Chapter 158: Nobody Ever Asked Him

It was Min who found it, and that makes total sense, because she’s the only person in this whole place who has never once been impressed by any of us.

She’d been working the resettlement barns for a season by then, doing her usual thing — walking in, saying I know, and just not leaving. She showed up at the path one night with her jaw set like she was about to drop some heavy news.

"Your weaver," she said.

"Tang’s weaver? Qiao."

"So you do know his name."

"I asked. Four months ago."

"Good. Now ask me what he does." Min sat down without waiting for an invite. "He weaves. That’s not a job he had, it’s what he is. He ran a shop with six people under him. He knows a way of setting a loom that I haven’t seen since I came up here — and I’m from his century, and I’d never even seen it, because it was a coast thing and I’m inland."

"All right."

"He has been in that cottage four years." She leaned in closer. "Four years, in a town with a wool market, and not one person has asked him to weave a single thing. Not one. They bring him food. They fixed his shutter last winter. But nobody has asked him a question."

I just sat there with that.

"They’ve been kind to him," I said.

"They’ve been kind to him the way you’re kind to a cupboard you can’t move," Min shot back. "He’s not a person who lives there; he’s a thing that got put there. And he has spent four years being grateful about it while slowly going out of his mind."

— • —

I went to see Qiao first, because it felt wrong to arrange a man’s life right in front of him without even knocking.

He made me tea and then apologized for the tea twice.

"Min says you ran a shop," I said.

"A long time ago."

"Six people."

"Seven, at the end. One was no good." He sat across from me, hands wrapped around his cup. They were a weaver’s hands, but they had nothing to do. "Has somebody complained about me?"

"No."

"You can say if they have. I know about the cottage." He said it steady. "There’s a young man it was meant for. I’ve seen him at the brewer’s. I’ve thought about going and saying something to him like fifty times, but I don’t know what I’d say. ’Sorry your council gave me your house’ isn’t really how you start a talk."

"You could start with anything. He’d take it."

"Maybe." Qiao turned the cup over in his hands. "Can I tell you the part nobody believes? I’d give it back. Today. I’d sleep in a barn quite happily." He looked up at me. "That’s not the thing that’s wrong with me. The thing is that I’ve been here four years and I’ve not made anything. Not one piece. I’ve got a loom in that room I could set in an afternoon, but I haven’t touched it, because—"

He stopped.

"Because?"

"Because nobody’s ordered anything," Qiao said. "And I’m not going to sit in a house I was given and weave cloth nobody asked for. That’s not work; that’s a hobby for a man who’s being kept." He set the cup down. "I’d rather be a nuisance in a barn than a pet in a cottage. I just haven’t found a way to say that to anybody without sounding ungrateful."

"It doesn’t sound ungrateful."

"It does," said Qiao. "It sounds exactly like that. I’ve practiced."

— • —

So I went back and sat in the bad chair.

"Your son," I said. "Kai. What’s he do?"

Tang’s mouth went tight. "Nothing. That’s the whole complaint, isn’t it? He does bits. He carts for the brewer three days a week."

"Does he want to?"

"He wants a house."

"Does he, though?" I asked. "Or does he want a living? Because a man of twenty-six with a trade can get a house in about six years, while a man of twenty-six with no trade can get a house tomorrow and still be carting for the brewer at forty."

Tang didn’t like that. I watched him not like it for a while.

"There’s no trades going," he said. "The guild takes two a year, and it’s always the same families."

"There’s a master weaver in your son’s cottage who has been sitting there for four years with no apprentice."

Tang just stared at me.

"He’s a returned," he said.

"He’s a weaver who ran a shop with six people under him and knows how to set a loom in a way nobody in this province has seen in nine hundred years." I stood up. "Tang. I’m not asking you to like it. I’m asking you to send your boy over to knock on his own cottage door and ask the man a question."

"And if he says no?"

"Then he says no, and you’ve only lost an evening." I put my hand on the door. "You’ve nodded at that man for four years. You could just ask him something."

— • —

Kai went round. I wasn’t there, and I’ve heard it three different ways since, so I’ll give the version Min got, which I trust because she got it straight from Qiao.

Kai knocked on the door of the cottage he had been waiting four years for, stood there, couldn’t think of anything to say, and finally blurted out, "My dad says you weave."

