Reunion

The mask doesn't want to come off.
That's the first thing that goes wrong, and Gordwin Bringer has been a Guard captain for twenty-two years and it is still the first thing that frightens him.
He gets down on the flagstones and gets both hands under the edge of it and it resists. Not the strap. The strap's fine, the strap's undone already, Brask has it. The mask itself has gone tacky against the boy's face along the line of the crack, the way a thing does when it's still drawing, and there's light coming out of the seam in a thin bright thread and going up into the air and not stopping.
"It's still running," Brask says. "Sir, it's still—"
"I can see what it's doing."
"If it's still running it's still taking—"
"I can see what it's doing, Brask."
He gets his thumbs into the eye-slits, which is the wrong way and the fastest way, and pulls.
It comes off with a sound he will be hearing for the rest of his life.
And underneath it is a twenty-year-old boy with a nosebleed and his eyes half open and nothing behind them at all.

"Down. Flat. Head back — Ellery, get his coat off him, I want his chest clear."
"Sir—"
"Coat, Ellery."
Gordwin has two fingers under the jaw and the pulse is there and it is completely wrong. Fast and thin and stuttering at the top, the way it goes when the body is trying to move something through channels that have already given up, and he knows exactly what this is because he has seen it four times in twenty-two years and two of those men are dead.
Severe. Not the headache-and-two-bad-days version. The other one.
"Kit. Now."
"Here, sir."
"Not that. The green one, the sealed — yes. Break it."
The vial is about the length of a finger and there are perhaps nine of them in the whole kingdom, because the compound is a nuisance to make and it keeps for eleven months and almost nobody ever needs it. Every Guard squad carries one and no squad has ever used one.
"Right," Gordwin says. "Right. I need his head back and somebody holding his jaw. Ellery, that's you, you've got clean hands. Brask, the room. I want the doors, the garden end, and that window, and I want the mage secured and the lord secured and nobody in here who isn't ours."
"There's a body by the wall, sir. Household."
"I know. Leave him. He's not getting worse."

"His name's Rellen."
Gordwin looks up.
There's a girl kneeling four feet away with one arm hanging wrong and blood down her chin and a torn sleeve and ears flat back against her head. She's got her good hand on the forehead of another girl who's lying in the chalk with her eyes shut.
"The body," she says. "By the wall. His name is Rellen and he does the boots and he has been in this house for nineteen years and you'll want it written down properly."
And then Gordwin Bringer's brain catches up with his eyes.
"Mia?"
"Yes, sir."
"Mia." He has known this girl since she was nine years old. He has been given tea by this girl perhaps forty times. He once spent an entire evening being lectured by this girl, aged eleven, about the correct way to lay a fire, while her lady sat on his boots. "Your arm—"
"It's not the important thing, sir."
"Who did that to you?"
"One of his lordship's men. He's through a wall in the sitting room." Absolutely level. "Sir, you pressed something and came four hundred miles, so I'm going to assume you don't want the pleasantries."
"...No."
"Then ask me what you need to know."
Gordwin has the vial in one hand and he's cracking the seal with his thumb, and some distant part of him is noting that the last time he was in this house, this child brought him a plate of biscuits he hadn't asked for and told him his coat was wet.
"You pressed the marker."
"Yes, sir."
"How did you get it?"
"He took it out of his own ear and put it in my hand and told me what you'd said." Her chin comes up very slightly. "That you'd come. Not send. Come."
Something happens in Gordwin Bringer's chest that he does not have time for.
"Good girl," he says. "Fastest thing I've ever done in my life. Now. I need to know what's wrong with him and I need it in under a minute. What's he done?"
"Today, or before?"
"Before?"
And the girl starts talking.
She does it fast and she does it flat and she does not put one single word in it that doesn't need to be there, and Gordwin Bringer listens to a fourteen-year-old he has been handing his coat to since she was nine deliver the cleanest field report he has heard in a decade.

