Chapter 624: The Ones Who Lost One

Location: Kaelport — the Lower School yard and the herb blocks below it

Date: 5 Emberwane 9943 AZI, Grindday, first light to mid-morning

Realm: Lower Realm

The mint had got into the creases of both of Bai Shu’s hands, and it wouldn’t come out with water.

She’d been on the ninth block since before it was light enough to see the rows, cutting the last of it. The frost had come down hard in the night and blacked the tips, and by noon the rest would go limp and brown and be good for nothing but the heap. So she cut it now, kneeling on a sack, with her knife and her bare hands, and laid it in the flat basket at her knee in bunches with the stems all one way. Nobody else weeded the ninth block. Nobody else cut it either. Every root in it was hers, and she knew what had gone into the ground and when, and she wasn’t going to have somebody’s well-meaning cousin pull the young sage because it looked like a weed.

Her knees were wet through. Her breath smoked. Up the slope behind her, the school bell hadn’t gone yet, and the road from the town was filling with children.

The boarders were out already. They’d been out since the dormitory bell, two lines of them in front of the two long timber houses at the top of the yard, Owl for the girls and Badger for the boys, standing to be looked at. The dormitory mothers went down the lines with lamps, looking at collars and fingernails and the backs of necks, and at the head of every sixteen a room leader stood with her chin up, or his, as if the inspection were being done to them personally. Beyond Badger the frames of the new houses stood against the paling sky in raw timber, one behind another, with nobody on them yet at this hour.

They came the way they always came on a Grindday. In twos and threes, and some alone, and the small ones holding a hand. A boy with a slate on a string round his neck, banging against his chest as he ran. Two girls arguing about a word. Some had walked from the town and some had walked a good deal further than that, and those came with their mothers, or a father, or an aunt with a basket, and the grown ones stopped at the wall.

The fathers had built the wall on a Restday in Sparkfall, four courses of whatever the yard had lying about, nine paces long, and it stopped where the stone had stopped. The children sat along the top of it to eat. The mothers stood against it in the mornings and watched their children go in, and then, most of them, went on standing there a while after.

Bai Shu had stopped counting how many stayed. She’d counted it for a week in Sparkfall because she’d wanted to know, and then she’d stopped, because she did know.

The yard was hers on Grindday and Temperday now. It had been since the paper. The doctor’s name was on a paper that lay on the Captain’s trestle in the long shed, under the Academy’s old seal, and nobody had touched it since Hammerday, and the doctor hadn’t been up to the school since. So it was Bai Shu who stood at the top of the steps when the bell went, and Bai Shu who knew which of the small ones had to be walked to the right door, and Bai Shu who went red to the ears when a mother thanked her for something she hadn’t done.

When the last bunch was tied off, she sat back on her heels and looked at her hands. Green to the second knuckle. Wiping them on the sack did nothing. Then she stood, and picked up the basket.

That was when she saw the woman on the road.

+++

Walking. That was the first thing. No carriage, no wardens in gray, nobody on a mule with a case strapped to his chest. A woman of no great height in plain gray wool, coming up from the town among the children at the pace of the children, with her hands open at her sides.

A step behind her came a young man in a pale coat with a book under his arm.

Bai Shu knew him. Everybody in that yard knew him. He’d stood by the back wall on thirty-odd mornings since Emberrise, every Grindday and every Temperday, never in the rain, writing in his little book and speaking to nobody. He’d asked the gate man one question in all that time, which was what hour the bell went. Then on a Temperday at the end of Flamefade he hadn’t come, and he hadn’t come since, and the yard had stopped looking for him.

He was here now. And he was carrying the woman’s book, not his own.

The woman reached the gate. The gate man, who was old and had a bad knee, straightened off his post.

She said his name. Bai Shu had worked that yard beside him since Emberrise and had never once heard anybody use it. “You’ll be cold out here,” the woman said. “Hard frost.”

The gate man opened his mouth and closed it.

Bai Shu came up the last of the slope with the basket on her hip. Who it was, she knew before she was near enough to see the cuff. Everybody in Kaelport knew. Half the town had stood in the long-shed yard on Hammerday and made a lane for her to walk down, and the other half had heard about it by dark. But Bai Shu looked for the cuff anyway, and saw it. One thread of gold, at the wrist, and nothing else on her anywhere.

“You’ll be Bai Shu,” the woman said. “The herb blocks. I’ve heard about your mint.”

