Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 549: Chapter 544: The Roll

Location:Kaelport — The Lower Yard

Date/Time:1 Emberrise, 9943 AZI — Kindleday, Afternoon

Realm:Lower Realm

The enrolling itself was chaos, and Eden enjoyed every minute of it.

A boy of about eight arrived at the table alone, gave a name, and then stood there.

”Is somebody with you?”

”My brother.”

”Where is your brother?”

”He is nine, and he said it is probably a trick, so he is watching from the road to see what happens to me.” The boy considered. ”If it is fine, I am to wave.”

”Then wave.”

He waved, enormously, with both arms, for a considerable time. Nothing happened out in the road. He waved again. Eventually a second boy came through the gate at a walk that was trying very hard not to be a run, and arrived at the table with his chin up and said, before anybody asked him anything, ”I can already count.”

”How far?”

”All of it.”

”All of what?”

”All of the numbers,” said the nine-year-old, with the flat confidence of a person who has never been asked a follow-up question in his life.

Meifen wrote both names down without a flicker.

+++

A woman brought four and apologized for it, and could not say why when Bai Shu asked, and then admitted she had assumed a limit of one and had brought the others to argue about, and had had the argument ready in the road for an hour.

Nobody had a limit of anything, which turned out to be a difficult sentence to make people believe more than once.

A girl of eleven refused to give her age and then refused to give her name, and Meifen wrote the tall one, eleven, refused and told her she could correct it whenever she liked and that the slate was hers now, and the girl came back forty minutes later and corrected it, and then stayed to watch her own name being copied into the roll, and then asked whether the roll was kept somewhere with a lock on it.

Eden said it was. The girl said good, and went home.

***

The two boys with the brooms had, by mid-afternoon, established a system.

Eden watched it develop out of the corner of her eye across two hours. It started as sweeping. It became sweeping in shifts. By the third hour there was a rota chalked on the wall in a hand that could not spell Quenchday, and the elder boy was refusing to let a third child join on the grounds that the third child had not been there at the start, and Feng Lian had to come out and explain to a nine-year-old that he had just invented a guild and that it was not going to be permitted on the first day.

”On the second day?” the boy asked.

”Ask me on the second day.”

”He is going to ask you on the second day,” Eden said.

”I am aware,” said Feng Lian.

+++

At the third hour of the afternoon, a man came to the table with a boy of about fourteen behind him, and the boy did not want to be there and was there.

”He is too old.”

”How old is he?”

”Fourteen. Fifteen at Ashbloom.” The man had his cap in both hands and was turning it. ”I brought him anyway. I know what you will say. I would rather hear you say it than sit at home for a year wondering whether you would have.”

Eden looked at the boy. The boy looked at the wall.

”Can he read?”

”He knows his letters. Some of them.” The father said it fast, to get it over. ”He was on the field until this year. There was no time in it.”

And there it was, the second time that day — a machine at Anseth doing in a morning what four people did in a week, and a fourteen-year-old standing in a yard with nothing to do and nine years of nothing behind him.

”I do not have an answer for you today,” Eden said. ”I am going to have one by tonight. Will you wait?”

The man looked at her for a moment.

”He will wait,” he said. ”He has got very good at it.”

They sat on the wall by the gate for four hours. Eden knew, because she looked up twice and they were there, and the third time she looked up the boy had taken a slate off the end of the table without asking anybody and was copying letters off the rota on the wall with his back to the yard so that nobody could see him doing it badly.

***

There were six hundred and eighty by the time the light went, and the road was not empty.

Bai Shu had lost her voice. Feng Lian’s urn had been drained three times and refilled with something that was no longer entirely tea. The guild was still sweeping, with the terrible thoroughness of children who have decided that a broom is a position of authority, and had by then admitted two more members on terms nobody had been shown.

And the room was not big enough. That was tomorrow’s problem, and Eden was going to enjoy having it.

”Six hundred and eighty,” she announced, to nobody in particular, and to a yard that had four people left in it and none of them listening.

[Six hundred and eighty-three,] Zhi said. [Three did not give a name.]

Why not?

[They did not have one they wanted to say.] The small voice was entirely matter-of-fact about it. [I did not ask them. You do not ask.]

Eden sat down on the end of a bench.

No, she agreed. You do not.

***

She did the baskets by lamp, with the yard empty, because Qin had told her to, and she had not been able to think of a reason not to that survived saying it out loud.

There were sixty-one of them along the wall by then, and she had a name to go with forty, because people had started telling her without being asked once they saw Bai Shu writing the first few down. Eggs, mostly. Cabbages. A crock of pickle with a chip out of the rim that somebody had plainly not been able to spare. Two lengths of undyed cloth. A jar of honey with a name scratched into the wax in a hand that had not scratched many names into anything.

Twenty-one had nothing attached to them at all.

Eden wrote unnamed twenty-one times, in the same hand and at the same size as everything else, and then sat and looked at the page for a while, because Qin had told her to keep the list and had not mentioned what it was going to be like to keep it.

Then she put one line at the bottom, in smaller letters, for whoever read it in nine years.

Nobody was asked. Nobody was turned away. This is a record and not an account.

***

Jayde came at dusk, in the plain coat, and did not come into the yard.

That was deliberate, and Eden had stopped arguing about it around the fourth month. A yard with a commanding officer in it is a different yard, and there had been a great deal of care taken this year about which places had one in them and which did not.

