Chapter 7: One Blow

The satchel is by the door before the sun is.

Bandages rolled flat the night before. A jar of the green poultice with the lid waxed down. A bone spoon out of the kitchen, borrowed a year ago and never brought back. A remedy book off a cart at the spring fair, two hares for it — a third of it wrong, every wrong page marked in the margins in his own hand.

Down the hill in the mill town there is a girl with a leg that has been going bad for eleven days. There is a man by the waterwheel who coughs in a way he does not want discussed. There is an old woman who wants to talk to him about her son, and that one he has been walking past for a month, because there is nothing to be done and she does not want to hear it.

Forty minutes down. An hour back up, which is the part nobody counts.

Under his ribs the iron sits where it has sat for six years. It went quiet in the middle of the night and it has done nothing since, and he has a leg to look at, so he is not going to make a morning of it.

He has the strap over his shoulder and his hand on the latch when the knock comes.

“Rennie. Rennie—“

He opens it.

Elinor Rusk is standing in the wet grass with her fist still up and a leaf in her hair. She has been running. She has been crying. She is doing neither of those things now.

“The master,” she says. “He’s hurt. They carried him in.”

He is past her before the last word is out, and she has to turn and come after him up the narrow part of the path, where the stones are slick and the yews hang low enough to take a man’s hat off.

“Who did it?” he says.

“Nobody’s said.”

“How long has he been up there?”

“Since before the second bell.”

“What color was the blood?”

“What?”

“His blood. What color was it?”

Her hand lands on his sleeve and stops them both for half a step. Her face, frightened a moment ago, is angry now.

“Is that what you want to ask me?” she says. “That’s the thing you want to know?”

“Yes.”

“It was on the floor,” she says. “It’s still on the floor. Go and look at it yourself.”

He goes.

There are eight of them standing in the yard outside the master’s house, and not one of them is looking at any of the others, and as Ren comes up the last of the path the door opens.

Lord Warden Corvin Ashe comes out and stands on the step.

“Nothing I can do will hold him,” he says. “This is his to survive.”

“Lord Warden.”

Ren nods and steps aside, except that his hand is already flat on the door before the nod has finished, and the two things don’t go together, and Ashe sees it.

“Ren—“

He stops. He stands there a beat longer than the beat needs, and then he goes down the steps, and the yard opens for him and closes behind him, and he doesn’t say the rest of it.

Ren doesn’t ask.

It smells of the poultice first — wet bark and vinegar — and then under that, blood.

There is a bowl on the boards with a rag in it. There is more on the floor by the cot, spread thin and long where somebody came down on a palm and stayed there.

Master Aldric Vane is on his back with his hands flat on the blanket, which is not how he sleeps.

Bran Coyle is on his knees at the foot of the cot, his hand on the hatchet at his belt. His knuckles are white on the haft and his face is doing nothing at all.

The master’s face is gray. It is the gray a man goes when he has bled most of the way out, except that it isn’t only gray. There is something under it, a fine gold, the way light comes through a leaf.

His mouth has gone yellow at the lip and purple behind it.

Ren stands at the side of the cot and looks at all of it, and does not say any of it out loud yet.

Then the master opens his eyes.

“Ah,” he says. “You came.”

“All three of us,” Elle says.

“I can see that. You’re breathing on my face.” He takes a moment over it. “Good. That’s good.”

“Don’t talk. They said you were not to talk.”

“There’s nobody left in this valley who can make me do anything,” the master says. “That’s what this is. That’s what I’ve been lying here working out.”

His mouth pulls up on one side, and it costs him.

“The rolls have me at third degree,” he says. “Nine years now. I sign them off myself every year, so it isn’t anybody’s mistake but mine.”

He gets a breath in.

“On those rolls the strongest man in this Order is Corvin Ashe. Nine years of the Order leaning on that. So I signed.”

Elle says, “What?”

“I’m fourth.”

The room does nothing with that.

“There’s one man in this Order who knows it, and he walked out of that door ten minutes ago, and now there are three more of you.” He stops to breathe, and the breathing is worse than the talking. “He put me on this hill. He told me to stay on it until it was finished. It was a good arrangement. It was mine.”

“Until what was finished?” Bran says.

“Until I was Ascendant.”

Ren’s eyes come off the blood on the floor and onto him.

“Then a while back I went out,” the master says. “You can’t get there from a chair. There’s something you have to see for yourself, and nobody can show it to you. So I went out to look at it.”

“And that’s where this happened,” Elle says.

“That’s where this happened.” He waits a moment. “Now there’s a thing I want said out loud in this room, so that all three of you hear it from me. I have some years in me yet. I am not going tonight and I am not going next week. Take those faces off.”

