Where the Wyrms Sleep: A Bargain in Blood

The arrow's fletching brushed Caelen's jaw with every heaving step, a wet feather-tick that told him she was still breathing, still bleeding, still costing him ground with every yard he gained against the mire.

He had not asked for this. He had asked for nothing at all, only a few weeks of quiet wandering through the southern fens to finish his master's map of the wyrm-falls, and instead he had found her, and now he was hauling her through water that came up to his thighs while something hunted them both in the reed-choked dark.

"Deeper," Lysenne murmured against his shoulder. Her voice came out thin, papery, wrong. "Find the deeper channel. It will not follow through water."

"I cannot wade deeper and carry you."

"You can. You must."

The black water pushed cold against his knees. The smell of it was thick and sour, rot and iron and the green vegetable stink of things that grew without sunlight. Behind them, somewhere past the wall of reeds, something large moved with a sound like a boat being dragged over gravel. Caelen did not look back. Looking back was what the prey did, and he had decided, somewhere around the third arrow that had hissed past his ear, that he was not prey tonight.

He found the hummock by feel more than sight, a hump of dry clay rising out of the mire like a sleeping animal's spine. He half-carried, half-threw Lysenne up onto it, then followed, and for a moment they both lay there in the thin moonlight, breathing. The clay was gritty beneath his palms and tasted, when a flake of it caught at the corner of his mouth, of old chalk and something faintly metallic. His legs had gone to water-wood beneath him, every muscle trembling with the cold.

The arrow stood from her left side just below the ribs. The wound around it was a dark bloom, the cloth of her coat soaked through and beginning to steam faintly where the cold air met the heat of her blood. Her hand lay across the entry-point, fingers curled in a grip that had gone white at the knuckles.

"Don't," Caelen said, when she began to pull at the shaft.

"It has to come out."

"Not like that. Not here."

She turned her head. Her eyes were glassy, the pupils blown wide, but the mind behind them was still in there, still working, still cataloguing options in that precise, fast way she had of seeing a problem and dissecting it before the body had finished reporting the damage. In the thin light her skin had taken on the gray color of old parchment, and a single bead of sweat tracked from her temple down the line of her jaw.

"You'll have to cauterize it," she said. "If you cut the shaft and pull, I will bleed out in this marsh before the next bell. You know that."

"I know it."

"Then burn it closed. My belt knife. It will hold an edge."

Caelen sat up. The hummock was barely wide enough for the two of them, a sliver of dry ground ringed by black water that lapped at its edges with a patient, sucking sound. He reached for the knife at her hip, a slim thing with a bone handle and a blade dark with oil. He had seen her clean it a hundred times in the evenings when they made camp, those small precise motions of a woman who had kept herself alive on the road through force of habit alone.

He slid it free. The bone was smooth under his thumb, polished by years of her grip, and he could feel, even through the chill of his own fingers, a faint residual warmth from her hand.

"Hold still," he said.

"I am a scholar of dead languages, Caelen Thornwood. I do not hold still."

A sound escaped him, something between a laugh and a groan. "Then pretend you are reading a particularly dull passage."

Her mouth twitched. It was the closest thing to a smile she had given him in three days of traveling together, and he filed it away in the part of him that kept memories against harder nights.

He struck the flint at his belt three times before he got a spark. The tinder in his pouch was bone-dry, kept so by a charm his master had taught him, and it caught with a small orange bloom that smelled of pine resin and something older, something like dust in a closed tomb. He fed the flame to a twist of marsh-grass, coaxed it higher, and laid the flat of the blade across the coals.

The metal began to darken. Then to glow, a dull cherry that pulsed in time with his own heartbeat.

While it heated, he unrolled the small bundle he carried at his hip, a rag and a strip of boiled leather and a twist of wire that had seen harder use than any proper field kit. Lysenne watched him without speaking. Her breathing had gone shallow, the kind of breathing that meant the body was beginning to bargain with itself for air, and he knew that if he waited too long the bargain would close against her favor.

"It will hurt," he said.

"Spare me."

"It will hurt more than the arrow."

"I said spare me." Her voice had come back, that crisp capital bite of it, and he found a comfort in the sharpness that he was not ready to examine.

