“He cannot take it.” Vaelith did not make anything of it.
“He has been turned away from that door four times on open gravel, and the village counted every one of them.”
And the second.
“That she cannot be left.
That whatever is wrong with her is bad enough that one of them sits up with her now, and that everything they have been told about a woman who is mending is a thing they were told rather than a thing they saw.”
Which will they land on.
“Both, for about a week, and then one of them, and I cannot tell you which.
It will go on what you do in front of them and not on anything I say.” He let that sit.
“I have already weighed it, and I am doing it anyway.
That is not a man being noble at you.
It is a man who has decided that the second reading is survivable and that finding you cold on a floor a third time is not.”
And the rest of it.
The part you are leaving where it is.
“When you can stand for the length of it.”
That is the second time you have decided what I am well enough to hear.
“It is,” Vaelith said, and went out, and did not close the door behind him.
***
The step took him a while to arrange, and she listened to all of it.
Boots.
Something heavy set down.
The particular scrape of a man putting his back against a metal wall and working out which way his knees were going to have to go.
Then nothing, for the rest of it.
The plan had been four boxes.
Aeryn got up off the cot and put the tin cup back under the lip, and sat down on the boards beside it, and did the other arithmetic.
One drop an hour.
Twenty a day.
A hundred and twenty in the cup, and a hundred and twenty was what she had just poured into a bath.
Six days.
Not three days a box.
Six, and not one of the six had anything to do with the reserve, and she had spent the whole morning pricing the wrong account and congratulating herself on the figures.
Eight boxes at six days was forty-eight.
She had thirteen, and thirteen bought two.
Two.
And then they walk in.
And not two of her choosing.
Three and four, whatever three and four turned out to hold, because the order was the order and she had known that since the day she counted them.
There was worse in it than that if she wanted to go and get it, and she went and got it, because leaving a thing alone because it was unpleasant was how people ended up standing in the open.
Seventy-six drops had been enough to overload her at half a dose.
A hundred and twenty against a whole one was not the same ratio and was not close to it, and there was no test for that and no second cup and nobody on this world she could ask.
The cup sat under the lip in the dark with nothing in it.
Two knocks, she thought, without deciding to.
She did not do it.