Chapter 5: We'll Never Be Apart Again

We’ll Never Be Apart Again

She counted her steps instead of her breaths. Counting breaths made a person aware of breathing, and she had other work tonight.

Ahead of her the number waited, where it had been waiting since the door shut. There was exactly one red thing in the world, and it was a number, and it was his, and the rest of him was in the dark, where she was not allowed to look.

The blood was already in the air. It had been in the air before she climbed in and it would be in the air after she got out, and there was nothing to do about that but breathe.

Fine. Where was the girl.

She had one. She had had her for years. She kept her folded up like a good dress, and she took her out now and shook her down and put her on, and while she was doing it she kept walking, because hesitation was a thing he could hear, and the girl she was putting on did not hesitate.

There. The eyes worried. The mouth doing what a mouth does when its owner has decided not to cry in front of anybody.

“Darling,” she said. “Are you hurt?”

She said it softly, pitched the way you pitch it for a small child with a scraped knee who has to sit still while you look at it. That lie was free, and she took it. He liked being asked about himself by somebody who was worried.

She came in close enough to be in range and reached down, fingers spread, not touching anything yet.

She could see the number clearly now and not one inch of what it was sitting on. In here the rules were simple: he was in the dark with her, and the only part of him she was allowed to look at was a figure in red.

Her fingers landed on cloth at his shoulder.

He was sitting low at the center of the carriage — she could tell from the height of the shoulder under her hand and the way the cloth hung off it. Under the cloth he was thin, and much warmer than a room should be, and every muscle under her palm was locked.

She put a point into him.

It cost what it always cost. The band tightened over her temples, one notch. For one blink there were two red lights in the dark instead of one, half an inch apart, and then there was one. She held her face steady through the whole of it, which was the part nobody ever saw and the part she was proudest of.

Under her hand, his breathing changed.

It came out of him longer. Slower. The way a person breathes when you take your thumb off the bruise.

The branch moved.

She had not seen it before that. Her eyes handed it over the way they hand over things you have been looking at for a while: a length of bare wood in his fist, knuckled and pale, no thicker than her thumb, no leaves on it, no bark left worth the name.

It had been standing nearly straight up out of his hand. Now it tilted away, off toward the boards of the carriage, and the tip of it had been at the height of her throat, and then it was down at the floor.

She was not going to swear it had been aimed at her. She was going to swear that her hand had landed on him, and that the tip of it had been up where her pulse was, and that one of those two things had come first.

She kept her hand exactly where it was.

“It isn’t mine,” he said.

His voice came out of the dark at the height of her knees: dry, sanded down, not quite finished being a man’s. There was something bright and loose in it, and she had heard that brightness before. It was the sound of a boy coming to show you something he had caught, holding it cupped in both hands, walking too fast, and you could tell from the shape of his hands that it was not going to be fine when he opened them.

“It’s the man who came for me,” he said. “I killed him.” A pause, to let her have it. “Do you want to see him?”

He answered himself before she could get a face together.

“No. Never mind.” Something folded up in his voice and went somewhere else. “You don’t like blood. And it isn’t cleaned off in here yet. I put the lamp out.”

Which meant he had been sitting in a dead man’s blood, in a sealed box, in the dark, since whenever he had done it. She did not follow that thought any further than it went on its own.

She had a job, and the job was her eyes filling.

She looked at the red thing on his face, which was all of him she could see — faint, low, the color of a coal under a layer of ash.

48

She had put a point into him a minute ago. She had felt it go and she had paid for it, and this was the return.

He had been moved up inside his house, and moved up meant more doors open and his pick of them, and she had allowed herself — privately, in the place where she kept her stupid hopes — to believe that somewhere in the middle of all that, a person with a title would look at him with both eyes open for five minutes.

Nobody had. Nobody ever did. He was sitting in a closed box in the dark with a branch in his fist, and forty-eight was his good mood. How does a promotion make a man worse?

“Sel,” he said.

Her hand was still on his shoulder. She made it move, a small stroke, the kind of touching you do to somebody you are about to take care of.

