"I'm here to see Sivon," I said. "I was told he could help me with something."
"Lot of people want to see Sivon." He didn't move out of my way. "Told by who?"
"A man in a tavern who took my money and didn't give me a name for himself. If that matters to you, I can go and spend the rest of it somewhere friendlier."
He weighed that, and weighed me, and I let him, keeping my hands loose and open and my face bored.
"Let him in, Domar," a voice came from inside the room, dry and unhurried. "If he came all the way down here he's either got coin to buy what he needs or a death wish, and I can satisfy both."
The big man stepped back, just a little, and I turned sideways to pass him, close enough to smell the smoke on him. He then shut the door behind me and put the bar back across it, which I didn't like at all but didn't let it show.
Sivon was not who I'd expected. He was an older man, mid-fifties, with sharp eyes, an old burn scar up one side of his neck that vanished into his collar, and broad shoulders that were rounding with age. He sat behind the desk with his hands flat on it and looked at me the way the big man had, only slower and with a great deal more going on behind it, reading my clothes and my hands and the way I stood, adding it up.
Whatever total he reached seemed to satisfy him, or at least not to worry him.
"Wait outside, Domar," he said, without taking his eyes off me. "This won't take long, and this gentleman isn't going to be any trouble." A thin pause. "Are you?"
"No," I said. "I'm here to buy, not to make trouble."
"So I see." He nodded at the door, and behind me I heard the big man grunt, haul it open, and step out.
The room was clean.
That was the first thing I noticed, after the squalor below, a clean spare room with a desk, a stove, and shelves of stoppered jars.
He looked at me for a long moment, at the mud on my knees and the way I held myself, and something in his face shifted, a recognition.
"I see that trouble found you on the way," he said. "But you made it."
"I did."
"Sit." He nodded me to a stool. He didn't ask my name, and I didn't offer it. "What do you need?"
"I'm hoping you can help me figure that out. My brother is suffering from a soldiers' affliction after a robbery, and I'm at my wits' end about how to help him. I heard that greycap offers a cure."
"Mm. A robbery, you say." He didn't believe that part of the story, but he believed the rest.
"I know how bad it is," he said. "I had what your brother's got."
So, he was a former soldier, just as I'd suspected. The last war Catonia had fought was before I was born, when Narevelle, the province to our north, rose up and tried to wrest control of the Council from Catonia by force.
"I came back from the northern border with it and relived my worst hour for over a year, until someone introduced me to greycap. It's the only reason I'm sitting here instead of being dead." He stood, walked over to his stacked shelves, and took down a jar. "I'll sell it to you. But I'm going to tell you the truth first. I don't want your brother's frayed brains on my conscience. I tell everyone I sell to what they're getting themselves into, so it's their doing, not mine."
I braced for him telling me about the addiction, and nodded, because I needed details. How much was too much? How much was safe?
"This can save him if used right, and ruin him if used wrong, and the line between the two is thin." He set the jar down but kept his hand on it. "What's in here is not medicine you dose like a tonic. It's a door. Each time he takes it, the door opens, and he walks back into that hour, only this time he can get all the way through it instead of being trapped at the threshold, and he comes out the far side with it behind him instead of in front of him. But it takes more than the one walk. A few. Spaced wide, never close together. And between them is where the real mending happens, not in the visions. The visions just open the door. You'll have to do the rest."
"How many are a few?"
"Two are good enough for most. Three at the outside. And then he never touches it again." He narrowed his eyes at me. "The visions are sweet, see. A man walks back through his worst hour and comes out clean and weeping and lighter than he's been in years, and a piece of him wants to go back in, not to heal now, just to feel that high again. And he tells himself once more it won't hurt. And then once more. And the door that healed him starts needing him to come back, more each time for less each time, until there's nothing left of him but a ghost of who he used to be." He held my eyes. "Everyone thinks they can stop, but only a few are strong enough to actually do that. You keep your brother to the few, and then you take this away from him, and you never let him touch it again. Best to destroy it."
"I will."
I expected him to name his price and hand over the jar, but he kept his hand over it.
"This is what you do. You prepare your brother first so the visions don't ambush him. Explain what will happen once hetakes it and make sure he wants to walk through the door it will open. Put him somewhere safe and quiet and warm when the time comes, nothing bright, nothing sudden, nothing that sounds or smells like the road that broke him. And stay with him the whole time, even if it takes hours. He'll need a hand to hold that won't let go."
It was, almost word for word, what I'd been doing with Arlen, so he wasn't telling me anything I didn't know. Only now there was an added hallucinated door he needed to walk through.
