Chapter 9 - Haunted

“You are leaving me,” said the Tome, “with a SLAVE and a FLORIST and an EGG.”

“I’m leaving you for one night.”

“You are leaving me so that you can go and take your trousers off in front of two DEAD MEN, at the invitation of a third man who is not dead but who ought to be, and you are leaving me on a WINDOWSILL.” It was on the windowsill of my room at the Nail, where Kaniz had propped it so it could watch me saddle Bertha in the yard below, and it was shouting down through the open shutter so the whole street could hear. “I have witnessed the coronation of four emperors and the wedding night of a fifth. I have watched a saint fall from grace in real time, in a bathhouse, with a lute player. And I am going to MISS THIS because of a WAGER!”

“It’s a stupid wager,” I said. “You heard me say so.”

“I heard you ACCEPT it!”

Kaniz stood beside Bertha in the snow with her chain over her arm, holding the bridle while I tightened the girth. She hadn’t said a word all afternoon. When I had everything buckled she put a bundle into my saddlebag, wrapped in a cloth, and I asked her what it was.

“Bread,” she said. “And cheese. And the oil.”

“Why would I need the oil?”

Kaniz looked at me for a long moment with no expression on her face at all. She reached up and fixed my collar. She kissed me, slowly, with her hand flat on my chest, and she didn’t say anything else.

Lily had already said goodbye. She had come to the Nail at noon and kissed me in Maple’s kitchen, long and hard, with her back against the flour bin, and when she was done she had held my face in both hands and said, “Don’t lose,” and I said I wouldn’t, and she said, “I know you won’t,” in a voice that said she knew I would. I had thought about that voice the whole time I was saddling Bertha. I was still thinking about it when I rode out of the yard.

“I hope they take your SKIN!” the Tome shrieked after me, from the windowsill, as I turned into the street. “I hope they take your SKIN and hang it on the GALLERY!”

I reached the River Bell at dusk, and the gate was standing open for me.

I stopped Bertha under the arch and sat there a while, looking at the yard. Somebody had swept a path through the snow from the gate to the inn door, one person wide and dead straight, and it sure as hell hadn’t been swept when we left. Over the door, the bronze bell hung still. Every shutter on the front of the inn was open, and I had a good guess who’d opened them.

“Right,” I said to Bertha. “Here are the rules.”

Bertha flicked one ear.

“We sleep. That’s all. We get up in the morning and go home, and I tell Felix I don’t care about this place, and I keep my trousers on the entire time. I keep my trousers on. That’s rule one.” I swung down out of the saddle. “There’s no rule two. Rule one is the whole plan.”

I put her in the stable. It was dry and clean, with twelve stalls and fresh straw in the end one, which also hadn’t been there when we left. Bertha went into it without being asked and dug into somebody’s hay, the traitor. I took the saddlebag and walked up the swept path to the inn, and opened the door, and went in.

My smallclothes were on the bar.

They were folded. They had been folded into a neat square and laid in the exact middle of the long oak counter, under the carved birds, and somebody had put a cup beside them, upside down, for a guest expected late. The rest of what they had taken off me yesterday, belt and boots and cloak and all, was in a heap on the bench underneath. They had put my smallclothes on top, so I wouldn’t miss them.

“Very funny,” I said, to the empty room.

I picked up the smallclothes and put them in my saddlebag. The common room stayed cold and dark, and the hearth stayed full of yesterday’s ash. Kit and Jory were there, though. I could feel them up in the gallery the whole time, looking at my ass, and I didn’t look up. I took my saddlebag up the stairs and along the gallery to the warm room above the kitchen, the one with Kit’s wide bed in it, and I shut the door and bolted it, which I knew perfectly well was no use at all.

The lock Kit had fitted was a good lock. I’ll say that for him.

