Chapter 205: Almost Nothing

(Alash Vortex POV)

I woke the next morning and nobody was sitting in the chair.

I checked. I lay still for a while first, listening, and then I turned my head and looked at the chair in the corner of the little room at the ford, and it had a folded blanket on it and nothing else. I looked at it for some time to make sure.

It stayed empty. I considered that a real improvement in my circumstances.

It was also the only one. The Hermit had gone west and taken his questions with him, but he had left the answers behind, and they were mine. Whatever we carried had moved our cores two stages and left our bodies where they were.

It still told each of us where the others stood. It had shaken his illusion at Zenith and lit gold under our feet on a ridge at the other end of the kingdom, and I knew what it was made of and almost nothing about how it worked.

And he had offered to train us.

I lay there with Dream Haven under my head and turned that over, as I had turned it over half the night. The strongest human alive had offered to teach me.

That might be the way to SS that Theoran had been looking for since I asked him. It might also be the closest anyone had ever stood to me who was clever enough to notice what I was hiding, and patient enough to keep looking.

I didn’t know which. I suspected it would be both.

’Will it help?’

[Will what help?]

’His training. Will it get me where I need to go, or will it just put me under a microscope?’

[Both outcomes are possible.]

’That isn’t a prediction.’

[No.]

’Could you make one?’

[I could make one. It would not be reliable.]

’Make it anyway.’

There was a pause.

[You will sleep less.]

I looked at the ceiling for a while.

’That’s the most reliable thing you’ve ever said.’

[I am aware.]

***

Outside, Renn was getting the convoy ready for another slow day.

I watched him from the doorway with my coat on and my pillow under my arm. He walked the line of wagons, and checked the girths on two horses that had already been checked, and spoke to the outriders before they left and again when one of them came back to ask a question. He looked at the road east for a long time.

The Hermit had walked through his security, sat in his chairs, refused his authority and then politely used his door. None of that had made Renn careless. If anything, it had made him more careful about the things he could actually control, as though he had decided that if one man in the world was beyond his arrangements, everything else would be inside them twice over.

Sorel and Valerian saw the five of us one at a time in the kitchen, because the kitchen was warm.

Nothing they found was dramatic. That was, I gathered, the point.

Elizabeth was still pale from the blood she had lost, and her arm was still strapped. James’s left hand was still closed more often than it was open, and he still wasn’t touching Space. Sophie’s hands were warm and her channels were tender, and she had left a white ring of frost on the kitchen table where she had rested her cup.

Daphne’s wrists were mending, slowly, and she was not cleared for anything heavier than a door. When Valerian pressed two fingers under my breastbone, I flinched before I could stop myself, and he saw it.

All five of us were C-Black. None of our bodies had been told.

"Same conditions as yesterday," said Sorel to Elizabeth. "Led. At a walk. Every hour. If you sway, the carriage."

"I didn’t sway yesterday."

"Then you’ll find today very easy."

Then Valerian turned to me.

"Rest," he said.

"I have been resting."

"You have been sleeping."

"That’s the same thing done more thoroughly."

"You slept through half of yesterday," said Valerian. "Including the part where I told you to keep your feet up. You can’t follow medical instructions you’re unconscious for."

I thought about that.

"That seems like an unnecessarily complicated distinction."

"I’m a healer," said Valerian. "Complicated distinctions are most of the job."

The convoy left the ford an hour after dawn, without incident.

For once, nobody treated that as a warning.

***

The days after that ran together.

Not unpleasantly. A road at a walk has a rhythm, once you stop fighting it: an hour on, a halt, Sorel’s fingers on Elizabeth’s wrist, an hour on again. Waystations at night. Breakfast.

Most of it was the same road we had come out on. I recognised it. We had come west along it full of plans, in a convoy with official gifts in one carriage and complaints in all the others, and now we were going east along it slowly, with fewer gifts and different complaints.

What I hadn’t expected was how differently the five of us would sit on it.

On the way west, Sophie had hung half out of the carriage window at every village, waving at anybody who looked twice at the royal escort, and once very nearly hit James in the face doing it. Now she watched villages go by with her chin on her hand. She still talked.

She talked about the bread, and the horses, and a dog she had seen in a yard. But she would talk for a little while and then go quiet for a long while, and once or twice I looked over and found she had fallen asleep mid-sentence, with her mouth still slightly open on the next word.

