Chapter 77: Take Nothing

The Prince had given his sister a room at the top of the iron tower, with a good fire, a soft bed and four guards on the stair.

She never used the bed. Aren knew because he dutifully carried her water up every morning, and every morning the blankets were folded exactly as the servants had left them.

On the second day, he found her in the small yard behind the tower, alone, in a shirt and leather trousers, with a practice lance. A post stood in the middle of the yard, wrapped in old rope. She hit it, stepped back, and hit it again, in exactly the same place, with the same sound.

He set the buckets down by the door and counted without meaning to. Forty-two strikes while he stood there. None of them were angry, which was the worst part. They were simply routine.

She glanced at him over her shoulder. The dead chain hung outside her shirt now, because she had stopped hiding it.

"Water."

"Put it down."

"It’s down."

She went back to the post. He picked up yesterday’s empty buckets and turned to go.

"Ren."

He stopped.

"The breathing." She didn’t turn. "Where did you learn it?"

"I watched some knights, Captain. In the north."

The lance hit the post, and she said nothing else. He went down the iron stair past the four guards, who ignored him, and only started breathing normally again at the bottom.

’Everyone wants to know about the breathing! Next time I’ll just wheeze.’

That night, Roderick went into the mine.

He came back two hours later with mud to his knees and his cloak torn on one side.

"Nobody guards the deep pool. Why would they? It’s dead. There’s a rope across the tunnel and an old man asleep on a stool. That’s all." He sat down. "The other pools have twenty men each. The Prince wasn’t joking."

"And the grey ones?"

"The chapel. All four. The box hasn’t moved." Roderick looked at him. "Ghost, what are you going to do in a dead pool?"

"Give it back."

Roderick waited, but Aren didn’t explain. He wasn’t sure he could have.

He spent the next two days doing everything he usually did, because a water boy who suddenly stopped carrying water was a water boy people noticed. Two hundred buckets a day, up and down the iron stair. Varro’s stick at night.

On the third night, the old man hit him eighteen times, and he held his ground on fourteen. On the fifteenth, he slipped neatly inside the stick, which Varro always said he couldn’t do yet, and touched the old man’s chest with two fingers before the stick came round.

Varro looked down at the two fingers. Then at Aren.

"Again!" Aren couldn’t do it again, not once in twenty more tries. But it had happened.

[Street Fighter’s Instinct. Mastery: 71% → 73%.]

On the last afternoon before the treaty, he went down to the old cistern.

The pillar was where he had left it. The narrow ledge at the height of a woman’s shoulder, where he had set down an iron heart on a chain six nights ago. She walked this way every evening on her rounds, and she had kept walking it even after the Prince closed the pools. He had seen her.

He took a piece of charcoal from the cook fires and wrote on the stone above the ledge, in small square letters that looked nothing like his own.

The deep pool. Tonight. Come alone.

Below it, he drew a circle with nothing inside.

’Very mysterious. Very dramatic. She’s going to bring a lance.’

Then he went to carry water, because there were still forty buckets to carry.

He went into the mine at midnight, mask on, hood pulled low over his hair.

The old man on the stool was asleep, just as Roderick had said. Aren stepped over the rope without touching it. The tunnel went down and down, and the air grew colder instead of warmer, which was wrong for this tunnel, and he knew why.

The deep pool lay at the bottom like a sheet of black glass, with no steam and no heat. The walls that had glistened five nights ago were dry and grey, crusted white where the liquid had touched them. It smelled of nothing at all, and that was the worst part. Even the dead tunnels in the Abyss had smelled of something.

He took off his boots and his coat and stepped in up to his chest.

It was cold enough to make his teeth hurt.

He closed his eyes and found the book.

It was easier now. The Familiar’s pages turned in the dark behind his eyes, slowly, and the two lines of ink were there, side by side, waiting.

Blood Tempering (Kaela Voss), 61%.

The essence of the Deep Pool.

He touched the second one.

The Familiar woke.

It didn’t like it. He felt that as clearly as cold or hunger. It had eaten this. It was its own. A small, heavy reluctance pressed against his ribs from the inside, like a child clutching a toy.

