Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 545: Chapter 540: Out Loud

Location:The Pavilion, and the DDF ground at Kaelport

Date/Time:The five Void Days, 9942 AZI

Realm:Lower Realm

The wyrmlings had worked out that something was happening and had not yet worked out what, which made them unbearable.

”Nobody is doing anything,” Tianxin announced, from the middle of the courtyard, at a volume that had never once been calibrated for a courtyard. She was in the small human shape she preferred for arguing in, bronze and copper and red down her back, and she had her arms out. ”Not one person. Green is not planting. White is not hitting things. The kitchen is cold. It is the fourth morning.”

”Third,” said Shenxin.

”Fourth.”

”Third.” He did not look up from the flat stones he had laid out in a row, in some order that was obvious to him and to nobody else. ”There were five, and there are three left after today, which makes today the third. You are counting the evening you could not sleep.”

”That was a whole day.”

”That was an evening.”

Jayde sat on the step with a cup going cold in her hands and let it run.

[He is right and she knows he is right.] Reiko was a warm weight against her hip, dog-sized today, the mercury rune under his ruff bright and unhidden, which it only ever was inside these walls. [She is going to say it again anyway.]

She is, Jayde agreed. Give her a moment.

”Fourth,” said Tianxin.

***

Huaxin had not said anything at all.

She was sitting on the low wall with her heels against the stone, pale as cream, amber eyes on the middle distance, and she had been there since the light came up. That was not unusual. Huaxin did nothing for hours and then did one thing.

Jayde watched her and waited, and drank cold tea, and did not hurry her.

Somewhere behind the far colonnade, Ashborn shifted, all blades and translucence, and put its head down again. It had been restless for three days, and Jayde had not yet decided whether that was the Pavilion being quiet or something else, and had made a note to ask Isha about it and had not asked.

[The eldest is going to lose that argument in a moment,] Reiko said, [and then she is going to come and sit on you.]

I know.

[I am only saying.]

***

”Why is nobody working?”

Huaxin. One question, into a courtyard that had been having a different conversation, and both of the others stopped.

”It is the Void Days.”

”I know what they are called.”

”They come at the end of the year. Five of them. Nobody works, and nothing is bought or traded, and the roads are empty.”

”Why?”

And there it was, the way it always was with the youngest — one word too far into a thing, arriving without any warning at all.

”Because it is when people say the names of their dead.”

Huaxin thought about it.

”Out loud?”

”Out loud.”

”To who?”

”To whoever is standing there.”

Huaxin turned that over with the particular seriousness of a person who is three and has been given something with an edge on it. Tianxin had gone quiet, which happened perhaps twice a season. Shenxin had stopped moving his stones.

”We do not have any.”

”No.”

”Is that bad?”

”No.” And Jayde found she had to take a moment over it. ”That is the best thing about you. All three of you.”

***

Yinxin came out of the shadow of the arch, and Jayde had not heard her arrive, which meant she had been there a while.

Golden eyes. Silver-white hair down her back, a plain gray robe, and her hands loose at her sides, and she looked at her three children in a courtyard on the third of five days and did not say anything for a while either.

”Mother,” Shenxin said. ”Do you have any?”

”Yes.”

”How many?”

”Shenxin.”

”It is a fair question.” Yinxin came down the two steps and sat on the bottom one, which put her below all three of them, which she did on purpose and had done since they were the size of cats. ”The answer is that I do not count them. I used to. I stopped.”

”Why did you stop?”

”Because I got to a number I did not like, and the number went on going up regardless of whether I was watching it, and I decided I would rather spend the five days saying them than tallying them.”

Tianxin came over then, and sat down against her mother’s side without asking, which is the only apology a three-year-old dragon knows how to make.

***

The 1,403 held theirs on the DDF ground, in the open, in the cold, and Jayde stood at the back of it in a gray coat with the hood down.

Nobody had organized it. That was the first thing she noticed and the thing she kept coming back to afterward. There was no dais and no order of service, and nobody had drawn up a list. Somebody had put out benches, badly, in a rough arc, and then people had come and gone, filling the ground behind the benches until there was no ground left, and then it had simply started.