On the way west, James had complained about the road every hour, about the slowness and the sitting and the lack of anything to hit. Now he rode at a walk beside a led horse for hours at a time and didn’t complain once. He didn’t touch Space. When his left hand wanted to open, he closed it.

Daphne still counted the turns in the road. I had watched her do it on the way out, under her breath, without seeming to know she was doing it. She still watched the verges, and the trees, and the place where a road dips out of sight.

But on the way out she had watched them alone, as though the safety of the convoy were a sum she had to keep checking herself. Now, when an outrider rode back to say the next bend was clear, I saw her shoulders let go of something.

Elizabeth was still Elizabeth. At a waystation two days east of the ford, she noticed a printed notice nailed to the stable door, announcing the treaty in the Crown’s best formal language, and read the whole of it, standing, before Sorel made her sit down.

At a village after that, she noticed that the innkeeper’s wife had painted over the old sign by the well that said what beastkin traders weren’t allowed to do. She noticed which roads had new Crown patrols on them and which didn’t.

She didn’t go and ask anyone about any of it. She noted it, and filed it, and let it go, because she couldn’t sit a horse for more than an hour and she knew it. I think that cost her more than the arm.

I found the differences unsettling.

We had left Zenith as five exceptionally talented students, with Elizabeth’s six-page route packet and my complaints about it. We were going back with stronger cores and weaker bodies, and with each other’s memories in us that none of us had chosen to share.

Renn’s timetable moved every day. A horse threw a shoe and we waited for it. A bridge had been mended and wasn’t yet trusted, so we went round by a ford. Sorel added an hour’s rest at noon because Sophie had slept badly.

None of it was sabotage. None of it was a hidden enemy, or a warning in the back of my head, or anything that needed me. It was a convoy of injured people going home slowly, and the road treated it like one.

Sorel saw that we ate, which with Sophie was easy and with Daphne was not. Valerian checked us every evening and told us every evening that however quickly our bodies seemed to be adapting, it was not quickly enough to start pushing them.

And I began to notice something.

James always made sure there was somewhere for Elizabeth to sit, before she knew she needed it. A folded cloak on a bench. A chair turned toward the fire. He never said anything about it. It was just there when she turned round.

Sophie passed Daphne food without asking whether she wanted it. Daphne ate it, mostly, without saying anything either.

Daphne noticed when Sophie had run out of energy halfway through a story and was trying to finish it anyway, and asked James something about horses, so that Sophie could stop.

Elizabeth caught James putting his hand to his chest one evening, and said "Yours, too," without looking up from her plate, and he took it away.

Nobody announced any of it. Nobody said let me help. They just did it, all day, in small ways, around each other.

And around me.

It took me a day or two to see that. My cup was refilled before I reached for it. My corner of the carriage had a folded blanket in it for my feet that I hadn’t put there.

When we stopped, somebody was always standing close enough to the step to take my elbow if my chest decided against the ground, and it was never the same person twice, and none of them ever looked as though they had planned it.

Most work I had always been delighted to leave to other people. But for most of my life, whenever somebody near me was hurt or in danger, I had been the one who stepped in and decided what happened next. I was still doing a little of that. But somewhere between Halden and here, without anyone asking me, I had also become one of the people the others made room for.

I didn’t enjoy that realisation at all.

***

It happened on the fifth day, at the noon halt.

We had stopped at a stretch of common land beside the road, with an old stone trough and a stand of beech trees, where the escort could water the horses.

Elizabeth had ridden every stage that morning. At each hourly halt Sorel had checked her and let her go on, and by noon she had spent longer in the saddle than on any day since Halden. Sorel was at the far end of the halt with Sophie, who had woken from a doze with frost on both her sleeves.

The guard at Elizabeth’s stirrup helped her down, as he had every hour for five days. She took her weight on her feet. Then, for a moment, she didn’t.

It wasn’t much. Her knees softened. She put her good hand flat against the horse’s shoulder, and stood very still, and the colour went out of her face, and then, slowly, some of it came back.

The guard had his hand under her elbow. He said something. She shook her head and smiled and said something back, and I knew without hearing it that it was I’m fine, because it was the face she made for I’m fine, and I had seen it before.

He didn’t let go. He had his orders, and he had seen her face. He kept his hand where it was and looked round for someone to send for the healer. The other guard had the horse. Neither of them was allowed to leave her, not since the ridge, and Sorel was at the far end of the halt with her back to them.

