Episode 200 · What the Hunter Sold

— You trained Varren, Soles said. In the army, then the special unit. But who trained you to do this?

The man stood up.

He did it carefully, testing each joint, the way an old man stands. The sweater was too big for him. He did not take it off.

— That’s not for sale, he said. Not tonight. Tonight you bought the building.

— Will they move him, when they hear you lost?

— Not tonight. They don’t hear anything quickly. They write it down first.

He went to the back wall of the hut, where the concrete met the earth of the bank, and put his bare hand flat on it.

— We’re even, he said. Next time I see you, I won’t come walking.

— Next time I’ll pick somewhere with no ice.

This time the man did smile. Then he leaned into the wall, and the wall took him, shoulder and head and the too-big sweater, and closed behind his heel without a mark.

Soles sat on the floor of the dam-keeper’s hut until the stove went down, in a shirt that had dried enough to stop steaming, with his coat across his knees like a blanket that had lost an argument with a river. He listened to the concrete. The weight went away from him through the bank, into the earth, north, fast, and then it was too far to feel.

It was getting light when he climbed the steps from the dam to the river path. His fingers would not close on the rail; he climbed with his wrists hooked over it, like a man with no hands at all. The river was gray now, not black, and loud, and the town lay upstream along its bank with its roofs white and its chimneys starting to smoke. His boots squelched. He had broken a tooth and a padlock and a river and he had kept a man alive who had come to take the blade, and he had a building on the north ring road with nine windows on every floor.

He walked the kilometer home along the river path, slowly, past the ferry steps, where the shelf had broken away and left a straight black edge, as if someone had taken a saw to it. He rehearsed what he would say.

He could tell them the truth. It would take five minutes. The keys, the ice, the dam, the building with nine windows. Krista would listen to all of it in the polite voice, and at the end she would say, quite reasonably, that he had promised. And Tesa would want to go to the north ring road tonight, and Maxim would want to drive her, and the house the man had called a target would empty out onto a road toward the one building in the city built to keep people.

He did not rehearse the other thing, the one about the house being a target. That one he kept where the man had put it.

Or he could say he had been at the workshop.

I went to the workshop. Dorin had a job.

He turned the corner into his street.

Every light in his house was on.

He had seen the lights from the end of the street and kept walking anyway, because there was nowhere else to walk to, and because some small, cowardly part of him hoped they had simply forgotten to turn them off. They had not forgotten anything. The gate was open. Someone had cleared the snow off the path in the night, badly, with a shovel and a great deal of feeling.

Krista opened the door before he reached it.

She was dressed. She had been dressed for a long time; he could tell from the way her coat was buttoned, all the way up, the buttons done by someone who had needed something to do with her hands. Behind her the hall light was on, and the kitchen light, and the light on the stairs, and somewhere at the back of the house Lucky was barking the short, offended bark he kept for people who came home late.

She looked at him.

At his boots, full of river. At his coat, stiff with frost to the shoulders. At his left hand, the palm scraped raw from an iron rung. At his mouth, where a corner of a tooth was missing. She looked at all of it in order, the way she looked at a photograph she was about to catalogue, and her face did not change at all.

— Dorin’s workshop closes at six, she said. I called him at nine. He was asleep.

— Krista.

— Come inside. You’re letting the cold in.

He came inside.

The warmth of the hall hit his face and hands at once, and his fingers began to hurt in earnest, the deep, slow ache of things coming back that would have been easier to leave frozen.

They were all in the kitchen. Maxim in the chair by the window, with his coat on and the truck keys in his fist, as if he had been about to go and look for him and had been told not to. He had been out twice already; the snow was still melting off his boots. Tesa standing by the stove, her hands at her sides, very still in the way she was still before a bell. For once her sleeve was pushed up, and the marks on her forearm were the first thing he saw. The guard’s sister at the table, her hands around a cup, looking at the floor. He thought of the keys going down past his boots into the white water. He would have to tell her that too, and he did not know how. Mina on the sofa, awake, watching the door. Lucky, who stopped barking the moment he saw Soles and came and leaned against his wet legs with his whole weight, as if to hold him in the room.

Nobody said anything, not even Maxim, who always said something. Soles had been in rooms like that before. Never with these people.

He sat down at the table because his legs decided it, and nobody told him to take his boots off first. Krista sat down across from him. She still had her coat on.