Episode 270 · The Hand on the Wrist

Krista was six steps up the stair when the dust thinned enough to show her the floor of the chamber.

Two shapes in the light from the slit. One turning, one circling right. She knew the turn. Soles kept men on his left now, on the side he could still hear.

She started down.

Noct was on the stair below her. He stood in the middle of the tread, exactly in the middle, his hands loose at his sides. Of course he was here. The stair was the only way out of the chamber that wasn’t water.

— Don’t, he said. His voice was clear. Nothing lazy in it at all. He wants this with nobody in it.

— I’m not nobody.

— Down there you are.

She went for the gap on his left. His hand was on her forearm before she had moved, as if he had seen it in her shoulders. She tried the right. The same hand, the same forearm, and her heel on the step she had left.

Fast. Faster than he should be. He watches what I’m about to do, not what I’m doing.

She stopped trying. She let the noise of the chamber fall away, the slit, the water, Tesa swearing somewhere below, until there was only one sound left to her. His breathing.

It was even. Then the slit breathed out, and his shoulder drifted an inch toward the wall, and his breath caught short.

Once more. Same inch. Same catch.

On the grating he had not touched the sides. In the chamber he had stood in the middle of the floor. Here, in the middle of the tread.

Not a habit. He’s afraid of it.

To read his hands she would have to lie to him. That was how it had always worked.

She looked past his shoulder, at the stone beside his head, and let her face go still.

— Noct, she said quietly. The wall.

His whole body went away from it. Hands up, weight thrown to the open side of the stair, eyes wide on the stone. Krista went past him on the wall side, so close her sleeve brushed the rock, and she saw his face as she passed.

Behind her he did not follow. She could hear his breath still going short and fast, still in the exact middle of the tread, as if the stair had become very narrow.

She had used that. She would have to think about it later.

❦

— Give me the pale one, Soles said.

Varren kept circling.

— With both of them I can see which threads are yours, Soles said. Without it I cut blind. I asked you the first night. I’m asking again.

— I heard you the first night.

— Then give it to me.

— No.

He came in on the word.

The first time Soles swung the chain out, it caught Varren’s coat and held. Varren let the coat go. He shrugged out of it the way you drop something you were only carrying for someone else, and the coat slid off the blade into the dark, and Varren was already inside its reach.

Soles stepped back to make room for the chain and swung again, quicker, and Varren was not where the chain went. He had stepped inside the arc, low, the way a man goes through a door he has been paid to go through. A palm touched Soles’s knee.

The leg locked. Soles went down on his back with the slit roaring beside his head, and Varren came down after him with one knee on his chest and the pale blade in his right hand.

The world slowed.

Soles knew this. It had come before, when something was about to kill him. The dust hung in the light. Varren’s blade was coming down the way a leaf comes down in still air. And Varren’s right forearm was bare, the sleeve pushed back, a hand’s width from the dark blade in Soles’s fist.

One cut. Not to the heart. To the arm.

He knew what the dark blade did to a man who carried other lives. It took them. It did not ask which. Whatever lives Varren carried, the ones that kept him upright, the dark blade would find one and take it, or take all of them, and Soles would not know which until he saw what was left.

Blind. Like the cut I was trying not to make.

He opened his hand.

Time came back all at once. Varren’s thumb landed on his wrist, and the wrist went dead, the dark blade lying useless in his open palm.

The pale blade came down. Soles caught Varren’s hands on the handle with his left hand, both of them, because the blade itself would throw him off, and held.

It was not enough. He had known it would not be. Varren had both hands and his whole weight behind them. Soles had one hand and a knee on his chest.

Varren leaned his weight onto the handle. His face was very close. There was dust in the cut over his eyebrow.

— Here, Varren said. You can have it.

The point went in under Soles’s collarbone.

It did not hurt yet. It was cold, and then it was very cold, and it went deep. Soles watched Varren’s eyes and saw the moment Varren believed he had found the heart.

Then the handle pushed Varren’s hands off it.

Not Soles. The blade. As if it had turned over in its sleep. Varren’s hands came away from it and stayed in the air, open, and he looked at them.

Soles’s left hand closed on the handle. It did not push him away.

— Then they’re mine to answer for, he said.

Something woke.

Not Phenom. Not Haya. Something with no name and no face, sitting up inside him in the dark as if it had always been there and had just been told to start work. Soles felt it the way you feel a stranger come into a room behind you.

Varren saw it too. Soles could tell from his face. Whatever Varren saw, it was not what he had come down here to see.

The slit breathed in.

The floor tilted under Soles, or he slid on it, toward the light, toward the heat, with a knife in his chest and one dead hand and nothing to hold. Varren reached and missed.

Somebody caught his wrist.

— One, Krista said. Two. Soles. Three.