Chapter 123: Thirteen

The Academy infirmary had a window on the third floor that faced the river, and the ivy under it was old and thick, and Aren had been climbing ivy since he was nine.

It was easier now that he was Rank D. He went up the wall in the dark without a sound, with Roderick a shadow on the roof above him, and crouched on the narrow sill with his fingers on the cold glass.

There was a lamp burning inside, turned low.

Nell was sitting up in a bed by the window, wrapped in the thick wool blankets Mira had bought her, with a library book face down on her lap. She wasn’t reading, only looking at the door, as if she expected it to open any moment, and her face in the lamplight was thinner and greyer than he had ever seen it.

The mark had spread badly.

It had been the size of a small copper coin when he left. Now it ran from her wrist to her elbow in thin black roots, and more of them were creeping up out of the collar of her nightgown along the side of her neck. When she breathed, it was short and shallow, the breath of somebody who had learned not to ask her lungs for too much.

He knocked on the glass, softly, twice.

Nell’s head turned toward the shape crouched on the sill in the dark, and this time she didn’t stare, and she didn’t climb out of bed. She simply closed her eyes, and her face crumpled, and she started to cry without making any sound at all.

He let himself in quietly.

"You’re late," she managed, when he was sitting on the edge of the bed with his arms around her and her face pressed into his coat. "You said two months. It’s been nearly four!"

"I know."

"You said you wouldn’t do anything stupid."

"I didn’t! I did several extremely clever things in a row, and some of them went wrong."

She laughed into his coat, and it turned into a cough, a long, wet, ugly cough that shook her whole body, and he held her until it stopped.

"Roddy says you’re the Blood Thief," she whispered.

"Roddy talks too much."

"He says you broke the Empire!"

"Only a very small bit of it, and it was already cracked."

She pulled back and looked at his face, just as she had always looked at everything, carefully and thoroughly, putting each piece away to think about later. She took in the white streak in his hair and the new hardness in his face and the eyes that had counted forty days on a frozen lake.

"Where’s Mira?"

He had known she would ask, and he had spent nineteen nights on the road deciding how to answer, and he still didn’t know.

"She came north, and she found me."

Nell’s face lit up. "She did? She was so angry when I gave her your letter, Aren, she threw a chair, and then she cried, and then she packed a bag and left the same night without telling anyone. Is she here, downstairs?"

"She’s with the convoy, coming home."

"Then why..."

She stopped, because she had seen his face.

So he told her. He told her about the black wave and the white fire, and twenty-three people standing behind it, and a girl with brown hair who had known what it would cost and paid it anyway. He told her about the moment Mira opened her eyes on the ice and asked him who he was.

Nell listened to all of it without a word. When he finished, she stayed quiet, holding his hand in both of hers.

"She doesn’t remember you at all?"

"Not one thing."

"Does she remember me?"

"I don’t know." He looked down at their hands. "I think so. I think it was only me she gave away."

"Then I’ll remind her," Nell said fiercely. "Every day. I’ll tell her everything until she’s sick of hearing it!"

’That’s my sister. Twelve years old, and she’s going to bully a memory back into existence.’

Then he remembered what day it was, and corrected himself.

The bell in the cathedral tower was ringing midnight across the river. He counted the strokes, and when the last one faded, he reached into his coat and put something small and wrapped in her hands.

It was a cord with a polished river stone on it, a plain grey one he had picked up on the shore of the White Hollow and carried for forty days without knowing why.

"Happy birthday, Nell."

She stared at it in confusion.

"I’m thirteen," she breathed, wonderingly.

"You’re thirteen, and you’re going to be fourteen, and fifteen, and much too old to boss me around."

"That’s not the present, is it?" She turned the stone over, then studied him with her serious, narrow eyes. "That’s just a rock. You’re doing the face."

"What face would that be?"

"The face you make when you’re about to do something stupid."

He laughed, and then he took her left arm very gently, and turned it over in the lamplight, and examined the black roots running up from her wrist.

He tried the Familiar first. It uncoiled under his ribs before he had finished asking and leaned toward her with a hunger that made his skin crawl. It had pulled the Choir’s verses out of fourteen people on the lake, cleanly, one after another, and for one bright moment he thought it would be that easy.

