For two days Serenia had nobody in charge of it, and Elliot learned more about how the world worked in those two days than in everything that came before.
He'd assumed the town would be glad. He'd been wrong about that so completely that the wrongness kept arriving in pieces.
The first piece came on the morning after, when a delegation of four men found him in the stable yard, grain factors, by their coats, and asked him, with great respect, what he wanted done about the Sarrow road tolls.
"What?"
"The tolls, sir." The eldest of them had his hat in his hands. "They're collected Thursday. Only there's no ruling on whether they're collected at the old rate or"
"Why are you asking me?"
The four men looked at each other with the particular blankness of people who have been asked to explain water.
"You beat him," said the eldest.
Ah, said Etreuf, with enormous satisfaction. There it is.
There what is?
The only law that has ever existed anywhere. The demon sounded like a man watching a favorite play. You have been walking around this world for a month asking how a person becomes a king, and every fool you asked told you strength, and you thought that meant strength was the qualification. A pause. It is not the qualification, boy. It is the procedure. You put the largest man on the plain through a wall in front of two hundred witnesses. Congratulations. You are the Bull of Serenia. There is no ceremony; there was never going to be one.
Elliot sent them away. They went. They came back in the afternoon with the same question, because the tolls were still collected on Thursday and the world did not stop for a boy's discomfort.
The second piece was worse.
Korran's men had not scattered. Elliot had assumed they would, assumed a gang was a thing that held together only while the big man held it, and instead they went on doing their jobs, guarding the wells and the wagon yards, and a few of them started standing near him, at a distance, watching, waiting to find out what they were now.
One of them, a scarred man of about forty called Denn who'd been with Korran nineteen years, put it plainly when Elliot finally asked.
"Forty men, lad. Four of us died on the north wall. If this town's got no law by the end of the week, half of us go bandit, because there's nowhere else for us to go and we know every well and gate for forty miles." He said it without threat, like a man reading a forecast. "That's not me telling you to take it. That's me telling you what happens if nobody does."
Elliot went and sat on the stable roof and put his head in his hands.
"You could just leave," Lyssara said, from behind him.
She'd come up without a sound, which she always did, and she sat down about a foot from his shoulder, which she never had.
He noticed it. He didn't say anything about it, because he'd learned that much, at least, that the fastest way to close a door was to remark on it opening.
"If I leave now the whole plain goes bandit," he said.
"Probably."
"That's not a probably I can walk away from."
"No," Lyssara agreed. She pulled her knees up. "That's the trap. That's what it always is. Somebody wins a fight and then finds out they've inherited the whole miserable thing, and the only way out is to hand it to someone worse." She was quiet a moment. "It's why I've never won a fight I didn't have to."
"So what do I do?"
"You don't do anything," she said. "You wait two days for a man with a hole in his chest to be able to stand up, and then you find out whether he's actually the person you've spent a week deciding he might be."
Korran Uldar came out on the third morning.
He came on his own legs, which nobody expected. He came without his men, which nobody expected either. He walked from the physician's house to the well in the middle of the square with a stick in his good hand and his chest strapped and his shirt open over the bandages, and every step was clearly a negotiation, and he made all of them without stopping.
The square filled behind him.
He'd sent word at dawn, the whole town, at the well, nobody stays home, and Serenia had come, all of it. Two hundred at the duel; a thousand for this. They packed the square and the mouths of the four streets and stood on the wreck of the grain exchange, and there were children up on the roofs.
Korran got to the well steps and turned around and looked at them for a long moment.
"I've had twenty-two years here," he said.
His voice was not what it had been. It carried anyway.
"Fifteen of them I've been the law, because there wasn't one. I want to say the true thing about that in front of everybody, and then I'll say what I mean to do, and then it's yours."
Nobody moved.
"I've kept this plain," Korran said. "That's real. I'll not have anybody stand up here and tell me it isn't, and I'll not have anybody tell me the year eleven didn't happen, because I was nineteen days in the south grass and I came back with my arm hanging off and the killing stopped." He let that sit. "That's the true part."
He shifted his weight on the stick.
"Here's the other one."
The square was silent enough to hear the flies over the burnt market.
"I've taken land off people in bad years and never given it back," said Korran Uldar. "I've priced things nobody should have to buy. I've had men beaten for talking about me in the wrong tone in their own houses. Three weeks ago I sat in that hall and told a girl who walked in asking a civil question that my price for it was her, in front of forty men, because I was bored." He didn't flinch off it. He said it the way a man reads a charge sheet aloud. "And when the boy came at me for it I put him through my own wall and told him to grow, and I enjoyed it. That's the sort of thing I've become in this town, and it happened slow, and I didn't notice, because nobody in Serenia has been able to afford to tell me."
Somewhere in the crowd a woman started crying.
"I ruled through fear," he said. "Not respect. I've been telling myself for years those were the same thing wearing different coats. They're not. Fear's what you use when you can't be bothered to earn the other one, and it works, and it's cheap, and it costs everyone but you."
He stopped. His breathing had gone bad. He waited it out.
"So," he said. "It's yours. All of it. You say what happens to me and I'll wear it, and if that's the east road with nothing, I'll walk it today."
The silence went on for a long time.
Elliot stood at the edge of it with Adam and Lyssara and Vessa and understood that he was watching something that almost never happened in the world, a thing everybody wants and nobody knows what to do with when it arrives.
It was an old woman who finally spoke.
She was small and stooped and she pushed forward out of the crowd with a hand on a younger woman's arm, and when she got to the front she let go and stood on her own.
