Page 63 of Broken Vow

He had gone quiet in a way I had not seen in him before, a held quiet, and the closer we came to the palace district the more of it there was. This was a man who sat with the dying without flinching, who had walked me up a mountain and into a witch’s scrying-pool without his voice changing once, and now, going to ask his own brother for a favour, he had the bearing of a man walking toward a thing that had hurt him badly once and might again. I did not ask. There was no breath to spare for asking, between the cobbles and the curse. But I marked it, and I reached over once and put my hand in his, and he gripped it harder than the moment seemed to call for, and I understood that whatever this brother was, the asking was going to cost him something I could not yet see the size of.

Cael kept rooms above the palace guardhouse, and we came to them by a side court, and Auden stopped at the foot of the stair before he climbed it, just for a moment, gathering something, and then he went up and knocked, and a voice from within said come, in a tone that expected to be obeyed, and we went in.

* * *

I knew him for Auden’s brother before either of them said a word, and I knew them for nothing alike in the same breath.

He stood at a table with a map weighted flat under his hands, and he was, like his brother, unfairly made. Whatever blood ran in that family had spent itself twice over on producing formidable men, and I caught myself thinking it even with the curse clawing at me, that it was a strange and almost unjust thing for two such men to come of one line. But where Auden was warmth banked under stillness, all open hands and the steadiness of a hearth you could warm yourself at, this one was the cold clean edge the warmth had been beaten out of, hard planes and a shut mouth and eyes that gave back nothing, a drawn blade to his brother’s lamp. He had Auden’s same economy of movement and none of his ease. His face was a closed door. He looked up, took the two of us in, priced us, and filed us away in the time it takes most people to say hello, and the first thing he said, to Auden, in a flat cool voice, was, “You bring a stranger to my door in the worst week the palace has had in thirty years. Either there is a reason, or you have lost your mind. Tell me which.”

And then Auden did a thing I did not expect. He crossed the room and put his arms around his brother.

It was not returned. Cael went rigid inside the embrace, his hands staying at his sides, his face over Auden’s shoulder gone blank with something that was not quite shock and not quite pain, the look of a man handed a thing he had stopped letting himself want. Auden held him a moment anyway, and let him go, and stepped back, and I understood from the whole of it, from how wrong it sat on Cael, that whatever these two had been to each other lately, it had not included this in a very long time.

I should have been watching them more closely. Instead I was standing just inside the door spending the whole of myself on not coming apart.

It had got worse the instant we stopped walking, as though the curse had only been waiting for me to be still. The pull came up through me in a long slow heave, my spine straining toward a curve it did not want, the bones of my hands gone hot and loose in a way bones should never feel, the gold pressing in at the edges of my sight so the lamplit room swam at its corners. I locked my knees. I breathed through my nose. I held my two human hands flat and still against my thighs and kept my chin up and my eyes clear while inside me something pulled and pulled and I gave it nothing, and the whole time a cold voice in me kept its own terrible count, that every minute I stood in this room being weighed was a minute I would not get back, that the woman was draining out of me by the spoonful while a stranger decided whether I was worth the risk.

Against my ribs, very quietly, Tsuki spoke, his voice pitched for me alone. “I like him about as much as he likes us, which is to say not at all. But he is the kind that gets a thing done. Hold your nerve, little silver sister.” No one else heard it. I held my nerve.

And then I looked at Cael properly, past the closed door of his face, and I forgot the count for a moment, because I saw the thing underneath it.

I knew it because I carried one myself. There was a wound in this man. Not a fresh one, an old one, walled up so long and so well that I do not think he knew anymore it was there, a stone carried so long in the shoe that the foot goes numb around it and you forget it was ever a stone. Everything cold in him, the priced look, the flat voice, the shut mouth, it was not the absence of feeling. It was a wall built over feeling, so high and so old that the man had lost the road back to his own heart and called the losing strength. I had spent my whole life since the temple learning to read exactly that wall, first in myself and then in everyone I had ever tried to mend, and I saw it in him in three seconds flat, and something in me ached toward it, helplessly, as you reach for someone falling before you have decided to.

