Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 551: Chapter 546: Not a Gift

Location:Zhū’kethara — the Integration Settlement, and the country north of it

Date/Time:14–15 Emberrise, 9943 AZI

Realm:Upper Realm

They sent for Lyria at the fourth hour, which told her most of what she needed to know before anybody said a word.

Nobody sends for the Prophetess about a missing child. You send for the watch, and the watch walks the settlement, and by the second hour somebody has found the child asleep under a cart. A woman is only fetched out of her bed at the fourth hour when the settlement has already done all of that twice and is beginning to be frightened of itself.

”How long?”

”Since the middle of the afternoon.” The caregiver had been running and had stopped being able to organize her face. ”They were in the yard at the noon bell. They were not in the yard at the second, and everybody thought they were with somebody else, and by the time we had finished each of us thinking that, it was dark.”

”Which two?”

The woman looked at her.

”Ah,” Lyria said. ”Of course.”

***

Asha and Mira had been the settlement’s weather for as long as there had been a settlement.

Four courtyard floods, the first of which had been an accident.

Two fires, neither of which had been.

The market fountain, which had run backward for a day and a half in Cinderfall and which nobody had ever managed to prove was them, though the settlement had gone on believing it with a good deal of confidence.

The winter the third cistern froze solid in Voidmarch and stayed frozen through the whole of Ashwhisper, because Mira had wanted to know whether she could hold it, and had found out that she could, and had then been unable to work out how to let go of it without taking the stonework with her.

The roof of the grain store, which Asha had gone up the outside of on a dare and come down the inside of through a hatch nobody had known was there, and which had had to be surveyed afterward by a man who did that for a living and who had found four things wrong with it and had thanked her in front of everybody, which had set the settlement back a full season.

And the steam demonstration, which had been banned by name after it triggered the ward alarms on the eastern face and brought out a full watch section who had been extremely willing to believe that something had finally come through the eastern wards, and who had arrived at a run to find two girls standing in a cloud of their own making, delighted.

It had not been malice, and nobody in the settlement had ever thought it was. It had been a pair of element-opposite twins with nothing whatever to do.

Somebody had eventually had the sense to put the pair of them into training, which is the one thing the settlement has done about any of this that worked.

It worked for about five weeks.

They are extremely good. Nobody argues about that any more, including the instructors, including the pair of them who asked to be moved. Asha does things with Inferno that the hall has no name for and cannot mark. Mira does things with Torrent that are worse, because Mira reads the form first and then does the thing the form exists to prevent, and then explains why, at length, to a man who has been teaching it for six hundred years.

And in Ashwhisper they had put the two together.

Nobody is entirely certain what they did. There is a scorched dish in the eastern practice ground some forty paces across, with a ring of frozen ground round the outside of it, and both girls walked out of the middle of it without a mark, and there is a very quiet standing order against doing it again. Eleven instructors and a Kael’thoren have spent the winter failing to reproduce it. Two of them have stopped trying and will not say why.

That is the part the settlement had not solved and had stopped pretending it was going to. There were schools for the small ones now and work for the grown, and in the middle there were four hundred adolescents who had been born into a life of being useful and had been moved, in one season, into a place where nobody needed them for anything, and the ones with the most in them were the worst off.

Asha had the most in her of anybody in the district. Mira had the second most, by about a minute of birth order and no margin at all in anything else, and was cleverer, which is a different and more dangerous thing.

”Where do they go?” Lyria asked. ”When they go.”

”The old aqueduct. The forge middens. The third cistern, which we have blocked twice.” The caregiver was counting on her fingers and getting slower. ”They have never gone past the wall. Not once. Asha will climb anything in this settlement, but she has never been outside it, because Mira will not, and Mira decides.”

”So Mira decided.”

”Yes,” the woman said, and her voice went. ”That is why I sent for you.”

***

Voresh was in the yard with the horses before she got there, which meant somebody had gone to him first, which meant they had all been more frightened than they had said.

He did not ask her anything. He handed her up and checked her girth strap himself as he had done every time for four years and would go on doing for the rest of their lives regardless of what she said about it, and then he put his hand flat on her knee for a moment.

”I am not going to be useful for an hour,” she said. ”I have to be quiet to see anything.”