"Sen Ackar," she said. "My husband's name was Toll Ackar. We had forty acres on the Sarrow bend."
Korran said nothing.
"Year of the short rain, you bought it off him for a third what it was worth," said Sen Ackar, "because he'd have starved by winter otherwise, and you knew it, and you let him thank you." Her voice was thin and it did not shake. "He never got over being grateful. That's what it did to him. Not the money. He died grateful and ashamed at the same time and I sat with him while he did it."
The square did not breathe.
"And the year eleven," she said, "my daughter was in Little Hask."
Korran's head came up.
"She's alive," said the old woman. "She's got three of her own and she's standing about nine feet behind me right now, and she wouldn't be, and I know exactly why she is." She lifted her chin. "So don't you stand up there and offer to walk the east road like it settles anything, Korran Uldar. It doesn't settle anything. You took my husband's life a piece at a time and you saved my daughter's whole, and I've had eleven years to work out what I think about that, and I'm no closer, and I'm eighty-one."
She turned and looked at the crowd.
"He stays," she said. "Not because he's forgiven. Because there's nobody else, and because sending him off makes me feel better and does nothing for anyone else, and I'm too old to be interested in feeling better." Back to Korran. "You stay, and you give back what can be given back, and you go on doing the thing you're good at. And every year we ask again."
"Every year," Korran repeated.
"Every year," said Sen Ackar. "Till one of us dies. Those are my terms and I'm not negotiating them, because I'm the oldest person here and I've earned that."
Nobody argued.
It was not, Elliot thought afterward, a verdict. It was the whole town agreeing to be uncomfortable for the rest of their lives, which was a much stranger thing and, he suspected, much rarer.
The crowd broke up slowly. A lot of people didn't leave for a long time.
He found Korran on the well steps that evening, alone, sitting where he'd stood.
Elliot sat down on the step below him without asking, and for a while neither of them said anything.
"They came to me about the tolls," Elliot said eventually.
"Course they did." Korran's mouth twitched. "Thursday's Thursday."
"I didn't want it."
"That's the only reason I let you sit down." The Bull looked out over the square. "Man who wants it, you've got about a year before he's me. Man who doesn't want it and takes it anyway, you've got maybe five. Man who doesn't want it and won't take it" he shrugged with his good shoulder, and winced. "Then somebody like Denn takes it and you've got about a month. There's no clean answer, lad. There's just which mess you can live beside."
"Sen Ackar's answer was pretty good."
"Sen Ackar's answer was the best thing that's happened to me in fifteen years," Korran said, "and it's going to be the worst part of every year I've got left, and she knew that when she said it. That woman's harder than I am."
They sat.
"Ask it," said Korran.
Elliot looked at his hands.
"How do you know I want to ask something?"
"Because you've been carrying it round this town for three days like a dropped egg." Korran shifted, grimacing. "Go on."
"When you were down," Elliot said. "In the wall."
"Aye."
"I wanted to kill you."
He got it out flat, all in one go, the way he'd been practicing in his head since the market. Korran didn't move.
"There was a " Elliot stopped. Started again. "The dark. When it came, it wasn't like the fire. The fire's borrowed; I can always feel that it isn't mine. The dark came out of something my mother gave me and it knew me, and standing over you it wanted you dead, and I wanted it too, and I couldn't tell where one stopped and the other started." His hands had made fists. "I still can't. That's the part. It's three days later and I still can't tell you how much of that was the thing and how much was me."
Korran Uldar was quiet for a while.
"You want me to tell you it was the thing," he said.
"Yeah."
"It wasn't."
Elliot's stomach dropped.
"It was you," said Korran. "Course it was you. Everybody's got that in them, lad, everybody. I've had it my whole life; it's how I killed a hundred and forty-one things on my own on open grass. Most folk go their whole lives never getting handed anything strong enough to find out." He looked down at Elliot for the first time. "That's not the interesting question. The interesting question's what you did about it, and what you did about it was stop, with the thing screaming in your hands and me on my back and nobody in the world able to stop you."
"That doesn't feel like enough."
"It's never going to feel like enough," said Korran. "That's the whole job. You'll want it again, next time, and the time after, and every time you'll stop, and it'll never once feel like a victory, and that's how you'll know you're still doing it right." He grunted. "First honest thing anybody's said to me in fifteen years and it's a boy telling me he nearly murdered me. Bloody world."
Elliot laughed. It surprised him.
He is not wrong, Etreuf said, and said nothing else.
The demon had been very quiet since the market. Elliot had noticed. He'd tried twice to ask about it and got nothing but the conversational equivalent of a closed door, and he'd decided, for now, to leave it.
"Tomorrow," Korran said, "come to the hall. Bring the hunter woman and your friends and the sharp one who put a knife in my neck." He got his stick under him and stood, in stages, breathing badly. "I owe you a road, and I'll pay it, and you're not going to like the shape of what I've got to tell you."
"Why not?"
"Because I've been sitting on it eleven years," said the Bull of Serenia, "and I've never once said it out loud, and there's a reason for that."
That night Elliot lay on the straw mattress over the stable and reached up, in the dark, to the place at his throat where a cord had been for sixteen years.
He did it perhaps thirty times a day now. His hand simply went, the way a tongue goes to a missing tooth.
The two halves of the coin were in his pocket, wrapped in a scrap of cloth. He'd tried, twice, to hold them together and make them a coin again. They fit perfectly and they were nothing.
Across the room, Lyssara had put her bedroll down under the window instead of against the door.
Elliot noticed that too.
He didn't say anything about that either.