Three weeks passed before the courier called his name at mail bell, and Finn had stopped expecting it by the fourth day of that third week, which was, naturally, exactly when it came.
“Hale!” The courier’s voice cut through the noise of the mess hall, flat and bored the way it always was, forty names to get through before he could go home himself.
“Finn Hale!”
Finn was halfway through his porridge.
He was standing at the courier’s table before he’d fully decided to move, the bowl abandoned, Pell watching him go with mild, curious amusement from across the table.
“One for you.” The courier held out a folded, travel-worn letter, the wax seal cracked slightly at one corner from the journey, his mother’s handwriting unmistakable even upside down.
“Don’t loiter, line’s backed up.”
Finn took it and stepped aside, and didn’t open it right there in the mess hall the way some of the other boys did with theirs, tearing into news from home between mouthfuls of breakfast like it was just one more thing to consume.
He folded it carefully into his coat instead, and finished his porridge without tasting a bite of it, and waited, patient in the specific way he’d gotten good at over two lives, for the morning bell to ring and the floor work to start and the whole long day to finally, finally end.
He read it that evening, sitting on the end of his cot with the small oil lamp the indenture quarters allowed after dark, Pell politely pretending to be asleep already though his breathing gave him away as still awake and still curious.
Dear Finn,
Your letter reached us on a Sunday, and your father read it out loud twice before I finally took it from him so I could read it myself, slowly, the way I wanted to the first time.
I am glad New Taipeng isn’t so frightening as I feared.
I pictured it larger and colder than you describe, though I suppose “larger than I expected” is doing quite a lot of work in that sentence, knowing you.
Your father laughed at the part about the grain dust and tar smelling like home.
He says to tell you a barge-mender’s son always finds a way to feel at home near a working dock, wherever that dock happens to be.
I am glad the foreman seems fair. Find the original chapter at g.com.
I confess I worried more about that than almost anything else — that you’d land somewhere unkind, and I wouldn’t be there to do anything about it.
Knowing there’s at least one steady hand over you helps me sleep, some nights, when sleep doesn’t come easily otherwise.
Bram came by the very evening your letter arrived, practically before I’d finished reading it myself, demanding to know everything you’d written.
He made me read the part about the leaf and the second piling three times.
He says, and I’m quoting him directly because I don’t trust myself to improve on it, “Tell him the rematch is already happening in my head and he’s losing so far, so he’d better hurry up and come back to defend himself properly.” He also wanted me to tell you Whit’s cousin did, in fact, eat most of the oranges, and that this is a tragedy you’ll simply have to live with.
Your father wants you to know the hull plank he mended the week you left is still holding.
He says it like it matters more than it probably does, but I think what he means is that some things stay fixed once they’re properly fixed, and he wants you to know he still believes that includes people, not just wood.
We miss you every single day, Finn.
The house is too quiet without you underfoot, and I never thought I’d miss being called out to for eating the last heel of bread before you got to it, but here we are.
Write again when you can.
Tell us the things you leave out too, if you ever feel ready to.
We can carry more than you think we can.
All my love,
Mother
(Your father made me add: “and mine too, obviously, I’m not made of stone, I just don’t write as well as your mother does.” So. There it is.)
Finn read it twice through, and then a third time, slower, lingering over the part about the hull plank longer than he meant to.
Something in his chest ached in a way that had nothing to do with grain sacks or Corbin or any of the ordinary hurts a warehouse floor could hand out, and everything to do with a small stone house two hundred miles away that he missed with a fierceness he hadn’t let himself feel quite this directly since the day he left. New chapters come out on novelping . com first.
𝑌𝑜𝑢 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑤𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑒 𝑏𝑎𝑐𝑘 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦 ℎ𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑑, the System said, quiet, careful, the same suggestion it had made once before.
𝑆ℎ𝑒 𝑎𝑠𝑘𝑒𝑑, 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒.
𝐷𝑖𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑙𝑦.
I know she did.
𝑌𝑜𝑢 𝑑𝑜𝑛’𝑡 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑑𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑑𝑒 𝑡𝑜𝑛𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡.
Finn folded the letter along its original creases, careful, the way he’d folded his own before sending it, and set it beneath his pillow instead of on the shelf, where he could reach it without having to sit up.
Maybe not everything, he thought, staring up at an unfamiliar ceiling that still didn’t have the water stains he kept expecting.
But something.
Next time.
She said she can carry more than I think she can.
Do you believe her?
Finn thought about his mother’s foggy, tired evenings after using her own small mark to save a neighbor’s dying fish stores, about the way she’d held him without flinching after a mountain pass and a Temple and a whole cosmos had already broken him once, in a life she’d never even know about.
Yeah, he thought, finally, letting his eyes close.
I think I do.
He fell asleep with the letter under his pillow, and dreamed, for the first time in weeks, of a kitchen that smelled like burnt bread and river water, and didn’t wake once before the bell.