Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 543: Chapter 538: A Day and a Night

Location:Pocket Dimension — Ithyra’s Room

Date/Time:Second Void Day, 9942 AZI

Realm:None. That is the point of it.

Nothing happened for a very long time.

Ithyra had been awake for all of the night that a place with no sun is willing to give, and she had spent it being sensible, and being sensible had worked until about the point the light came up.

After that she sat on the edge of the bed and waited, and the waiting went on, and nothing came through the floor at all.

A thousand years.

Ithyra had stopped putting it in those words a long way back, because words make a thing sit up and look at you. It had come in the order it comes. First the skin, which is the honest one, and the easiest to bear, and which had not stopped since the day the door shut between them. Then the mind, which had gone quiet and strange somewhere in the early centuries and had never entirely come back. Then the spirit, which is harder to say anything sensible about and which she had carried as a kind of leaning, all day, every day, in one direction.

And then the last one, which nobody discusses.

A truemating is not two people who are fond of each other. It is one thing living in two bodies, and the two bodies are built on the understanding that they can reach each other. Days are nothing. Weeks are a nuisance. Years are hard and can be borne by anyone with a spine and a reason.

A thousand years is not survivable. They had survived it, and the reason was that they had both been born very strong, and that neither of them had ever once been willing to be the one who let go first.

It had cost, though. The bond itself — the thing between them, which was not hers and was not his and had been the healthiest thing either of them owned — had begun to fray. She had felt it go thin in places. She had never mentioned it. He had never mentioned it either, which was how she knew he had felt it too.

She built the reasons. That is what the mind does, and there is no stopping it. The year had turned badly. A report had come in overnight. Somebody in the Mid Realm had said the wrong thing to the wrong priest, and Sharlin had woken with it in her teeth, and a promise made to a chained thing on a holiday is not a promise; it is a mood, and moods do not survive a bad morning.

She has changed her mind, Ithyra said.

She has not.

You cannot know that.

No, Renvyr agreed. But you have been sitting up there for two hours deciding it, and I would like a turn.

I am not deciding it. I am preparing for it.

You are deciding it, he said, and calling it preparing, and you have done that for twenty thousand years, and I have never once said anything about it, and I am saying something about it now because I would rather like to be permitted to want this.

Ithyra put both hands flat on the blanket.

Then want it, she said.

I want it.

That is not wanting it.

I have wanted it since she said the word. The rockfall, gone quiet. I have not let myself want anything in four centuries, woman, and I let myself want this at about the hour she left your room, and if she takes it back it is going to do something to me and I would rather you knew that in advance.

Ithyra found she had put a hand over her mouth.

Renvyr—

And then, beneath her, the bolt went.

***

They came for him at the hour the light changed, and Ithyra heard the whole of it through the floor.

The bolt. Three voices, none of them raised. The manacles coming off, which took longer than it should have, because they had been on a long time and the wrists under them were not the wrists the smith had measured. Water. A great deal of water. Somebody saying lift twice in a bored way.

She sat on the edge of the bed with her hands in her lap and did not move for any of it.

They are washing you.

They are.

Renvyr.

Do not, he said. Whatever it is. Not while there are three of them in here with their hands on me.

So she did not. She sat and listened to a man being made presentable for his wife, and counted, because counting was a thing to do.

***

The room had been cleaned.

She had not asked for it, and nobody had told her. She had woken, and it was done — the floor scrubbed, the bowl gone, fresh water, a second blanket folded at the end of the bed as though the bed had ever needed one.

And the chair moved. Not much. A hand’s width forward, and turned.

Ithyra had looked at that for a long time this morning.

There was a part of her, small and traitorous and never once silenced, that had thought she is being kind, and had meant it, in the half second before the rest of her arrived. That part was not stupidity. She had stopped calling it that around the fourth millennium. It was simply what a person becomes when the only face they see belongs to the only power there is, and it had to be watched, as you watch a bad hip.

The chair had been moved so Sharlin could see both their faces at once.

That was all. That was the whole of the kindness.

***

The door opened, and Ithyra stood up too fast, and her chain went tight, and she did not care.

Two guards. Then him, between them, on his own feet.

She had told him she knew exactly what he looked like.

She had been wrong, and she had known she was wrong when she said it, and she had said it anyway because he needed it — but knowing a thing through a bond and having it in front of you in the light are not the same, and the bond had been merciful in ways she had not understood until now.

He was enormous still. They had not managed that. Whatever else they had taken, they had never got the size out of him, and he filled the doorway the way he had always filled doorways, and it was the only thing about him that had not changed.

Everything under the skin had gone. Not thin. Emptied — the great chest fallen in on itself, the shoulders standing out like the frame of a building somebody had stripped. One horn broken and grown back wrong, curling in toward the temple where it would never stop pressing. The pupils gone to slits and stayed there, which happens in the dark, over centuries, and does not come back.

Purple eyes. Those were his. Those had never once been anything but his.

And at the base of his throat, the vine.

