Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 599: Chapter 594: Ten to One

Location:The Pavilion — the Medical Bay

Date/Time:6 Flamefade 9943 AZI, Restday, afternoon (outside) — the second day since the beach (inside)

Realm:Lower Realm

Sixty-seven.

Sixty-seven small chalk marks across the slate, one for every weave since Voidmarch, and above each mark a figure in Eden’s hand for the number of days it had taken Yinxin to stand up afterward.

Two, at the left edge. Two again. Three. Then a long, slow rise that never once came back down, and at the right edge, under North Kessig, twelve.

Jayde had seen the slate before. She had never seen all of it at once, propped against the synthesis unit with the green light behind it, the whole curve in one look.

”Before you say anything,” Eden said, ”I want to say what it isn’t.”

She was sitting on the second table with her boots on the crossbar and the handheld on her knee. She had slept, by the look of her, for about an hour, two days ago.

”It isn’t her failing. I thought it was, for most of the summer, and I didn’t say it, because I wasn’t sure, and I’d rather not be the one who puts that word in a room.” Eden tapped the slate with the end of her stylus. ”It isn’t a decline. A decline would show in what she can do. What she can do hasn’t moved. Every weave is as clean as the first one. The only thing that moves is how long she takes to come back.”

”Then what is it?”

”Ground.” Eden turned the handheld round so Jayde could see the column. ”I’ve put this on her after every nest since Voidmarch, and again this morning, in here. The ambient out there is thin. It’s the thinnest I’ve measured anywhere on this continent, and she’s built for a great deal more than it carries. She spends everything at a nest, and then she lies in a shed trying to fill back up from a world that’s got almost nothing to give her. That’s the curve. That’s all the curve is.” She put the stylus down. ”It’s a measurement of the Lower Realm. It isn’t a measurement of her.”

Jayde looked at the slate a while longer.

”And in here?”

”In here I’ve got numbers I don’t believe yet, so I’m going to give you the one I do. Since yesterday, she’s closed more of that shoulder than Green expected her to close in a week.” Eden glanced at the bed. ”Green’s words. Not mine. Green doesn’t say expected about anything.”

On the bed, Yinxin did not open her eyes.

”I can hear you,” she said.

”Good,” said Eden. ”That’s why I said it in that order.”

+++

Yinxin was sitting up, which was new.

She was propped against a bank of pillows somebody had stolen from three different rooms, with the shoulder dressed and strapped and her silver-white hair over the good side, and Huaxin asleep in a curl against her hip. The other two were not in the room. Jayde could hear them, faintly, somewhere down the long hall, arguing about something with the particular volume of children who have been told their mother is going to be well.

Yinxin opened her eyes.

”You have a face on,” she said. ”You are going to ask me something.”

”Yes.”

”You may ask it sitting down. I would be obliged.”

Jayde sat on the stool beside the bed. Her palms were still wrapped, and she put them flat on her knees, and for a moment she said nothing at all.

She had spent most of the night working out how to say this, and every version she had built began with an order, and she had thrown every one of them away.

”Stay in here,” she said. ”Until it’s done. Not until you can stand. Until it’s done.”

Yinxin looked at her.

”I am going to be in here for some time regardless. Green has opinions about my shoulder.”

”Green said months because she thought you’d be out of that door the day you could stand. You always have been.” Jayde leaned forward. ”Ten to one. Ten days in here for every one out there. If Green needs five months for that shoulder, you can have five months, in here, and the sun outside goes round fifteen times.”

”I know the arithmetic.”

”I know you do. I’ve offered it after every one of them.” Jayde kept her voice level. ”Sixty-seven times. And sixty-seven times you said no, and came out of a chamber and went and lay in a shed at Kaelport for two days, then three, then twelve. In the thinnest ground on the continent. When you could have walked through that door and lain in here for a fortnight and lost one night outside doing it.” She did not look away. ”So tell me again. Properly, this time.”

Yinxin did not answer at once.

”I have work outside,” she said.

”Tell me what work.”

