Chapter 76: Breathing Lessons

He lowered his eyes immediately. It was the first thing a servant learned and the last thing he forgot.

"Yes, my lady."

"You know who I am."

"Everyone in camp knows, my lady."

She stayed where she was, but Luna didn’t. The dog got up, crossed the frozen ground, and stopped a step from his boots, nose lifted toward his left side. A thin sound came out of her, the same sound she had made in the corridor.

Vivienne watched the dog closely, not him.

"She did that in the tower, days ago. She’s never done it for anyone else."

"Dogs smell water, my lady. I carry a lot of it."

"She isn’t a dog."

’Yes, thank you, I’d noticed!’

Under his ribs, the cold stirred. It had been full and quiet since the deep pool, but it knew what Luna was: a small thing made of moonlight, standing close enough to touch. He pressed his arm tightly against his side and held it there like a wound.

"Captain Voss came to see me this afternoon. She doesn’t come to see me. We haven’t liked each other since we were children." She tugged her gloves tighter, deliberately, one finger at a time. "She asked me one question and left. She asked who in my house teaches Ashgrave breathing to water boys."

He had known this was coming since the night by the pool. He had known it the moment he said the words to Kaela, take nothing, return everything, and saw her eyes change. He had said them anyway, because she had been dying.

"I carried water in the north for two winters, my lady. There was a yard. Knights trained there in the mornings. I watched how they breathed. It kept me warm."

"Which yard?"

"I don’t know the name of the house. A steward paid me."

"No knight in the north breathes like that. Nobody does. I learned it from one book, in a locked room at Highcrest." She paused. "One servant had the key to that room. He left the book open on my desk and told me he’d dropped it." Her voice stayed perfectly flat. "I didn’t believe him either."

"I’m sorry, my lady. I don’t know him."

"No. You wouldn’t. He’s dead."

[Vivienne Ashgrave. Hostility: 64%.]

The number held steady. He hadn’t really expected it to move.

"Open your collar. The left side."

A water boy couldn’t refuse a duke’s daughter, not in front of the woodpile, not anywhere. Aren untied the cord at his neck and pulled the cloth aside on the left, down to the ribs.

The scar was there, pale and smooth, running from his ribs to his hip. It looked old, which was exactly how it was supposed to look.

Luna whined again, louder, and pushed her nose almost against it. The cold under his ribs rose to meet her. Aren set his teeth and forced it down, like swallowing a cough in a quiet room, and for three breaths he could do nothing else.

’Down. Down! If you come out now, we’re both dead.’

Vivienne stepped closer. She looked at the scar, then at his face, then at the scar again. He could see her thinking hard, and he could see her not finding anything.

"Where did you get that?"

"A cart, my lady. In Aldermere. The axle broke."

"It doesn’t look like a cart."

"It was a big cart."

Her mouth tightened, and for the first time since she had pushed back her hood, she looked annoyed rather than cold. He had seen that look a hundred times. It was the look she gave things she couldn’t make sense of, right before she decided they weren’t worth the effort.

This time she didn’t decide that.

"Close it."

He tied the cord, and his fingers were clumsier than he wanted.

"The Prince’s men are asking about the deep pool. Someone killed it, and the Crown Prince wants a name before the treaty. He’d like the name to belong to somebody small." Her eyes moved over his buckets, his stick, his dirty hair. "A water boy from Aldermere who walks the camp at night would do very well."

"Will you give them mine, my lady?"

"I haven’t decided."

She pulled her hood up. Luna didn’t move.

"Stay away from Kaela Voss."

"I carry her water, my lady."

"Then carry it and leave."

She turned and walked briskly away between the tents. Luna stayed, staring at his side with her two moon eyes, until a single low word called her. Then the dog turned and followed her mistress without a sound.

Aren stood by the woodpile until his hands stopped wanting to shake.

’She’s circling. She’s circling like she circles everything. And she never lets go.’

He didn’t go to the hollow straight away. He went up the ridge path to the flat stretch below the rocks, where snow lay thin over the stones, and took off his coat.

Two stones, eleven paces apart. He had marked them on the first night.

He stood at the first one and stepped.

Moonlit Step wasn’t speed. He had learned that in the Abyss, with his eyes closed and the hounds breathing. It was the space between one foot and the next, made smaller. Every time he got it right, eleven paces became nine. Every time he got it wrong, he fell on his face in the snow.

He fell flat on his face in the snow forty-one times.

’Forty-two.’

He kept going stubbornly. He counted the steps instead of thinking, because steps were easier. At a hundred, his legs burned. At two hundred, the burning stopped, which was worse. At two hundred and sixty, eleven paces became eight, and his foot came down on the far stone without a sound.

[Moonlit Step. Mastery: 46% → 47%.]

He did it three hundred times. Then he put his coat back on and went down to the hollow.

Roderick was standing at the edge of the rocks with his cloak wrapped around him, looking down at the Imperial side, where the lanterns had multiplied.

"Your lady came to find you." Roderick didn’t turn.

"You saw?"

"I see everything at night now. It’s very tiring." He looked over his shoulder. "Does she know?"

"No."

"Then why do you look like that?"

Aren sat down slowly on the cold stone and took his time answering.

"Because she will. Not tonight. But she keeps coming back to the same question, and she never stops until she has an answer. She never has."

Roderick was quiet, and then he sat down beside him.

"There’s something else. I went back to the chapel after you left. The chaplain didn’t stay there. He went up to the iron tower, to the Prince." He picked at a thread on his cloak. "I couldn’t get close. But I saw the captain come out afterwards. She walked past twenty men without looking at any of them, and her hand was on the chain at her neck the whole time."

"What happened?"

"I heard the soldiers at the door talking after she’d gone." Roderick pulled the thread loose and let the wind take it. "The Prince has closed the pools to her. All of them. Every pool in Kharn, until the treaty is signed. For her own safety, they said. After what happened to the deep one."

Aren looked across the valley at the iron tower.

The chaplain hadn’t needed to do anything clever. He had only needed to say one sensible thing to a careful man. She was nearly killed in the deep pool, Your Highness. Let her rest until the treaty. And the Prince, who wasn’t cruel, who only wanted his sister alive on the day she had to stand beside him, had agreed.

’Clean. No blood, no poison, no nail. Just good advice!’

[Kaela Voss. Rank D: Blood. 81%.]

Nineteen points. Four days. No pools.

Under his ribs, the cold lay full and quiet, and in the dark behind his eyes, a line of ink waited in the Familiar’s book.

The essence of the Deep Pool.

Every drop that pool had ever held, written down in his side. The only deep water left in Kharn, and nobody had thought to close it, because nobody knew it was there.

"Ghost. You’ve got that look again."

"Yes."

"Does it work out this time?"

Aren put his hand flat against his left side and felt the cold turn under it, like something sleeping turning toward a voice.

"I don’t know yet. But I think the captain’s about to get her pool back."