I ate Kaniz’s bread and cheese sitting on the edge of the bed in my coat. I didn’t light a fire. Jory had said, folding my smallclothes over his arm, that the fire made them strong, and Kit had said, at the hearth, nobody’s lit it since, and I had lit it anyway, and lost my trousers in the next minute. So it stayed dark. I took off my boots and nothing else, and I lay down on the wide bed in all my clothes with the quilt pulled up to my chin, and I stared at the ceiling and waited for the haunting to start.

It took them about as long as it took me to close my eyes.

“He kept his coat on,” said Kit’s voice, close beside my ear.

“I see it,” said Jory’s, from the foot of the bed.

I didn’t open my eyes. I was being firm.

“Do you think he sleeps in it?” Kit said. “Every night? Do you think he goes to bed with the girl in the chain and keeps his coat on?”

“I think he’s doing it for us,” said Jory. “It’s a statement.”

“It’s a very stupid statement.”

“Most of them are.”

The quilt started sliding off me. It went an inch at a time, down off my chin and over my chest, until it was bunched round my hips, and I let it go, because grabbing for it would have meant opening my eyes. A breath of cold went over my face and my throat. I kept my eyes shut. A finger, or the cold where a finger would be, drew a line down the front of my coat from the collar to the first button, and stopped, and pressed, and the button slid out through its hole all by itself.

“Kit,” I said, with my eyes shut. “That’s my coat.”

“I know,” Kit said. “I like your coat. It’s got so many buttons, who needs this many buttons?” The second button went. “I’d like it better on the floor.”

I opened my eyes.

He was lying beside me on the bed. He was lying on his side with his head propped on his hand, the way Lily lay on hers after we had finished, and he was gray and see-through in the dark, and the quilt went straight through his hips. His shirt hung open. His hair was in his eyes. He was looking at me with his mouth open and the third button of my coat pinched between his fingers, and my cock, which had been told the rules at the gate, perked up under the quilt and called for a vote.

“Rule one,” I said.

“What’s rule one?”

“Trousers stay on.”

Kit looked down at my trousers, and back up, delighted. “Nobody’s touched your trousers.”

“I’m telling you in advance.”

“He’s telling us in advance,” said Kit, over his shoulder, thrilled. “Nobody ever tells us in advance.”

Jory was sitting on the foot of the bed, which meant he was sitting with his legs through the footboard. He had his arms folded and his collar open and his boots crossed at the ankle, and he was watching the two of us with the calm, patient face of a man watching somebody else do the accounts badly.

“Your second button,” Jory told Kit. “You pushed it from the wrong side.”

“I pushed it from the side it was on.”

“That’s why it took so long.”

“It did not take long. I was savoring it. You don’t rush a button.”

“Forty seconds,” said Jory, to me. “I counted.”

I shut my eyes again. “I’m going to sleep.”

“Liar,” Kit said happily, and my coat came open all at once, every button, and slid off my shoulders and down my arms and away off the bed onto the floor without my moving a muscle. My shirt came out of my trousers. The bed went cold down one whole side of me, and Kit’s weight lay down against me, and his cold mouth pressed against the side of my neck right under my ear, and stayed there, and moved.

My hips came off the bed. I didn’t send them. My cock was hard against my trousers so fast that it ached, and every hair on my body stood up at once from the cold, and my nipples went tight enough to hurt under my shirt, and I gasped out loud, and Kit laughed against my neck.

“Ooh,” said Kit. “He’s not sleeping.”

“Your angle’s wrong,” said Jory. “He wants it lower.”

“I know where he wants it. I can see where he wants it. I’m dead, not blind.”

“You don’t. You went for the neck on the tanner’s journeyman, too, and he wanted it lower.”

“The tanner’s journeyman never complained!”

“The tanner’s journeyman fainted.”

I opened my eyes, and sat up, and they both went quiet.

