Chapter 103: The Fool’s Law

[Day 5 of 40.]

Cassian Haskel came down the gangway an hour after dawn, and the first thing he did was smile.

It was a good smile, the warm, easy one from Patrons’ Night with all his white teeth in it, and he wore it down the whole slope of the hull and across the ice to the rings, untroubled. He wore it as if a boy called Garret hadn’t been folded into a deck the night before, and as if every person he had bought hadn’t walked away from him at dawn.

The heat came with him, rolling ahead of him across the ice in thick waves. Aren felt it from thirty paces away, and he saw the faces in the rings turn toward it before they could stop themselves.

’He’s not here to apologize. He’s here to buy them back.’

Aren was still standing at the bow of the ship. He hadn’t moved since he found the empty place in the ring of carved figures, and Priest-boy was still kneeling on the ice a few paces behind him, praying over his beads.

Haskel stopped in front of the rings.

"Let me be plain with you all," he began pleasantly. "Last night was a tragedy, and Garret was a friend of my family’s." He let that sink in. "But I think we’ve all been listening to the wrong advice. A ship, a song about firewood!" He spread his hands wide. "Who told you to come down off that ship? Who told you it was alive?"

Nobody answered him, but several of them glanced at the fool.

"Exactly," said Haskel. "A fool, a man who falls over for coppers." His smile widened smugly. "We’ve been taking our lives into our hands on the word of a clown, and I think it’s high time someone reminded him what he’s for."

He turned and walked toward the bow.

Ivo called out something sharp from the edge of the camp, and Kaela’s head came up on her horse, but neither of them moved, and Aren understood why. The Prince’s charter said the escort guarded, and it never touched.

Haskel came to a stop in front of the fool.

"Dance," he ordered.

Aren looked at him through the eye holes of the mask. "I’m sorry, my lord?"

"You’re a fool, and fools dance, so dance for us." Haskel tilted his head. "Make us laugh. Go on, that’s your job, isn’t it?"

’Fine. Falling down is free.’

So he danced, doing the silly hopping step from the end of Grell’s show, the one the twins loved, with his elbows flapping and his bell jingling madly, and halfway through he tripped over his own boots and went down flat on the ice. A few people in the rings laughed nervously, because they didn’t know what else to do.

He was getting up again when Haskel hit him.

It was an open hand across the face, and it was burning. Aren felt the heat go straight through the mask and into his cheek like a branding iron, and the force of the blow put him back down on the ice. The mask cracked from the eye to the jaw.

A sound went through the rings, everybody breathing in at once.

Nobody ever hit a fool. It was written in the law, and everybody in the Empire knew it as surely as they knew not to spit in a temple. Fools were nothing, and you didn’t hit nothing, because it was far beneath you.

Haskel looked down at him and smiled. "There, that’s what you’re for."

’Stay down. Stay down, take it, fall over again. He wants you to get up, so don’t give him anything.’

He stayed down, and Haskel drew back his foot.

And then Priest-boy was there, although Aren never saw him move. One moment he was kneeling behind the fool with his beads, and the next he was standing between them with his thin arms spread wide and his shaved head bare to the wind, shaking so badly that his teeth clicked.

"Leave him alone!" His voice cracked. "He saved you. He told you about the fire and you didn’t listen. He saved all of us, so leave him alone!"

Haskel blinked at him in genuine surprise, as a man might if a chair suddenly spoke.

Then he put his burning hand flat on Priest-boy’s chest and pushed.

It wasn’t a hard push, only the kind you give a door, but it was hot enough to make Priest-boy cry out, and he stumbled backward two steps, then three, with his heels skidding helplessly on the ice, until his back struck the bow of the ship.

Aren saw it happen as slowly as he had seen the lance coming at Vivienne in the yard at Kharn, every piece of it at once. He saw Priest-boy’s shoulders hit the old wood, and the ring of carved figures above his head, and the empty place in the ring, smooth and clean, with two wooden hands reaching into it from either side.

The hands moved. They didn’t snatch at him; they opened a little wider and took his wrists, gently, as you might take the hands of a frightened child to lead him across a road.

Priest-boy looked up at them curiously, and Aren was on his feet without remembering how he got there. He crossed the ice in two strides, locked both hands around Priest-boy’s arm and pulled, and he didn’t pull like a fool. He pulled with all four hundred and thirteen points of a body that had been through four temperings, while his boots slid on the ice and the old wood creaked and refused to give.

’Weight. Zero. Make him weigh nothing!’

[Reduce to Zero: the boy’s weight.]

It made no difference whatsoever, because it wasn’t the boy’s weight holding him. The wood was already climbing his wrists, smooth and pale, up his forearms toward his elbows, and Aren could feel it through his own hands, the same slow pulse as the nails and the same blood.

He pulled until something in his shoulder tore.

"Stop," Priest-boy whispered. He wasn’t looking at the wood climbing his arms or at the ship, but at the fool’s face, at the crack in the mask and the eye behind it.

"It’s all right. It doesn’t hurt. It’s warm." He sounded surprised. "It’s warm, and they’re all holding hands, did you know that? So nobody’s alone." The wood reached his shoulders. He opened his fingers, and his string of beads dropped into the snow between them. "Count for me," he said. "I always lose my place."