It frightened me, that ache, because under it was something else I had no name for, a low strange pull toward this cold stranger that I had felt only once before in my life, on a mountain, with his brother. Some part of me had recognized his hurt as the twin of my own and turned toward it before I could stop it, a wordless wondering whether two people walled up the same way might teach each other the road back out. I did not want it. I loved Auden, I knew that as surely as I knew my own name, and besides I was done to the bone with men who did not want me near them. So I shoved it down under the curse and the fear and everything else I was holding closed, and I made myself attend to the only thing that mattered, which was getting him to open that door.

“Her name is Liora,” Auden said. “And the reason is the empire.”

* * *

“The empire,” Cael repeated, flat. “You walked a sick girl across a city under high alert, and brought her up my stair, for the empire. Try again. And be quicker about it. I have a watch to set.”

“The order was not made to serve an emperor,” Auden said. “It was made to serve the realm. You know that better than any of us. We were set above the throne in one regard only, that our duty runs to the land and the people on it, and not to whichever man happens to be wearing the crown on a given morning.”

“I know the catechism. I command the men who recite it.” Cael had not moved. “What I do not know is why you are reciting it to me at midnight with a fever-case at your elbow.”

“Because the throne is sick, Cael. Not the man. The throne itself, the thing under it.” Auden’s voice stayed level, but his hand had closed at his side. “There is old magic at work in this palace, the severing craft, the kind every temple in the realm has named cursed and buried. It is being worked right now, under our feet, in a sealed room beneath the new stone, under a mark older than the Aurelians. And the emperor either knows of it and has let it grow, or does not know and is being moved by it. I cannot tell you which is worse.”

For the first time something shifted in the cold face. Not belief. Attention.

“You have seen the edges of it yourself,” Auden pressed. “These last weeks. Honest people dragged off the streets as foreign witch-folk. The sick robbed of their medicine in the name of public safety. Orders coming down out of the inner palace that make no sense from a sane throne and perfect sense from a frightened one. You have stood closer to the crown than any of us. Tell me you have not felt the wrongness of it.”

“I have felt that the emperor is not himself,” Cael said slowly. “I had laid it to grief. The court says he grieves something, no one knows what.” His eyes narrowed. “You are telling me it is not grief.”

“I am telling you grief is being used to hide something worse.” Auden drew a breath. “And the one soul alive who has been inside the reach of the thing at the centre, and lived, is standing in your room. She has to get back to it, into that sealed chamber, to undo what was done to her there. Help her, and you do not betray the emperor. You do the one thing we were ever made to do.”

Cael was quiet a long moment, his eyes going from his brother to me and back.

“That is a great deal of treason,” he said at last, “dressed up very prettily as duty.” But he had not said no. And he was looking at Auden in a way that had changed across the exchange, something working behind the shut face, and I understood, watching the two of them, that it was not the argument that had reached him. It was the embrace, and the asking, and the brother he had thought long gone standing warm in his doorway.

“You are different,” he said, and it did not come out as a compliment, it came out as an accusation, or an old grief pressed without warning. “You came here and asked me for something. You. You have not asked me for anything in years. You used to climb that stair only to tell me where I had gone wrong.” He stopped. Whatever stood at the end of that sentence, he left it standing. “Now you put your arms around me and tell me a story about the empire, and you look at me like I am your brother again.”

Something crossed Auden’s face that I had not seen on it before, not in the snow, not at the worst of the mountain. A very old hurt, and under it something that hoped and hated to hope.

“You are my brother,” he said quietly. “You were always my brother. We quarreled, you and I, over the work and how to do it and who we owed, and I let the quarrel grow until it stood between us like a wall, and I called that your doing for a long time. It was not only your doing. It was mine, that I never once crossed the wall to tell you I loved you anyway, differences and all. I am crossing it now.”

The room held very still. Whatever lay between these two was deep, and years old, and not mine to know yet, but I had just heard the edge of it. Cael’s jaw worked once. Then his eyes cut to me, sharp.

“What did you do to him,” he said. It was not quite a question.