“I’ve talked to my teacher,” he said. “That’s what this trip is. I came down the mountain to bring you home. We’re going to be married.”

His arm went around her waist.

She was not ready for it and he was faster than he looked, and the floor went out from under her, and then she was across his lap with her shoulder jammed into his chest and both arms closed around her, hard, the whole length of the branch pressing along her back like a slat out of a bed frame.

“We won’t ever be apart again,” he said, into her hair.

He sounded happy. He sounded, for one second, like a person. She had learned a long time ago which of his moods were the expensive ones.

Desmond Crowe had told his teacher he was getting married, and apparently nobody had thought to ask the bride.

She had exactly one door out of this world.

She had spent years finding it. It was thin and it was ugly and it had a bad name attached and not one piece of paper behind it, and it was a door, and she had been planning to walk through it, and she was not going to be married instead.

She took stock, because taking stock was the only work available in a dark box with no windows. Her body — he had that. Her face — he had that, for as long as she was in this carriage. One rumor about a house nobody could tell her anything about, and the word of a boy on a mountain road who had stopped in the middle of a sentence, and nothing else she could point at.

The story he told himself was not complicated. She had learned it the way you learn a language you are going to need later. He had been here before. He had been better at it the first time. This world would not allow a second one of him to rise the same way, so it had planted knives all around him, and every kind face he had ever been shown was one of the knives, held so that you only saw the handle.

She had gotten that out of him in pieces, in the first months, while he was still — generously — talking to her. She had kept every word. A man’s whole map of the world is the most useful thing he can hand you, and he had handed her his without noticing, because it had never once occurred to him that she might read it.

So she used it.

“But darling,” she said, and she put the hesitation in on purpose and left it sitting in the middle of the sentence, where he could watch her decide to be honest with him. “You told me there are people in your house who want you dead.”

His hand stopped moving on her back.

“And I’m — you’ve seen how mine came back. An empty line.” She said that into his collar, where it was easier. “If somebody comes for you while I’m standing next to you, then I am one more thing you would have to carry.”

“No,” he said, and there was a small bright pleasure in it, the pleasure of a man who has already handled a problem and now gets to say so out loud.

“I went first. I killed those two.”

She made sure her hand did not change, and she made sure her breathing did not change, because both of those were his to read.

“Once I’m past—“

He stopped.

She knew which two.

He had told her about them once, in the middle of a long afternoon of telling her how well his house treated him: two people who had come into the house the same season he did, under the same teacher, who brought him food when he was sick and walked him back to his room when his hands started shaking and sat with him so that he would not have to be by himself.

He had told her all of that, and then he had told her what it meant.

They wanted the thing he was. It was his whole theory of other people, and it was not the kind of theory a man arrives at and can be talked out of. It was load-bearing. Take it out and there was no him underneath it.

She did not know whether he had killed anybody. He said things like that, and some of them turned out to be true.

There was a word for what was wrong with him. She had had the word for years, and it had never once been worth saying out loud, because there was nobody in this world to say it to. Where she came from, a boy like that got a name and a room and people trained to sit with him. Here, a boy like that got a house that bowed when he walked past, and every door he tried, and a whole room of people agreeing that a man who could do what he could do was right about the rest of it as well.

Nobody had ever made him be anything else. That was the part she could not get past. His family had given him the best of what they had, and his house had opened every door and let him choose, and in his entire life not one person had looked at him and said no.

She was the exception. She knew why. There was nothing nice about why.

She was the only person alive who could put a point into him and make one minute on the inside of his own head into somewhere he could stand. That was the arrangement. He kept her near; she made him tolerable to himself in small doses; and the one the arrangement ate was her.

If she had come into this world without it, she was fairly sure he would have finished it in the first ten minutes, in a courtyard, in the snow, before he ever learned her name.

She had one winter she tried not to spend time in. It came back anyway.

Snow — a courtyard swept in the middle and left alone at the edges. A child standing in the swept part, straight up, arms at his sides, in clothes that would have been good clothes if they had been clean. Blood on his face: a few points of it, one at the corner of the mouth, none of it running.

