Location: Thinblood, Kell Vor
Date: Firstclaw 13, Yr 76 of the Still Flame
POV: Aeryn Veyra
Somebody moving on gravel, close, a hand’s width and a wall away.
Aeryn came up out of sleep already knowing who was outside, and lay listening to him get up off the step at first light with the carefulness of somebody trying not to make the noise he was making.
He had not slept much.
She had that from the number of times he had shifted in the night, and from the fact that she had counted them.
Then the boots went, up the slope, and she got up.
Her legs took her weight on the first attempt.
That was not nothing.
She stood beside the cot in the half dark and paid attention to it, because the last six mornings had begun with a negotiation and this one had not.
***
Twenty-eight paces before the knee said anything.
She stopped because it had said something and not because she had to, and did the arithmetic twice to be sure she was not being generous.
Eight yesterday morning.
It is the food.
A figure that triples overnight has an error in it somewhere.
She went looking for the error and did not find one.
The box had bought an appetite.
The appetite had been answered, twice yesterday and once again last night, with meat and marrow fat and something Vekka put in the bottom of the bowl that Aeryn had not asked about.
And a body living six weeks on ration pills and thin broth is not weak in the way a wasted body is weak.
It is empty, and the difference between empty and fed is not a slow curve.
The box had not made her stronger.
The box had made her hungry, and being hungry had turned out to be the thing standing between her and the use of what she already had.
Which means this is the top of it.
Twenty-eight was not the beginning of a climb.
It was the whole of what the last box could buy, arriving at once, and the next step up was sealed in a chest under her cot behind six days of a cup that fills one drop an hour.
***
Midmorning, then, when the fire had people at it.
Forty paces.
And she did it without stopping.
Not well.
The last eight of it were done on a leg that had begun negotiating again, by a woman who had made a decision about her face somewhere around the twentieth pace and was keeping to it.
But she went down the whole of that gravel on her own legs, and sat down on the log under her own control, and did not put a hand out once.
The fire noticed.
Not a head came up.
That was how she knew.
Six days ago every window on this slope had opened to watch a woman cross forty paces in six stages.
This morning she crossed it in one; the two men eating at the fire went on eating, and the whole of it was so carefully ordinary that Aeryn could have counted the people performing it.
Vekka came round the fire and handed her the bowl and stood there a moment longer than the handing required.
“There you are, then.”
Here I am.
“Aye.” She looked at her for a second.
“Eat that.”
***
Most of the bowl was gone when Vekka sat down.
“You’ll want to know what you did last night.”
I did nothing last night.
“No.
He did.” Vekka took a stick out of the ash and turned it over.
“There’s a man sleeping on your step, and the whole face knew it before he’d got his back against the wall.
There’s not been a step slept on in this village in nine years.”
Tell me the last one.
“You’ll not want it.”
Tell me anyway.
“Girl up past the third box.
Her man went down a shaft, and her brother came and sat on her step for a month till she’d got herself back.” Vekka put the stick in the ash and left it there.
“Then he went home.”
And that means what.
“It’s no claim, and it’s no courtship, if that’s your worry.”
It is not.
“No.
It wouldn’t be.” She watched the ash for a moment.
“It’s a house saying out loud that the woman inside it is protected.
You don’t get to say that to one person.”
Aeryn sat with the bowl on her knees.
Nobody asked me.
“No.” Something moved at the corner of Vekka’s mouth and did not become anything.
“And then you came down that slope on your own legs in front of eleven households, which says the opposite, and you did it before the light was properly up.”
That was not why I did it.
“I know it wasn’t.
That’s why I’m telling you.” She got up.
“There’s two things out there now.
A man on your step saying you’re protected, and you crossing that gravel on your own saying you don’t need to be.
The village won’t hold both past the week’s end.”
***
The way back up went in one as well and cost her the next hour, and she spent it on the crate with her back to the wall, building a program out of what was in the room, which she had not done since the last life.
There was a floor eight paces long.
A cot.
A crate.
A wall plate.
A partition.
Four pails that arrived every afternoon and left every afternoon.
There was a body that could now walk eighty paces in a day and would be ruined by a hundred.
So: not walking.
Walking was the readout and not the training, and she had watched better officers confuse the two and get people killed for it.
Sit-to-stand off the cot, counted, to failure and not past it.
Wall push at an angle she could hold, and the angle was the load, adjustable by how far out she put her feet.
Shoulders off the floor.
And the pail, which she could lift with a third in it, held at the knees for as long as her hands would close.
That last one was the one that mattered, because the figure she was working toward was a full pail and half again carried in front, down broken ground, at the end of a day.
None of it went down on the band.
Then the first set of everything.
The numbers were contemptible in every category, and she put them in the column as they came, and sat afterward with her arms shaking and felt better than she had since she opened her eyes on this world.
***
The boy came in the afternoon.
“Four.”
Four.
