Chapter 123: You say things like this on purpose

Getting out of bed took me four days. The healers had opinions about that. Old Liu’s daughter-in-law, a woman named Mei who set bones for a living, informed me that my core was "a dry well with a little damp at the bottom" and that I was forbidden from doing anything more strenuous than walking to the river and back. I tried to argue. She looked at me the way you look at a dog that has gotten into the pantry, and I stopped.

So I walked to the river. Qing Yan came with me, to make sure I didn’t fall in, she said. On the way back she kept her hand near my elbow without touching it, ready to catch me, and I pretended not to notice, and she pretended she wasn’t doing it. That was how the first week went.

On the sixth day, they buried the dead. I had missed the first burials, since I was unconscious, but Old Liu had been telling the truth. They had waited for the forty-one who had died in the Throat. We walked out to a low green rise above the river, where the villagers had dug a long row of graves and planted a young willow at each one. People stood in silence. A boy played a bamboo flute, badly, and nobody asked him to stop.

I had no speech. I stood at the end of the row with my hands at my sides and read the names Captain Ru had carved into wooden markers. A baker. Two brothers. A woman who had been a sect disciple once, before the demons took her sect. They were people who had been given three years of hiding and then one night of fighting, and had spent it well.

Qing Yan took my hand. She didn’t say anything. At the end of the service she bent and set a small flame on the nearest grave, a gold-red bead that hovered above the earth and did not go out. One by one, other people with fire in them did the same, until the whole rise was dotted with tiny lights in the dusk.

"My sect used did this," she said quietly. "For the fallen. We called it keeping the lamp."

"It’s beautiful."

"It is only a custom." She wiped her cheek with her sleeve. "But I am glad I remembered it."

Behind us, at the edge of the crowd, I saw Lu Chen standing alone. He wasn’t looking at the graves. He was looking at the little lights, and at Qing Yan among them, and when he noticed me looking he turned and walked down the hill. I let him. I told myself it was grief.

By the second week, I was allowed to do things, and I did what I always do when I’m given too much freedom, which is cause trouble.

Captain Ru gave me a seat at the council table, a long plank in the hall where she, Jiang Wei, Old Liu and four others went over the valley’s problems each morning. I sat in on the first meeting thinking I would listen, and it turned out to be a problem list that would have made a banker faint. Not enough grain for the winter. Not enough iron. Forty-three refugees in the south barns with nowhere else to go. A veil that held but could not be repaired, because nobody knew how it worked.

"Senior Barry," Jiang Wei said at the end of the first hour, "what do you think?"

"I think I used to run a ledger," I said, before I could stop myself.

Everyone looked at me.

"It’s a long story." I rubbed the back of my neck. "Basically, I know how to count things. Can someone get me paper?"

They got me paper. By the end of the week, I had a list of everything the valley owned, everything it needed, and how long each item would last at the current rate of use. It was not elegant. It was mostly scratches and arrows. But Captain Ru read it and said, very slowly, "You were a quartermaster."

"Something like that."

"Where?"

"Far away." I smiled. "Good enough to know we’ll run out of salt before the first snow."

That was how I ended up in charge of rations, which I had not expected, and also how I ended up in charge of the winter grain, the barn assignments, and the argument over whether the goats belonged to the village or to the man who had brought them. I settled that one by declaring the goats the property of the goats. It satisfied nobody and ended the argument.

I thought of the capital more often than I wanted to. I’d catch myself counting sacks of rice, and for a moment the sacks would be in a different warehouse, in a different hall, and I’d have to put the pen down. But it got easier.

I trained with Qing Yan in the mornings, after the council.

It began as a favor. She had Dawn and Dusk, and a growing sense that she did not know what to do with them, and I had two good arms and nothing to prove. We took a patch of dry ground behind the house, away from the village, and for an hour each day she showed me what her sect had taught her while I tried to explain what I had learned by getting hit.

I’m not a good teacher. I said things like "you’re leaning too far forward, so don’t." She’d stop mid-motion and glare at me, and I’d throw up my hands and say, "Fine, fine, do it your way, but when you fall on your face, don’t blame me." Once she did fall on her face. She got up, brushed the dirt off her robes, and said with great dignity that it had been deliberate.

But I watched her work, and what I saw was a woman who had spent three years with her power chained down, now learning to carry it again. She was good. Better than she knew. The fans didn’t answer her every time. Dawn would blaze for a minute and then go dull, sulking, and Dusk would refuse to open at all. But on the eleventh day, in the middle of a drill, both of them flared at once, gold and crimson, and a spiral of fire came off her hands in a shape that was almost, though not quite, a bird.

She stopped.

"Did you see that?"

"I saw it."

"That was a phoenix." Her voice rose. "Barry, that was the first stage of the Phoenix Descent, my teacher never taught me, it was in the sect scrolls, I only read about it, and I did it, I did it by accident—"

"You’re welcome."

"What?"

"You said it was an accident. So I’m assuming I’m the cause."

"You are not—" She stopped, caught my expression, and burst out laughing. She laughed until she had to put her hands on her knees. When she straightened, her cheeks were bright, her eyes shone. I realized I had never seen her happy before. Not like that.

I decided, very quietly, that I would do whatever it took to see it again.

The evenings were the worst, and the best.

We’d go back to the little house by the river, the same one with the same single bed, and neither of us had mentioned the arrangement since the night before the army came. It simply continued. She would wash at the basin, I would build up the fire, and we would sit on opposite sides of the table eating whatever Old Liu’s wife had left at the door.

She couldn’t cook. I discovered this on the ninth night, when she announced she was going to make dinner and produced something that was black on the outside and raw in the middle. She watched me take one bite, and her face fell so completely that I ate the entire thing out of sheer cowardice.

"You do not have to finish it," she said.

"It’s delicious."

"It is not. You are lying."

"I’m eating it. That’s the opposite of lying."

"You are making a face."

"It’s my face. It does that."

She laughed in spite of herself, then pushed the plate away, then pulled it back, then stole a bite from my side of the table and winced. "Oh, no. That is terrible."

"It’s the thought that counts."

"The thought was that I could do one thing correctly."

"You can do loads of things correctly. You can set fire to a mountain."

"That is not a household skill."

"It’s a skill," I said. "And if we ever have a camp, you’re in charge of lighting it."

She was quiet for a moment, the corner of her mouth twitching. Then she got up, came around the table, and sat sideways on the bench next to me, so close our knees touched.

"I–I will learn," she said. "I want to be good at something that is not killing."

"You’re good at plenty."

"Name one."

"You’re good at listening," I said. "At waiting. At looking at someone and knowing what they need before they’ve said it. It’s the thing I noticed first about you. Before the fire."

She went very still. The firelight moved on her face.

"Barry."

"Mm?"

"You say things like this on purpose."

"Sometimes." I turned my head. She was closer than I had realized. "Is it working?"

"It is a scandal," she said, in a small shaky voice, and kissed me on cheeks, even i got shocked for a second.