Chapter Three — Little Guesclin

"Twice a week," Loretta said, scooping him up onto her shoulder. "You and the little miss."

She got him balanced.

"Your mother's settled it with hers. No argument from anybody, she says."

A sniff.

"Means somebody argued."

Twice a week.

A recurring appointment.

He'd had one of those before. Every ninth day. A room with a drain in the middle of the floor.

The only good thing about it was that you knew when it was coming.

That was, he discovered, still the good thing about it.

He started counting days.

On the fourth day he noticed he was counting days.

He decided not to look at that too closely. There was a lot of that lately. He'd sort it out when he had hands.

Alina Guesclin had been in the room the first time the sky did it.

She'd been twenty. Flat on her back, too wrecked to turn her head to the window. The shouting came up through the floor, and she thought, very clearly:

Oh no.

Not oh. Not at last. Just oh no, very quietly, at the ceiling.

Her son had been sworn at twelve. He came home twice a year now, if the season allowed it, and he was polite to her.

He also had a way of standing in a doorway that she recognised, because his grandfather did it too. Checking the room for exits before he came in.

Her son was sixteen and he checked rooms.

Then the light came over the Strade house, and every soul in Redmont went down on their knees in the road.

She lay there with her daughter still wet on her chest and thought it again.

Oh no.

She named the girl at seven days.

She didn't discuss it. Didn't write to Renoir. Didn't wait for the family to send a list. There was a list.

She had looked at the small furious thing in her arms and understood that a great many people were going to want a say in this child.

She intended to be first.

She called her Marika.

What she wanted for her, in full: a long life, a bed at the end of it, and nothing about her ever written down anywhere.

She knew it was already lost.

She wanted two years. That was all. Two years of the girl being nothing but a baby — loud, ordinary, screaming the roof off about nothing at all.

After that they'd come. They always came. Priests first, then some pleasant man from the palace who would explain that of course there was no obligation.

Which was why she kept coming back to Janet's room.

The confinement was long over. Her own house was four days away. She stayed anyway.

Because Marika screamed. Every day, about that hour, for as long as anyone could stand it and then longer. She had screamed on the road. She had screamed through two changes of nurse. She had screamed at a bishop.

And she did not scream at the Strade boy.

Alina had watched it happen four times and still couldn't see the mechanism.

He didn't do anything. That was the strange part.

He lay there — later, sat there, propped up like a badly balanced sack — and he looked at her. And Marika would stop mid-breath and look back. And then the two of them would go on looking at each other in silence, like a pair of cats.

Janet said he did it to everyone.

Whatever else that house had made, Alina thought, it had made a quiet one.

A steady child. She'd known men in the field like that. The ones who never got loud. You gave them the difficult jobs because they didn't spend anything on being upset first.

He'd be good for the girl. Steady was good for the girl.

There had been one moment, that first afternoon.

She'd bent down over the two of them, and the boy's eyes had come up and found hers, and there was nothing in them at all.

No fear of the large face. No search for a familiar one.

Just a flat, unhurried attention. As if she were a door he was deciding whether to go through.

She thought about it for a day and a half. Then she put it down.

He was six weeks old, and she'd been getting three hours of sleep.

They put the two of them on the same bed and let them get on with it.

His first proper experiment was the hand.

He had a great deal of data on his own grip, most of it in the form of ruined blankets. He had none at all on a normal one.

So he waited until her fist came near, and let her take his finger.

She took it. Hard, wet, immediate.

Grip strength: nothing. A closed circle of warm damp nothing. He could have got the finger back with about as much effort as blinking.

Duration: indefinite. She had no intention of letting go. She had, in fact, forgotten she was doing it, and was now looking at the ceiling about something else entirely.

Conclusion: so that was what one felt like.

He left the finger where it was.

He'd got what he came for in about two seconds. He left it there for the rest of the afternoon, and did not examine that decision at all.

Warm.

Warm, and it has a bit that goes in the mouth, and the bit is a good size.

Again.

By the fifth month he could sit up, mostly, if nobody bumped the bed.

Marika could sit up better. She could also roll from her back to her front, which he couldn't, and then be furious about it — four or five times an afternoon, never once seeing it coming.

By then he had run into a problem.

The problem was daylight.

His night work was going well. He had a routine now. Wait for Loretta's breathing to go slow. One hand on the rail to hold the crib against the wall. Everything silent, everything deniable.

It paid the way it always paid. Work, sleep, wake up with the ceiling higher.

But nights were only nights. And he had begun to resent the eleven hours a day he spent being carried around a house and pinched by people.