The wood closed over his face.

Aren was holding an arm made of pale, smooth wood, and he let go of it.

Above him, in the ring around the empty circle on the bow, there were fourteen figures now. The new one was thin, with a shaved head and a calm face, and its hands were held fast by the figures on either side.

[Reduce to Zero. Uses today: 1/2.]

He bent down and picked the beads up out of the snow.

Behind him, Cassian Haskel laughed, and it wasn’t a good laugh. It came out too high and too quick, and Aren could hear the fright in it, the same fright as on the night Dunstan had walked into the ice. But Haskel was a boy who had been taught his whole life that when you were frightened you got louder, and so he got louder.

"Well, he walked into that, didn’t he? You all saw it, nobody pushed him into anything." He looked around at the rings. "That’s what happens when you listen to fools."

Aren turned around.

He didn’t fall over, or stumble, or jingle, or pull a face. He turned around with the beads in his left hand and the cracked mask on his face, and he looked at Cassian Haskel.

Something in how he did it made Haskel stop talking.

Then Haskel’s pride caught up with his fear, and he swung again.

This time it was a fist wrapped in fire, a real blow with all the strength of a Rank D Blood behind it, the kind that broke jaws. It came straight at the fool’s face, very fast.

Aren caught it. He didn’t duck or block it. He reached up with his right hand, closed it around Haskel’s burning fist and held it there in the air between them, and although the fire hissed against his palm, he didn’t let go.

The whole lake went silent.

Haskel stared at his own fist. He pulled, and it didn’t move. He pushed, and it didn’t move either. He poured more and more heat into it until the air around their hands shimmered and the ice under their feet began to steam, and still the fool’s hand stayed where it was.

’You’ve wanted to do this since Patrons’ Night, so admit it.’

He happily admitted it.

[Reduce to Zero: Cassian Haskel’s heat.]

He thought it, and it happened instantly.

The fire went out, and not only on Haskel’s fist but everywhere at once. The shimmer around him vanished, along with the steam off his shoulders and the warmth that had rolled ahead of him across the ice all morning, all of it gone at once, snuffed out completely!

And the cold of the White Hollow, which had been waiting outside that warmth for five days, came rushing in.

Haskel’s knees went first, and Aren watched them buckle. Then every bit of color drained out of his face. His lips went grey and then blue, and frost came out of nowhere and settled thickly in his hair, his eyebrows and the fine fur of his collar, while his teeth chattered uncontrollably.

Aren held on to his fist and let him sink, slowly, until Cassian Haskel was kneeling on the ice in front of him, shaking, in front of all twenty-one people still standing on the lake.

[Cost: the Host’s heat. 1 second.]

For one second, the same cold went through Aren too, and every scrap of warmth in his body vanished at once. Frost bloomed white across his coat and his cap and the cracked mask, and his heart stuttered painfully.

Then the second ended, and he was only very cold again, and Haskel was still kneeling.

[Reduce to Zero. Uses today: 2/2.]

Aren bent down until the crack in his mask was level with Haskel’s frozen face, and when he spoke, it wasn’t in the fool’s voice.

"The law says nobody hits a fool," he said quietly. "It doesn’t say anything about what the fool does back."

He let go, and Haskel toppled sideways onto the ice and lay curled up there, shaking, while the heat crept back into him from wherever it had gone.

Nobody went to help him. His one remaining companion took one step forward, glanced at the fool, and hurriedly stepped back again.

Aren put the beads in his pocket and walked back to the rings.

The rings opened for him. Freckles was crying, the Corvane twin was gaping at him with his mouth wide open, and Jory had both hands pressed over his face. The merchant girl, who almost never spoke, said it for all of them.

"He was right about you."

Sigrid Varken stood at the edge of the ring with her hands in her sleeves, and she didn’t look remotely surprised. She looked at the crack in his mask and the frost on his coat, and her mouth moved very slightly.

"So much," she murmured, "for looking like it’s hard."

He didn’t answer her, because he didn’t trust his voice yet.

Kaela rode over slowly and stopped her horse beside the ring. She looked down at him without speaking, and she didn’t look at the fool’s cap or the bell or the silly painted mouth. She looked at his right hand, at the burn blistering across the palm where Haskel’s fist had been.

"Who are you?" she demanded.

"Naught, Captain." The fool’s voice came back, a little hoarse. "Nobody at all, I’m afraid."

"No." Kaela’s dark eyes stayed fixed on him. "Nobody falls down like you do, and nobody gets up like that."

She turned her horse and rode away.

[Kaela Voss. Hostility: 100%.]

[Cassian Haskel. Hostility: 100%.]

He considered the second line.

’Well, that one isn’t an Anchor. That one’s a promise.’

Slowly, he became aware that the ice under his boots felt different, and he looked down.

There was a soldier frozen beneath him, as there was beneath everyone, a grown man in old armor caught in the middle of running toward the center. On the first day he had been facing the center, and on the second he had turned his head.

Now his whole body had turned around, and he was facing the fool.

Aren lifted his eyes and looked out across the lake.

As far as he could see, in every direction and in every row, every soldier in the ice had turned around, and they were all facing him.

[The Hollow has noticed you.]

’So much for being a fool.’