Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 596: Chapter 591: Two

Location:The Pavilion — the Medical Bay · Kaelport — the water side

Date/Time:6 Flamefade 9943 AZI, Restday, first light

Realm:Lower Realm

Green counted out loud.

Not to anybody. Not for anybody’s benefit. She counted the way some people hum when they work, in a low flat voice that never rose and never hurried, and the numbers came out of her one at a time and fell into the room, and nobody picked them up.

”One. Two. Three. Hold. Four.”

Jayde stood at the head of the table with her split hands on the array and listened to the numbers and did not interrupt them.

The Medical Bay was Eden’s. Everything in it was where Eden had put it, and Eden put things where a pair of hands would find them in the dark: the surgical suite along the long wall, the diagnostic array on its arm above the table, the synthesis unit humming in the corner with its single green light. All of it had come out of the Resolute in a ring, on a day neither of them talked about, and all of it had been carried up into the Pavilion piece by piece and set down in a room that smelled of linen and steeped herbs and, now, of Yinxin’s blood.

Eden was in the Corps.

So it was Jayde at the array.

The display came up in the air over Yinxin’s shoulder in clean blue lines, as it had come up over a thousand bodies in another life, and Jayde read it as she had read all of them, from the outside in, without letting any of it reach her face.

The face held.

The wings did not. They had come out on the beach at the word, with the hair and the eyes and everything else the necklace had been keeping, and she had not once thought to fold them since. They stood half open over the table now, dark through the whole vane, curved down around the woman lying on it, and the primaries hung past the far edge so low that their thin black metal edges were a hair off the floor. She had not told them to do that. Green had to duck under the left one to reach the shoulder, and did, without a word, and Jayde did not move it, because she did not know it was there.

Penetrating trauma. Entry at the cervicothoracic junction, deviating inferior along the scapular border. Two major vessels compromised. Blood volume loss significant and continuing.

Cangwei had said four fingers, and it turned on the bone, and went down. Cangwei had been right about every part of it.

”The deeper one,” Jayde said. ”Under the blade of the shoulder. That is the one losing.”

”I have it.”

Green had both hands on Yinxin’s shoulder, one flat over the wound and one under the shoulder blade, and her eyes were shut. Whatever she was doing went in through the palms. It did not glow, and it did not hum. It simply went in, the way water goes into dry ground, and on the array the bright line of the deeper vessel began, very slowly, to narrow.

”Five,” Green said. ”Six. Hold.”

Jayde watched the line.

It narrowed. It stopped narrowing. It held, a thin bright thread against the dark of the tissue around it, and did not get any thinner, and did not get any wider either.

”Green.”

”I see it.”

”It is not closing.”

Green’s eyes did not open. ”It does not want to close. It is not a human vessel. It is built for more than I am giving it.” A breath. ”Seven. I am giving it more.”

The line narrowed again.

Jayde had watched surgeons work for most of sixty years, in theaters with power and light and a full team, and she had watched them on the floors of burning corridors with nothing but their hands and whatever they had in their pockets. She knew what it looked like when somebody was doing something at the limit of what they could do. She was looking at it.

Nobody spoke. There was nothing to say that would help, and the one thing that would not help was another voice in the room.

The line closed.

On the array it went from bright to dim to nothing, and the blood volume figure in the corner of the display stopped falling and sat where it was, and then, after what felt like a very long time, began to climb.

Something at her back let go.

She heard it before she felt it: a long dry whisper of a great deal of feather settling all at once, and the small hard ticking of metal edges finding one another as they came down. The wings had dropped a hand’s width and loosened, as a held breath goes. Nothing in her face had moved at all.

Green opened her eyes and looked at the display. Then she took the upper hand off the wound and put two fingers against the side of Yinxin’s throat, under the jaw, and held them there with her head tilted, listening to something no instrument in that room could hear.

She was checking. She had the array right in front of her, giving her the number, and she was checking it with her fingers.

Green said a number.

The array said the same number.

Green looked at it for a moment longer. Then she took her fingers away from Yinxin’s throat and did not put them back, and did not check again, and Jayde did not say anything about that either.

+++

Let me in.