And Qiao — who hadn’t been asked a question in four years — said, "...Yes."

"Is it hard?"

"Yes."

"Could I see?"

And that was it. Just like that. An hour later, they were both sprawled on the cottage floor with a loom pulled into pieces, and Qiao was rambling about tension — something he’d explained to six apprentices nine hundred years ago — while Kai messed it all up and Qiao kept correcting him, which was the first time in four years that anyone in town had treated the weaver like his words actually mattered.

Kai finally dragged himself home at two in the morning, his hands covered in dye and his mouth unable to stop running.

Tang caught up with me eleven days later by the fire. He stood there, waiting.

"It’s not the cottage," he said.

"No."

"He’s in it every day. He sleeps at my place and never sets foot in his own bed." Tang glared at the flames. "Doesn’t fix the houses, though."

"No. It doesn’t."

"There’s still three hundred and twelve of them and the same shitty wells."

"Yes."

"Right." He turned a piece of wood over in his hands. "The council is going to un-pause the placements. I’m telling them at the next meeting, and I want Ji Lan there, just like before, because I said the other thing in public and it’s only fair." He looked miserable. "I’m also going to tell them the houses aren’t finished and you lot have eleven years of work to do, and I’ll be at every single meeting until it’s done."

"Good," I said.

"I’m not being nice about this."

"I don’t want you to be nice," I replied. "I want you at every meeting."

— • —

It spread the way true things always do — which is to say, unevenly — and I need that unevenness written down.

Xue Ningzhi’s people started asking one thing at every barn: *what do you do?* Not how are you, not what do you need. Eight million people from a thousand years ago, and nobody had stopped to ask what they were actually good at.

The answers came back and completely overwhelmed her. Dyers who knew shades that had vanished from the world. A woman who read a river like Nai’s people read a swell. Four hundred and nine boat-builders from a coast that didn’t have a single dock anymore. A man from the first age — the *first* age — who spent two weeks explaining a way to set a broken arm that Mu Chen has since taught to nine thousand healers, and which he claims is better than our own methods.

In about a third of the towns, it didn’t change a damn thing. No wool market, no guild, no boats to build, and just not enough land to go around — and no amount of craft can fix that. Those places just got builders, a strict schedule, and a woman from Xue Ningzhi’s office who showed up every season, invited or not.

"A third isn’t a victory," Xue Ningzhi said.

"It’s not nothing."

"No," she agreed. "It’s not nothing. Write it down as a third. If we pretend it worked everywhere, we’ll stop showing up for the other two."

DING. Reach: growing, slowly, town by town. Belief: grudging. Filed: a twenty-six-year-old kid knocked on a door he’d hated for four years and said "my dad says you weave," and a guy who hadn’t been asked a question in four years actually said yes. Talent, I want to note one thing and then I’m done. I’ve put out legends about you that shook the sky. This is just two guys on a floor with a broken loom, arguing about tension. It’s got a better completion rate than the sky stuff. I have no idea what to do with that information.

— • —

The warm — late.

I made soup. Su Yue burnt something in it, on purpose now, which she keeps calling a ’technique.’

"A third," Tao Tao said, chewing. "Those are terrible odds."

"They’re the odds," Xue Ningzhi said.

"I’m going to the other two."

"I know. I already put you down for eleven of them."

"Eleven?"

"You said it really loudly," Xue Ningzhi replied, "right in front of me, and I had a pen."

Min ate with us for the first time that night, and she criticized the soup in a way that made Yun Shu look at her with genuine respect.

"It’s thin," Min said.

"It’s always thin."

"You could at least put a bone in it."

"He won’t," Yun Shu said. "I’ve asked for nine years."

"It’s not that kind of soup," I said.

"It’s not any kind of soup," Min said. "It’s just hot water with an opinion."

Yun Shu put her spoon down and asked, "Where have you been?" And they’ve been friends ever since, which has been almost entirely at my expense.

Later, when it was finally quiet, Yun Shu leaned against my shoulder. "Eleven years of building."

"About that."

"You’ll be at every one of those meetings with the turnip man."

"Probably."

"Good," she said. "It’s a small, loud life. It’s supposed to have meetings in it."