Chapter 67: Eleven Days

Neither of them moved.

The lantern swung slightly in Aren’s hand. Its light ran over the black water, over the pillar with the dark smears on it, over her split knuckles and the hair hanging across her face. She made no attempt to hide any of it. She only looked at him, the way a soldier looks at someone who has walked into the wrong room.

’Of all the cisterns in all the fortresses. Run. Run now!’

He didn’t run, because water boys didn’t run from officers.

"Get out."

"The cook tent needs water for the morning, Captain."

"Then get it and get out."

He went down the last step, set the lantern on the stone and knelt to fill the first bucket. He did it slowly and deliberately. A boy who rushed in front of an officer looked guilty, while a boy who took his time looked like a boy doing a job.

Behind him, she started again: left, right, left. The flat, ugly sound of bone on stone.

He filled the first bucket and started on the second.

She was hitting it wrong.

He hadn’t meant to notice, but two hours behind a woodpile with Varro, and his eyes had started doing it on their own. Every blow she threw started in her shoulders. Her hips never moved. All the power came from her arms, went into the stone, and came straight back into her hands.

It was none of his business. He had already taken four months of her life. He had no right to anything else, not even her mistakes.

"You’re hitting it from your shoulders."

The sound stopped.

’Why. Why did you say that? You had one job, and it was buckets!’

He kept his eyes on the bucket. He could feel hers on the back of his neck.

"What did you say?"

"Your hips don’t move, Captain. That’s why your hands are breaking and the pillar isn’t."

The silence went on long enough that he started working out how fast he could reach the stair, and then she laughed, shortly and dryly.

"A water boy," she drawled, "is going to teach me how to throw a punch."

"An old sergeant told me tonight. I’m only repeating it."

"Varro."

"He knocked me down fifteen times. I don’t think he’d call it teaching."

"He would." She came down to the edge of the water a few paces from him, crouched, and pushed both hands into the cistern up to the wrists. The water clouded dark around them, and she didn’t make a sound. "That’s exactly what he’d call it."

He lifted the second bucket out and set it beside the first, and began to fit them to the pole.

"Show me."

He looked up.

"The hips. Show me what he showed you."

"I’d break my hands too, Captain."

"I didn’t say hit the pillar." She was watching him now, really watching, with the same measuring look she had given him in the yard. "Show me in the air."

He should have said no, and picked up his buckets, and gone.

He stood up, set his feet the way Varro had kicked them into place an hour ago, and threw one slow punch into the empty air. He let it start from the floor, through the back foot and the turn of the hips, and only at the very end into the arm.

He did it badly, like someone doing a thing he had learned an hour ago, which was exactly the point.

She watched him in silence.

"Again."

He did it again.

"Your back heel lifts too early. He’ll knock you down for that tomorrow."

"He knocked me down for it tonight."

The corner of her mouth twitched, and then it was gone before it could turn into anything.

"What’s your name, water boy?"

"Ren, Captain."

"Ren." She said it slowly, as if she were putting it in a drawer to look at later. "From the valley."

"Yes, Captain."

"With a girl who bites."

He felt the back of his neck go uncomfortably hot. "Yes, Captain."

She stood up, shook the water off her hands and turned back toward the pillar. She didn’t hit it. She stood in front of it with her feet apart and her fists loose at her sides and only breathed.

He picked up the pole and settled the buckets on his shoulders. He made himself look at her hands once more, the split knuckles and the dark water dripping off them, and thought about the white thing in his side drinking her blood down in the dark, and how warm it had been, and how full.

[Kaela Voss. Rank D: Blood. 36%.]

’Thirty-six. It was ninety-seven. I did that.’

"Eleven."

He stopped on the bottom step.

She wasn’t talking to him. She was looking at the pillar, at the dark smears her own hands had left on it.

"Eleven what, Captain?"

She was quiet so long that he thought she wouldn’t answer.

"Days. Eleven days, water boy." Her voice was perfectly flat. "And then none of this will matter anymore."

She didn’t explain, and he didn’t ask. Officers didn’t explain things to water boys, and water boys who asked were remembered.

[Kaela Voss. Hostility: 100%.]

He went up the stair with the buckets swinging. Halfway up, her voice came after him, low and even, from the dark at the bottom.

"Water boy."

He stopped and looked back. She hadn’t turned around.

"The girl who bit you. Was she pretty?"

He looked down at her, at the straight back and the loose hair and the raw hands hanging at her sides.

"Very," he said honestly.

She didn’t answer. After a moment he heard her start again, not hitting this time. Slow, quiet steps on the stone, and the soft sound of breath let out from very low down.

She was moving her hips.

He climbed the rest of the stair, crossed the dark yard to the cook tent and set the buckets down by Varro’s fire. The old man was apparently asleep on a sack of onions with his one arm over his eyes.

He wasn’t asleep.

"You took your time." Varro didn’t move his arm.

"There was someone in the cistern."

"There’s always someone in the cistern." The old man lifted his arm an inch and looked at him from under it. "Who?"

Aren thought about lying. He thought about how well that had gone the last time, behind the woodpile.

"The Captain."

The arm came down. Varro sat up on his sack of onions, slowly, the way old men sit up when their backs have opinions about it, and studied him in the firelight.

"And you’re still alive."

"She was hitting a pillar. With her hands."

"Ah." Varro didn’t seem surprised. He reached for the pot of cold tea by the fire and drank from it without bothering with a cup. "She does that. Every year, around this time. Since she was fifteen." He set the pot down. "What did you say to her?"

"That she was hitting from her shoulders."

Varro stared at him. Then he laughed, a short rough bark that made a horse whicker somewhere behind the tents.

"You told Kaela Voss how to throw a punch!"

"I told her what you told me."

"That’s worse." The old man lay back down on his onions and put his arm over his eyes again. "Much worse. She’ll remember she learned it from a water boy. And she’ll remember the water boy." A pause. "Go to sleep, Ren. I’m knocking you down again tomorrow."

Eleven days.

Aren sat down on an upturned barrel beside the fire, looked at the iron half of the wall black against the stars, and counted.

In eleven days, the lords would sign the treaty.

And in eleven days, something would happen to Kaela Voss that made her break her own hands on a pillar in the dark, and he had a horrible feeling he already knew what it was.