# The Smoke

**Jack Abbott**

*Children of Andromeda — Book Ten*

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## Part One — Full Text

### Spring, 1607 (Part One)

#### I. The Smoke

The smoke did not behave like smoke from a fire. Kyra had watched it for most of the morning, from the snow line down through the first stunted trees, and by the time the forest closed over them she was sure of that much. It went up thin and steady and nearly straight, and it did not flare or thin or die back the way a thing does when a person stops tending it. Whatever was making it had been making it for days and meant to go on.

She did not say so. There was nothing to say it with yet, and Val had stopped again.

Val stood with both hands on the staff Kyra had cut for her at the treeline, a length of dead pine gone silver and hard, with her weight on it and not on the leg. She did not look at the leg. She looked down the slope at the next stretch of it the way she looked at a problem on a panel, as though it could be solved in order if she were patient enough, and Kyra looked at her.

That was the trouble with stopping. There was nothing on the mountain to look at but Val.

Her hair had come out of its tie again. The weeks of snow light had bleached it at the ends until it was nearly the color of the dry grass along the melt, and it stayed darker where it parted, and a piece of it had blown across her mouth and she had not moved it, because both her hands were on the staff. Kyra watched the wind take it off again. She did not know how long she watched. It arrived in her the way weather did on this world, a day early and out of nowhere, and she let it go through and did not ask it what it was.

"How bad," Kyra said.

Val considered the question with the seriousness she gave everything. "Worse than this morning. Better than the ninth day."

"That isn't a number."

"You didn't ask for one."

Kyra laughed, and it hurt her ribs, which were hungry. It was the fourth time either of them had laughed on this mountain. She had counted all four, because she always counted, and because each one had come out of her like something dug up.

Val shifted her grip on the staff. Then, without being asked, in the flat voice she kept for things she would rather not say at all: "It's worse than I've been telling you."

*Nothing kept. Not from here on.* Kyra had said it into the cold with her voice gone, and Val had said yes, and this was what it looked like — not a confession, only a sentence handed across like a tool.

"I know," Kyra said.

"You don't know. You've been guessing."

"I've been guessing well," Kyra corrected. "Give me your arm on the steep part."

Val gave it to her.

· · ·

They had no business going down at all.

Tolven had looked at fires in a line along a river and said, *Then we go down somewhere else*, and that had been the first decision in the history of two worlds that nobody had a procedure for. Tolven had gone down somewhere else in the sixth section. Her rule had come down the mountain anyway, carried in the two of them, and they were breaking it this morning for the oldest reason there was.

The ration had run out on a morning Kyra could have named to the hour. Since then there had been snow water, and the pale shoots she found at the edge of the melt, which Val had examined one at a time and pronounced unlikely to kill them, and then less of that. You could be very clever about hunger for a while. After that you were only hungry.

So: the smoke. Where there was smoke there were people, and where there were people there was food, and between the two of them they had strength left for about one mistake.

There had been a hut on the open ground above the trees, low and silver-logged inside a fence of poles, with no smoke of its own and no tracks to its door. She had looked at it for as long as it took to pass it, and filed it, and gone back to watching the smoke.

The field ran through her while she thought it. It had run through her every hour since the snow — wrong, enormous, a hum at the back of her skull that did not stop and did not ask, like being homesick in her teeth. North was downhill and a little to the left of the smoke. She did not know how she knew that. She had stopped asking early, the way you stop asking a sore tooth why.

· · ·

It was not a fire. It was a hill.

They came out of the trees into a clearing somebody had made on purpose, the stumps cut level and old, and in the middle of it stood a mound of earth and turf taller than a man and wider than a house, and the smoke came out of it. Not from a top. From everywhere, a little: from small dark holes around the base, from a seam near the crown, seeping, as though the whole hill were breathing out very slowly. The air smelled sweet and scorched and green at once. Cut wood was stacked at the edge of the clearing in walls higher than Kyra's head.

Val had not come past the edge of the trees. "It's burning. Inside. Without enough air."

"On purpose." Kyra walked a slow half circle around it before she could stop herself, because a thing nobody had measured was a thing nobody had measured, and hunger had not managed to take that out of her yet. "They're starving it. It isn't making heat, it's making—" She held her hand out toward one of the vents and felt the warmth come off it. "Carbon. It's turning wood into carbon. Val, somebody down there is working metal."

"Somebody closer than that," Val said, "is standing behind you."

He was at the edge of the clearing, by a lean-to of bark and poles, and he had been there the whole time. He was black to the elbows and to the eyebrows, and the whites of his eyes stood out in his face like something set in coal. He held a long pole with a hook at the end of it, and he did not raise it and did not put it down.