”The houses. The mills, the weaving. The couriers. Two salt licenses and a cooperage that has never once in its life delivered a stave on time.” Her voice stayed dry, but it had gone a little flatter. ”Somebody signs the papers, Jayde. Somebody reads the ledgers on Grindday. Somebody sees the cloth before it goes up the road. I built all of it, and I am the one it reports to.”

”I know you are. I’ve seen the wall.” Jayde did not look away. ”So here is what I think. If that company can’t run for fifteen days without you, it’s already failed. It failed the day you built it, and nobody noticed because you were standing there holding it up.”

Yinxin’s mouth opened, and closed. Her eyes went past Jayde’s shoulder, once, to where the wings had come half up off her back, and came back to her face.

”You built it to feed an army that didn’t exist yet,” Jayde said. ”You built it to keep running while you were in the dark for forty minutes at a time. Fifteen days is nothing to it, if it’s any good. And it is very good. That was never the question.”

”That is a dirty argument.”

”It’s the one you’d use on me.”

From the second table, Eden made a small sound and did not look up.

Yinxin looked down at the child sleeping against her hip. She put two fingers on the pearl-pale back, very lightly, and left them there.

”And what am I to do,” she asked, ”for five months, lying in a bed, being healed at?”

”Not in a bed.” Jayde had thought about this part most of all. ”Get out of that skin. You’ve been in it for months. You walk to the rocks in it every morning and sit down on three of them because it’s the shape that fits through a door. Go down to the sanctuary and be what you are. Lie in the grass. Let the sun in there do its work on a body it was made for. Let Green come to you, for once.”

Yinxin was very quiet.

”And spend it with them,” Jayde said, and nodded at the curl of pearl at her hip, and toward the hall, where something had just fallen over, and two voices were blaming each other for it. ”Five months. You haven’t had five days with them since Voidmarch that weren’t you lying down recovering from something. Teach them to fly properly. Teach Shenxin whatever it is he’s working out on his own. Let Tianxin set fire to something in a place where it doesn’t matter.”

”She will set fire to the sanctuary.”

”Then Green will have opinions about that instead.”

Yinxin’s hand went very still on the child’s back.

”You do not get to tell me,” she said, ”that I harm myself to prove I am strong.”

”I’m not telling you. You already know it.” Jayde’s voice went down. ”We all know how strong you are. Every one of us. There is not one person in this building who needs to see you walk four hundred paces on a bad morning to know it. You don’t have to prove it to us. You don’t have to prove it to anybody.”

Yinxin turned her head and looked at the wall for a long time.

”Sixty-seven times you have offered me that door,” she said at last, still looking at it. ”And every one of them sounded like an order with the word please on the end.”

”This one isn’t.”

”No. You did not order it.”

”No.”

”You could have. In one word.” Yinxin brought her eyes back round. They were gold and very tired and entirely steady. ”I have been sitting here waiting for you to, for the better part of two days, and preparing what I would say about it afterward. I had a speech.”

”Was it good?”

”It was excellent. I shall never be able to use it now.” She closed her eyes. ”Fifteen days.”

”By the sun outside.”

”Outside.”

”And then we argue about the nests.”

”Then, and not before.”

Yinxin breathed out through her nose. It was very nearly a laugh.

”Then go away,” she said, ”and let Green fuss. I am going to need my strength to be civil about it.”

+++

Jayde went as far as the synthesis unit and stopped, because Eden was looking at her.

Not the way Eden looked at a patient. The other way. The way she looked at a number she had caught somebody rounding.

”That was very good,” Eden said.

”Thank you.”

”If it can’t run for fifteen days without you, it’s already failed.” Eden turned the stylus over in her fingers. ”I’m going to have that cut into something.”

”Don’t.”

”I’m going to have it cut into something,” Eden said, ”and hang it over your bed.” She tipped her head. ”When did you last take a day?”

Jayde opened her mouth.

”Not a day the work stopped because of weather,” Eden said. ”Not a day you were unconscious, which happens to count for you about twice a season. A day. When did you last get up and decide not to do anything and then not do it?”

Jayde closed her mouth.

From the bed, without opening her eyes, Yinxin said, ”Oh, please. Please do go on.”