The blade glowed dull cherry. He lifted it from the coals by the bone handle and felt the heat come up his arm in a single bright wave, fierce enough to tighten the skin of his palm. The hummock smelled now of scorched air and the iron tang of his own sweat.

"Hold your coat out of the way," he said. "And bite this."

He held out the strip of leather. She took it between her teeth without a word, and her eyes, when they met his, were very steady. He pulled the sodden edge of her coat aside, exposing the entry of the arrow, and saw for the first time how deep the shaft had gone. Too deep to draw. The fletching sat nearly flush with the skin, and the blood welled around it in slow, dark pulses.

He pressed the flat of the blade to the wound around the arrow's entry.

The sound Lysenne made was not a scream. It was smaller than that, and worse, a tight clipped note bitten off at the root and swallowed before it could become anything so vulgar as a cry. The smell of it came up at once, burnt wool, burnt blood, the sweet-horrible char of living flesh. Caelen held the blade steady for the count of three, then four, then five, and the wound blackened and sealed beneath the metal with a small ugly hiss.

He pulled the blade away.

Lysenne's eyes had closed. Her jaw was locked around the leather. A line of sweat tracked down her temple and vanished into the collar of her coat, and her hands, which had been fisted in the mud at her sides, slowly uncurled. For a long moment she did not move at all, and Caelen found himself counting the rise of her chest the way he had once counted the beats of a signal-fire on a distant ridge, waiting to see if it would hold.

It held.

He set the knife down. His hands were shaking. He watched them shake for a moment, these hands that had spent most of their life drawing coastlines and ridge-lines and the slow meanders of rivers, and which were now learning a different sort of work. He pressed them flat against his thighs to still them, and the cloth of his trousers was soaked through, and the cold of it bit at his palms.

He did not let himself look at her again until he had scrubbed the blade clean in the cold water of a nearby rut. The blood came away in thin brown coils that the current took and unpicked, and the metal rang faintly when he drew it across a flat stone to clear the edge. The sound was small and honest, and he was grateful for it. Small honest sounds were easier to bear than the quiet breathing of a woman who had just held still for the bite of hot iron.

Caelen wrapped the knife in a fold of oilcloth and slid it into the inner pocket of his coat, where it sat against the small carved things he had carried since his master died. His hand hesitated there. The bones were cold through the cloth, six of them, no larger than the first joint of a thumb, each one etched with a different sigil in a hand that had not been his master's. He had found them in the locked box at the back of the cartographer's workroom, the box that smelled of cedar and of something older, something mineral and cold, and he had taken them because he had not known what else to do with them and because his master had never spoken of them and that, in Caelen's small experience of old Bram Thornwood, had meant they mattered. He had not used them. He had sworn to himself he would not use them. He had carried them anyway, the way a man carries a tooth he cannot bring himself to throw away.

He slipped the cloth-wrapped bundle deeper into the lining, where the stitches were already pulled loose from a previous concealment. Then he pulled the lining flat and pressed his palm against it, twice, the way a man pats down a letter he is not certain is sealed, and he tucked the coat closed and sat back on his heels.

"You're still bleeding."

Lysenne's voice came from behind him, thin and scraped, but precise. He turned. She had not moved from where she lay, but she had lifted her head an inch or two off the mud, and her eyes, when they found his, were not the eyes of a woman who had fainted. They were narrow, and clear, and very much awake.

"Not from the wound," he said. "From the mud. There's a spring somewhere under us. It's soaking up through the heather."

"That's not what I meant." She swallowed, and the motion cost her something. Her chin dipped, came up. "The arrow. You did not pull it. You pushed it through and you burned the hole shut. You did not pull the fletching out first, and the arrowhead is still in me, and you know it, because you felt it under the skin when you laid the blade down. I felt your hand stop."

He said nothing.

"So either you are the worst field surgeon in the northern fens," she said, "in which case I shall be dead by morning and you may take my boots, they will fit you, and I shall trouble you no further. Or you are something else, and you have chosen not to tell me what."

He looked at her. The wind moved across the bog and brought with it the wet-rot smell of cut peat and the brighter, sharper smell of bog cotton. Somewhere close, a snipe drummed, the sound coming and going like a small mechanical heart.

