Chapter 104: Thin Blood

[Day 5 of 40.]

They came to him in the afternoon, one at a time, as people come to a well.

Jory came first, with a strip of linen to bind up the crack in the fool’s mask. Then the two Merrow girls arrived, with nothing to give, and stood awkwardly in front of him not knowing what to say until he told them which ring had room. After them came the Corvane twin, who didn’t say anything at all. He sat down on the ice beside the fool and stayed there, probably just as he used to sit beside his brother.

By the time the light began to drain out of the sky, all of them were asking him things.

They wanted to know which way the wind would turn and whether the ship would move again. They asked whether it was safe to melt snow for water, whether you could eat it, and whether it was better to stand or sit. They asked in low, embarrassed voices, and they called him fool because they didn’t know what else to call him, but it didn’t sound anything like the word Haskel used.

’This is bad. This is what I didn’t want!’

A fool was nobody, and that had been the whole point. Nobody watched a fool, nobody remembered his face, and nobody ever asked where he came from. In a single morning he had turned himself into the most interesting person on a lake that was trying very hard to kill everyone on it.

The worst part was that he would have done it again.

[Familiar of Nothing: Hunger 52%.]

It had been somewhere in the forties when they first stepped onto the ice. He fed it every night, in small careful bites, and every morning it was a little hungrier than the night before, because each bite only showed it how much more was out there.

’Later! I’ll deal with you later.’

Ivo found him at dusk.

He didn’t sit on his heels this time. He sat down on the ice beside the fool, with his blue-grey hands folded in his lap, and at first he said nothing whatsoever.

"I don’t want to know what you are," he said at last.

"That’s very kind of you!"

"It isn’t kindness. If I knew, I’d have to decide what to do about it." He looked out at the ship, small and black against the last of the light, with no fire burning on its deck tonight. "Can you keep them alive?"

Aren didn’t answer right away.

"Some of them," he admitted.

"That’s more than I can do." Ivo reached inside his coat and drew out a folded square of oiled leather, cracked and stained, and held it out to him. "My map. It holds everything I learned eight years ago, as far as five hundred paces in: the cracks that breathe, the places where the ice runs thin, and where the soldiers stand closest together." He paused. "I’m not giving it to the fool. I’m giving it to whoever caught that fist."

Aren took it. It was still warm from Ivo’s coat.

"Why?"

"Because I’m thirty-one years old, and my hands are blue, and I came here to bring Sigrid out alive." Ivo got to his feet. "And because this morning, after eight years of nothing, every soldier in this lake turned around." He looked down at the ice between them. "They never once turned for me."

[Day 5 of 40. Night.]

[Sleepless Watch: Night 2/5.]

Kaela Voss put her bedroll down three paces from his ring and sat on it.

She didn’t walk the circle tonight; her sergeant did it for her. She sat cross-legged with her lance across her knees and her dark hair white with frost, and she watched him openly. She didn’t even pretend not to. She watched him as steadily as he had watched the ship the night before, all night long, hardly blinking.

Around the sixth wave, when the ring had settled into its counting and the jokes had finally run out, she spoke.

"Do you know what they called him in Kharn?"

He didn’t ask who she meant.

"The Blood Thief," Kaela went on. "He came into my mountain in a mask, on the night before my Blooding, and he went down to my pool and ate it. Everything my family had put into that water for me was gone in a single night, and afterward I stood in the water and it was as cold as a well." Her voice stayed level. "I was nine when my father first took me down there. I’d been waiting my whole life for that night."

He kept his eyes on the ship and his hands still.

"I’m sorry, Captain. That sounds terrible."

"Then he came back," she continued, as though he hadn’t spoken, "as a water boy. He carried my water up the stair every morning for two weeks, and once I even gave him a coin for being quick." Something moved at the corner of her mouth. "And in the mine, when the priest came for my blood, he saved it. He ate the stolen blood off the chain, and the mountain answered me. I’ve never understood why he did that."

