Chapter 10: The Line Across the Palm

Dain Corrow puts the village behind him before there is any light in the sky.

Two men follow him out. Both are old enough to have known his father as a young man, both Bedrock, and both have spent the whole trip giving him advice he does not take. They come out behind him now into the grey, and neither of them says anything, because they have learned that much.

The village has nothing in it. That is the fourth one this week. The whole trip has been a month of nothing with two exceptions, and both of them are in the satchel on his hip.

The first is a stone. He found it in a cave up the ridge two weeks ago: grey, faceted, no bigger than his thumb, and heavy the way a thing is heavy when it is more than it looks. He put it in the satchel thinking it was a ley shard gone dark. Then he had the two of them lay their tools on it and they got nothing back. No scratch, no spark, not the smallest shiver. Two Bedrock between them, and neither could tell him what it was or what it might be worth, and he has carried it ever since with the particular pleasure of owning something nobody else can put a name to.

The second is better. Last night, in a village three ridges back, he saw a teapot.

It sat on a shelf behind a very old man. Brown along the bottom from a hundred years of tea, cracked at the spout, and Corrow looked at it once and stopped walking.

The old man would not sell it. The teapot is in the satchel anyway. Corrow does not ask how and does not remember who.

He is Dain Corrow. He is Kindling ninth degree, which surprises everyone at home but him, and he would be Bedrock already if the Godfall Reach were not opening this year and his father had not told him to hold. His father runs the Emberglass. This whole country — the ridges, the villages, the mill towns, the roads between them — lies a hundred miles from the Emberglass’s front step, and every soul on it knows that.

Nobody here is going to touch him. It would be like touching weather.

“We should turn for home,” one of them says.

“We should,” says Corrow.

That is the whole conversation. He does not even have to win it.

And then there is a voice.

A boy comes up out of the tree line about forty paces off, moving like he thinks he is quiet. He looks around once, twice, and then ducks behind the boulders at the edge of the road and pulls somebody else in after him.

Corrow stops.

“—listen. Listen. I’m not making it up. I went up over the ridge last night, north of the spring, and there’s a hole in the rock up there, a big one, and it’s lit. All the way in, it’s lit. Colors going around inside it like oil on water, seven of them, and when you get close there’s the smell of it, like the air after a storm, and it’s warm. The good kind of warm. It goes straight into you.” A pause, fast breathing. “I stood there half the night. I’m not lying to you.”

“You’re sure.”

“I’m sure. Look at me.”

Corrow looks. A farmhand, or whatever it is they grow up here. Round-faced, thick in the shoulders, hands too big for him, and his voice is doing the thing a voice does when somebody is trying to sell something and has never sold anything before. Corrow would bet money the boy’s hands are shaking.

“Boss,” the boy says, “I know what you are. I’ve seen your sort on the road with the badges on. I’m not one of you and I’m never going to be, and there’s no sense in me lying about a hole in a hill when I could just as easy lie about a hole in a hill somewhere closer. That thing in there is no good to me. I can’t carry it and I can’t spend it. You go in, you take what’s yours, and you leave me a little something. That’s the whole of it.”

A silence. Then:

“Show me the way.”

The second voice is flat and unhurried, and it belongs to somebody who has never in his life been in a rush to be convinced. Corrow edges one step sideways until he can see through the gap in the rocks, and gets a look at him.

One shoulder. The left sleeve hangs empty and pinned, and the rest of him does not look like the arm ever mattered to him much. Tall, thin, weathered; a man in his forties dressed like he stopped caring where the patches fell. Kindling seventh degree, Corrow would guess, or near it. Nothing. A cripple and a boy, on a road, at dawn.

One of the Bedrock men says, low: “Corrow.”

“I know.”

“A set. This has the smell of one.”

“I heard him the first time.”

“He’s been walking this ridge all night. Nobody walks a ridge all night for a hole in a hill.”

“You,” Corrow says, and turns his head just enough to let the man feel it, “have been old since I met you.”

The other one is looking at the boulders, and his eyes have gone still in a way Corrow does not like, but Corrow does not ask him what is wrong, because asking would make it real.

“I have seen that one somewhere,” the second man says. “The round one. I can’t put it down.”

“You have seen every round-faced sheep in this country. There are four hundred of them and they all look like that.”

“Maybe.”

“Then it is maybe we go and have a look at this hole in a hill, and maybe on the way you both stop talking to me about it.” Corrow grins. It is a good morning. He can feel it in his hands. “Come on.”

They follow.

They follow for a mile and a half, and the road bends north into scrub, and the one-armed man stops dead and turns around.

“I know you’re back there,” he calls. “Come out.”

Corrow comes out from behind the tree with his hands open where they can see them, because it is funny.

“Cripple,” he says. “Was that meant for me?”

The boy goes the color of wet paper. He backs up two steps, gets his heels in the road, almost sits down anyway, and his hands come up before he has decided what to do with them.

The one-armed man does not run. He puts himself between Corrow and the boy without making a show of it, and says, “You have no business with us. We’ve given you no offense.”

“Ah,” says Corrow, and lets it sit there.