The heat went up Bai Shu’s neck and into her ears, and there was nothing at all she could do about it.

“Instructor.”

“Lanhua. Please. I’ve not been anybody’s instructor for a while.” She smiled, and the smile went all the way up into her eyes and stayed there. “May I come in? I’d like to see the children go in. I won’t be in anybody’s way.”

There was a rule about the gate. Two rules, and Bai Shu had both by heart. The Headmaster’s was older: nobody who came to that wall was turned away. He’d said it to the doctor on the first morning, standing among sixty-one baskets, and the doctor had written it down. The doctor’s was the other one, and she’d said it about the young man with the book, the first day he stood at the back. Let him count. A school you have to whisper about is a recruiting office.

There was no rule for this. Bai Shu stood with the mint going cold against her hip and knew, as surely as she knew a block was too wet before she put her hand in it, that if she shut that gate it would be at Hessen by night and in every village on the Corran road by Restday. They wouldn’t let her in. What are they keeping in there?

“Come in,” she said.

“Thank you.” Lanhua stepped through. As she passed the gate man she touched his arm, lightly, above the elbow. “Look after that knee.” He looked down at his own knee as if he hadn’t known it was there.

+++

The children were still coming up. Lanhua stood at the side of the steps, clear of the door, as she’d promised, and watched them.

To the boy with the slate on a string she said good morning, and his name with it, and he stopped dead on the step and stared at her. Then a girl’s name, and the girl didn’t stop, because that one never stopped for anything, but she looked back over her shoulder the whole way to the door.

Lanhua knew them. Not all of them. But she had a name for every third child, and she said each name as a person says the name of a child they’re fond of and haven’t seen for a while. The children went in with their faces turned back toward her.

Bai Shu stood two steps above with the basket and didn’t know what to do with her hands.

The bell went. The doors shut. The yard was suddenly empty of children and full of grown people, and Lanhua turned to the wall.

Bai Shu followed her. It wasn’t a decision. Down went the basket on the top step, and she went after her, and it was only halfway across the yard that she understood she was walking as she walked when she was telling somebody a thing, a little ahead, a little to the side. Except that she wasn’t telling anybody anything. Following.

There were perhaps thirty at the wall. Bai Shu knew most of them. Not their names, always, but their faces, and what they bought, and what they’d come to the herb blocks to ask about. Feverfew for a husband’s head. Something for a cough that had gone into the chest. And other things, that they hadn’t come to ask about at all and had told her anyway, standing at the end of a row with their hands in their aprons, because she was a person who knelt in the dirt and didn’t look up while they talked.

Lanhua walked along the wall.

She didn’t stop for the woman from the ropewalk, who had two at the school and told everybody so, and who said “Good morning” in a loud bright voice because she wanted to be seen saying it, and got a smile and a good morning back. Nor did she stop for the father from the slip, who stood with his arms folded and looked at her as if she were weather. She went on, past four or five more.

By a woman from out along the Anseth road, she stopped. Bai Shu knew her. That one came for willowbark in Ashbloom, and had told Bai Shu, kneeling on the third block, about a girl who’d read well and gone on a cart three summers ago, and how the house had been quieter after.

Lanhua said something to her. Bai Shu couldn’t hear it. The woman listened, and nodded, and Lanhua touched her hand and went on.

A little further, she stopped again. A woman from up the river. Bai Shu knew her too. A boy, nine, a list read out in a hall, a cart on a Grindday. They said four months. She’d said that to Bai Shu over the sage and then said nothing else at all for the rest of the morning.

Lanhua spoke to her. Touched her sleeve. Went on.

Bai Shu stood in the middle of the yard and felt her stomach go cold and tight.

Counting was the thing she did. Two, and both of them had lost a child to the cart. Two out of thirty wasn’t a count. Two was a thing that could happen.

None of the women on that wall was looking for anything. Bai Shu had to keep reminding herself of it. Not one of them knew what had happened on the night of the twenty-fourth; as far as any of them knew, the schools were still in their valleys, and the children in them were warm and fed and too busy to write, as the man in the coat had promised. They had not come to the Lower School to find a child. They had come to bring the one they had left, and keep that one off a cart. It was Lanhua who had come looking, and she had walked the length of a wall of thirty women and stopped, so far, only at the ones who had given a child to the Temple and never had a letter back.

