Chapter 13: No Second Owner

There Has Never Been a Second Owner

He did not step back.

He would have liked to say afterward that he had made a decision. There had been no decision in it. It was a thing his body did while he was busy with the rest of the room — the band downstairs closing one set and thinking about the next, a cart on the stones outside, laughter on the floor below that belonged to neither of them — and he stood with his mouth a finger’s width from the Chancellor’s throat and did not step back, and after a while understood that he was not going to.

Behind the screen, the house’s burning dish sent up its thin line of smoke, and the line was straight. It had been straight since the women went out. Somebody on the far side of that screen was standing very still, and had been for a while now, and he did not turn his head to look, because looking is how you tell a man he has been seen.

He had caught the smell on the third floor. He had caught it again in the passage, and both times he had filed it and kept walking, because there is nothing to be done about a smell in a corridor. Up here there was.

It was not soap, and it was not scent. It was dry and faintly bitter, the inside of a drawer in an apothecary’s shop that nobody opens, and it did not stay where a smell belongs. It got past the back of his throat and went down lower than breath goes, and he did not care for the company it kept down there. So he did what he did with anything he could not place. He asked it what it was.

“What is that,” he said.

Quiet, and with no theater left in it, close enough that the words went into the man’s collar instead of into the room.

“That smell on you. What is it.”

The Chancellor did not answer. His face did not change. His eyes stayed where he had put them, on the middle of the wall, and he gave Cassian nothing at all — and Cassian, as close as he was, could feel what the nothing cost. Stillness held the way a man holds a cup filled to the rim.

The order still stood — Cassian had laid it on him and had not lifted it — not one word until the house was done with them. Silence was the only weapon left in the room, and the Chancellor had found that out early and was spending it well.

The Chancellor was white around the mouth. The coat was not his — a shoulder too wide on him, and a dried smear of mud along the left cuff that had been there before midnight and that neither of them had mentioned. He had been holding the same cup for most of the evening. He had never held anyone down with those hands. They were doing exactly what he told them to.

Cassian waited. He had been told no by men who were good at saying it, and he knew the difference between a no that wanted raising and a no that had already been raised as high as it was going; this was the second kind. He straightened up and gave the room its performance back.

“Darling.”

Loud enough for the screen. Warm enough for a house that had already told him no once tonight.

“After I’ve had the queen of this place, I’m coming back up here to have you.”

He turned his head a degree, toward the screen, on the chance that anybody was still standing behind it.

“You’ve had me waiting all evening,” he said, at the same volume. “Sit still. I’m nearly done with the house.”

The Chancellor’s mouth moved — once, and not on purpose. He had it back under control before Cassian had finished looking. Cassian watched him put it away and got more out of that than out of anything the house had given him all night.

And then, under the endearment, under the twitch, he heard the back stair take a man down.

One step, and the boards, and nothing after it. The screen was empty. The audience he had been playing to since the women went out was walking down the back of the house with the story he had built for it, and the story was a good one, and it would cost somebody a great deal of money to unlearn.

He kept going anyway.

There was still one man in the room who had not been got at. He had spent all night with his mouth shut and his eyes open, taking the measure of everything and writing it down behind his eyes, and he was not, as far as Cassian could tell, any nearer to being finished with him.

“Sweetheart.”

The cup came up and hit him in the mouth.

Not hard. It could not be hard. The man holding it was forbidden one syllable of what he thought about any of this, so he had put the entire opinion into a teacup and pushed it against Cassian’s teeth; the tea had gone cold long before; and both of them knew what it was and neither of them was going to say so.

Cassian licked the rim of the cup. Slowly, one side of it and then the other, so that the man holding it would not be able to pretend afterward that he had missed it.

“Feed me,” he said, around the cup. “Feed me, sweetheart.”

A breath went through the Chancellor. The hand on the cup was not steady, and he poured anyway. It cost him something to do it, and Cassian drank what he was given and settled, and filed the moment away among the better things that had happened to him that year.

He set the cup on the table.

“Gone,” he said. Quiet now. Down at the level he had used for the question, the level the screen could not have heard if the screen had still been occupied. “The man behind the screen was gone before I got to sweetheart.”

The Chancellor’s eyes came up off the wall and stayed on him.

“In case you were keeping accounts,” Cassian said.

He took a grape out of the dish and peeled it in his fingers and put it in his own mouth and chewed and made a face.

“Sour,” he said.

The Chancellor watched him with no expression whatever, which was the only answer available to a man in his position, and Cassian decided to accept it.

“You think I did it,” he said. “You’ve thought so since the Mercy House. I’d think it too. I’d have thought it harder.”

