Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 600: Chapter 595: Twenty Days

Location:The Pavilion

Date/Time:7–8 Flamefade 9943 AZI, Kindleday and Hammerday (outside) — twenty days (inside)

Realm:Lower Realm

Day one.

There was no bell, because there was no Academy in here. No carts. No boots on the stair of the long shed, no runner with a slate, no knock. The Pavilion at first light made the sound it always made, which was water somewhere in the garden and something in the walls that was not quite a hum, and under that, nothing at all.

Jayde was awake, because she was always awake at that hour.

For a while she lay and listened to the nothing. Then she got up, and dressed, and went down the long hall, and it was only when her hand was on the frame of the workshop door that she noticed she was holding a slate.

She looked at it, and did not remember picking it up.

Eden was at the workshop bench with a book open in front of her and a lamp pulled close. She looked up with the expression of a woman who had been caught.

”I’m reading,” Eden said.

”What are you reading?”

”A book.”

Jayde came round the bench. The book was open to a table of nest diameters, and there was a second sheet beside it covered in Eden’s arithmetic.

”That’s the platform log.”

”It’s in a book now. I bound it.” Eden put her hand flat over the sheet. ”It counts.”

”It doesn’t count.”

”Then what’s that?” Eden nodded at the slate.

Jayde looked at it again. It had cooperage — Kindleday written across the top in her own hand, and under it a column she had apparently started on the way down the hall without noticing.

They looked at each other.

”Out,” Jayde said.

”You first.”

They went out together, and left the slate and the book on the bench, side by side, and Jayde turned at the door and looked at them for a moment, as a woman looks back at somebody she has left in a sickroom.

[You two are funny,] said Reiko, from across the threshold, where he was lying at dog size with his chin on his paws. [I can smell paper on both of you. Fresh.]

”Nobody asked you.”

[I know. I find out anyway.] He shut his eyes, entirely pleased with himself. [It’s going to be a long twenty days.]

+++

Day three.

Eden had decided, on the second evening, that the problem was method.

Until then she had approached rest the way a person approaches an unfamiliar instrument: without a protocol. Nobody would calibrate a handheld by sitting next to it and hoping. So she had picked a book from Green’s shelves that had nothing to do with anything, a long novel from somewhere in the Mid Realm about a family of river-traders, and she had sat down in the garden in a chair in the sun with Zhi along her forearm and opened it at the first page.

By the fourth Chapter she had found two errors in the arithmetic of a barge’s cargo and corrected them in the margin, lightly, in pencil.

At the seventh there was a note on the inside of the cover about the river’s flow rate, which could not possibly have been what the author claimed if the barge had made that distance in that number of days, and a second note underneath it that said unless they were rowing, which they were not.

[What are you doing?]

Zhi had his head up off her wrist. His scales were a steady blue, which was good, with a little green moving through it, which she had learned meant interested.

”Reading.”

[You’re writing.]

”I’m reading, and I’m writing a bit.”

[On the book.]

”In the margin. It’s allowed.” She looked at the margin. ”It’s allowed in my books.”

[Is it your book?]

”Not exactly.” She considered that. ”It’s Green’s.”

Zhi looked at the pencil, and then at her face, for a long time, as he looked at a reading he did not understand yet.

[Are you sick?]

”No.”

[You’re sitting still. You never sit still. Not since I knew you.] The scales cycled once, uncertainly, and settled. [It’s a not-working-quiet. I don’t know that one.]

Eden opened her mouth to explain, found she had no idea how, and closed it again.

”Neither do I,” she said.

The pencil went down on the grass, out of reach, which took more effort than it should have. Then back to the beginning of Chapter seven and read it again without correcting anything. It was quite a good Chapter, once she let the barge go at whatever speed the author wanted.

Sleep came without her noticing. When she woke in the chair, it was with the sun a long way round the garden and the book on her chest and Zhi coiled on top of the book. From the angle of the light, she had been asleep for most of the afternoon and a good part of the evening.

Eleven hours, give or take. The figure was worked out before she was fully awake, and her hand was already reaching for the pencil to write it down.

The pencil stayed where it was.

It was, she thought, the first sample she had ever deliberately failed to record. It was surprisingly easy.

+++

Day seven.

Yinxin was in her own shape.

Jayde had not seen it in months. Thirty feet of silver on the sanctuary grass, long and loose in the sun, the scales throwing light up into the air in a moving dazzle, and the left shoulder bound in a dressing Green had made out of what looked like the better part of a sail. The great golden eyes were half shut, her chin on her forelegs on the slope above the pond, a place chosen, she said, because it had the best view of three children making mistakes.

