Chapter 618: The One Who Smiles

Location: North Kessig — the survey camp on dead ground, a held tent

Date/Time: 29 Flamefade 9943 AZI, Grindday

Realm: Lower Realm

Steady was the word Eden would have written, if she had been writing it for somebody else. The instrument sat cold and flat in her palm, held a hand’s width over the woman’s breastbone, not touching, and the small face of it showed her the shape she had been looking at for five days now in child after child on the mountain: a ring of eleven, threads to an empty heart, and on the eleventh, a hook.

Except that in the children it had been a whisper. Barely there above the noise. Something she’d had to want to see.

This was not a whisper.

There was no cord at her neck. Eden had looked for one first, as she had looked on every child since the breath. The ring sat in the woman’s chest anyway, as clear and hard as a line drawn in ink, as if whatever a pendant did had been done to her so long ago that she no longer needed one. The hook was plain. And it was not moving. For a full minute she held the instrument against her own pulse and wrote the first number on the edge of her slate, and held it another minute and wrote the second, and looked at them.

They were the same.

A third minute, because she did not believe the first two, and the third number was the same as well.

“Is something wrong?” the woman asked.

A pleasant voice. Low and even and kind. It was the voice Eden used herself, at a bedside, when she wanted somebody to feel that everything was in hand.

“Nothing,” Eden said. “Hold still for me, please. One more.”

The woman held still, and was very good at it.

+++

They’d put her in the last of a row of six corps tents on the dead field at North Kessig, with a stack of corps blankets against the canvas and a lamp and a bench. Two of First Company were on the door. Her wrists were bound in front of her with a soft cord, loosely, in her lap. There was not a mark on her. Someone had given her a corps blanket and a pair of corps boots that were too big for her, and she sat on the bench in the canvas-smelling dark with her bare ankles showing above the boots and her hair down, and she smiled.

Not at anything. That was what had kept Eden awake two nights running. The woman did not smile at Eden, or at the guards, or at the window. The woman smiled as a lamp is lit. It was simply on.

Zhi had come in on Eden’s left forearm and had not stopped looking at the woman since. He was coiled tight, tighter than usual, and his scales had gone from blue to a pale washed blue and then, as Eden held the instrument steady, to something paler still. Not white. Not quite. But the color of a sky just before it decides to snow.

[Cool,] he said. [Cool-dim. All of her.]

“I know,” Eden said, under her breath.

[Not like the children,] Zhi said. [The children were cool-dim on the outside and warm under. She’s cool-dim all the way in.] His head came round to look up at her. [I don’t like it.]

“Neither do I,” said Eden.

Finally the instrument came down, and the fourth number went on the slate, the same as the other three. Eden sat back on the stool they’d brought her and looked at the slate.

Five days. Three children now, measured twice each, morning and evening, every day since the breath. Every second number smaller than the first. Every evening smaller than the morning. A curve, going down, slowly, which she’d been calling a direction and not a measurement because she was not going to call it anything else until she’d seen it twice more.

And here, in the woman who had knelt in the frost at Ostrey and said every child’s name, a straight line.

“It isn’t fading,” Eden said, to the slate. “It isn’t anything. It’s just there.”

+++

She’d come to ask questions, without deciding which.

Dunmore had tried, the day before, and got a smile. Meifen had tried, standing in the door with her arms folded, and got a smile, and gone out again with her jaw set. The woman had not said one word to anybody since the night except, once, thank you, to the First Company man who had brought her water.

Eden was not an interrogator. She’d never been one. There was exactly one way she knew to ask a person a question and get an answer, and it was the way you asked a patient where it hurt.

The instrument went down on the shelf beside her, and the slate on top of it. Her hands folded on her knees. Her face went into the shape it went into at a bedside, which she knew from the inside and had used on more people in two lives than she could count, and which was warm and careful and entirely true and also, she was perfectly aware, a thing she was doing.

“How old were you,” she asked, “when you came here?”

The woman looked at her. The smile did not change.

“Seven,” she said.

It came easily. As if nobody had ever asked, and it was a pleasant thing to be asked.

“Seven years old,” Eden said. “From where?”

“A village.” The woman’s eyes went to the small square window, briefly, and back. “There was a hall. A man came with a coat and read a list. I read well.” The smile, if anything, warmed. “I always read well. There was a cart on Grindday. I remember the cart. The horse had a white face.” She looked down at her bound hands in her lap. “And then this.”

“This valley?”

“Always this one.”

