Chapter 118: Blood Thief

[Day 39 of 40.]

She came aboard an hour after midnight.

Aren was sitting on the deck with his back against the mainmast, holding his right wrist in his left hand while Perfect Blood slowly put the bones back together. Most of the ship was asleep, or pretending to be. Sigrid had bandaged her own head and was sitting by the bow with her sword across her knees, and she was the first to hear the gangway creak.

She stood up, but Kaela walked past her without a glance.

"Stand aside, Varken."

"Captain, he..."

"I said stand aside!"

Sigrid looked at the fool, and when he nodded once, very slightly, she stepped back.

Kaela stopped in front of him. She wasn’t wearing her armor, only a plain dark coat, with her lance in one hand and the iron heart hanging on its chain outside her shirt. In the starlight her face was perfectly calm, which was much worse than angry.

"Take it off," she ordered, and he didn’t move.

"Take off the mask, fool, or I’ll take it off with the point of this lance, and I’ll take some of your face with it."

’Well, it was a good run.’

He didn’t take it off. He simply let his left hand fall away from his wrist and sat there, and after a moment Kaela understood that he wasn’t going to stop her. She crouched, reached out, and pulled the cracked white mask off his face.

She looked at him for three breaths, exactly as she had on the ledge in the mine.

"Ren," she breathed.

"Captain."

"The water boy, the thief in the Pools, the man who stole four months of my blood while I sat in the dark and felt it go." Her voice didn’t rise at all. "And then put it back. And then pulled me out of the deep pool and pushed on my chest until I breathed."

There wasn’t anything to say that she didn’t already know, so he kept quiet.

"There’s a warrant for you," Kaela went on quietly. "It’s in my tent, and it came up with the last supply sledge before the trial, under my father’s seal. Ren of Aldermere, the Blood Thief, to be brought before the Iron Throne alive." She turned the mask over in her hands. "Do you know what my father does to people who are brought before him alive?"

"I can guess."

"You can’t, because nobody can." She set the mask down on the deck between them.

’This is where she kills me. Or this is where she doesn’t. I really can’t tell which.’

"Tomorrow at dawn, I’m going into the ring," Aren said. "Ansel has the girl, and whatever’s under there has been waiting for three hundred years, and I don’t think it’s going to let anyone off this lake if I don’t." He held her eyes. "Come with me, and if we’re both alive at the end of it, you can put me in chains and take me to your father, and I won’t fight you."

Kaela was silent.

"You’ll run."

"I’ve had forty days to run, and I’m still here."

She looked at him a while longer, at the face she had drawn from memory and nailed to the walls of every guardhouse between Kharn and Frostgate. Then she stood up and picked up her lance.

"Dawn," she decided. "If you run, I’ll kill you myself, and I won’t need a warrant to do it."

She left the mask where it was.

[Kaela Voss. Hostility: 100%.]

He sat with it in his lap until the stars went pale. Then he put it back on, because the people on that ship knew him as the fool, and the fool was the one they had followed this far.

The iron ring was a thousand paces across, and at dawn it was the quietest place in the world.

The dead stood all around its edge, ten thousand of them, facing inward. None of them moved as two figures walked out across the ice, one in a cracked white mask with a bell on his cap and one in black armor with a lance. Their breath steamed in the cold, and the bell rang softly with every step.

Ansel was waiting in the center.

Freckles stood beside him, holding his hand like a child at a fair, humming. The thread from her back ran down into the ice at her feet, taut as a bowstring. Somewhere far out under the ice, the iron of the ring curved away on every side, and under it lay the hollow, and in the hollow, the thing that breathed.

"Captain Voss," Ansel said pleasantly. "I didn’t think the Crown would send its own daughter to watch."

Kaela didn’t answer, and the point of her lance didn’t waver.

"No? Then you’re here for him." The grey eyes moved to the fool. "I understand completely. He’s very hard not to follow."

’Of all the people to agree with.’

"Give me the girl, and we can all go home."

"Nobody goes home from this lake, little eater. That was never the arrangement." Ansel tilted his head. "But you came, and I admire that. So I’ll give you a fair chance before the Hollow wakes. Take her from me, if you can."

Kaela moved first. She crossed forty paces of ice in a heartbeat, low and fast, a Blooded lancer at the peak of her strength, and the lance went at Ansel’s heart with three hundred years of Imperial drill behind it. It was a perfect thrust, the kind that ended duels before the crowd had finished sitting down.

Ansel lifted Freckles into its path.

Kaela turned the point aside so violently that her own shoulder cracked, and in the half-second she was open, Ansel stepped past the lance and touched her breastplate with two fingers. She flew backward across the ice, hit it, rolled, and came up on one knee with blood running out of her nose.

’Twenty years of training against two fingers. That’s what Rank B looks like up close.’

Aren went in after her, with the Moonlit Step and the eel blade low and Street Fighter’s Instinct wide open, and for three exchanges he understood exactly how outmatched he was. Ansel didn’t move faster than him. Ansel was simply already somewhere else, every time, as if he had read the whole fight in advance and found it a little dull. The eel blade cut nothing but air. On the fourth exchange, Ansel tapped him on the side of the head, almost fondly, and the world went white and spun.