The three children were making them.

”Up,” Yinxin said, without lifting her head, ”is the direction away from the ground. I mention this because Tianxin appears to be attempting another one.”

Tianxin came down out of a climb she had not finished, in a tangle of copper-washed silver wing, and hit the grass, and rolled, and was up again shouting before she had stopped rolling.

”Again. Mama, watch. Mama.”

”I am watching. I have been watching all morning. I have watched you fly into the pond twice and a tree once, and I would like it understood that the tree had done nothing to you.”

Shenxin went up without saying anything, made a clean lift off the slope, held it for what Jayde counted as four beats, came down, and landed exactly where he had taken off. He looked at the place where his feet were. Then he folded his wings with great precision and stood there, not saying anything, and Jayde could see him counting.

”That was good,” Jayde said.

He nodded. Once.

Huaxin was not flying. Huaxin was lying in the long grass at the bottom of the slope with a seedpod in her front claws, turning it round and round, and when Jayde had asked her an hour ago whether she wanted to try, she had looked up and said, ”Later,” and gone back to the seedpod.

Then Tianxin set fire to the reeds.

It was not entirely an accident. It was the stand at the far end of the pond, and Green had walked down that morning, chosen it, measured it, and told Tianxin in front of witnesses that those reeds and only those reeds were hers to burn, and that the margin of error was one pace and not two. Tianxin had listened to all of this with the expression of a child being given a birthday.

The reeds went up with a sound like a held breath let out all at once. Tianxin shrieked with joy. The fire stopped at exactly one pace.

Green, standing by the pond with her arms folded, watched it burn to the waterline.

”Eighty-four percent,” she said. ”Of the stand. That is acceptable. Next time, ninety.”

”Ninety,” Tianxin said, as if it were the greatest gift anybody had ever given her.

She will try for a hundred, and she will take the willow with it.

It came in under her own thoughts as it always did, dry as a duty roster and unmistakably somebody else’s. Takara was lying in the shade under the willow in question, midnight-black from nose to tail, with the lightning running quietly along his back.

You’re under the willow.

I am aware of where I am. I chose it. It is the best shade in the sanctuary and I am on duty.

You’re not on duty. Nobody’s on duty.

I am always on duty. A pause. That is the difference between me and the rest of this household, and I bear it.

Twenty minutes later, the three of them had made him play a game. It had rules Tianxin invented as she went and Shenxin enforced, and its central feature was that Takara was it, and that being it required him to stand in the middle of the meadow with his eyes shut while three wyrmlings hid behind things that were much too small to hide behind.

With enormous formality, he did it. He stood at attention. He counted aloud, through the bond, in a voice like a man reading out a garrison roll. He opened his eyes and went looking with the deliberate, measured, utterly dignified tread of the head of an elite guard conducting a search.

He did not find Tianxin, whose tail was sticking out from behind a stone the size of a loaf. He did not find Shenxin, who had worked out where he would look first and was standing behind him. He walked past Huaxin twice.

His mane was crackling the whole time, small blue sparks going up off it into the sun, and when Tianxin finally burst out from behind the stone shrieking that he had lost, he had lost, the lightning along his back went bright and loose and danced, and he lay down in the grass in a single heavy movement and let three wyrmlings climb on him.

I was defeated, he said to Jayde, with great gravity. By superior tactics.

You walked past Huaxin twice.

I was outmaneuvered.

On the slope, Yinxin had her eyes shut, and Jayde was nearly sure she was smiling, which was difficult to tell on a dragon and which Jayde had never once seen before.

+++

Day twelve.

Cangwei found the workshop on the twelfth morning.

Jayde knew about it because she was in the workshop doorway herself, again, without a slate this time, which she considered progress, and Cangwei came along the long hall with a ledger under her arm and stopped dead when she saw who was standing there.

They looked at each other.

”I was going to inventory the stores,” Cangwei said. ”Nobody has. There is no record of what is in them.”

”There’s no record because nobody needs one.”

”Everybody needs one.” It came out like a fact about the weather. Then she seemed to hear herself, and looked down at the ledger under her arm. ”He told me,” she said, ”about the twenty days. He said I was to rest. He said it several times.”

”Did you?”

”I lay down for most of the first day.” A pause. ”And then I counted the panes in the ceiling of the room I was given. Then the floorboards. Then I went and found a ledger.” She looked at Jayde very directly. ”I am given to understand that you came down this corridor on the first morning holding a slate you did not remember picking up.”

”Who told you that?”

”The shadowbeast. He told everyone.”