”I’ve seen your ledger,” Eden said. ”You were in the long shed at the first bell yesterday. You were in it at the first bell the day before. You were in it on the Void Days, when the entire continent was naming its dead, and nobody was working, and you were doing the cooperage tally on the end of a trestle with a lamp.”

”That cooperage is a disgrace.”

”It is,” Yinxin agreed, from the bed.

”You’re doing it again,” said Eden. ”You’re doing exactly the thing you just took her apart for. You don’t think the corps can run for two days without you.”

”The corps can run for two days without me.”

”Then prove it.”

Jayde looked at her.

”When did you,” she asked, ”last take a day?”

Eden’s stylus stopped.

”Not a day you were reading the platforms. Not a day you were in a bay at Kaelport with a handheld on somebody’s arm. Not a day you spent writing up a nest because nobody else could. A whole one.” Jayde folded her arms, carefully, because of the palms. ”When, Eden?”

Eden looked at the stylus. Then at the slate. Then at the slate a little longer, as if the answer might be written on it in somebody else’s hand.

”That’s not the point,” she said.

”It’s the whole point.”

”I’m a doctor. Doctors don’t—”

”Name one.”

Eden opened her mouth. Closed it.

The corner of it quirked. Not quite a smile. The ghost of one.

”Fine,” she said. ”Fine. It’s fair. I don’t know. Before I came here, probably. Before I died. I’m not entirely sure I took one then.”

”So all of us.”

”Every one of us in this room,” Eden agreed. ”Her and her sheds. You and your cooperage. Me and—” She waved the stylus at all of it, the slate and the handheld and the bay and the whole continent outside. ”We’re the three worst people on Doha at stopping.”

”Four,” said Yinxin, still with her eyes shut. ”Green has not sat down since Emberrise.”

From the far bench, where Green had her back to all of them and was grinding something very fine in a mortar, there was a pause in the grinding.

”Cinderfall,” Green said, without turning round. ”I sat down in Cinderfall. Twice.”

The grinding started again, at exactly the same speed.

+++

They did it properly, because neither of them knew how to do anything else.

Through the open door to the garden, Jayde could see the low wall along Green’s beds, and Heiteng sitting on it with his back to the room and Cangwei beside him, close, with her dead hand in her lap. They had been there since some time in the night. He was talking, low and steady, without stopping, and she was not interrupting him, and every so often she turned her head and looked at him as if checking that he was still saying it. Jayde had given him leave for all of it. She did not go and listen to how he was spending it.

Jayde wrote the order in her own hand on a sheet of corps paper and signed it against her knee. The corps stands down Kindleday and Hammerday. First Company holds the yard. Meifen has the shed and the board and the authority to sign for both. The survey parties stay where they are and report to her. Nothing comes to me that Meifen can answer. She read it twice. Then she crossed out Nothing comes to me that Meifen can answer and wrote instead Nothing comes to me, and read that twice too, and found she disliked it a great deal and signed it anyway.

Eden wrote one for the bays. It was longer, because Eden could not write a short one, and it had three caveats on it before it got to the part where she said she was not coming in.

Two days outside.

”Twenty,” Eden said, when it was done. ”In here. Twenty days.”

”So I’m told.”

”I don’t know what to do with twenty days.”

”Neither do I.”

They looked at each other across the second table, with the slate between them and its sixty-seven chalk marks climbing toward the right-hand edge.

”I think we’re going to be very bad at this,” Jayde said.

”Appalling,” said Eden. ”We’re going to be appalling at it.”

On the bed, Yinxin slept. Against her hip, Huaxin turned over once in her sleep and put a small pale foreclaw out across her mother’s wrist, and left it there.

Somewhere down the long hall, Tianxin was asking at the top of her voice whether anybody wanted to see something burn, and Shenxin was telling her no, in a voice that meant yes, and Jayde found she had already stood up to go and look.

She sat back down.

It took more effort than anything she had done all week. Behind her the wings, which had come up off her back at the first shout, settled again slowly, feather by feather, and lay still.

Eden watched her do it and did not say a word, which from Eden was very nearly applause.