Chapter 57 Wolf’s Restless Soul
He looked at stone. He looked at the slit. He looked at the bowl and saw his face in the liquid, distorted, not handsome, not monstrous yet. He looked at the pillar and remembered how to breathe like a man taught to breathe by a father who had never been allowed to show his son that breathing would not save him.
“I’m here,” she said. “Stay with me.”
The chain at his right wrist went hot. Metal should not go hot that fast unless it is in a forge. It did. The link where the priest had set his favorite prayer glowed cherry and then white, and the prayer burned up and left the metal naked.
“Don’t come,” he said. He had meant to say something else. He had meant to make a joke about prayers. The old jokes were how they had lived, once. He could not find the shape of one now. “Whatever happens, don’t, ”
The floor bucked.
Sigils up the wall flared and died. The old paint that had made them flake fell like dandruff. The pillar he was chained to throbbed once under his spine like a heart. The slit coughed air that was suddenly not air at all but light, pure and cold, silver enough to make a man think of knives and blessing in the same thought.
Then the light hit him.
It came down the slit the way water comes down a cliff when rock breaks and the river finds a new path. It struck the collar first. The silver pattern carved into the band answered with silver in the air and tried to turn it aside. The light did not turn. It smiled and went through. The collar screamed a sound only metal makes. Ryder’s back arched. Every muscle around his ribs seized as if an invisible hand had lost patience and closed.
He did not say her name for a breath and then he did, because the pain became a road and her name was the only town on it that was not on fire. “Sienna,” he gasped.
“I’m here,” she said again, and her voice carried something fierce now, not just mercy. “I’m not leaving.”
“Leave,” he said. He could not see anything anymore. The light had erased the cell and put a white place where a black place had been. He tried to turn his head and the chains reminded him he did not turn his head. “Go.”
“Do you hear me?” she said, and the hand he could not feel on his face stroked a line across his cheek with a thumb he had kissed when he was allowed to be foolish. “Breathe.”
He breathed. The light moved through him as if he were a house with every door open. It found rooms he had walled up and rooms someone else had walled up for him and turned all the handles and laughed without humor at all the locks.
“Say your name,” she told him. “Not mine. Yours. Say it until this doesn’t know you.”
He swallowed and found his throat. “Ryder,” he said. It sounded like a word said by a man in a fog for whom language is a game friends have pretended is still worth playing. He said it again. “Ryder. Ryder.”
The chain at his left wrist let go of one prayer. The metal there went soft. He dragged his hand and the link drew like taffy and then held, half melted, ugly, not chain anymore, not free either.
“Again,” she said.
“Ryder,” he said, and a part of him that was not him yet liked the taste of saying it and came closer to hear better.
The light thinned enough to be seen through.
He saw the cell again, a ruin of its careful wards. He saw the pillar sweating where the stone had heated and then cooled too fast. He saw the bowl overturned. He saw a man’s face in the slick on the floor and recognized nothing in it but breath.
He saw her.
Not outside in some forest of glowing sap, not a voice through stone. Here. The shape of her on the other side of the door where no one stood, not with eyes. A figure the light suggested without drawing, a woman sketched by a candle with a long wick and a taste for drama. She lifted a hand. He lifted his before he could remind his hand that it had work to do. They did not touch. The thought that they might made the chain around his throat loosen its grip for the space of a sigh.
“I can hold you,” she said.
“Bad idea,” he said, a laugh finding him with a limp. “You weigh less than my mistakes.”
“Let me have one,” she said, and the edge of humor in it saved him from drowning in her gentleness. “I like to collect them.”
The wardens did not return. Somewhere above, men were shouting in the language of orders, not prayers. Somewhere beyond them, something was breaking trees like sticks.
“Do you see her?” Lunaris asked. The goddess’s voice slid in under Sienna’s and made it colder. “My ruin. Your hope.”
“She is neither,” he said, and the last link on his right wrist glowed stubborn and then didn’t. “She is herself.”
“Careful,” the goddess murmured. “You are falling in love with already fallen things.”
He gritted his teeth as the link gave. “I was born in a house made of fallen things,” he said. “We used the bricks.”
The shudder in the chain ran through his shoulders and down his spine and opened something that had been held shut with a bar and a promise. He felt the shift come up like a storm out of the ocean, fast and terrible, and he threw his head back and swallowed a roar and turned it into breath.
“Don’t go,” she said, and knew he would and could not help telling him not to.
“I’m trying to be polite,” he said, voice thick with a mouth that wasn’t finished being a mouth. “It is not my gift.”
The cell sank deeper under the weight of night. He tasted fur and blood and the warm salt at the hinge of a woman’s jaw and shut his eyes to both hunger and memory. The skin over his knuckles went tight with tooth under it. Bone worked itself to different work. He set his palms flat against the floor and did not punch it the way he wanted to, because the pillar would bring the ceiling down and the ceiling would bring the corridor down and the corridor would bring men, and he did not want men right now. He wanted her voice and the dark.
“Ryder,” she said, softer now, not command, not mercy. “Look at me.”
He looked without seeing. He sensed heat through the stone, that soft human heat that wolves were built to find half a mile away in snow. He put his forehead to the pillar to cool the change. The iron around his ankles hissed. The sigils there screamed once and then fell silent, as faithful as they were able, as faithful as men, which is to say faithful until the world changed and the words they had memorized no longer fit.
“Hold,” he said, to himself, to the other, to the collar. The collar answered by tightening and then, unexpectedly, loosening, as if some other hand far away had stroked a mark on its inside and made it remember it was not the only thing that knew how to command.