Of course he had.

Cangwei stood with the ledger a moment longer. More color in her than on the beach, no wall at her back, the dead hand in a soft sling of Green’s against her ribs. Jayde looked back at her, and something that was very nearly fellow feeling went between two people who did not know how to stop.

”Come and see something,” Jayde said. ”Leave the ledger.”

Cangwei hesitated. Then she set the ledger down on the floor beside the doorframe, squarely, aligned with the boards, and followed.

The clutch was in a corner of the long hall where the light came in low and warm and the floor had been laid with soft earth and spirit stones set in a ring. Five eggs, the size of a man’s head, the color of old bronze, leathery and faintly ridged. One of them was moving very slowly, the way a sleeper turns over.

Ashborn was folded down beside them, blade-arms tucked, sensory pits warm and steady, humming. It filled the corner the way it filled every space it entered, completely, and without waiting to be asked.

Cangwei stopped two paces short.

Jayde watched her take it in, as she took in everything, from one edge to the other. The eggs. The ring of stones and the faint pale threads of essence going down into the shells from them, gently, the way water goes into ground. The horse-sized mantis with her pits turned toward the clutch. The hum.

She did not ask what it was, or whose.

For a long time she stood there. Then, very slowly, as a person moves in a room where something is sleeping, she lowered herself to sit on the floor with her back against the wall, and stayed.

Her live hand was in her lap. There was no ledger in it.

Jayde left her there. When she came back past the corner at noon, Cangwei was still sitting against the wall, Heiteng beside her, neither of them saying anything, Ashborn still humming, and one of the eggs had turned over again.

+++

Day sixteen.

White made another cake.

Nobody had asked him to. Nobody had known he was going to until it came out of the kitchen on a door. An actual door, off its hinges, because there was no board in the Pavilion large enough, carried by White at one end and Isha at the other, and Isha’s tails were very straight, which meant he was concentrating on not being crushed.

It had two tiers.

The lower one was black at all four corners.

”You fixed the corners,” Eden said.

”They match now,” said White.

The upper tier was not black anywhere, because it had not been in the oven long enough to become anything, and it sat on top of the lower one at an angle that Jayde, who had once flown a transport with a reactor housing held on by strapping, did not like at all.

The whole household was in the long hall for it. The five of the quintet in human form along one wall, Green and Eden, with Zhi round Eden’s shoulders. Takara at full size with a wyrmling on his back. Reiko at the head of the table because nobody had stopped him. Heiteng and Cangwei beside him with her sling. Yinxin had been carried up from the sanctuary in her human shape for the afternoon by four of the quintet, under protest, and was sitting in a heap of cushions with her shoulder strapped and her eyes half shut and the expression of a queen enduring a great kindness.

And at the end of the hall, in their own light, two of the old queens had come to look.

”Is it load-bearing?” Eden asked.

White considered the cake. ”The bottom one.”

”And the top?”

”The top,” said White, ”is being borne.”

The top moved.

Not far. A finger’s width, downhill, with a soft wet sound like a boot coming out of mud. Every person in the long hall leaned the other way at once, including two of the quintet and one dead queen.

Takara put out a paw, without getting up and without looking, and stopped it.

I am on duty, he said, to the room in general.

Nobody argued.

Green went to cut it. The knife went into the lower tier about an inch and stopped, and stayed there when she let go of it, standing up on its own like a flag on a hill.

”It’s dense,” White said.

”It is geology,” said Green.

Xinglong came off the wall. Built to make weapons and hold ground, he had never once in seven months of opening fields looked as interested as he looked now. He laid two fingers on the lower tier, beside the knife, and something went into it that made the air smell of hot iron, and the knife came out clean.

”It resisted,” he said, with something very like respect.

Green cut a sliver, and ate it, and chewed for a long time, in a silence the whole hall shared.

”Sixty percent food,” she said.

”Next time seventy,” said Tianxin, from Takara’s back, with joy.

”It’s better than the last one,” White said.

The hall considered this.

”It is bigger than the last one,” Green said.

”That’s what I said.”

At the end of the hall, Gǔlong had been examining the cake for some time. Her face, which was all cliff, did not change.

”What is it for?” she asked.

”Nothing,” Jayde said.

Gǔlong looked at her. Then at the cake, on its door, with a lightning cat’s paw holding the top of it up. Then at the room full of people who were not working, on a day when nothing in particular had happened.

”Sufficient,” she said, at last, and Hélong beside her laughed, soft and warm, and put a light hand that was not quite a hand on Gǔlong’s arm.

Tianxin had the first piece. It was mostly corner.

