"Because it doubles," Chan-i said, at the gate.
The two men on the gate let them out and shut it and did not look at them.
"An anchored man's knot is tied around his own intention. He's the anchor — nobody else can untie it and neither can he, because untying means performing the dead man's last intent, and the dead man's last intent was to not be killed by him." Chan-i was walking fast. "Kill him, and now you've got two anchors in the same knot. It can't be untied by anybody, ever, and it doesn't need a body to stand up in, because it's got two. That's not a restless. Nobody knows what that is, because it's been done once, four hundred and six years ago, in the western basin, and there is a lake there now."
Doha stopped walking.
"A lake," he said.
"Ask Grandmother Ok some time when she's clear." Chan-i kept going. "She'll tell you it's a story. She'll also tell you the exact depth."
Hong Ji-an went into the ground at dusk.
The eighth rite was the only one that had no technique in it at all. You dug, and you filled, and you set the stone, and the Hall did it with a total absence of ceremony that some families found insulting and that Doha had always privately thought was the only honest part.
Hong Yeohwa stood at the graveside with her hands folded.
When it was done she waited until the rite-keepers had gone, all of them, which took a while, and then she waited a little longer, and then she said:
"Come here."
Doha came.
Up close she looked exactly as bad as he did, which was some comfort, and none.
"I watched you," she said. "For three days. I sat against a wall in a shed and I watched a seventeen-year-old gravedigger learn a sword form he'd never seen, standing over my brother's coffin, in the dark, for three nights, and on the fourth day I watched you perform it over his grave and I watched it work."
"Yes."
"It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life," said Hong Yeohwa, "and I would very much like to put my sword through you, and I'm telling you that so it doesn't sit in me and go bad."
Doha thought about that.
"All right," he said.
"That's it? All right?"
"You watched a stranger wear your brother." He kept his voice level, because it was the only way he could keep it at all. "I don't think there's a way to feel about that. I think you just have to have it."
Hong Yeohwa turned her face away.
"Nineteen days," she said. "I sat with him in a room full of ice for nineteen days because I read in a book that it slows the souring, and it did, and every day I told him what the weather was doing, because that's — my mother used to, when he was ill as a boy, she'd sit and tell him about the weather. And the whole time there was a woman in him."
She stopped.
"Was she in him while I was talking?"
Doha did not answer, because she had not, in fact, asked him a question, and because the answer was yes.
"Her name was Seo Un-hae," he said instead.
"Don't."
"She was one of ours. She left eleven years ago to go after the man who—"
"Don't," said Hong Yeohwa. "I don't want her name. You have her — whatever it is. The seam. You have her wanting sitting in your chest and you'll have it for fifty years and I will never have anything of my brother at all except a stone with his name on it, so no, I don't want to be told about her, and I would like you to understand that I am being extremely reasonable about this."
The wind came across the Low Field.
"You're right," said Doha.
"Yes."
"About all of it."
"Yes."
"I'm going to Sohari in the morning," he said. "Where she died. Where he died. There's a body somewhere that Nam Gyeol left empty, and there's a village or two between here and there drinking iron, and I'm going to find out how he lifts them out."
Hong Yeohwa wiped her face with the back of her wrist, once, efficiently, and put her hands back at her sides.
"Yes you are," she said. "I've hired a cart."