Chapter 620: Page Seven

Location: Kaelport — The Long Shed, The Yard, The Street

Date/Time: 2 Emberwane 9943 AZI, Hammerday, first bell to noon

Realm: Lower Realm

Meifen heard the hooves from the stair, before the bell, with the brazier tongs in her hand and the shed still dark. Not a cart. Carts in Kaelport came in at a walk, one horse, a man swearing at it. This was four horses at least, shod, at a trot on the stones of the Hessen road, and under them the grind of good iron tires that had been kept oiled. Nobody in Kaelport kept their tires oiled.

The tongs went against the wall, and Meifen went to the door.

A carriage. Black, lacquered, with gold at the corners of the doors gone dull with road dust, and the Temple’s sun on the panel. Two riders in front of it in the gray coats of road-wardens, the eastern road, one of them older with a heavy face and his hand on his thigh as if it ached. Behind it, on a mule, a thin man in a magistrate’s clerk’s black with a sealed case strapped across his chest like a child he was afraid of dropping.

The carriage came down the hill into the yard and stopped at the bottom of the board road, and the older road-warden got down and opened its door.

Out of it stepped a woman in plain gray wool, with nothing on her anywhere to say what she was, except one gold thread at the cuff.

Meifen knew her. In her third year she had sat in the back of a lecture room at the Academy and listened to this woman talk for an hour about the duties of the strong to the weak, warmly, beautifully, with her dark hair falling forward over one shoulder and her hands open as she spoke, and had come out of it feeling better about the world than she had in a month. Then she’d gone back to the forge for the summer and tried to tell her father what the woman had said, and found she couldn’t remember one sentence of it.

Instructor Lanhua looked up the board road at her, and smiled.

+++

“Captain Meifen,” Lanhua said, at the trestle.

Lanhua had come up the stairs without being asked, and in at the door without being asked, and stood now on the other side of the trestle in the gray light from the window with her hands folded in front of her and the road-wardens behind her in the doorway and the clerk with his case a step behind them. Not at the board. Not at anything but Meifen.

“Instructor,” said Meifen.

“Oh, not any more.” Lanhua’s smile warmed, as if Meifen had given her something. “Not for a little while now. But it’s kind of you to remember.” She tilted her head. “You were in the third year. The lecture on the duties of the strong. You sat at the back by the window, and you had burns on your knuckles, and you didn’t take a single note.” She laughed, softly. “I always notice the ones who don’t take notes. They’re usually the ones listening.”

Meifen said nothing. Both her hands were flat on the trestle; she had not decided to put them there.

“How is your father?” Lanhua asked. “Halvar. He’ll be at the forge in Loam Hollow still, I expect. And your mother. Essa.” The smile did not change. “I hear the corps still hasn’t got a road through to Loam Hollow. It’s been forgotten for such a long time.”

The brazier ticked behind Meifen, unlit.

Never once had she told this woman her father’s name. Nor anybody at the Academy her mother’s.

“He’s well,” Meifen said. “What do you want?”

Lanhua looked at her a moment longer, warmly, and then the clerk came forward from the door without being told and set the sealed case on the trestle, and unbuckled it, and took out a single sheet, and laid it down in front of Meifen, square, and stepped back.

It was a copy. Meifen could see that. It had the Academy’s seal at the foot, the old one, the one on every certificate of every student who had ever passed out of that place, and above the seal, in a clerk’s hand, a heading.

Charter of the Obsidian Academy. Page seven. The custodial provision.

And under the heading, two names.

Jayde Ashford.

Eden of Millhaven.

“Both are on the Academy’s books,” Lanhua said gently. “Both are still students, in law, though I know they haven’t been to a lecture in some time. Under the provision, the Temple of Light is entitled to take into its care any student of the Academy whose welfare is in question. We believe theirs is.” Not at the paper. At Meifen. “We would like to see them, please. Both of them. Today.”

Meifen looked at the two names for a long moment.

“They’re not here,” she said.

