Episode 124 · What He Wanted

He recognized the request. He knew it from somewhere deep, from before himself. People standing in front of death and refusing it. Refusing it with everything they had, for years, for whole lives, each with a reason: an until, something unfinished, someone to protect. Soles himself had told death, so many times without knowing he was telling it: not until I know.

Varren stood in front of him with the same refusal turned inside out. He did not want to live until he finished something. He wanted to die before he himself was finished.

And he was asking Soles to give him that.

The anger in Soles’s palms wavered. It did not go out. It simply had nowhere to go. If he let it out, he did exactly what Varren was asking. If he killed this man, on this bank, with this blade, Varren won. He got what he had wanted from the beginning: Soles beside him at the end, the only person who had come.

Phenom’s attention tightened on the blade.

Kill.

One word. Soles could supply the movement himself, and every reason he had carried here.

Soles knew exactly where. That frightened him more than anything else that night.

— No, he said again.

His voice came out softer than the first time, but steadier.

— I’m not killing you, Varren. Not because I forgive you. I don’t. Maybe I never will. But I’m not giving you what you want. You made sure I wouldn’t be alone when I found out. Fine. I’m not alone now either.

He did not turn toward the others. He did not need to. He could feel them: Maxim’s weight resting on the crowbar, on the stone, to his right; Tesa’s breathing, slow the way she breathed between rounds; Krista’s hand, no longer holding the phone but a stone from the bank the size of her fist.

Varren looked past Soles at them one by one. Something passed over his face that Soles had never seen there. It was not anger. It was a kind of quiet sadness. What he had made had not turned out the way he planned.

— Then I’ll make you want to, he said quietly.

And the steam above the water stopped rising.

It hung over the surface like stretched cloth, motionless, and in that silence Soles heard for the first time how loudly each of them was breathing.

Varren did not come toward him.

He went toward Maxim.

He did not run. He took two steps, and the third could no longer be seen. Soles felt him moving through the stones of the bank, a weight passing from one place to another without crossing the air between, the way pressure moves through a beam when you step on one end. Then Varren was beside Maxim, and the crowbar was already rising to meet him.

Maxim had felt him coming. That was what he told Soles later, wearing the face of a man who did not understand how: he had felt Varren the way he felt ships from an hour away, except the hour had lasted half a second. He raised the crowbar with both hands, crosswise, like the barrier on the bridge.

Varren caught it in one hand. He bent it.

The iron, thick as a wrist, warped in his palm with a long squeal like an old door until the ends nearly touched. Varren did not even strain his face, and he stopped there, as if bending it any further would have been showing off. He took the crowbar from Maxim as if taking a toy from a child and threw it into the water.

— I’m sorry, he told him. I know you were fond of it.

Then he pushed Maxim in the chest with the back of his hand. Not hard. Just enough to put his weight onto the injured ankle. Maxim fell onto the stones with a short sound and did not cry out.

— Look at me, Soles, Varren said without turning. Look at what I’m doing. I’m not going to stop.

Tesa closed her eyes.

Soles saw her close them and understood. Varren made no sound. No footsteps, no rustle of clothes, nothing. But the water did. Water moved out of his way in the puddles on the bank, and the frozen steam shifted when he passed through it. Tesa was listening to the water.

She struck her good wrist against the cracked cast once. Pain shot through her arm into her teeth, white and clean. And the one who had kept apart from her since the quays came.

Varren turned toward her, and she struck before he finished turning. Her good fist caught him beneath the ribs, short and rising from below, with all the weight from her knees and all the weight of the one behind her. Soles heard the blow the way he had heard ten iron cabinets start moving on their rails in the archive.

Varren folded. Then straightened.

— Beautiful, he said. Truly beautiful.

He caught the wrist inside the cast with two fingers. He did not squeeze. He only pressed once, in a single point, with the certainty of a man who knew exactly where bones break the second time. Tesa made a sound through her teeth and dropped to one knee. She did not open her eyes. She did not rise, but neither did she sink any farther.

Soles was already moving. He did not remember deciding to.

It was not the soldier, who had held him upright in the shield line. Not the king or Elias. Phenom had come beside him, close as the wrist Soles had once touched in the garden. The refusal had not driven him away. He waited for Soles to choose where the blade would go. Soles’s body went low and long. The hilt entered his palm on its own, held tight from underneath, the blade turned back toward his wrist, and his feet found a path across the wet stones that he had never walked and somehow knew.

Varren saw him coming.

And for a moment, his face changed. Not with fear. With recognition, like a man hearing a voice from home in the street.

He slipped away from the blade with a movement Soles knew. Not from any fight. From his own body. Elbow tucked, shoulder turned, weight on the back heel. It was the movement Soles himself would make. The movement he had just made, a heartbeat earlier, to get there.

— You taught us yourself, Varren said softly, astonished.

— From your left! Krista shouted.

Soles threw himself to the right. He got his head clear. Varren’s palm caught the forearm he had raised beside it.

The arm struck his chest. Both feet left the stone.

He landed on his hip and slid, the blade tight against his right wrist. The impact emptied his lungs. He tried to get up and found himself on one knee, his left arm hanging too heavily to help.

Varren had stopped with his striking elbow still bent. He could have followed. He stayed where he was and watched Soles try to breathe.

He stopped the blow. That was him stopping.

Soles wanted the point of the blade under that arm. The knowledge came cleanly, with the promise of an end to the pain and the watching. He shut his fingers harder around the hilt and kept the point down.

Krista was still calling. He heard her on his right. He put a foot beneath himself and stood before the others had to come for him. His forearm throbbed with his heartbeat. Varren’s hand was open again.