He got on with the port, and she watched the water go in at the rate it went in, and asked the question that had been sitting under everything since last night.
Where does the water come from.
“Cistern by the third box.”
And into the cistern.
“Off the shoulder.” He said it as one says a thing that is not interesting.
“Comes down the runs.
Everything comes off the shoulder, that’s what a shoulder’s for.”
Everything.
“Every drop on this face.”
Nothing from underneath.
“Nothing under us at all, my da says. The source of this chapter is g.com.
Straight down and dry as a bone.” He shrugged at the pails.
“It comes off the top and runs, and we catch what we can before it goes past.”
Aeryn sat very still on the crate.
***
The cup filled at twenty drops a day and had done since the first night, and she had spent twelve days treating that number as a property of the world.
It was nothing of the kind.
It was a property of one seep in one wall, at the bottom of a slope, at the end of a run, catching what was left.
Up, then, to the wet end, with her hand flat on the cold plate above the tank.
If the seep was the end of a run, there was a run, and there was ground where it came out of the rock before anybody caught anything.
She had twenty drops a day because she was last in the line.
Four breaks that were worth the walk.
The ground breaking above the second shoulder, where the water came off it in the Growing and had been coming off it since before anybody.
Where the water came off it.
Not roots.
Water.
She stood with her hand on the cold plate for a long time.
***
Unless the cup was not the only cup.
Aeryn made herself take the rest of it, because there was no version that stopped at the good part.
The second shoulder was out of reach.
Twenty-eight on the flat, forty down a slope with the village watching, and a full climb before the climbing started.
Going alone was not available either.
A girl had made that plain on this crate two days ago, in a voice that had not been unkind about it.
And there was nobody she could tell why she wanted to go, because a woman asking after water is asking after a thing every person on this face knows and has never had to think about.
So I need a woman, and a day, and a reason that is not the reason.
***
Skarr came up late in the afternoon, did not knock, and got two paces in before she said anything.
“There was a man asleep on your step this morning.”
There was.
“Whole face is talking.” She sat on the crate.
“Ma’s saying nothing, which is how you know.”
Aeryn let that alone and went at what she had got up for.
I want to go to a break with you.
Skarr looked at her.
“You did forty this morning.
Whole face has had it off somebody.”
Then you know what I can do.
“I know what you can do on a slope with a village watching.” She did not say it as a concession.
“That’s not a break.”
I know what it is.
I am not asking for this week.
“When, then.”
When I can do it.
And you will have to tell me what that looks like, because you have been up there since you could walk, and I remember twelve days.
Skarr sat with her hands on her knees and thought about it, and Aeryn let her, because the girl had come in with something of her own and had not put it down yet.
“I’ll take you.”
Say the rest of it.
“How d’you know there’s a rest of it?”
Because there always is, and because you did not offer two days ago when it would have been easy.
That got the long look, held past where anybody else on this face held anything.
“Teach me what you know,” Skarr said.
Be specific.
“You stood in that doorway on your third morning and read this whole slope.”
Your mother told you that.
“She said you looked at the ground a bit and then wrote down which way a thing would come at us and which way we’d go.” Skarr’s jaw was set.
“Ma’s been here thirty-one years.
She’d not have put it better, and she’d have needed a week.”
And what else.
“That.
Whatever that is.”
That is not a thing women do here.
“No.”
Then why.
“Because in four years I get allotted.” She said it entirely evenly.
“And I’ll go where I’m put.”
Aeryn waited.
“There’s nobody on this face knows a thing that isn’t stone or roots or weather.
Whatever’s in my head when I get there is the whole of what I take.” Skarr looked at the wall.
“You know something else.”
Aeryn did not answer straight away.
She had learned this week what happened when she treated a thing as a transaction, and the girl had just put something on the floor between them that cost a good deal more than a day on a break was worth.
There was no version of teaching that girl anything that did not end with somebody asking where a starving mute noblewoman off a transport had learned to site a defensive line.
Yes.
“Yes, what.”
Yes.
And I will hold nothing back, and you will not repeat one word of it to anybody, including your mother.
When you understand why I asked for that, you will understand what you have agreed to.
Skarr read it twice.
“Right,” she said, and stood up, and stopped in the doorway with her hand on the frame where Aeryn had seen a man put his.
“The far breaks,” she said.
“That’s where you want to go.
Not the near ones.”
Why do you say that?
“Because you’d not have asked me if it was the near ones.
Ma takes anybody to the near ones.”
She turned and left.
And she worked out which breaks I meant before I did.
***
He came at dark and stopped in the doorway, and she looked up from the boards where she was working through the last set and finished it before she sat up.
“Do you remember anything?”
No.
He nodded.
He had asked it every third day since the first week, and she had said no every time, and he had never looked as though the answer cost him anything.
Tonight he stayed in the doorway.
“You walked to the fire and back without stopping,” he said.
You were on the timber.
“Four people told me.
