Chapter 66: The Pact of Enemies, Part Nine: The Blank Canvas

That night I didn't go down to the library.

Told Layda I was tired, which was true and therefore made nothing glow, and locked myself in my room with a candle, a useless ring, and a cat who had been told to stay still and had decided against it.

You see, the System gave me that ring last week for hugging a girl on a riverbank.

The girl was Durania Sandahll. She was crying by the water because nobody ever remembers her, and I told her that her Empero could turn her into a small, tender walking calamity, and she laughed, and that's why the System paid me. I mention it because it helps to know where things come from.

The ring is ugly. Made of a metal I don't recognize, that neither weighs like iron nor shines like silver. Two taps on anything and you take a bit of its color, and that color stays inside for a few hours and then leaves.

When it handed it over, I asked what it was for. It answered, with that voice it puts on when it's enjoying itself too much, that it was a se-cret and that I had to figure it out myself. I told it it had given me a useless thing.

It told me it was everything but useless.

I've spent a month turning that phrase over.

I've tried stealing the color from a sword to see if it weakened: no. From a closed door, just in case: no. From the water in a bucket, from an apple, and from the blood of a cut I made on purpose, which was the night I decided I was losing my mind. Nothing. The object stays the same, a bit paler, and after four hours it recovers what's its and the ring empties itself.

I also tried the obvious, because I am exactly that kind of idiot: writing a word with the stolen pigment instead of with my Empero. The word didn't come out. It didn't even manage to manifest. The color stayed inside the metal the way water stays in a glass: still, available, and with no intention whatsoever of doing anything on its own.

That night I had three reasons to try again, and only one of them was good.

The good one: if the ring served a purpose, that purpose had to surface before the first of February.

The other two were that I didn't want to think about an empty chair on the third floor of the library, and that I didn't want to think about three beats and a long turn.

"Let's see," I said. "Again."

Tapped the candle twice. The ring took a bit of the flame's yellow, and the flame kept burning the same, a bit paler, and inside the metal remained a thread of light the thickness of a hair.

Tapped the paper. It took the white.

Tapped the blanket. It took the garnet. That bothered me more than was reasonable, and I gave the blanket back to it after a while, once it had passed.

And in none of the three things did the ring do anything beyond that: store it and lose it.

Lying on my back on the floor, with the ring on my chest, I talked to the ceiling. Sometimes, repeating things out loud helps me find a way to approach the matter.

"A god of pacts, a sealed archive, a father who's never going to talk, and this." Hand raised. "A color thief."

And since I was lying on the floor with no dignity left to lose, I called it.

"System."

[Yes, Romeo? What a pleasure. You looked so cute lying there.]

"The ring. It's been a month. Give me something."

[I told you it was a secret.]

"Eighteen days until that wedding."

[I know. I keep count better than you do.] [And I also told you that here you have to earn everything. If I explain it, it's over. It's like asking the author how the book ends: you can, sure. But then why did you read.]

"You're unbearable."

[I'm consistent. Which is certainly worse.]

And it left, which is what it always does right when it starts saying something true.

Garchi climbed on top of me.

He climbs on top of me every night and I've never authorized it. He settled right on my sternum, all four paws together, and sat on the ring with that determination cats have for always choosing the worst possible spot.

"Get off."

He didn't get off.

"Garchi, you're heavy."

He lowered his head and sniffed the metal. Bumped it with his nose. Once.

And then he bumped it again.

The ring warmed up.

It was half a second. It warmed the way a coin warms in a pocket, nothing more, and something inside it shifted and came loose, and the thread of yellow it had left from the candle came out of the metal and went into the cat.

It went into the cat.

Sitting up so fast that Garchi went flying and landed highly offended a meter away, and sat there watching me as if I were the idiot.

He's white. Has been since the day I found him next to a corpse, entirely white, without a single spot, and that night by candlelight he still was.

White with a point of yellow on the tip of his left ear, the size of a fingernail.

"…What are you?"

Approaching on my knees, very slowly, hands in front, and he let me touch his ear with the absolute indifference of someone who has never done anything strange in his life. I rubbed the fur between my fingers. It was yellow from the root.

And there, kneeling on the floor of a room that smells of stone, looking at a cat's ear, I remembered something I said out loud a month ago and haven't told anyone.

Garchi grew up without a mother in Mayorka's gardens. Dayne Ascalar found him there two months before dying, took him in, named him, and fed him. Then Dayne was crushed against a wall, and it was this cat who led me to the body, meowing as if his life depended on it.

The first night he slept in my bed, I promised him he wouldn't be alone. That I would protect him too.

I promised an animal of six months who trembled in his sleep. I wasn't thinking about anyone's usefulness.

"Let's get one thing straight between us," I told him, the warm ring in my hand. "You're not a tool."

Garchi looked at me with those green eyes of his, enormous and without a single worry inside, and yawned.

⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽ ☆ ☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅

Then I tried everything I could think of, which wasn't much.

Held the candle up to him. He backed away, with reason.

Held the garnet blanket up to him. He lifted his head and bumped it with his nose twice, exactly twice, and absolutely nothing happened. I spent a good while trying to understand why with the ring yes and with the blanket no.

In the end the only thing I could think of at that hour occurred to me, and it was so simple it embarrassed me: the blanket had nothing inside.

So I held the ring up to him again, already empty, already without the yellow. He sniffed it once. On the second try he got bored and started licking a paw.

It wasn't the ring, then. It was what the ring was carrying.

It lasted eleven minutes. I counted them.

Then it faded, and he was a white cat again, about six months old, who sleeps trembling, and I was left sitting on the floor with the cold metal in my hand and the certainty that I had just seen something important without understanding a single part of it.

What exactly Garchi was remained unknown to me, but I was certain he could prove useful.

I wrote it in the notebook that night, in the margin, in small letters.

The ring. Two taps. He too.

And below that, because by now I knew how my life worked:

Ask Fendrel without asking Fendrel.

Then I stared at the ceiling a while longer.

You see, there's something I haven't told anyone and that I'm going to tell you, since that's what you're here for.

That night I had an idea that didn't come from the book.

It was my own idea. About something that doesn't happen in The Throne of Ashes and Thorns, that happened to a cat who doesn't exist in the original novel, in front of a ring that doesn't exist in the original novel either.

And I realized I had been here three months having very few of them. Three months of remembering things that had already happened and calling it thinking.

Although... the events of the novel were changing too fast. Sooner rather than later, all my knowledge would be merely encyclopedic: at the rate things were going, it wouldn't matter how much I knew about the plotlines.

I fell asleep with Garchi on my chest and the ring in my fist, happier than I had been all week.

The next morning everything went to hell for a completely different reason.