Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 552: Chapter 547: The Answering

Location:The Old Wood, North of Zhū’kethara

Date/Time:15 Emberrise, 9943 AZI — before first light

Realm:Upper Realm

Asha turned round to see who else had arrived, and Zharek went down on his knees in the leaf litter as though somebody had taken his legs.

Nobody moved.

Lyria had heard the accounts. Everybody has heard the accounts. It is the one story a people with no children keeps telling itself, and there are four hundred versions of it, and they are all the same version, and every single one of them had left out that it is fast — that there is no moment in which a man decides anything, no gathering, no breath taken.

He was standing. Then he was not.

And Asha, who was nineteen and filthy and had been crying and had come four miles into a wood at dusk to stand on ground that was nobody’s, looked down at a demon of eight thousand years kneeling in the leaves in front of her, and did not step back.

***

”Zhu’anara1.” Zharek’s mouth shaped it. ”Ahn’sul veth kira, mal’ahn veth sora2.”

It did not sound like his voice.

That was the part Lyria had not been told and could not have been told, because nobody who has heard it has ever been able to write it down. The words did not come out of him as a man’s words come out of him. They arrived, whole, at the speed of something that had been waiting a very long time in a corridor for a door to open, and they used his mouth on the way past.

Somewhere behind her, Voresh had gone absolutely still.

She knew what he was hearing. He had said those words himself, in a snowy yard in Thornhaven, at a girl of fourteen who had not understood one syllable of them, and had then had to stand there in front of her mother and call it a protection oath.

Four years. He had never once said them again. There is no occasion to. A man says them one time in his life and then carries them.

***

Tharek did not go down.

Lyria saw it and did not understand it for a moment, and then understood it completely.

He had gone rigid, on his feet, with his hands open at his sides, and he was looking at Mira, and he was not going anywhere near her. Because Mira was standing in the middle of that hollow with her boots off and her feet on the ground she had walked four miles to find, and it was hers, and she had just said so out loud to seven people.

And he had worked out, in the time it took his brother to hit his knees, that if he crossed that ground now she would never be able to say afterward that she had let him.

So he stayed where he was, at the edge of it, on somebody else’s dirt.

”Mira of the settlement,” Tharek said. ”May I come onto your ground?”

Mira looked at him for a long moment.

”Yes,” she said.

Then he crossed it, and knelt, and the words came out of him the same way they had come out of his brother, and they did not sound like his voice either.

”Zhu’anara. Ahn’sul veth kira, mal’ahn veth sora1.”

***

There is a thing that happens to a Vor’kesh1 at that moment, and Lyria had been told about it and had assumed it was decoration.

It is not decoration. It is visible from six feet away in bad light.

Zharek’s leaves stopped.

They had not been falling — he is eight thousand years old and has all of them — but there is a slow perpetual motion to a vine on a living man, a settling and resettling, as a tree is never entirely still even on a windless day. It stopped. All of it, at once, along the whole length of his throat, and then held, as though something had put a hand on it.

Tharek’s did the same, four feet away, at the same instant.

He can never harm her, Lyria thought, watching it. That is what that is. It is not a promise he has made. It is a door that has shut behind him, and he could not open it again if he spent the rest of his life trying.

***

Asha put her hands over her mouth.

She did it as a girl of nineteen does, entirely unguarded, and above her hands her eyes were enormous, and she looked round at all of them for help, and there was nobody in that hollow who was going to be able to give her any.

”I do not know what to say,” she said, through her fingers. ”I know what this is. I know exactly what this is. She told us, she told us both, she made us learn it—”

”Then you know it,” Mira answered.

”I cannot remember it.”

”You can remember it.”

”Mira, I cannot remember one word of it, I am—” Asha’s voice went. ”He is on the ground.”

***

And Mira, nineteen years old, standing on four miles of her own dirt with her boots off, said the Kaeth’ara.

She did not say it to Tharek. That was the thing Lyria understood about half a second late and has thought about a great deal since. Mira turned her head and said it slowly and clearly and in the direction of her sister, one phrase at a time, the way you hand somebody a rope.

”Kael’vorn1,” she said, and waited.

Asha’s hands came down off her mouth. She got the word out on the second attempt. Mira gave her the next of it and waited again, and Asha got that out as well, and somewhere in the middle of it her voice stopped shaking and went somewhere Lyria had not heard it go before.

