Chapter 240: A Gift Without Reason (1)

In the fourth week, Sera started coming to his room in the afternoons.

The first time, she stood in the doorway for a long while before she spoke. She held a basket of mending against her chest, and Pudding sat on her shoulder with most of its legs wrapped around her neck.

"The Sage says you’re allowed visitors now," she said. "For a little while. If you don’t get excited and hurt yourself."

Encrid looked at her from the chair by the window.

"I’ll try not to hurt myself."

"Good. Because he said if you do, he’ll make me leave, and then he’ll make you drink the green one again."

She came in and sat on the small stool near the bed. Pudding climbed down her arm, looked at Encrid with several of its eyes, and decided he was not interesting. It curled up in the basket on top of a torn stocking.

Sera took out a needle and began to sew.

Encrid waited for her to ask him something.

People always asked him something. That was how conversations had worked since the day he woke up in this body. The Duke had wanted him gone. Ferris Cavel had wanted to know if he was useful. Vess had wanted to know what he would get. Every commander on the Wall had wanted something before they gave him their vote. Even Rael, in the end, had signed a contract in exchange for his support.

Encrid did not blame any of them. It was how the world worked, and it was how he worked too. He had made a whole book out of it.

But Sera only sewed.

After a while, she said, "Pudding learned to fetch yesterday."

"Did he?"

"Well. He learned to sit next to the ball. That’s almost fetching." She pulled the thread tight and bit it off. "I think he’s clever. He just doesn’t like being told what to do."

"I know someone like that."

"Do you? Who?"

Encrid thought of a voice on top of the garden wall that called him a frail mortal every night.

"A friend," he said. "A very proud one."

Sera nodded as if that explained everything.

She told him about the plum tree next. It had been planted by her grandmother, she said, and it gave sour plums every second year and no plums at all in between. Her father had wanted to cut it down once, but she had cried so much that he left it alone.

"I was small," she said. "I don’t remember it. Crescent told me."

Then she told him about the kitchen cat, who was afraid of Pudding, and about the old cook, Hanne, who sang when she thought no one could hear her. She told him that the well-house roof leaked on the left side, and that the best place to sit in winter was the third step of the back stairs, because the warm air from the kitchen came up through the boards.

Encrid listened.

It was strange. He kept reaching for something that was not there.

For more than a year, whenever he met a person, a small window would open in his mind. Name. Age. Realm. Condition. He had grown so used to it that he had stopped noticing how much he leaned on it. Lying. Afraid. Grieving. Hungry. The windows told him what people felt before they said a word.

Now the skill was sealed, and the windows did not come.

He had to look at her face instead. He had to listen to the words and the way she said them, and guess the rest like an ordinary man.

He found he did not mind.

"Can I ask you something?" Sera said.

’Here it is,’ Encrid thought.

"Of course."

"Were there birds at the Wall?"

He blinked.

"Birds?"

"Father never tells me about the places he goes. He says they’re boring. But I don’t think they are. So I wanted to know if there were birds."

Encrid thought about it properly, because she had asked properly.

"There were crows," he said. "Big black ones. They sat on the signal masts in the morning and argued with each other. The soldiers fed them crusts, even though there was an order against it. And in spring, small brown birds nested in the cracks of the old stairs. Nobody knew what they were called. The cooks called them stair birds."

Sera smiled.

"Stair birds," she repeated softly, as if she was putting the words somewhere safe.

"And in autumn there were geese," Encrid went on. "They flew south over the Wall in long lines. You could hear them before you could see them. Some of the old soldiers would stop whatever they were doing and watch them go."

"Why?"

"I think it made them feel like the Wall wasn’t the end of the world. Something could still go over it and keep going."

Sera was quiet for a moment.

"I used to watch birds from my window," she said. "When I was cold. I couldn’t go outside in winter. The cold sleeps came more often then. Sometimes I’d sleep for two days, and when I woke up, the birds on the plum tree would be different ones."

She said it simply, without any sadness in her voice. It was only a fact about her life, the same as the leaking roof and the singing cook.

"This is my first whole winter without one," she said. "Not one time. I count the days. Today is eighty-one."

"That’s a good number," he said.

"It’s the best number I’ve ever had."

She put the mending back into the basket. Pudding complained and was lifted out and placed on her shoulder again.

At the door, she stopped.

"Tomorrow I’ll bring you something," she said.

"You don’t have to bring me anything."

"I know I don’t have to," Sera said, as if he had said something silly. "But I want to."

She was gone before he could answer.

Encrid sat alone by the window for a long time.

The square of sunlight moved across the floor. Out in the garden, the plum tree stood bare against the grey wall. On top of the wall, where the moss had been pressed flat, there was nothing at all.

{ The girl talks a great deal. }

"She does," Encrid said quietly.

? ? ?