”Then be quiet.” His copper eyes came up. ”We will ride, and you will sit in it, and when you have something you will say so, and if you never have anything we will find them the ordinary way. That is the arrangement, and it has always been the arrangement.”

Five leaves at his throat, and a sixth budding, where four years ago there had been one.

Lyria looked at that, as she looked at it perhaps twenty times a day and would have denied under oath, and then closed her eyes and started listening.

***

The five went out ahead of them.

All of them were Voresh’s bloodkin — men he had trained or fought beside or been dragged out from under something by, and every one of them had volunteered for a duty that has no end and no promotion and which is the highest thing an unmated male of that people can be given.

Zharek took the western line. Tharek took the eastern, because Tharek always took the eastern, for a reason that had been explained to Lyria once and had turned out to be that he had lost a coin toss some centuries back and had never conceded it.

They had been the youngest demons alive for eight thousand years, and they were not any more, and neither of them had entirely taken it in.

There had been one girl first, a little over a year ago. Lyria had watched the pair of them stand in a corridor afterward, saying nothing, for a length of time that had embarrassed everybody who walked past. Then six more inside the year. There are twelve women carrying now and twenty-three behind them and three hundred pairs on a list, and a demon of eight thousand can no longer walk the length of the Zhū’kethara market without going past something asleep in a sling.

Eight thousand years of being the last thing that ever happened to a whole people, and it had taken about a year to stop being true, and neither Zharek nor Tharek had once mentioned it.

”Crimson,” Zharek said, coming back in. ”The east wall, low down, either side of the culvert mouth. Handprints. Scorched in.”

”How old?”

”Today.” He delivered it to a point somewhere above Lyria’s head, which is what Zharek does instead of laughing. ”She went down a drain she has been told about eleven times.”

”And Mira?”

”There is no sign of Mira anywhere on that wall,” said Tharek, from the other side, ”which means Mira went out through the gate at the shift change like a person, and then waited for her sister on the far side and told her off.”

***

They found the tracks two hours out, and the tracks went the wrong way.

Not the road. Not the eastern margin, which is where a person imagines a runaway going, and which had been Lyria’s own first thought and was wrong. Not the aqueduct or the middens or any place a child goes to be somewhere else.

They went north, off the road, into country nobody has any business in.

”That is the old wood,” Voresh said.

”Yes.”

”There is nothing in the old wood.”

”Yes,” Lyria said. ”I know.”

He sat his horse for a moment and did not say the thing.

The country north of the settlement is not dangerous the way a rift is dangerous. It is dangerous as any large piece of ground is dangerous when nobody has walked it in living memory — there is no road in it and no ward line, and no reason for either, and the last people to put a name on any part of it did so before the Sundering and are all of them in the mountain now. It is not forbidden. Nobody has ever needed to forbid it. There is simply nothing out there, and a realm of eight million people has spent a great many centuries agreeing about that without once going to check.

Two girls had walked into it at dusk with no lamp and no coat worth the name and no notion at all that anybody would mind.

***

Lyria had sat in three separate councils about the four hundred and had watched every one of them solve a different problem instead, because the problem is not one a council can get hold of.

They are fed. They are housed. They are schooled, and the schooling is good, and some of the men who teach it came down out of the fortress to do it. They have ward lines and physicians and a law that covers them and a king who has never once had to be asked twice about any of it.

Every single thing in their lives was handed to them by somebody who meant it kindly.

That is the whole of it, and nobody in the settlement has ever managed to say it out loud, because said out loud it sounds like ingratitude and is not. A person can be glad of a roof every day she lives under it and still reach nineteen without ever once having had a thing of her own.

Lyria sat a horse in the dark on the north track and understood, with the particular flatness that arrives when a thing is obvious and has been obvious for four years, that a girl who has been given everything she has will eventually go looking for something nobody handed her.

And she takes her sister, because her sister will climb anything and never once asks why first.

***

They picked the trail up again a mile past the last cutting, and Voresh got down twice inside the hour and did not hurry either time.

”Both of them. Walking. Not hurried.” He came up and wiped his hands. ”And they have not cast about once. They went north the moment they were clear of the wall, and they have gone north ever since, which means they knew where they were going before they ever left the yard.”

”Then they got there.”

”They got there,” Voresh agreed. ”Lyria. It is nine hours.”

That was the whole of it, and neither of them said the rest.

