Chapter 20: Brothers in Arms

I woke before the dawn.

I do not know what woke me. The dell was grey. The fire-pit was banked. The shapes of the bedrolls around me were the soft dark shapes of people still in their sleep. The air had the cold edge of a spring morning that had not yet had a sun in it.

I lay on my back a long count. The night came back to me in pieces. The bones. The reading I had not quite landed. The exorcism I had told myself I would have to do this morning before whatever the day asked me would be asked of me. The snake inside me. The not-faith.

I rose.

I dressed quietly. I did not pick up my sword. I had not, the night before, gone to sleep thinking I would need it. I had gone to sleep thinking I would need to walk down to the lake in the dawn, alone, and put my body into the cold water, and find out whether what was left of me was enough for the day. I did not put on a sword for that work. A sword would have made it the wrong work. I put on my shirt and my breeches and my soft boots, and I left the dell by the south path the way I had come up from the bowl the afternoon before, and I went down to the lake in the small grey first light.

The path was empty. The wood was awake at the level the wood is awake before the sun — a single bird working over a single branch, a small water-sound from the stream, the air not yet up to the day. I walked. I did not, on the way down, think much. I had done the thinking in the small hours. The body needed only to be in the cold water.

I came round the small bend in the path and the lake was in front of me.

The lake at dawn was a different lake from the lake of the previous afternoon. The water lay flat and grey under a sky that had a small wash of pink along its eastern edge. The forest stood dark on all sides. No wind. No birds on the water. The little beach of pale sand and small smooth stones was empty. The lake was empty. The dawn was empty. I stood at the edge of the small beach with the silence around me.

I took off my boots. I took off my shirt. I took off my breeches. I shed everything, until I was naked as a man on the day he was born, and left it all in a small folded heap on the sand. I waded in.

The water was cold as it had been cold yesterday — the cold of a lake fed by springs — and the cold drove the air out of my lungs the first three strides. I went under. I came back up. I gasped. I swam.

I swam out from the beach in long slow strokes, the way Davil had taught me eight summers ago in the river under the castle. The cold worked itself into me. The body began to settle. I had been carrying, for the better part of a week, a weight in my shoulders I had not registered as a weight until the water took it off them. By a hundred paces out the body had remembered itself. By two hundred I was thinking, with the small clean clarity the cold gives a man who is the right kind of tired.

I had seen, the previous afternoon, an island in the middle of the lake. A small island with pine trees and what had looked like a small bright beach on its far side. I swam for it.

It took me perhaps ten minutes. I came up on the far side onto a beach of fine sand and small flat stones, with grass behind it, and a single tree at the centre of the small grassy crown. There were no birds. There was no movement. The island was, in the dawn, the kind of place a man could sit on for an hour with no one in the world knowing where he was.

I climbed out of the water.

I sat down on the warmer sand at the back of the beach where the grass began. I put my back against the small tree. I closed my eyes.

I sat with the snake.

I sat with the snake the way Davil had taught me, eight summers ago in the courtyard, to sit with a thing the mind had to put down before the body could carry it. The snake was the not-faith. The snake had been eating me for a week. The snake had been telling me that the kingdom could not be fixed, that my father could not be reached, that the road could not be walked, that a queen of hearts was a story and a kingdom-without-rot was a story and a peace between two kingdoms in arms for forty years was the same story. The snake had been wrong on every one of those, and had been winning anyway, because winning was what snakes did inside a man who was tired and afraid and far from home.

I told the snake to leave.

I told it the way Davil had taught me to tell things. You have been here long enough. You may go.

I did not, at first, feel anything happen. I sat with my back against the tree and my eyes closed and the cold of the lake still on my skin, and I told the snake to leave. I told it again. I told it a third time. I did not pretend, at the third telling, that I had finished. I knew that the kind of thing the snake was took longer than three sentences to be gone from a man. I knew that the work of the morning was not the killing of the snake; the work of the morning was the deciding to kill it, and the deciding to keep deciding. The decision was what a man could give the morning. The execution would be the rest of his life.

I decided.

I decided that I would not, from this morning on, accept the country as it had been given to me. I had been accepting it for eighteen years. I had been accepting that the king failed and the queen protected herself, and that the lords took and the people went hungry, and that the kingdom drowned in fair lies and that this was the shape of the kingdom and that the shape was not mine to alter. I had accepted because the snake had been telling me, the whole week of the road, that the shape could not be altered, and because I had not had the standing to argue with the snake.

I would no longer accept.

I would risk altering. The risk would be the rest of my life. I would risk failing. I would risk dying. I would risk being a man who had tried where my father had not tried and who had been struck down for trying. The trying would be the work. The not-trying was what the snake had wanted of me, and I would not give the snake what it had wanted.

And I would not, from this morning on, doubt myself in the way that had been letting the snake in. I had been doubting myself since the first night out of the castle. I had been doubting because Davil’s saying needed a queen of hearts and I had not had one; I had been doubting because the bones had said snake and I had not known which friend; I had been doubting because the verse had said the kingdom would drown and I had been afraid I was watching it. I had had reason for each. But the doubting itself had been the snake’s food, and the snake had grown on the food, and the snake had begun to be louder than the man.

I would silence the doubting; I had been through my baptisms of fire. Not deny it — I was eighteen and the world had given me reason for it — but I would not, from this morning on, feed it. I would act first and doubt second. I would risk first and weigh second. I would, if it came to it, fail first rather than not try.

That was what I decided.