I was sitting on the carriage step forty feet away. I had been watching her because I had nothing better to do. That was all. The thing that told me where the others were told me she was by her horse, which I could see perfectly well. It didn’t tell me she was dizzy. It doesn’t tell me things like that.

My first thought was to go to her.

My second was my hands. I could put them on her, and Heal. I had done it on a ridge with her blood on the stones.

Then the third thought caught up with the other two, and it was in Valerian’s voice, and Sorel’s, and the voices of every healer I had ever argued with.

Healing mends what is torn. It doesn’t put back what has run out. Elizabeth’s blood would come back as her body made it, and ordinary Healing couldn’t hurry that.

The only thing I had that could was the skill that had got me into this, and even that only made a body do its own work faster for an hour. It wasn’t mine to use. Theoran had seen to that, Sorel hadn’t said yes, and a dizzy spell at a horse trough was nothing like a ridge.

Her channels were raw from palm to shoulder, and nothing I had healed channels either. If I walked over and laid my hands on her, it would make me feel useful. It wouldn’t do anything for her.

What she needed was someone who could decide whether she rode the next stage, and someone to fetch the person who could tell him.

The first wasn’t me. The second, for once, was.

Renn was at the head of the line, talking to an outrider, getting ready to move us on. I got up off the step. My chest had an opinion about that, and I let it have it, and walked down the line to him at the pace of a man who had been told to keep his feet up.

He saw me coming and stopped talking.

"Commander."

"Vortex."

"Her Highness went unsteady when she got down," I said. "Just now, at the trough. She held on to the horse for a few breaths and lost her colour. She told her guard she was fine. He didn’t believe her, but he can’t leave her to fetch anyone." I made myself stop there. "I think Healer Sorel should see her before she gets back on."

Renn looked past me, down the line, at Elizabeth. She was standing quite straight now, with one hand on her horse’s neck, talking to her guard. If you hadn’t seen the moment before, you would have seen nothing.

He looked back at me for perhaps a breath.

Then he turned to the outrider. "Hold the column." To the nearest man: "Find Healer Sorel. Her Highness, at the trough. Now, please."

That was all. He didn’t ask how I knew. There was no how. I had been watching, and I had seen her, and I had told him what. He didn’t thank me, or tell me I’d done well, or look at me like a man marking a test.

He just walked back down the line to Elizabeth, with me some way behind him, and stood there while Sorel came.

Sorel took Elizabeth’s wrist and then her other wrist, and looked at her eyes, and asked her three questions I couldn’t hear. Elizabeth answered them. Sorel didn’t look pleased with any of the answers.

"Carriage," said Sorel.

"I’m perfectly..."

"You’re perfectly upright, Your Highness, which is not the same thing. You’ve had more of the road this morning than I’d have given you, and your body’s telling you so." Sorel let go of her wrist. "That’s what the conditions were for. They’re doing their job. Carriage, for the next stage at least. I’ll look at you again at the next halt."

Elizabeth looked at her horse, and at the carriage, and at Sorel, and for a moment I saw exactly how much she minded. She couldn’t fight. She couldn’t touch an element. She couldn’t sit a horse for more than an hour, and now not even that. Every day of this road had taken one more thing away from her and asked her to be gracious about it.

"Very well," she said.

Renn had already turned away. "Her Highness rides in the carriage for this stage," he said, to the guard at her stirrup and the guard at her horse’s head. "Lead the horse behind. Same men, same places. Nothing else changes."

Nothing else did. They led her horse round behind the carriage, and the escort closed up around it, and nobody had to find a new vehicle or a new formation. Elizabeth was helped up the step. James appeared from somewhere and moved Sophie’s bread off the seat so that she could sit down, without being asked.

"We move when Healer Sorel says," said Renn.

Sorel said, a quarter of an hour later. We moved.

Renn passed me on his way back to the head of the line, and paused just long enough to look at me.

"Thank you, Vortex," he said, and went on.

That was all. It was ordinary. It was the kind of thing he would have said to any of his men.

I got back into the carriage and sat down in my corner, and found that I was oddly, unreasonably pleased with myself.

I had done almost nothing. I had looked, and walked forty feet, and said three sentences to a man whose job it was to decide.

And for once, almost nothing had been exactly enough.