Chapter 135 — "Two Horses"

The device went off at second bell and Kael was in the yard.

He would object to this afterward, repeatedly, to a crow with no intention of letting it go: that after two years of nothing, the box had gone twice in five days, and on the second occasion he had been three hundred feet away holding a practice blade with no idea anything had happened.

Tax was in the room.

Tax had developed, over roughly four days, a strong and sudden interest in furniture.

The panel lit.

The crow looked at it. Then out the window, at the man standing perfectly still in the yard, who would go on standing perfectly still for another eleven minutes.

Tax weighed his options.

Tax stayed exactly where he was.

"When."

"Second bell."

"That was eleven minutes ago."

"About that."

"You were in the room."

"I was resting."

"You were watching it."

"I was resting near it," said Tax. "In a chair. Which is what chairs are for. If you’d like a conversation about the ethics of furniture I’m free all week."

Kael crossed the room.

He did not hurry.

Tax noted, privately, that he crossed it in about a third of the time it had taken him on Thursday, and filed that where he filed everything.

Two sheets.

The first was the receipt.

NORTHERN LINE — EXPRESS

Posted: Kestral Academy, first bell.

Received: Ardenhouse, second bell.

Charge: forty-one silver marks. Paid at origin.

He read paid at origin four times.

Set it down as though it might go off.

Kael.

Sixty-one days is not your fault and I’m not going to let you carry it, so put it down.

You paid forty-one silver marks to tell me my punctuation is bad.

I have not stopped thinking about that all day and I am not going to tell you how it made me feel, because you already know, because you always already know, and it is the single most irritating thing about you.

— S

He read it once.

Sat down on the edge of the bed.

Read it again.

Then a third time, and on the third time he stopped at all day and stayed there — because she had written all day, which meant it had arrived in the morning, which meant she had carried it around through whatever a day at Kestral was, and had done training and eaten meals and spoken to people while carrying it.

He knew what she looked like carrying something.

He’d watched her do it since she was three years old — the specific stillness that came over her when she’d decided to not-think about a thing, and the way she talked slightly faster to cover it, and how she pointed at people more.

He could see her doing it four hundred miles away, precisely, in a place he’d never been.

That was the part that got him.

Not the forty-one marks. Not the irritating.

That he could still see her.

He read it about thirty times over the following hour, at first properly and then in pieces, and eventually only the last line — the one about him already knowing.

She was right, was the trouble.

He did know.

He had known at four lines. He’d known before he finished the first one. And she’d written the whole thing out anyway, in her own hand, on a sheet that cost a horse, at an hour when the administrative wing was shut — which meant she’d stood outside in the cold and waited for a clerk, and had done that rather than send it slow.

He worked that out at some point and then had to put the paper down for a while.

Daren arrived at seventh bell with bread, because Daren had a route now and walked it daily.

"Tax says—"

"Yes."

"THE BOX WENT OFF AGAIN."

"Yes."

"IT’S BEEN FIVE DAYS."

"Daren."

"TWICE IN FIVE DAYS AFTER TWO YEARS OF NOTHING AND YOU’RE STANDING THERE LIKE A TABLE—"

Kael handed him the receipt.

Daren read it. Read it again. Something happened to his mouth.

"Paid at origin."

"Yes."

"She paid."

"Yes."

Daren sat down on the floor, which had stopped being a reaction and become a procedure, and set the bread carefully beside him.

"She sent standard for two years."

"Yes."

"And you sent express once."

"Yes."

"And she came straight back with express."

"Yes."

Daren looked at the ceiling.

"That’s not two letters," he said. "That’s two people finding out at the same time that they’re both willing to spend a horse."

"She’d object to the horse."

"SHE’D OBJECT AT LENGTH," said Daren, with enormous satisfaction, "SHE’D OBJECT FOR PAGES—"

He wrote back that night.

Three attempts. He counted, because he counted everything.

Aina.

I’ve put it down. You told me to and it worked immediately, which is annoying, and which you know.

You paid forty-one marks to call me irritating. For the record I paid forty-one to say your punctuation was bad, which is the smaller crime, and I’m still the one being described as the single most anything.

He stopped there and looked at the page for a long time.

Then wrote the thing he had been not-writing for two years, quickly, the way you do a thing you’ve decided not to think about first:

There’s something you’re not saying. I’ve known for about a year.

I’m not asking.

I’m telling you I know it’s there, and that when you want to say it there won’t be a version of me that isn’t listening.

He read that back once.

Every instinct he had said fold it.

He put it in the slot.

Express.

"That’s eighty-two in five days," said Tax.

"I’m aware."

"That’s two horses."

"Tax."

"I’m keeping a tally."

"Don’t keep a tally."

"It became a tally at the second one. That’s what a tally is."

Kael stood with his hand still on the lacquered wood.

"She waited outside for the clerk," he said.

"How do you know that."

"Posted at first bell. The wing opens at fourth."

Tax turned his head.

"You got that off a receipt."

"Yes."

"In about a second."

"Yes."

Tax looked out at the dark yard.

"You two are exhausting," he said.

And did not add the rest of it, which was and I have waited three years for you to be exhausting in the same direction Her reply did not come.

He noticed on the third day, and then decided he had not noticed, and then noticed himself deciding.

By the fifth day he had stopped being able to do that.

The panel stayed dark. He walked past it in the mornings on his way out and in the evenings on his way back, and did not check it, and knew exactly what it looked like anyway, because a lit panel changed the light in a room and a dark one didn’t.

On the ninth day Daren said, "Has she—" and Kael said "No," before the sentence finished, which told Daren more than the answer did.

