Location: Thinblood, Kell Vor
Date: Firstclaw 4, Yr 76 of the Still Flame
POV: Aeryn Veyra
Her finger had gone black under the nail by morning.
Lying on the cot in the gray light, she got the left hand up and worked through it in order, because the order was the only part of this she still controlled.
Third finger, swollen through the middle joint, hot, the nail bed filling, bending half of what it should.
Nothing grinding.
The bone had held, and something soft hadn’t.
On a woman who could walk, an inconvenience.
On one who couldn’t speak, it was her mouth.
Everything she’d said on this world came off the band on her left forearm, written with the right while the left held still, and the left holding still was the whole trick of it.
A forearm that flinched wobbled the letters, and a woman who has to be read twice loses the room.
And there was no innocent way to have gotten it.
A crush injury to the hand of a bedbound patient in a shut room, overnight, and Vaelith would ask.
He’d catalogued her elbows on the second day without needing to be told what he was looking at.
Three explanations, all thrown away inside a minute.
So the day arranged itself.
Hand out of sight.
Get to the store.
Be somewhere public when he came.
+++
Vekka arrived at the same hour and stopped inside the door, the iron-gray roped back with its cord, and looked at the room rather than the woman in it.
“Where are they?”
The band had something else on it.
Aeryn cleared it.
Where are who.
“Your men.” No edge on it at all, which was worse.
“Two of them here in the village, and neither one sleeping under your roof.
There’s talk out there, and I’d sooner have it off you than off the pot.”
I am not sending for them.
The headwoman took that in and didn’t argue, and the not-arguing weighed more than a refusal would have.
“That’s yours to say.” Then she came at the rest of it from the side, the long way round, the way she came at everything.
“You’ll want to see the crate, then.
You’d not have looked at me as you did yesterday when I said crate, otherwise.
And you’ll want carrying, and you’ll not be carried by mine.”
Aeryn got that wrong, and got it wrong for a full minute.
Three men at that fire.
A headwoman with a tally to keep and no reason to spend an hour of anybody’s morning on a woman who put nothing in the pot.
A question of labor, and there was a counter-offer half written on the band before the woman spoke again.
“I’ve three men,” Vekka said, at the wall rather than at her.
“They’re mine.
Not one of them goes under another woman’s arm while I’ve breath in me, and every woman on this face would tell you the same, most of them louder.”
The band stopped where it was.
Two days building an organizational chart out of a village, and she’d left out what the village was built on.
They are not labor.
They are held.
So a woman lying alone in a box, with none of her men sleeping under her roof, wasn’t being pitied out there.
She was being read.
Either her men had refused her, which was a scandal.
Or she was refusing them, which had no name anybody was going to say in front of her.
“I’ll find you girls,” Vekka said, and went out.
+++
They came inside a quarter hour, and one of them was worth the wait.
Tall and restless, dark red over black, tracery climbing up from the jaw instead of down.
She wore a man’s coat with the sleeves rolled, too big in the shoulders, which had been her father’s before it was hers and still sat as if it expected him back.
Where the men at the hearth had kept their faces off Aeryn, this one looked at her outright, at the wasted arms and the useless legs and the plain gray ring, and kept looking one beat longer than she needed to.
“Skarr.
Long Count says you’re for the store, I carry you, and I’m not to ask you anything.” A grip under the shoulders with the efficiency of somebody who’d shifted heavier.
“Never said I couldn’t look.”
The other girl said nothing and took the legs and was strong through the back.
Between them, Aeryn weighed nothing at all.
“There’s nothing to you,” Skarr said, halfway across the gravel, sounding put out about it.
“I’ve hauled water heavier.
That’s not right, that.”
Bregg, who kept the store, was sixty or near it, heavy, brown going gray in uneven patches, with tracery around the left eye only, so that a stranger would’ve taken it for a scar.
He had the book open before they were through the door.
“Veyra.
Consignment, one crate, sealed, down on the same drop as your pod and held against arrival.” He turned the book and set a finger on the line.
“That’s you.
I’ll want your mark when it’s off my floor.
The Long Count’s asked me twice what’s in it, and I’ve told her twice I don’t open other people’s freight.”
All of it came out without his once raising his voice, and underneath was the thing she knew off every quartermaster she’d ever dealt with: a man performing his own correctness in front of the person most likely to test it.
The crate came past her waist where she sat propped against the counter.
Gray composite, stamped and sealed, without a mark of what a wet mountain puts on a thing in six weeks.
Bregg cut the seal and stepped back, which she noted.
Vekka, sleeves already up, lifted the lid.
The smell came out first, and it was wrong for this world entirely: cedar and something floral in the packing.
Then the color.
Folded in layers with tissue between, pale rose and pale green and a blue no dye on this planet would make in four hundred years, and the light coming off it in that room was obscene.