That got him nothing. He had not expected anything, and he ate the rest of the grape.

“The city’s been saying for years that I kill without blinking,” he said. “Nobody’s ever argued with it.”

He said it looking straight at the man. Under the sentence something old turned over and did not go back down, and afterward he could not have told anyone whether he had shown it on purpose.

Then he peeled the second grape, which he did not eat, and smiled with about a third of his mouth.

“Which means,” he said, “one or two more deaths on my account wouldn’t be any great scandal. Would they.”

The Chancellor looked at him, and looked for a place to put what he had just heard. Cassian watched him come up empty, and counted that a better answer than the cup had been.

He heard them in the passage.

Boots on boards. More than one man, walking like men who had been told where to walk.

He was up before he had decided to stand, the second grape still in his fingers, and he put it against the Chancellor’s mouth.

“Baby,” he said. Warm, and pitched for the room, for the passage, for whatever was on the far side of the screen. “There are a thousand pretty things in this city, and the only one I love is you.”

The Chancellor took it. He did not look at the grape, or at the screen, or at Cassian; he chewed and swallowed and put his face back where he kept it, and at the corner of his mouth there was a small movement that Cassian chose to read as the fruit being sour.

They came around the screen one at a time, unhurried, and stood along the wall. Five, and then six, and by the time the last was through, Cassian had counted the room twice and had his answer about what was behind the screen. They were big and they were patient, and none of them looked at the wine jug or the fruit or the chairs. They looked at the two men in the room. The biggest of them was not the one in charge.

The one in charge came last, around the screen, behind his men, carrying a bottle. He was smaller than the rest. Heavy lids, a wide mild face, and nothing in it — no anger, no apology, no interest at all in how the evening came out. A house keeps one man like that, for exactly this.

The madam had not come back. She had sent this man instead, with a bottle and a wall of six, and that was an answer of its own.

Cassian stepped forward and put the table behind him, which put the Chancellor there too, and he did not bother looking pleasant about it.

“So,” he said. “The house won’t sell me its queen. Has the house come up here to take mine?”

The small man bowed. Not far. The bow of somebody who had already decided what respect the moment was owed. He set the bottle down on the table between the cup and the dish.

“The name that went on the table tonight is a good name,” he said. “Nobody in this house has a word against it. But the Primrose has one rule older than anybody in the building. What is sold here is sold once. The queen of this month is spoken for. There has never been a second owner for one of ours, and there will not be one tonight.”

“The Morays would have paid the debt and remembered the courtesy,” Cassian said.

“The house would rather not be owed.”

He put two fingers on the bottle.

“The oldest in the cellar. It went into the ground the year a daughter was born to this house, and nobody has had cause to open it since. From the Primrose, to the two gentlemen.” He looked around the room once, thoroughly — the chairs, the screen, the table, and the paper on it, which he did not touch. “The room is yours until morning. Nothing is owing on it.”

The Chancellor did not stand up. He was not going to be any use against six men and had never pretended otherwise, and he looked at the bottle instead, and then at Cassian, and waited to see what he was going to do.

Cassian did the sum.

Six of them, and a small one with the house standing behind him — six and a mouth to answer to afterward. One door, behind them. One window on the back of the house, over a yard he had not looked at yet, and he did not like anything he had not looked at. He put the count in order as he did it at a border crossing — the first man moving before he knew he was moving, the second before the first was down — and past that it got interesting, and interesting was another word for expensive, and he had come up here tonight to spend money, not blood.

His arm was around the Chancellor by then. It had gone there during the small man’s speech, without instruction from him. It was steady. He knew the Chancellor could feel that it was steady, and would be making his own reading of it, and would be right about half of what he read.

Let him.

“Then I’d be a fool,” Cassian said, and showed all his teeth, “to argue with a house that gives me its oldest bottle and keeps my room and won’t take a thing for it. I’m much obliged to you. Truly.”

The house read it as houses read any man who stops pushing: as a man who had given in. Good. Let that be the version that went down the stairs ahead of him.

The small man bowed again, and the wall of men came off the wall and out, and the door closed behind them, and the room was theirs until morning.

Cassian did not take his arm back for three seconds. He noticed that. Then he took it back.

The door was shut. The room was paid for. On the table: a bottle he had not asked for, going warm; a dish of fruit that belonged to nobody; the cup the Chancellor had been holding all night; and the paper he had put down at the start of the evening, still where he had left it, untouched.

And across the table the Chancellor watched him out of a face that gave away nothing, doing arithmetic he did not intend to let anybody see.