Chapter 626: Both Names

Location: Kaelport — the long shed, and the Lower School yard above it

Date: 5 Emberwane 9943 AZI, Grindday, dusk · 9 Emberwane, Temperday, morning

Realm: Lower Realm

The slate was cold.

It had sat in the box by the back-room door since some hour of the morning Jayde hadn’t been there for, and the chalk on it had dried pale and dusty in the shut air. Thirteen words and a letter. Lanhua at the school. On the wall with the mothers. Going up. M.

It read the same the second time.

Hearthwell had taken the whole day. Eden had wanted a hundred children, chosen by Orsa from every hall so that Eden couldn’t choose them herself, and a hundred meant a hundred: each one past a bench in the long hall at first light and again at dusk, the instrument held a hand’s width over each small breastbone, the numbers taken, and every number lower than it had been ten days before. Every one. Eden had said what the readings were not before the first child sat down, and after the last one at dusk she’d said nothing at all, and had sat with her hands round a cup Orsa put there until it went cold. Green had filled the basins twice. Coming back through the Pavilion at dusk, Jayde had seen Yinxin on the slope above the pond with Huaxin asleep against one foreleg and the light going, and hadn’t stopped, and was glad now she hadn’t, though she’d have liked to.

Nine hours. The slate had been sitting in that box for nine hours.

Reiko pushed his head against the back of her knee, dog-sized, as he went everywhere on this ground. [The lamp’s been burning in there since the afternoon,] he said, nose toward the shed. [Nobody’s eaten.]

[Who?]

[The Captain. Sitting. A long time sitting.]

+++

Meifen was at the trestle with the lamp pulled close and a book open in front of her, and she started to get up when Jayde came in, and Jayde put a hand out, palm down, and she stayed down.

“Commander.”

The book was the register. Jayde knew it without looking at the spine: Meifen’s square hand, the columns ruled with a slate’s edge, the oiled-wood case open on the boards beside it with its hasp hanging. It lay open at the last page. Page seven lay beside it, where it had lain since Hammerday, square to the edge of the trestle.

“She came up on foot,” Meifen said. “Among the children. Before first break. The observer was with her, carrying her book. Walked the wall and stopped at three of the women who lost one, and sat down at the far end by one of them, and she sat there all morning and talked to nobody except Bai Shu, about the sage.” She stopped, then went on in the same voice, like a woman reading off a weighbridge. “She’ll be back Grindday and Temperday. Mornings. Same as he used to. She says they all know where to find her.” Her burned knuckles rested on either side of the open page. “I took Tam off the wall in front of her.”

Jayde didn’t answer that.

“The woman from up the Corran road came to me after,” Meifen said. “Lanhua told her the elder boy’s been moved up a year and forgot to write. She asked me if it was true.” She looked down at the book. “I told her the one thing I had that was true. Then I came down here and read every line.” Her finger was still on the last one. “He’s not in here, Commander. Two summers.”

Cangwei’s columns said months between a cart and the gate, never years, and the gate was the top of the column road, and the top of the column road was the jar on the workshop bench that smelled of nothing at all. Jayde knew what two summers meant. Looking at Meifen’s face in the lamplight, she understood that Meifen had worked out at least the first half of it on the hill, and had read eleven hundred and forty-two lines anyway.

Jayde laid her hand flat on the trestle beside the book and left it there.

[Do not tell her it was the right thing to do,] Kazren said, from wherever he sat in her. [She did not ask you.]

[I was not going to.]

[You were considering it.]

The door at the end of the shed creaked inward on its leather hinge, and Takara came through it on three legs.

He came at the pace of a lion who has decided that the pace is his choice. The right foreleg was strapped close against his chest in Green’s linen. He’d been out since before dawn and smelled of it, of wet grass and the road, and he sat down at the end of the trestle with enormous dignity and only a little lean to the left.

The south valley, Commander. Nothing. Suki lay on the ridge above the school from first light to dark, and Isha brought her back through at dusk. A fox crossed the yard twice. The bell rope moved in the wind. Nobody came for you. A pause, in which his whiskers went forward. The north road was the same as yesterday. I watched it myself. On three legs, in a ditch, for eleven hours, which nobody has yet thanked me for.

“Thank you.”

It is late, but I accept it.

