Chapter 14: I Gave You a Chance

I Gave You a Chance

Ambrose sat with his chin in his hand and watched the man in the door frame.

The men from the house had gone down a while ago. The door was shut behind them, and the room had stopped being anything else: a table, a screen, a bottle nobody had opened, and a paper with a name on it that the house had read and declined to put a finger on. Under the floor the musicians worked the same figure over and over, slow enough to be a pulse. Out in the street the carriages kept coming and the voices kept coming with them, and all of it was about other people.

Everyone in the capital had a version of him. The version with the widest circulation was the one where he liked it. Ambrose had spent years taking those versions out of the mouths of men who had never stood within ten feet of him and putting them where such things belong, which is nowhere.

They were decoration. Under them was something the city had not made up and could not have.

Cassian Roan, Duke of the North Marches, had killed. He had done it with an army behind him, to a city, once. He had come home afterward and been thanked for it, and the thanks had been a border to hold, and then he had come to court and taken his seat like any other man who had ever been thanked for anything.

And tonight, in this room, with his eyes open and nothing particular on his face, he had said the other thing. The killer isn’t me.

Ambrose kept turning it over. It was true. That was what made it hard to put down: a man could put a city into the ground and say, truthfully, that the man they were hunting was somebody else. There was no contradiction anywhere in it. Everything the Duke said was true. It had taken Ambrose most of the evening to work out that this was not a comfort.

He knew what his face did while it was working — he had been told, more than once, by people who thought it worth telling him — and he was doing it now, chin in hand, looking at a man straight on and giving him nothing at all, which made most men start talking. It had been useful to him a long time, and he had never once bothered to fix it.

He had been told, hours ago, to keep his mouth shut in this room, and he had kept it, which was not the same as agreeing. He had not decided yet which of his reasons had been the real one.

The man in the door frame did not open his eyes. He did not need to, to know he was being looked at. He had chosen to stand there and let it happen, which was information, if Ambrose wanted any more of that tonight.

The door opened without a knock.

Ambrose did not turn around. He watched the Duke’s face, which did not change, and then he watched the man who came in.

Black from the hood to the boots, and quiet with it — the quiet of a man who has spent his life walking into rooms he was not invited into and has learned to do it politely. He stopped two steps inside, shut the door behind him with two fingers, and pulled the cloth down off his face.

Ambrose had seen him once before, at Thornhallow, for the length of one introduction. One of the Duke’s captains. Voss.

Voss took in the room. The chair, and the Chancellor in it. The cup. The dish. The paper on the table with the name on it that the house would not touch. He took it in twice, and whatever he had expected to find upstairs at the Primrose this close to midnight, it had not been the Chancellor of the Realm in his Duke’s private room, wearing a coat that did not fit him.

He did not say so. A man who walks in on that and reports his business anyway, and does not ask, has not failed to notice anything. He has decided the question belongs to somebody else.

“The swap is made,” Voss said. Then, after it: “Your Grace.”

The sentence had a hole in the middle of it and Ambrose could not get at the edges. The swap is made. Of what. Between whom. With whose money, where the thing that had been swapped was sitting now, and who would be told if it went wrong.

He had sat in this chair for three hours. He had drunk nothing and eaten one grape, and the man across the room had let him do every one of those hours. Now an officer had come up the stairs and put a sentence in front of him with the middle taken out of it, and the Duke had not so much as opened his eyes.

That was when Ambrose stood up.

He put his cuffs straight and brushed down the front of the coat — borrowed, still a shoulder too wide, the cuff hanging half an inch past his knuckles — and crossed the room.

The Duke did not open his eyes. “Go down,” he said to the man in black. “Wait for me.”

Voss bowed, and went out, and shut the door, and on the way out he did not look at Ambrose, which was a small courtesy and Ambrose took it as one.

Then the door was shut, and the Duke opened his eyes.

He looked at Ambrose the way he had looked at him at the Mercy House: without heat, out of a face half in shadow, the whole weight of his attention coming down and settling, with no door anywhere in it.

“Go down with him,” he said. “He’ll see you home.”

There it was. Ambrose’s face went flat on its own, and he felt it happen, and could not stop it, and it had cost him seats at better tables than this one.

He was to go home.

He had spent this evening in this room being called darling in a voice pitched to carry through a screen. He had held a cup to that man’s mouth and poured, with his own hand shaking, and he had eaten a grape out of that man’s fingers in front of six men and the small man who ran the room and whatever had been standing behind the screen, because the other option had been worse, and the other option had been worse every time he measured it. That was everything he had to spend tonight. He had spent it. He was not going home before he found out what it had bought him.

And he could not say any of that, because the man had told him at the start of the evening to keep his mouth shut in this room and had not said otherwise since. That was a separate grievance, and he intended to take it up later, at length, with somebody.

So he shaped it with his mouth instead, small and exact, for one man only, and then he looked at him and did not look away.

Not going.

The Duke looked back.

“You’re not going,” he said.

It was not a question. It was what the man did: take the thing in front of him and say it out loud, flat, until it stopped being able to hide.

The fingers hanging at Ambrose’s side twitched once, without his leave. He could not have said what it was about. He put them still against his thigh and left them there.