"I know," he whispered, to nobody. "I’m sorry. Let it go."

He pulled.

The ink came off the page.

[Ledger entry withdrawn: The essence of the Deep Pool.][This entry cannot be withdrawn again.]

It came back into him all at once.

He had thought he knew what the pool had held. He had been in it, nights ago, with Kaela dying beside him. He hadn’t known anything. Every drop that pool had ever been, every year of heat rising from below the mountain, every soldier who’d sat in it and bled into it and grown stronger, all of it poured into his blood at the same moment. And his blood was only nine percent of the way to being able to hold it.

His heart hit his ribs so hard he heard it.

The veins stood out on his arms. He could see them in the dark, swollen and dark grey. He knew they weren’t really grey. He knew what color they really were, and he couldn’t see it, and he never would. He only saw them getting thicker.

[Rank D: Blood. 9% → 13% → 19%...]

The numbers started climbing.

’I could keep it.’

He understood that very clearly, even through the pain. If he just held on, if he stopped fighting, the pool would finish what it had started, and he would walk out of here Blooded, tonight, the night before the treaty.

And Kaela Voss would stand beside her brother tomorrow at eighty-one percent and lose her name. The mine would answer to a prince who listened to his chaplain, and a grey-eyed man would put a nail into it.

’Take nothing. Return everything.’

He breathed out.

It was the breath from the thin grey book in the locked room at Highcrest, the one he had left open on the desk of a girl with silver hair, a lifetime ago. Four counts in. Hold. Six counts out. Except this time, on the six counts out, he let go of more than air.

He let go of the pool.

It went out through his skin. He felt it leave like sweat on a hot day, except it wasn’t sweat. It was heat and weight and years, flowing out of him and back into the pool it had come from.

[Rank D: Blood. 19% → 16% → 12%...]

The Familiar pulled against him, hungry. It had tasted this once. It wanted it back. He felt it reaching past him for the pool, just as it had reached for Kaela’s blood the first night, without asking, without thinking.

"No."

He held it as he had held it by the woodpile with Luna in front of him. Not with force. He had no force left. He simply refused to let it move, and breathed, four counts in, six counts out, again and again, while the cold in his side turned and pushed and slowly, sulkily, lay down.

[Rank D: Blood. 10%.][Rank D: Blood. 9%.][Absorbed: 0.]

The pool around his chest was warm.

It wasn’t warm like a bath. It was warm like a living thing. He opened his eyes, and steam was rising off the surface in thin threads, the walls were wet again, and the smell had come back: iron and stone, and something deep and old beneath both.

He couldn’t tell what color it was. He’d never be able to tell. But it was moving now, slowly, in circles, as it had before.

He climbed out on his hands and knees and lay on the stone with his cheek against the wet rock, and he stayed there a while.

[Familiar of Nothing: Hunger 61%.]

His arms were shaking. His legs were shaking. Every vein in his body ached as if it had been stretched and let go. He had put a whole pool into himself and taken it out again, and he’d kept nothing, not one percent, and the System had written that down too, as if it wanted him to remember.

Absorbed: 0.

’Worst trade of my life. Both lives!’

That was fine. He’d never been good at keeping things.

He was still lying there when he heard footsteps in the tunnel.

They weren’t the old man’s. The old man shuffled. These were quick and light and very even, the steps of someone who had walked the same corridors every night for two winters and didn’t need a lamp to know where the walls were.

Aren pushed himself up onto one knee.

The steps stopped at the bottom of the tunnel.

The point of a lance came out of the dark first, low and steady, aimed at the center of his chest. Then the hand holding it. Then the rest of her, in a dark cloak, the dead iron heart hanging on its chain outside her shirt and no armor at all, because she had come straight from the yard, alone, as the wall had told her to.

’Told you. A lance.’

Kaela Voss looked at the steam, at the wet walls, at the slowly circling pool.

Then she looked at him.

[Kaela Voss. Hostility: 100%.]

"Thief," she said quietly.