Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 581: Chapter 576: What One Person Can Carry

Location:Loam Hollow, four days east of Kaelport

Date/Time:9 Infernorest 9943 AZI, Temperday

Realm:Lower Realm

They parted at the Suhe fork on the third morning, and Bai Shu did not make anything of it, which Meifen of First Company had known she would not.

”Six days,” Bai Shu said. ”Seven if my aunt is alive.”

”Is she likely to be?”

”She was alive in Cinderfall and she has been dying since I was nine.” Bai Shu shifted the pack, which was too heavy and which she had refused help with twice. ”Meifen. If yours goes badly, do not come back early and tell me it went well.”

”I was not going to.”

”You were absolutely going to.”

And she went north, and Meifen went east, because neither of them is any good at the other kind of goodbye.

***

Loam Hollow is not on any list.

Meifen had known that her whole life without having the words for it, and had got the words in the long shed at Kaelport on a Temperday in Scorchwind, standing in front of a chalkboard, when a woman with blue eyes explained that the corps had only ever been able to ask people where there were people.

Loam Hollow has people. A hundred and ninety-six of them at the last count, which was Meifen’s own, done from memory on a slate on a road. It is not on any list because it is four days from Kaelport up a valley with nothing in it worth a cart.

No road. There is a track, and the track was there when her grandfather was a boy, and it is exactly as good now as it was then.

She came up it at the ninth hour with a pack that had cost her three arguments and one direct order to get.

***

Her father was at the forge and heard her before he saw her, which she had counted on, because a smith who has been at one fire for forty years hears feet on his own path as other men hear their own name.

He came out with the hammer still in his hand.

”You are thinner,” he said.

”I am not.”

”You are thinner, and your boots are corps boots, and there is a thing on your collar.” He looked at the thing on her collar for slightly too long. ”What is it?”

”It is a major’s.”

”What is a major?”

And Meifen stood in her father’s yard and discovered that she had rehearsed the entire four days’ walk and had not once rehearsed that.

***

It took until dark to get the pack open, because everything else had to happen first.

Her mother, who cried and was furious about crying. Her brother’s wife, whom she had never met, holding a child born in Ashbloom and called Tam, after nothing at all, because it is a common name in that valley. Four neighbors who came to look and stayed to look some more. A very old woman who took Meifen’s hand in both of hers and turned it over and looked at the palm and said nothing whatsoever about it, which Meifen thought about for a long time afterward.

Nobody asked what she did.

That was the thing she had not expected and had no way to prepare for. She had come four days up a valley braced for what do they have you doing and had got instead a sequence of people who were extremely pleased to see her and entirely uninterested in the answer, because Loam Hollow does not have a category for it and was not going to invent one on a Temperday evening.

At full dark, her father shut the forge door and sat down on the bench with his hands on his knees and waited.

So she told him.

***

All of it, in the end, and it took two hours, and he did not interrupt once — not through the founding, not through the roads, not through the mountain, which she gave him in a handful of sentences and none of the ones that mattered.

He asked three questions. The first was whether she was paid. The second was whether her mother could be told the part about the mountain, and Meifen said no, and he accepted it without argument, which she had not expected either.

The third came at the end.

”How many are there like you?”

Meifen sat with that, because the honest answer had four different numbers in it depending on what he meant by like, and he was not going to want an establishment table read to him in his own forge at midnight.

”Not enough.”

”That is not a number.”

”No.” Meifen turned her hands over on her knees. ”Ask me next year, and I’ll give you a different one. They’re taking them at fifteen now, and they have been since Frostforge, and whatever I write down is wrong by the time I’ve walked home.”

”Then give me one that stays still.”

”There’s one.” She said it flatly. ”The ones who were in that mountain with me. Nobody gets added to that.”

Her father looked at the floor of his own forge for a while.

”That is not many,” he said.

”It isn’t. And it’s the only count we’ve got that can only go down.”