Lying there with my eyes shut and a dead man’s mouth on my neck, I had worked it out. They could take my coat. They could take my trousers whenever they liked. I had seen what they could do to trousers. They could stand round my bed all night discussing my neck, and I could lie there shivering with my eyes shut and my cock trying to climb out of my body, and in the morning I would ride home and tell Felix I didn’t care, and Felix would look at me and know I was lying. I was going to lose this bet no matter what. I had lost it yesterday in the yard, when Kit came up out of the snow. I had lost it for certain at the hearth, with his mouth on mine.

If I was going to lose, I was going to lose properly.

I took my shirt off over my head and threw it on the floor on top of my coat.

“Kit,” I said. “Is that what you want?”

He had gone still on the bed beside me. “Is what what I want?”

I undid my trousers. I was shaking with the cold and with what I was about to do, and I didn’t give my hands time to change their minds. I pushed my trousers down over my hips and kicked them off the end of the bed straight through Jory, who flinched, and I lay back down on the wide bed in the dark, naked, with my cock standing up hard against my stomach, and put my hands behind my head.

“Rule one’s gone,” I said. “Go on, then. You’ve been talking about this bed since I walked in the door. Show me what it’s for.”

The room went dead quiet, and I liked that a lot.

“Oh,” said Kit, in a small voice.

“Your move,” said Jory, to Kit, with enormous interest.

Kit was sitting up now, on his knees beside me with his shirt hanging open. He looked at my cock. He looked at my face. His grin was gone, and I guessed nobody had ever called his bluff before. He reached out one see-through hand and stopped it an inch above my stomach, and held it there.

“I can’t,” he said. “Not properly. Not without the fire.”

“You were doing fine without the fire a minute ago.”

“That was… I was only teasing. That was only cold.” He looked at his hand over my stomach. “I can’t feel anything without the fire. You can feel me. I can’t feel you.”

I lay there looking up at his face and didn’t feel like I had won anything.

“Then watch,” I said.

I took myself in my hand.

I took my time. I looked straight at him the whole time and stroked myself, from the root to the tip and back, in Kit’s wide bed in the dark with the cold of the room all over me and two dead men watching, and I told him what I would have done if he’d been solid. I told him I would have had him on his back in the middle of this bed with that half-laced shirt torn the rest of the way open, and my mouth on his throat where the bruise was, and my hand where his was hovering now. I told him what I wanted him to do with his mouth. I told him how I wanted him to sound.

Kit stared at me. His mouth fell open, and stayed open. The bruise round his throat came back, faint and dark, and he didn’t try to hide it. He leaned closer, and his hand came down at last on my stomach, cold and tingling, and stayed, and he watched my hand move on myself with his eyes enormous, and that look nearly finished me right there.

“Keep going,” he whispered. “Please. Keep telling me.”

I kept telling him. I sped up. The cold went everywhere, all over my chest and down my thighs, and Kit’s other hand followed mine an inch above it, and he was making short gasping noises every time I stroked down.

“Your other hand,” said Jory from the foot of the bed, to me, without any hurry in it. “It’s doing nothing. Put it on your chest. No. Lower.” He watched me do it. “There. That’s where Kit was going to go first. He always goes there first. He just never gets that far.”

“Jory! I get that far all the time, you’re just never looking!” Kit wailed.

Jory looked at me. “You’re a six. With the other hand, a seven.”

I came with my head back on Kit’s pillow and both of them watching, harder than I meant to, with Kit’s cold hand spread flat on my stomach and his face right over mine, and I said his name when I did it. I hadn’t planned to.

The room was silent after that. I lay there breathing hard, sticky and freezing and naked on top of the quilt, and Kit knelt beside me, and he didn’t make one joke.

“You said my name,” he said.

“I know.”

“Nobody says my name.” He took his hand back and looked at it. “Jory says it. Jory doesn’t count.”

“Thank you,” said Jory.

Kit watched me.

“The fire downstairs,” he said. “If you lit it. I could…”

He got up off the bed, went out through the bolted door, and the room got warmer when he left it.

