Chapter 577 - 576: The Part He Could See

Chapter 577: Chapter 576: The Part He Could See

Location:Seven Peaks — The North Gate; The East Barracks; The Hall

Date/Time:TC1857.12.03 – TC1857.12.08

They heard the counting before anybody saw the line.

It came up the north road on the wind in the last of the afternoon, thin and high and steady, a single child’s voice saying numbers in Old Northern at a walking pace, and it was the sound that brought people to the gate, because by then everybody at Seven Peaks knew what that sound was and what it meant when it arrived.

Raven was already there. She had been at the gate at that hour for six days.

Aren was beside her. He had been there for seven, and had not been sent away, and had not asked whether he could stay.

The counting got closer. Somebody at the gate said a number under their breath along with it, and then somebody else did, and by the time the line came round the last shoulder of the road there were a dozen people at the north gate of Seven Peaks counting in a language most of them did not speak, and getting it right, because they had heard it enough times since the ninth month to know how it went.

Forty-one.

The girl at the front of the line stopped at the gate and said it, and turned round, and looked at the man at the back.

Bjorn said it back.

***

He did not come to Aren straight away. He saw the children in first, all of them, and stood at the gate while the east barracks took them — the northern girl who had been first through that gate in the spring coming down with her arms out already, organizing, and the eleven-year-old from the second group behind her doing the count again in her own voice and getting the same number and nodding as if that settled something — and only when the last of the forty-one was through did he turn round.

Aren had not moved.

Bjorn crossed the yard to him and went down on one knee in the mud, which put his face level with his son’s and put the wrapped hand where the boy could see it.

"Iron," Bjorn told him.

Aren nodded once and did not ask anything else about the hand.

Then Bjorn took the bark out of his coat, from the inside where Freya kept hers, and held it out, and did not say anything, and let the boy read it.

Raven watched Aren read it. She watched him find the three names and the count, and then the line under the count, and then the word under that, and she watched his face do nothing whatever for a long moment, the way his father’s did.

"Standing," Aren read aloud.

"What does it mean?"

Bjorn did not answer straight away. Raven had never once seen him take so long over a sentence.

"It means it’s the part I could see," Bjorn answered at last. "When I cut it. She was going in, and she was standing, and the pass shut on the fifth day like she said it would, and after that I couldn’t see any more." He put his good hand over the boy’s on the bark. "So I wrote the part I could see, and I stopped."

Aren looked at the bark a while longer.

"That’s the right way."

"I know. I learned it off your mother. She learned it off a woman with no name."

***

Bjorn gave her his account of the traverse that night, in writing, because he had said on the route that he would not tell it out loud and he meant it.

It was a page and a half in the heavy hand, and it was not like the sheet. The sheet had been four lines of what he had seen and one line of what he had counted. This was the other thing. What it had been like to go up a slope in snow at a thing with an ice axe in a hand with no skin on it, with a woman kneeling in the snow ahead of him and a man under the animal and nobody watching its head.

Raven read it at the table in the Hall with nobody else there.

At the bottom, he had written: This is for you and not for the record. Burn it or keep it. I am not going to say it again, and I wanted one person to have it who would not do anything with it.

She read it a second time. Then she folded it along its creases and put it in Thorne’s sealed file, the one that nobody else opened and that he would burn on one person’s instruction, and she wrote on the outside of it B.F. — the traverse — his, not ours, and gave no instruction either way.

***

Elian had the sheet by the evening, and he did the thing he did now, which was to put the three names in the first column in Sera Vahn’s counting order, and the forty-one and the eight, and the third day of the surge, and the traverse below Cold Shoulder, and Bjorn’s line about the third position, copied word for word.

Then he stopped, with the pen over the page, and looked at Raven.

"Freya."

"Yes."

"Where does she go?"

Raven had known that was coming since the gate and had not worked out an answer and did not pretend to.

"What do you think?"

"First column. Gone in. Middle country. Second pass shut the twenty-fourth of the eleventh month." He said it steadily, and she could hear that he had been saying it to himself since noon. "And then nothing until somebody comes back through the pass and says what happened. Not in the fourth column. The fourth column is for what things mean. We know what it means. We just don’t know what happened."

"That’s right."

"It’s the first time there’s been a person in the record we can’t find out about until spring." He put the pen down. "Everything else, somebody could go and look. This one nobody can. I’m going to put a line under her and leave the rest of the page empty till the thaw, and I want it to stay empty, and I want it to be the only empty page in the book."

"It will be."

"Aren’s going to come and look at it."

"Yes."

"Then I’m going to let him," Elian answered, "and I’m not going to say anything, because there isn’t anything."

Aren came to look at it on the fourth morning, before the linen.

He did not ask. He came into Elian’s room and stood at the end of the bed, and Elian turned the board round without being asked either, so that the page faced him.

Three names and a count. The date the pass shut. Freya Frostborn — gone in. Middle country. And under it, a single ruled line across the whole width of the board, and below the line nothing at all, all the way to the bottom edge.

Aren looked at it for a long time.

Elian did not say anything. He had said he would not, and he did not, and after a while he went back to the other board and started ruling columns for the forty-one as if Aren were not there, which was the kindest thing anybody did for Aren that week and which neither of them would ever mention.

When Aren went, he stopped at the door.

"It’s a big empty," he said.

"It’s the only one," Elian told him. "I’ve kept it that way on purpose. Nothing else goes on that page till somebody comes back through the pass."

Aren nodded once and went to do the linen.