Shenxin cut his own, measured it against Tianxin’s with his eye, cut a sliver off, and handed the sliver to Huaxin without saying a word. Huaxin took it in both claws and looked at it for a long time, and then at Shenxin, and said, ”Thank you,” which was two words, and Shenxin looked at the floor for a long time and did not count anything.

Jayde leaned past Eden for a plate. On Eden’s shoulder, Zhi’s scales went cool and dim, and he slid round to the far side of her neck, away from Jayde, without seeming to decide to. Eden did not notice. She was laughing at something Hulong had said, and Zhi settled against the side of her face, and after a moment the blue came back into him.

[I want the corners,] Reiko said.

”There are four.”

[I want all of them.] He thought about it. [I’ll share one with Ashborn.]

He did. He carried it over to the clutch corner himself, at dog size, the black corner clamped carefully in his jaws, and put it down in front of the mantis, who looked at it for a long time with her pits, and then hummed.

May I take my paw away, Takara asked, now?

”No,” said the whole hall.

+++

Day nineteen.

”Take them up,” Yinxin said. ”Please.”

Back in her own shape on the slope above the pond, shoulder still strapped, chin on her forelegs, she said it without looking at Jayde, and said please as she said it when she meant it, which was rarely, and Jayde heard the whole of what was under it. I cannot. Not yet. They have been watching other things fly for nineteen days and I cannot take them, and you can.

”All three?”

”Two. Huaxin will not go. She is not ready and she knows she is not, and I am not going to be the mother who argues with that.” The great golden eye opened. ”Tianxin will try to race you. Do not let her win.”

Jayde had not flown for nothing in her life.

She had flown to reach things and to leave them, and to see ground from above before she committed a force to it. To the Widow’s Field and every nest since, and back. Off a ridge on the morning her wings came out doubled and the air came off the black edges with a hiss and bit where it used to slip.

Never once had she gone up because she wanted to see what it was like.

She went up now.

The wings came off her back full span, and the air of the sanctuary caught them, warm and thick with growing things, and she went up off the slope in three beats and the ground went small below her. The pond was a coin. The burned stand of reeds was a black thumbprint at the edge of it. The willow, the meadow, the long slope with a silver dragon lying on it like a fallen piece of the sky.

Tianxin came up after her shrieking, and Shenxin after Tianxin, silent and correct, and the three of them went out over the sanctuary in a ragged line with nothing to reach and nothing to leave.

Halfway round, Tianxin tried to race her. Jayde let her get almost level, and then did not.

What her wings were doing she did not know, and never had. But she could feel them, wide and loose and easy, catching every current the warm air gave them and taking it without fighting it, and for the first time in a very long while she did not want them to do anything other than what they were doing.

On the slope below, Yinxin watched the three of them go round twice, and then a third time, and then put her chin back down on her forelegs and closed her eyes.

+++

Day twenty.

The light in the sanctuary went down slowly in the evening, from gold to amber to a deep soft blue, and then it went on into something darker that was not quite night and was full of small lights that were not quite stars.

Jayde lay on her back in the grass on the slope with her wings spread flat on either side of her.

Eden was beside her, also on her back, with her hands folded on her stomach and nothing in them. No slate. No handheld. No book; that was on Green’s shelf, pencil marks and all, where she had left it on the fourth day.

”Doc,” Jayde said.

”Commander.”

It was the first time in twenty days either of them had said it. There was nobody on that slope but the two of them and the grass.

”What’s the readout?”

Eden thought about it.

”Rack time, nineteen of twenty,” she said. ”I lost the first one to a book. Caloric intake, irregular, mostly cake. Ambient, excellent. Watch rotation—” She stopped. ”There isn’t one. Nobody’s on watch.”

”Takara’s on watch.”

”He’s asleep under the willow with three dragons on him. I checked.”

Jayde smiled at the sky. It was a short smile, and it went away again, and she let it go without minding.

”It isn’t a sky,” she said, after a while.

”No. Isha says it’s what the Pavilion does when it thinks you’d like one.” Eden turned her head on the grass. ”Do you miss the real one?”

Jayde did not answer at once. Above them, the small lights that were not stars sat in the dark, steady, not trembling, in no pattern she knew.

”Every day,” she said.

Eden did not say anything to that, and did not need to. She lay there with her hands empty, and after a while reached across without looking and put her shoulder against Jayde’s wing, lightly, and left it there.

Neither of them got up.

Nobody reached for anything.

Outside, the sun was going down over Kaelport on the second day, and in the long shed Meifen was signing something, and nothing at all was coming to either of them.