I sat with the decision a long count. The dawn lightened around me. The pink along the eastern edge of the sky widened. A bird, somewhere on the far shore, woke up and began to call. The water of the lake began to shift from grey toward a thing I could see colour in.

I had begun, I thought, to be the man the day was going to ask.

I had not finished. I would not, by sundown, have finished. But I had begun, and the beginning was what the lake had been for.

I opened my eyes.

I had decided, sitting under the tree, that I would lie back on the sand a few minutes more, then swim back, and dress, and walk up to the dell, and be at the table when Tor called us, and do whatever the day asked, and the work would be done with the man I had begun to be.

I lay back.

It was then that I heard the splash.

The splash was on the lake side of the island, not the side I had come up on. I lifted my head. The dawn had come on enough that I could see colour in the water — the grey going green at the edges, the small pink of the sky on the surface — and I could see, twenty paces off, a head and a pair of shoulders and the line of a back coming up out of the water and turning toward the island.

I did not, for a moment, understand what I was seeing.

I had been alone in the dawn at a lake nobody else of our parties could swim. I had been thinking of the cold and the snake and the decision. I had not been thinking of anyone coming up out of the water toward me, because I had not, in the whole of yesterday or yesterevening or this dawn, conceived that any of the others could swim.

She was perhaps ten paces from the beach when I understood who it was.

She came up the slope of the small bottom in long unhurried steps. She had been swimming hard — her breath was up — but she did not, in the coming up, hurry. She kept the pace of a woman walking, as the water fell to her hips, as the water fell to her thighs, as the water fell.

The water fell.

I sat up.

Lirien was also naked as the day she was born.

I have, in the months since, tried to set down what I saw of her in those last steps as she came up out of the water and onto the small beach. I have not been able. I have written it and I have struck it and I have written it again and I have struck it again. The piece I have not been able to strike, and that is the only piece I will set down here, is this: the place where her hips met between her legs made a small clean V that I had not, in eighteen years on the earth, known the body could make, and the V was the cleanest most perfect line I had ever seen on a body, and I have not been able to unsee it. The rest of her is the rest of her. The V was the piece my eye would not, all morning, leave alone.

She came up the wet sand at the water’s edge.

She stopped six paces from me.

I could not, for the space of three breaths, find air. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and I had thought yesterday at the table that the noticing I had done of her under the dress had been the largest piece of it, and I had been wrong. The largest piece was the woman in front of me now in the dawn with the water running off her skin and the cold of the lake making the freckles stand a little darker than they stood when she was warm. I sat under the tree and looked at her and could not, in those three breaths, find a word.

She did not, in those three breaths, find one either.

She stood and looked at me with her hands at her sides and her hair flat to her head and her chest still moving from the swim, and she let me see her, because she had nothing else left to give me, and she had come to the island to give it.

She said, into the small still moment:

“I have come because I want to know, just once, what it is to be loved by a good man.”

She said it plainly.

She said it without lifting her voice. She said it without a tremor. She said it the way a worker tells the work she has come to do. I have come for this. This is what I have come for. She did not say what she would do if I refused. She did not say that she had thought about my refusing. She did not say that she had thought, perhaps, that I might. She had not, I would understand later, the practice of expecting to be heard at all, and so the sentence she had brought to the beach was the sentence of a woman who had not, in the whole of her eighteen years, learned to provide for the case in which a man heard her and said no. She had brought the offering and the offering was what she had to bring. The rest was mine.

I had a recognition come up at me as she stood there.

I had said, in a small buried room with a Truth-Teller four months ago, all around me is death, and there is only one way to live. I had said it about my own life and the kingdom around it, and I had meant it then, and I had walked with the meaning of it through every step of the road since.

She had been living the same equation in her own kingdom for years. She had been living it longer than I had been living mine. All around me is death. The lords, the father, the impending sale, the future husband she would not have chosen, the queen of hearts work done in the dark, the disrespect of her court, the I am no beauty that had not been hers to invent. All around me is death. And — there is only one way to live. And I thought about my words about Aelea: a coin to be spent on whichever fat old lord or foreign princeling falls out most to her father’s advantage when the day comes. About how very fortunate she is: she will be handed across like the coin she is, to be opened and used and got with child by a stranger she was never once asked to want.

The one way she had found was to come to a small island in the dawn and give the next outcome of her life to the only man she had met whose hands she could trust her body to.

She had not come to be ravished. She had not come to bind me. She had not come because she thought a single morning of love would change anything in the political road that lay between us. She had come because one was what a woman in Brandt’s house could choose. She had had one morning. She had chosen what to do with it. She had chosen this.

I understood it at her, in the three breaths, the whole way through.

I did not, in any second of those three breaths, want anything other than to take what she had offered.

She was perhaps the most beautiful thing the earth had ever put in front of a man, and she was naked at six paces, and she was asking for one morning of being loved by a good man. The body in me — the eighteen-year-old in me — wanted exactly what the body in me wanted, and the wanting was not small, and the wanting was not negotiable, and I had to look at her and hold the wanting where it was.

I had to.

I knew it before I had named it.

I had to, because I had spent eighteen years refusing princesses against a saying my tutor had given me at nine. I had refused them because none of them had been a queen of hearts and a King needed a queen of hearts. I had refused them on the saying. I was sitting on a beach now with the queen of hearts in front of me, and the queen of hearts had offered me herself for one morning, and the one morning was the version of her her father had made her into and the refusal of which was my whole work. I could not take the one morning. I could not honour her by taking what she had been broken into being able to offer. The one morning was the shape Brandt had cut her into. To take it would have been to confirm the shape.