Chapter 198: Lines

“So I need them to believe a needle can hurt me,” I said.

“Yes.”

“In about a minute.”

“Ideally.”

“How?”

The Scroll was quiet for a moment. Then it said, very carefully, in the voice it uses when it already knows the answer and would like me to arrive at it on my own:

“Talent. Is there anything you are afraid of. That is true. And small. And would embarrass you a great deal if eleven hundred million people knew it.”

I didn’t say anything.

From the doorway, Tao Tao said, “Needles.”

“Tao Tao.”

“He’s afraid of needles,” said Tao Tao, to the whole kitchen. “He always has been. He fainted at the herbalist’s in Greenmarch.”

“That was the heat.”

“It was a splinter,” said Tao Tao. “The herbalist got a splinter out of your thumb with a pin and you went down like a felled tree. I was there. I caught your head.”

“I’d like it noted,” said Bai Qing, from behind her, “that I saw that too.”

Everybody looked at me.

“It was a very large splinter,” I said.

“May I?” said the Scroll.

I closed my eyes.

“Yes.”

“May I?”

“Yes.”

“Talent. May I.”

“Just do it.”

[DING.] A NEW LEGEND HAS BEEN PUBLISHED. The Calamity That Walks is afraid of needles. He once fainted at a splinter. Source: two witnesses, one of whom caught his head. Accurate. Was this legend helpful? 👍

It went out. I felt it go. And I felt the world, all eleven hundred million of them, read it at once, and believe it, and laugh.

Maru dipped a fourth needle, looked at me with deep suspicion, and tried again.

It went in.

I yelped. I want that on the record. It was a short, high yelp, and Tao Tao has done it at me every day since. Maru drew a short neat line across the top of my ear, and wiped it, and sat back and said something with enormous satisfaction.

“She says,” said Nai, “now you look like somebody.”

— • —

Yun Shu didn’t need a legend.

I’d wondered, while I was clutching my ear, why her needle had gone straight in when she’s Mythic too, now, as of last week. I asked her afterwards.

“Nobody’s ever believed I was invulnerable,” she said. “Not once. Not even Heaven, when I worked for it.” She touched the blue line on her ear. “They believe I’m accurate. That’s different. Accurate isn’t armour. It’s the opposite. You have to stand there and let it get you.”

— • —

That should have been it. Two lines, two ears, a letter to Teru. Small.

Then Tao Tao came in from the doorway and sat down on the stool in front of Maru, and held out her ear, and didn’t say anything at all.

Maru looked at her, and then at me.

“She’s asking what Tao Tao is,” said Nai. “To you.”

I didn’t have to think about it. I’ve never had to think about it.

“Kin,” I said. “She’s kin. She was the first.”

So Maru put my line on Tao Tao’s ear, and Yun Shu’s next to it. And then Tao Tao looked at me, very fierce, with her chin going.

“And you have mine,” she said. “On yours. Under hers.”

“Of course.”

Her needle bent, the first time. Tao Tao’s Mythic too, now. She didn’t wait for the Scroll to ask.

“I’m afraid of spiders,” she said instantly. “Big ones. Publish it.”

“DING,” said the Scroll, delighted, and it went in.

— • —

After that it wasn’t small anymore. I don’t know why I ever thought it would be.

Xue Ningzhi came and sat down with her board on her knee and said she had made a list, and read it out. “Item one: needle. Risk: low. Item two: belonging somewhere. Risk: high.” She put the board down. “Accepted.” Her needle went in on the first try. Nobody has ever believed Xue Ningzhi was anything but careful.

Su Yue came in from the second tent with flour on their hands, having heard the yelp from across the yard, and asked what was going on, and Nai told them. Su Yue stood very still in the middle of the kitchen.

“I was the Lantern of the Nine Skies,” they said. “For a thousand years. I had the whole world’s eyes on me every night.” They looked at their own floury hands. “I never had a single line.”

They sat down on the stool. Maru looked at them. They looked at me.

“Kin,” I said.

Their needle bent twice. The third time, Su Yue said, “My bread is bad,” and the whole kitchen said “Yes,” together, with great feeling, and it went straight in.

— • —

Bai Qing came last.

She had stayed in the doorway the whole time, a head taller than everybody, with her arms folded. When the stool was empty she came in and sat down on it, very upright, the way she sits on a horse.

“Kin,” she said to Maru. Not asking. Just telling her.

Maru looked at me, the way she had for all the others.

But Bai Qing didn’t wait for me to answer. She looked at me herself, steadily, the way she’d looked at me on the jetty with her hand on my chest.

