Chapter 580 - 579: Fourteen

Chapter 580: Chapter 579: Fourteen

Location:Seven Peaks — The Hall; The East Barracks

Date/Time:TC1857.12.28 – TC1858.01.01

Kairos made the tea too strong on the twenty-eighth, and Raven drank it anyway, standing at the Hall window at the second hour, and it tasted of the pot and of the leaf left in too long and faintly of iron, the way everything tasted of iron at Seven Peaks in the last week of the year when the water came up from the deep cistern because the high one had frozen.

She liked it. She had never told him that. He had never asked, and made it too strong every morning, and she had begun to suspect that he knew exactly how strong it was.

The letter from Windbreak was on the table behind her. She had read it twice and was waiting for the tea to finish before she read it a third time, because she already knew what it said, and the third reading was for finding out what she thought about it.

***

The renewal is on the ninth. It has to be in front of all four. I am offering Windbreak and I have already asked the other two, which I would not have done a year ago without asking you first, and I am telling you that I did it so you can tell me whether it was wrong.

The Empire says yes. The roads south of the Imperial City are open in winter; they always are; that is the entire reason the Imperial City is where it is. The Federation says yes, through the Assessor, who has apparently been given the renewal as a standing duty and wrote to me herself in a hand I would not have guessed.

That leaves you.

I know you cannot come. I read your four lines at the pavilion in the sixth month, and I have not forgotten one of them, and a room with three governments in it and you at the table is a room that sixty of them know the address of. I would not ask you, and I am not asking.

So I am asking the other thing. Who comes?

Your signature line is reviewed on the ninth. You wrote that yourself. For herself and for those who choose to be bound by her hand. I have read that line more times than I have read anything in the Compact, including my own clause, and I think the room will read it on the ninth with you not in it, and I think whoever is standing where you would have stood is going to be asked what the line means with the hand absent.

I do not know who that should be. I would like to know before the other two do.

Raven put the cup down.

"He’s worked it out," she told the window.

"Yes," Kairos said, from the table, where he was reading something else and had not been. "Several days before you did, if the date on it is honest. Which it will be. He is a man who dates things honestly."

"I can’t go."

"No."

"And whoever goes is the answer."

"Whoever goes," Kairos said, "is an answer. Whether it is the answer is what three governments will be sitting there to find out." He turned a page he was not reading. "I would observe that you have eleven days, and nine of them are road, and that you have been given a count by three people who read every word of the half-sheets, and that you have not yet asked any of the three what they would do with it."

***

Thorne brought the other letter on the thirtieth, because it had come through the channel and everything through the channel came through him, and he brought it to the Hall and not to her rooms, because it had come on Imperial stock and she had a rule about Imperial stock.

"It’s for the boy," Thorne told her. "Not for you. It says so on the outside."

Raven looked at it without taking it.

For Tianlei, on the thirty-first, to be read to him by whoever he would like to have read it, and not by anybody he would not.

"He can’t read," Raven pointed out.

"No." Thorne did not put it down. "That’s why it says what it says. I think it’s the most careful thing he’s ever sent this mountain, including revision ten."

She thought about it for a long moment. The boy had done nothing to her. She had said that to the Hall once and meant it, and had built a room around it and a rule and a man who timed his silences and died in a corridor for him. The boy was not his father, and he was four tomorrow.

"Ask him. Tomorrow. Who he’d like to read it. Don’t tell him what’s in it and don’t tell him who it’s from until he’s picked."

"And if he picks you?"

Raven did not answer that.

"Then I’ll read it," she said eventually. "And I’ll read it the way it’s written and not the way I’d like it to be written, and you’ll be in the room, and it’ll go in the book that it was read and by whom and nothing else."

***

The birthday was in the east barracks because the northern girl had decided it would be.

Nobody had asked her to decide. She had heard in the linen room on the twenty-ninth that the small boy on the east side who lived in the room with the night book had a birthday on the last day of the year, and she had gone to Sera Vahn — not to Raven, to Sera Vahn, which Raven thought about afterward — and said that in the north you did not have a birthday alone in a room with one adult and a book, you had it with whoever was in the house, and the house was the barracks now, and the barracks was full of people who knew how to do it properly.

Sera Vahn had said it was not her decision.

The northern girl had said she knew that, and she was not asking for a decision; she was telling somebody who would not have a view, so that there would be one person on the mountain who had heard it before it happened.

So it happened.

***

Raven’s rule from the year before was still the rule. Nobody watches the birthday child in any way he could notice. She had said it again that morning, to Sera Vahn and Mira and Thorne, and all three had nodded, and Sera Vahn had added quietly that the night book was for nights and that she would not be keeping it in the barracks in the afternoon, and that she was writing that down too, so that the gap was on the page as a decision and not as an absence.

Raven stood at the back by the door with her hands in her coat.

She did not take them out. She noticed that she did not, about a quarter of an hour in, and left them there.

The barracks was loud. Every child in it and the adults who looked after them and a meal that the northern girl had organized out of whatever the kitchen had been willing to give her, which was more than the kitchen gave anybody else, because the kitchen had learned in the autumn that it was quicker to give the northern girl things than to discuss them. Aren was running a game in the far corner and had lost control of it inside five minutes, which was a tradition. The eleven-year-old was counting something under her breath. The nine-year-old from the forty-one was counting something else, and the two of them had noticed each other and were now counting at each other, competitively, in Old Northern, across the room.