The next wave came through under the ice. The ring flinched and held, Sigrid turned the worst of it aside, and the Familiar drank the rest. For one moment Aren felt it straining hungrily toward the woman three paces away, as though it remembered her.

’Not her, don’t you dare!’

Kaela held up her hands, palms out, in the faint grey light that rose off the ice. The rope burns from the ship had healed cleanly, and there wasn’t a trace of frostbite on them anywhere.

"On the third night I stood alone on the ice, and I should have lost these. I’ve seen men lose their hands to far less." She lowered them. "I didn’t, and in the morning there was a fool standing on the windward side of his ring, shaking so hard that his bell was ringing."

"Fools have very thin blood, Captain."

"You keep telling people that."

"It keeps being true."

She was quiet after that, long enough that he thought she had finished.

"I’m going to find out what you are, fool," she said at last. Her voice was calm and low, so that nobody else in the ring could hear it. "And if you’re what I think you are, I’m going to kill you for what you took from me, slowly, in front of my men."

She lay down on her bedroll with her back to him and pulled her furs up over her shoulder.

"And then," she added, so softly that he almost missed it, "I’m going to thank you. I haven’t decided in which order."

[Kaela Voss. Hostility: 100%.]

’Still a hundred! But that’s the strangest hundred percent I’ve ever seen.’

He stood on the windward side until dawn and didn’t look at her once, which turned out to be much harder than holding Haskel’s fist.

Far to the south, on the stone wall of Kharn, a girl in white couldn’t sleep either.

Vivienne Ashgrave sat on the parapet with a lantern beside her and a square of paper on her knee. It had come north with a smuggler for the price of a silver ring, and it had been folded and unfolded so many times that the creases had gone soft as cloth.

REN, of Aldermere. Water carrier. Wanted alive.

She studied the drawing. It was a very good one, and whoever had made it had clearly looked at that face from very close.

She had gone up the ridge on the morning after the battle, as she had known she would. She had followed Luna to a hollow in the rocks and found two flat sleeping places and no ashes, since nobody had lit a fire, and nobody there, and she had known then that he hadn’t died in the yard.

She hadn’t told her father, and she hadn’t told anyone else either.

At her feet, Luna lay with her chin on her paws, and she wasn’t looking at the camp or the Imperial wall or her mistress. She was looking north, as she had been looking north for weeks, and every so often she whined softly at something only she could hear.

Vivienne folded the paper and slipped it inside her coat, against her heart, where she kept the things she didn’t want her father to find.

"I know," she told the dog quietly. "Wherever he is, he’s cold."

[Day 6 of 40.]

The count came at dawn. It was twenty-one, and everyone answered.

Up on the ship, nobody had lit a fire.

Cassian Haskel had spent the night alone in the captain’s cabin with the door shut, and the cold of the Hollow had crept in underneath it. He had pushed it back with everything he had, hour after hour, until his power ran thin and the frost began to grow on the inside of the walls. He had sat with his back against the door and his knees drawn up and his teeth chattering, and every time he closed his eyes he saw the fool’s hand closing around his fist.

He didn’t sleep. He didn’t dare.

Just before dawn, somebody knocked.

Haskel threw the door open with fire in his hand. There was a soldier standing on the stern castle, one of Kaela’s men, a young one with frost in his beard and the black coat of the Imperial escort. Nobody had seen him leave the rings, and nobody had seen him cross the ice, not even the fool, who had watched that ship all night.

His eyes were open, but there was nobody behind them.

He was humming softly, a low and patient tune of the kind a mother might sing to a child who couldn’t sleep, and it didn’t seem to need any breath at all.

"Lord Haskel," the soldier said pleasantly, in a voice that wasn’t his own. "Brother Ansel sends his regards. He was terribly sorry to hear about your morning."

He held out his hand. On his palm lay a small sliver of something grey and smooth, a chip broken off a gravestone, and the cold in the cabin bent away from it as though it were fire.

"He’d like very much," the voice added, "to meet the eater."