+++

It was true. Meifen had not seen the Commander since the lower hall six days ago, with the slate and its four lines on the table between them, and she had not seen the doctor since then either. Where they were, she did not know. There was a slate from four days ago in the Commander’s left hand, and a runner who came and went, and nothing else.

“I’m Captain of First Company,” Meifen said. “Anything that comes for the corps comes to me.”

“Of course.” Lanhua inclined her head. “And this isn’t for the corps, Captain. The corps is a very fine thing. Everybody says so. This is for two young women who are students of the Academy, and whose welfare we are concerned about, and whom we would very much like to help.” She paused. “Do you know when they’ll be back?”

“No.”

“Do you know where they are?”

“I don’t.”

“Will you tell them we came?”

Meifen did not answer at once.

Lanhua waited, and was very good at waiting. On the far side of the trestle she stood with her hands folded and her head a little on one side and her warm eyes on Meifen’s face, and did not shift her feet or look away or fill the silence, and Meifen found that she wanted, very much, to fill it for her. To say something. To explain. To make this warm, kind, attentive woman understand that Meifen was not being difficult, that she simply did not know, that if she did know she would of course tell her.

Meifen stopped herself. It took a physical effort, like setting your heels against a horse that wants to go.

This she knew. Never seen before, and known anyway, all at once, with her whole body, because she had stood in a valley yard on the night of the breath and watched a woman in white, with her wrists bound, smile at nothing. And she had heard the Commander say, in the lower hall, what the sisters did, how they knew every child’s name before the cart was unloaded, how they knelt and said it and the child looked up and was not afraid.

They knelt in the frost and said the child’s name.

Halvar always said you could tell a bad weld from the top. It looked clean. It looked better than a good one, smooth and bright and even, because nobody had worked it. It was only when you put weight on it that you found out there was nothing underneath.

Meifen took her hands off the trestle.

“I’ll tell them,” she said. “I don’t know when.”

+++

The yard had filled.

Meifen saw it through the window behind Lanhua’s shoulder before Lanhua did. Not a crowd. Kaelport did not do crowds; it did people standing about. A woman from the cooper’s row with her arms folded, and the three who always came with her. Orun with his hat in his hands. Two of the herb-block families. A man from the slip with tar on his forearms. More coming down the hill on foot. They stood at the bottom of the board road round the Temple’s carriage and did not go near it, and did not say anything, and looked up at the shed door.

Lanhua turned her head and saw them.

Meifen watched her do it: the warm eyes going over the yard, quick and practiced, the way her own father’s went over a rack of iron to find the one bar that would bend. Looking for the frightened one. The one who wanted to be told it was all right.

There wasn’t one.

Kaelport did not know about the valleys. Nobody on this continent did, outside a room in the Academy and a mountain nobody could find. But it knew the testing. Half the people standing in that yard had a sister or a cousin or a neighbor in a testing village, with a child who had read well and gone on a cart and not written, and they had been saying since the testing for three years the way you say since the flood. And it knew the corps, which had put in its roads and its bathhouses and its school, and it knew what a Temple carriage at the bottom of the corps’ board road before first bell was likely to mean. Word had run down the hill ahead of the horses. Nobody had needed to announce anything.

Nobody shouted. Nobody threw anything. Nobody called the woman in plain wool a name. They simply stood in the cold at the bottom of the board road with their arms folded and their hats in their hands, and looked at her, and there was no heat in the yard at all.

Lanhua looked at them a long time.

Then she turned back to Meifen, and her face was exactly as warm as it had been, and the smile was exactly where it had been, and something behind it had moved very slightly to one side, like a door on a hinge.

“Your town is very loyal,” she said.

“It’s not my town.”

“Of course not.” Lanhua’s eyes went to the board, for the first time, to the twenty-one coins and the chalk. “No. I don’t suppose it is anybody’s.” She looked back. “Not yet.”

+++

Lanhua did not take the paper.

Meifen had expected her to, and had expected to have to stand at the trestle and refuse it, and had been working out how, and Lanhua did not give her the chance. The paper simply stayed where the clerk had laid it, square on the trestle, with the Academy’s seal at the foot and the two names in the middle, and stepped back.