***

The Hall sat on the fifth day about the third position and it was the shortest sitting of the year because there was nothing to argue about. Everybody had read the sheet.

"Twice in thirty days," Taron observed. "Same failure. Same death. And the second time they built for it."

"Say what the rule should be," Raven told him.

"I can’t. That’s why I’m saying it out loud." Taron did not move from the window. "The rule is the watcher doesn’t leave. The watcher left twice, because the front went down and there were children behind them, and doing nothing felt worse than dying. You can’t write a rule against that. People will break it every time it matters."

Sera Vahn had been standing at the back. She spoke without coming forward.

"Then stop asking the watcher to be the only spare."

"Meaning?"

"Four to a team." She said it flatly. "Front, side, head, and a second front who does nothing until the first front falls. Nothing. Not watching, not striking, standing a pace behind the front with a shield on his arm and his mind on one thing. When the front goes down, the second steps in, and the watcher never has to choose."

"That’s a third more people," Raven answered. "On every point. And we haven’t got enough threes."

"We haven’t. And I’d rather have two fours at a point than three threes that each lose a watcher when it matters." Sera Vahn did not blink. "I’ll say the rest. They’ll build for the four. Probably by the spring. The Assessor told us to our faces that the working life of anything we publish is going to get shorter and shorter until it’s nothing. I’m not proposing it because it’ll last. I’m proposing it because it’ll last longer than the three did."

"Publish it?"

"Publish it. Same as everything." Sera Vahn had not moved from the back of the room. "With Kira Desh’s name on the top and the three from the traverse under it, and the line that says it was built from the watcher leaving twice. The next people to stand in a four should know why there are four of them."

Raven looked round the Hall. Nobody objected.

"Four," Raven ruled. "Written tonight."

Sera Vahn wrote it herself that night and brought it to the Hall before it went, which she had not done with any sheet before, and stood while Raven read it.

Four to a team. Front, side, head, and a second front.

The second front does nothing until the first front falls. Not watching. Not striking. One pace behind with a shield and one thing in mind. When the first front goes down, the second steps in, and the head is never left.

Built from Cold Shoulder, tenth month, and the traverse below Cold Shoulder, eleventh month. Both times the watcher left the head to replace a fallen front. Both times somebody died of the unwatched head. The second time the animals had built for it.

And at the top, above all of it, in the same size, one name, and then three, and a line.

This is the rule they did not have.

Raven read it twice.

"That last line," she said.

"It’s accurate." Sera Vahn had her hands behind her back. "I’m not publishing a rule for the living without saying plainly who it was too late for. The Assessor said nothing we write lasts. Fine. Then everything we write should say who paid for the version before it."

Raven handed it back.

"Send it."

***

Shen Wuyan did not leave when the others did.

She waited until the Hall was nearly empty, and then she said, without any preamble, "The renewal."

Raven had been expecting it for a week and had been hoping it would wait until the new year.

"Six months from the ninth of the seventh month," Shen Wuyan went on. "The ninth of the first. Five weeks. The border clause comes up in front of all four signatories, and so does everything else that was written as reviewable at the first renewal." She folded her hands. "Your signature line is one of those things. You wrote it that way yourself."

"For herself, and for those at Seven Peaks who choose to be bound by her hand, so long as they choose it."

"And reviewed at the first renewal and every one after." Shen Wuyan said it plainly. "The Emperor has asked the Imperial Heir one question about this settlement. You know what it was."

"Whether it has a succession."

"In five weeks, three governments are going to sit at a table and read a signature line that says, in your own words, that this settlement is bound by one person’s hand. And at least one of them has already asked what happens when the hand stops." Shen Wuyan looked at her very steadily. "You have spent a year teaching the continent that the way to handle a thing you cannot demonstrate is to publish it before somebody else finds it out. This is that thing. You cannot demonstrate who comes after you. And somebody has already started asking."

Raven sat down, which she did not usually do in the Hall.

"I don’t know who comes after me."

"I know."

"I’m not sure anybody should."

"That may be the answer. It may be the correct one." Shen Wuyan did not move. "But it is not an answer you get to arrive at by yourself in a room at night, because the only thing that makes it worth anything is that the people bound by the hand have said so. They have to be asked. All of them. Before the renewal. And the question has to be put in a form that they can answer without it being a question about whether they love you."

***

Raven went up to the east terrace afterward, which she had stopped avoiding, and stood at the rail in the cold.

Below her, the east barracks had every lamp lit. Forty-one more children than a week ago, and the northern girl organizing all of them, and Aren somewhere among them with his father’s bark in his coat and a word on it that meant the part I could see.

Kairos came out after a while, as he did now, and stood beside her and did not say anything.

"Shen Wuyan wants me to ask the whole mountain who comes after me," Raven told him.

"Yes. I heard. She did not lower her voice."

"Before the renewal."

"Yes."

"And to ask it so it isn’t a question about whether they love me."

Kairos considered that with his hands on the rail.

"That is the correct question," he allowed at last, "and it is extremely difficult, and I have no view on the answer, and I would like it noted that for once in my life that is not a pose." He did not look at her. "I will say one thing, and then I will go back to being furniture. You have spent this year giving things away and writing them in the second column. This is the last thing in the first column that is only yours."

Raven did not answer for a long time.

"Then it goes in the second column," she said.

"Eventually."

"Before the renewal."

"That," Kairos said, "is five weeks, and you have never once in your life done a thing in five weeks that you could possibly do in three, and I am going to go inside where it is warm."

He did. She stayed at the rail until the east barracks put its lamps out one by one, and counted them, without meaning to, all the way down.