Ithyra made herself look at it, because she was the only one of them who could, and because not looking would not change what it said. It had gone the color of old rope. The leaves were shut — not fallen, shut, folded in tight along the stem as a thing folds when nothing is coming up from the root any more, and there were fewer of them than there had been, and what green was left in them was not worth the name.

None of it was news. She had known for a long time, through a floor, at the far end of a bond.

Knowing it and reading it off his throat in the light were not the same, and that was twice in one minute now.

He looked at her and did not come in, and she felt the whole of it hit him at once — she can see me — and felt him decide to stand there and let her.

”Well,” Renvyr said, in a voice like a rockfall, ”you have not changed at all, and it is extremely irritating.”

The guards let go of his arms and went out and shut the door.

***

There was no run to it and no cry.

She crossed the six steps her chain allowed, and he crossed the rest, and they came together the way two stones come together, badly, hard, his hand behind her head and her face in the ruin of his chest, and neither of them said anything for a long time.

The bond went.

That is the only word. It had been a corridor for a thousand years — a good corridor, a wide one, they had kept it beautifully — and it went, all at once, the way a dam does not so much break as stop being relevant, and there was no corridor and no direction and no hers and his, and what was left was one thing that had been cut in half a long time ago and had never for one hour agreed to it.

She was aware, distantly, that she was making a sound.

She was aware, more distantly, that so was he.

And underneath all of it, the quiet thing.

It started the moment her skin was on his, and it did not ask her. A demoness carries life in her Radiance. That is the plain gift of her, the one every female of her people is born holding and no male has ever been able to name properly, and hers had spent the whole of it with nowhere to go — dammed behind a floor, pushed down a bond that was never built to carry it, arriving at the other end as very nearly nothing at all.

Now there was a hand on a chest.

It went out of her as water goes downhill. There was no working at it. She had only to not stop it, which took nothing whatsoever, and she had no intention of stopping it, and somewhere in that first minute she felt the body under her palm take hold of what she was giving it and begin, very slowly, to drink.

***

Sharlin sat in the chair for the first hour.

Ithyra knew it and did not look and did not stop. That was the arrangement, unspoken, twenty thousand years old: the woman got to watch, and what the woman got out of it was hers, and there was nothing on this world that would make Ithyra pay for the hour by taking less of it.

She had learned that in the second reunion. In the first she had tried to be dignified about it. She had been dignified for perhaps a quarter of an hour, and then Sharlin had left and Renvyr had been dragged out, and she had gone eighty years working out what a quarter of an hour of him had been worth, and what she had spent it on instead.

Never again. Let her look.

At some point Sharlin made a small pleased noise, the way people do at weddings.

At some point after that the door shut, and she was gone, and neither of them had noticed which of those two things came first.

***

They talked all day about nothing whatsoever.

They talked out loud, and they talked like fools, and both of them knew the room was being listened to and neither of them cared, because the words were not the conversation and never had been.

He complained about the water, and about the temperature of the water, and the men who had brought it, and the soap, which he said smelled like a flower he had never liked and could not name. The flower took some describing. He was not funny. He had never been funny. He had been not-funny at her in exactly this way for as long as she had known him, and she had let him for exactly as long, and she lay against him with her ear on his sternum and listened to a man she had married describe soap.

Underneath it, all day, without one pause in it, the pouring.

That is too much.

Yes.

Ithyra.

I have a day, she said. Ask me about it on the day after.

He did not ask her about it on the day after either, in the end. He asked her about nothing for a very long time. But that was later.

Underneath that, in the place where they actually lived:

Four years into ten.

I heard.

She has never given me a number before, Renvyr. Not once. Not in twenty thousand years. It came out of her before she could stop it, and she did not even notice it going.

And?

And it ends. Ithyra kept her hand flat on his chest, where a thing was beating that had no business still beating. That is what I have been sitting with since yesterday. There is a date now. Six years, at the outside. Either that place opens, and she gets what she has spent three centuries building toward, or it does not.

And either way.

Either way, she said, she stops needing to keep two demons alive in a hole.

He did not answer for a while. His hand moved on her hair, slowly, badly, the fingers not doing what he wanted them to do.

Good, Renvyr said at last.

Do not.

I am not being brave at you. I am being accurate. The rockfall voice, in her head, where it had always been more careful than out loud. Twenty thousand years I have not been able to see the end of this, woman. Now there is one. I do not care in the slightest which side of it we come out on. I care that it has edges.

She closed her eyes.

Six years, she said.

Six years.

I can do six years.

I know you can, he said. That was never the thing I was worried about.

***

Night, in a place with no sun, is whenever the light is taken away.

They did not sleep. There is a kind of exhaustion that will not permit sleep because it knows exactly how much time it has, and they lay in it, and the bond stayed open and stayed one thing, and they spent the whole of it not talking.

Very late, his beast came up.

It did not come as it used to come. There was no size in it and no anger and nothing in it that would have frightened a child. It came as an old animal comes to the end of the bed when it is cold and has been waiting all evening to be told that it may.

Renvyr started to put it back down.

Do not.

It is not fit to be near you.

It is dying, Ithyra said. It is dying because it has been kept away from me, and you have known it as long as I have, and neither of us has ever said it out loud. I am too tired tonight to go on not saying it. Let it come.

