I come around the corner. She turns the paper over. Flat. Face down on her knee. Her hand covers it.
“Private,” she says.
“All right.”
“You’re still standing there.”
“I am cataloguing the corridor.”
“Catalogue it from your chamber.”
I go. Behind me she laughs, low, almost soundless.
I coil in my chamber. Through the doorway the charcoal starts again. Quick strokes. Certain. She draws something she does not want me to see. The sound of the charcoal is faster than the sound she makes when she sketches the corridors. That work is careful. This is something else.
BRYN
Ihave been watching the patterns. The dead stone where he rests. The green where I sleep. The teal spreading up my forearms, deeper every day. I know what we are doing to this building. I know what the bond is doing to his venom. I do not need to explain it to him. He knows too.
On the nineteenth morning I wake against his coils and stay perfectly still.
Light reaches them from the hall, pale and indirect. His breathing is slow beneath me. The scales at my back rise and fall. His pulse runs through the loop of tail that curves around my hips, steady and deep.
I lie there and I count his breaths. Not to learn anything. I am counting because I want to stay inside this minute, and counting gives me a reason.
At some point he wakes. I feel the change beneath me. His breathing catches, then steadies. The coil at my hip tightens a fraction, holding me closer before he is fully aware that he is doing it.
He does not move. He is paying attention to something he does not want to disrupt.
I put my hand on the coil at my hip. I press.
“Morning,” I say.
“Morning.”
“Your pulse does a thing when you wake up,” I say. “Speeds, then settles.”
“It is deciding whether you are real.”
I press my face against the scales so he can’t see what that does to me.
We stay. Two more minutes. Three. Then the day starts the way it always starts, the pour and the channels and the bread, and I carry the morning into all of it.
The stew is getting better. I roast the root before adding it to the pot and the char changes the flavor. He watches me do it the first time and nods.
“The char. My mother used that sometimes with the river fish,” he says.
I don’t know where to get river fish. I hold the thought anyway.
On the twentieth day I find a section of calcification in the lower corridors that is thicker than anything I’ve cleared before. The deposit has narrowed the channel to a slit. I chip at it for an hour. The original carving underneath emerges clean-edged, undamaged.
I carry a piece of the calcification to the main hall and set it on the stone beside our breakfast.
“Look at this,” I say. “The original channel is intact.”
He picks up the chip and turns it in his fingers. The yellowish deposit on one side, the smooth carved stone on the other.
“The calcification is a layer on top of the original carving,” I say. “Every section I’ve cleared, the original stone is intact underneath. Strip the buildup and the channels work.”