Jory stayed where he was, at the foot of the bed with his arms folded. He looked at me lying there in the mess I had made of Kit’s quilt.

“He’ll be at the hearth,” he said. “He sat there all night after you left yesterday.” He stood up, and went to the door, and stopped there with one hand through the frame. “If you’re going down, take the quilt. And the oil in your saddlebag. Your girl packed it for a reason.”

“How do you know about the oil?”

“I looked in your saddlebag,” said Jory, “while you were putting the mule away,” and went out through the door.

I lit the fire.

I knelt in the ash in my trousers and nothing else, because rule one was still rule one, with Kaniz’s oil in the pocket, and I got a fire going with my flint and the wood somebody had stacked beside the hearth. It caught fast and went roaring up the chimney, and the whole common room lit up, the bar, the carved birds, the gallery, every bit of blue glass in the place at once. It was a good room, and I didn’t want it to be.

Kit was on the hearthstone. He was sitting with his knees drawn up and his arms round them, gray in the new firelight, watching me build it, and I wanted him in my lap already.

I sat down beside him with the quilt over my shoulders. I held out my hand.

He looked at it for a long time before he put his hand in mine.

It was cold, and there was almost nothing to it. I held on anyway. The fire got hot on my back, and his hand got heavier in mine, a bit at a time, until his fingers closed on mine and they were warm, and they stayed warm.

“Don’t let go,” Kit said. “It goes if you let go.”

“I won’t let go.”

He leaned on my shoulder and I could feel all of him now, his weight on my arm, warm through his shirt, his bony shoulder, his hair tickling my cheek. He was solid and warm all down my side, and he was shaking, and he turned his face into my neck and breathed in, long and slow, the way Kaniz did.

“You smell like snow,” he said. “And horse. And the girl’s oil.”

“That’s Bertha.”

“I know it’s Bertha.” He laughed into my neck, a real laugh this time. “Three years. I haven’t smelled anything in three years. You smell like horse and I could cry.”

I kissed him.

Yesterday’s kiss had been over before I knew it was happening. This time I took my time. I kissed him slow, with my free hand on his jaw, and he opened his mouth under mine and kissed me back, and his hand that wasn’t in mine came up and took hold of my hair. He tasted of woodsmoke. He made a sound into my mouth. I pulled him round onto my lap on the hearthstone so he was straddling me with the quilt round both of us and my hand still locked in his between us, and he was warm and heavy on my thighs, and I could feel his cock hard against my stomach through his trousers.

He was a ghost. I was kissing a ghost on a hearthstone in a haunted inn in the middle of the night, and he was hard, and I was hard again already, and Felix and his bet could go hang.

“You have to keep holding my hand,” Kit said, against my mouth. He was breathless. “I can’t stay if you don’t. I’ll go right in the middle, and that’ll be embarrassing for everybody.”

“I’ve got two hands.”

“You’ve got one hand. The other one’s holding mine.”

“I’ve got one hand,” I agreed, and put it down the front of his trousers.

Kit threw his head back. His throat was bare in the firelight, with no bruise on it at all, and he cried out at the ceiling, and the fire roared up the chimney in one long rush. All the shutters on the ground floor rattled at once, and I nearly let go of his hand. Up in the gallery, a door banged open and shut by itself, and Jory said “Kit. The doors,” from somewhere upstairs, in no hurry at all.

“Sorry!” Kit gasped, to the ceiling. “Sorry. Sorry, I can’t help it, you’re…” After that he couldn’t talk at all, because I had my hand round him, and he was hot and hard and slick at the tip, and he rocked down into my fist on my lap with his fingers locked in mine so tight the bones ground together, and he kissed me hard.

He didn’t last long. I didn’t expect him to. He’d been dead three years. He came in my hand with his face in my neck and his teeth in my shoulder, and the whole inn shook with it, and the bell over the front door rang once, deep and long, out over the river. He was still shaking when it stopped. I held him. I kept his hand in mine, and I held him on my lap with the quilt round us both, while the fire cracked, until I couldn’t hear the bell anymore.