Kyra lifted her hand, open, the way you would on Sethal to someone across a courtyard, and felt foolish, and kept it up.

The man looked at her hand. He looked at Val's leg, and at the staff, and at the gray ship clothes with no seams where seams should be, and at Kyra's face last and longest. Then he lifted his own hand, slowly, the pole in the other, and held it there, black to the wrist.

He said one word. It was low, and it did not go up at the end.

"We're hungry," Kyra told him in her own language, because it was the only one she had, and heard how it sounded in the clearing: like a noise.

The man lowered his hand and pointed with the hook, down the slope, past the woodpile, to where the trees thinned and more smoke rose in separate threads from roofs she could not yet see.

Val leaned on the staff and followed the hook with her eyes. "He's telling us where to go."

"Or where not to."

"Those," Val observed, looking at the threads, "are chimneys. This was never the village. We followed the wrong smoke."

"It was the only smoke there was," Kyra said, and it came out harder than she meant. She did not know why until they were well past the woodpile. The man was the first living person on this world either of them had stood in front of, and he had looked at them for a long time, and it had not been unkind.

· · ·

The village lay where the valley flattened: a scatter of wooden houses under steep roofs of silvered shingle, plowed strips running out from it in every direction like the lines around a sunspot, and in the middle of it all a tall wooden building with a pointed tower, which every path in the place seemed to lead toward. There were geese in the lane. There was a well with a long wooden sweep. There was the smell of animals and wet ground and bread, and Kyra's stomach turned over at the bread so hard she had to stop.

A woman at the well saw them first.

She was drawing water, and she stopped with the bucket halfway up and looked at them — two thin, gray-faced women in gray clothes coming out of the forest, one of them lurching on a stick — and Kyra watched her see it. Watched the whole of it happen in the woman's body before a word was said. The woman let go of the rope. She took the child playing at her feet by the arm and pulled it behind her skirts, and put her hand over its mouth, and then over her own.

It went through the village faster than a shout would have. Doors. A man in a doorway, then two, then more. Somebody had a long wooden fork. Somebody else had a flail. They came as far as the last fence and no farther, most of them with a sleeve or a cloth held up over their noses and mouths, and one word went round and round among them, hard at the front and soft at the end. Kyra heard it three times, and then a fourth, and filed it, because she could not help it.

Val's voice did not carry past Kyra. "They think we're sick."

"We are sick," Kyra admitted.

"Not with anything they know."

Kyra tried anyway. She put her hand to her mouth, the plainest thing she knew — *eat, food, please* — and the whole line of them flinched back at once, as though she had coughed on them.

She understood it a moment too late. Hand to mouth. Of course. She stood there with her hand still half raised and felt the anger come up in her like a banked fire catching, useless and total — at the fences and the forks and the woman with her hand over the child's face, and at herself, and at Tolven for being right.

She took a step forward.

The man with the fork lifted it.

Val's hand closed on Kyra's sleeve at the elbow. Not hard. It did not pull. It simply arrived and stayed, and Kyra stopped because it had, and turned her head.

Val had gone still. It was the stillness Kyra had known since they were eighteen, the one Val did on purpose when everything in her was running as hot as it went: her face closed and composed, her hands quiet on the staff, as though somebody had set her down there and she had agreed to it. Anyone in that lane would have said she felt nothing. Kyra, who had been reading that face for fifty-nine years, could see all of it. The fear, and the hunger, and under both of them something steadier that was nothing but Val deciding, very precisely, that Kyra was not going to be hurt in a lane full of strangers over a piece of bread.

"All right," Kyra said. "All right."

· · ·

He came down the lane from the one house that was not like the others.

It had a ground floor of stone, and glass in its windows, and a carved beam over its door, and he came out of it without hurrying: an older man with gray in his beard, in a dark coat that had been cut for him somewhere that was not here. He said something to the men at the fence. It was short and it was not loud, and they did not like it, and the fork came down anyway.

Then he did what nobody else had done. He walked up to them until he was close enough to touch.

He did not look at their faces. He looked, very deliberately, at their throats — under the jaw, one side and then the other — and at the insides of their wrists, and then at their hands, turning his head to see Val's where they held the staff. He looked last at their eyes, at the whites of them, the way you would look at a sky for weather. Kyra stood for it because Val did. She could feel Val beside her watching him do it, and she knew that look on Val too. It was the look Val gave a panel.

Whatever he was looking for, he did not find it. He nodded, once, to himself, the way a man nods when a sum comes out.