“You weren’t walked up,” Eden said. “To the gate. With the others.”

“No.” The woman said it the way somebody else might have said no, I didn’t care for the soup. “Some are kept. Some of us stay. We’re needed. Somebody has to know the new ones.”

Eden did not let anything happen to her face. That was the one thing she had always been able to do.

“Know them,” she said.

“When they come. When the cart comes in.” The woman looked up at her, pleased, as if Eden had asked about a thing she was good at. “We know their names. Before they’re out of the cart. You kneel down and say it, and they look at you, and they’re not frightened any more.” She tilted her head. “Didn’t you see? At Ostrey? I said every one.”

“I wasn’t at Ostrey.”

“Oh.” The woman considered that. “Then somebody told you.”

“Somebody told me,” Eden agreed. “How do you know them? Their names. Before they’re out of the cart.”

The woman looked at her for a long time with an expression Eden had seen on small children who asked a question that is too obvious to answer.

“We just know,” she said. “It comes. You hear it.” She smiled again, gently. “You’d understand, if you’d been here longer.”

+++

Zhi’s scales had gone white.

Eden felt it more than saw it: the coil on her forearm clamping, the small body rigid, the cool coming off him through her sleeve. Her other hand went over him, very lightly, without looking down, and left it there, and he did not loosen.

“How long have you been here?” she asked. Her voice was perfectly even. “Since you were seven.”

The woman thought about it, and seemed to find it difficult.

“A long time,” she said at last. “The wall’s been mended twice. There were three of us when I came, sisters, and now there are six. There was a bell before this bell. It cracked.” She smiled. “That was a winter.”

“Twenty years? Twenty-five?”

“I don’t count them.”

“What was your name?”

The smile did not change. “Corra.”

“Before,” Eden said. “Before the cart. What did your mother call you?”

For the first time, the woman did not answer at once.

On the bench the woman sat with her bound hands in her lap and her bare ankles above the too-big boots, and looked at Eden, and her face went on smiling, and her eyes went somewhere else. Eden watched them go. Eden had seen that look before, in the bay of a hospital ship, in a man who had been asked his own birthday after a head wound and had reached for it and found a door where it should have been.

“Corra,” the woman said again.

“That’s the name they gave you here.”

“It’s my name.”

“And your mother?”

“I don’t—” The woman stopped. Her smile was still there. Something underneath it had moved, very slightly, as the ground moves under a building before anybody inside knows. “This was always home,” she said. “I’ve always been here.”

“You came at seven,” Eden said, gently. “In a cart. With a horse with a white face. You told me.”

“Yes.”

“Where were you before that?”

The woman looked at her.

“Before what?” she asked.

+++

Eden went outside.

Not by deciding to. She found she had stood up off the stool and gone past the two men on the door and out into the cold, and was standing on the dead grass between the tents with her back against the post of the held one and her hand still flat over Zhi on her forearm, breathing.

It was mid-morning. North Kessig lay round her in the low gray light: a closed field, dead ground with grass on it, her own words on her own sheet once, and a row of corps tents across it that any farmer passing on the far road would take for surveyors. There were no children here. The children were on a mountain in a warm hall with old women and baths, and they could cry now, and did, a great deal. Here there was only the field, and six tents, and a guard on every flap who had been told to say nothing at all.

She looked at the field, and then back at the shut flap of the tent.

Seven years old. A hall, a list, a cart. Kept, not walked up. Twenty years under a wall that said be quiet, be calm, be here, every hour of every day, until the quiet had gone all the way in, and the feeding with it, and there was nothing left of whatever had been there before it. Until she could not find her own name. Until a thread from very far away ran down through her as clear and steady as it ran through the floor of the room at the back, and she could hear it, and it told her the names of children in a cart, so that she could kneel in the frost and say them, and the children would not be afraid.

It comes. You hear it.

Eden made herself do it in order, as she would have done it for a slate.

The sisters were not jailers. Not the way the word meant. They had not chosen this. They had been chosen, at seven, for reading well, the same as the children on the mountain. Only they had not been walked up. They had been kept back to do the kneeling and the naming, and kept long enough that the wall had finished with them, all the way: fed for twenty years and told for twenty years, until there was nothing left of the girl who came off the cart but the woman who knelt in the frost.

The instrument. Four readings. Steady. Not fading.

