Kieran Refuses

Osric held the first sheet up to the lamp and read it for a very long time.

He did not hurry. He examined each of the three pages front and back, tilting them against the light, running his thumbnail along the borders to feel the grain of the vellum. He made a small, tuneless humming noise in his throat. Twice he took off his spectacles and wiped them, and twice he put them back on and began again at the top. Kieran watched him from the other side of the reading table with his arms folded and his jaw set, and Solaia, sitting cross-legged on the floor behind the old man with Soot asleep across her lap, watched Kieran.

She had not been told what the pages were. She had been told only that the Pontiff had come, that he had left something, and that Osric should see it. The rest she had read in the way he held himself.

"Well?" said Kieran, at last.

"The draftsmanship is exquisite," said Osric.

"That is not what I asked."

"It is what I can say with certainty." The old man laid the sheet down with great gentleness. "The work is real. I would swear to it. The proportions are those of the old Sky Guard, and the notation is Vraelyran, of the late period. This was made by someone who knew the craft. Someone who had walked the Seat of the Thrones with a measuring rod."

"Can it do what he says?"

"Draw the fire out of a body?" Osric considered. "Yes. I believe so. It would be a very elegant way to do it."

Solaia's head came up. "Draw the what?"

"Nothing, my dear."

"Osric."

"It is a theory," said the archivist, with a sidelong glance at the Emperor, who had not moved. "Of a device. A way to bleed the power out of a creature of the Sky. I have seen the sketches before, in a fragment, in the Keepers' own records. We were never certain if it was meant as a weapon or a cure."

"And which was it?"

"It was meant, I think, as both." His faded eyes were troubled. "That is the difficulty with a good tool. It does not care who holds it."

He turned the third sheet toward the light, and stopped.

"Ah," he said softly.

"What?"

"The Seat."

"The point at the apex. He called it the Seat."

"Yes." Osric laid one dry finger on the small clear script. "I wonder, Your Majesty, if you noticed what is not written beside it."

"What do you mean?"

"The design is a circuit. A ring of pillars, a lattice, a draw. The fire passes through the body and is led away along the lines. Into the Seat." His finger tapped. "But a circuit has two ends. A thing is drawn from one place. It must be delivered to another. And he has told you where it comes from, and where it is stored." The finger lifted. "He has not told you who sits there."

The silence was very thorough.

"The fire does not vanish," said Osric. "It cannot. It is carried to the Seat, and held there, and it has to be held by something. Some vessel. Some body, or some will." He took off his spectacles. "I should like to know, before any of this is built, whose."

Solaia got to her feet. Soot slid from her lap, protesting, and climbed the leg of the table.

"Someone tell me," she said, "what we're talking about."

Kieran looked at her.

He had known that he would have to. He had spent the whole night preparing the words, turning them over like stones, searching for the shape that would hurt the least. And now they were all gone. He stood in the lamplit cold of the Archive and looked at the woman who had once been a queen, and had once been a beggar, and was both, and he opened his mouth.

"It is a method," he said, "of making you safe."

"Safe how?"

"By taking away what they want."

She looked at the vellum. She looked at his face. Her own had gone very quiet, and very still.

"Taking away the fire," she said.

"Yes."

"Taking away me."

"No. No." He crossed the room in two strides and caught her by the shoulders. "Not you. Never you. Only the thing in you that they will not stop hunting. You would still be Solaia. You would still know me. You would be—"

"Ordinary."

He closed his mouth.

"That's the word, isn't it? You didn't want to say it." Her voice did not shake. She was looking up at him with a sort of puzzled intensity, as though she were reading a letter in a language she half knew. "He offered it to you. The old man. He said he could make me ordinary."

"He did."

"And what did you say?"

"I said nothing." He swallowed. "I took the pages."

"Why?"

"Because I did not know how to refuse him."

It was the truth. He had not known he would say it until it was said. It sat between them in the cold, quiet and enormous, and he felt it go through her like a draft.

Then, to his astonishment, she smiled. A small, crooked, rueful smile. She put her hand up, slowly, and laid it against his cheek.

"Thank you for telling me," she said.

"I should have—"

"You didn't hide it." She stroked her thumb along his cheekbone. "You came down here and put it on the table in front of me. That's not nothing, Kieran. I've known you a good while. That's very much not nothing." She drew a breath. "Now. What are you going to do?"

…

He burned them that night, in the Frost Chamber, in front of Crane.

He had not meant it as a performance. He had thought to do it alone. But the Commander had come in at midnight with a dispatch, and found the Emperor on his knees in front of the great stone hearth, feeding a fold of black silk into the flames, and had stopped in the doorway with his mouth open.

"Majesty?"

"Close the door, Halvard."

Crane closed it. He came forward, slowly, and stood at the Emperor's shoulder. In the fire, the vellum had curled up and blackened. The fine lines of the draftsman's pen glowed and shriveled, one after another, like the veins of a dying leaf. For a moment the whole design stood out in orange against the char: the ring of pillars, the lattice, the small bright point at the heart of it. Then it crumbled.

"May I ask what that was?"

"A gift."

"Majesty, with respect. I do not think it was a gift." The old soldier's voice was very low. "I have seen the Pontiff's gifts. I helped bury the last one."

Kieran almost laughed.

"You are very perceptive, Commander."

"I am very old." Crane did not take his eyes from the fire. "I do not know what it was. I will not ask. I will only say that I have followed three Emperors, and that I believe this is the first time any of them burned a thing because it was wrong."