"Twelve days ago he ran a charge array under the library. Nine days' charge, one caster, he did the draw himself. Her mother built it eight years ago and died before she could fire it."
"He fired a charge array—"
"It went wrong partway. Link runes failed. He opened his own thumb and used the blood to bridge six of them while holding the release with the other hand, and the array was taking off him the whole time." Her voice doesn't move at all. "Then her ladyship started failing, and he did something with his hands and said some words I didn't understand, and then he asked me for a quill."
"A what?"
"A quill, sir. Out of the desk." She swallows. "He knelt on that floor for a bit over two hours and he put his own mana into her, in little lines, with a goose quill. He said thirty-one. He was bleeding from the nose for most of it. Then he passed out and slept eighteen hours and told everybody it was a headache."
Gordwin has stopped moving.
"Two hours," he says.
"A bit over."
"Two hours of laid work into another person's pathways."
"Yes, sir."
"And today he's taken a four-circle seal off a door, put a man down at the gate, put another through a wall, and then—" He looks at the hole in the floor, and the ash still coming down, and the white mask lying on the flagstones with a crack across the cheek. "What in all hells did he do in here?"
"He put a box round it," Mia says, "and then he put something through the middle of it that was about as thick as his wrist, and it stopped existing."
"With that on."
"With that on."
Gordwin Bringer looks down at a boy he recruited at fifteen.
"You absolute idiot," he says, very quietly.

The infusion is simple enough in principle.
You cannot get mana into an unconscious man through his circles, because his circles are the thing that's failed. You cannot put it through the skin, because the skin is not a channel. What you do is carry it — you mix your own mana into a compound designed to hold it and you get it into him by the only route the body will accept from outside, and then you hope.
"Ellery. Jaw."
"Got him, sir."
"Keep his head back. If he brings it up, turn him, don't let him take it in."
Gordwin puts three fingers over the mouth of the vial and pushes.
It takes a moment. It always takes a moment. He shuts his eyes and does the thing he has done perhaps fifty times in his life, the slow careful seepage of his own mana into a liquid that is built to want it, and the compound goes from clear to a very faint gold, which is what it does, which means it's taken.
"Right," he says. "Right."
Then he gets a hand under the boy's neck and lifts, and puts the vial to his mouth, and does it the only way it can be done for a man who cannot swallow: his own mouth over it, and a hand on the jaw, and he breathes it into him.
For about a second, nothing.
Then the boy's whole body convulses, and Ellery swears, and it comes straight back up.
All of it. Every drop, out onto the flagstones, gold going to clear as it leaves him.
Rejected.

"Again," Brask says. "There's another vial in—"
"It won't take."
"Sir, there's another—"
"It won't take." Gordwin sits back on his heels with the empty vial in his fist and stares at the floor. "It's not the dose. It's not the compound. It didn't get past his throat, it came back the second it touched him."
"Then what—"
"Our mana was never compatible," Gordwin says. "Not once. Not ever."
Ellery is still holding a boy's jaw and does not appear to be breathing.
"We found out in a field outside Harrowmoor when he was sixteen." He's still looking at the floor. "He'd overdrawn on a bridge and gone down and I had the vial out and the medic was already saying it's not taking, sir and I stood there and shouted at him about it like shouting would fix it, and in the end he came round on his own because he was sixteen and it wasn't severe." He looks up. "It's severe now."
"Then who—"
"Two in a hundred, and it's not the two you'd expect, and there's no test but trying." Gordwin's voice has gone somewhere flat. "I've got six men in this building. Get them in here. All of them. We'll go through the lot and then we'll go through the household and then we'll go down the valley road and stop carts."
"Sir, that'll take—"
"I know what it'll take. Get them in here."

"You can't."
It's very small, and it comes from the chalk.
Gordwin turns around.
The girl on the floor has her eyes open. She's got blood dried in pale silver hair and a great deal of it down one side of her face, and she is looking at the ceiling rather than at anything in particular, and she is quite clearly not entirely present.
Mia is already moving. "My lady—"
"You can't try everyone." Verena Ashveil's voice is a thread. "It takes — how long does one take?"
"My lady, don't—"
"How long."
Gordwin crosses to her because there is nothing else useful he can do with his hands.
"Two minutes to mix and a minute to know," he says. "Lie still."
"And how long has he got?"
Nobody answers her.
"How long has he got?"
"I don't know," says Gordwin Bringer. "Under an hour. Possibly a great deal under."
"Then you can't try everybody," Verena says, "because there are eleven people in this house and four of them are dead.

She's trying to sit up. Mia's got a hand flat on her collarbone and is losing.
"My lady — my lady, stop—"
"He put it in me."
"What?"
"He put it in me." Her eyes have come round and they are not properly focused and they are absolutely fixed on Gordwin. "Twelve days ago. You heard her. She just told you. Thirty-one repairs, two hours, his own mana, laid into the walls of my pathways with a quill—"
Gordwin goes very still.
"—and it's still there," Verena says. "It didn't wash out. It's not a loan, he didn't lend it to me, he built with it, it's part of the channel now, I've been casting through it for twelve days—"
"Verena—"
"So either his mana can sit inside mine," she says, "or I couldn't have lit a single candle. And I've lit four hundred."

