Chapter 575 - 574: The Ones Who Aren’t Sent

Chapter 575: Chapter 574: The Ones Who Aren’t Sent

Location:Seven Peaks — The Forge; The Hall

Date/Time:TC1857.11.14 – TC1857.11.17

The forge had been cold since the fifth month, and it still smelled of his father.

Coal and scale and quench water gone stale in the trough, and the leather of the big apron that hung on the peg by the door, and under all of it the thing Aren had no word for in either language, which was the smell of a place where somebody large had worked every day of Aren’s life and then stopped. He had not let anybody clean the trough. Nobody had asked to.

He went in most mornings and sat on the anvil block for a bit, which his father would have told him not to do because it put grit in your trousers, and then he went and did the linen with the northern girl, who had decided in the ninth month that he was hers to organize and had not asked him either.

He was nine. He could count the weeks since his mother had gone back north on his fingers and needed one hand and a bit of the other, and he did it every morning on the anvil block, and he did not tell anybody that either.

***

His father’s letter came on the fourteenth day of the eleventh month, and Raven brought it to the forge herself, which was how Aren knew it was bad before she said anything.

She did not sit down on the block. She stood in the doorway where the apron was and held the letter out to him.

"It’s to me," Raven told him. "But you should read it first. You’ll read it better than I do and you’ll see what’s not in it."

Aren took it.

His father’s hand was worse in the cold. The letters were bigger, and the lines went downhill.

The second pass will close. Not this week. Inside a fortnight, maybe inside ten days. Freya says ten, and she has been right about the ice every time.

When it closes, nothing moves north of the middle ford until the first thaw. I mean nothing. Not us, not a rider, not a group. The clans do not cross it in winter, and they have not in a hundred years, and the reason is the people who tried.

There are forty-one children at the first pass waiting to come down. There are a hundred and forty-four more in the middle country who have not been sent yet.

I can bring the forty-one down before it closes if I move every point at once and do not space the groups. I have written what that costs on the second sheet. It is not a cost I would choose.

The hundred and forty-four stay where they are until spring.

I have not written the rest of it because I do not know how to write it to you. The boy will know. Ask the boy.

Aren read it twice, and then a third time, and the third time he was not reading it any more.

***

"He wants you to say it," Raven went on. "I’m going to let you decide whether to."

"You know it already."

"I know some of it. I know the old thing, because the exile said it in your father’s yard. I know there’s an argument at home and I know I took a side in it." She had her hands in her coat. "What I don’t know is what it’s like from inside, in winter, when the pass is shut. Your father thinks you do. I think he’s right and I’d rather he wasn’t."

Aren put the letter on the anvil.

"It’s not the hundred and forty-four," Aren answered. "Not all of them."

Raven waited.

"The ones who get sent are the ones whose families decided to send them. That’s how the route works. You said it yourself in the yard. Anybody who comes to a gate with a child gets fed. Comes." He had his hands on his knees, and he was looking at the floor of the forge, which was easier. "So the forty-one at the first pass, and the nine and the twelve before that — they’re the ones whose people had already won the argument at home. They were never the ones in danger. Their families were never going to do it."

"And the rest."

"Some of those are just slow. Families that haven’t decided. Families that are far out and haven’t heard." Aren made himself go on at the same speed, because Raven had told him once that slowing down was asking to be forgiven. "And some of them are in houses where the argument went the other way. Where somebody said not ours. And nobody’s going to send those ones, because the people who’d send them are the people who lost."

The forge was very quiet.

"The route takes the ones who come. It can’t take the ones who don’t. And the ones who don’t are the ones on the list."

***

Raven did not say anything for long enough that Aren looked up.

She had the face she had in the Hall when somebody had said a thing she had half known and not finished, and she was not hiding it, which he had noticed she had stopped doing sometime in the summer.

"How many?" she asked.

"I don’t know. Nobody knows. That’s the thing about it, it’s not a number, it’s a house." Aren shook his head. "I only know about mine because I was in it."

"Would it be spring?"

"It’d be winter." He said it flatly, the way his father said things, the way people from the north said the things that were too big to say any other way. "When the births stop, and the ground’s gone hard, and there’s no traveling. When nobody from outside could come even if they wanted to. That’s when it gets decided. That’s when it was going to be me."

Raven crouched down, which put her at his height, which she had not done before.

"Then here’s what I can’t do, and I want to say all of it, because I owe you all of the answer and not the part that makes either of us feel better.

"I can’t go and get them. If I send people into a house in the middle country and take a child who wasn’t sent, that’s a foreigner stealing a child out of a family, and I don’t care what the family was going to do, I’ll have done the thing the Empire’s man with the pen did — decided I know better from outside, and written it down, and taken. And the clans would be right to stop letting anybody on that road ever again, and then there wouldn’t be a road for the next forty-one."

"I know."

"I can’t send more people north before the pass closes. There aren’t the threes, and there isn’t the time."

"I know."

"And I can’t make the argument at home come out differently, because I’m not from there and nothing I say counts."

"I know," Aren told her. "I’ve known it since the yard."

***

They took it to the Hall in the afternoon and Raven made him read his father’s letter out, which he did, standing, the way he had in the spring, and then she made him say the rest of it himself, and he said it.

Nobody interrupted.