Then he turned and walked back up the lane, and at the corner of the stone house he looked back at them and lifted two fingers — *come* — and went round behind it.

Kyra did not move. "Val."

"I know."

"He could be—"

"He could." Val shifted her weight onto the staff. "He's also the only one who came closer."

· · ·

It was a storehouse, cool and dim and smelling of wool and salt and something sharp that might have been leather. Sacks. Bolts of cloth on a shelf. Barrels with marks burned into their lids. He left them standing inside the door and went into the house by another way, and Kyra stood in the dimness and counted the barrels, because it was that or think.

He came back with his arms full.

Clothes. He laid them out on a barrel head one piece at a time, as if he were making sure of them himself: two long skirts of heavy dark wool, two shifts of rough pale linen, two laced bodices, two shawls, and two lengths of white cloth folded into squares. When he came to the second shawl he stopped with it in his hands. It was a dark red, worn soft at the edges, and he held it a moment longer than he had held anything else, and Kyra saw his thumb move once along the fold.

She did not know what that was. She knew what it looked like.

He put it down with the rest. He pointed at their gray clothes, and at the pile, and then he turned his back on them and walked to the door and stood in it, looking out at the yard, with his hands behind him.

"He's keeping watch," Val said.

Kyra was already untying the gray collar at her throat. "He's giving us the room. It's the same thing."

Val sat on a barrel to do it, because of the leg, and Kyra knelt and did the leg for her: the soft ship boot off, the gray cloth worked down past the knee and over the bad place below it and the boot back on again, slowly, with Val's hand flat on Kyra's shoulder for balance and her breath held in a way she would have denied. The shift went on over Val's head. Kyra did not look at the place low on Val's back, on the left, above the hip. She had first seen it in a boot room when they were eighteen, and she had spent most of the years since not looking at it, which was its own kind of looking, and she did not look at it now.

The bodices laced up the front. Val did her own, fast and exact, and then did Kyra's without asking, because Kyra was making a knot of hers, and Val's cool hands went up the laces one crossing at a time as if she were closing a seam.

Then the white cloths. Kyra understood those without being told. Every woman in the lane had worn one.

She stood behind Val and put it over her hair and drew it back and tied it at the nape. The pale ends had come out at the side, and anyone at any distance would have seen them, so she tucked them in with her fingers along Val's temple, one piece and then another, and Val held still for it and said nothing at all. Kyra's fingers stayed at the edge of her face longer than the hair needed. She knew that. She let it go through and did not ask it what it was.

Val did Kyra's in turn, briskly, and stepped back and looked at her.

"You look like somebody's aunt," Val said.

Kyra opened her mouth. "I'm somebody's—"

She stopped, because the rest of it was *mother*, and it was not a word she could say on this world yet. Not in a storehouse. Not with a stranger at the door.

Val did not say anything. She reached out and took the end of Kyra's headcloth, which had come loose when Kyra turned, and tucked it back where it belonged.

Their boots stayed on. There was nothing else to climb a mountain in, and the skirts came to the ground.

The gray clothes lay on the floor. Val folded them — sleeves in, the seams that were not seams matched — and rolled them tight, and tied the roll with one of its own sleeves. When Kyra looked at her, Val said, "We don't leave these."

"I know."

"Anywhere."

"I *know*, Val."

The man turned from the door. He looked them over, the whole of it — the skirts and the bodices and the white cloth and the rolled bundle under Val's arm — and something in his face eased, and he gave the same nod he had given in the lane.

He took them out through the back of the yard, through a gate and down a path along a stream that ran behind the houses and away from the lane, where nobody was. At the end of it the trees began. He stopped there and pointed up the valley, toward the forest and the mountain above it, and did not need a word to say it: *go*.

It was not unkind. It was not anything else, either.

Kyra put her hand flat on her chest, over the place where a person on Sethal says a thing like this, and said it in her own language — *thank you* — and felt again how it sounded. Like a noise.

He looked at her hand for a long moment. Then he put his own hand flat on his chest, in the same place, the way she had.

Then he went back along the stream, and the gate shut behind him.

· · ·

They went up slowly, and stopped often, and kept going.

The light was going off the valley by the time they passed the clearing again. The charcoal man was at the edge of it with his hooked pole, a darker shape against the dark wood, and he watched them come up out of the trees in village clothes with the gray roll under Val's arm. He did not lift his hand this time, and neither did Kyra. He watched them all the way across, and when Kyra looked back from the far side he was still watching.

"He examined us," Val said, a long way above the clearing, when there was nobody left to hear it. "The man in the coat."

"He looked at our throats."