He works his hand down to his belt. It takes him three tries and Elle’s fingers are under his the whole way, and what comes up is a pouch the size of a fist.

He drops it on the blanket and the cot groans, and the room is brighter for having it in it. Every shard in the pouch is flawless, and flawless ones will do that with the shutters closed and the lamp turned down.

“Those were for the climb,” he says. “They’re no use to me.”

“Master—“

“Split them. There’s no sense leaving them in a box.”

Elle doesn’t touch it. Bran doesn’t touch it. Ren puts his hand on it and leaves it there.

“Lad.”

Ren looks up.

“The Order has owed you for years,” the master says. “I said so to the one man who could have done something about it. He didn’t do it, and I let him not do it.” A breath. “Leave it where it is.”

Ren hasn’t moved.

“Who did it?” he says.

The master looks at the beams over his head and doesn’t answer.

For a while the only thing in the room is the sound of him breathing.

“Who did it?” Ren says again.

“That’s a debt you can’t collect,” the master says. “Don’t go after it.”

Ren doesn’t argue with that. He stands where he is, and then he starts talking like a man reading off a list.

“There’s gold in your blood.”

Elle’s head comes up.

“It’s in the bowl. It’s on the boards where your hand went. It’s on that blanket.” He hasn’t looked away from the master’s face. “Your skin is white, and the white has gold under it, and your mouth has gone yellow at the lip and purple behind it.”

He waits.

“It’s in the Physick of the First Crown,” he says. “There’s a page in it for blood-work. What it does on the inside of a man, and what that looks like from the outside. This is what it looks like.”

“Rennie—“

“Only one house works blood that way. One.”

The master’s eyes come back to him.

“House Aurelis.”

For a moment nothing happens.

Then the master laughs — one sound, small, and it costs him more than a sound.

Elle is there before it is finished, with the rag, and he gets two fingers up to move her off and doesn’t have the breath to move her off properly, and she does what she wants anyway.

“Say the rest of it.”

“There isn’t a second house that can.”

“Say the rest of it.”

Ren doesn’t.

The master is looking at the ceiling.

“Cassius Aurelis,” he says.

Nobody says anything.

Elle has the rag in her hand and she isn’t doing anything with it. Bran’s hand is on the hatchet and it hasn’t moved.

“Twenty years old,” the master says. “Crucible, first degree.”

A breath.

“One blow.”

Ren says, “You’re fourth degree.”

“I’m fourth degree.”

“Then how are you on this cot?”

“I had a stick and a flat stone in my belt.” He gets the next part out in pieces. “I cut a trace into the dirt and I went through it and I don’t know how far. That’s the only reason I’m here, and I want it understood that it was luck.”

Elle says, “You’re telling me a boy — a boy half your—“

“I’m telling you he didn’t have to try.”

Ren says, “What was it for?”

The master closes his eyes.

It looks like he’s finished, and Elle’s hand goes to his shoulder, and then he says, without opening them:

“A young man in a small Order put his shoulder into a chariot and moved it a foot off its line. He’d been drinking. That’s the offense. That’s the whole of the offense there was.”

He breathes.

“The man in the seat got down.”

The bowl on the boards catches the light and goes still again.

“He took the first one apart slowly. Slowly, they say. I don’t know who they are.” A breath. “Then he rode to that man’s Order and took that apart too. Sworn members, every one of them, and the name with them. There’s nobody left to keep that name.”

Ren’s hand is flat on the pouch.

“Then he went to the family,” the master says. “Farmers. Thirteen of them. There wasn’t enough ley in that house to light a candle, not in any one of them, not in all of them together.”

A long breath.

“He used one hand.”

Ren’s hand closes on the pouch and stays closed.

“I was on the road below,” the master says. “I saw the end of it. And I opened my mouth.”

Elle says, “Master.”

“There’s a thing I used to think was obvious,” he says. “The ones who climb and the ones who stand in front of something used to be the same men. There was one word that did for both of them.” He stops. “I said something like that, standing in a road, with a boy sitting up on a chariot looking down at me. And he got down.”

“Master—“

“The part that’s any use to you is this. Don’t cross them. If one of them is on the road, be in a field. If one of them wants a thing of yours, it was never yours.” A breath. “They don’t pay for what they do. I’ve never known them to. I’ve never met a man who could say he’d seen it happen.”

“The Reach,” Bran says.

Elle turns on him. “Bran.”

He doesn’t look at her. “It opens.”

“It does,” the master says.

“Three months.”

“Three and some. It opens once in ten years, and this is the year.”

Bran’s hand is on the hatchet and he doesn’t move it. “Who goes?”