When he had finished, Taron put in, in the flat voice, "So the route works, and it’s saving the wrong children."

"It’s saving children," Raven answered. "They’re not the wrong ones. They’re just not all of them, and they’re not the ones most in danger, and we have spent six months thinking we were doing the second thing when we were doing the first."

"Then what do we do?"

"About the forty-one? Bjorn moves every point at once and brings them down before the pass closes." She put the second sheet on the table. "And I’ll read you what that costs, because he wrote it down and he’d want it read."

Aren had read it in the forge. He listened to her read it out anyway.

Every point moves at once. No spacing between groups. Each team walks its own leg and the next leg too and hands over at the far point instead of the near one, and nobody sleeps two nights in the same place until the forty-one are below the middle ford.

That means the teams are strung out. That means there is no point on the route where there are nine people. There are points with three and points with four, and there is nobody sitting in any of the shelters, and the whole route is one long line walking in the open.

They know where the points are. We publish them. They came to Cold Shoulder four days after the reassignment went on the return.

I would not choose this. I would take it if there was not a pass.

Raven put the sheet down.

"And I’m signing it now," she said. "Because there is a pass."

Nobody argued. Aren watched the room not argue and understood that everybody at the table had already done the arithmetic, and that the arithmetic was the same for all of them, and that nobody wanted to be the one to say the number of teams that might not come back.

"As for the rest," Raven said, "nothing, from here. Nothing anybody on this mountain can do."

Shen Wuyan had not spoken. She spoke now.

"That is not true."

Raven turned.

"It is not true that nobody can do anything. It is true that nobody here can." Shen Wuyan did not raise her voice. "The boy has just told you that the argument is settled in the house in winter by the people who are inside it. Then the only thing that changes it is somebody inside it saying the other thing. The clans do not take a word from outside. They take a word from a person who stood in front of people and said it."

"We haven’t got anybody inside."

"You have somebody who was." Shen Wuyan looked at Aren, and then away from him, deliberately, so that it was not a demand. "And his mother is at the second pass. And the exile who lost the argument is dead on the north road and cannot say it again, and there is nobody else living who has stood in front of a clan and said not the children out loud and been heard."

***

Aren understood about a second before anybody else in the room, and it went into him under the ribs the way his father’s words had in the forge yard in the spring.

Not him. He was nine and on the wrong side of the mountain and a pass that would shut in ten days, and nobody in the north would take a word from a child.

His mother.

Freya was not an exile. Aren was nearly sure of that, and not completely, because nobody had ever said it out loud, and in the north nobody said that out loud. She had gone with one. She had walked out with his father and with him, and her own clan was gone now, gone in the second month in the east and high where nothing was on the way to anything.

He did not know whether that made her a person the middle country would stand still for at a fire.

He knew that she had walked at the back of every leg since the ninth month and that the teams at the points stood still when she counted, the way they stood still for the girl.

He knew that nobody else alive had a better chance.

And he knew that the pass would shut, and she would be on the wrong side of it until spring, in a country that would not feed a southerner and would not easily feed anybody who had come home to tell them they were wrong.

"You can’t ask her."

"No." Raven had not moved. "I can’t. Nobody in this room can."

"Then who does?"

Raven looked at him for a long moment, and he saw her decide not to make it easier.

"The only person who’s allowed to ask Freya Frostborn to stay north through a winter," she answered, "is Freya Frostborn. And the only thing I can do is make sure she has every part of it in front of her before the pass shuts, including what the boy said in the forge, in his words. After that it’s hers."

***

The northern girl found him in the linen room that evening, because he had not come to do the linen, and stood in the door with her arms folded exactly the way his mother did.

"You were in the Hall."

"Yes."

"About the pass."

He had not told her there was a pass. He looked at her, and she looked back, and he understood that everybody in the east barracks from the middle country had known since the first frost, because they were from there and they had not needed a letter.

"The ones who aren’t sent," she said, in Old Northern, quietly, so the little ones would not hear. "That’s what you told them."

"Yes."

She was quiet for a moment.

"I’ve got a cousin," she said. "Not sent." Then, before he could say anything: "Don’t. I don’t want you to say anything. I wanted one person to know, and it isn’t going in anybody’s book."

Then she handed him half the stack of sheets, and they folded them without talking until the stack was done.

***

Aren wrote it himself.

Raven offered to, and he said no, and she did not argue. He sat on the anvil block in the cold forge with a board across his knees and wrote to his mother in Old Northern, because that was the language she would read it in first, and then under it in the common tongue, smaller, because Raven had done that with the chair and he had thought it was right.

He wrote what he had said in the forge. He wrote that the route took the ones who came and could not take the ones who did not. He wrote that the ones who did not come were the ones on the list, and that it would be decided in winter, in the houses, by the people inside them.

He did not write stay. He did not write come home. He had thought about both for a long time and had decided that either one was him asking, and that the whole point of what Shen Wuyan had said was that nobody was allowed to ask.

At the bottom he wrote the only other thing he could think of that was true.

I am all right. I sit on Father’s block in the mornings. I have not let anybody clean the trough.

Then he took it up to the Hall himself and put it in the rider’s bag, and stood there while the rider went out through the north gate into the first of the real cold, and counted the weeks again on his fingers, and needed one hand and a bit of the other, and thought that in ten days he might need both hands and not know for how long.