Nobody said anything at all.
Aeryn got her right hand in and lifted the first one clear.
It came up weightless and kept coming, and she held a court gown at arm’s length in a room built for grain that wasn’t there.
Then she looked at the shoulders.
That took under two seconds.
Cut for a woman a hand taller than the body she was in and a good deal fuller through the chest, and not cut generously but cut exactly, as a house weaver cuts against a pattern already on file.
Somebody else’s measurements.
She put the question where she could reach it later and went back in.
The counting took most of an hour, and she did all of it herself, propped with her legs useless in front of her, and Bregg wrote down what she signaled without being asked twice.
Forty-eight.
Six layers of eight.
Under the last layer, nine pairs of slippers with soles two fingernails thick, and a flat case.
Inside the case, on velvet, eleven ornaments for the hair.
Combs, pins, a circlet of silver wire with nothing in it worth stealing.
Aeryn looked at those longer than at anything else in the crate, and the looking wasn’t feeling.
No feeling was available.
Two signatures at the bottom of the manifest that lay under the case, and no way to say whose hands they belonged to, and whatever the woman whose body this was had felt about them went out of her on the morning she woke, with everything else.
What was left was a crate.
She worked it as she’d have worked anything an unfriendly party left where she could find it.
Six layers of eight, ordered by the dozen.
Nobody had selected anything, so nobody had spent time on it, so the order had a date somebody was working to.
Cut against a pattern already held.
No current measurement taken and none sent for.
An order placed by people who didn’t expect to be in a room with her again.
Eleven pins, and not enough hair on this head to hold one.
Cedar in the packing and no weather on the crate.
Somebody had paid to have it done correctly.
And a manifest.
Every line numbered and priced, sealed at the top, signed twice at the bottom, recording in detail that the House of Veyra had provisioned its exiled daughter to a standard appropriate to her birth.
No letter.
Every garment line ended in the same three words, which was the pattern it had been cut against, held on file at the weaver under a name.
She’d read that name three days ago, going through the records the band still carried, because she’d needed to know what this body stood convicted of.
It sat one line above her own in the household register.
One line above.
That was the whole of what she had.
A woman whose measurements a weaver kept current, recorded immediately ahead of her in a household, and no way from here to say whether that made her a sister, a cousin, or somebody who’d married well. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
She filed the name with what she knew, and didn’t decorate it.
Not sent to me.
Sent to a record.
The crate wasn’t a gift and never had been.
It was evidence, assembled to prove a thing had been done, and a house assembles evidence because it expects to be asked.
Somebody was going to check.
That went in with the ten men marked on her wrist and the six years of the agent in her bones, and her face didn’t move while it went.
+++
The rest she took for economics, and got wrong for another hour.
No coat.
No boots.
Nothing with a pocket, nothing that closed at the throat, no jewel in the case and not a gram of metal worth a meal.
Where it came from, the whole crate was an afternoon’s account against a house that owned ships.
Ithren weave, house grade — Ithren being the clan that wove it, and house grade the best they made.
She knew that the moment it was in her hand, having never in her own life owned a thread of it, and the knowing came with nothing attached.
That was how most of what she knew about this empire arrived now.
Facts with nobody standing behind them.
It didn’t rot.
It didn’t take water.
It came through hard use and out the other side, and house grade didn’t travel: woven for named women against held patterns, loom to wardrobe.
But the knowing in her head had stopped six years ago and had never once been about this world, and what she had of the Ninth was three days and a single crossing.
Every shirt she’d seen in Thinblood was mended more than once.
Bregg’s shelves were built for four times what stood on them.
So, probably: not a gown here.
Lining, wrapping, patch material.
She marked the confidence low and put it to Bregg, and it took three goes on the band to get it into a shape he’d answer.
Not as clothing.
As cloth.
What is it worth.
Bregg read it twice and put both hands flat on the counter, which she’d already learned he did instead of laughing.
“You’re asking what it’s worth as cloth,” he said.
“Nobody on this mountain is going to buy that as cloth.”
Then say it plainly.
“There’s sixty-odd young men on this face with nothing to put in front of a woman.
Not an energy crystal, not a beast, not a stitch.” He said it in the voice of a man reading his own book aloud.
“And three times that with a wife already and a place in her house they’d like moved up.
A man can’t wear that.
A man gives that.
And whoever takes it is the only woman on this world in Ithren.”
The band didn’t move.
She was working.
“Then she sells it on, or her house does, and what it fetches is energy crystals.” He let that sit.
“You’ve seen the face.
You know what they buy here.”
Everything she’d built in the last hour turned over and came down the other way.
The males court and the females hold.
She’d had that in the knowing with the rest, six years old and broad, and had filed it as manners.
It wasn’t manners.