The master’s eyes come round to him and stay there, which is easier than moving his head.

“Ten go in. Three Orders open that door together. Us, Highgate, and Coldwell. Each of the three hands out two writs of passage. That’s six seats, given away before anybody sets foot in a yard.”

“Given to who?”

“Ours go to Frayne and to Selwyn. You knew that before you asked me.”

Bran says nothing.

“That leaves four,” the master says. “Four seats, and every Kindling in three Orders pulling at them.”

“Why Kindling?” Bran says. “Send a Bedrock man. One Bedrock man would walk it.”

“One Bedrock man would tear it open.”

He lies there and gets his breath back.

“It isn’t a room. It’s a piece of an old war nobody ever cleaned up, and it has never closed. Anything at Bedrock or above, worked inside it, pulls it wide.” A breath. “And what the opening takes, it keeps. It doesn’t kill you. It drops you out — no floor, no wall, nothing at your back — and it holds you there while your years run out. Which for a strong man is a long time.”

“That’s why it’s Kindling,” Ren says.

“That’s why it’s Kindling, and ten of them.” The master shifts his head an inch. “The door itself wants an Ascendant to open it. There isn’t one. Not in Highgate, not in Coldwell, not here. So it’ll be ten at Crucible, working it together, and that will have to do.”

He stops, and drinks air, and goes on.

“It stays open a month. A month, and you come out the way you went in. Go past the month and it doesn’t open for you. Not that year, not the next. Nobody has ever come out late.”

He stops, and it goes on long enough that Elle leans in to look at him, and then he goes on.

“Ten go in. Five come out, and we call that a good year.”

“Five,” Elle says.

“You’ll be down there with Highgate and with Coldwell, and you’ll be pleasant to them,” the master says. “They’ve been taking ground off us for years. A stone a season, a field a year, moved at night, and we say nothing, because saying something costs more than the field. They stopped being our enemies this year for one reason and it isn’t goodwill. Neither of them can open that door without us.” A breath. “So they’ll be friendly until it shuts. Watch them be friendly.”

Bran says, “And the four.”

“You and Elle will put in.” A breath. “You’ve as much right to a seat on that floor as anyone on this hill. Go and take one.”

“I’m not going,” Elle says.

The master’s eyes come round to her.

“You are.”

“I’ll stay here. I’ll look after you, and half the Order can have my—“

“You’ll go in.” He has to stop in the middle of it. “There’s a month in there that would make you stronger than anything on this hill can, and I know, because I went in and I came out of it better than I’ve been since. Don’t stand there and tell me what I want.”

Elle doesn’t say yes to that. She doesn’t say anything to it. Her jaw is set and she stays exactly where she is.

Then the master’s eyes come round again.

“And you,” he says. “You’d go if there was a way.”

“I know.”

“You can’t. You’ve never held a spark.” He stops for breath. “A thousand years of this Order and not one man could do Swordplay, and then you come up the hill at ten years old and you do it. And not a spark. Not one, not ever.”

Ren doesn’t say anything.

“I have never once known what to do with that,” the master says.

His hand moves on the blanket, an inch, and stops.

After a while it’s clear he’s asleep, and the room is the room again, and Elle lets go of a breath she’s been holding since the door.

Ren puts two fingers on the inside of the master’s wrist.

He stands there.

He counts.

Then he takes his fingers off and puts them back on, and counts again.

“What?” Elle says.

He doesn’t tell her. He lays the arm back down on the blanket the way it was, and picks the pouch up off the bed, and puts it inside his coat, and goes out.

The light has come up over the yews. There are five or six of them still in the yard doing nothing with their hands, and they get out of his way.

The trough is under the eaves. He works the handle and holds his hands under it, and the water comes off them pink, and then it doesn’t.

Elle comes out after him and stands at the corner of the house. Bran has come out behind her and is standing with his hand slack at his side.

“Rennie.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re going down to the town.”

“There’s a girl down there with a leg gone bad. It’s been eleven days.”

Elle looks at him.

“You’re going to go and look at a leg,” she says.

“Yeah.”

He turns the handle off and shakes his hands out.

“How many days until the Reach opens?”

“What?”

“The Reach. Until the door opens. How many days?”

She stares at him.

“Three months,” she says. “Ninety-something. Why?”

“Ninety-four.”

He wipes his hands down the front of his shirt and goes.

His own door is open the way he left it. He takes the satchel off the peg and puts it over his shoulder and goes on down, and the road to the mill town is wet the whole way, and he doesn’t look back at the hill.

At the corner of the master’s house, Bran Coyle takes the hatchet out of his belt and holds it, and doesn’t put it back.