Nathan opened his eyes.
The ceiling came first. Rough grey stone, a beam across it with hooks screwed into the wood, and for a moment he had no idea where the ceiling was or why he was under it. Then the cold came back, and the smell, lye over something worse, and it all arrived at once.
The room. The table. The floor.
He was still on the floor.
He breathed in, and it worked. He breathed out, and that worked too. His hand rose off the stone and closed into a fist and opened again, and every finger did exactly what he asked it to. He lifted his head. His neck moved. There was no wound, no fire, only a tight cool seam of skin where a line had been opened, the same as the last one, an old scar on a body that had no business wearing it.
’Back.’
’Took longer this time. But I’m back.’
He sat up slowly, one hand flat on the stone. The blood was still there. His blood, a wide dark stain dried across the floor and running toward the drain in a thin cracked line, and he looked at it with a strange flat calm, the way you’d look at something that had happened to someone else a long time ago.
A small sound came from the corner.
Nathan turned his head.
The girl was pressed into the angle of the two walls, as far from him as the room allowed, and she was staring at him with her whole body gone rigid. She had watched him die. She had watched the blood come out of him and pool on the floor and she had sat three feet from the body for however many hours it had been, and now the body was sitting up and looking at her.
She shoved herself back against the wall hard enough that her shoulder blades must have hurt, arms coming up, a thin broken noise catching in her throat.
Nathan looked at her.
He wanted to say something. He could see her terror and he understood every part of it and there was a version of this where he crouched down and kept his voice low and told her it was alright, that he wasn’t going to hurt her, that whatever she’d just watched she was safe from him.
But he didn’t have it in him. Not yet. There was too much of the other thing filling him up, cold and total, and it left no room for gentleness, and he wasn’t going to hand her soft words with his throat still scarred and his eyes like that. She wouldn’t have believed them anyway.
So he just held her gaze for a moment.
’Not you,’ he thought at her. ’Whatever happens in here. Not you.’
Then he looked away, and put his hand on the table leg, and got to his feet.
The room tilted, steadied. His legs held.
He could hear them.
Through the wall, muffled, two voices and the knock of a cup against wood. Laughing at something. Comfortable. Waiting out the hours until their buyer came, drinking to pass the time, three strides from the boy they’d opened up and left to cool on the stone.
Nathan looked down at himself. No weapon. No stone in his belt, the belt gone too. Nothing in his hands and almost nothing in his body, his strength a fraction of the little it had been.
It didn’t matter.
He wasn’t going to wait to be strong. He’d waited in the dark long enough.
He crossed to the door.
The two men were drinking.
Perrin had found a stool and Hask had the crate, and there was a clay bottle going between them and the grey afternoon coming thin through the one high window, and they were arguing again, easily, without heat, the way they’d argued about everything since the road.
"...telling you, three fingers, and he acted like I’d shortchanged him," Hask was saying. "Wanted them wrapped separate, too. Separate cloth for each finger."
"That’s mages." Perrin took the bottle. "No sense of the trouble. They see the piece, they never think about the getting of it."
"Coin’s good though."
"Coin’s very good." Perrin drank. "That’s why we put up with the three-fingers of it."
The door opened behind them.
Neither turned at first. There was no reason to. The boy on the floor was not going to open a door, and the buyer would knock, and so the sound of the latch lifting sat wrong in the room for a full second before Perrin frowned and looked over his shoulder to see who’d let themselves in.
The bottle stopped halfway to Hask’s mouth.
Perrin went very still on the stool.
In the doorway stood the boy.
The dead boy. Upright, on his own two feet, one shoulder against the frame because standing was clearly costing him something. His tunic was black and stiff down the whole front of it. And across his throat, plain in the grey light, ran the dark dried line of the wound that had put him on their floor, the wound Perrin had opened with his own hand and watched empty out.
He was looking at them.
Not wildly. Not like a thing clawing its way back for vengeance. He looked at them the way a man looks at two others across a quiet room, patient, unhurried, faintly amused, and that was so much worse than screaming that Hask’s cup slipped out of his fingers and cracked on the stone.
Perrin’s mouth opened. Nothing came out of it.
The warmth was gone from his face. All of it, the creases, the crinkle at the eyes, the easy kindness he’d worn on the road and worn while he killed. What was under it now was the colour of the lye on the walls.
"You," he managed. "You were—"
Nathan smiled.
It was a small thing. It did not reach his eyes at all, and it sat on his blood-crusted face like something borrowed, and it was, note for note, the exact warm smile Perrin had given him on the road when he’d handed a starving boy half a loaf of bread.
"I must say," Nathan said, and his voice came out low and rough through the scar on his throat, "thank you very much. For your kindness."