One of the Bedrock men steps forward and lets it out.

It comes off him like heat off a forge door, and Corrow watches it land. The boy folds immediately — down on the ground with one hand on his chest, breathing like he has run up a hill, and his eyes wet. The cripple stays up. Teeth, shoulders, both feet planted, the whole of him braced against a weight that is not going to stop, and he stays up the entire way through it.

That is more than Corrow expected, and he files it away, and it changes nothing.

“There’s something in a cave up the ridge,” he says. He is using his good voice now, the low patient one, the one that has gotten him out of everything he has ever been in. “We’re going to go and see it. You’re going to walk us to the door and then walk away. Nobody gets hurt.”

“And then.”

“And then you walk away.” Corrow smiles and crouches down a little, to the boy’s eye level, and it costs him nothing. “I said it, so it’s true. You tell me where the hole is and I’ll let you both go.”

The boy is crying. His hand comes off the ground and presses flat against his chest, one second, the twitch of somebody putting a hand over a pocket. Then it is on the ground again and he is hunched over it, breathing, and nobody is looking at his hands.

The boy’s palm stays flat on the dirt, and whatever he is holding does not get set down. It goes into the road the way water goes into sand, out of sight before the hand has finished landing, and something under there gives one thin cold flicker and is gone.

One of the Bedrock men stops mid-step.

Corrow does not see him stop, because Corrow is watching the boy, and there is nothing in the boy to see. Something has come up into the old man out of the ground and gone again, quick, the way a floor settles under you in the night. He opens his mouth.

“Don’t—“

“Now,” says the boy, and it is not the boy’s voice at all.

The ground lights up.

A ring of it, bright as a lamp through cloth, running out from where his palm is flat, and above the ring the air opens into marks — long lines and hooked lines and lines that turn back on themselves, drawn in light, standing in the air where nobody put them. All three of them know in that first quarter second exactly what has happened, because all three of them have reached for their own power and found it is not there.

Half a breath.

That is what the ring buys them. What Ren’s master called a stillness array is a full figure in the primer, strong enough to sit a great cultivator down on the ground and keep him there; what Ren has is one corner cut off it, a ring and an axle and three lines that hook back on themselves, and for half a breath it holds, and then it is finished, and whatever they have not done by then they are not going to do.

Ren is already off the ground.

He goes left because Bran goes right, and they did not plan that part out loud and they do not need to. The man on the left has his mouth open on a word he is never going to finish. Ren comes in low and brings both fists up together into the underside of his jaw, and the man’s head goes back and up and then is not a head anymore, and something hot sprays across Ren’s arm.

To his right there is a sound like a hatchet going into a melon, and Ren does not look. He does not need to look. Bran had his end of it, and Bran had all morning to make sure.

The third one.

The heir has his hand at his waist and there is a shield in the air in front of him — not in his hand, in the air, a shimmer the shape of a plate, made out of nothing in the time it takes to reach for it. He is the fastest thing Ren has ever seen up close.

Bran comes in and the hatchet comes down and the shield spits it back.

The noise is enormous. Bran leaves his feet, all of him, arms and legs and hatchet, and he hits the road eight feet back and rolls and stops against the verge, and there is blood coming up out of him before he has finished rolling, a lot of it, dark red, running out under his ribs.

The heir’s other hand comes off his belt with a sword in it.

Ren does not think about the primer and he does not think about half a breath and he does not think about the fact that he is a boy from a mill town who has never once in his life won a fight against anybody who had any business being in one. There is a sword coming at his face, and he has two hands, and one of them is better than the other.

He puts the left one out.

Not a block. Not a dodge. He opens his hand and closes it on the blade.

It hurts like a struck thumb all the way up his arm. The edge goes into his palm and keeps going, and he feels the sword pushing to finish what it started, the whole weight of it driving down the middle of his hand. It comes an inch. About an inch, and it gets through, and then it does not go any further, because he will not let it.

Blood comes out between his fingers, slow, and runs down his wrist.

His right hand is already moving. He does not aim it and he does not think about it. It is just there at the top of the arc and then it is on the shield, and the shield makes a sound like a bell thrown down a well.

The heir’s arm folds under it. He goes back half a step, and his eyes change, because he felt that.

Ren’s foot comes up under the shield and finds the low middle, the well under the belt where everything a man is gets drawn from, and puts his heel through it.

The heir goes down.

And something goes out of him. Nobody sees it go and both of them know it went. He is a young man in good clothes on his knees in a road now, with a hand on his stomach and his mouth open, and that is all he is.

The sword is on the ground.

Behind them the light is gone. Where the ring ran there is a scorch in the road, a circle with broken lines running off it, and the dirt inside it is already cooling.

Ren looks at his own left hand.

The cut is closing.

He watches it happen. He cannot not watch it. The skin comes in from both sides of the wound like wax running uphill, and the blood still on his palm is the wrong color — thin, and blue, a wrong shade of blue where it pools in the crease. There are six years behind that and he does not know what any of it means, and this is not the morning to work it out.

