Page 30 of Crow’s Shadow

I bank all of it. The rotations. The tempers. The debt between Bad Knee and Sleeper, old and mean, a crack in the wall of them I can work a finger into when the hour comes. I do not have a plan yet. I have the makings of one. The makings keep the panic off my spine, so I gather them the way I once gathered names for the Ledger, careful, patient, three marks to a line.

What came in. What goes out. Where it goes down.

I am writing my own escape in Loki’s old cipher, and the only reader is me.

Then the good shoes come across the floor, slow, even, expensive, and I put the small frightened girl back on over the top of everything true.

Renner carries his chair, he always does. He sets it the same careful distance from my chain and folds down into it, elbows to knees, and studies my face with the tenderness I have learned to hate more than any fist.

“You slept,” he says.

“No.”

“You did. There is color under your eyes again. You are healing in here, whatever you tell yourself.” He tips his head. “Do you feel it? The mending. It is the work going on beneath the skin. A witch heals faster once she wakes. Your body knows what you are before your stubborn head will hear it.”

“Stop.”

“You blew the lights and lived. You have felt the water answer you.” He does not blink. “Yes. I know about the water. My man found a wet ring dried on the concrete, could not explain it. I could. You are practicing, Shadow. In the dark, where you think no one counts your breaths.” A soft, terrible warmth. “I count all of them.”

The floor drops a hand’s width under me. I keep my face shut. Hiding what I feel is one skill no cannery can take from me.

“So, I am a witch,” I say, flat. “You keep telling me. What I keep waiting for is the part where any of it changes the room I am chained in.”

“It changes everything about the room you are chained in.” He leans closer, and the fake grief goes out of him. Under it is the thing he truly is, patient, cold, hungry. “Let me tell you what you are, since no one else ever will. You come from a long line of women with power, Shadow. Your mother had it. So did the women before her. And you have spent your whole life carrying it without knowing what the hell it was.”

“And you want to be the hand.”

“I want to be the hand.” No shame in it. None. “There are two ways the door opens. You will want to hear both, careful girl. You cannot stand not knowing.”

He is right. I hate it. I sit still and let him pour.

“The first way, you give it. Freely, eyes open, of your own will. You choose it. You choose the one who turns the latch. When it is done you are more than you dreamed, and he is stronger for the giving. Two halves of one thing, each of you greater than the sum. Clean.” His mouth thins. “Your mother could have had it clean. I offered. She said no.”

“And the second way.”

“The second way, I take it.” Quiet. Reasonable. Worse than a shout. “A door can be forced. The lock breaks. The frame splinters. What is behind it comes through all at once, whether the door willed it or not.” His eyes hold mine. “But a forced door never closes properly again.”

Marchetti’s words I will never hear, in a dead man’s mouth. Renner keeps women until the light goes out of them. I understand now what turns the light off.

“That is what you did to her,” I say. “My mother. You forced her door.”

“She left me no other way in.” For half a second something crosses his face I could almost mistake for pain. Almost. “I took what she would not give. It burned her to a husk in my hands. There was not enough of Maren left to keep, so I gave what was left to the fire.” He lets it sit. “I have spent twenty years wishing she had chosen. I do not intend to make the same mistake twice.”

“You think you are offering me a choice.” My voice comes out steadier than I have any right to. “Give it or have it stolen. Bloom or burn. That is not a choice. It is a gun with a bow tied on it.”

“It is the only choice anyone ever gets.” He stands, smooths the coat down the front. “Give, or be taken. The whole world runs on it. I am simply honest enough to say the words out loud.” At the door he pauses, one hand on the frame, and that awful tenderness comes back into his face. “I would rather have you whole, Shadow. I would rather you gave it willingly. But do not mistake my patience for a soft heart. I have waited twenty years. I will not wait twenty more.” A last look, gray and fond. “Choose soon. Before something forces my hand, before I have to force yours.”

The door shuts. The chain is cold. Somewhere above me the gulls go over, free and stupid.

He thinks he read me down to the floor. He read the frightened girl. He did not read the second book, the one behind my eyes, where I have been writing him into a line of his own for four days.

Because here is the thing Renner does not know. While he sat there explaining how it works, he handed me what I needed.

He needs it given. He needs it so badly he has spent four days courting a woman he could have cracked open on the first night. He wants it freely or it rots in his hands, useless, gray, a husk he has to burn.

Which means my no matters.

He cannot take what I refuse to give him.