The children were fading because the mouth was closed. Nothing was feeding them, or talking to them, any more. But this woman did not need the mouth. She had been under it so long that she was one. That was why she smelled of nothing, as the room did. That was why the cart sister on the column road had sat up on her plank seat and turned her head south at the moment of the breath. They were on the thread. All of them. The thread ran through them the way it had run through the floor.

And a thread ran both ways. Whatever came down it to feed them might hear up it.

Eden stood very still against the wall.

Six tents. In every one of them, five or six women in white sitting on benches, smiling. The north’s. The far west’s. The coast’s. The garden’s. The south’s. These. And one more, from the column road. Every one of them a mouth. Every one of them on the thread.

If the thread ran both ways, then the far hand had not lost six mouths on the night of the breath. It had lost six walls. It still had thirty-odd mouths. Sitting in six tents on a dead field, hearing every word First Company said on the doors, and every word that had been said in front of them in the valleys before anybody knew to be careful.

The Temple’s young man had not come to the school yard on Temperday. Meifen had sent word.

He did not need to count any more. Somebody was counting for him.

“Oh,” Eden said aloud, very quietly, to nobody. “Oh, no.”

Then she made herself stop, and stand there, and say it to herself as she would have said it to anybody else who had just come running in with it.

That’s a guess. One woman. Four readings, an hour apart. A thread the queen had felt go slack and drift and be gone, on the coast, with her own hand on the stone. Nobody had measured a thread running anywhere. Nobody had measured a thing. It was a shape she could see because she was frightened, and she knew exactly how much that was worth.

It isn’t a measurement.

She breathed out.

And until it is, I treat it as one.

On her forearm, under her hand, Zhi had gone so white he was nearly translucent, and he was shaking.

[Eden,] he said. [Eden. I want to go.]

“In a minute,” she said. “One more minute. I need to ask her one more thing.”

+++

She went back in.

The woman was sitting exactly as Eden had left her, hands in her lap, ankles above the boots, smiling at nothing, and looked up as Eden came in, pleased, as if a visitor she liked had come back.

Eden did not sit on the stool. Instead, she knelt on the floor in front of the bench, so that her face was lower than the woman’s, which was how she knelt at a frightened child’s bed, and she looked up at her.

One more question. She had been carrying it since Ostrey, since Meifen’s report of a mother saying they knelt down in the frost and said his name. Nobody had asked it. It was not an interrogator’s question. It was a doctor’s.

“When you came here,” Eden said, “at seven. In the cart. With the horse with the white face.” She kept her voice low and even and true. “Did you ever ask to go home?”

The woman’s smile stayed exactly where it was.

Then, for the first time in five days, something happened to it.

It did not go. It stayed on her face, the same shape, the same warmth. But her eyes, above it, came down out of wherever they had been and looked at Eden, really looked, for perhaps the space of a breath, and in that breath there was somebody in there. Small and far back and seven years old, standing at the end of a very long hall, looking out.

The woman’s bound hands moved in her lap. One thumb pressed hard into the palm of the other hand.

“No,” she said.

It came out very small.

“I never—” She stopped. The smile was still there. Her eyes were not, quite. “It was quiet. It was always so quiet. I never thought to.”

Eden did not move.

The woman looked at her. Then, slowly, her eyes went back to wherever they lived, and the smile settled over them again like a sheet drawn up, and she was looking at nothing, and pleasant, and kind.

“Is anything wrong?” she asked.

“You did very well,” Eden said.

She got up off the floor.

+++

At the flap of the tent she stopped, with the cold coming in past her, and took the slate off the shelf and looked at the four numbers in a row. Then she took the stylus and wrote, underneath them, in her small upright hand, the same thing she had written under every child’s reading for five days.

Ask me in ten days.

Eden looked at it.

For the children she had written it because she believed it, or believed it enough. A curve going down. A direction. Something starving that would, if she was right, if she saw it twice more, starve all the way.

She did not believe it here. Four readings and a straight line and a woman who could not remember her mother, and there was nothing in any of it that told her ten days, or ten years, or anything at all, would be enough.

Twice, anyway, she underlined it.

Then she put the slate under her arm and her hand over Zhi, who had not stopped shaking, and went out across the dead grass between the tents, toward the edge of the field and the dragon waiting in the hollow beyond it, and Jayde.

“Thirty of them,” she said aloud, to Zhi, as she went. “More. On the thread. In the middle of everything. If I’m right.” She did not slow. “And if I’m right, every one of them can hear us.”

[Then don’t talk,] Zhi said.

Eden shut her mouth, and walked faster.