"I am a peat-cutter," he said.

"You are not."

"I am a peat-cutter," he said again, more carefully this time, the way a man lays a second stone on top of a first to see if it will hold. "Out of the lower Moss. I work the cuttings south of the causeway. The storm drove me off the turf before I could finish the stack, and I was trying to get home when I heard the horses."

"You lie like a man who has been taught to lie, and not by a peat-cutter's wife."

He almost smiled. Almost. The corner of his mouth moved and then stopped, because he had been thinking of old Wenna, who had not been his wife and had not taught him anything except how to cut a clean turf and how to gut a trout without spilling the milt, and who would have boxed his ears for the clumsy way he had just sealed this wound. Old Wenna had been dead seven winters now, and he had not let himself think of her in a long while, and he did not mean to start now, on a hillside, with a woman he did not trust watching his hands.

"Then let me lie as I will," he said. "It is no concern of yours what I am, provided I get you off this hill before the light goes."

"Provided you do not kill me in the doing." Her voice had not risen. It had grown colder, which was worse. "I have been hunted before, peat-cutter. I have been hunted by men who were very particular about what they were not, and very careful to leave me with no notion of what they were. You have the look of one of them. The patient hands. The quiet voice. The way you spoke to me just now, telling me what you were, as if the telling was a kind of medicine in itself. I have heard that voice before."

"I am trying to keep you alive."

"You are trying to keep me quiet. There is a difference, and you know it."

He did know it. He knelt in the mud and felt the cold of it pressing through the cloth at his knees, and he did know it.

The snipe drummed again, closer now, the sound rising out of the heather like a small wheel turning. He watched her eyes. They were the color of the bog water in autumn, dark and watchful, and there was a bruise coming up along her left temple where the arrow had clipped her on its way in, and the bruise was the exact blue of a thunderhead he had once watched from the mouth of his master's tent, when he was small and had not yet learned to be afraid of the things that moved inside storms.

"What craft do you practice, then," she said. "When you are not cutting peat."

"I told you."

"You told me nothing. You told me a name for what you do, the way a man tells you a name for a road he has never walked. I am asking you what you do. I am asking you, in particular, whether you have ever seen the reading of bones practiced, or the casting of the old sigils, or the speaking of words into a fire that ought not to be spoken. I am asking you, peat-cutter, because there is an arrow in my shoulder that smells of wyrm-bone ash, and there are two men dead in the gully behind us who were not killed by any sword I have ever seen, and I have been riding for six days with a thing at my back that I cannot see and cannot name, and I will not be tended by a man who will not tell me what is in his pockets."

He was very still.

The wind dropped. The bog cotton did not move. The snipe stopped drumming, as if the bird had been listening too.

"Say that again," he said.

"The arrow. It smells of wyrm-bone ash. I have smelled it before, in the capital, in a room I am not supposed to have entered. There is a particular char to it. You would know it if you had ever stood over a wyrm-fire. You have not, I think, but the arrow has, and the man who shot it had, and he meant for that char to mark me, the way a man marks a letter he intends to send back. So. The bones, peat-cutter. Have you seen them read."

The bog was very quiet. The only sound was the small uneasy suck of water in the ruts, and somewhere far off the lowing of cattle that had been left out too long in the weather. He could feel the carved things against his ribs, cold and patient, and he could feel his master behind him, not as a ghost, because he had never believed in those, but as a weight, the way a man feels the weight of a chair he has just risen from.

He reached into the lining of his coat. He drew out the cloth-wrapped bundle and set it on the mud between them, and he did not unwrap it.

"I have not read them," he said. "I have carried them. I do not know what they are. I found them in a box that belonged to a man who raised me, and he never spoke of them, and he is dead, and I took them because I did not know what else to do."

She looked at the bundle. She did not reach for it.

"What was the man's name."

"Bram Thornwood."

"The cartographer."

"You know of him."

"I know of him. He was thought to be dead twenty years before he was. He made a map that was never finished. I have read the fragments. There are three of them in the Royal Library, under seal, and I am not supposed to have read them either." She paused. "Did he teach you to read the bones."