"It is not the first time you have seen me do something wrong."

"No, Majesty." A creak of a smile. "But it is the first time I have seen you do something right in the same breath."

Kieran said nothing. The last of the vellum fell to ash. He took the poker and broke it up, carefully, into the coals. He watched the glow die. And he thought, with a slow cold wonder: there. It is finished. I have said no.

It had been so easy.

He stood up. He put the poker back on its rack. He turned to dismiss the Commander, and as he turned, something in his chest gave way.

…

It was like being struck from behind with an iron bar.

He had not felt it come. There had been no warning, no tightening, no creeping chill. One moment he stood on the hearthstone with his hand on the rack, perfectly well. The next, the room had gone black. A vast soundless pressure had come down on him from above, from the back of his skull, and all the strength went out of his legs. He pitched forward. His hand caught the mantel. He heard Crane say his name from a long way off.

There you are, said the dark.

It was not a voice. It had never been a voice. It was the sense of an enormous patient attention, a weight, a hunger; a thing that had waited at the edge of his mind for ten years, and had been, for the first time in two months, outside the door. And it was furious. It poured through his veins like cold lead. The black lines burst from his wrists and climbed in an instant to his elbows, to his throat. His breath froze in his lungs.

You have said no, said the thing. You have said it to the one who could have saved you. You will pay.

"Majesty!"

Crane's hands were on him. Crane's voice was shouting for a surgeon, for the guard, for the Lady. He heard the door bang. He heard boots in the corridor. He felt his own mouth open, and a sound come out of it that was not any sound a man should make, and the stone beneath his knees began to crack.

And then there was a hand on his face.

It was small, and warm, and a little rough from the practice sword. Fingers slid into his hair. A body pressed against him, light and fierce and shaking. He smelled snow and woodsmoke and cold iron, and under it something sweet that he could not name. A voice, very close, very steady, said, "Look at me."

He could not.

"Kieran. Look at me."

He opened his eyes.

She was kneeling in front of him on the broken floor, in her nightgown, with her hair all down and a smear of ash on her cheek. Her eyes were enormous. They were not gray. They were violet, from rim to rim, and the pupils were vertical slits, and around her head, in the dark, a faint white halo had begun to glow.

"There you are," said Solaia.

She put both hands on his chest.

The cold went out of him like a tide.

It did not go all at once. It had to be drawn, a thread at a time, out of his veins and his bones and the dark place behind his eyes, and he felt each thread as it came, a thin sweet burning that ran up her arms and into her. He felt her shudder. He felt her hold. The black retreated from his throat. From his elbows. From his wrists. It sank back under his skin and was gone, and the thing at the back of his skull let go with a kind of sullen snarl and drew back into its hole.

He breathed.

He lay on the cracked stone, panting, with her hands on his heart, and listened to the silence.

"There," said Solaia, in a very small voice. "There. It's gone."

She swayed.

He caught her as she fell. She came down against his chest like a dropped cloak, boneless, the violet fading from her eyes, and her skin where it touched his was cold as a fish. Her breathing was fast and shallow. A thread of blood had begun to run from one nostril.

"Solaia."

She did not answer.

"Solaia." He had her face between his hands. "Halvard! Fetch the physician. Now. Fetch—"

"No," said Crane, in a strange voice.

He was standing very still, a few paces away, with the guard behind him crowding the doorway. He was looking at the Lady Solaia. He had been looking at her, Kieran realized, since she came in.

"She is not hurt, Majesty," he said. "Look at her."

He looked.

There was no wound. No bruise. The nosebleed had stopped. She lay in his arms with her head thrown back and her lips slightly parted, and the color was beginning to creep back into her cheeks. But she was thinner. He saw it with horror. The bones of her face stood out as they had not an hour ago. Her wrists, lying limp across his knees, looked like a child's.

"It cost her," said Crane quietly.

"It cannot—"

"It did, Majesty. I saw it."

Kieran bent over her. He put his forehead against hers. Her breath was warm and slow on his face, and in the dark behind his closed eyes, as clearly as if she had spoken it aloud, he heard the voice of the thing in his veins, very small, very patient, very far away.

She cannot do it again and again.

How long, do you think, before there is nothing left?

…

He did not sleep.

When the physician had come and gone, and the guard had been dismissed, and the Lady Solaia had been carried back to her bed and tucked into it with a hot brick at her feet, the Emperor of the Ice Kingdom sat alone in the Frost Chamber with a single candle and a clean sheet of parchment.

He did not decide to do it. He would remember that afterward, with a kind of terrible honesty. He did not say to himself I shall copy them. He only found, as the candle burned low, that his hand had picked up a pen. That it had begun, steadily, line by line, to draw: first a ring, then thirty pillars, then a lattice of fine strokes, and at the apex a small bright point.

He knew it perfectly. He had looked at the original for only an hour. But every curve of it lay in his memory like a map of a country he had been born in.

Only to have it, he told himself. Only in case.

The ink went on. The candle guttered. Outside, the first gray light of morning began to creep along the sill, and on the table beside his elbow lay the folded page from the Marshal's ledger, with its last four lines, and the name of the woman he loved.

I pray he will be a man who loves her.

He folded the drawing in half, and in half again, and slid it behind the false panel of the desk drawer that his father had used for his own dark things.

And he closed it, and locked it, and told himself that this was not a betrayal.