He got up, because the alternative was staying down, and went in again!

On the fifth exchange, Freckles came up into the path of his blade, and he tore the cut aside with his wrist screaming.

On the sixth, it happened again.

On the seventh, he stopped trying to hit Ansel and watched him instead.

Street Fighter’s Instinct was not a skill that won fights. It was a skill that noticed things, and what it noticed now, on the seventh pass and the eighth, was that Ansel was a creature of habit. He always lifted her the same way. His left hand closed on her collar, and his arm came up and across, and for one instant, at the top of the lift, her whole weight hung from four fingers and a thumb.

’He’s not reading me, he doesn’t need to! He has the only shield I won’t hit.’

He let Ansel knock him down twice more, so the priest would grow bored. Then he came in high, from the right, the most obvious blow he could throw, and Ansel reached for Freckles in exactly the same way.

At the top of the lift, Aren reduced the strength of that grip to nothing.

It cost what it always cost. The same thing went out of his own hands at the same moment, and the eel blade simply left his fingers in the middle of the swing. But it had already started its arc, and steel does not need to be held to keep moving. Freckles slid out of Ansel’s dead hand and dropped to the ice, and the spinning blade went on through the space where she had been and opened the priest from collarbone to ribs.

Ansel staggered back a single small step, and he looked down at the long red line across his grey robe with mild surprise, as a man might look at a bird that had landed on his sleeve.

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

Aren dove for Freckles, and Ansel’s hand went into his chest.

He never saw the hand move. One moment he was reaching for the girl, and the next there was a pressure under his breastbone like a door being kicked in. Then came the sound, a wet, splintering crunch that he heard from the inside, and Ansel’s arm was in him up to the wrist.

The priest’s fingers closed around his ribs from behind and pulled outward.

They came open like the bars of a cage, and he looked down and saw his own ribs standing out through the torn furs, white and broken and pointing at the sky, and between them, Ansel’s hand, red to the forearm, groping in the steam of his body for something that wasn’t there. Blood poured down over his belt in a sheet and smoked on the ice. His lung went with a hiss he could feel more than hear, and his next breath came up as a mouthful of hot copper.

"Where is it?" Ansel murmured, so close that his tired, kind face was a hand’s width away. "Where do you keep it, little eater? What you took from my brother?"

His hand closed around something under Aren’s heart.

The Familiar bit him!

Ansel snatched his hand back with a hiss, and two of his fingers didn’t come with it. Aren fell and landed on his back on the ice with his chest open to the morning, and the cold poured into him through the hole, and his heart beat once, and then it didn’t seem to want to anymore.

[Warning: Fatal damage.]

[Write-Off (Lv. 2). Available.]

He didn’t have to think about it.

[The wound occurred. Its value is erased.]

[Cost: The Host loses one memory. The Host does not choose which.]

The ribs went back. He felt them close, one after another, and the lung filled, and the skin ran together over the place where a man’s arm had been, until there was nothing left of the wound but torn furs, an old white scar across his chest, a great deal of blood on the ice and a small, sharp absence somewhere in the back of his head.

’Something’s gone. I’ll never know what it was, and that’s the whole point of the price.’

Then he stood up!

Ansel had been wrapping his ruined hand in his sleeve, and he stopped. For the length of a breath, the priest looked at the fool standing intact in a puddle of his own blood, and his face did something it had not done in forty days. It forgot to smile.

"What are you?" he whispered.

Aren reached into the Ledger instead, to an entry he had been saving since the night a boy in fine furs had tried to burn a child to the bone.

[Ledger entry withdrawn: The Choir’s gift (Cassian Haskel).]

[This entry cannot be withdrawn again.]

Blue fire came up out of his skin.

It was grave-flame, cold and pale and hungry, the gift the Choir had once given Haskel to make him king of a dying ship, and it climbed over Aren’s arms and shoulders and the cracked white mask until he stood wrapped in it from head to foot. Ansel reached for it at once, by instinct, just as he reached for every song on the lake. Aren felt the pull of it, sharp and greedy, and the fire didn’t answer him at all.

"Everything that sings is yours," Aren said. "I know that. But this one doesn’t sing anymore, because I bought it!"

He threw it.

It went across the ice in a sheet of blue and hit Ansel full in the chest, right in the long red cut the eel blade had left, and the priest screamed. It was a high, thin sound that didn’t belong to his voice, and it went up into the dawn while he beat at the fire with his ruined hand and staggered back across the ice, step after step, until he stood at the edge of the black thread that ran from Freckles into the lake.

When he stopped screaming, smoke was rising off him, and the grey robe hung in burnt rags, and the kindness was gone from his face entirely.

"Fine," Ansel said softly. "Then we’ll finish this the other way, little eater, and you can watch your friends die first."

He knelt, and laid his good hand flat on the thread.

The ice under Freckles didn’t crack. It simply opened, a long dark eye in the middle of the lake, and the breath of the Hollow came up out of it in a white column that went straight up into the sky. Freckles rose off the ice on her thread, humming, her arms hanging loose. And far behind Aren, out on the open lake, ten thousand frozen dead men turned their heads, all together, toward the west.

Toward the ship.