Episode 197 · The Hunter's Patience

The plate rounded the bend, and Soles saw the dam two hundred meters ahead. Water fell over the long concrete lip in an unbroken white line. Its roar swallowed the smaller sounds of the river.

Two minutes. Less.

Wet to the skin. Hands that half work. Make them count.

The ice had stopped turning. It was drifting broadside toward the drop; when its leading edge went over, the whole plate would tip beneath him.

The weight moved under him.

He felt it go along the inside of the plate, a man walking through ice as if through a corridor, toward the thick edge farthest from the dam. Away from the thin place. Away from him. The plate would go over, break on the concrete, and the river would take whoever stood on top. Whoever lay inside the thickest ice might come through it. He had no reason to come out.

Whatever was standing on top was Soles.

He stood still and listened. The roar filled everything. Spray drifted back over the plate in a fine cold mist that froze where it landed. The weight had stopped moving: a man lying in a stone bath, waiting.

He’s not going to fight me. He’s going to let the river do it. Patient. Of course he’s patient. He taught somebody patience.

He looked at his bleeding left knuckles. He could barely close the hand. The cold had been in it since the hole.

Options. Jump, and swim two hundred meters of black water in this, and he walks out on the bank in the morning. Stay, and the dam has us both. Wait for him to come out. He won’t.

You can’t control it. Fine. Don’t control it. Aim it.

He thought of Tesa’s arm on the stairs, the marks of his fingers going from white to red. He had not been able to stop it then. Here there was nothing he needed to stop it for. The stairs had taught him one thing: the strength did not ask where it was going. So he would have to choose the place before he opened the door.

He crossed toward the hidden weight at the rear edge.

It was the stupidest thing he had ever decided, and he decided it the way he decided which bolt to undo first on a seized engine: there was only one that would move.

His wet clothes had begun to stiffen. Every step pulled at the place low in his back where the palm had landed, and his feet arrived on the ice a little after he sent them. He put each boot down on ice that had not cracked. Two steps, then another, while the spray came over him in sheets and the roar shook the plate. The time he needed to test his footing was time the river took from him. He stopped over the hidden weight, beneath the gray surface, still, waiting for the dam.

He knew what would happen if he did it. The man would be in the water, in the dark, above a dam. Something in him, quiet and very old, said that this was exactly right: you did not leave behind anything that could come up the road after you. Soles heard it, and did not argue with it, and did not agree. That was for afterward. There was going to be an afterward only if he did something now.

Up close, he could feel the man through the ice the way he felt a boiler through a wall: a shape, a warmth, a stillness that was not sleep.

He knelt. He laid his left hand flat on the ice, just above where the man’s chest would be. It was faintly warm.

— I know where you are, he said, though nothing could hear him over the water. I always know where you are, on this.

Then he let the strength come.

He did not push it. He did not hold it back. He opened the door under his ribs and let all of it go down his left arm and through his palm into the ice, the way the river was going over the dam, all at once, without asking.

The ice did not crack.

It burst.

The edge of the plate came apart under his hand in a white explosion of shards through its whole thickness, and the man who had been lying inside it was suddenly lying inside nothing, inside black water, his coat billowing up around him, his face, for the first time, a face Soles would remember: open-mouthed, astonished, entirely human for one long moment in the light from the town.

He came up once, in the broken water at the edge of the plate, with his bare hand reaching for ice that was no longer there.

Then the current took him under the plate, and he was gone. The plate rocked with the loss of his weight, righted itself, and went on toward the white line as if nothing had changed.

For three heartbeats, Soles knelt at the broken edge and did nothing at all. The spray had frozen in his eyebrows. He could hear his own teeth.

The black water churned where the man had gone under. Spray came over the plate in cold sheets. The roar of the dam was a wall of sound now, and under it, very quiet and very reasonable, in the garden beside his plant, Phenom said what he had said on a path in the snow, and in a stable yard, and over a man hanging upside down from an apple branch.

The river.

Soles knew what it offered. Leave the man to drown; the water would do what the blade had not. It was possible, perfectly, coldly possible. Phenom’s certainty did not make it Soles’s decision.

He knows where the guard is.

That was true as well.

And he looked at me like a man, at the end. Not like a lock.

That was not a reason. It was not anything he could have said out loud to Tesa or Krista and had them nod. But it was the thing that made him lie down flat on the ice. The cold of the plate came through his wet clothes at once, the whole length of him, and he lay in it anyway.