Takara had been at the far door since the beach. Not inside it. At it, filling it, ten feet of midnight-black at the shoulder with white-gold lightning running in slow, uneasy ropes along his back and his mane standing straight up off his neck, and behind him, packed into the corridor where he had put them and was keeping them, three wyrmlings who wanted very much to be somewhere else.

Let me in, or let me out. I do not care which. I was in a corridor when she went down. I was in a corridor while you built a sun twice on a beach with your arm hanging off you, and I could feel every part of it, and I could not do one thing about any of it, and I would like you to know that I am extremely angry, and that I will be angry for some time, and that I am not going to apologize for it.

I know.

You do not know. You were on the beach.

Takara. I needed you exactly where you are.

A long pause, with the lightning going along his back like something deciding.

I am aware, he said finally. That is the worst part of it.

He did not move from the door.

Something moved past him anyway.

It came low along the floor at the base of the wall, under the line of his foreleg where there was perhaps a hand’s width of room and no more, pale as the inside of a shell, and it did not hurry, and it did not look up at Takara, and it did not look at anybody. Takara’s head came around and down and stopped, a breath from the wyrmling’s back, and did not close on her. He let her go.

Huaxin crossed the floor of the Medical Bay without making a sound.

She went to the side of the table where Green was not, and she put her forefeet up on the edge of it, and she looked at her mother for a long time. Her eyes were amber and very steady. Then she reached out one foreclaw, carefully, the way a person reaches for something hot, and laid it flat on Yinxin’s ribs below the wound, and held it there.

Green watched her. She did not tell her to get down.

Huaxin held it for longer than Jayde would have expected a three-year-old to hold anything. Then she took the claw away.

”Closed,” she said.

It was the only word anybody heard out of her that morning.

Green looked at the child across the table. It was not a look Jayde had seen on her before. It was the look one craftsman gives another across a bench when the second has just done something the first did not know they could do.

”Yes,” Green said.

On the table, Yinxin’s eyes opened.

They went to the ceiling first, and then, slowly, to the small pale head at the edge of the table, and stayed there.

”Who let you in?” she asked. Her voice was barely there.

Huaxin did not answer. She did not look at the door. She looked at her mother.

”Nobody,” Jayde said.

Yinxin breathed out, once, through her nose. It might have been a laugh if there had been anything behind it.

”Then you had better stay,” she said. ”Since nobody let you.” And then, to the room in general, without moving her head: ”If anybody intends to stand over me with that face, they may do it from the corridor. I would be grateful to be spared the whole of it.”

Nobody moved to the corridor.

Yinxin’s eyes closed again. Huaxin did not take her forefeet off the table.

+++

”She will live,” Green said.

They were standing at the synthesis unit with the green light between them, a pace away from the table, where Yinxin could not hear unless she was listening, and she was not listening. She was asleep, or something close enough to it that the array called it sleep.

Jayde waited.

”The join of the neck and shoulder,” Green said. ”That is where it went in. That is where it turned.” She did not point. ”You know what she does with her hands at the face. You have watched her do it at every one of them. It comes up through her and goes out through the shoulders and down the arms and into the wall. It goes out through the join.”

Jayde said nothing.

”It will heal. All of it. The vessels are closed, and they will hold. The muscle will knit. The bone was scored, not broken.” Green’s voice did not change at all. ”It will heal slowly, because it is deep, and because I am not certain what I am doing to a silver dragon’s shoulder, and I am not going to pretend to be. Months.”

”How many?”

”I will not give you a number.”

Jayde looked at her and waited.

”Because the first number I give you is the one you will plan around, and I do not know it. When I know it, you will have it. Not before.”

Jayde looked at the table. At the long silver-white hair, loose across the pad. At the small pale shape at the edge of it, unmoving.

There was no need to ask the next question. She had the answer to it already, and so did Green, and it sat in the room between them with the green light.

One caster in the world. One. There had only ever been one, and the whole of the work, all of it, every chamber since Voidmarch and every chamber still to come, had gone out through the join of a woman’s neck and shoulder. And it was not going out through it for months.

The nests did not stop being there because Yinxin was in a bed. They went on drinking. Three of them went on rising. Ardh went on rising.

Jayde put that away, carefully, in the same place she had put everything else this morning, and found that the place was nearly full.