Meifen said four names. Bai Shu said eleven and got most of the way through the twelfth. Ruifen stood up, said nothing at all for the better part of a minute, sat down, and stood up again ten minutes later and got through six.

Hu Bing said one name and then said, ”and every other soul on the eastern face, whose names I do not have,” and there was a sound out of the crowd at that which Jayde did not have a word for.

It went on for the whole of the fourth day and most of the fifth.

Eden stood beside her the entire time and said nothing.

***

”You are not going to say any,” Jayde said.

Eden did not look round. She had her hands pushed into her sleeves, and her breath was going up in front of her face and hanging there, and she had been standing in one place long enough that the frost had gone from around her boots.

”No.”

”Because they are not here.”

”They are not anywhere,” Eden said it very quietly, the way people talk at the back of a crowd. ”That is the part I have never been able to get anybody to hold. Dead is a thing that happens on a world and leaves a hole in it, and you stand in the hole and say the name and the ground knows what you mean. This ground has never had them on it. Not before. Not later. Not at all.”

”I know.”

”If I said one of them here — one, out of all of them — the person next to me would ask who she was, and there is no answer to that question. She is nobody. Not one of them has ever once been anybody, here.” Eden’s hands stayed in her sleeves. ”And I am not going to stand in a field and explain a world to a stranger.”

”You could say them to me.”

Eden’s jaw moved.

”I know,” she answered. ”That is why I am standing next to you and not somewhere else.”

[Eden is cold,] said a small voice at the edge of the bond. [Her hands are cold. I told her. She said it is fine. It is not fine; it is cold.]

Thank you, Zhi.

[Tell her.]

I will.

Jayde took her own coat off and put it round Eden’s shoulders and Eden let her, which told her more about the state of the woman than an hour of asking would have.

***

She had her own, and she was entitled to most of them, which she had not expected.

The heaviest were not from the pits, and not from the Freehold, and not from anywhere she had been a child. She had spent the first two days assuming otherwise and being wrong about it.

Nor were they from the life before this one, and that was the part that had taken the two days. There were a great many of those. She had commanded some of them. She had spent the whole back half of sixty years earning the right to carry them and had carried them across a death and out the other side, and she had come to this field fully intending to stand up and say four of them.

Then Eden had said her piece about ground, and Jayde had gone on standing there with her mouth shut, because it was her problem too and she had simply never turned it over. A name said on this ground has to have had feet on this ground. Hers had not. Not one.

What was left, when she had finished putting things down that she was not allowed to pick up, was a mountain. Recent. And every one of them had been standing where she put them.

So on the fifth afternoon she went down through the crowd to the front, and stood up, and said them.

Nobody remarked on it. That is the whole of the rite — you stand, you say, you sit — and she said nine and sat back down, and the woman beside her put a cup of water into her hands without being asked and then went back to waiting for her own turn.

It was the first thing she had ever done in public that cost her and that nobody made a fuss about her.

***

There was one she did not say.

Not because of the face. The face had nothing to do with it, which was its own small unpleasant surprise, since she had spent two days assuming the face was the problem.

Jade was not dead.

That was the whole of it, and there was no way round it. The rite is for the dead. It has a shape and a set of days, and three realms have agreed on it since before anybody can say when, and every part of it assumes somebody gone.

So she stood in the cold at the back with nine names spent and one left over, and thought:

I could go somewhere and say it where nobody can hear.

And then, immediately, because she is who she is:

That is not the rite. The rite is out loud. Doing it privately is doing a different thing and calling it the same one so I can feel better about it.

[You are welcome to say it in here.]

Kazren. Dry as flint, from the soul-space, where he had been silent for the whole two days and had presumably been listening to every word of it.

That is still not out loud, Jayde told him.

[It is out loud. I am not a room. I am a person standing there, which was the requirement as you explained it to the small one, and I have been standing here for a very long time and am not going anywhere.] A pause. [I would also point out that I have a great many of my own and have never once had anybody to say them to. So if we are trading, I will consider myself in your debt.]