Then he felt what it was leaning toward.

The mark wasn’t a verse. There was a song under it, low and slow and very old, the same tune Nell had hummed over her books since she was four, but it wasn’t wound around her heart like the others had been. It was woven through her hearing, through how she listened, through whatever it was that made Nell herself. The Familiar didn’t want the mark at all. It wanted that.

’If I let it eat, she’ll be cured. And there won’t be anything left of her that hums.’

He pulled it back so hard that his breath caught. It went, sulking, and curled up behind his heart again, and Nell frowned at him and asked what was wrong with his face.

"Nothing at all," he told her. "Just give me a moment, Nell."

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

[Target: one other person.]

[The wound occurred. Its value is erased.]

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

He had thought about this all the way from the White Hollow, every single night. He had thought about it on the moor and in the mountains and in the paupers’ field, next to his own grave. He had told himself he would find another way, a flower or a priest or a deal with something that had no face.

There wasn’t another way. The lilies had stopped working, the mark was growing toward her heart, and the mark wasn’t a song at all. It was a debt the Abyss had written on her, and there was exactly one thing he owned that could erase a debt. Once, on a night full of flowers, he had refused to bet her on a wheel he couldn’t see. Now the wheel was the only thing left.

And whatever it took from him, he had more memories than she had years.

"Nell, hold still."

He fixed his eyes on the mark, on the debt the Abyss had written on his sister’s arm when she was too small to know what a debt was. He drew a line through it in his mind, exactly as he had once drawn a line through the bite of a Bell-Eater on the ninth day at the bottom of the world.

The mark went pale.

It didn’t fade or shrink, it simply became old, all at once, a thin silver tracery of scars under her skin, like the ghost of a tree drawn in chalk. The roots on her neck went white. Nell gasped, and her back arched, and then she breathed in.

She breathed in all the way.

He watched her take the first full breath of her life, deep and slow, right down to the bottom of her lungs, and hold it there with her eyes wide and astonished, and let it out again in one long shaking line.

"Aren," she whispered. "Aren, it doesn’t hurt."

"I know, I know."

"It doesn’t hurt anywhere!"

She was laughing, and crying, and breathing, all at once, great deep greedy breaths as if she were trying to make up for years in one night, and he held her while she did it and didn’t let himself look for what he had lost.

He went looking for it later, after she had fallen asleep with the river stone in her fist.

He sat on the windowsill with the cold air on his face and went through it all, as he had in the Abyss. Nell, the healer house, the Academy. The trading floor and the rented flat. Rook and Varro, Roderick and Kaela, were all still there. The gutter behind the tanneries, and the girl with brown hair sitting down next to him in the mud.

She had pointed at things, he remembered that. She had pointed at things, one after another, until he said their names back to her.

He tried to remember the first thing she had pointed at.

It simply wasn’t there anymore.

He sat on the sill until the stars faded, with his hands loose in his lap.

’Of all the things to take, it took the first word.’

When the sun came up over the river, somebody knocked softly on the infirmary door.

It opened before he could reach the window. Professor Crane stood in the doorway in his long grey coat, with a tray of tea in his hands and a healer behind him, and his gaze went to the sleeping girl in the bed, at the silver scars on her arm, and at the dead man sitting on the windowsill.

He put the tray down very carefully on a table.

"Servant," he observed, in his bored voice. "You came home."

"It was her birthday, Professor."

Crane studied Nell’s arm again for a long breath. Then he turned to the healer and sent her away with one quiet word, and closed the door behind her.

"The Headmaster has been studying that mark for months," he said. "She has seen two in her whole life, and nobody has ever survived one." He folded his hands behind his back. "And there is something else she noticed while she studied it, Servant, something about your sister."

"What about her?"

"The mark didn’t make her weak. It was eating something the whole time, something very large." Crane’s thin face gave nothing away. "The Headmaster has enrolled her. Youngest student in the history of the Academy, by three years, under her personal protection." He paused. "She will stand in front of the Awakening Crystal at seventeen, like everyone else, and not a day before. The Headmaster does not care to find out what that mark was eating until your sister is old enough to carry it."