She stood at the gate instead, with her hands in her pockets, and looked at the slates stacked in the crate.

”Six hundred and eighty-three,” Eden said. ”And I have told the rest to come back tomorrow, which they did not like.”

”How many did you plan for?”

”Sixty.”

”Good.” Jayde’s mouth moved. ”How many are Temple?”

”I do not know yet. Some. There was a man at the back all afternoon who did not enroll anybody and did not leave and wrote nothing down, and I am fairly sure he was counting.”

”Let him count.”

”He will report it.”

”I am counting on it,” Jayde said. ”There is no version of this that works if it is a secret. A school you have to whisper about is a recruiting office.”

***

She stayed a while, at the gate, not coming in.

”There is a boy sitting on that wall,” Eden said. ”He is fourteen. His father has been there four hours and has not come and asked me twice, which I think was on purpose.”

”What is your answer?”

”I do not have the authority to give one.”

”You have had the authority since Cinderfall, and you have not used it once, and one of these days I am going to stop pointing that out.” Jayde did not look away from the road. ”What is your answer?”

Eden took a breath.

”We take him. We take anybody up to fifteen at the door, and every single one starts at Grade 1 with the six-year-olds, because there is no other honest place to start a person who does not have his letters.” She had been building it for four hours, and it came out steadier than she expected. ”Fifteen is when you come in. It is not when you go out. He stays until he is finished, and if that puts him at the entrance two years behind the child he started beside, then he sits it two years behind her, and nobody writes an exception for him because there is no exception. That is simply what Grade 1 is when a person of fourteen walks into it.”

”He will be humiliated for a month.”

”Yes.”

”By six-year-olds, in public, where the whole district can see him.”

”Yes,” Eden said. ”And at the end of it he sits the same examination as everybody else with his name off the paper, and there is no version of this where I can spare him the month and still give him the years.”

Jayde was quiet for a moment.

”Write it down tonight,” she said. ”All of it, including the month, in the words you just used. It goes at the front of the charter. Because the first time somebody wants to make a separate class for the older ones out of kindness, that is the day this becomes two schools, and one of them will be the good one.”

”He took a slate,” Eden said. ”He did not ask. He has been copying letters off the broom rota for two hours with his back to the yard.”

”Then he is going to be a great deal of trouble,” Jayde said, ”and I would like him written down first tomorrow, in front of everybody, before the small ones.”

***

”They did not come for the school,” Jayde said eventually.

”No. They came because three students went home to Corran and talked, and because there are machines in the fields now and nobody has ever had a spare child before, and because there is a woman in that road who has been waiting three years for a letter.”

”They came because the word Obsidian was on it.” Jayde’s hands stayed in her pockets. ”That mountain has been standing there their whole lives and their grandmothers’ whole lives and every life behind that, and it has never once done anything for them, and it has never once lied to them either. That is a balance. It is not mine, and it is not Qin’s — he has only had the keeping of the last ten thousand years of it. Today I spent a great deal of it in one morning against a promise that does not come due for nine years.”

”That is what you wanted.”

”That is exactly what I wanted. Do not mistake what it was.”

Eden looked at the crate of slates.

”There will be a second one,” Jayde said. ”That is the part I want you thinking about tonight, and not the room being too small.”

”A second school?”

”A second offer.” Jayde was watching the road. ”Free, well-run, real teaching, boarding, and better housed than this by a good margin, because they can afford it and we cannot. And it will be genuinely good, Eden. That is the part people get wrong when they imagine it. It will not be a trap with a sign on it. It will be a very good school.”

Eden thought about a man in the road asking what it was for.

”And the difference is?”

”The difference is what happens to the ones who are excellent,” Jayde said it without any particular emphasis, which was how Eden had learned to tell she had been sitting on something for a while. ”Ours go into the corps and get paid. Theirs go somewhere and are useful.”

”You cannot say that to a parent.”

”No. I cannot.” Jayde turned to go. ”Which is why the entrance examination has her name off it and mine on it, and why every result gets read out in the yard where the whole district can hear, and why you are going to hate me by the third year for how much of that I am going to make you do in public.”

***

The last thing that happened was small, and Eden thought about it for a long time afterward.

She was locking the crate when the man from the morning came back into the yard, alone, without the girl.

”You wrote her down,” he said.

”I did.”

”I would like to see it.”

So Eden unlocked the crate and got out the slate and turned it round and held it up, and the man looked at his daughter’s name written in Meifen’s good, clear hand on a piece of slate in a cold yard, and did not touch it.

”There is no mark by it.”

”No.”

”There is a mark on everything.” He was not arguing. He was checking, the way a man checks a coin. ”Every list I have ever been on had a mark by my name. Somebody had put it there, and nobody ever told me what it was for.”

”There is no mark.”

The man looked at it a while longer.

”Then put one.” He said it flatly. ”A good one. Put whatever you put by the ones you are going to keep an eye on.”

”That is not how it—”

”I know how it works.” He was already turning away. ”I am asking you to do it anyway. Because in nine years somebody is going to read that list, and I want them to get to her name and stop.”

He went out through the gate and up the road, and Eden stood in the dark with a slate in her hand for some while.

Then she went and found the chalk, and did not put a mark by the girl’s name, because a promise made in a yard is worth more than a favor done in one.

She wrote the man’s request down instead, word for word, on the back of the slate, and dated it, and put it in the crate.

Somebody was going to want that in nine years.