Chapter 1: You're Impotent, Your Grace

You’re Impotent, Your Grace

“You’re impotent.”

The physician said it the way a man reads a weight off a scale. No pleasure in it, no apology either. He had the flat, wet eyes of a man who had long ago stopped expecting anything from the people who sat down in front of him, and he kept a room that smelled of cheap soap, boiled linen, and the tallow they burned back here because candles cost money.

“What?” Cassian said.

“Impotent.” The physician let that sit, then appeared to remember a duty. “Your Grace.”

“Say the last part again.”

“Impotent?”

“The one after that.”

“Your Grace,” the physician said, obligingly, and louder than before.

The room was the back room of the Mercy House — four walls, a curtain over the doorway, a screen, and the heavy post that carried the beam. The curtain did not reach the floor. Through the gap Cassian could see the courtyard where the poor waited: thirty of them, maybe forty, sitting on the ground or standing with their arms crossed, all day if they had to, because the Mercy House asked them for nothing. Closer, in the front room, a boy of about fourteen kept the ledger at the counter. He had stopped writing. His pen was still in his hand, and he was looking at the curtain.

Cassian had come in an old campaign cloak with the collar up, given the boy at the counter a name that was not his own, and paid in coin that was. No groom had held his horse outside; he had walked the last two streets. None of it had done any good. The physician had known him before he sat down.

He had come to hear the thing said to his face, once, and then to see to it that it was never said again. That had been the plan.

“The diagnosis is wrong,” he said.

The physician blinked at him, slowly, the way a lizard blinks on a warm stone. “It is not wrong.”

“It’s wrong.”

“Your Grace has a great deal of experience being right,” the physician said. “I have forty years of experience being a physician.”

Cassian sat with that. It was the wrongness that got under his skin, not the insult. A man who could look at him and see the exact opposite of what was there was a man who might look at a wound, or a fever, or a corpse, and see the opposite just as well. And this one had said it out loud, in a room with the door open and a boy at the counter taking it down in his head.

Then a boot heel came down on the porch boards, out past the window.

Cassian’s hand was inside his coat before the sound finished. The knife came out of its own accord by now — shoulder, wrist, the flagstones out front measured at twenty paces, and no thought left in any of it. The paper over the window was thin and wet with spring, and the blade went through it without slowing.

The dark shape on the porch folded sideways. The knife took the post behind it and stuck.

Then nothing.

Cassian counted the seconds. Behind him the physician had gone quiet, and in the front room the boy had stopped breathing, or sounded like it. Outside, one of the waiting women laughed; another one told her to hush.

He did not go out. Whoever had been on the porch had come to the door and not the window, which meant he would wait, and Cassian had outwaited better men on colder ground for longer. There were also forty people in that yard, and every one of them would remember a duke coming out of a charity clinic with a knife in his hand. He stayed where he was.

The door opened slowly.

The man who came through it was in white — a plain white coat, no braid, nothing on it to say what he was. He got one hand on the frame and stepped over the sill and looked up, and there was a small dark mole at the corner of his left eye, set exactly where the skin creased when he smiled. He was smiling. He put his tongue to his lower lip and took it back.

“Calloway,” Cassian said. It was not a greeting.

“Your Grace.” The Chancellor of the Realm said it the way a man greets a neighbor over a fence. “What a coincidence.”

Behind Cassian, the physician had evaporated. Cassian heard cloth move and did not turn around; the man had plainly spent years learning to leave rooms quietly.

“A coincidence,” Cassian said. “Is the Chancellor impotent too?”

Calloway’s face did something small and quick, like a man missing a step on a stair in the dark. He looked down at the floor, wet his lips again, and then, visibly, decided to be helpful.

“Your Grace,” he said gently. “You mustn’t be ashamed.”

“Mustn’t I.”

“Truly. It’s a condition like any other. It isn’t a matter of character.” He glanced around the room, which no longer contained a physician. “The men here are said to be the best in Kingsmoor. With treatment —“ a pause, and something in his voice that he probably thought was tact “— most people recover.”

Cassian looked at him for a while.

“I’m not ashamed,” he said.

“Good,” Calloway said, and looked so pleased for him that Cassian could not look at him.

Which was true, and was the whole of the problem. He was not ashamed. He was the reverse of ashamed, and had been the reverse of ashamed for a good many years, and now and then his body took the opportunity to say so out loud to whatever room it happened to be standing in.

This was one of those rooms.

He kept his hands off his coat and his weight back on his heels, because a man who stands still can keep a good deal to himself. There was a warmth low in him that owed nothing to the spring weather and did not take advice, and so long as he stayed where he was and kept his own mind on a short rein, the room could go on being a room. Calloway was still talking. Calloway was two feet away, with his mouth moving and that mole at the corner of his eye, and Calloway had no idea — none — and Cassian, who had once stood down a cavalry charge by doing nothing at all, could not get his pulse down or his attention anywhere in the room except there. He bit down on the side of his tongue until he tasted iron.

“At court this morning, Your Grace, the matter of the Protector—“

Cassian crossed the floor and put his hand over the man’s mouth.

He hadn’t decided to. He was aware of that, later. His palm met Calloway’s lips and stopped the words in the middle of a word, and the lips were cool, and softer than anything had any business being in that room, and Calloway’s eyes went wide — surprise first, then something with more fear in it.

Rennie’s chair. The boy was ten years old and the old king was not yet in the ground, and there were three houses in the capital deciding who would stand behind that chair with a hand on the boy’s shoulder, and the man doing the deciding out loud was standing in a charity clinic with Cassian’s hand over his mouth.