None of them thought they were telling me anything.” He came in and set the case on the crate.
“May I?”
Aeryn put the wrist out.
***
The scanner came out of storage.
He ran it down the wrist and then the line of her jaw, and turned the casing round so she could see the readout unasked, which he had done on her first morning and every time since.
He kept it there longer than the wrist had ever taken him, and read it a second time, and she watched a man arrive at something and decide how much of it to hand over.
“Your throat is mending.”
Explain that.
“There is damage in there that was not done by the wall and was not done last month.
How old.
“Older than I can put a figure on.” He said it flatly.
“Whatever put it there is gone, and the tissue under it is coming back.
There is a difference between what this read in your first week and what it reads tonight.”
And.
“That is all I have.
I cannot tell you it will finish, and I cannot tell you when.”
She sat on the cot.
Say the rest.
“You may get a voice.
You may get a sound and nothing after it.” He put his hands behind him.
“I have never seen a throat do this, and I would not have said it could.
I am telling you because you will feel it before I do.”
***
The head.
“Worse.” He sat down on the crate.
“The clot has gone.
Some time in the last ten days, and I did not catch the day.”
Then the memory.
“No.”
Say why.
“A clot is a stone in a stream.
Take it out and the water runs.”
Then the water is running.
“It is.” Vaelith turned the casing so she could see it.
“What that is giving me now is not the stone.
It is the bank the water tore out while the stone sat there.”
And a bank does not fill in because the stone went.
“No.
And it is not swelling, and it is not pressing on anything, and it is not going to.”
Aeryn sat very still.
So it is permanent.
“I am a man who spent two years on a survey crew and eleven years after it with one scanner and his hands, none of it here.” He did not look away from her.
“I would not say permanent to you.
I have never seen one come back from what that is showing me, and I have not seen very many.”
***
Then explain the rest of me.
That got the first pause of the evening.
“Veyra holds the birds,” Vaelith said.
“Every bird on every world.” He let that sit.
“Your bloodline is Phoenix, and so is your beast.”
She had the first half already.
It had sat in the column since her ninth day with the space under it empty, because a name arrived at confidently is worse than a gap.
The word went into the space and filled it exactly, and the rest came up behind it without being asked for.
The widest of the twenty.
A throne argued for on the breadth of it.
Rebirth and fire.
A hall that has not gone out since the first of them sat down.
All of it hers.
Not an hour of it remembered.
And underneath, arriving late and refusing to sit down, the fact that a man had just told her what she turned into.
Go on.
“Your mother was Phoenix.
Your father was Phoenix.” He let that sit a moment.
“That is not the usual arrangement, and it is the whole reason the record says what it says about you.”
Say what it says.
“Fullblood.”
Explain the word.
“A child takes the stronger of the two lines, whichever way round.
Put a Phoenix woman with a Draveth man, and you get a Phoenix, and nobody argues about it, and the child is not fullblood.” He turned a hand over.
“Both of yours were Phoenix.
So the registry has you as fullblood, and it does not have your sister as one.”
Aeryn sat with that.
Why not the sister.
“Different father.”
And a fullblood is worth what.
“Paper.” He did not dress it.
“A line in a registry.
It is worth a great deal at a betrothal and nothing anywhere else.
It has never made a woman stronger than the one standing next to her.”
There is a word under that one.
“There is an older one, and nobody uses it seriously.
Pureblood.
The line running back to the ancestor with no break in it.” One shoulder moved.
“Stories.
There has not been one entered in thousands of years.”
How is it tested.
“It is not.
There is no test, and there never was.”
Then go on.
“The Phoenix mends.” He said it without any weight.
“That is the domain, and it is the whole of what anybody outside your house has.”
Why so little.
“Veyra has never let a word of it be written down.” He let that sit.
“What I have is what a Draveth boy gets told.
Stories.
One of them is that a Phoenix mends from anything that does not kill it outright.”
You believe that.
“I have watched a woman go from a bed to forty paces in five days, and I have nothing else on the table.” He got up.
“It is a poor answer.”
Then give me the good one.
“The other one available requires me to think something about you that I would rather not.”
What is it.
Vaelith put a hand on the doorframe, and went out to the step.
Aeryn sat on the cot for a long time after he had gone.
There had been a list since her second morning here.
Names she wanted back.
The order of a corridor she had walked.
Whoever signed her onto that transport.
She had kept it as a debt, because she had expected to collect.
Tonight she did not read it, and put it away with the things that were finished.
Then she got down on the boards and lifted her shoulders off the wood nine times.
The ninth was worse than it had been that morning.
Twelve days before the three of them came down.
Eight boxes under the cot, and water in the cup for two of them.
Above the second shoulder a run of water came off the mountain, and the only person who could walk her up to it wanted the one thing she could not be seen to have.
She lay down and listened to Vaelith arranging himself on the gravel a hand’s width from her head, and worked out how many days of walking lay between her and the top of it.