"He taught me to draw a coast."

"Did he teach you nothing else."

"He taught me," Caelen said, slowly, "that there are some rooms in a house one does not enter, and some boxes one does not open, and some questions one does not ask a man who has been kind enough to give one a roof. He taught me that by never answering them himself."

"And yet you opened the box."

"I opened it the day after he died. I opened it because there was no one left to ask."

The bruise on her temple had darkened. The line of sweat had dried on her throat. She looked at him for a long moment, and the wind came back, gently, and moved a strand of dark hair across her mouth, and she did not lift a hand to push it away because the motion would have cost her the arrow.

"I think," she said, "that you have told me the truest thing you have told me all evening, and I think it has cost you more than the wound cost me. Sit down, peat-cutter. Sit down and do not lie to me again until I have had time to think about whether I can bear to be tended by you. And do not unwrap that cloth. If I am to be tended by a man who carries bones he cannot read, I would rather not know what they look like while I am deciding whether to trust him."

He sat down.

He did not unwrap the cloth. He sat with his hands on his knees and the cold of the bog working up through him, and he watched the light fail by small degrees along the western ridge, and he did not think about old Wenna or about his master or about the rooms in the house he had never entered, and he thought about all three.

He sat down, and the cold found him through the seat of his trousers, and he did not move away from it. The cloth lay in his lap, dark and heavy against his thigh, and he kept his hands on his knees because she had told him to keep his hands where she could see them, and he was determined to give her nothing else to flinch at.

She studied him for a long while. The light was going from the ridge, and what was left of it was the color of old pewter, and it lay along her jaw and the line of her throat and the hollow at her temple where the bruise was deepening toward something almost black. She had lowered the arrow an inch. She had not lowered it all the way. He knew better than to mention it.

When at last she spoke, her voice had changed again. It was quieter than before, and there was a brittleness in it, like the sound a frozen branch makes just before it gives.

"I have been walking for six days," she said. "I have not eaten since yesterday morning. I have a clay bottle of water in my pack that has gone flat and warm, and I have three strips of dried eel wrapped in oiled linen, and I have been rationing them because I did not know when I would find water again, and because a woman alone in the bog who eats everything on the first night is a woman who starves on the fourth."

She paused. She looked past him at the dark water.

"You offered me water. You offered me food. I am going to accept them, because I am a fool, but not so great a fool as pride will let me die of it. Set them on the stone between us and step back. Do not come within arm's reach of me. Do not speak until I have eaten."

He rose. He went to his pack where it lay in the grass, and he took out the leather bottle, half full, and the small pouch of provisions he had carried since the burned steading, and he brought them back to the stone and set them down. The bottle made a small sound against the rock. The pouch made no sound at all. He stepped back the way she had told him to step back, three paces, and he sat down again in the same spot, and he folded his hands in his lap over the cloth and he did not speak.

She watched him for another moment. Then, with a motion so careful it was almost ceremonial, she set the arrow down on the stone beside the bottle and the pouch, and she unbuckled her quiver and set it beside the arrow, and she picked up the leather bottle and uncorked it and drank. He heard her swallow. He heard her breathe out through her nose. He heard the small sound she made when the water met the dryness in her throat, and he looked away from her, because there are some sounds a man should not witness, and that was one of them.

She drank twice. She corked the bottle. She opened the pouch and drew out a strip of the dried eel and bit into it, and the smell of it, salt and smoke and something faintly sweet, came to him across the cold air, and he realized he was hungry, and he had not realized it until that moment.

"Eat," she said, without looking at him. "I will not have you faint on me before I have decided what to do with you."

He took a strip from the pouch and ate it. It was tougher than he remembered. He chewed slowly and watched the last of the light leave the ridge, and the dark came up out of the bog like a tide, and somewhere a bird he did not recognize made a single low call and did not call again.

When she had eaten half the strip, she wrapped the rest back in the oiled linen and returned it to the pouch. Her hands were steadier than they had been. The brittleness had gone out of her voice, and what was left in its place was something he could not name, something between resignation and the particular calm that comes when a decision has been made and cannot be unmade.

"You have a knife," she said. "I have seen the hilt under the hem of your coat. You will give it to me before we go any further."