At the very end of the wall, where it ran out, and there was nothing but a heap of stone the fathers hadn’t got to, Lanhua stopped a third time. A woman was sitting on the top of the last course with her back to the yard, looking down the road. Sitting as if she’d been put there and forgotten. Her shoulders were set wrong, too high, as a person’s shoulders go when they’ve been braced against something for so long that bracing has become the shape of them.

Bai Shu knew her best of all.

Every Grindday and every Temperday she came in from a village an hour up the Corran road with her younger boy, who was eight and had been on the roll since the second month, and she stood at the wall until he went in, and then she sat on it, and she didn’t go home until the noon bell. Never bought anything. She’d come to the herb blocks only once, at the end of Sparkfall, and hadn’t asked for anything then either. She’d stood at the end of the ninth block while Bai Shu was thinning the young mint and said, without being asked, that her elder boy had read better than anybody in the district and the man with the coat had said so in front of the whole hall, and that he’d gone on a cart two summers ago, and that she’d been so proud she’d cried, and that she’d made his porridge with honey in it that morning, all the honey there was.

Then she’d said, “So I wasn’t putting this one on any cart,” and walked away up the hill before Bai Shu could get off her knees.

Three. Three out of thirty, and all three of them.

Lanhua sat down on the wall beside her.

+++

Not close. A little way off along the stone, at the woman’s height, with her hands in her lap, looking down the road where the woman was looking. For a while Lanhua didn’t say anything.

Bai Shu came up behind them and stopped where she could hear. Nobody told her to go. Lanhua knew she was there; it was in the set of her back, which didn’t change at all.

“A long walk,” Lanhua said. “From up the Corran road.”

The woman didn’t turn her head. “It’s not so bad.”

“Twice a week. In this.” Lanhua looked at the frost on the stone between them. “You’d not be out in it if you didn’t have a reason.”

The woman said nothing.

Then Lanhua said the elder boy’s name.

Softly. Not as a question. The way you say the name of somebody who isn’t in the room, when you’re sure the other person will know who you mean.

The woman turned her head.

Bai Shu had heard that name once, at the end of Sparkfall, at the end of the ninth block. She hadn’t written it down, or said it to anybody. And the woman hadn’t said it to anybody either, Bai Shu would have staked the whole block on it, because she wasn’t a woman who said it. She’d said it to the mint, once, with her back half turned.

“How do you know his name?” the woman asked.

“I knew he read well,” Lanhua said. “Everybody who heard him knew that. It isn’t the sort of thing that gets forgotten.” She smiled. It wasn’t a smile at the woman so much as a smile at the boy, wherever he was. “And I hear the younger one’s the same.”

“He’s all right.”

“He’s better than all right. He reads like his brother.”

The woman’s hands had been folded in her lap, gripping each other. They loosened a little.

“They said four months.” The woman’s voice was flat. “When he went.”

“I know.”

“Two summers, now.”

“Two summers.” Lanhua’s face eased, as if she’d been handed something good. “And he’s done so well in them. Better than well. They moved him up a year in the spring. They don’t do that for many.” She said it the way Bai Shu would have said a planting date, as a thing written down somewhere she’d seen it. “A boy that age, with that much in front of him, all his classes and his cultivating on top of them, he forgets. He forgets everything that isn’t on the desk in front of him. It isn’t that he doesn’t think of you.”

“He hasn’t written.”

“No. And that’s on us as much as on him, and I’ll put it right.” Her hand moved toward the woman’s and then didn’t go the rest of the way. “I’ll write to his teacher myself, tonight, and I’ll see to it he writes home. You’ll have a letter before Voidmarch.”

And she meant it. Bai Shu would have given a great deal to be able to say she didn’t. It was in her voice and her face and in how sure she was, as a person is sure of a thing she has never once had reason to doubt.

“Where is he?”

“Where the best of them go,” Lanhua said. “Up the road, at the academy. Warm, and fed, and working hard. I promise you that.”

The woman’s eyes didn’t leave her.

Bai Shu’s mouth was dry.

She didn’t know where he was, and she couldn’t get past it. She’d sat in the lower hall on the night of the twenty-sixth with the rest of them, at the long table with the lamps, while the Commander told it in order and nobody spoke. What the carts were for. What was at the top of the column road. And then the other half: that some of them were somewhere safe now, a great many of them, more than anybody had dared to count on, and that the Captain had every name in a book. The Commander hadn’t said where. Nobody had asked her.

