The water in the seep basin was so cold that it ached in the bones of Naim's hands, and he kept them in it because the ache was his.
He had been in the side chamber for weeks, or what the Cave counted as weeks now that the sun stood still over the human city above. Someone brought him water and left it. Someone had cleaned him, early on, when he could not hold his own shape for longer than a breath, and he remembered the touch of a cloth but not the face. He remembered snarling at Ithra. He remembered the chain she had made for him, and that it had not hurt.
That morning he had woken and lain on the stone and found that the gaps were gone.
Everything was there. The pass in the third offensive, with the wind coming down off the ridge and the sound of the slope giving way under the enemy's feet, which had not been the enemy's feet. The rubble on his chest. A human hand, warm and dry, brushing dust off his face. The house after that, the grinder and the kettle and the eleven stairs, and the workroom wall he had lived inside. Forty years of it. He could walk through those years now the way a man walks through his own house in the dark, knowing where each chair was.
He took his hands out of the water and looked at the marks round his wrists. They were pale and narrow, like the marks a ring leaves on a finger after it has been worn a long time.
He had always known there was a night. Near the end of the forty years, some weeks before the binding snapped, while he lay in the plaster where the binding kept him, something inside him had come loose. It had felt like a knot slipping in a rope he had not known he was tied to. There had been no pain. Afterwards he had been colder than before, and the cold had never left. He had not understood it then. He understood it now, because they had told him in the Cave when and how his son had died, and he had counted.
The lamps in the passage dimmed for the Cave's rest. Naim's body went down before he could stop it, onto its knees and then onto the stone, and he was lying in the middle of the chamber with his cheek on the floor, looking up at the edge of a table that was not there. It was the hour the binding used to draw him out of the wall. His body still kept it. He made himself sit up again, slowly, the way you lift something that might break.
Soren came while he was still sitting there. He stood in the doorway a moment, as he had stood in doorways long before he ruled the Cave, when they were both young and working the registered pacts together. He had been heavy then too. His shadow was heavier now. It lay across the floor of the chamber thicker than the lamp could make it.
"Sit," Naim said. "I remember all of it. I want to tell you while I can still say it in order."
Soren sat on the bench by the wall. He did not speak.
"He kept a table," Naim said. "Your people will have found it. A low table in the front room with a brass tray on it. Every evening after his work he sat at it and poured two glasses. Then he let the binding draw me out of the wall and lay me on the floor by his feet, and he set the second glass on the edge of the tray, above my head, where I could see it."
He could see the glass, thin, with a gold rim and a sprig of mint going dark in it. Marcus used to give it a quarter turn on the brass before he let go, as if the glass had a front and he wanted it facing his guest.
"I never drank it. He knew I wouldn't. He made it anyway, fresh, every night, for forty years. When it went cold he poured it out and made another." Naim turned his hands over on his knees. "You understand what that was. A courtesy. He was always courteous."
"Go on."
"He asked about my son."
Soren's face did not change. The lamp hissed.
"Not at first. At first he asked about the war, and the pass, and the tribes, and I told him nothing, and the binding hurt me for it. It was a plain pain, in the joints. I could carry it. I had carried worse." Naim was quiet for a while. "Then one evening he poured the tea and said, 'You have a boy.' I don't know how he knew. Perhaps I said the name in my sleep. He said, 'Tell me about him. Only what you like.'"
The window in Marcus's room had looked out on a wall. In the evenings the light had come off the wall yellow and lain across the tray. From the floor Naim had watched it creep up the legs of the table.
"So I told him. I told him Kael was small for his age and hated it. I told him the boy moved his lips when he read and didn't know he did it. I told him he would go to the Cave one day as a ward, because his mother had asked it of me if anything happened, and that he would want to train with the assignees before he was old enough, and you would make him wait." Naim's voice did not rise. "I told him the boy loved the old histories and would sit in any archive that let him in. I told him the boy would believe I was alive long after everyone else stopped. That he would go anywhere for a word about the pass."
He made himself look at Soren.
"Marcus asked, 'What does he dream about?' I said, 'That I come home.'"
Soren sat very still.
"He never wrote anything down," Naim said. "He listened like a friend listens. He laughed at the right places. After a few years the evenings were the only hour I had a voice. I waited for them." He stopped. "Do you understand me? I waited for them."
There had been a last evening of questions, though he had not known it was the last. After it Marcus came home one night with a paper bag of figs, set down the tea, and ate the figs at the window with his back to the room. He asked nothing. He never asked about the boy again. Naim had lain under the cooling glass and thought, with something close to grief, that the man had grown tired of him.
"Ithra asked me whether the binding made me speak," Naim said. "I've thought about her question every hour since I could think. The binding punished silence. It never put a single word in my mouth. I could have lain on that floor and borne the joints for forty years, the way I bore the first ones." His hands had closed on his knees. "I talked because he was the only one who asked about my son, and I wanted to say my son's name to someone. So I said it. Every evening. I gave that man everything he needed, one evening at a time."
The cold in him had a shape now. It sat under his breastbone like a stone in a stream.
"He used it. I know he used it. Ithra told me how. The pass, the word about me, the job off the registry." Naim's voice went thin and he waited until it came back. "Kael came to that man because I had told him exactly which door the boy would open. I'm telling you because you're the law here, and because you raised him when I couldn't. You have the right to hear it from me before anyone writes it down." He held out his hands, wrists up, the pale rings showing. "Put it in the registry. Call the elders. Do whatever the law does with a father who sells his son for an hour of conversation. I won't argue a word of it."
Soren looked at him for a long time. His eyes went to Naim's wrists and stayed there.
Naim waited for the question. Soren had always asked the next question, in every hearing and every reading Naim had ever sat through beside him. It was what he was for.
Soren stood. He did not look at the bench or the lamp or the basin. He walked to the doorway and through it, and his shadow went after him along the passage floor. Naim listened to his steps go down the long gallery past the turn where they should have slowed, and they did not slow, and then there was only the drip of the seep into the basin.