Chapter 112: The Hunger Stops

The System had been dutifully counting the whole time.

[Manifestation Remaining: 00:04:51.]

Four minutes and fifty-one seconds for the worst conversation I had ever needed to have. I set the empty jug down between my boots and made myself ask the questions in the order that mattered, because if I lost the thread I wasn’t going to get another chance at it for the rest of my life.

"Did you get inside my head?"

"No." Flat, immediate, no offence taken. "The domain is a made place. I build it and I put us in it. It does not open your memory. It does not read your thoughts. If your mother’s name is written on the inside of your skull it is still there and I still cannot see it."

"But it changed what I wanted."

"It changed what you could hold." She had not come any closer. "Glamour is not command. It does not put a wish in you. It thins your grip on the objections you already had, and it makes what you already felt very loud, and in a made place with no walls and no clocks there is very little left to hold on to." A pause. "That is worse in some ways, and you should understand that it is worse."

"Did you plan it?"

"No."

"Then what happened."

She looked at her own hands, turned them over, and put them behind her back — and I recognised the gesture, because it was the same thing I do when I don’t want somebody watching my fingers.

"I looked at your soul, as you permitted," she said. "Permission for looking. Nothing else, and I will not pretend otherwise later." Her jaw tightened. "What I found was not what a soul-sight is built to survive. Your soul’s life-force is layered like a war-saint’s and it is sitting in a body a hard winter would kill. Over it there is a Charisma that does not read as a face or a manner. To something that eats what I eat, it reads as an open flame in a dark field. I looked directly into it with my guard down because I had judged you harmless."

"And your instinct took over."

"My instinct opened the domain before I had a thought about it. My glamour followed, because glamour is not a thing I switch on — it is what I am, and it rises with hunger the way your mouth waters." Her eyes came up. "And then you responded, which fed the reflex further, which is why it went as fast as it did."

I sat with that.

Here is what I had already worked out while I was lying on the floor, and it was not a comfortable piece of arithmetic. I had wanted her before she opened her soul-sight. I’d wanted her within four seconds of her manifesting, standing there with her arm on fire. That part was mine. Every part after the domain opened had my desire in it and something else in it too, and the two were mixed in the same cup, and I would never be able to separate them by tasting.

"I want to be clear about one thing," I said. "I didn’t agree to that."

"No."

"I agreed to be looked at."

"Yes," Nyssara said, and did not qualify it.

"So don’t tell me later that I wanted it."

The pause before she answered was the longest of the conversation.

"You did want it," she said. "And you did not consent to it. Those are two different accounts of the same minutes, and only one of them is a defence, and it is not the one that flatters me." Her chin lifted a fraction. "I opened a working over a man who had not been told what the working was. I fed while his judgment was clouded by something I put there. I do not require you to arrange those facts kindly."

"How close was it?"

"To your death?"

"Yes."

"Seconds." She said it without any softening at all. "There is a surface layer that renews. Below it there is a reserve that does not. I was at the boundary of the second when I stopped, and the reason I stopped is that I felt the edge of it and understood that I was about to take something that does not grow back."

"Will the weakness stay?"

"Hours. You will be unsteady, you will be ravenous by evening, and you will sleep badly and then very deeply. Nothing was taken that your body does not remake." Then, precisely: "I am not being kind. If I had gone another few seconds I would be describing something permanent."

"Can you do it again?"

"Not while I am here," she said. "You have a rifle under your hand, you are behind a bench, and the working that brought me will not permit me to kill you. But you should hear the honest version, which is that if you ever stand in front of another of my kind and open yourself to a soul-sight, you will not have this conversation afterward. Most of us would not stop. A great many would not even have to decide."

Note that down, I thought. Word for word.

"I want terms," I said.

"Say them."

"If chance ever puts you in front of me again — and it’s chance, I can’t choose you, I want that understood before you start planning around it — nothing that touches a mind, a soul, a glamour or a dream gets used on either of us without a warning first and an answer after. You ask. I answer. Or I ask and you answer. And ’no’ ends it."

"Accepted."

"That’s it? No negotiation?"

"You have offered me the only arrangement in which I can trust myself in a room with you," she said. "Why would I bargain it down?" She let that sit for exactly as long as it needed to, then added, in a different register: "In return I will investigate my own failure, which is not a small undertaking, and I will not approach you while you cannot stand. That is not tenderness. It is that I do not intend to find out what I am like a second time."

"Then that’s the whole of it," I said. "Information can move. That’s all. I’m not promising you an alliance, I’m not offering you a soldier, and this isn’t friendship."

"No," she agreed. "It is not."

[Manifestation Remaining: 00:02:08.]

She saw me look at the corner of my own vision and read it correctly.

"Two minutes," I said.

Something in her changed then, and it was almost restful to watch, because it was competence. She straightened her coat. She wiped the blood off her chin with the back of her wrist and looked at it once, unimpressed, and let her hand fall. The coil of her hair got pushed back into place with two quick movements. The wings came in and folded down flat.

"Your observation about captivity," she said. "I have been turning it over."

"And?"

"It is correct, and it is worse than you know, because it tells me what they will have prepared. If they intend to take me they will have a physician’s letter, a writ of infirmity, and an escort waiting at the north stair to conduct me somewhere restful." Her mouth curled, not pleasantly. "Which means the men in my hall are not expecting a fight. They are expecting a scene. A duchess who rages and is subdued proves the letter."

"So don’t rage."

"So do not rage." Black-crimson fire began gathering along her right forearm again, low and controlled, nothing like the wild leaking crawl of ten minutes ago. "I will let the flame drop. I will put a hand on the arm of the chair as though the room has turned. I will let my war minister say the sentence he has rehearsed, and I will let him believe I am going quietly to the north stair, and I will find out on the way who else is standing in that corridor. Vharrek did not buy three men. Three men do not take a march."

"And when you know?"

"Then I will have their names, and their letter, and their escort, and no reason left to be careful."

The counter fell under a minute. She turned to face the clear part of the floor, feet set, and I understood that she was arranging herself to arrive back in exactly the posture she had left — arm out, fire raised, mid-heartbeat — so that nothing in that throne hall would see a seam.

She was going to walk into a coup pretending to lose.

"Duchess," I said.

She didn’t turn her head. "Yes."

"Don’t die."

"That," said Nyssara Vhal, "would be extremely out of character."