Hong Yeohwa had stood up.
"Sit down, girl," said Grandmother Ok, not unkindly. "You are about to hear the worst thing you will ever hear and you will want to be sitting."
"What does he mean, it isn't his?"
"He means what he said. Doha. All of it."
Doha kept his eyes on the table, because looking at her was not possible.
"It's a draw," he said. "Two hands, from a stance about this low—" he showed it, and had to go lower than he wanted to, and his thighs told him about it immediately "—and it's long. His is a heartbeat. This one takes four, maybe five. It comes up out of the stance in a spiral and the blade doesn't leave the sheath until the third beat and there's a — there's a pull at the end, like you're pulling a rope out of a well, not like you're cutting."
He stopped.
"And?" said Elder Mo.
"And it's the wrong size." Doha looked up. "He was nineteen. This is somebody with about six inches of reach on him and forty years of practice. The knees are wrong, the hips are wrong. It's like—" He tried three ways to say it. "It's like a coat that isn't his. It's just been put on him."
Chan-i had backed up a step from the table without appearing to know it.
"Put on him," he repeated.
"It doesn't fit anywhere," said Doha. "That's what's wrong with it. The small one's in him, it's part of the shape of him, you can't tell where he stops and it starts. This other one is sitting inside him the way a stone sits in a shoe."
Nobody said anything.
Then Hong Yeohwa said, in a small, hard, extremely steady voice:
"Are you telling me there is another person in my brother?"
This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
"No," said Grandmother Ok.
She opened her eyes.
"There is another person's last moment in your brother," she said. "Which is a great deal worse, because a person can be buried."
They went up out of the cold room at midday and Elder Mo cleared the receiving room of everyone but four.
"Say it plainly," said Grandmother Ok. "Mo Yeongsu. You have been thinking it since the wound."
Elder Mo put his hands inside his sleeves.
"A knot can be lifted out of a body," he said. "It has been known for three hundred years and it is the most useless piece of knowledge the Hall possesses, because a knot in open air comes apart in about a quarter hour. There's nothing to hold it. It's an intention without a body to have been intended by. It thins out and it's gone."
"Unless," said Grandmother Ok.
"Unless you put it somewhere." The elder's voice was very dry. "A freshly dead man will hold one. Not a living one — a living man's own gi fights it. Not one long dead — there's nothing left to hold onto. But a man killed cleanly within the hour, with a needle, with no wound to speak of and everything else intact—"
"Is a jar," said Grandmother Ok.
Hong Yeohwa made a sound.
She got it back almost at once. Doha thought that was the single most impressive thing he had ever seen a person do.
"Then Ji-an wasn't—" She stopped. Started again. "He wasn't killed for anything. He wasn't killed because of something he did, or saw, or—"
"He was nineteen, healthy, alone on a road, and available," said Grandmother Ok. "I am sorry. I have found in sixty years that people would rather their dead were murdered for a reason. There is very often no reason. There is only a use."
The room was silent for a while.
"Whose is it?" said Hong Yeohwa at last. "The other one. The — the coat. Whose is it?"
"That," said Elder Mo, "is a question the Hall does not answer."
"Elder Mo," said Grandmother Ok.
"Hallmistress—"
"Mo Yeongsu, we are not in the position we were in this morning." She shifted in her chair. "A man has learned to carry knots. That is not a secret we can protect by declining to discuss it, because he already knows it and we are the ones catching up. Girl."
Hong Yeohwa's chin came up.
"Ask your question again in three days," Grandmother Ok said. "Because we will have to untie it to bury your brother, and in order to untie it, that boy is going to have to perform it. And when he performs it, he will find out who it belonged to, because that is what the seam is."
She looked at Doha.
"And I want you to understand," she said, "what I am asking you to do. That thing in the coffin is four or five beats long, out of a stance you cannot hold, from a school neither Mo Yeongsu nor I recognize, and it was made by somebody at Standing Water or above."
Doha said nothing.
"Say the number back to me," said Grandmother Ok.
"One a month," said Doha.
"And this is the one," she said. "Heaven help us all."