Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The days ran together after that, the way days do when you are busy and afraid.

Every dawn, Fel climbed into Gideon Claive’s punt with a fishing rod and no sword, and sat.

He sat for three hours, in silence, watching the water. He sat through rain, through blazing sun, through a sudden swarm of gnats. When he fidgeted, a hook plucked his collar. When he complained, a carp hit him in the face. It was the most boring thing he had ever done in his life, and by the end of the second week, he began to hear things he had never heard before: the tick of a beetle on a reed, the whisper of a fin, the change in the river’s voice when a stone shifted upstream.

“Now you may hold a sword,” said Gideon.

Gideon taught him what he called the Undertow, though the old man was quick to say it was not a style so much as a rumor.

“Styles are for people who fight in front of an audience,” he said. “The Undertow is for people who intend to go home.”

It had three parts, and all of them were ugly.

Hook. The golden saber was made for it, long and curved, with a deep belly and a cruel, upturned tip. Gideon taught him to stop thinking of it as a sword and start thinking of it as a gaff: to catch a blade on the curve and pull, to hook a wrist, an ankle, a belt, a jaw, and drag. Falling Star, straight and black and quiet, was the knife, for the moment the hook had done its work.

“Nobody ever won a fight by being fair to a fish,” said Gideon.

Haul. Fel learned to fight with his whole body and everything within reach. Shoulders, elbows, the crown of his skull. The heel of a boot on a knee, the pommel across a temple, a fistful of river mud thrown into the eyes. He learned to stand on an opponent’s foot and drive his forehead into a nose. He learned to trip, to shove, to dump a man off a bank and follow him into the water. Every lesson came with a bruise, and the bruises came from a fishing rod.

“Do not look for the opening,” Gideon said, whipping a line across his ankles until he fell. “Make one.”

Gut. And when the man was off balance, hooked and hauled, there was the second blade. These lessons were the worst. Gideon strung up bundles of wet reeds in the shape of men and made Fel kill them. Not cut them, not slash them, kill them. Under the ribs. Behind the knee. Through the tendon at the wrist, the soft hollow of the throat, the place where the shoulder met the neck.

“Never cut what you can stab,” the old man said, as calmly as a man reciting a grocery list. “Never stab what you can break. Never break what you can drown.”

Fel was good at it. That frightened him a little.

“It should,” said Gideon, when he said so. “Brutal is a tool, boy, not a temper. Pick it up when you need it. Put it down when you don’t. The day you start to enjoy it, I will break both your arms myself.”

“Would you?”

“Twice.”

In the afternoons, Gideon made him fight blind. In the evenings, he made him fight tired. On the fortieth day, the old man rowed him out to the middle of the river, stood up in the punt for the first time since they had met, and drew a single thin, rusted sword that Fel had never seen.

“Cut me.”

Fel cut.

He cut a hundred times, and none of them landed. The rusted blade turned every stroke aside with a movement so small it seemed like a twitch. But somewhere around the hundredth, Fel stopped trying to cut and started trying to win. He caught Gideon’s sword on the belly of the golden saber, twisted, and hauled, and for the first time the old man stumbled. Fel came in behind the stumble with a shoulder and a knee, the way he had been taught, and put Falling Star’s point a finger’s width from the old man’s belly. Then, because he could not help himself, he flicked it upward.

The straw hat split neatly in two and fluttered down onto the deck of the punt.

They both looked at it.

“Hm,” said Gideon Claive.

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He picked up the halves, examined them, and laughed until he had to sit down.

“You’ll still lose to someone who cheats,” he said, wiping his eyes. “Learn to cheat better.”

Vili scrubbed pots.

He scrubbed them for eleven days. On the twelfth, Mother Sable made him peel a hundred and fifty grains of rice with a needle of sand. It took him five hours. He got a hundred and forty-one. She threw the rest out and made him do it again.

He learned to salt a soup grain by grain. He learned to carve turnips into swans, and swans into cranes, and cranes into cranes with feathers. He learned to boil an egg to a hundredth of a degree by feeling the steam on his fingertips. His hands, at first, shook. Then they steadied. Then, one morning, he noticed with mild surprise that the silver wire in his fingers no longer felt like a prosthetic, but like an extension of his own bones.

He did not tell anyone. He simply began to spend his afternoons in the Cradle Halls, sitting by a bed of green moss, shaping tiny sand roses on a sleeping girl’s blanket.

“Rose number forty,” he murmured, one evening, threading golden grains into petals thin as breath. “You would say it is ostentatious. You would be right.”