Behind her the wings had pulled in so hard against her back that the edges rang on one another, a thin flat sound like a blade drawn an inch out of its sheath and stopped there. Green’s eyes went past her, over her shoulder, and stayed there a moment, and came back to her face, and Green said nothing at all.

”Your hands,” Green said.

”After.”

”Now. You have been standing at that array with your palms open, and I have watched you not notice it.” Green had already picked up the dressings. ”Put them out.”

Jayde put them out.

Green turned them over, palms up, and looked at them for a moment without touching. The blisters across the heel of both hands had split and gone ragged and wet, and the skin around them was white and dead, and under that, where it was not white, it was very red.

”Twice,” Green said.

Jayde did not say anything. Green did not seem to need her to. She began to work, cleaning first, and it hurt in a way that went all the way up both arms and into the place in the chest where the backlash had rung the Core like a bell, and Jayde stood still and let it.

Green’s face had not changed once since the beach. It had not changed when Jayde came into the Medical Bay with her hands on the queen and the necklace dark at her throat and her hair coming loose silver-white over her shoulders. It did not change now. Green had seen that face for years in the Pavilion, at the workshop bench and at the table and in the medical room with her wings out, and to Green it was simply Jayde’s face, and the brown one was the disguise.

Jayde found that she was grateful for that more than she could have said, and did not say it.

Once, working on the left hand, Green glanced up past Jayde’s shoulder to where the wings had come half up again and canted forward, toward the table and the woman on it, as a hand goes out to steady something that is not falling. She looked at them for as long as it took to tie a knot. Then she looked back down at the hand and went on, and whatever she had seen there she kept.

[She’s standing up.]

Reiko, from the beach, small in the back of her head.

[The dragon. She got up off the stones and walked up to him. He turned around and got down on his knees in front of her, and he’s holding her hand. The dead one. He hasn’t let go of it.]

[And White?]

[White made her sit, before. He says the hand’s dead from the inside out, and she was going into shock. Now he’s watching them. Isha’s watching her. I’m watching her. Nobody’s moved. Nobody’s said anything except the two of them, and I couldn’t hear what.] A pause. [She keeps looking at the place you went.]

[Is she going to run?]

[No.] He did not hesitate. [I can smell her from here. She’s cold, and she’s bleeding inside, and she can barely stand. She’s not going anywhere. She’s waiting.]

[For what?]

[You.]

Green tied off the second dressing and stepped back.

+++

There were four things Jayde could do about a woman on a beach who had seen her face and watched her open the Pavilion, and she went through them in the time it took to flex her hands inside the dressings and find out which of the fingers would close.

She could kill her.

She had built a strike to do it on that beach, and the rule had been perfectly clear about it, and then a hand had gone into a wound and stayed there, and the rule had turned out to be about who was bleeding. And then Yinxin had started to say the dragon is not from the stones, with half the blood in her gone into the shingle, and had not been allowed to finish. Jayde knew how that sentence ended. She did not need to hear it.

That one was gone.

She could send her away. Put her on the road, let her walk back to wherever she had come from with a dead hand and a torn core and the whole of it in her head, Jayde’s face and the Pavilion opening and the queen going into nothing — and trust a stranger to keep it. A stranger who had come down a world to kill her. Who had been wrong about something large enough to bring her down a world, and had only found it out on the stones this morning.

That was not trust. It was hope, and she could not spend hope with the wyrmlings in the corridor behind Takara and Yinxin asleep on the table.

She could keep her on the beach with White and Isha and Reiko around her, under guard, in the open, where the corps would be coming down the hill as soon as Heiteng ran out of carts to stand in front of. That was not a solution. It was a delay with a cold woman at the middle of it.

Or she could bring her inside.

Not as a prisoner. There was no prison in the Pavilion, and there never would be. Inside, where the secret already lived, where everybody who knew it already was. Where nothing Cangwei had seen could leak, because there was nobody inside to leak it to who did not already have it.

And where there was a healer, who had just closed a vessel in a silver dragon’s shoulder and could look at a dead hand and a torn core and say a number or decline to.

Jayde turned that over once more, looking for the hole in it.

