Page 49

He watches me do it. We have had one candle, no candle, a dark corridor, and a wooden face on a chest by the door.

“You will be able to see me,” he says. “Clearly.”

“That’s the idea.”

“You have never looked at me while we did this.”

“No. I took you in the dark on purpose, so it wouldn’t count when I lost you. I’m done with that.” I lean back against the shelf with the light behind me. “Katell’s asleep by the kitchen fire. He’s asleep two rooms off and sleeps through thunder. Tonight I’d rather look at you than listen to you, and I have never said that about anything.”

He goes very still. I know this stillness now. It is the one he gets when I offer him something he is afraid to want.

“Come here,” I say.

He comes.

I take his coat off and put it on the chair. I take his shirt off, and he lets me, and I am not ready for the length of him in light. Pale as tallow, hard all over, every line of him too long.

And down his left side, collarbone to hip, the seam.

In the dark it was a ridge under my palm. In the light it has edges. It is not a scar. It is a hair’s width where there is no skin at all, running down him like the gap at the edge of a door.

“Tell me what it is.”

“That is where they go,” he says. “The dead. When I carry someone over, they come in there, and they go out at the other side when I cross.” His voice is level and he does not look away from me. “It does not heal because it is not a wound. It is a door. It is the part of me that is the work.”

Downstairs the furnace ticks as the day’s heat goes out of it.

“Does it hurt?”

“No.”

“Then why did you stop me from touching it? Twice.”

“Nobody has ever kept a hand on it. I do not know what happens if somebody does. I was not going to find out by accident.”

“I’m asking, then.” I put my fingers on his wrist, where he caught mine. “You can still say no.”

“Yes,” he says, and lifts his arm to make room for my hand.

I put my whole hand flat on it, on that long impossible line down his side, and it is warm.

It is the only warm thing on him. A fortnight of cold through sleeves, cold under my palms, cold in my bed, and one strip of him is the temperature of a living person. I make a sound that is not dignified.

“It’s warm.”

“Yes.”

“Riwal. It’s warm, you absolute fool. I’ve been sleeping on your chest for a fortnight and you let me think you were cold all the way through.”

And the big terrible creature standing in the middle of my childhood bedroom with a woman’s hand on the door of the dead starts to shake.

“Tell me what you want,” I say.

“That.” His hand comes up and covers mine and holds it there, flat, against his own side. “Keep your hand there. I have wanted it since you first put your fingers on it in Morlac.” His hand is not steady on mine. “Please.”

So I get him onto that bed with my hand on the warm part of him, and I let go only when we have to move.

I get the rest of his clothes off him in the light and look while I do it. Then I take off my own, with both lamps burning and his eyes on me, and I watch his mouth part as I bare myself. In the dark I could only hear what that did to him.