"The Old Argument"

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Two days before the Gambit, Mida went to settle a debt she had been pretending she did not owe.

She went alone.

Badina would have come---Badina came everywhere, uninvited---and Badina read faces the way Mida read marks, and this was not a thing Mida wanted read off her while it happened. So she slipped away while the Savanna girl was drawn to the water-lines, and crossed the yard toward the North ground by herself, thumb to her silent wrist-mark.

A contract was a debt, and her body was a ledger of them, thirty-seven deep. This one she had never let herself weigh, because weighing meant looking, and she had crossed the whole dry country refusing to look. People died in the Gambit. She would not carry an unnamed debt into a place that killed people. So she would name it. Once. She would not pretend it was more than it was.

She found him on the North ground with a practice spear in his hand.

The Mountain boy was there---half the Gate knew the Canyon skein had taken to drilling the beastless boy and the small Forest girl---and she had already decided how much attention she'd give it, which was none. She had cut this boy twice and spent nothing looking either time. She spent nothing now: her eyes crossed to the Canyon one and stopped nowhere between. The wrist-mark stayed silent. She kept it that way by not looking at what woke it.

Kadrimani saw her before she reached the line. He set the spear down and came to the ground's edge, and the rib-mark low on her left---the one that had gone warm and certain across a burning circle and never fully cooled---pulled toward him. She let it. There was no point fighting a debt already written.

She tipped her head toward the long stone trough at the ground's far edge, away from the drill, and they stood at it with the salt going white and a body's length of cold stone between them.

≈ ≈ ≈

They stood a moment in the silence of two people who understood exactly what they were and had no wish to dress it up.

"We're promised," Mida said. "I came to say it out loud. Once. So it's said."

"I know what we are." Low, even, giving up nothing. "You didn't walk over here to tell me a thing I've carried since the road."

"My way doesn't let a debt stand unspoken two days before a game that puts people in the ground." She looked at him straight, the way she looked at a spirit she meant to hold to its terms. "I'm not here because I want this. I want you to understand I know you didn't either. We were signed before either of us had a mouth to say no with. I won't insult you by pretending otherwise."

His face changed and settled.

Relief.

"Then it's said," he agreed.

"There are terms."

"What terms," his eyebrows came up.

"We don't undercut each other."

"What?"

"Not to the cadres, not to anyone who thinks it's their business. Whatever we are in private, in front of the Gate the contract stands, and neither of us shames the other by acting otherwise. A refused betrothal is a debt called in ugly, and I won't have our Lands paying it because we couldn't manage a united face."

"Agreed." No hesitation.

Then she asked the thing she had really come to ask, and did not ask it the way she meant it.

"Can you hold your line?" Practical. About the wall, the cadre, the Gambit---the rest left underneath, where he could find it if he wanted. "There's talk. That you went down on the North ground over nothing, in front of everyone. I'm not asking what it was. I'm asking whether Kinka still trusts you to hold, or whether I've been signed to a man the salt is already taking apart."

His jaw did nothing. His hand did not go to the seam. He looked at her and decided how much to give, which was little.

"Kinka still gives me the line," he said.

That was everything. He wouldn't tell her it had frightened him, and she wouldn't have believed him if he'd pretended it hadn't. The truth sat between them, unspoken, and they left it there---part of the unvoiced bargain they'd just struck: neither would demand honesty about the things that actually hurt. It was the most workable arrangement she'd ever had with anyone.

That was when the Mountain boy crossed toward the trough.

≈ ≈ ≈

He came with the Forest girl, both of them blown from the drill, heading for the water without a glance for who else stood at it.

Mida's wrist-mark went cold---the small hard chill it had gone the morning he'd caught her elbow---and she pressed her thumb to it and let her face do nothing, and watched him, because the mark had already made her look.

She watched the wrong thing.

She meant to watch the hands---the soft gold hands that had never dug anything, the hands her whole cold argument about him hung on. The hands were there, still soft, still everything she'd said. That was not what caught her.

It was the ease.

The Mountain boy said something low and the Forest girl said something drier back, and he laughed---an actual laugh, short and surprised out of him, his careful face coming open around it---and the girl rolled her eyes and shoved a waterskin at his chest, and he took it and drank and knocked his shoulder into hers, and the two of them stood there easy as water, comfortable in a way that cost them nothing.

Mida had never once been that with anyone. She had a girl who steered her by the elbow and forgave her before she could apologize, and even that she held at arm's length and paid back in guilt. Warmth had always been a thing she watched other people spend like they had an endless supply of it. And here it was, spent freely, thoughtlessly, by the one person on this salt waste she'd decided would get nothing from her.

It should not have needled her.

It did.

She'd known from across the ground that he moved differently now---more into the salt, less a boy performing a fight than one who'd been in an unfair one and lived. She'd noticed it before choosing to, which meant she'd been watching him more than a girl watches a thing she feels nothing for.

She turned it back into the old argument. Gold all the way through. Dug out of the deep by people like mine. His comfort is my grandmother's breath, spent.

It held. It always held. She took her thumb off the cold mark and looked away from him first.

Kadrimani had watched her look. She felt it and he said nothing. He waited until the two had drifted back to the drill, then picked the thread up as if the interruption had been weather.

"You're running the Gambit."

"I have to. Every trainee runs it or forfeits their placement, and I didn't cross the dry country to forfeit."

"On what beast."

There it was---the actual danger, laid bare by a boy who cut straight to the load-bearing wall of a thing.