"Under the jaw, then the wrists, then the hands, then the eyes. In that order." Val stopped to breathe, both hands on the staff. "He knows a sickness that shows in those places. He was making certain we didn't have it."

"And we don't."

"Not that one," Val conceded.

Kyra thought about that for most of the next stretch, and about the red shawl, and about his thumb along the fold of it, and got nowhere with any of it.

They had come down for food and were going back up with clothes. A village's way of saying *go*, and one man's way of saying something else, on the same afternoon, without a word either of them could understand. She did not know yet what to do with that. She would have to carry it up the mountain and look at it later, when there was light and something in her stomach.

Near the treeline Val's leg began to go.

Kyra felt it before Val said anything — felt it through the arm Val had given her, a hitch and then a give — and then Val said her name, and nothing else, because that was the rule now.

"I know," Kyra said.

"You don't—"

"I do."

Below them, far down where the valley opened, the charcoal man's hill went on breathing out its one thin thread of smoke, straight up into the still evening, as though nothing on the mountain had changed at all.

#### II. The Carry

The leg went the way Val had calculated it would, which was no comfort at all.

She had done the arithmetic on the way down that morning, as she did everything, and had arrived at a figure for how much of a day the right leg had in it. The village had used more than its share. By the time the clearing was behind them she could feel the figure running out through the arm Kyra held, a little with every step, like water through a bad seam, and a short way below the last of the trees the knee above the break simply declined to do what it was asked.

She sat down. It was not a decision. The path came up to meet her, and the staff went over sideways into the needles, and the rolled bundle of ship clothes stayed under her arm because she had been holding it that way for so long that her arm had forgotten how to do anything else.

Kyra was down beside her before she had finished sitting. "Tell me."

"It isn't going to take my weight."

"For now, or for tonight?"

There was a fraction of a second in which Val considered the smaller answer, and found that she no longer remembered how to give it to this woman. "For tonight," Val admitted.

Kyra sat back on her heels. The light was nearly gone off the slope, and in the last of it Val watched her think: the brows first, dark and drawn hard together, the way they had drawn together over every problem Kyra had ever been handed, since they were eighteen and the problems were small. Kyra's whole face worked on a thing. Val had never been able to decide whether that was a flaw or the finest instrument on two worlds.

The ship was above the snow line. Val did not need to say it, and did not. At their pace it was most of the night away, in the dark, with the cold that came over the ridge every evening already starting down it, and one of them unable to stand.

Kyra looked up the slope, into the dark, as though she could see through it. "There's a hut."

"What hut?"

"On the open ground above the trees. We passed it this morning. You were looking at your feet."

"I was looking at the path."

"You were looking at your feet," Kyra said, "and there's a hut, and it's closer than the ship." She stood up and brushed the needles off the dark skirt as if she had worn one all her life. "Up."

"I can't."

"I didn't ask you to."

She picked up the staff and put it into Val's free hand, and crouched, and got her shoulder under Val's middle, and her arm behind Val's knees, careful of the right one. Then, with a sound Val had last heard her make lifting a crate of instruments onto a bench at the institute, she stood up with her.

The world turned over. The path was suddenly above Val's head and the sky was somewhere past her feet, and her face was against the small of Kyra's back, and the bundle was crushed between them, and the staff dragged a line in the needles behind.

"This," Val said, into the wool, "is undignified."

"You can file a correction." Kyra was already climbing. "Somebody on this mountain will read it."

"I'd have to find somebody to file it with."

"You'll find me," Kyra said. "I'll be the one underneath you."

· · ·

She did not remember, afterward, very much of the climb. She remembered it the way she remembered a fold: in pieces, in the wrong order, with the important parts missing.

She remembered Kyra's breathing, which was the whole of the sound on the slope, and which went ragged and then steadied and then went ragged again. She remembered Kyra stopping, and setting her down against a rock, and standing with her hands on her knees, and saying nothing, and picking her up again. She remembered the cold coming.

And she remembered, with a precision she did not know what to do with, the back of Kyra's neck.

The headcloth had slipped in the first steep stretch, and nobody's hands were free to fix it, and so it hung loose, and the hair had come out from under it. Dark chestnut, and copper where the last light caught it, and heavy, and damp at the roots from the effort. Under it, a hand's width from Val's face, was the nape of Kyra's neck: the hairline, the fine dark hairs below it, the two long cords that went down into the collar of the borrowed shift and moved when she breathed. There was a pulse there, just to one side, that she could see as well as she could have counted it.