Tianlei was in the middle of it with honey on both hands.

He did not know most of these children. They did not know him. It did not appear to matter to any of them in the least. A small northern boy of about five had taken charge of him on arrival and was showing him how to do something with a length of string that involved both of their hands and a great deal of concentration, and Tianlei was getting it wrong and laughing about getting it wrong, and the northern boy was patient in the way of children who have been looked after by older children all their lives.

Raven watched the string and not the boy. That was allowed.

She had not been in a room this loud since the summit, and the summit had been loud in a different way — three governments being careful at each other. This was the other thing. Nobody in the barracks was being careful about anything. A child near her knocked a cup of milk off a bench, and three others fell on the puddle to see who could make it bigger, and an adult from the kitchen looked at the mess and then at the room and decided, visibly, that it could wait until tomorrow.

***

It happened at about the fortieth minute.

The string was between them. The northern boy had just shown him the move again. Tianlei’s hands went up to do it.

And stopped.

Not the hands. Him. The hands stayed where they were, halfway, with the string across them and honey on the fingers. His face stayed where it was. And the thing that had been in his face — the laughing, the attention, the four-year-old wanting very badly to do the string thing right — was not there any more. There was nothing in its place. His eyes were open and they were turned very slightly east, toward the wall, toward nothing, toward the ground under the wall and a great deal of ground under that.

Nobody was watching him. That was the rule. Nobody in the barracks was watching him.

Raven was not watching him either. She was watching the string.

She counted anyway. She could not have stopped herself counting if every life on the mountain had depended on it.

One. Two. Three.

The northern boy said something to him. He did not answer.

Seven. Eight. Nine.

Across the room, the two counting girls were still counting at each other.

Eleven. Twelve.

Twelve was the most Aldis Stell had ever written. Twelve was the top of the number that had been in the book for eight months.

Thirteen.

Fourteen.

And he was back. The hands finished the move. The string went wrong. He laughed. The northern boy said it was wrong again and showed him, patiently, and he tried again, and there was honey on the string now, and neither of them cared.

No blood. She would have seen blood. She was watching the string, and the string was right under his face.

***

She did not move from the door for another twenty minutes.

Her hands stayed in her coat. She was aware of them there the whole time, pressed flat against the lining, and of what they would have done if she had taken them out, and she did not take them out.

Kairos had come in at some point and was standing at the other side of the door, and he did not look at her and did not say anything, and when the game in the corner finally collapsed entirely, and Aren came over to complain about it he answered all of Aren’s complaints in full, one at a time, gravely, while Raven stood beside him and did not have to say anything at all.

***

Tianlei chose Thorne to read the letter.

Raven had not expected that and understood it immediately. Thorne was the man who wrote things down and never tried to be interesting, and the boy had been living for eight months with a man like that and then a woman like that, and when he was asked who he wanted, he picked the one who was most like the room he slept in.

Thorne read it standing, in the corridor outside the barracks, with the boy on the bench and Raven at the end of the corridor and Sera Vahn at the other end, and nobody else.

It was short.

Happy birthday. You are four. I am in a city with a great many stairs in it, and I count them when I go up, which is a thing I did not used to do. I am told you count things too.

I will not be there. I was there last year, and I am sorry I cannot be there this year. That is not your fault or anybody’s on the mountain. It is only where I have to be.

I have sent a stone from the garden here. It is not special. It is smooth because water has been going over it for a long time. I thought you might like to hold it.

I am your father. I will be that for as long as you want me to be. You do not have to decide anything about it now or ever.

Tianlei held out his hand for the stone.

Thorne gave it to him. It was gray and round and entirely ordinary, and the boy held it in both of his honey-sticky hands and turned it over twice and looked at it with great seriousness.

Then he looked up at Thorne.

"Is that all of it?" he asked.

Thorne did not look at Raven. He looked at the boy, and spoke to him as a clerk.

"That’s all of the letter," he answered. "That’s all of the part he wrote down."

Tianlei considered that, and nodded, and got down off the bench and went back into the barracks with the stone in his fist.

***

Raven went to Sera Vahn’s room that night, before the book was opened, and stood in the doorway.

"I’ve got a number. For the first column. I wasn’t timing, and I wasn’t watching. I was watching a piece of string. But I counted."

"Say it."

"Fourteen. At about the fortieth minute. Eyes east. No blood." Raven did not come in. "That’s all of it. That’s all of the part I could see."

Sera Vahn opened the book and wrote it — the date, the time, fourteen, counted by Raven, not timed, during the birthday, eyes turned east, no blood observed — and then, without being asked, drew a small line under the number and wrote beside it, in the same size: above the previous highest recorded (twelve, Aldis Stell). Below the threshold of twenty.

She did not write anything else. She closed the book.

Out on the east terrace, at the turn of the hour, somebody in the barracks started counting down in Old Northern and every child in the building joined in, and the year went over, and it was TC1858, and nobody anywhere on Seven Peaks except the woman standing in a doorway with her hands in her coat was thinking about the number fourteen.