Chapter 55: Promises

The healer house had a back wall that faced an alley, the back wall had a drainpipe, and Aren had been climbing that drainpipe since he was ten years old.

It was much easier now. His arms pulled him up the old iron pipe as if he weighed nothing, his feet found the same cracks in the bricks they had always found, and in less than a minute he was crouched on the narrow ledge outside the second-floor window, at the far end of the building, where the light was.

He looked carefully through the glass.

Nell was sitting up in bed with the farmer’s book open in her lap, but she had stopped reading and was looking at the door. Her face was thin and tired, with grey shadows under her eyes that had nothing to do with Rift sickness. The bandage on her left arm was fresh, and the lamp beside her bed had burned low.

He knocked on the glass, very softly, twice.

Nell’s head turned.

She didn’t scream, though he had been afraid she would. She made no sound at all. She sat in her bed and stared at the shape crouched outside the window in the dark, and her face went blank with shock.

Then she pushed her blankets off, climbed out of bed and walked across the cold floor in her bare feet, slowly, like someone walking toward a deer in a field, afraid that if she moved too fast it would vanish.

She unlatched the window, and he climbed quietly in.

They looked at each other for a long moment. She looked at his thin face, his torn and filthy clothes, the strange white streak in his hair, the old pale scars on the back of his hand. He watched her look at each thing carefully, as she always looked at things, and put it away somewhere to think about later.

Then she hit him, hard.

She hit him in the chest with both fists, as hard as a sick twelve-year-old could hit, which wasn’t very hard. She hit him again, and again, without saying anything, just kept hitting him, her small fists thumping against his ribs, and her face crumpled, and she was crying silently with her mouth open, like she used to cry when she was very little and had hurt herself and was too proud to make a noise.

He knelt on the cold floor so she could reach him better.

She stopped hitting him and put her arms around his neck instead and held on so tightly he could barely breathe, and cried into his shoulder.

He held her tightly. In two lives he had never found the right words for anything that mattered, and he didn’t find them now.

"You promised," she mumbled at last, into his collar. Her voice was thick and wet. "You promised you wouldn’t do anything stupid."

"I know."

"You jumped into a hole, Aren."

"I didn’t jump. I was pushed."

She pulled back and glared at him with wet, furious eyes. "That’s worse."

A laugh tried to come out of him and turned into something else halfway.

She wiped her face with the back of her hand and looked at him again, harder, at the white in his hair.

"What happened to you?"

He gave her the only true thing he could find. "I was somewhere very dark. For a long time. Longer than you’d think."

"How long?"

"Ninety-eight days."

She frowned. "It’s been nine."

"I know."

He watched her decide not to ask. She had always been better at that than anyone he knew.

He sat on the edge of her bed while she climbed back under her blankets, and he took the bundle off his back and unwrapped it on his knees.

Nell stared.

The black lilies lay in their wrappings of dried eel skin, twenty of them, thin and dark and soft, their petals moving very slightly in the still air. In the yellow lamplight they looked strange and beautiful and wrong, like flowers from a dream.

"What are they?" she whispered.

"Medicine. For your arm."

He didn’t tell her what they had cost, or about the Furnace, or the voice, or the chain. He pulled a single petal off one lily and dropped it into the cup of warm water by her bed, the one the nurse left for her salt every night. It sank. The water around it went dark, then cleared again, and smelled faintly of rain.

"Drink it. All of it."

She drank it and made a face. "It tastes like the sea."

"I know. Sorry."

He unwrapped the bandage on her arm very gently. The black mark was there, the size of a large coin now, its thin roots spreading across the pale skin of her forearm like cracks in ice. It was larger than when he fell.

He watched it closely.

Nothing happened. Then, so slowly that at first he thought he was imagining it, the thin black roots began to pull back, like a spider drawing in its legs, hair by hair. The edges of the mark softened. The farthest roots faded to grey and then to nothing, and the skin of Nell’s arm was just skin again.

When it stopped, the mark was the size of a small copper coin, smaller than it had been since the summer.

Nell looked down at it. She put her other hand over it, very carefully, as if it might change its mind.

’One petal! One petal did that. And I’ve got twenty flowers.’

He had thought about the other way all the way up the chain. One other person. He could have drawn a line through the mark and been done with it.

But every time he’d used Write-Off, something had gone with it. A thing he couldn’t name on the ninth day. The stone cutter’s name in the Furnace. He had no idea what it would take if the debt was hers. Something of his, or something of hers. Maybe her.

He was not going to bet her on a wheel he couldn’t see, not while the lilies still worked.

"You have to listen to me now. This is important."

She looked up.

"Nobody can know I’m here. Nobody can know I’m alive. Not the nurse, not the healers, not anybody."

"Why?"

"Because some very bad people think I’m dead. As long as they think that, they won’t come looking." He held her eyes. "If they found out, they might come looking for you too."

She was quiet.

"Mira."

He didn’t answer.

"Mira cried at the funeral. She doesn’t think I know. The nurse told me." Her small face was very serious. "She comes every day, Aren. She brings me bread and reads to me and pretends she’s fine. She’s not fine."

He looked at the floor.

"Not yet. Not even Mira. Not yet. I’m sorry."

Nell didn’t answer straight away. He could see her weighing it, the way she weighed everything, the way he had taught her without ever meaning to.

"Okay." She sighed at last. "I promise." She paused. "But you have to promise too."

"Promise what?"

"That you’ll tell her. Soon. Not not-yet. Soon."

He thought about Mira on the low wall of the training yard with a bruise on her cheek. You’re always sorry, Aren.

"I promise," he said.

"You always break those." But she didn’t sound angry. She sounded as if she was nearly smiling.

She fell asleep near dawn with her hand still over the small mark on her arm.

Halfway into sleep, she began to hum. It was low and slow, the tune she always hummed when she read, the one he had never been able to place.

He could place it now. He had heard it coming up out of a black seam in the sand.

He put his hand over hers, over the mark, and held it there until the humming stopped.

Then he tucked the blankets around her like he used to when she was six. They were the thick wool ones Mira had bought her, a deep warm color he could see was dark but could no longer name.

"Nice blankets," he murmured, mostly to himself. "Mira picked a good brown."

Nell stirred, half asleep. "They’re red, silly," she mumbled, and turned over, and was gone again.

Aren stayed on the edge of the bed.

Red. He knew the word, and he knew what it meant. He looked at the blankets and couldn’t see it. He could see nothing but dark wool, a little warmer than grey. He would never see it again, not on her blankets and not anywhere.

’It’s fine. It’s only a color. I’ve still got all the others.’

He sat there and let himself feel it, and it wasn’t fine.

Then he wrapped up the lilies and stood to go, and a window opened in front of his eyes with names he hadn’t seen since the day he fell.

[Anchors back within range.][Rook. Hostility: 83% → 71%.][Vivienne Ashgrave (Primary). Hostility: 97% → 64%.]

He stared at the last line.

Sixty-four.

She had hated him for months, every day, every look, every word, ninety-something and steady as stone. He’d fallen into the Abyss and been gone nine days, and somewhere in those nine days, a third of it had simply gone away.