A male’s beast is not a creature he keeps. It is the other half of him, the part that came from wherever it is that demons come from, and it belongs to him no more than her empathy had ever belonged to her. It has one place it fits.

It had been out of that place for a thousand years.

He let it come.

It came up through him and out along the bond and into her, and Ithyra held still and opened everything she had and let a dying thing walk into her soul and lie down in it.

There was no light and no sound and nothing whatever to see.

It turned once, as they do, and settled, and stopped.

And then it was quiet. Not asleep — at rest, which is a different thing, and she had forgotten how far apart the two of them are. Ithyra lay in the dark under the weight of a man’s arm with his beast curled up asleep inside her soul, and found that she was crying and had been for some time, and did not particularly want to stop.

Ithyra.

Do not say anything.

I was not going to.

***

The bond began to mend somewhere in the small hours.

She noticed it as a person notices a noise stopping. The thin places went quiet, one after another, and it was not something either of them did on purpose. It was only what happens when the two halves of one thing are put back in the same place and left there. Every hour of it mended something. His hand in her hair mended something. Her mouth at the pulse under his jaw mended something. None of it was healing in the sense the word is usually given, and all of it was healing, and by the time the light came back the thing between them was stronger than it had been since long before the fraying started.

That was the part Sharlin had never understood and never would, and had been handing them, free, every few hundred years, out of spite.

Once, very late, he said out loud: ”Do you remember the orchard?”

”Yes.”

”Which orchard?”

”There was one orchard,” Ithyra said. ”There has only ever been one orchard. You have asked me that four times in twenty thousand years, and it is the same orchard every time.”

”I like hearing you say it.”

”The east side of your mother’s house, and the trees were too old to crop properly, and you would not have them out.”

”I would not have them out.”

”You said they had earned it.”

”They had earned it,” Renvyr said, and after that he did not say anything else for a long while, and neither did she, and the not-saying was as good as the orchard.

***

The light came back.

***

Renvyr heard the bolt and had her off him and onto her feet before the door opened, because he had thought about this part for the whole night and had decided that whatever else happened, she was not going to be found lying down.

She stood. Chain, six steps, chin up, green and gold going through him like a blade.

”Do not fight them,” she said.

”I was not going to fight them.”

”You were absolutely going to fight them.”

”I was going to consider it,” Renvyr said, ”at length, and with great pleasure, and then not.”

Four guards. Sharlin behind them in the doorway, arms folded, and the expression on her face was the worst thing in the room and always had been — the soft one, the fond one, a woman looking at something she had made and found sweet.

Then it went. It always went. He had watched it go a dozen times and had never once seen the moment it happened, only the after.

”If I cannot have it,” Sharlin said, ”I do not see why you should.”

”You could have it,” Renvyr said. ”You have simply never once—”

The guards had him.

His beast went before they did. It knew. It got up out of her soul and stood a moment where it had been lying, and then go, and the going of it was worse than anything the four of them did afterward.

He had known they would. He had said it anyway, because it was true, and because she would carry it up the stairs with her and it would sit in her all day and there was nothing whatever she could do about it, and after twenty thousand years a man takes what is on offer.

They got him to the door.

And the bond began to pull.

***

That is the part nobody has a word for.

Not the cell. Not the manacles going back on, which would come, and not the dark, which he was used to and had never much minded.

The pulling.

Two paces and it was a hand at the back of his skull. Four and it was the whole length of him, from the throat down, and it did not hurt in any way a body understands hurting — it was a thing being asked to come apart that does not come apart, and being asked by distance, which cannot be reasoned with and cannot be fought and has no opinion about any of it.

At six paces he heard her make a sound and he did not turn around, because he had promised himself in the night that he would not turn around, because if he turned around he would see her face and he would have to be carried the rest of the way.

At the stairs he stopped being able to think in words.

Here, she said. Faint. Stretched to almost nothing and coming anyway.

He could not answer. He got as far as reaching for it.

Renvyr. Here.

Down. Down and down, and the air changing, and the smell of the place he lived, and somewhere above him a thousand years starting again from the top.

Here, he managed.

And the cell took him, and the manacles went on, and the men went away, and Renvyr d’Aar lay on the stone of the floor and did not move for a long time.

What she had put into him stayed in him. That was the one mercy in the whole arrangement, and he lay there in the dark and took an inventory of it, counting it off like coin — the warmth low under his ribs that had not been there yesterday, the breath going all the way down, the vine at his throat which he could not see and could feel, holding.

The bond held too. Thinner. Whole.

His beast lay down where it always lay down, in the wrong place, in the only place left to it, and did not settle, and would not settle again for a long time.

Somewhere over his head, one floor up and no distance at all that a body could walk, she would be sitting on the edge of a bed with a second blanket she had not asked for, learning it all over again.

He got his hand up off the stone and held it there, flat, toward the ceiling and the floor above it, where she was.

I would do it again tomorrow, he said, to nobody, because the bond was too thin to carry it.

So would I, she said.

So it was not.