Chapter 7: The Tin

Cavan woke with the gold disc warm on his chest and Fenny's request still in his ears.

He had not answered it in the linen room.

He answered it now, with his hand closed over the cord.

"It's the only thing Roddy ever gave me," he said. "It stays on."

Fenny, at the washstand, looked at the fist and said nothing.

Then he took his tray and went down to the kitchens, and his jaw was tight.

Cavan found the tin on the washstand where he had stood, while Fenny was gone.

It was a dented tin with a tight lid, the kind a soldier keeps tobacco in.

He weighed it in his hand.

It rattled thinly.

He thought of the washroom door, and the two pills swallowed dry, and the smell of pine smoke on a beta.

He opened the lid.

Six pills. White and round, each one stamped with a small fox.

He was still looking at them when the door opened.

"Don't," Fenny said.

He had a tray in his hands and a face gone pale.

"You're counting them."

"Six," Cavan said. "You had a full tin when you moved in. Twenty, at least."

"They're for emergencies."

"You've taken fourteen in nine days."

Fenny set the tray down so carefully that the cups did not ring.

"It's my regimen," he said. "I have an old condition. It flares when I'm under stress. And I've been under stress."

"You told me this was a slow thing in you. A long cure. That you were stable."

"I'm stable on the tablets."

"Then why do they stop working every time I touch you?"

Fenny did not answer.

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