The old wood is not one wood. It is what is left of something that was managed once and has had nobody in it since, and it goes on north for as far as anybody has bothered to look, and there are hollows in it and old cuttings and stretches where the trees stop for no reason a person can see. Nothing lives in there that would trouble a demoness of nineteen with Inferno in her hands.

But it is cold, and it is dark, and there is no wall in any direction, and neither of them had ever in their lives been outside one.

***

Lyria stopped at the edge of the trees and made everybody else stop.

This is the part she has never once been able to explain to anybody, including Voresh, including herself. It is not seeing. Nothing arrives as a picture, and nothing has ever arrived as a picture. What arrives is the shape of a thing that is going to happen, the way you know a room has somebody in it before you have looked.

She stood in the cold with her hand flat on a trunk and let it come, and what came was not fear.

That surprised her enough that she checked it twice.

”Anything?”

”They are alive,” Lyria said. ”They are together. They are not frightened.”

”That is good.”

”It is not good; it is odd.” She opened her eyes. ”Voresh, there is something down there that is going to matter, and it is not the girls, and I cannot see what it is because it has not happened yet.”

”Then we go and be there when it does,” Voresh answered, and took the lamp off her, and went in under the trees first, because he has gone in first every time for four years, and there is no arguing with a man about the one thing he was made for.

***

They found them at the fifth hour, four miles in, standing in a hollow where the trees stopped.

Asha was sitting on a fallen trunk with her arms round her knees and a small unhappy fire going in her cupped hands for the light. Midnight-black hair with the crimson through it, singed short at the ends as it always was. Green-gold eyes with the red flecks, and she had been crying and had stopped a while ago and had not bothered to do anything about her face.

Mira was standing in the middle of it.

Dark hair with the deep azure in it, and the same green-gold eyes with blue in them instead of red, and the angelic face that had got the pair of them out of more trouble than Asha’s climbing had ever got them into.

She had her boots off and her feet flat on the ground, and she had plainly been standing exactly there for a very long time, and when the lamps came round the edge of the trees she did not turn round.

”It is nobody’s,” Mira said.

Nobody answered.

”I have been here since the light went and I have walked the whole way round it twice. There is no marker on it. Nothing has been cut. There is no road to it and no ward on it and no rule about it, and nobody is going to come out in the morning and explain it to me kindly.” She still had not turned round. ”Everything we have was given to us. All of it. This is the first thing I have ever stood on that was not.”

Zharek came round the trees behind Lyria and stopped.

He did not make a sound. Lyria was looking at the girl and did not see it happen, and she has been sorry about that ever since.

”How far did you go?” Voresh asked.

”Until I found ground that nobody had got to first,” Mira said. ”It took four miles.”

***

Asha got up.

She got up slowly, because she had been sitting on a cold log for nine hours and was nineteen years old and had a great deal of pride, and she put the little fire out against her palm and came and stood beside her sister with her chin up and her face filthy.

”We are not lost,” she said. ”I want that written down somewhere. We knew exactly where we were the whole time, and we were coming back at the light.”

”Nobody said you were lost,” Lyria said.

”Everyone is going to say we were lost.”

”Then they will be wrong, and I will be there, and I am very difficult to argue with.” Lyria came further in. ”Mira.”

Mira turned round.

She had been crying too, at some point, and had made a better job of dealing with it than her sister, and the face that came round was not a child’s and had not been for some while.

”Everyone has been very good to us,” she said. ”I want that said first, because I am about to say the other thing and it will sound as though I have forgotten it. They have been very good to us, and I know exactly what the two of us would be by now if they had not.”

”I know.”

”And I am nineteen, and I have never once in my life had a single thing that somebody did not decide to let me have.” Mira put her heel down on the ground she had been standing on all night. ”This is not a gift. Nobody knows it is here. Nobody would miss it. I have been standing on it for nine hours finding out what that feels like, and now I know, and I am not going to be able to stop.”

***

Tharek had come up on the other side without anybody noticing, which is a thing he does.

He was looking at the two of them the way a man looks at a piece of ground he is going to have to cross, and Lyria — who had known him for four years and had never once seen his face do anything at all — thought, with no weight on it, that he had gone very still.

Then Asha turned round to see who else had arrived.

And Lyria, standing three feet away with a lamp in her hand and nothing whatever in her head about it, watched two men who had been eight thousand years old and young the entire time stop being young.