”Vor’thal ahn’sora—”

”Vor’thal ahn’sora, zhu’lin ahn’thala.” Asha got the whole of the last of it out on her own, in a rush, and then stood there breathing as though she had run up a hill.

Then Mira turned back to Tharek and said the whole of it again, from the beginning, straight through, in a voice like somebody reading out a bill of lading.

+++

Lyria had not known she was going to weep and did not notice she was doing it.

Four years ago those two came over the border with a family name and no notion whose it was, and somewhere in that first winter a very old woman in the eastern quarter did the work herself and found out that they were hers. Her son’s son’s girls. Four generations down a line, she had spent eight thousand years assuming they had gone into a ditch in the Mid Realm along with everybody else.

She did not send for them. She put what she owned into two baskets and moved into their house, and has been in it since, and has never once been asked to leave.

And she did not teach them the useful things, because the settlement teaches the ward lines and the law and where the physicians are.

She taught them how to be demonesses.

What the seed at a woman’s brow is and what it is doing there. Which of the dead in the mountain are theirs, and why the stone is set as it is set, and what is done at each of the doors. How a house is held. What is owed to a guest and what is never owed to anybody. The Old Tongue, badly at first and then not badly at all. Every rite in the year, in order, including the ones nobody has had occasion to use in eight thousand years.

The Kaeth’ara1 among them. Both of them. Properly. Because you do not know which one it will be.

And about everything else she has been magnificently, publicly, no help whatsoever.

Every demoness carries Radiance and Verdant. Those two carry them as well — either of them could put a hand on a broken arm and mean it — and neither has ever once been willing to sit still long enough to find out how, because what is underneath is Inferno and Torrent and there is a great deal more of that than there is of the other, and they would both a hundred times rather take a thing to pieces than mend it.

Their grandmother has had this explained to her by four separate instructors. She listened to all four and agreed with none of them, and told the last one that she had waited eight thousand years for a girl in her house and did not intend to spend what was left of her explaining to one why she ought to be quieter.

It is also her, Lyria happens to know, who is the reason nobody was ever charged for the market fountain, and she has never asked which of them did it, and she is not going to.

That was the whole of it, and it went through Lyria like a bar.

Once in ten thousand years. In a courtyard, to Sethrak, to a woman who had learned it in exile from her own grandmother and had answered it in the Old Tongue in front of everybody, knowing exactly what she was saying.

Once. To somebody else’s granddaughter.

And an old woman in the eastern quarter had heard about that, and looked at her two, and taught them the whole of it anyway.

***

Zharek and Tharek got up.

There is nothing after the Kaeth’ara1. That is the part nobody tells you either. It grants the right to court, and it grants nothing else whatsoever, and the two of them stood up out of the leaves and had no idea at all what to do next, and neither did the girls, and for a while everybody in that hollow stood about in the dark like people at the end of a wedding whose carriage has not come.

”You may not carry anything of hers,” Voresh said, from the trees, in the voice of a man who has been waiting four years to be useful about precisely this. ”Either of you. Do not offer. She will hand you a thing when she wants you to have it and not before.”

”How long?” Zharek asked.

”As long as she likes.”

”That is not an answer.”

”It is the only answer there has ever been,” Voresh said, ”and I asked Vaelith the same question four years ago and got the same one, and I want you both to understand that she was not being unkind.”

***

They walked out of the wood at first light in no particular order.

Asha talked the entire way, at volume, mostly to Mira, occasionally over her shoulder at a man who had spent eight thousand years being unable to be surprised by anything and had stopped being able to construct a sentence.

Mira did not talk at all.

She walked at the back with her boots in her hand and did not put them on, and about a mile from the settlement she stopped and looked behind her at four miles of nothing, and Lyria stopped with her.

”It is still nobody’s.”

”Yes.”

”I want that on paper. Not a grant. Not somebody giving it to me for being clever, and not because of this.” She did not look round. ”I want to have gone and got it.”

”Then we find out how.”

”There will be a way.”

”There is a cellar under that fortress with four floors in it,” Lyria said, ”and somebody down there has written down how to do everything anybody has ever done. We can start at the bottom.”

***

Mira went on. Voresh did not.

He let the rest of them get ahead and then stood in the road with her and said nothing, which he does at these moments, and which it had taken Lyria two years to stop reading as restraint. He simply has no words he trusts.

Five leaves at his throat, and a sixth coming.

