Chapter 71: Its Own Blood

The iron heart stubbornly refused to wake.

Aren held it every morning in the hollow under the rock before he went down to the camp, like a stone you have picked up on a beach to see if it is still warm. It never was. It lay in his palm, black and heavy and cracked through the middle, and did absolutely nothing.

It answers only to its own blood.

The cold in his side answered instead, every single time. It woke the moment he unwrapped the scarf and leaned toward the iron like a dog leaning toward a plate on a table, patient and very interested, and every time he had to press his hand flat against his ribs until it gave up and settled.

"It wants it." Roderick was watching him on the second morning.

"It wants everything."

"Not like that." Roderick sat at the edge of the hollow with his cloak pulled up against the light. "It doesn’t lean toward stones like that. Or toward me." He paused. "Whatever’s in that thing, it’s worth a lot."

"Then it’s worth more to her."

’And to me it’s worth exactly one stab wound, if anyone finds it in my coat.’

He wrapped it up again carefully and tucked it inside his coat, on the side away from the scar.

He finally saw her at dusk.

He had carried water all day, up and down the slope, past the tents, into the tower. He was crossing the central yard with two empty buckets when he noticed a figure in a grey hood standing in the deep shadow of the gate arch. She wasn’t moving, and nobody stands like that unless they’re waiting for something.

He didn’t look at her, because he didn’t need to. He knew exactly how she stood. He had stood behind her for nine hours once, the day after her Trial, her sword case on his shoulder, watching her stand exactly like that.

And at her feet, a faint pale shape lay curled on the stones.

’Oh, good! She brought the dog.’

The other water boys were heading down the cistern stair in twos and threes for the evening fill. Aren slowed, stopped, set his buckets down beside a cart, and bent over them as if a handle had come loose.

A farm boy he didn’t know came past with his own pole. Aren caught his sleeve.

"Take mine down for me? Fill them, bring them to the cook tent. I’ll give you a copper."

The boy squinted suspiciously at him. "Why?"

"Bad back."

"You’re my age."

"It’s a very old back."

The boy shrugged indifferently, took the copper and the buckets, and went down the stair.

Aren went the other way, around the back of the supply carts and along the wall, and didn’t straighten up until he was out of the yard and behind the cook tents, his heart pounding against his ribs.

She had come to watch the water boys.

She had come to watch for one of them.

Varro somehow knew before Aren said anything.

The old man was waiting behind the woodpile with his two sticks at the last bell, and he didn’t throw the first one. He looked at Aren’s face, then toward the yard, then back.

"A lady came to see the clerk yesterday. Asked to look at his book. Asked about a thin boy with a pale streak in his hair." He tossed Aren the second stick. "Clerk told me this morning. Very pleased with himself. Thought he had been useful."

Aren caught the stick.

"I didn’t ask who you are. I’m still not asking. But a lady from House Ashgrave doesn’t come down to look at a water boy’s name in a tally book for no reason." He set his feet. "Whatever you are, boy, you’re getting noticed. And you’ve got the face of someone who’s never once been allowed to be noticed in his life."

He came forward steadily with the stick.

Aren’s feet wanted to go back, as they always did. He felt the old pull in his heels, the thing Varro had seen in him on the first day, the urge to step away before the blow even came.

’No. Not tonight.’

He put his weight forward, a finger’s width, just enough that going back would cost him something. The stick came at his shoulder, and instead of moving away from it, he moved into it, half a step, and turned. The stick slid off his own and past him, and for the first time in four nights, he was still standing when it was over.

Varro stared at him in disbelief.

"Again."

They went again, and Aren went down that time. But the time after, he held firmly, and the time after that.

When it was finished, the old man leaned heavily on his stick and breathed, studying Aren in the dark.

"There. Now you’re standing like someone who means to stay."

[Street Fighter’s Instinct. Mastery: 66% → 68%.]

The standing itself wasn’t a skill, and the System had no name for it. But Aren felt it settle into his legs as he walked away from the woodpile, the same as the cold settled into his side after it had fed. Something new, that hadn’t been there before.

He thought about the iron heart in his coat, and about who it belonged to.

He couldn’t give it to her as Ren. A water boy from a farm didn’t dig up an Imperial prince and stroll into the cistern with his sister’s inheritance. She would ask where he found it, and why, and how a valley boy had known where to look. She would ask in front of her officers, then she would ask Varro, and then everything would come apart.

He couldn’t give it to her as the thing from the Pools either. She would happily put a lance through him before he opened his mouth.

’So what’s left? Gift-wrap it and run?’

He sat on an empty barrel behind the cook tent with the fire burning low and turned it over and over. In the end, only one way didn’t ask her to trust anyone.

Leave it where she would find it, and be somewhere else when she did.

’Yes. Gift-wrap it and run!’

He went down to the cistern an hour before midnight with two empty buckets, like any water boy. The stair was dark, and the yard above was empty. Nobody stood in the shadow of the gate anymore.

The cistern was silent, because she hadn’t come yet.

He knew the pillar. He would have known it with his eyes shut: the one nearest the stair, with dark smears on it at the height of a fist, old and new, layer over layer, from five nights of her hands.

There was a narrow ledge on it, just above the smears, where someone had cut the stone to hold a lamp a hundred years ago.

He unwrapped the iron heart and set it there. Not hidden. Exactly where her eyes would be when she raised her fists. He laid the chain neatly beneath it so it wouldn’t slide. Then he stepped back and looked at it in the light of his lantern: black, cracked, very small against the great grey pillar.

The cold in his side leaned toward it one last time.

"No," he said quietly, and pressed his hand firmly against his ribs.

He filled his buckets dutifully, because a water boy who went down to the cistern and came back empty would be remembered. Then he climbed the stair, crossed the yard, and left without looking back.

He didn’t see her find it.

He was lying in the hollow under the rock with his coat over his face when the sound came across the valley, an hour before dawn. It was faint, from the direction of the fortress, and it wasn’t a bell or a horn.

Someone was shouting on the iron half of the wall. Then came more voices, and then lanterns, moving fast along the battlements, one after another, as if the whole Imperial garrison had been woken at once.

Roderick sat up sharply beside him.

"What did you do?"

Aren watched the lanterns.

"Nothing. I returned something to its owner."

"At four in the morning? Through a wall full of soldiers?"

"Good service is never easy."

[Kaela Voss. Hostility: 100%.][Investment recorded: Hidden aid. The Iron Guard.]

The number stayed where it was, as it was always going to. She didn’t know who had left it. She knew nothing at all, except that someone had been in her cistern in the night, had known where her brother was buried, and hadn’t wanted her to know who they were.

And somewhere on the iron half of the wall, he thought, a woman was standing with an iron heart in her hands, watching it begin to glow.

Behind them, on the rock above the hollow, in the last of the dark, something small and pale lifted its head and watched him.