Chapter 578 - 577: A Question That Isn’t About Love

Chapter 578: Chapter 577: A Question That Isn’t About Love

Location:Seven Peaks — Thorne’s Office; The Hall; The North Camp

Date/Time:TC1857.12.10 – TC1857.12.19

There were seven drafts on Thorne’s desk on the second morning, and every one of them had a line through it, and he could see from across the room that the lines had been drawn by somebody who had read each draft to the bottom first and then struck it slowly.

Raven’s hand. Every one.

He did not touch them. He sat down at the desk and looked at them in order, because she had left them in order, and because a person who leaves struck drafts in order on somebody else’s desk wants them read.

The first began If I were to die. The second began In the event that I am unable. The third was shorter and began Who would you follow and had been struck before the end of the first line. The fourth and fifth were attempts to say the same thing without saying I, and they read like a document written by a person standing just out of frame. The sixth was a list of names, with nothing after them, and it had been struck hardest.

The seventh was one sentence.

I cannot write this, because every version of it is about me.

That one had not been struck. It had been left at the bottom of the pile with the pen lying across it, which was how Thorne understood that it was not a draft at all. It was the instruction.

***

When Shen Wuyan came in at the second hour, he had the answer ready for her before she asked.

"You," Thorne told her. "And the boy. And nobody else."

"Why the boy?"

"Because he keeps the record and because he’s the only person on this mountain who has spent a year learning the difference between a question about what happened and a question about what it means." Thorne had the seven drafts squared up on the corner of the desk. "And because every adult I could ask loves her, and I’ve been told the question can’t be about that."

Shen Wuyan considered him for a moment.

"You love her as well."

"I do. That’s why I’m not writing it either." He did not look away. "I’m the clerk. I’ll hold the pen, and I’ll write down what the two of you decide the question is, and I’ll send it, and I will not have a view about the wording, because a clerk with a view about the wording of a question like this is the most dangerous person in the room."

***

Elian was carried down by Coop, which he tolerated now, and put in the chair by the window with the boards on his knees because he had said he wanted them, and sat there listening to Shen Wuyan explain the problem with his head slightly on one side.

"The question cannot be who comes after her," Shen Wuyan explained, "because that is a question about her, and every answer to it will be a statement about how much the person answering loves her or does not. The question cannot be would you follow somebody else, because that is a question about loyalty, and nobody will answer a question about loyalty honestly in a settlement where the answers will be read."

"Then what?"

"That is what we are here to find."

Elian was quiet long enough that Shen Wuyan looked at him. He had the rule across the top board and was not using it.

"Ask them what they’d keep doing."

Shen Wuyan turned her head.

"Not who. Not whether. What." Elian put his hand flat on the board. "If she was gone tomorrow, what would you still do on the day after. What would you still write down? Who would you still count? What would you still take to the gate? That’s a first column question. It’s about things you do. And you can answer it without saying anything about her at all."

Thorne had his pen over the page and had not moved it.

"And the answers tell you what?" Shen Wuyan asked.

"They tell you what’s in the second column." Elian looked at the board and not at either of them. "She’s been giving things away all year and writing them down as gone. The measure. The screening. The anchors. Naida. If people answer and it’s all things she does, then nothing’s in the second column yet, and she’s all of it. If people answer and it’s things they do — then that’s what comes after her. Not a person. The things."

The room was very quiet.

"You’ve been thinking about this," Shen Wuyan observed.

"Since the terrace." He did not say which terrace or how he knew what had been said on it, and neither of them asked. "Kairos said it was the last thing in the first column that was only hers. I didn’t think it was. I wanted to find out."

***

It took them the rest of the day to get the words right, and Thorne did not suggest a single one.

What went out on the twelfth was a half-sheet, and it went to everybody at Seven Peaks who could read and to everybody who could not in the form of a person who would sit with them and write down what they said and read it back.

It said, in the same size throughout:

This is not a question about Raven.

If you woke tomorrow and she was not here, what would you do that day that you do now?

Not what you would feel. What you would do. What you would write down, who you would count, what you would carry, where you would stand.

Write as much or as little as is true. Sign it or do not. Nobody will read these answers, but the three people whose names are at the bottom, and she will not read them at all. What she will be given is a count.

And at the bottom: Shen Wuyan. Elian. Thorne, clerk.

***

Raven read it at the Hall table before it went and did not change a word.

"I’m not going to see them."

"No," Thorne answered. "You’re going to see what we count. Shen Wuyan has the boards for it, and the boy is building the columns. You’ll get a number, and a list of the things that come up more than once, and nothing with anybody’s hand on it."

"That’s right."

"You asked for that."

"I did." Raven put the half-sheet down. "I’d have read every one. I’d have read them looking for my name, and I’d have counted how often it came up, and I’d have learned the wrong thing from it, and I’d have known I was doing it and done it anyway." She stood up. "It’s the first thing all year I’ve been told I’m not allowed to see, and it’s the first thing I’ve wanted to see this badly, and I’d like that written down somewhere, in case it’s useful to somebody."

Thorne wrote it down.

***

Sera Vahn came to his office on the fourteenth with a question he had been expecting since the half-sheet went out.

"Does it go to the Corps?"

"It goes to everybody at Seven Peaks."

"The Corps isn’t Seven Peaks’." She did not sit. "We decided that on a terrace in the tenth month. Kira Desh said it, and I wrote half of it. Nobody’s taking us back, and nobody owns us. We’re not bound by her hand. We never signed anything."