It was the market.
And behind the market, the mountain face, where every household had its home cut into the rock, higher or lower: the high cuts belonged to the old money, and she’d never once asked how anybody climbed.
Now she knew, and she’d just held a climb up at arm’s length in front of two witnesses.
How many households on this face.
“Fifty and some,” Bregg said.
“Nearer sixty with the boxes, and I don’t count those.
They don’t buy.”
And I have forty-eight.
He didn’t answer that, and the not answering was the answer.
“That’s yours to sell, and I’ll not tell you how,” Vekka said, off the wall now, the cord at the back of her head the only tidy thing about her after an hour over a crate.
“I’ll say what I’d do, and then go back to my own business.”
The band waited.
“I’d sell slow.
Fifty-odd roofs, and every one sits where it sits because somebody paid to be that high, and they all know to the last energy crystal what it cost.” At the wall again.
“Put four dozen out by winter and half this face climbs, and the other half finds out it can’t.
I’d not want to be the woman who did that.
I’d want to be her even less the winter after.”
How slow.
“Two before the cold.
Nothing till the paths open.” A shrug that wasn’t one.
“That’s advice.
You’ll do what you do.”
Then she looked at Aeryn properly, which she hadn’t done once all morning.
“And whatever you sell, what’s left—” She stopped, and started again from somewhere else.
“It stays in your name.
On Bregg’s line.
Not a man’s.
Not a house’s.
Not mine.”
Her eyes went back to the far wall.
“You’ll have men about you again.
Sooner or later.
Whatever you’re at with them now.” A breath.
“What a man earns is yours.
What he brought in is yours.
Put him out, you keep three parts in four of what he came with, and he goes with nothing off you after.
That’s the law.
It’s a good one.”
A pause, longer.
“But what goes into a house gets counted with the house.
Three women on this face I’ve watched lose the whole of it that way.
Not one of them saw it go.” Flat, no opinion in it.
“You’re not from here.
Somebody had to say it out loud.”
Nobody in that room owed her anything.
Two.
And you choose the houses.
Something went out of Vekka’s shoulders that had sat there since the lid came off.
“That’s sense,” she said.
“I didn’t expect it off a Covenant woman.”
The two gowns sold for more than she’d been prepared to ask.
The houses Vekka chose paid in dim energy crystals, dozens of them, and Bregg counted them onto the counter in rows and then counted them again, because he was Bregg, and wrote the total into his book against her name.
She took one back off the counter and kept it in her lap.
Seated in a shelter pod’s cell, Bregg said, a dim one would run the whole pod, heat and light and water, for four months.
In all his years behind that counter, nobody in Thinblood had owned a pod to put one in.
Then she bought what the crate should have held.
Forty-eight gowns, nine pairs of slippers, eleven ornaments for hair she didn’t have, and not one thing a woman could use.
Not a towel.
Not a bar of soap.
Whoever had packed it had provisioned a portrait.
So: a soft-scraped hide to dry herself on after the bath.
Soap, and something for her hair.
A toothbrush and paste.
Toilet paper.
Salt.
And a lamp that worked by hand, because the pod’s own lights answered to a voice, and she didn’t have one. The source of this chapter is g.com.
It barely marked the line.
The goods went into the storage necklace at her throat, in among the nine dresses, and the dim energy crystals after them, a handful at a time.
Nobody in the store looked twice.
A storage necklace was a thing people here had seen.
It was hers.
Everything that had been in her hands since she woke had been put there by somebody else.
The pod.
The covers.
The heat crystal in her pot.
The food off the fire.
This she’d made herself, out of a crate somebody else had packed and a decision nobody had made for her.
The first thing on this world she owned because she’d earned it.
For two.
Out of forty-eight.
That left the water.
Thirty days of it, carried to the pod and paid out of the same line, if she could find somebody to carry it.
The forty-six were the problem, and she knew it with the ink still wet on Bregg’s line.
Not a fortune she couldn’t spend.
A fortune she couldn’t spend safely, on a face where every house knew to the last energy crystal what its height had cost, and where a whole face’s worth of climbing now sat in a crate with her name on it and no lock.
+++
The boy from the communal box came in at a run, because he knew no other way into a room.
Bare feet, a bad shirt, the tail going out behind him on the turn.
“Nettik,” Vekka said.
“Stand still.”
Standing still took his whole body.
He looked at the gowns on the counter, then at the woman propped against it, then back at the gowns.
“Are those all yours?”
Aeryn wrote slowly, because the hand was tired and she wanted this one clean, and held the arm out.
The boy looked at it, didn’t read it, didn’t pretend to, and turned to Vekka with the flat expectation of somebody who’d never once been embarrassed about it.
“She’s asking do you want work,” Vekka said, a hand going up to the cord at the back of her head and finding it where it always was.
