The next few days were nothing.
That was what stuck, oddly.
He woke, went to the Archive, worked among the shelves and ledgers, came home, talked to Marin about small things, slept.
He’d expected to think about the document every hour, the way he had the night after he found the symbol, and he didn’t.
The question came up now and then in the middle of some job, and then Martin would shout across the room asking about a seal, or a customer would start up outside, and it went away again.
One morning he sat with Marin in the kitchen, the table between them covered in bread crumbs and two cups with a mouthful left in each.
She was mending a hole in the sleeve of his shirt.
He was telling her about the Archive, about the new clerk who’d mixed up two classifications that looked alike and made Martin redo a whole shelf.
“And did he put it back how it was?” she asked, eyes on the thread.
“More or less.
Two records in the wrong place.
Nobody’ll notice for ten years.” She laughed, tied the last knot, and held the shirt up to look.
“There.
It won’t last forever.
It’ll do till I have time to do it properly.” He took it and said thanks, and they sat there a minute not talking.
Fine by both of them.
“You know,” she said, winding the leftover thread around her finger, “yesterday in the market a woman was going on about the capital.
There’s a market there, she said, two whole streets long.
Things in it I’d never even heard the names of.” “Like what?” “I didn’t catch all of it.” She frowned.
“Shows, something about shows.
Inside covered squares, with colored lights, and people pay just to sit and watch.” She shook her head, openly impressed, not hiding it.
“Paying money to sit and watch.
I can’t picture it.” “Sounds like a waste of money.” “Sounds wonderful,” she said, and smacked his arm.
“Not everything has to be practical, Oren.” He smiled and left it.
He’d known this about her for years, how she got about places she’d never seen, places big enough to have things that would mean nothing here.
It had never occurred to him she might act on it.
She didn’t talk about it that way herself.
It was something she liked to bring up now and then, like the weather somewhere else.
“Do you ever think about leaving?” she asked, lighter, like it had just crossed her mind.
He took a second.
“Sometimes.” “Only sometimes?” “I wouldn’t know where to go.
Or what I’d do when I got there.
So it’s hard to think about it as a real thing.
It’s just, I don’t know.
Someone else’s idea.” She nodded, as if that was what she’d expected.
“Me neither.
I like thinking about it, though.
Even if nothing happens.” He left for the Archive by the same road he’d walked for years, except this time he stopped at the little shop that sold metal tools, because the owner was talking to two men and one of them wore the gray courthouse uniform.
He looked young for it.
Younger than the officials Oren was used to seeing there.
“…the names will be reviewed over the next two months,” the man was saying, flat, the way you say something you’ve said in a lot of shops already.
“Those of age will be called in turn.
No need to worry yet.
It’s an early notice.” “What about people with steady work?” the owner asked, wiping his hands on a rag.
“Them too.” He didn’t add anything.
He and his colleague went off to the next shop down the street.
Oren didn’t ask.
He didn’t feel like it.
He’d heard this kind of talk before, a call-up here, a call-up there, over the years of the war in the east.
He’d never seen that war.
It was just around, in the price of salt, in the soldier limping through the market street, in a conversation like this one.
He walked on to the Archive with the sentence still in his head, no heavier than knowing wheat would go up again.
That evening when he got home, Marin had dragged an old wooden box out of the storage room and left it on the floor of the sitting room.
“Found it looking for the winter sewing things,” she said, wiping the lid with her sleeve.
“It was behind everything.” He knew it at once.
His grandfather’s box.
He’d put it in the storage room himself after the funeral and never opened it.
He sat down on the floor in front of it and reached for the small rusted lock, and it came open a lot easier than he thought it would.
Inside there was a notebook, older than his own, the leather cracked at the corners.
A few old coins nobody used anymore.
Something small wrapped in cloth that he didn’t touch yet.
And one page folded more carefully than everything else.
He opened the page first.
A map, in his grandfather’s hand: a road leaving the village and going east, with names along it he’d never heard.
Some were crossed out with a thin line, like the old man had changed his mind about the route a few times.
“Did Grandfather travel a lot?” Marin asked.
She’d sat down next to him and was picking through the coins.
“I never knew.
He used to mention places he’d seen.
I figured they were stories.
What old men tell kids.” He opened the notebook.
The writing was smaller and neater than the handwriting he remembered from the end, and a few pages had dates from decades back, before Oren was born.
Two or three lines in, he could tell it would take longer than he had tonight, so he shut it carefully and told himself he’d come back to it when he had time.
He picked up the cloth bundle last and undid the little knot.
A round metal piece, about the size of a big coin, with a simple mark on it that he couldn’t make out in that light.
A circle inside a circle.
Or an eye.
He wasn’t sure.
No writing on it, and nothing in the notebook next to it saying what it was.
“What is it?” Marin took it from him and rolled it between her fingers.
“No idea.
An old button?
Something sentimental?” “Too heavy for a button.” She gave it back and picked up the notebook.
“Read the whole thing, maybe it says.” He put the piece down on the table next to the map and looked at both of them.
He didn’t feel any rush.
His grandfather had been quiet at the end, hadn’t talked much about his past, and Oren had never pushed.
He was starting to mind that.
Putting the notebook back, he remembered something the old man had said once, years ago, when Oren was a boy and they were setting this same box on a shelf after they’d moved into the house.
“When you leave the village, take this with you.” Said in his normal voice, like he was talking about a hoe.
Oren hadn’t asked why.
He’d figured it was just an old man wanting his things to mean more than they did, and his grandfather hadn’t explained.
He’d gone back to the shelf he was working on.
Oren hadn’t thought about it once since.
Leaving the village had never been a real possibility.
But now, closing the lid, the sentence came back very clearly, and it didn’t feel like a sign or anything.
It was just that his grandfather had carried a whole history around and never handed it to him, and what was left of it was a small wooden box in a storage room.
The next day, crossing the old square on his way to the market, he stopped next to the old man who sat on the bench near Alden’s statue, like always, watching people go by and mostly not talking.
Oren had seen him there a hundred times and never spoken to him.
This time he said hello.
The old man nodded back, then jerked his chin at the statue.
“Was just looking at him.
When I was young they called him Oren, you know.
Not Alden.” Oren stood there a second, hearing the name so close to his own.
He didn’t say anything about it.
He just asked, “Why did it change?” The old man shrugged, slowly.
“Couldn’t tell you.
One day everyone was saying Alden, and nobody said the other one anymore.
Somebody got it wrong somewhere and everybody copied.
Happens.” He smiled a bit, more to himself than at Oren, and went back to watching the passersby.
Oren let it go.
It didn’t seem worth pushing.
One of those small things that change with time and nobody notices when.
He went on to the market, and the name stayed with him for a minute or two, until a vendor started complaining about egg prices and that was that.
He got home that evening and the box was still half open on the table, the metal piece next to it under the lamp.
Marin was mending something else on the other side, and without looking up she asked if he’d decided about the notebook.
“Not tonight.
Maybe next rest day.” She nodded and kept sewing.
They stayed like that a long while, the light going outside.
The house was quiet, but not like the night before the Rite.
This was just an ordinary day finishing the way it started.
Your support means everything.”