“You don’t understand what love is,” Steppan said, wiping the back of his hand across his beard.
“And you do?”
“Love is like recognition. It’s the moment when you catch sight of someone and you think There is someone I have business with in this life. There is someone I was born to know. Has that never happened to you?”
“It has, but I never took much comfort in it.”
Steppan waved the old woman closer and held out his cup for her to refill. At this rate, he’d be snoring asleep before twilight. Which might actually be the best thing. Asa wasn’t looking forward to finding a reason that Steppan couldn’t come to this last part of the plot.
“Love is like a baby sleeping on its mother’s breast,” Steppan said.
“Inchoate and likely to piss itself?”
“Ah, you can play at being a cynic, my friend, but I’ve known you too long. You’re a romantic at heart. You’re in love with the world.”
“I’d say I’m inchoate and likely to piss myself,” Asa said, trying not to smile. Steppan’s pleasure was simple and unfeigned and infectious.
“Fine! Fine, then love isn’t like a baby. Love is like falling from a window and discovering you can fly.”
“Unlikely to happen and dangerous to try.”
Steppan’s laughter was a howl. Asa saw the men passing below them look up, curious, and didn’t feel impatient any longer. The foul mood had passed for the moment. It would come again, but for now it was gone. That was a gift.
“Love is like the burst of sweetness when you bite into a strawberry.”
“Brief for you and painful for the berry.”
“Ach! Love is like beautiful music played in a ruin.”
“Give me a minute. No, just a minute. I’ll think of something.”
And the game went on with the hours and the wine. Asa tried to forget what had come before and what would come next. It was a long pleasant afternoon, just the two of them and the city beneath their feet. A golden moment that could wax and wane. By the time darkness fell, Steppan could barely walk straight. Asa had matched the prince cup for cup and felt sober as a judge. There was still work that needed doing, and a thousand things to go wrong.
Workhouse captives died all the time, of course. Usually, they had the grace to do it after they’d spent months or years behind the high gray walls, but some lucky few would die on the quay, and in those cases, the workhouse men would do the same thing they always did: fling the corpse into the river and forget it. Asa poled the little boat out just beyond the quay, tied it to a rotting stonework wall built by hands a hundred years dead, and waited. The Taunis was a dull river, predictable and deliberate as a plow horse. The children of Sovereign North Bank knew the places where wood and corpses came to rest on its banks the way in other cities they might know which corners had the sweet shops. The river stank and muttered against the side of the boat. The splash of something heavy being dropped from the quay would have been easy to miss if Asa hadn’t been listening for it.
The girl’s body lay facedown in the water. Her shoulders were a dim gray in the moonlight, her head a knot of ropy black. Hauling her in set the little boat tottering, but not dangerously. Her face was mottled ice white and bruise purple, her tongue swollen until it pressed out past her lips, and her eyes, open in slits, were still as stones. Asa had never seen the dead look deader.
At the shore, a little hand truck waited, and Asa was glad to have added it into the plan. Zelanie, daughter of no one any longer, was waterlogged deadweight and felt like she’d been filled with sand and lead. That the hand cart didn’t have a cover was an oversight to keep in mind for next time, but it wasn’t as if hauling a corpse through the lowest streets would attract much attention. Stranger things happened all the time.
Rouse waited in the tiny workshop at the back of the temple. Shelves of salt and dried herbs covered the walls and ate into what little space there was. Together, they lifted her onto the low slate table more usually employed for preparing the dead. Rouse stripped off her river-soaked clothes with a steel knife, washed the filth and river scum from her, and folded a warmed blanket of wool that covered her from toes to neck. He placed heated stones along her body, and then drew a tiny flask from the shelves and carefully placed a single crimson drop on her tongue. The chancellor grunted with satisfaction.
“She’s all right?” Asa asked.
“She is as I expected her to be. After this, she should wake, not as one does from sleep, but from a wound to the head. She may wake sober, or she may be confused. Or possibly violent.”
“And what do we do about that?”
“I tell you that she may be confused and violent, and you watch over her while I sleep. That is what we do,” Rouse said, putting the flask back in its place.
After Rouse left, Asa leaned against the wall, watching the woman’s face by the light of the single candle. As slowly as the stars turning in the night sky, her skin began to clear, the blackened, monstrous tongue grew smaller and retreated behind her teeth. Asa watched the changes without knowing quite what they meant. Considered for long enough, she went from pretty to plain back to pretty, and then settled into a kind of visually interesting that was in its way more compelling than beauty. It became possible to believe that a man such as Steppan might have his heart swept away by glancing at her at a fortunate moment and in the proper light. Her eyes shifted under their lids and she began to tremble like a child left too long in the cold.
When she gasped in her first real breath in hours, Asa started back like she’d shouted. Her eyes opened, bright and wild and uncomprehending, and a moment later, she laughed, deep and wild and satisfied. When she stretched, a half dozen stones fell from her blanket to the stone floor. Her gaze found Asa, and she lifted her chin, grinning like she was greeting a dear friend.
“Who are you?” she asked languorously.
“My name’s Asa. We have someone in common.”
“Do we?”
“Well, you don’t know him, but yes.”
She shook her head, blinking, and laughed again. It took a moment for her to bring her focus back, but she didn’t seem fearful or prone to violence so much as drunk and happy. Asa sat at her feet.
“You saved me?”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“For love.”
“Of me?”
“No.”
She shifted forward, wrapping herself with the blanket as an afterthought and with only partial success. Her hand found its way into Asa’s, the fingers like frozen sticks. She was still very cold.
“Your friend, then?”
“Yes.” The answer could have meant Steppan’s love of her or Asa’s love of him. Both would be true.
“You have saved me,” Zelanie said softly, smiling her beatific smile.
“I did.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
“Actually, yes. I like being clever, and I got to be very, very clever. So that part was nice at least.”
She made a pleased hum and shifted forward. Her hair smelled of the river. Her mouth was soft and tasted of copper and dirt. When her hand slipped under Asa’s clothes, the feeling of skin against skin was like pouring water on a burn. The longing to be touched—at first by Steppan but eventually by anybody—that had lain ignored so long rose up like the heat of summer. When Asa pulled back, she brought their twined fingers to her mouth.
“You’re drugged.”
“I am a bit, aren’t I?”
“You aren’t yourself.”
“I’m not someone else.” She lay back on the slate table, pulling them together as she did. Her hands tugged at the stays of Asa’s cloak. “Anyway, how would you know who I am?”