”Right.” He got up and put the hammer on the rack, which he does last, every night, and has done every night of her life. ”Then we had better see the pack.”

***

What was in the pack was this.

Bath sachets, the medicinal kind they steep in the big tubs at Tiller’s Row, each one a fist of dried herb sewn into muslin and good for one soak for one person. Twenty of them, wrapped in oilcloth, and a separate bundle of twelve smaller ones in white muslin, gentler, made for an infant. A jar of the salve Bai Shu’s people had started making in Sparkfall and that nobody had a name for yet. Two rolls of the plain cloth the corps issues, because the last time Meifen was home her mother had been mending the same sheet. Four books, which had been the hardest thing to get and which came from the school at Kaelport with a note in somebody’s careful hand. Needles. Six needles of the good steel, which her father held up to the lamp one at a time and did not say anything about at all. And at the bottom, under the cloth, a small box she did not open that night.

And a letter from an office, in a fair round hand, saying that Loam Hollow had been entered on a survey list.

Her father read the letter twice.

”What does that mean?”

”Somebody’ll come and look at the valley. That’s all it is.”

”A road, then.”

”No.” Meifen put her finger on the paper where it said the word. ”It says survey. It doesn’t say road, and I’m not having anybody go to bed thinking it does. If they hope for one and it doesn’t come, nothing out of this coat is worth a thing in this valley again. Not from me and not from whoever comes after.”

”That is a hard way to put it.”

”It’s the cheap way. Telling them now costs one evening.”

Her father folded the letter along its fold.

”You have got harder,” he said, and it was not a complaint, and she was not sure it was a compliment either, and she let it be neither.

***

Her mother went first, on the second evening, because in daylight, with the neighbors looking, she would have refused.

”It’s for sick people,” her mother said. She had said it in Emberrise, when Meifen’s letter came home promising this, and she had plainly been saying it ever since. ”I’m not sick.”

”It’s for everybody. Sick people just get it first.” Meifen had her father’s old cooling trough scrubbed out and set in the middle of the kitchen floor, long enough to lie down in and deep enough to take a body to the chin, and her father carrying water in from the forge, where it had been heating in the quench copper since the middle of the afternoon. ”Get in. All the way under, to your chin. It only works on what’s in the water. You can complain from inside it.”

Her mother got in, complaining, and lay back until the water closed over her shoulders.

Meifen tore the muslin and dropped the sachet into the water. Inside a minute the water had gone the color of strong tea and the kitchen smelled green and bitter, cut stalks and wet bark, exactly as the long hall at Tiller’s Row smells at the second bell with every tub full.

Then she pulled the stool up beside the trough, reached into the water, put two fingers on the inside of her mother’s wrist as Bai Shu’s people are taught to, shut her eyes, and felt for the core.

It was where it had always been. Every person on this world carries a fire at the center of them, and her mother’s was a small banked ember low in the Ashborn tier, the bottom of the ladder, where it had sat her whole life. Meifen had felt it as a child without knowing what she was feeling. She knew now.

For a quarter of an hour, nothing happened, and her mother said so.

Then the ember began to draw, and her mother stopped saying anything at all.

It hurt. Meifen had told her it would, and her mother had not believed it, because nobody believes it until it happens: a deep heat that starts low in the belly and goes out along every channel the body has, and finds every place that has been shut for years, and pushes. Under the water, her mother’s hands found the sides of the trough and gripped. Her jaw set. Sweat stood out on her forehead, and it was not clear sweat. It came out gray, and then darker, an oily black that beaded on her face and seeped out of her under the water in dark threads that spread through the tea, and the smell came up off it sour and rank, a lifetime of hearth smoke and bad water and everything else a body puts away when it has nowhere to send it.

”What is that?” Her mother’s voice had gone thin. ”Meifen, what is that coming out of me?”

”Everything you don’t need. Keep breathing. It’s meant to do that.”