She had never asked him what that cost. She had asked Vaelith once, in the third year, and Vaelith had put down what she was holding and had not answered for long enough that Lyria had said never mind and had gone away and had not asked anybody again.

”You said them to me.”

”I did.”

”You had one leaf.” She had not meant to start there and could not now get back. ”You were standing in that snow with one leaf left, and you said them to me, and I did not—”

She stopped.

”I thought it was a soldier’s thing,” she said. ”I thought it was something you said over a girl you had been told to stand in front of.”

”I know.”

”You let my father think that.”

”Yes.”

”For a year.”

”Yes.”

”Why?”

”Because you were fourteen,” Voresh said. ”And because a woman who does not know what she is answering has not answered.”

***

Flowers left where she would find them. Stones carved with a pattern she had never once mentioned out loud. Not one of them ever handed to her, not one of them ever remarked on afterward, and every single one of them kept.

Nothing asked for. Nothing said. All of it done alone, for four years, by a man who had gone on standing in her mother’s doorway as though that were a normal way to spend a life.

She had thought the words were the end of something.

She had been wrong about which end. He had said them and then stopped, because saying them was all he was permitted to do, and had waited four years at a starting line she had not known she was standing on the other side of, and had never once told her that was where he was.

”Voresh.”

”Yes.”

She could not work out what to do with her hands, which had never once been a difficulty in her life, and she ended up putting them behind her back like a child called out in a hall.

”Kael’vorn1,” Lyria said. ”Ahn’sul vor’eth zhu’kira. Vor’thal ahn’sora, zhu’lin ahn’thala2.”

***

He did not move at all.

For a moment she thought she had got it wrong — that she had mangled a word, or that four years was too long and there is a term on these things that nobody had told her about, and she felt the whole of that arrive and go through her in about a heartbeat.

Then she saw his face and understood that he had simply stopped being able to do anything.

The vine at his throat put out the sixth leaf.

Not budding. Not coming. It opened, in front of her, in the gray light at the edge of a wood, in the time it takes a hand to open — and Lyria, who had watched that vine for four years and had counted it every day and had lied about counting it, made a sound she was not proud of.

”Ahn’zhu vor’nal kira1,” Voresh said.

She did not know that one.

”What is that in the common tongue?”

”My soul no longer cries,” he said, and then he had to stop, and it was a while before he could go on. ”It is a thing we say about a man. It is the worst thing we say about a man. You say it of the ones who are almost finished.” He got his hand up and put it flat over the leaves. ”Nobody has ever said it the other way round. There is no other way round. There has never been an occasion for one.”

”Then say it wrong,” Lyria said.

”Ahn’zhu vor’nal kira,” said Voresh, and this time it meant the opposite, and it came out of him like something being put down after a very long carry.

***

Somewhere south of them, eight million lights on a web nobody in that wood could see went quiet, all at once, the way a room goes quiet.

Ren knew exactly what it was.

He had felt it once before, years ago, standing in the middle of a sentence in his own council chamber — Sethrak’s, answered in the Old Tongue by a woman who knew what she was saying — and eight million people had stopped whatever they were holding at the same instant, and a good many of them had wept about it without being able to say afterward why.

This was the third since midnight.

He took all three of them out on the terrace with his hands on the parapet and did nothing whatever about his face, because there was no one up there to see it.

Twins. Both of them. In one hollow, inside a minute of each other, after thousands of years of nothing at all.

And then the part he had to put his forehead down on his own forearms about, which was that it had gone across.

Fire to the water girl. Water to the fire one. Zharek is Inferno to the bone, and the Path had handed him the one who freezes cisterns; Tharek is Torrent and had been given the one who sets fire to grain stores. There is not a line in eight thousand years of doctrine that accounts for it. Ren found that he did not care in the smallest degree and was going to be laughing about it in a hundred years.

Then the other thing, underneath, which was not funny.

Those two will never know.

Eight thousand years old, and they have not faded, and now they never will. Neither of them is ever going to find out what it is to be thousands of years into a life with the color going out of it, counting leaves, saying nothing about it to anybody. They will simply have it, from the beginning, the way a man is supposed to.

That is what it looked like. Ren had read the accounts and had never once seen it and had privately assumed the old writers were being sentimental — a people where a man of eight thousand is a young man, and finds her, and there is no tragedy anywhere in it, and nobody makes a song about it because it happens constantly and always has.

Three in one night.

He stood a long time on that terrace with his eyes shut, listening to a realm that was not going quiet any more.