“Water.
Thirty days.
The tank at her pod, filled every day, and you don’t go inside.”
“That’s easy work.” The scorn of somebody who’d been hauling since he could carry.
Then, with a good deal more interest: “How much?”
“Fed at the fire for it,” Vekka said.
“Same as anybody hauling.”
He didn’t answer straight off.
He considered it, properly, the way he considered everything.
“One dim,” he said.
“For Ma.
At the end of the month.”
It wasn’t what he’d been offered.
Against the rows on Bregg’s counter it was nothing, and he’d bargained for it anyway, for his mother, as if it mattered.
To his mother it would.
Aeryn found herself doing something with her face she hadn’t done since the bridge.
Agreed.
+++
Sothran was outside when the girls carried her back, at the corner of the store, where he could see the gravel and the treeline at once, the pale gold of him dull under a flat sky.
He watched the boy go past with the first pail, the tail swinging to balance it.
Nothing got said.
Going by, she was close enough to feel what keeping quiet was doing to him.
It came off him as heat, rising under his collar, the way it had come off him the morning she woke.
Two paces on, she heard it.
“That’s my water run.”
Nobody answered him.
Nobody had answered him yesterday either, and she understood, carried past a man for the second morning running, that this would keep happening and that she was the one making it happen.
Skarr shifted her grip and looked back at him, dark red over black, and said nothing for once.
Four words on the band would’ve fixed it.
They’d even have been half true, and would’ve cost her nothing, and the man had put her into a wall and had also carried a pail forty paces a day for six weeks before anybody told him to.
Aeryn didn’t write them.
Not spite, and not oversight, and not only the nine boxes and the hundred and sixty units that had to go on that floor nine more times without a witness.
She’d spent a career being the person other people leaned on, and had never once in the whole of it been the person leaning.
A body that couldn’t stand had changed what she could do about that, and had changed nothing else.
She would buy the water.
She wasn’t going to be given it.
Not one of them.
Not for anything.
+++
She brought one dim energy crystal back to the pod in her lap, the one for the pod’s cell.
The rest rode home in the necklace.
When the girls had set her on the cot and gone, she took the rest out again, every one, and moved them into her soul space.
She set them down beside the spring, because the spring was the one thing in there she could find without looking.
A storage necklace she’d trust as far as she trusted whoever had made it, and she didn’t know who’d made this one.
Her soul space nobody had made but her.
The one for the cell she kept in her hand, and didn’t put down for some while.
Vaelith didn’t come.
A whole morning arranged around a man who never arrived.
The hand out of sight, three explanations graded and ready, and by the time the light went flat she’d used none of it.
A man who comes at the same hour every day is a schedule.
A man who doesn’t is a decision, and she had no way of telling which decision it had been.
Giving her room.
Kept by something.
Sitting somewhere working out what to make of a woman who’d gone to the Long Count for a door and a store for water.
It went in the column under his name, which now had four entries and not one bad one, and that was beginning to be a problem of its own.
The energy crystal in her hand was the size of the last joint of her thumb.
Dull, gray-green, cloudy through the middle in the way of the lowest grade there is.
The cheapest thing anybody on this world would take for anything, and the money the whole world ran on.
On the morning she woke, with the floor going cold under a dying woman, this body had reached out and taken hold of a sentinel’s sleeve.
Not because he was a sentinel.
Because his was one of the few faces the woman in it knew, on a world that body had been on six weeks, and she’d had no voice to ask with, and he was standing there.
Nobody in that room had known what she wanted.
One of them had put her into a wall for it, and her heart had stopped, and by the time it started again there was somebody else inside her.
Now the same body sat on a cot with an energy crystal in its hand.
That was what the hand on the sleeve had been asking for.
One person alive knew it.
She turned it over once.
Then she got the plate up over the cell, seated the dim energy crystal where the dead one had been, and felt the pod come on around her: a hum in the walls, the tank’s pump turning over.
Her place, and soon a warm one, and nobody was coming in to be warm in it.
The lights stayed dark, waiting for a voice.
She lit the lamp, got herself down onto the floor, and started the forms.
The box lid called them that, and she’d been calling them that for two days because the lid did.
Lying on the boards with her knees under her, it occurred to her that whoever wrote that lid had been describing something he’d never had to do.
They weren’t forms.
A form is a shape you hold.
This was an order of movements that had to be gone through in order, or none of it counted, and she’d been taught it under another name in another life, and the other name was the accurate one.
The sequence, then.
Knees.
Weight.
Elbows.
Line.
Four seconds.
Down.
Under her cheek, for the first time since she’d woken on it, the floor was getting warm.
The boy came at first dark with the second pail and didn’t come inside, and she heard him counting paces on the gravel going back, out loud, the way children do.