"That's the problem. Mamida's water. She's bonded, she's mine, and she's a thousand leagues southwest in a river where she belongs. Salt would kill her, or turn her, and I won't do that to her to win a placement. There's a price sewn into that bond too, one she doesn't lay out for strangers, and she keeps it the way she keeps every debt she hasn't yet finished being afraid of." She kept level over the raw place. "I found something, weeks back, in the pens. It didn't come to anything. Your cadre had already put a claim on it."

She left it there.

"So I'm beastless," she finished, "two days out, and the only thing left in those pens is what nobody else wanted."

Kadrimani was quiet.

"What nobody wanted isn't always what nobody should want. The pens sort for the wrong things." He turned the spear-butt against the salt, thinking. "There's an animal down there they've passed over. Old. Strange temper. It won't come to a whistle, won't shy from a prod, so they've marked it dull and left it to be sold. It isn't dull." He looked at her. "I've standing enough in my cadre to walk you into the pens and vouch a claim. Whether it takes to you is yours to find, not mine to promise. I think it will."

She should have said yes at once. It was a clean solution to a killing problem, handed to her for nothing.

That was why she hesitated.

Nothing was for nothing.

Say yes and she'd walk out owing this boy---the near-stranger the contract had already knotted her to---a thing she couldn't price and couldn't repay on a schedule she controlled. A borrowed beast, a vouched claim, gratitude itself: all of them ropes, and she had spent her life keeping the count of what she owed low enough to carry.

"You understand I'll owe you for this."

"I understand you think that way." A dry amusement crossed him and was gone. "I'm not keeping a count."

"I am. I always am. That's the difference between us." She held his flat gaze, then took the debt up with both hands. "All right. Show me."

≈ ≈ ≈

The pens were cut into the rock below the Gate, blue with slow akobi-light, thick with old hay and beast-musk and the underground warmth that never reached the surface. The hum was worse down here, this near the deep---a pressure in the back teeth, in the jaw, in the seat of the breath.

Mida had stood in this exact dark three weeks ago, and the place knew it, and for one step the thing she carried stirred behind her ribs and offered up its name. She pressed her thumb to her wrist and walked through it. Later. Never. The half-eared handler at the gate looked at her a beat too long, said nothing, and let them past.

Kadrimani led her to the far end, where the pens got smaller and the light got thinner and the beasts nobody was buying waited on the world to decide what to do with them.

The old one stood alone in the last pen. Big, heavy-boned, the grey of long-dead ash, and it did not turn its head when they came. She saw at once why the handlers had written it off. It stood the way a broken thing stands, weight settled, gone somewhere behind its own face. Its eyes were the giveaway---sunk and clouded to a flat pale nothing, gone entirely, two blind stones in a grey skull. No cadre wanted a mount that couldn't see the ground it ran, and no handler had patience for one that wouldn't answer a whistle. So it had been left down here to be old and finished.

Then it caught her.

By the air.

Its wide flat nostrils worked once, twice, tasting the air she'd moved, and the loose skin along its throat shivered, reading the small weather she made just by standing there and breathing. Its head came around, slow and certain, and its blind face turned to exactly where she stood, tracking her by the air the way she tracked a debt by its pull---through the channel everyone else was deaf to.

Mida went very still.

She knew this. Her eyes showed her a grey ruined animal; the older sense under them showed her something else---a thing that read the world the way she read it, through what moved when nothing showed, through pressure and absence and the information other people walked straight past. The pens had looked at it and seen a beast that would not obey. Kadrimani had looked and seen a thing built to perceive exactly what its rider perceived, deaf to every whistle because it had never once been listening for one. It was listening for the air. Right now, for her.

She stepped to the rail.

It did not shy.

She put her hand flat where it could feel her, and it leaned its blind grey head into her palm and breathed her in, and took her---just as a lock takes the one key cut for it, easy, and without the long, careful earning the pens said a bond should cost.

Too easy. She felt how easy it was, and it laid a small, cold weight in her she did not examine. Mamida had been a season of work; the blind runner in this dark, three weeks gone, days of it before the name even surfaced. This grey thing let her in between one breath and the next, as if it had always been hers and had only been waiting for her to arrive and notice.

And it gave her no name.

That was the wrongness she couldn't walk past. A bond arrived with a name---the true one, the one you learned never to spend lightly. This one came with nothing. The place in her where the name should have surfaced stayed silent, an empty pen where a name should have stood, and she did not know what it would cost to have taken a beast whose terms had never been stated. She reached for the name the way you press a mark to see if it answers.

It did not.

Beside her, low, Kadrimani said. "I won't tell you it's a safe wager. It's blind, and old, and you'll run it three weeks through salt it's never smelled, on a bond that hasn't set. That's a gamble. But... a better one than beastless, I think. But it's yours to make."

She barely heard him.

The hum pressed in her teeth, that deep north-facing pressure that had every other beast in the pens fretting in its stall---and this one did not shift. It stood under her hand calm as still water, its blind face already half-turned toward the north wall, toward the deep, toward the thing in the rock everything living was built to fear, and it was not afraid. A beast that didn't fear the buried thing. She felt the wrongness of it and set it aside. She had a Gambit to run, and no room to ask a grey animal why the thing under the salt didn't frighten it when it frightened even her.

"I'll take it," she said.

She made herself turn to him.

"Thank you."

It came out stiff, because gratitude always came out of her stiff, because it was a rope she was handing him one end of. He inclined his head, did not make her say it twice, did not make it mean more than it did, and for the plain unfussed size of that she was grateful again, which was worse, which she would also carry.

She left the pens with a mount for the Gambit and two debts she could not pay: a name in her ribs with no beast left to give it to, and a beast under her hand with no name to give her back. The salt kept doing that. Taking one half, leaving her holding the other, and calling it even.