"Then don’t send it."

"I didn’t say don’t send it." Sera Vahn’s expression did not change, which by now Thorne could read. "I said we’re not bound. That’s a different thing. A person who isn’t bound can still be asked what they’d do on the day after, and I’d like to know the answer, and so would they, and I’m not going to be the commander who decided on their behalf that the question didn’t apply to them."

"Then send it."

"I’m going to send it with a line on it." She put a folded note on his desk. "That the Corps is answering as the Corps and not as Seven Peaks, and that nobody who answers is saying anything about whether they’re bound. You can count us separately or together. I’d rather separately, so it’s clear afterward which answers came from people who could have walked away."

Thorne unfolded the note and read it, and put it with the half-sheets.

"Separately," Thorne agreed.

***

The answers started coming back on the fifteenth and by the nineteenth there were more than Thorne had expected and fewer than he had feared, and Shen Wuyan read every one, and Elian ruled the columns and Thorne counted, and nobody else came into the room.

He did not read them for what they said about her. That had been the rule, and he kept it. He read them for what they said people did, and wrote the things down in the order they came up, and put a mark beside a thing each time it came up again.

Most of them were short.

I’d do the linen.

I’d go to the frame at dawn.

I’d count the camp, same as always. By name.

Write the return. It’d still be due.

Fit the next hand. There’s sixty behind the first one.

Walk the north road in the spring if they’d have me.

Some were longer, and some were in hands he recognized, and some were in hands he did not, and one of them was in charcoal on the back of a piece of shuttering board and said only keep the fourth column empty, and was not signed, and Thorne put a mark beside that line, and then over the next three days put eleven more marks beside it from other answers that said the same thing in different words.

The Corps answers came in a single bundle, tied with a length of the cord they used for the survey pegs, with Sera Vahn’s note on the top saying again what it had said on the fourteenth: answering as the Corps and not as Seven Peaks; nobody here is saying anything about whether they are bound.

There were more of them than Thorne had expected. Sera Vahn had not made anybody answer; she had put the half-sheet on the board outside the command tent and let people take one or not, and a great many of them had.

He counted them separately, as she had asked, in their own column.

The thing that came up most in the Corps column was not a thing that came up in the other column at all. It came up in a dozen different ways, most of them short, and he had to read several before he understood that they were all the same answer.

Go.

Be on the road by the next morning.

Get there first.

Whatever she’d have gone to, go to it.

We’re the ones who go. That was Kira Desh. She’d want it on this.

Thorne sat back from the table.

Shen Wuyan was reading over his shoulder, which she had not done all week.

"That is not an answer about Raven," she said.

"No."

"That is an answer about what they have decided they are." She did not move. "Write it exactly as it is. The column for the people who could have walked away, and the thing most of them wrote, which is that they will walk toward it."

***

On the evening of the nineteenth, Elian put his pen down and looked at the columns for a long time.

"It’s not her. Mostly it’s not her. Some of them are. Some of them just say her name and nothing else." He did not seem distressed by that. "But most of them are a thing. And the things that come up most are the things she’s given away."

Shen Wuyan did not answer.

"That’s a finding," Elian went on. "About what people wrote. It’s not a finding about whether there’s a succession. I know the difference."

"Yes."

"But I’d like it in the first column anyway. Because the Emperor asked whether this place has a succession, and the honest answer is that I don’t know and neither does anybody, and this is the only thing we’ve got that’s a count."

Thorne wrote the date, and the number of answers, and the number of Corps answers counted separately, and the things that came up most, in order, and the one thing that had come up twelve times in twelve different hands, and nothing else.

Then he took the count, and only the count, up to Raven.

She was in the Hall with the lamps low and the two-column ledger on the wall behind her and the Corps roll beside it, and she did not get up when he came in, and he put the single page on the table in front of her and stood back.

She read it slowly. He watched her read it, which was not his job and which he did anyway.

The number of answers. The number of Corps answers, separately. The things that came up most — the linen, the frame at dawn, the count by name, the return, the next hand on the wall, the north road in spring, the record. The Corps column with its single word written a dozen ways.

And the one line that had come up twelve times in twelve hands, in the order Elian had ruled it, at the bottom, in the same size.

Keep the fourth column empty.

Raven put her finger on that line and left it there.

"Twelve," she said.

"All in different hands. One of them on a bit of shuttering board, in charcoal."

She did not say anything for long enough that he thought she had finished.

Then she said, without looking up, "How many said my name and nothing else?"

Thorne had known she would ask. He had decided in advance that he would tell her, because she had asked for a count and that was part of it, and because a clerk who withholds part of a count has started having views.

He told her the number.

It was not small. It was not most of them. It was a number a person could hold in one hand and feel the weight of.

Raven sat with it.

"That’s the part I can’t give away," she said at last. "Those ones. If I’m gone, that’s the part that’s gone with me, and there’s nothing I can write down that changes it." She took her finger off the page. "And everything else on this sheet is a thing somebody else does. Which is the answer the Emperor asked for, and it isn’t a person, and I’ve no idea whether three governments will accept it as one."

"You’ll find out on the ninth."

"I’ll find out on the ninth." She folded the page along the middle and put it inside her coat. "Thank you for not letting me read them."

"You asked me not to."

"I know. I’m thanking you for holding to it after I’d asked." She stood. "I’d have asked again by tomorrow. I’d like it written down that I knew that."

Thorne wrote it down.