He turns the hand over and looks at it.
“It bleeds,” he says, out loud, to nobody. “So the body’s not so much after all.”

He looks at the heir.

The heir gets his wind back before Ren reaches him.

“Don’t.” His hands come up. “Don’t, don’t, don’t — we have nothing between us. Nothing. You have walked up and taken everything I ever had, and look at me, look at what you’ve done to me. Isn’t that enough? Is that not enough?”

“It’s not about you,” Ren says.

He does not say it loud and he does not say it like a man making a threat. It comes out the way it comes out, and the heir hears it, and something in his face starts doing arithmetic.

“Last night,” Ren says. “The house. The old man in it.”

The heir nods.

It is not even a lie. It is what his head does when somebody says something true at him. Then he hears himself, and his head goes the other way, hard, twice, and his voice climbs an octave.

“That was not me. I was not there. That was—“ He jerks his chin at the two men on the road, both of them finished, and stops. “Them. They did it. I never put a hand on him. Not one hand. I told them to leave it. I told them we were going home—“

“Did you.”

“I did. You can ask them, you can—“ He stops again. He is a fast young man and he has just worked out how that one lands, and his mouth stays open a second too long.

Ren does not answer him and does not move, and the heir finds the reason to be afraid in that.

The heir finds a different voice.

It takes him about three seconds, the same three seconds in which any other man would have been begging. Low, reasonable, wounded in the right proportion, and so smooth that Ren can hear the seams moving under it.

“All right,” he says. “All right. Then listen. I am done. You have taken it. There is nothing left in me that could hurt anything, and I have to live in that now. That is what I am asking you to leave me. People say you get one. One bad thing, and the rest of your life to be somebody else. Give me that. That’s all I’m asking for. You’ll want yours someday — you’ll want somebody standing over you with his hand already raised, and you’ll want him to stop.”

Ren’s fist comes loose.

He does not tell it to. It has been closed since before the array lit, and now it is not, and his eyes come down.

Then Bran.

Ren does not see the swing. He sees the hatchet at the top of its arc and then he sees it in the back of the heir’s head, one stroke, from the side, and Bran’s whole body is behind it even though Bran’s whole body is falling apart.

The heir does not fall.

He is on his knees with a hatchet in his skull and he does not fall, and he turns his head slow, the way somebody turns to look at a person across a room, and he is smiling. All the way up into his eyes.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says.

There is blood in his teeth.

“It doesn’t matter what you do to me. You’ll never be clear of it. I’ll come back for this myself, and I’ll take it out of the both of you, and there is nowhere you can stand that I won’t find you.”

Then his head comes apart.

Not a wound. Apart, all at once, from the top, and then there is a body in the road and there is not anything else, and neither of them is standing anywhere near it.

For a while neither of them says anything.

Bran sits down at the edge of the road, slow, one arm folded across himself. The cut is under his ribs and it is bad. His coat is black to the elbow with his own blood and he is holding the whole side closed with his hand and not looking at it, the way he looks at anything except the thing that is actually wrong.

“You hesitated,” he says.

It is not an accusation. Ren checks. It is not.

“Yeah,” Ren says.

“Not the killing.” Bran tips his good hand an inch, then opens it all the way out, letting go of something small that is not there. “The talking. Soon as he started, you went like that.”

“I know.”

“You know what that costs when I’m the one on the ground?”

“Yeah.”

“’Cause I am the one on the ground right now.” He says it without heat. “That’s what I’m paying. That’s my end. Not a lecture. Just so you know what it looks like from here.”

Ren opens his mouth. He does not have anything to put in it.

“There was a man in that house,” he says finally. “Eighty-one years old. He didn’t want to sell a teapot.”

“I know.”

“That’s all.”

“Yeah,” Bran says. “I know.”

He gets one-handed at his own sleeve and gets it up over the wound, or mostly up, and he does not ask for help, and Ren does not offer, because offering would mean it was worse than it was.

“The shards,” Bran says.

“Gone.”

“How many.”

“Three.”

Bran grunts. Three flawless into the dirt of a road nobody is going to name, and Ren counted them this morning and knows to the coin what they were worth, and he is not going to add it up now. Half a breath. That is what he bought, and the half a breath is the only reason Bran is sitting up instead of lying down.

“Nothing off them,” Bran says.

“Yeah.”

“Somebody’s going to come looking. Two Bedrock and a family’s son.”

“Then they’ll come looking.”

Bran looks at him a second longer than he needs to, and then looks away, and does not say the thing he was going to say.

“Get up,” Ren says. “It’s a long way.”

Bran gets up. It takes him three tries and he lets the last one hurt without making a sound about it, and then he is up, and he has the hatchet back in his hand.

The sun is over the ridge. The road east is flat and pale and there is nothing on it.

They walk.

Bran looks back once, about a quarter mile on, quick, over his shoulder — the way you look back at a dog that has gone quiet behind you on the road. He does not say anything about it and Ren does not ask.

Ren’s left hand has closed itself again without being told to. The line across the palm is almost gone. By tomorrow it will not be there at all.

He hears it anyway. All the way down the road, with the sun coming up, he hears it.