“Oh,” said Kit, much later, into my neck. “Oh, I forgot. I forgot that’s what it feels like.”

Jory came down after a while. He took the stairs slow, to give us time, I guessed, and went behind the bar and put his hands on the counter. He looked at the two of us on the hearthstone. He looked at the fire.

“That’s the first fire in three winters,” he said, “that nobody lit to warm their hands at.”

“I was cold,” I said.

“I know. The bell rang once.” Jory looked at the cup on the bar, the upside-down one he had left out for me. He turned it the right way up. It took him a few tries, because his hand kept going through it. “Do you want to know what we want?”

Kit had gone still on my lap.

“From a buyer,” Jory said. “Fenwick asks everyone what they want from a house. He never asks us. We’ve had three years to think about it.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“We want it full,” said Jory. “Fourteen rooms, and something happening in all of them. Noise on the stairs at three in the morning. People in the wrong beds. The girl in the chain down in the cells, making all the noise she wants, and somebody making her make it. Music in here, on a night like this, with a fire like that, and people with their shirts off, and nobody asking who slept with whom.” He looked at the empty room, the carved bar, the gallery with all its doors. “That’s what we built it for. That was the whole plan. Kit put the locks on and I paid for them. We never opened.”

“We want people who’ll play,” Kit said into my neck. “Jory wants all of them. I only need the one.”

I didn’t say anything. I sat there with Kit on my lap and his hand locked in mine, and the fire on my back, and Jory behind the bar, and I looked round at the common room in the firelight. And the stupid thing was, I could see it. Fire going, music up in the gallery, Kaniz’s chain ringing somewhere under the floor, Lily’s flowers all over the yard, the Tome shouting off the top of the watchtower, and me in the middle of it, with no clue how I’d got there.

I had a room at the Nail. I had a perfectly good room at the Nail.

“I can’t,” I said.

“You haven’t been asked,” said Jory.

Kit lifted his head and looked at me, and his eyes were brown in the firelight, solid now, and close.

“Stay till morning,” he said. “I’ll be good. I won’t, but I’ll try. Just keep holding on till morning.”

I held on till morning.

I held on while the fire burned down and Jory built it back up by moving one stick at a time with his whole face screwed up with effort, and I held on while Kit fell asleep on my lap with his head on my shoulder, heavy and breathing, which I hadn’t known ghosts could do. I held on while the windows went gray, and I tried not to think about Felix and his stupid bet. My arm went dead at about four in the morning. I didn’t let go.

The bell rang at sunrise.

It rang once, hard, because somebody outside had pulled the rope. Kit woke up on my lap and went thin and cold all at once, and his hand went through mine, and he was a ghost again on the hearthstone, looking at me.

I went to the door in my trousers, with the quilt hanging off one shoulder. Felix was standing in the yard in the snow.

He was standing in the middle of the swept path, wrapped in his black coat with his hood up, and he had ridden hard, and I could see his horse steaming at the gate. He looked me up and down from the doorway, the quilt, the bare feet, the bite mark on my shoulder, and the sunrise came up gold behind him over the wall, which I thought was a bit much.

“Well?” he said. “Do you care?”

I opened my mouth to say no. I had been planning to say it for two days. I had said it to everybody at the Nail as loudly as I could, and I had a whole speech about smallclothes, and I stood in the door of the River Bell with Kit’s bite on my shoulder and Kit behind me on the hearthstone, and I couldn’t get the word out.

Felix waited.

“I’ll collect later,” he said. “My choice of night.” His mouth was tight under the hood. He had won, and he wasn’t even smiling about it. “You’ll want to come home first.”

“Why?”

“The cult,” said Felix. “They came back last night. They took somebody out of the lane behind the Nail.”