So the north fact had gone nowhere, and the south fact had gone nowhere, and on the day the south fact named, with the corps’ eyes on an empty school, Lanhua had spent the morning on the one wall in Kaelport the Commander wouldn’t be anywhere near. There’d been no need to believe the fact, only to know the corps would be watching the place it named. It was a good move. It was the move Jayde would have made.

Page seven came up off the trestle in her hand.

It was the first time anybody had touched it since Hammerday. Good paper, heavier than corps stock, the Academy’s old seal at the head of it and the two names halfway down. One fold, pressed flat against the edge of the trestle, and it went inside her coat, against the docket and the slip that weighed nothing.

Meifen watched it go in.

“Temperday,” Jayde said. “I will go up.”

“She’s got your name on that.”

“Yes.”

“And the doctor’s.”

“Yes.”

Meifen’s jaw set. “Then I’m on the woodstore corner.”

“You are here. With the book, and the box.”

For a moment Jayde thought she’d argue. Halvar’s daughter followed a sound read and nothing else, and she was plainly turning this one over to find the flaw in it. Whatever she found, she kept. The register shut, and the sound of it closing went down the length of the empty shed. It went into its case, the key turned, and the cord went back over Meifen’s head.

“Yes, Commander.”

Eden came through the back-room door with the instrument case under her arm, her hair half out of its tie from a day of bending over children. Meifen, the shut case, the folded corner of paper showing at Jayde’s coat, Takara’s sling: Eden took them in, in that order.

“I heard Temperday,” she said.

Jayde told her the rest.

Eden set the case down on the trestle very carefully, the way she set down anything with a cell in it. “I want to say what this isn’t, first. It isn’t safe, and it isn’t necessary for the paper. The paper will keep.” On her wrist, Zhi’s scales were a calm, steady blue. “I’m coming.”

“It names you.”

“She asked for two names,” Eden said. “She can have the pair of us standing in front of her.”

+++

Restday the sixth went by. The east fact had put the sisters on the road from North Kessig to Kaelport that day, to be tried in front of the corps, and if it had gone up to anybody, somebody would be waiting on that road to meet them. Canirr lay above the Hessen road from first light until dark. A carter with a load of slate went by, and two boys with a goat. Nobody else came.

Kindleday. Hammerday. The children went up to the school and came down again, and Bai Shu cut the last of the frost-blacked sage, and the woman from up the Corran road walked her younger boy to the wall both mornings and stood there with him, though neither was a morning Lanhua had named.

Temperday came up clear and hard, with frost on the ruts.

They went up the school road at the same hour as the children, in the open, at the pace of people with somewhere to be. Jayde wore the corps coat and the face the Academy had on its books, black hair and brown eyes. Eden walked on her left with Zhi coiled round her wrist. Reiko went ahead at dog size, nose down, reading the road.

Children overtook them in twos and threes. A boy from the ropewalk saw Eden and shouted Doctor! loud enough to turn heads all down the road, and Eden lifted a hand, and the boy ran on, delighted with himself.

Above the yard the frames of the new dormitory houses stood up against the hard blue, and somebody on the nearest ridge beam was already knocking in pegs.

At the top of the rise Reiko stopped dead, nose up. [Lavender.]

As they came over the rise, the air changed in Jayde’s mouth. Metal, and rain, and no rain anywhere in that hard blue sky. It came off the woodstore roof. Jayde didn’t look up at it.

The yard was filling. The bread-eaters were already climbing onto the wall. At the far end of it, where the four courses ran out into a heap of stone, the younger boy sat swinging his heels between his mother and Lanhua.

The observer stood by the back wall in his pale coat with the cream-bound book under his arm. Down at the edge of the herb blocks, Bai Shu straightened from the ninth bed with a knife in her green hand, saw who was on the road, and stood very still.

Lanhua stood up.

No step forward. Just the gray wool beside the heap of stone, hands open at her sides, letting them come to her, and they did, the whole length of the wall: past the ropewalk mother, who said nothing at all, past a father from the slip, past the bread-eaters, who stopped chewing. It was nine paces of wall, and it felt a great deal longer.

Jayde had last seen that face in the great hall of the Academy, years ago, beside the Headmaster in assembly while he introduced her to the whole school. She’d watched it then the way she’d watch a sapper’s hands near a charge. It hadn’t changed. The smile reached the eyes and stayed there, and it was warm, and it was meant, and somebody had spent a great deal of time teaching a woman to make that look like no effort at all.