Nobody in that hall says anything at all.
Gordwin Bringer has been a soldier for twenty-two years and he has never once in that time been outreasoned by a fourteen-year-old girl with a head wound.
"That's not how compatibility works," he says. And then, after about a second: "That may be how compatibility works."
"It's the same direction," Verena says. She's shaking. "It's his in mine. You want mine in his. It's not proof, I know it's not proof, but you've got an hour and eleven people and four of them are dead and there is one person in this house who is already carrying his mana without rejecting it."
"You're fourteen."
"I'm the only one who's tested."
"You've a head injury and two circles—"
"Then I'll be very tired afterwards," says Lady Verena Ashveil, "and he'll be alive, and I'll have Mia carry me to bed. Give me the vial."
Gordwin looks at her for two full seconds.
Then he puts his hand out. "Brask. The second one."
"Sir—"
"Now, Brask."

Here is what it takes.
It takes Mia getting one arm round her lady's back and hauling her upright because the arm that works is the only one available, and it takes Ellery kneeling behind a twenty-year-old's head with both hands on his jaw and his own face absolutely white.
It takes Gordwin cracking a seal with his thumb and handing a fourteen-year-old a finger's length of glass and saying, "Three fingers over the top. Don't force it. Let it go out of you the way a light goes out of you, don't push."
It takes Verena Ashveil, who has been able to use magic for twelve days, running the single most delicate piece of mana work she has ever attempted on the floor of her father's reception hall with blood in her hair and her mother's broken staff four feet away.
The compound goes from clear to gold.
She makes a small noise.
"That's it," says Gordwin. "That's it, girl, that's exactly it, stop there."
"Is it enough?"
"It's enough."

Mia holds her up, because she cannot hold herself up. Gordwin gets a hand behind the boy's neck and lifts.
And Verena leans in, and puts the mouth of the vial against her teacher's lips, and does the thing they told her to do, which is to breathe it into him the way you'd breathe on a coal.
There is a second where absolutely nothing happens.
Then another.
Then Iori's chest comes up off the flagstones and he takes a breath — a real one, a whole one, the first proper breath he has taken in six minutes — and Gordwin Bringer says something that isn't a word, and Ellery starts crying and is too busy holding a jaw to do anything about it.
"It's taking." Gordwin has two fingers under the boy's ear. "It's taking. It's taking—"
"Is he—"
"Shh. Wait."
The pulse under his fingers comes up, and steadies, and slows.
"There," says Gordwin Bringer, to nobody. "There. There you are."
Verena Ashveil sits back very slowly, and her eyes go somewhere else, and Mia catches her before she's halfway to the floor.
"My lady—"
"'M fine."
"You are absolutely not—"
"Did it work?"
"It worked, my lady."
"Good," says Verena, and stops being awake.

Gordwin kneels on the flagstones of a wrecked hall with his hand on a boy's chest and counts his breathing for a while.
Around him men are moving. The lord is being bound. The mage is being carried. Somebody has found the household in the cellar behind a barred door — six of them, unhurt, Bessin's voice audible from three rooms away — and somebody else is being sick out of the broken window, and Brask is standing in the middle of the floor looking at a hole the width of a man's wrist burned three inches into four-hundred-year-old stone.
"Sir," he says. "What do I write?"
Gordwin doesn't answer for a moment.
There's a bone-white mask lying on the flagstones about a yard away. Cracked across the left cheek, light gone out of it now, quite dead and quite quiet.
Every man in this building saw it.
"Sir?"
"Write it up," Gordwin says. "Four dead in this room, one of them household. Lord Halvard Ashveil under warrant. And there's a village at the west end of Vellhold that's been going out for three winters that I want counted before anybody in this squad sleeps." He gets his arms under the boy and stands up with him, and he weighs almost nothing at all. "Squad was on training rotation in the valley and responded to a distress marker. That's what we were doing here."
Brask looks at the hole in the floor. Then at the mask. Then at his captain.
"Training rotation," he says.
"Training rotation."
"Sir." And he picks up the mask off the flagstones, carefully, with both hands, and puts it inside his coat.