It is not a death.

[No.]

Then it is not the rite, and it does not count.

[I did not offer you the rite,] Kazren said. [I have no authority over rites and I would not want it. I offered you somewhere to say a name out loud to somebody who is standing there. What you put into it is not my business and never was.]

Jayde stood in a cold field with the names going on all round her.

Jade.

[Jade,] Kazren said.

And then he said, after a while, four names of his own, in a language she did not know, in a voice she had never heard him use.

She did not ask about them. He did not offer. They stood together in a soul-space in the middle of a cold field, and neither of them said anything else for a long while, and it was, Jayde thought afterward, the first entirely equal thing that had ever passed between them.

[Jade,] Kazren said again, at the very end, when the crowd had begun to break up around her. [I am putting it somewhere. It is not a working, and it will not do anything. But it will be there, and I will still be there, and that is the whole of what I am able to offer.]

That is enough.

[It is not,] he answered. [It is simply what there is.]

***

The voice that arrived in her head was not hers and never had been.

The eastern approach is clear, and it stays clear until the crowd breaks. Takara, dry, unimpressed, from somewhere she did not look toward. I am also to tell you that you have been standing in one place for two days, and it is making the work harder. That did not come from me. I am the one carrying it.

Tell her I heard.

I will not. She knows you heard.

***

They went back through the courtyard at dusk on the fifth day, and the kitchen was still cold, and Green was still not planting, and White was sitting on the mounting block outside the workshop with the bone-handled whip across his knees, not doing anything with it, steel-gray eyes on nothing.

He had been like that since the first morning. Jayde had not gone near him. Some people do the five days by talking, and some people do them by sitting on a block outside a workshop for the whole of it, and after long enough you learn to tell which sort you are looking at.

Green came out with two cups and put one beside him and did not sit down and did not say anything and went away again.

That was the whole of what happened, and Jayde watched it from the far side of the courtyard and understood that she had been watching something private and did not look away, because looking away would have been worse.

***

Isha found her on the step after the light had gone.

[The small one has been asking me the same question all day,] he said. [I have not been able to give her an answer that satisfies her, and I have been at this a very long while and am not accustomed to that.]

Which question?

[Whether she has to start.] The old-craft voice went careful. [She has worked out that people acquire them. She wishes to know at what point a person becomes somebody who has names, and whether there is anything to be done about it in advance.]

Jayde put her head back against the pillar.

What did you tell her?

[That the workings I know are for wards and seals and bindings, and that nobody has ever built one for this, and that I have looked.] A pause. [She took it better than I did.]

***

The three of them were asleep by the time she went in — properly asleep, in a heap, which they had grown out of six months ago and went back to whenever anything in the house was strange.

Huaxin had one hand shut round a fistful of her brother’s collar.

Jayde stood in the doorway for a while.

The youngest opened her eyes without moving anything else, the way she did, and looked at her across the dark room.

”Did you say any?”

”Nine.”

”Was that all of them?”

There were four true answers, and three of them were too large for the room.

”I said the ones I was allowed to say,” Jayde said, ”and there is one I was not, and it is not because anybody stopped me.”

Huaxin thought about that for a while, and her eyes had already started to close again by the time she got to the end of it.

”Next year,” she said.

Then she was asleep, and had probably been most of the way there for the whole exchange, and would not remember any of it in the morning.

Then she went along the gallery to the courtyard where Yinxin was still sitting on the bottom step in the dark, exactly where she had been at noon, and sat down beside her without asking, and neither of them said anything for a long time.

”You said nine,” Yinxin said eventually.

”I did.”

”And you have been sitting out here since dark.”

”I have.”

Yinxin nodded slowly.

”Next year.”

”Next year what?”

”I do not know yet.” The golden eyes stayed on the dark. ”But not this. Not two of us standing at the back of a field with our mouths shut while other people do it properly.”

Nine of them stood where I put them, Jayde thought. And the tenth is not dead, and there is no day in the year for that, and there is not going to be one.

Behind them, deep in the house, something enormous and full of blades settled at last and went quiet.

The year ended.