On the ground behind him, the shapes. She had never gotten a count she trusted out of that memory. Three, or four. The snow around them had been moved.

In his fist, held low, a branch. Bare. Long, knuckled, the kind of thing the wind takes off a flowering tree in a cold month and leaves in a yard for somebody to pick up.

She had come across that courtyard because she heard screaming and ran toward it, which at the time she had believed was information about her character. He had lifted his chin to look up at her, because she was taller and he was small.

“Are you going to kill me too?”

Which she had heard, then, as a child asking her to save him from the people who had come to hurt him.

She said no. She said it with her whole chest. She reached for him, and while her hand was out she started putting points into him, one, two, three, standing in the snow, because the number on him was so bad she could not hold it in her head. She had been deciding where to take him. She had been deciding what to tell the grown-ups. She had, in the middle of all of it, felt like a good person.

She could find the picture whenever she wanted, and she had found it plenty of times. The child with his chin up, the branch level in his fist, the tip of it resting in the hollow under her jaw, where the pulse is, an inch under the surface. He had not moved it there while she talked. It had been sitting there the whole time — through the no, and the reaching, and the points, and her deciding, out loud, that he was a victim.

He had not done it. It was the only fact she had, and there was no second fact underneath it. He had made some decision in the middle of that minute, and she had been living inside the results of it for years, and she had never learned the terms.

Now she had the picture and the picture had a caption, and the caption was: that was not a branch. That was the last half-second before something got done. He had been holding it against her throat, the way he had been holding it when she climbed into this carriage.

And now he was grown, and promoted, and good at it. And she was on his lap.

All she had to do was never make a mistake. That was what kept her awake in the good months. Every night he held her was a night she had gotten away with it. You could live beside a man like that a long while — longer than people thought. Nobody lived beside him forever. Somewhere out there was a person, or a thing, that was going to catch up with Desmond Crowe; she was sure of it, the way she was sure of most things she had never been able to prove. She just did not intend to be standing next to him, in the front row, when it did.

His heat went out.

It came off him the way cold comes off stone: nothing, nothing, and then all of it at once. She felt it through the cloth of his sleeve and then everywhere their skin touched, and his arms came in a notch tighter and stayed there.

She had learned that cold a long time ago, and it had never once been wrong. It meant something was moving around behind his eyes that she was not allowed to see.

Her mouth was already open.

There was a sentence in it. She had not built it on purpose; it had built itself, in the last half-minute, while the cold came off him — the reasonable, wounded refusal, the one with a door in it, the one she could say in the worried-girl voice and walk out of with her face intact.

She made a smile instead. In the right order, the way he liked it: the round eyes first, then the lift at the corners, then the small helpless wobble at the end that made him want to fix something for her.

“Of course I’ll come home with you,” she said. “Of course I will, darling.”

Then she put her face down into his collar and pulled her knees up and made herself small, and after a moment his arms came back around her, heavier than before, and the cold went out of him the way it had come.

The carriage had been moving the whole time. She had heard the wheels on the wet road a while back and put the sound away without looking at it, because the other option was to spend the ride thinking about where she was going.

Nobody had carried her up the steps of this carriage. She had walked up them by herself.

The number on his face had not moved.

48

She checked it again, from closer, with her cheek against his jaw and both eyes open in the dark, because he could not see where her eyes were pointed and because there was nothing else in the carriage to look at. One point, paid in full. The number sitting exactly where she had left it.

She filed it. She had one other address in the world, and it was not an address. Starwatch. A house on the far side of the register with a story attached to it that nobody had ever been able to finish, and a boy on a mountain road who had stopped himself halfway through telling her what it was.

It came to no proof, no way in, and nobody she knew how to find.

His hand moved on her back, slow and pleased, the way a hand moves on a dog.

She adjusted to it without deciding to, and lay still under it in the dark, and did not close her eyes.

Under the floor, the wheels rolled on.