One breath. Two.

Calloway shoved him. He got a hand up against Cassian’s chest and pushed hard enough to mean it.

Then the curtain stirred, and a foot came down on the boards behind them.

Someone had come in.

The room had one screen in it, cheap silk over a wood frame, standing three steps in from the doorway, and it hid a folding cot and a chamber pot and nothing else. It hid them badly. It was what there was, and the post stood at its corner, and Cassian had Calloway behind it before the foot came down again.

He let go of him and held up one hand. The footsteps came on, slow and unhurried, the walk of a man who knew the floor. Calloway stopped moving, and stayed stopped, which was a decision.

Then the silk split, top to bottom, in one motion.

The blade went through both panels and through the frame and took the crossbar with it. The wood cracked — a wet, green, splintering crack, loud in a room that size — and the whole screen leaned and dropped into the corner.

Cassian had already turned, one arm around Calloway’s waist, and put him against the post.

He heard everything after that in pieces. The floorboard by the cot. A breath. The silence where the front room should have been, with the boy at the ledger in it, and the yard beyond going quiet in that particular hush a crowd gets when something is breaking in the room past the wall.

Then the weight of the boots turned and went back the way they had come. The door did not slam. It closed with a hand.

Calloway’s heart was going hard enough to see in his throat. He had bitten his own tongue; there was a spot of blood at the corner of his mouth, small and bright. He was warm through the coat, and his hands were shaking, and Cassian’s palm was flat on his waist the whole time.

Cassian waited until the yard noises came back up.

“Chancellor.” He stepped away and waved a hand in front of the man’s face. “He’s gone.”

Calloway came back to himself in stages. He looked at the ruined screen, and at the curtain, and then he got off the post and took two steps away and put his tongue to the corner of his mouth, where he had bitten it. “I—“

“You stay away from me,” Cassian said. “I’ve told you that. It wasn’t a suggestion.”

Calloway had nothing to say to that.

Seven days. Cassian had brought the Marches’ army home seven days ago, and in seven days he had not once been in a room with this man on purpose. At court he looked through him. Away from court, the calling cards that came over from the Chancellery — one a day, in that small, careful hand — had gone back unopened every time, handed to a footman with instructions not to explain. It was a cheap kind of hatred and it cost him nothing, and he had liked it very much until this afternoon.

“You put a man on my porch,” he said.

“I did not.”

“He came through the yard and stood outside my window, and he stopped the moment you opened the door. That’s your man.”

Calloway drew a breath. He was doing the arithmetic — Cassian could watch him do it. Then he let it go, and reached into his sleeve for a handkerchief, and wiped his palms with it. Left, then right, careful, methodical, taking his time.

“I came for a consultation as well,” he said.

Cassian looked him over, all of him, from the unpinned hair to the wet shoes.

This was the best physician in Kingsmoor for this particular complaint. Nobody made that walk by accident.

“Your Grace,” Calloway said, reading it off his face, “whatever you believe happened in this room today — I won’t speak of it. You have my word.”

Every word out of the man’s mouth was one more thing to hold at arm’s length, and he had to get out of the building.

He stopped at the window. The tear in the paper was the shape of his own arm, roughly; he put that arm out through it, found the hilt where it stood in the porch post, and worked the blade free. The post gave it back with a complaint. He wiped it on his sleeve and went through into the front room.

The boy at the ledger had his head down and his shoulders up around his ears and was writing with great concentration, and his eyes kept sliding sideways to the counter.

The physician was under the counter. Cassian got a fistful of the man’s coat at the back of the neck and hauled him out, and the man came up with ink on his sleeve and his hands over his face, which was not going to help.

“Who was on the porch?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know anything, Your Grace, I never saw him—“

Cassian put the knife into the counter. It went through the oak board beside the man’s hand and stood there, quivering, and the physician went gray.

“Who.”

“I don’t know who he is!” The man was breathing badly now, short and fast, and behind him the table was still set with the day’s jars, and the ledger, and a lamp, and Cassian got a hand under the edge of it and turned the whole thing over. Jars broke on the floor. The ledger came apart at the binding and slid the day’s records across the boards in wet sheets, and one of the boards split along a line he hadn’t even seen go.

The noise went through the front room and out into the yard. Somebody out there said Oh. Somebody else said a name. Cassian heard all of it, and filed it, because that was tomorrow’s problem and tomorrow could wait.

“Look at me,” he said.

“I don’t know his name,” the physician whispered. “I saw his face is all. He was on the porch when I came around, and I saw him plain, and then he was gone. He had his hair down.” He swallowed. “Loose. Down past his shoulders. And his clothes — his clothes were wrecked. Filthy. Like he’d been sleeping in the ground.”

“Then what.”

“He wasn’t—“ The man’s mouth worked. “He wasn’t dressed right. He wasn’t a person you’d— he didn’t look like a person.”

“Describe him.”

“He looked like a ghost.”

Cassian stood over him.

“Like a ghost,” the physician said again, and then kept saying it, because he had found the thing that made all of it make sense to him, and he was not going to let go of it. “A ghost. He was a ghost, Your Grace, I tell you he was—“

Cassian left him on the floor with the broken glass.

He went out past the boy, who was writing again, and pulled the knife out of the counter on his way through — one tug, and the board split a little further where the blade had gone in — and crossed the yard past thirty people who had all heard the screen break and were all pretending they hadn’t.

He walked fast, collar up, three streets, four, and the physician’s voice came the whole way with him. Thin and shrill and tireless, still talking, three streets back, to a room that had emptied out.