So he might be in that book. A boy who read well, two summers gone, held back in some valley, as the long-held ones had been. He might be asleep somewhere tonight under a blanket that was his own. Or he might have gone up the road a month after the cart took him, and been gone ever since, and the honey in his porridge on the last morning might have been the last thing anybody gave him that was meant kindly.

Bai Shu couldn’t know which. She couldn’t ask the Captain with this woman sitting here, and she couldn’t tell this woman there was a Captain to ask. Not yet. The Commander had said it standing, with one hand flat on the table. Not one family. Not one village. Not until I can stand between every one of them and the Temple. And the Captain, who’d more cause than anybody in that room to want to run to a door, had said she’d carry it and hate every day of it.

Bai Shu hadn’t said anything that night. She’d sat at the table and thought about the woman at the end of the wall and kept quiet, because she hadn’t trusted herself to say it well, and because she’d known the Commander was right.

She hadn’t known it would be like this. Standing in the frost three paces off, close enough to touch, while somebody else told her he was well.

After a while, Lanhua spoke again. “And the younger one.”

“What about him?”

“There’s a place for him, if you want it. A real school. Not like this.” She glanced back at the long hall, at the low roof, and the raw timber of the new houses beyond it, and the wall the fathers had built, and her face showed nothing unkind about it at all. “With a bed of his own, and books of his own, and teachers who’ve done nothing else their whole lives. It’s what his brother has. It’s what he’s owed. A boy who reads like that shouldn’t be sitting on a wall to eat his bread.”

The woman’s hands came apart in her lap.

“I’m not asking you for anything,” Lanhua said. “I want you to understand that. I’m not here for an answer. I wanted you to know there’s a door. That’s all. Somebody should have told you a long time ago, and nobody did, and I’m sorry for that too.”

The stem of mint Bai Shu had been turning in her fingers without knowing it fell onto the frost by her boot. She didn’t pick it up.

Say something. Not the truth. She couldn’t say the truth, and she didn’t have it to say. But something. He’s happy here. He’s top of his row. He’s got a friend. Any of it. All of it true.

She opened her mouth, and the heat came up into her ears, and nothing came out. Every true thing she could think of was a thing Lanhua could take and turn round and hand back to the woman, warm. Of course he’s happy. Of course he has. Think what he’d do with books of his own.

+++

The doors of the long hall opened for the first break, and the children came out into the yard all at once.

They came out loud, as they always did now, running for the wall to get the good places, shouting each other’s names. A rag ball went up. Somebody was crying because somebody else had taken a turn. The ones with bread climbed up onto the top course and sat with their legs hanging down.

Halfway along, a child sat cross-legged on the stone with a slate on one knee and a smaller child pressed up against the other side, reading out loud.

Bai Shu knew the voice before she looked. Everybody at the school knew it. Clear and quick and a little too careful with the long words. Tam had learned letters early, from somebody patient, and had been reading ever since to anyone who’d sit still for it. Tam Fenwick, from Loam Hollow, the Captain’s own village, which had no road to it and was on nobody’s list, who slept, so the teachers said, with a slate under the blanket that had every word on it Tam had ever learned.

“And the river,” Tam read, “was so wide that the boatman could not see the other side, and he was afraid. But he went anyway.” A pause. “Do you know what afraid means?”

The smaller one shook a head of fair hair.

“When you think something bad’s going to happen. But you go anyway. That’s the good part.”

On the wall at the far end, Lanhua turned her head.

Nothing else moved. She listened, and smiled, the same smile, the one that went all the way up and stayed there and didn’t change at all.

Bai Shu looked at the woman from up the Corran road.

The woman was sitting exactly as she had been, with her back to the yard and her face to the road. But her hands lay open in her lap now, palms up, the fingers loose. She hadn’t said yes. Or no. Or anything at all.

Bai Shu turned round.

The gate man was at his post where she’d left him. Across the yard to him she went, at something that wasn’t quite a run, because there were children everywhere and a run would have frightened them, and when she got there she found she still had the green on her hands and nowhere to put them.

“Go down to the long shed,” she told him. “Now. Fetch the Captain.”

He looked past her at the wall. “What do I tell her?”

Bai Shu could feel her ears burning, and she knew he could see it.

“Tell her it’s the ones who lost one. She’s sitting with them on our wall. Then tell her it’s the woman from Hammerday.”

He went. He went faster than she’d ever seen him go, bad knee and all, down the road between the last of the late children coming up.

Behind her, Tam turned the slate over and began to read the other side.