Mere nudity could not make Perceval naked, but standing spread-eagled while a servant of the House of Rule gawked at her stumps was a true humiliation. She lifted her chin anyway, and chewed the porridge before she swallowed it. The stewed grains popped between her teeth. She could taste the flowers in the honey. Thyme and lavender, she thought.
A mercy, that Rien did not touch her. But she did say, as if she would like to touch, 'So why is it that your wounds aren't healed?'
Perceval shuddered, as if Rien's words had been a hand brushed across the fine shaved stubble on her nape.
Her wounds weren't healed because she could not bear to heal them. She could not bear to admit that she would never fly again. And that was the darkest kind of foolishness.
She did not need to close her eyes to heal herself. She just reached into the symbiotic web that interleaved her brain, pumped through her veins, laced her flesh and muscle, willing the wounds to heal. There was a prickle and itch; she felt scabs writhing, the cells growing, the wounds sealing closed.
She let the chains take her weight again, though the pain was dizzying. Healing exhausted her.
Rien still stood behind. Perceval could picture her, mouth agape, watching the scars knit where the unblade had bitten deep. She wondered if she could actually feel the heat of the girl's palm hovering near her freckled back, or if she only imagined that Rien would want to touch, and barely restrain herself.
In any case, now Perceval needed food more than before.
'The porridge,' she said, and Rien gasped an apology, scampering around to raise the spoon and bowl again.
Perceval ate it all, and drank the tea. And as Rien was leaving, Perceval stood up strong and stretched against her chains. If she had wings, they would have fanned for balance...
Instead, the tender healed skin broke, and blood trickled in quill-thin streams down her back once more.
Rien ascended the stairs, shaking. The empty bowl rattled on the plastic tray and her feet clicked on the transparent steps. The echo—through strangely silent halls—could have been the reverberation of Perceval's voice, as if the prisoner called after her: Rien, Rien, Rien.
When Rien came into the kitchen with the dirty bowl, Roger was there with Head, being trained to supervise the scrubbers. He was skinny and dark—a beaky, random-jointed man with a cleft chin, counterpoint to Head's stocky muscularity. Head glanced up as Rien came in, and with a flick of fingers gestured her closer. Rien leaned past Roger to slide the dishes into the scrubbers: pink and frothy, they reached up to cushion and coat each item as it dropped from Rien's hand.
Head stepped closer and pinched Rien's cheek to make her smile. 'Why the worryface?'
Strange that sie should tease, when Head's own expression was taut. But that was Head. Sie had been castelan and householder to the Conn family since Tristen and Aefre were crawling babes, to hear hir tell it. Rule might have grown up around hir, as if sie were its rooftree.
Head had no need to prove hir authority through blows or remonstrations. And Rien, who was without family, could think of none she trusted more. 'Head, she knew my name.'
Head tched, and touched Roger's elbow to draw his attention to a place where the scrubbers were working over the same spot again and again, caught in a feedback loop. 'They say demons know all sorts of things,' Head said, without a glance at Rien. 'And if what crawls out of Engine is not demons, why there are no demons in the world.'
Rien snorted, and that
'No, Head.'
But Head smiled, a quick flicker of lips, and Rien smiled back before she dropped her eyes to the scuffed toes of her shoes. And then Head dipped a hand into hir pocket and extended the closed fist to Rien.
What sie laid in Rien's cupped palms, though, was no gift, but a crumpled length of black crepe. 'While you were in the dungeon, the Commodore struck Lady Ariane over the prisoner,' Head said, 'and the princess sent for a sharpening stone. You'll want to be ready with that.'
At the sound of footsteps, Rien backed into the shadows of the portrait hall, wringing her rag between her hands. It was slightly greasy, aromatic of lemon oil.
If she closed her eyes and crowded the wall, she could convince herself that she smelled that, and not the acrid machine-oil scent of noble blood. She could convince herself that the burled gold-and-black ironwood frame of the Commodore's portrait—of the
There was no black sash across it yet, though the confrontation had been coming a long time. Rien had the crepe looped through her belt in the back, freshly pressed, and she had a hammer in her apron pocket also, and sixteen long framing nails.
Eight of the other twenty portraits in the hall were already crossed by mementos of mortality: those of the Princes Royal Tristen, Seth, Finn, Niall, Gunther, and Barnhard, and the Princesses Royal Aefre and Avia. Tristen and Aefre were the eldest, and Aefre had died in a war with Engine before Benedick or Ariane were ever born. There were songs about them, some of which Rien knew. They had been lovers as well as brother and sister, and Tristen was most recently lost, though he had been gone longer than Rien had been alive. So that was centuries of life without his true love, and Rien, who as a Mean could expect to live a hundred years if she were lucky, wondered what it had been like. Could you find other loves? Did you just endure alone, like in the songs?
That seemed, she thought, unnecessarily melodramatic.
Of the other twelve portraits, nine smiled or frowned from the wall, unmarked: Benedick, Ariane, Ardath, Dylan, Edmund, Geoffrey, Allan, Chelsea, Oliver. Oliver was Rien's favorite. She gave his frame especial attention. Three final portraits were turned to the wall and nailed there. Whoever they memorialized, Rien had never heard their names, but she knew they had rebelled and been cut down.
The blood smell wasn't fading, no matter what lies she recited. And the footsteps were growing closer. Crisp footsteps, a woman's hard small boots, and the shimmering of silver spurs. Rien forced her eyes open, untwisted the rag j in her hands, and began rubbing the scrolled edge of the frame, work smoothing the tremble from her fingers.
No gilt to concern her, just oil-finished wood from which a deep luster had been developed by centuries of polishing. Like the spider in the window, whose web had already been cleaned away when Rien went to see, she wouldn't look up, wouldn't pause, wouldn't seek notice.
Not until the jingling spurs drew closer. Then she put her back to the painting, lowered her eyes—closed her eyes, truth told—twisted that sorry rag in her hands again, and bowed so low she felt it in her knees.
The footsteps paused.
Rien held her breath, so she wouldn't sneeze on the I stench of gardenias and death.
'Girl.'
'My Lady?'
'Your rag,' the Princess Ariane said, her spurs ringing I like dropped crystal at the slight shift of her weight. Rien I knew she was extending her hand. She risked a peek to find it, and laid her greasy yellow chamois across the princess's callused palm.
Lady Ariane Conn of the House of Rule could never be mistaken for a Mean. Her hair was black-auburn, her eyes peridot. Her collarbone made a lovely line over the curve of her velveted ceramic power armor, and her cheek would have been smooth as buttermilk had the plum-dark outline of a gauntlet's fingers not been haloed in chartreuse upon it, pricks of scab night-colored against the bruising where sharp edges had caught her.
The scabs writhed as she repaired herself.
Lady Ariane laid the flat of her unblade on Rien's chamois and wiped first one side, then the other. She scrubbed a bit where forte joined hilt, angled it into the light for inspection, picked with a thumbnail—careful of the edge—and scrubbed again. The blood she wiped was scarlet, not cobalt. The unblade had already absorbed whatever noble virtue had been in it.
At last satisfied, she handed the rag back, then sheathed Innocence almost without steadying the scabbard.