"No," he said.

She looked at him. In the growing dark her eyes were darker than they should have been, and there was a stillness in them that was not calm at all but something held very carefully in check.

"No," he said again, and he was surprised to find that his voice did not shake. "I will not. I have given you water and I have given you food and I have given you the truth about my master and about the cloth and about the bones, and I will lead you to the fen-edge and I will take you to the place where your patrol was last known to camp, because that is what you asked of me and it is the least of what I owe. But I will not give you the knife. It is my master's. It is the only thing of his that I have that is not on a page."

She did not speak for a long time.

"Then I will keep my own knife," she said at last, and she reached down and drew from the top of her boot a slim blade, dark-handled, well-worn, longer than he had expected. She held it up so the last of the light caught the edge. "I was not going to surrender this to you either. I thought you should know. I thought it was the kind of thing we ought to say to each other plainly, if we are going to walk together into a place where plainness may keep us alive."

He looked at the blade. He looked at her.

"That is fair," he said.

"It is not fair," she said. "It is merely honest. There is a difference, peat-cutter. Learn it before morning."

She sheathed the knife. She buckled the quiver back over her shoulder. She picked up the arrow and held it across her knee, loosely, as though she had forgotten about it. He did not believe she had forgotten about it. He did not think she would ever forget about it. He thought it likely that she would not sleep that night, and that she would hold the arrow across her knee in exactly that loose way until dawn, and that she would let him see her holding it so he would know she was not sleeping, and that this was a kind of trust, or at least the only kind of trust she had left to give.

"In the morning," she said, "you will lead me east, toward the fen-edge, toward the place my patrol was last known to camp. You will walk ahead of me, because I do not yet trust what is behind me. You will not speak unless I speak to you, and when I speak to you, you will answer me as plainly as you have answered me tonight, because if I catch you in another lie, even a small one, even a kind one, I will leave you where you stand and I will find my own way back."

"Yes," he said.

"Yes what?"

"Yes, my lady."

The corner of her mouth moved. It was not a smile. It was the place a smile would have been if she had allowed herself one, and she did not allow herself one, and the absence of it was louder than the sound the bird had made.

"Not my lady," she said. "My name is Lysenne. If you are going to walk ahead of me into the dark, you will use it."

"Lysenne," he said. The name felt strange in his mouth. It tasted of capitals and of rooms with high ceilings and of a kind of life he had only ever read about in his master's books. "My name is Caelen."

"I know," she said. "I have known since the second time you said it. I am only now letting you know that I know."

He sat with that for a moment. He sat with the cloth in his lap and the taste of the eel in his mouth and the cold working its way up through his bones, and he understood that he had been admitted to something, and that the something was small, and that he had not earned it, and that she had given it to him anyway, and that the weight of it was heavier than the cloth.

"I will lead you in the morning," he said. "East, toward the fen-edge. To the place where your patrol was last known to camp."

"Yes," she said.

"And you will keep your knife."

"Yes."

"And I will keep mine."

"Yes."

"And we will not lie to each other."

She looked at him across the small distance between them, and the dark had come fully now, and he could not see her face clearly, only the shape of it and the pale line of her throat and the gleam of the arrowhead resting against her knee.

"We will not lie to each other," she said. "That is the bargain. It is a poor one. It is the only one I have to offer."

"It is enough," he said. "It is more than I had an hour ago."

She did not answer that. She leaned back against the stone and drew her cloak around her and laid the arrow across her knee and closed her eyes, and he sat with the cloth and the dark and the sound of the bog breathing around them, and he did not sleep. He watched the slow wheel of the stars above the ridge and thought about his master and the rooms he had never entered and the questions he had never asked, and he thought about the woman beside him and the knife at her boot and the bargain they had made in the dark, and he thought that it was, in its way, the truest bargain he had ever made, because it asked nothing of either of them that they were not already willing to give.

Somewhere before dawn the bird called again, once, and was silent, and the bog held its breath, and the first gray light came up out of the east like a slow door opening, and Lysenne opened her eyes and looked at him, and he looked back at her, and neither of them spoke, because there was nothing left to say that the night had not already said for them.