“I’ve stood at the edge of the firelight for fourteen years,” she said. “Every night. That’s where I stand. It’s the right place for me and I’ve never minded it.” She turned her head so Maru could reach her ear. “I’d like one line that says I was in the ring. That’s all. It’s the right size.”

I didn’t trust my voice. I said, “Kin.”

Her needle went straight in. Of course it did. Bai Qing has never once in her life asked the world to believe she couldn’t be hurt. She has only ever asked it to believe she’d hold.

— • —

Ji Lan didn’t sit down.

She stood in the doorway with her hands in her sleeves and watched every one of them, and when Bai Qing got up, everybody turned to look at her, and she shook her head.

“Not yet,” she said.

Nobody said anything.

“It’s not — ” She stopped, and started again, which Ji Lan never does. “I’m a writer. Every line I put down means something. I’m not having a line on my ear that says the wrong thing.” She looked at me, and then at Yun Shu, and then at the floor. “When I know what mine would mean, I’ll sit down. Not before.”

“Take your time,” said Yun Shu gently.

Ji Lan looked up at her.

“In Teru,” she said, “that means I missed you.”

“It means both,” said Yun Shu.

And Ji Lan laughed — a small, wet, surprised one — and stayed in the doorway, and didn’t go away, which I noticed.

— • —

We left a space on every ear. Maru said that was the custom. You leave a space next to your own line, on everybody’s, for the one who’s away. Mu Chen was in Teru with Kesa, sitting with grieving families on a cold coast, and he would come back in spring, and his line would go there.

Nai didn’t take a mark. Way-singers don’t. She said she’d do it her way instead, and the next night she sang a new verse into the end of the song that goes to Saltreach — a short one, with all our names in it, every one, in the order we’d sat down. She wouldn’t tell us what the tune meant. Ji Lan says it’s the best verse Nai has ever made.

And the Scroll, which has no ears, waited until everybody else had gone to bed, and then asked Maru — through Nai, very formally — whether a document could be kin.

Maru thought about it for a long time. Then she took the needle and the blue dye, and very carefully, at the very edge of the Scroll, where the gold runs out, she drew a short line.

The Scroll didn’t say anything for nearly a minute.

DING. Filed: the first document in the history of Heaven or earth to be kin. One line. Blue. At the edge. Talent — I have recorded the deaths of gods. I have filed the end of the longest story there is, and it was a plum. I have never once been in a record. Only the thing that kept it. Was this helpful? I do not have a word for what it was. 👍

— • —

The answer from Teru came back three nights later, along the song. Song brought it, and added a line of its own at the bottom, in the thin grey hand: I like the blue.

There was a page from Iri.

RECORD. Day 47. The cook and the reader were married all along. Nobody told us. Sesa says typical. — I.

There was a letter from Mu Chen, which said that Kesa had laughed with her mouth open for nearly a minute when Nai’s message was read out on the beach, and then sat down on the sand and asked him whether he’d like a line. She put it on me herself, he wrote. Her own. I’m kin to the keeper of the gap. I didn’t know what to say. I said thank you in Teru, and she said my accent was ashi-ne.

And there was a message from Kesa. Four lines, through Nai’s people, through the song.

She knew. From the way you stood, on the first evening. She was waiting for you to say. In Teru, you say. In spring she will put her own line on both of you. She has run out of room, so it will have to go on the other ear.

— • —

I made the soup that night with Taro’s recipe.

I want to be exact, because it only happened once. I used less. Less salt, less fish, less stirring, less of everything I normally do, which is everything. I stood over the pot for an hour with my hands behind my back so I couldn’t touch it.

Everybody ate it. Nobody said anything.

Then Tao Tao put her spoon down and looked at me, horrified.

“It’s good,” she said.

“Don’t tell anyone.”

“It’s actually good.”

“Talent,” said the Scroll, with a light in its voice I had not heard in years. “May I—”

“NO,” said the whole table, all at once. Me, and Yun Shu, and Tao Tao, and Bai Qing, and Xue Ningzhi, and Su Yue, and Ji Lan, and Nai by the fire, and Maru, who didn’t even understand the question.

The Scroll subsided.

“I understand,” it said, very sadly. “It would ruin everything.” A pause. “Also, talent. Before I forget. The first deep snow is in nine days. It has asked if it may come up again, the way it did last winter.”

“Of course it can.”

“It has asked,” said the Scroll, “if it may bring guests. Twelve of them. From a cove in Teru. They have never seen snow.” Another pause. “They are arguing about it already.”