She found one. Cangwei inside was Cangwei knowing everything — not just the face, not just a door opening on a beach, but all of it. The wyrmlings. The workshop. The seedling. The ship. Ashborn and the five eggs. Everything Jayde had built in four years to be the one place on three worlds nobody could see into.

For a long moment she looked at the hole.

Then she looked at the table, where Yinxin lay asleep, who had stepped into one pace of beach and chosen which blow to take, and had chosen the one that let the dragon live. Who had started to say the dragon is not with almost nothing left in her to say it with.

Yinxin had already decided. Jayde had only been slower.

”Green,” she said. ”I am bringing her in.”

Green did not ask who. She did not ask why. She looked at Jayde’s face for a moment, and then she went to the cabinet against the long wall and began taking things down from it and laying them out on the second table, the empty one, in the order she would want them.

”White says the hand is dead from the inside,” Jayde said. ”Reiko heard him.”

”Then I will not know what that means until I have touched it.” Green set down a basin. ”I will tell you after.”

”And the core?”

Green stopped with a jar in her hand.

”I have never touched a torn core,” she said. ”Nobody I know has ever touched a torn core and lived to describe it, because the ones who have them do not come back up the road to be looked at.” She set the jar down. ”I would like to try. I will not promise you anything.”

”I am not asking you to.”

”I know. That is why I will try.”

+++

The beach came back around her all at once, as it always does.

Cold first, off the water in a flat sheet, and then the light — real light now, gray going pale gold at the edge of the sky behind the hill, enough to see colors by. The river. The reeds. The flat gray plate of fused shingle at the water’s edge, cooled to silence. Two of them.

Reiko was on his feet before her feet had found the stones. He did not come to her. He went and stood at her right side, the side with the arm that would not lift, and stayed there.

White had not moved. Isha had not moved. Both of them looked at her, and at her bandaged hands, and neither of them said a word.

Twenty paces up the shingle, Heiteng was already standing.

He had been on his knees. Jayde could see the marks in the gravel where his knees had been. But he had heard her come, or felt it, or simply known, and by the time she turned toward him he was up, and he had moved, one long step to the side, and now he was standing square between her and the woman behind him.

Cangwei stood behind his shoulder. Her dead hand hung at her side. The live one was held away from her coat, the blood on it gone dark and dry. She was looking past him, at Jayde.

At Jayde’s face.

In daylight, this time, with nothing over it. The hair silver-white and loose. The eyes gold. And behind her, in the first real light that morning, the wings: dark through the whole vane, every feather edged with a line of black metal that caught the gold coming up over the hill, folded high behind her shoulders and not quite still.

Cangwei did not look away from them.

Jayde watched her find the rest. The slate-gray eyes stayed on the wings a long time. Then they came down to the fine silver sheen of scale along Jayde’s jaw and the side of her throat, and down again, to the hands, to the fingers bare past the linen and the talons at the end of each one, clear and hard as cut diamond in the new light — and then back up, slowly, to the face, as a clerk goes back over a column she thought she had finished.

Jayde did not look away either.

She walked up the shingle. Twenty paces. Every one of them was loud, the stones going out from under her boots in small slides, as everything on that beach had been loud all morning. Heiteng watched her come and did not move out of her way. His face gave her nothing. His hands were at his sides. She had used his name twice that morning, and she was not going to use it a third time for this.

Jayde stopped one pace from him.

He was a head taller than her, and he did not look down. He looked straight ahead, over her, at nothing, the way a man stands in a doorway he has decided to stand in.

Jayde did not ask him to move.

Her wings did. They came up off her back without her, half open, the edges lifting into the light with a long dry hiss, as they lift on a ridge before she goes off it, and Heiteng’s eyes went to them and stayed. Behind him, Cangwei went very still.

Jayde brought them down. It took more than her face had taken all morning. They folded slowly, feather by feather, and lay flat against her back, and this time they stayed there.

She lifted her left hand — the one that would lift, wrapped in Green’s clean linen from the heel to the wrist, with a spot of red already coming through at the center of the palm — and reached past his shoulder with it, slowly, so that he could see every inch of where it was going, and held it out, open, to the woman behind him.

”Green is waiting,” she said. ”She would like to look at your hand.”