“When they come home,” she said, “please give them this. Both of them. I’ll be at the Temple house in Hessen until Grindday.” She smiled. “It isn’t far. They can always come and talk to me. I would like that very much. I think I could help them.”

Grindday. The fifth.

Meifen did not know why that word went through her the way it did, only that it had, and that it would go on the slate.

“Thank you for seeing me, Captain,” Lanhua said. “Give my regards to your father. And your mother. And to Tam Fenwick, across the lane.” She turned to the door. “Such a clever child, I hear. Reads so well.”

Meifen did not move.

From the trestle, hands at her sides, she watched Lanhua go out of the door and down the stairs, unhurried, the road-wardens falling in behind her and the clerk behind them with his empty case, and down the board road to the carriage. The people in the yard stood aside to let her through. They did not have to be told. They made a lane, wide, the width of a cart, and she walked down the middle of it in her plain wool with her hands folded in front of her and her face warm and kind and turned a little toward each of them as she passed, and not one of them looked away from her, and not one of them spoke.

The older road-warden held the carriage door for her. Then he looked up, once, at the shed, at the window where Meifen stood, and his heavy face did something she could not read. Then he got up on his horse with his hand on his aching thigh, and they went.

+++

The surveyor came at noon.

He was one of hers, from Lantern Hill, a boy named Tobben with a chain over his shoulder and mud to his knees, and he came up the stairs two at a time with a slate and stood at the trestle getting his breath.

“North Kessig road,” he said. “From first light. Like you said. Me and two more at the track into the field.” He breathed. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing moved. Not a cart. Not a rider. Two old men with a goat and a woman with eggs, and I know all three of them.” He looked at the paper on the trestle, the seal, the two names, and back at her. “Was something supposed to?”

“I don’t know,” Meifen said. That was true too. The order had been put eyes on the North Kessig road from first light on Hammerday and tell me if anything Temple goes down it, and no reason with it, and she had not asked. “Thank you. Get something to eat.”

He went.

Meifen stood at the trestle for a while. Then she took a clean slate off the stack and the chalk off the ledge and wrote, in her own hard round hand, everything, in order, the way her father had taught her to write up a job so that the next man on it could pick it up without asking.

Page seven came. First bell. Instructor Lanhua, plain wool, one gold thread at the cuff, Temple carriage; two eastern-road wardens; a magistrate’s clerk. They asked by name for both. I said not here. She did not take the paper back. It is on the trestle. She is at the Temple house in Hessen until Grindday. She knew my father’s name and my mother’s. And Tam Fenwick’s, across the lane. She said Tam reads well.

There she stopped, and looked at that line a long time, and did not cross it out.

The street came. Thirty, forty. Nobody said anything. She looked at them, and something moved. She said, “Your town is very loyal.”

North Kessig Road: nothing, first light to noon. Tobben.

And then, at the bottom, because it had been sitting in her chest since the stair and she did not know why, and her father always said if a thing sits in your chest you write it down and let somebody else decide if it matters:

She never once mentioned the valleys. Not one word. Not the carts. Not the sisters. Not the children. She asked for the two of them and nothing else. The only child she named was Tam.

M.

The runner took it. He went.

Then she went down the stairs, past the paper on the trestle, which she did not touch, and out into the yard.

The people were still there. Fewer now. Some had gone back to work. The cooper’s-row woman had not, standing at the bottom of the board road with her arms folded, exactly where the carriage had been, looking up the hill where it had gone.

“Was that them?” she asked. “The ones that take the children? Since the testing?”

Meifen thought about the answer. About the list inside her coat, eleven hundred and forty-two names in her own hard round hand, and a slate on a table in the lower hall with four lines on it, and not yet.

“I can’t tell you,” she said. “Not yet.”

The woman’s gaze stayed on her. Then she nodded, slowly, and did not unfold her arms.

“Then we’ll stand here a while,” she said.

Meifen stood with her. After a time, Orun came and stood on her other side with his hat in his hands, and then the man from the slip with the tar on his arms, and then others, and nobody said anything, and none of them went home, and the shadow of the long shed went slowly round the yard until it was afternoon.