The girl on the moss did not stir. The green light that surrounded her pulsed slow and steady, and her right arm, once strapped in a splint of ash, lay uncovered on the blanket, pale and whole, laced from elbow to wrist with a spiral of faint, glimmering veins.

“She is doing well,” said Karmina’s old teacher, from the doorway. “Better than I hoped. The Mother likes her.”

“The Mother has good taste,” said Vili, and set a sand rose gently on Loria’s palm.

Fel came every night at dusk.

He never brought flowers. He was not that sort of fool. He brought himself, and he sat on the edge of her bed, and he talked.

He told her about the river. About the carp. About the day the old man’s hat had split. He told her about Orcus and the Willow’s Drip and the fat green goblin who talked to goats, and about Tori, and the clove, and the rain. Some nights he said nothing. Some nights he only held the black feather from her braid, turning it over and over in his fingers, and listened to her breathing grow deeper and steadier.

By the ninetieth day, it was twelve breaths a minute.

By the ninety-first, it was fourteen.

On the ninety-second day, at dawn, when the light came through the knot in the trunk and turned the Cradle Halls gold, Fel and Vili were both sitting at the bedside, having fallen asleep in their chairs. Fel woke because someone was watching him.

He opened his eyes.

Two crimson eyes stared back at him from the pillow.

She was very pale. Her hair had grown back to her shoulders in a rough black fall. Her lips were dry, and the corner of her mouth twitched, like a muscle relearning its work.

“You look terrible,” said Loria.

Fel could not speak.

“You have a sunburn,” she said, in the dry, raspy voice of someone who has not used it in months. “And a stain on your collar. And you are staring.”

“I’m not…”

“You are.”

A sound came from the other side of the bed, a small, cracked, unmistakable sound, and Fel turned his head. Vili Wyrnia was awake. His mouth was open. His hair was a mess, and he was crying, not delicately, not with dignity, but with his whole face, the way children cry, and he did not seem to care in the least.

“You’re still talking,” he managed. “You never stop…”

“I said one sentence.”

“It was a full sentence!”

“It was three words.”

He reached across the bed and took her hand, the whole and healed one, and pressed it to his forehead, and she let him.

“Twelve,” he was saying, over and over. “Twelve, twelve, fourteen, twelve…”

“What is he doing?” said Loria to Fel.

“Counting your breaths,” said Fel. His own voice wasn’t steady. “He’s been counting for three months.”

She looked at Vili’s bowed golden head. She looked at the silver-wired fingers wrapped around hers, and the tiny sand roses lined up along the blanket like a garden. For a long moment, her face did something Fel had never seen it do. It softened.

“I see,” she said quietly.

“There’s a lot you missed,” Fel said. “We had to go to a marsh.”

“Which marsh?”

“A very sad one. There was a tree.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I had to talk to it about a woman who’s dead. It was a very good tree. It cried.”

“You,” said Loria, “talked to a tree.”

“Yes.”

“For me.”

“And I got a cup of sap, and I nearly drowned, and I spent three months learning to fish with a man who throws carp at my face, and Vili spent three months washing dishes.”

“Pots,” said Vili, thickly.

“Pots.”

She looked from one to the other. The crimson eyes were very bright. When she spoke, it was slowly, choosing each word.

“You went to a tree,” she said. “And a witch. And a fisherman. For a girl who nearly killed you both.”

“Twice,” said Fel.

“Three times, if you count the balcony,” said Vili.

“That was not my fault.”

“It was entirely your fault.”

She laughed. It was a rusty, painful, beautiful sound, and it turned into a cough, and Fel rushed for water. When she had drunk, she leaned back against the pillow, and her eyes found his and held them.

“Do you think,” said Loria, “I am worth a willow?”

“Two,” said Fel, without thinking.

“Don’t flatter me, TeneDente.”

“It isn’t flattery. I bled on a marsh.”

“And you liked it.”

“I hated it.”

“Liar.” She lifted her healed hand, slow and deliberate, and flicked him on the forehead with one black-nailed finger. It stung. “You’re softer than you look. It’s disgusting.”

“You’re welcome,” said Fel, rubbing his brow.

“I didn’t thank you.”

“You will.”

“I will not.”

“Unbearable,” said Vili, from behind his hands. “The two of you are unbearable. I have spent three months preparing for this moment and I am being subjected to this.”

But he was smiling through his tears, and Loria, after a moment, was smiling too.

Outside the Cradle Halls, high in the branches of the Mother’s tree, a thousand lantern moths were opening their wings.