Chapter 144: — "The Day"

Daren arrived at the Arden house at fourth bell in the morning with bread.

Kael was already up. Kael had been up since second bell — Daren established that within about nine seconds, because the kitchen was clean and the kitchen was never clean, and a man who has scrubbed a kitchen at three in the morning has not been sleeping.

“You’ve cleaned the—”

“It needed doing.”

“At three.”

“It needed doing,” said Kael, and did not turn round.

“Go on then,” said Tax, from the windowsill.

“No.”

“Kael.”

“No.”

“Four years,” said the crow. “Three nights a week. A building three roads east. Considerable cost to everyone’s sleep. Let’s see it.”

“It’s not a—”

“Do the first one,” said Daren, through bread.

Kael put down the cloth.

Turned round.

And smiled.

Daren dropped the bread.

“That’s disgusting.”

“You asked—”

“That’s a weapon—”

“You asked—”

“I’ve forgotten what I came here for,” said Daren, retrieving the bread off the floor. “I came here at four in the morning with a purpose and it’s gone.”

Tax, drily: “Do the third.”

“No.”

“Do the third—”

Kael leaned on the doorframe.

Daren made a small sound and left the room.

“He’ll use the fourth one today,” said Tax, when he’d gone.

Kael picked the cloth back up.

“Probably too early,” said Tax. “Probably badly. And then he’ll be furious about it for a week.”

“I’m not using anything.”

“Mm,” said Tax.

He was at the gate by sixth bell.

The road was empty. It was going to be empty for hours — he’d known that when he walked down. He’d known it while he was putting his coat on.

He stood there anyway.

There was a particular bend about four hundred feet up where the road came out from behind the hedge, and anything coming south appeared there first, and he had worked that out at some point in the first hour and had not looked anywhere else since.

Daren came at seventh with more bread and said nothing.

Tax arrived at eighth and sat on the post.

By tenth bell Kael had stopped pretending to do anything but watch a bend in a road.

Five years.

He’d stopped counting in years at some point — years were too big to be useful. He’d gone to seasons, and then to months, and somewhere in the fourth year he had caught himself counting in weeks and had been so appalled that he had stopped counting altogether for eleven days.

Then started again.

He knew things he should not have known. He knew that the winter road out of Varen cleared in the third week of the thaw. He knew that a carriage did eleven leagues on a good day and seven on a bad one. He had asked a merchant about it once, four years ago, casually, in a doorway, and had never forgotten a single figure the man said and had never once asked anybody else because asking twice would have meant something.

He knew she would be twenty-one.

That was the one that got him, when it got him. Not the distance. The arithmetic.

Sixteen when she went. Twenty-one coming back.

He had done the same five years. He’d had them here, in a house, on a road, in a storehouse three roads east, and every one of them had happened to him in a place she had never seen — and every one of them had happened to her in a place he could not picture.

He’d tried. He’d tried for four years to build the room she slept in and had never got further than a window, because he had nothing to build it out of. She had never told him. He had never asked.

Cold, he thought. That’s all I’ve got. Cold, and it’s serious, and the soup is bad.

Five years of a person and he had the soup.

“You’ve done that four times,” said Daren.

“Done what.”

“Touched the braid.”

“I haven’t.”

“Four times in an hour,” said Daren. “I’ve never once seen you touch it in three years. So I’d like it noted that I’ve noticed.”

Kael put his hand down.

He looked at the bend.

“I don’t know what she’s going to look like,” he said.

“She’ll look like her.”

“She was sixteen.”

“So were you—”

“She was sixteen and she had a bag and she went up a road at five in the morning and I stayed at the bottom of it because she asked me to.” Kael’s voice did not change at all, which was somehow the worst part. “And I’ve had five years to imagine a face, and I’ve done it every day, and I’ve got it wrong, Daren. I know I’ve got it wrong. She’s been becoming somebody the entire time and I’ve been standing here maintaining a picture of a sixteen-year-old.”

Daren didn’t say anything.