On Eden’s wrist, Zhi stayed blue all the way to the end of the wall. Deep, steady, untroubled blue, a hand’s width from Lanhua’s gray sleeve. Eden glanced down at him once and said nothing. Not a sister, then. Not a mouth, and nothing listening through her. Just a woman.

“Jayde,” Lanhua said. “Eden.”

“I’d hoped one of you might come. I didn’t let myself hope for both.” She looked at Eden first. “I hear you’ve stopped turning anybody away. A woman at Tiller’s Row told me. Said you’d sit up with a bad chest until it broke, and then start again on the next one in the morning.”

Eden didn’t answer that.

“There are houses up the road,” Lanhua said, “where nobody counts what a healer uses. Every text there is. Every herb that grows anywhere, dried and labeled and on a shelf. You’d never again stand in a room full of people deciding which of them waits.”

It was true. All of it. She’d looked at Eden for the space of a breath and found the precise shape of what this continent had cost her, and offered to fill it in exactly, and none of it was a lie.

“No,” Eden said.

Lanhua’s smile didn’t move. It turned on Jayde, exactly as warm.

“Not long ago you were on the Academy’s books, being taught to hold a blade properly. Now there’s a whole town that won’t go home while you’re not in it.” She said it gently, almost sadly. “The paper says care. I know what people have made that word mean. I mean it the plain way. Somewhere warm. Somebody else carrying it for a while.”

“No,” Jayde said.

Jayde took page seven out of her coat. It had kept the fold. Opened, it lay flat on the top course of the wall between them, and she took a stone the size of a fist off the heap at the end and set it on the paper so the wind off the road couldn’t have it.

Lanhua looked down at the paper under its stone.

No hand went to it. No step back from it, either. Lanhua simply looked at it, and the smile stayed exactly where it was, and Jayde, who had been reading faces for two lives, couldn’t find one thing in that face that hadn’t been there a moment before. That was the most unsettling thing on the wall.

[She is not angry,] Kazren said. [She is not anything. Watch her hands.]

The hands stayed open.

Lanhua turned to the woman beside her, the one from up the Corran road, who had sat through all of it facing the road, her hands open in her lap.

“I’ve written to his teacher,” Lanhua said quietly. “You’ll have your letter.” She waited, but the woman didn’t look round. “Before Voidmarch. I promised you.”

Then she looked back at Jayde, and her voice didn’t change at all.

“I asked to be the one who came first. I won’t be the one who comes next.”

The smile was still there. Warm, unhurried. Nothing else in the whole yard had moved: not the children on the wall, not Eden, not the boy’s heels against the stone, which had stopped swinging.

“I won’t be here Grindday,” Lanhua said to the woman, and touched her sleeve above the wrist.

She went out through the gate with the observer a step behind her. The old gate man watched them past him with his scarf up to his ears. Nobody in the yard spoke until the two of them had dropped out of sight below the rise.

Reiko came and sat against Jayde’s leg. He blew out through his nose, long. [A person. Only a person.]

[I know.]

[That’s worse.]

The first bell went.

All at once and shrieking, the yard emptied, as it always did. On the wall beside them the younger boy slid down, and stood, and looked up at his mother.

The woman got up off the stone, slowly, as though the wall had been holding her up, and took the boy’s hand. Not toward the gate and the Corran road. Across the packed earth of the yard, past the pump and the woodstore and the ropewalk mother, to the door of the long hall, where she stood while he went in and watched it shut behind him.

Then she came back.

The whole length of the wall, and not to the end by the heap of stone where she’d sat with Lanhua. On the top course a little way from Jayde, near the paper under its stone, she sat down with her back to the road and her face to the school.

No question for Jayde. Nothing from Jayde, either. Eden looked at Jayde once over the woman’s bent head, and Jayde shook her own very slightly, and Eden let it be.

Down at the herb blocks, Bai Shu bent and went back to cutting sage. The taste of metal and rain was still on the air, faint, off the woodstore roof.

The woman from up the Corran road sat on the wall in the hard, bright cold, and the hands that had lain open in her lap all morning closed.

Bored or looking for something else to read?

Why not try Raven’s story?