Meifen kept her fingers on the wrist. Under the heat, the ember was brightening and filling and pressing outward against the edge of where it had always stopped. It reached the top of the tier and pushed, and her mother made a small sound through her teeth, and it held there for a long moment, and then it went through all at once, like a door that had been stuck her whole life giving under a shoulder. It settled on the far side, bigger and brighter, and burned steady.

Her mother let go of the sides and let out a breath as if she had been carrying something up a hill for years and had just this moment put it down.

”Sparkforged.” Meifen’s own voice was not quite level. ”That’s the second tier. You’ve just gone up one.”

”I’m too old for that.”

”You’re not. You’ve just done it. In a cooling trough.”

The water had gone from tea to something nearer bog, with a dark skin on it, and her mother looked down at it and then at her own arms, and Meifen watched her see it.

The backs of her hands had cleared. The brown spots that had been there since Meifen was small had faded nearly to nothing. The knuckles that swelled every winter were the size of knuckles again, and when she turned her face up into the lamplight, the lines at her mouth had eased, as if somebody had taken five or six years off her and put them somewhere she would not miss them.

And under that, the thing nobody could see. People in this valley died at eighty if they were lucky, and Meifen’s mother had been planning on it since she was forty. Sparkforged begins at two hundred.

Her mother cried for the second time in two days, and was furious about that as well.

Her father was standing in the doorway with an empty bucket.

”Your turn,” said Meifen.

No argument. That was how she knew what his face had been doing while he watched.

Fresh water, and a fresh sachet, the second of twenty, and she counted it as it went in. Her father lay back in his own trough with the water to his beard and his forge-scarred forearms under it, and Meifen reached in and put her fingers on his wrist and found his fire. It was bigger than her mother’s had been, because forty years at an anvil does that even at the bottom of the ladder, and it was pressed hard up against the top of the tier, as if he had been leaning on that door for most of his life without knowing it was there.

It went harder on him than it had on her, because there was more in him to come out. Forty years of forge smoke came out through his skin black as quench scale, and the smell drove her mother out of the kitchen with her hand over her face, and her father sat in it with his eyes shut and his teeth together and did not make one sound. Meifen felt every muscle in the wrist under her fingers go rigid and stay that way.

Then he went through, in half the time her mother had taken.

No gasp. Just his breath going out of him, long and slow, and he sat in the black water and let his shoulders come down. Meifen kept her fingers on his wrist until the fire had settled, because she wanted to feel it for as long as there was anything to feel.

When he stood up out of the trough, his back came up straight. It had been bent since before she left home. The old burn scars on his forearms, white and puckered as long as she could remember, had gone flat and pale, and his hands, when he opened and closed them, opened all the way.

”That’s both of you,” she said.

”That’s both of us,” said her father, and looked at his daughter on a stool in his own kitchen with her collar undone as if he had only now understood what she had walked four days to bring them.

***

Her mother fetched the water the next morning.

Meifen was coming out of the house and saw it happen and stopped in the doorway and said nothing at all, because there was nothing to say that would not have made it smaller.

Her mother is five feet and a little of it, and for as long as Meifen could remember she had carried water up from the stream one bucket at a time, with a rest at the gate and another at the step. She came up the path now with a full bucket in each hand. She did not stop at the gate. She did not stop at the step. She tipped both into the water butt, and turned round, and went straight back down for more, complaining about the hinge on the gate.

Meifen went and found her father at the forge.

He was standing at the anvil with both hands under it, and by the look of him he had been standing there for some time. Then he lifted it. A hand’s width off the block, held, and set down without a sound. When he turned round and saw her watching, he was not in the least embarrassed.

”Forty years,” he said. ”I’ve never once had it off the block.”

”You have now.”

”Your mother’s bringing the water up two at a time.”

”I saw.”

”She’ll be insufferable about it,” said her father, ”and she’ll deny it.”