"That doesn’t mean anything," said Daren.

"No."

"Express is same-day but she has to write it, she’s got assessments, she’s got—"

"Daren."

"I’m just saying it doesn’t mean—"

"I know what it doesn’t mean."

And that was the end of that conversation, and Daren went home, and Kael sat in a room with an unlit box and thought, with the flat precision of a man who had done this before:

Two years of nothing. Then five days. Then nothing.

She wrote back within a day the first time.

So the difference is something that happened after.

He turned that over for a while and got nowhere with it, because he had exactly one fact and four hundred miles and no way to ask.

He had spent two years being extremely good at waiting.

He discovered that week that he had been getting worse at it the entire time, and had simply not noticed, because nothing had been arriving to measure it against.

Nine days became a month.

A month became something he stopped counting in months.

He was aware that this was a decision — that at some point he had moved from counting the days to not counting the days, and that the not-counting had taken more effort than the counting ever had, and had been less successful.

The box sat by the window.

The panel stayed dark.

Daren stopped asking around the fourth month.

He didn’t announce it. He simply arrived one morning with bread, sat down, and talked about something else, and then did it again the next day, and the day after that.

Kael noticed on about the third day and never mentioned it.

That was, he thought, the single kindest thing anyone had ever done for him — and it had been done by not doing something, and he had no way at all of saying thank you for it.

The first year, he assumed she was busy.

That was reasonable. She was at a combat academy in a nation with a different calendar and a different climate and instructors who postponed assessments for nine days without explanation. There was a letter he had sent that ended with there’s something you’re not saying and he had spent a good deal of the first year wondering whether that had been the thing that stopped it.

He decided it hadn’t been.

He decided that on the evidence — she had answered him within a day, twice, at forty-one marks a sheet — and he held onto the evidence the way he held onto everything, precisely, without comment.

The second year, he stopped assuming anything.

Daren found out about the others in the third year, by accident, in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely.

"Mira hasn’t written since spring."

Kael looked up.

"Which spring."

"Last one." Daren was picking at the bread rather than eating it, which he only did when he was working something out. "It wasn’t a — she didn’t stop, exactly. It went from every week to every month and then it went to nothing, and I didn’t notice the middle bit happening, I only noticed the end."

"Have you asked her."

"I’ve written four times." He shrugged, badly. "They’re going. They’re not bouncing. The device says received."

Kael put his cup down.

"Rowan," he said.

"What about him."

"Ask him."

Rowan’s answer came in three days, which was Rowan.

Daren.

Nothing since the spring here either. Two letters from me, both received, neither answered.

Fell writes monthly. He’s still writing. He says she’s well and training hard and that’s the whole report and it hasn’t changed in eleven months, which I’ve been assuming was thoroughness and have started assuming is something else.

I’ve asked him to say more. He hasn’t.

I don’t have a theory. I want to be clear that I don’t have a theory, because you’ll build one out of the fact that I wrote at all.

— R

Daren read it out loud in the front room and then sat holding it.

"She stopped writing to everyone," he said.

"Yes."

"That’s — Kael, that’s different, that’s not the same thing as—"

"I know."

"That’s not her going quiet at you."

"I know."

"Then why do you look worse."

Kael looked at the window.

"Because it’s not her going quiet at me," he said.

He worked out, some time in the fourth year, that he had stopped writing too.

Not deliberately. He’d sent express for a while — every week, then every second week, then when something happened worth reporting, then when something happened at all.

The last one had been about a horse.

An actual one, at the market, badly priced, and he’d written four lines about it because it had been funny and because she’d have found it funny and because forty-one marks per sheet had stopped being a number he thought about somewhere in the second year.

That had been eleven months ago.

He found the receipt in a drawer while looking for something else and stood there holding it for some time.

Then put it back in the drawer.

Four years.

He was twenty-two. She was twenty-two, and an hour older, and there was one year left of five.

He had a life. That was the thing nobody ever said about waiting — that it didn’t stop the rest of it. There was work. There was the noble path and everything that had come attached to it, which was more administration than anyone had warned him about. There was the building three roads east, and whatever happened in there, which had gone on for four years and had changed him in ways he could name and several he couldn’t.

There was Daren, daily, with bread.

There was Tax, who had stopped making the tally joke about eighteen months ago and had never explained why.

And there was a lacquered box by the window that he did not check, that he had not checked in over a year, and that he could tell was dark from the doorway without looking — because a lit panel changed the light in a room, and it had been the same light in that room for a very long time.

Tax found him at the window one evening at the end of the fourth year.

Not doing anything. Just there.

"You’re at the window."

"I’m looking at the yard."

"You’ve been looking at the yard for forty minutes."

"It’s a good yard."

Tax landed on the sill and did not say anything for a while, which from Tax was a form of pressure.

"One year," he said eventually.

"I know."

"That’s not very long."

"No."

"You’ve done four."

"I’m aware."

Tax looked out at the same yard.

"She’s alive," he said. "I’d know."

Kael turned his head slightly.

"How."

Tax didn’t answer that.

He’d been not answering it for four years, and Kael had stopped asking somewhere in the second, and they had arrived at an arrangement neither of them had ever put into words: that the crow knew something, and would say it when it mattered, and that until then the fact of him sitting calmly on a windowsill was itself the information.

"One year," Tax said again.

"Yes."

"Then she comes back."

Kael looked at the yard.

"Then she comes back," he said.

And did not say the rest of it, which was and I don’t know what’s coming back, and I haven’t known for four years, and I have gone on standing here anyway.