“That’s the part,” said Kael. “Not the waiting. I can wait. I’m extremely good at waiting, it’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at.” He looked at the road. “It’s that she’s already there. Whoever she is now — she’s already finished becoming it. It happened without me. It’s been happening for five years four hundred miles away and I’ll meet the result of it at a gate.”

The news came at half past eleven.

Nothing came officially. A man came up the road on a tired horse and stopped at the inn at the crossing, and by the time it reached the gate it had gone through four people and grown in three of them.

Daren went and got it and came back at a speed that told Kael everything before he opened his mouth.

“There’s — Kael—”

“Say it.”

“There’s talk of something in the north. Varen.” Daren was still catching his breath. “A slip. A collapse. Something in the passes. He says the eastern roads are shut and the relay at Vell is—”

“Vell.”

“He said Vell.”

Kael did not move.

“How does he know.”

“He came through. Four days ago, maybe five. Turned back and came south and he’s been telling it at every stop.” Daren’s hands were doing something. “Kael, he’s a traveller. He might have it wrong. He might have got it from someone who had it wrong—”

“Four days.”

“Four. Maybe five.”

“Then either she’s four days ahead of it,” said Kael, “or she’s in it. And there’s no way to know which, because there are three roads south and I don’t know which one they put her on.”

He was still watching the bend.

“I don’t know which road,” he said again, quietly, as though testing whether saying it twice made it more bearable.

It did not.

He stood at that gate for six more hours.

Daren tried twice to get him inside and gave up both times.

Tax said nothing at all, which was worse than anything he could have said, and did not leave the post.

Mid-afternoon a farm cart came round the bend, and Kael’s entire body changed before it was close enough to see properly — and then it was close enough to see properly, and it was a farm cart.

Daren watched that happen.

Then went and stood four feet away, facing the same direction, and stopped talking, because by then it was obvious that talking made it worse.

At some point Kael said, to nobody:

“She never wrote.”

Daren looked at him.

“Two years,” said Kael. “And I’ve never been angry about it. I want that understood. Not once. I’ve had two years and I’ve never got to angry.”

“Kael—”

“I’ve been afraid of it,” he said. “That’s the whole of it. That’s all it’s ever been. She stopped, and everyone else says she stopped writing to them too, and that should be a comfort and it isn’t — because it means whatever happened is big enough to take everybody, and I’ve had two years to imagine what’s big enough to take everybody.”

The road stayed empty.

“And now a man on a horse says the passes came down,” said Kael, “and I find I’ve already imagined this. I’ve imagined this exactly. I’ve had this precise afternoon four or five times in the last two years, lying in a room, at about three in the morning.”

“That’s not—”

“It’s not the same,” Kael agreed. “It’s worse. It’s worse because I recognise it.”

At dusk he said:

“She might not come today.”

“No.”

“It was never a date. It was a year. Five years isn’t a day, it’s a season — it could be a month either side, it could be two—”

“Yes.”

“I built a day out of it.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been standing at a gate.”

“Yes,” said Daren. “Since sixth bell. I know. I’ve been here.”

Kael’s hand went to the braid, and he caught it, and put it down.

“It might be nothing,” he said. “It’s a man on a horse. It’s four people deep by the time it got here. Half of it’s probably invented and the other half’s probably a different pass in a different year—”

“It might be nothing.”

“It’s probably nothing,” said Kael.

Neither of them believed it. Both of them let it stand.

He turned round at last.

And Daren — who had spent four years three nights a week in a storehouse teaching this man to have a face — looked at that face and immediately wished he hadn’t.

It wasn’t one of them.

It was whatever they had built the rest on top of.

“Four years of that,” said Kael quietly, “and I’ve been standing here since sixth bell trying to work out which one you’re supposed to be when you don’t know if she’s alive.”

Tax said nothing.

“There isn’t one,” said Daren.

“No,” said Kael.

And he went back to the gate, and stood facing the bend in the road, in the dark, where nothing was coming.