The room had gone as quiet as it ever got. The music still came up through the boards, and the street still went on outside, and there were only the two of them in it now, and nothing in the room that either of them needed.

The Duke stood with his back to the frame and his face out of the light. From where Ambrose stood he was mostly shadow with an edge on it — the line of a jaw, the line of a shoulder, the outline of a man who had held a small room with an enemy in it for three hours and never once shifted his feet. Handsome, in the way that has never done anybody any good.

The candle leaned over and stood up again.

And the Duke’s hand was on his throat.

It was warm. That was the first thing, and he resented that it was the first thing, but there it was: a warm hand closing, with a whole man’s weight behind it and no hurry anywhere in it, the pressure coming on the way weather comes on, with no single moment in it where it turned into too much.

Ambrose did not move.

He had one rule for hands at his throat, arrived at early and never revised. Give the man nothing. No sound, no step back, no hand coming up to the wrist. He had kept it in worse rooms than this one.

He could feel his own pulse going up against the fingers. One. One. One. His pulse was up. That was the hand, and he put it down to the hand, and did not go back to it.

The fingers tightened a degree. And the man smiled — a thorough piece of work, that smile, fitted carefully to the occasion, and reaching nothing under it.

“Chancellor,” he said. “I gave you a chance.”

He was close enough now that there was nothing else to see. Not the room. Not the door. Not the chair he had stood up out of, not the paper on the table, not the bottle that had come up the stairs in place of an answer. All of that was somewhere behind a shoulder. What was in front of him was a jaw and a mouth and a pair of eyes doing something he could not read, and the weight of a hand.

Ambrose kept his own eyes open.

Not out of courage. He wanted to be exact with himself about that, later. There were two things he could do with his eyes and one of them was to shut them, and shutting them would have handed the man something, and he was not going to hand him anything.

The pressure came up another degree.

His throat closed on it. His chest began doing what a chest does when it has been told there will be no more coming, and the room went soft at the edges — not dark, soft, the way wet paper goes. His face hurt. Somewhere above his brows his forehead was drawing down without asking him.

Then the water came. It came the way it comes when a man cannot get air, which has nothing to do with crying and never has. It stood in his eyes and did not fall.

The mole under his eye would be pink by now. It always went pink when his eyes reddened; he had been told so, by people who thought it worth remarking on, and he knew the exact color it went, and he hated knowing, and he did not blink.

The Duke’s eyes went down to it and stayed.

And that was when Ambrose learned the one useful thing he was going to learn all night, and learned it without wanting to. Whatever the man had come up here to do, this had not been on the list.

“Ink and no iron,” the Duke said. “That’s a College man.”

He let go.

Ambrose bent over and coughed.

The cough came up out of him hard and filled the small room: a ragged, entirely audible thing, the first sound he had made in hours, and the sound he had been told not to make. He put a hand up to his throat and coughed again, and his eyes were streaming and his face was hot, and there was a mark coming up under his fingers the shape of four of them, which he could feel and did not need to see.

He would not be forgetting that one.

And there was the other thing, which he had seen from very close and would not be able to unsee.

It had not been a decision.

The hand had come off his throat before the man it belonged to had finished making up his mind. There had been nothing in the room to do it — no sound on the stairs, no name spoken, no reason either of them could have put into a document. Something in the man had done it on its own, and then he had covered it as fast as he could with the first ugly thing that came into reach.

Ambrose did not expect to enjoy having it.

The Duke reached for him.

A hand out for his wrist, plainly meaning to set him upright — and Ambrose, who had spent three hours being moved in directions he had not chosen, went the other way, put his foot down wrong, and went over backward.

An arm came around his waist.

And a knuckle came up under his jaw.

It was quick and it was precise and it hurt in a place he had no name for, a bright, clean hurt the size of a coin, and then his voice was not there.

He tried it once, out of stubbornness, the way a man tries a door he already knows is locked.

Nothing.

The second time tonight, and more thorough than the first. The first had been an instruction, and an instruction is a thing a man can disobey. This one had been done to him with a hand, and it did not require anything from him at all.

He brought his own hand down hard and knocked the arm off his waist.

He could not speak. So he did the other thing, which he had been doing all night and was going to be doing for a while yet. He looked at the man. Straight on, both eyes open, and gave him nothing out of them.

The Duke took it the way he took everything, standing still. And then he said the thing he had said once already in this room.

“I told you,” he said. “I don’t like hearing your voice.”

There it was again. That excuse, delivered flat, as though it were doing work. His voice. Out of everything in this room a man could object to, his voice.

If his voice were poison, he would be the first man to feed it to the Duke of the North Marches. He would have done it before supper.

The Duke did not step back. Neither did he.

The music came up through the boards. Out in the street the carriages went on coming and going, and somewhere down there a man laughed at something, and none of it had anything to do with anybody in this room.

He had not been sent home. The order was where it had been left, and neither of them had touched it.

Ambrose stayed where he was. His throat hurt, and his voice was down a well somewhere and would come back when it came back, and the night was most of the way spent.

The Duke looked at him for a while.

He did not say it again.

Ambrose did not go.