Then, in the fifth month, he noticed something about the room.

Nobody was looking at him.

They were all looking at her.

Of course they were. The sky had put a ring over her. People had ridden four days to stand next to her.

He had once rolled clean off a pillow and hit the mattress face-first, and it took forty seconds for anyone to notice. In those forty seconds, three separate women told Marika she was a lovely girl.

He lay with his face in the bedclothes and understood that he had been handed the best cover of his existence. Either one.

Let them watch the girl.

He got to work.

The push-ups came later, and they came by accident.

He was face-down on the bed doing the thing he did. Slow press up off the elbows. Four inches, hold, down. Unimpressive to look at, which was the point.

Marika had spent the previous minute crawling toward him. Badly. Sideways, mostly on one elbow.

She arrived at his back and sat on it.

He stopped.

He held very still and ran through it.

Additional load: one little Guesclin.

He pressed up.

It was much harder. His arms shook. He got the four inches, held them badly, and came down.

And something came back.

The sensation he had no word for and had started to recognise anyway — the one at the end of a good night's work, the one that felt like being handed something.

More of it. Noticeably more. Like a slow drip briefly opening up.

He pressed up again.

Same thing. Fuller.

He lay under a five-month-old girl in a warm room and did the sums.

She is worth about four ordinary sessions.

He pressed up again.

Behind him, Marika discovered that the world went up and down now.

Warm.

Warm and it goes UP.

Again.

She started giggling.

Then laughing — loud, gulping, whole-body laughing, at a volume that had no business coming out of something that size.

Alina turned around.

He dropped flat, put his face in the blanket, and became a baby who had been pinned.

"Marika." Alina crossed the room. "You don't sit on people. Where did you even — off. Off him."

She lifted her daughter away and set her down on the bedspread.

Marika's face went through four expressions in half a second and arrived at the fifth.

The wail came up out of her from somewhere near the floor.

He TOLD me to.

"Oh, don't," Alina said. "Don't. You were on top of him."

He lay where he was and watched it happen.

It was the first time in this life he'd felt that particular thing. Watching somebody else pay for his work.

He gave it a moment. Unpleasant. No clear use.

Then he rolled onto his side, which took some doing, and looked at her until she looked back.

And let his arm slide out from under him, and dropped his face flat onto the mattress.

The wail cut out.

He did it again.

Marika Guesclin hiccupped, and made a noise like a small bell falling downstairs.

"...What is he doing," said Alina.

"He does that," said his mother, who wasn't even looking up. "He just does things."

It went on for a while after that.

He'd stop. She'd start winding up. He'd do it again. She'd make the bell noise.

Somewhere around the ninth repetition he understood that he had stopped taking readings four goes ago.

He noted that, and did it a tenth time.

Then she said something.

"Ah."

Not at the ceiling. At him.

He went still.

He had been producing that sound for five months, by accident, at nobody. He had never once heard it aimed.

He tried it back.

"Ah."

Marika's entire face changed.

"Ah."

"Ah."

"Ah! Ah!"

They did that for some time.

Above him, somewhere out past the edge of the bed, the room had gone very quiet.

"...Janet."

"I see it."

"She's answering him."

"I know."

"She doesn't answer me."

"Right then, my lord, that's your hour—"

Loretta got her hands under him and he came up off the bed, and something came up with him.

Marika had his finger.

She had taken it back at some point, and he had not noticed, which was a serious lapse and he intended to look into it.

Loretta lifted. Marika came off the bedspread by about an inch and made a low sound of pure warning.

Loretta stopped.

"...She isn't letting go," Alina said.

"No, my lady."

"Can you—"

"I'd rather not, my lady."

He was put back down.

He lay there with a five-month-old attached to his hand and worked out what the afternoon was going to cost him. A session. Two, if he went under and slept through the evening.

He decided he would allow it.

That was the last thing he decided.

They lay on their sides facing each other, which neither of them had arranged and neither of them could have undone, and they were both asleep inside a minute.

Janet cried, obviously.

"You're crying."

"I'm aware."

"They're asleep. That's all that's happening. Two children are asleep."

"Mm," Janet said, and did not stop.

Alina looked at them for a long moment.

Then: "Don't say it."

"I haven't said anything."

"You're going to."

"I'm going to say nothing at all," Janet said, "for about fifteen years."

"Janet."

"I said nothing."

Alina sat down on the edge of the bed, where she could see her daughter's face, which was doing nothing at all.

For the first few weeks of her life, Marika had spent this hour screaming.

She had not spent it screaming since the day they put the two of them on a bed together.

She stayed there until the light went.