She catalogued all of it, in order, the way she would have read a panel. It was only when Kyra stopped for the third time and set her down against a stone that Val understood she had been doing nothing else since the trees, and had no idea how long that was.

She looked away, at the dark, and put the fact where she put facts she had no use for yet.

· · ·

The hut was low and made of logs gone silver with weather, with a roof of wooden shingles held down against the wind by stones. Around it ran a fence of rough poles enclosing a stretch of trampled ground, and the whole place smelled of old smoke and animals and something sour Val could not place. The door was held with a wooden peg through a loop. Kyra worked it out with her free hand, with Val still over her shoulder, and did not ask for help, and did not need any.

Inside it was entirely dark and a little warmer than outside, which was all it had to offer, and it was enough. Kyra found a bench along the wall by walking into it, and put Val down on it, onto straw that crackled and smelled of summer, and then stood in the middle of the dark breathing like a woman who had carried another woman up a mountain.

Val found the edge of the bench with one hand and held on to it. "Thank you."

"Don't."

"I was only—"

"I know what you were only." Kyra's voice came from somewhere near the floor, where she had apparently sat down. "Give me a moment and then you can thank me with a straight face and I'll let you."

Val gave her the moment. It was a long one.

Then Kyra got up and found the hearth, which was in the middle of the floor, a ring of flat stones with a hole in the roof above it, and found the wood, which somebody had stacked dry against the back wall and left, and made a fire. It took her a fraction of the time it had taken on the sixth day, on the slope below the ship, when she had spent four hours proving that a woman with two doctorates could, eventually, make one.

"That was fast," Val observed.

"I've been practicing."

"You have not."

"In my head," Kyra said, and sat back on her heels to watch it catch, and the light came up over her face.

· · ·

By the fire the hut turned out to be a place somebody cared about.

There was a great wooden tub by the wall, bound with hoops and scrubbed pale, and a hook of black iron hanging over the hearth from a crossbeam, and shelves. On the shelves were ladles, and bowls, and wooden things Val did not understand at first — small carved blocks, hollowed and patterned inside with stars and wheels and little lines, like seals, or molds. Everything had been washed and turned over to dry and put away, and the ash in the hearth under Kyra's new fire had been cold for a long time.

Val looked at all of it in order, from the door round to the door again, because she could not get up and looking was what she had.

"Somebody keeps animals up here," Val said at last. "Not now."

Kyra turned from the fire. "When?"

"When there's grass, I would think. The snow is barely off this ground. The fence has wool caught on it, and there's no dung in the pen that isn't a season old." She nodded at the tub, and the molds. "They make something from the milk. That's the smell."

"So we have until there's grass."

"We have until whoever this belongs to comes back," Val corrected. "Which is not the same thing. It depends on the weather, and on whether they're the kind of people who come early."

Kyra was quiet a moment. "The weather's going to hold." Then she looked surprised at herself, and did not explain it, and Val did not ask. There had been a good deal of that since the snow.

· · ·

Kyra came and knelt by the bench. "Let me see it."

Val did not pretend not to know what. She moved the hem of the dark skirt up past her right knee, and Kyra looked at the leg in the firelight for a long time without touching it.

It was not a good thing to look at. The bruising had gone the dull greens and yellows of something old, and the swelling was up again from the day, and below the knee the shin did a thing no shin should do. It was not much. A slight wrongness in the line, as though whoever drew it had been jostled. But it was there, and it was going to stay there, and they both knew it.

Kyra put her hands on it then, very lightly, one on either side of the break, the way you would lay your hands on a bench to feel whether a pump was running. Val held still. Kyra's hands were warm from the fire, and they stayed where they were for longer than looking needed, and Val noticed that too, and put it with the other thing.

Kyra's brows had drawn together over it, hard. "I set it badly."

"You set it in the dark, on the first night, with a piece of hull and a strap, while I told you what to do in a voice I'm told was not at its best." Val looked at the top of Kyra's bent head. "It's set. How well is a separate question."

"It's the only question."

"It's a question for when we have something better than a strap," Val conceded. "We don't. So it will wait."

Kyra's hands came away. She did not get up at once. She stayed on her knees by the bench with her arms around them, looking into the fire, and Val looked at her looking, and after a while said the thing she had been carrying up the mountain since the lane.

"I was afraid down there."

"I know. You went still."

"You saw that."

"I always see that," Kyra said, not looking round. "You go still, and everybody in the room thinks you're bored, and I think, there she goes."

Val considered it. It was accurate, which was the worst thing that could be said about it.

Val watched the fire. "I thought they were going to hurt you."

"They were going to try."

"Yes." Val looked at the hands around the knees, the knuckles gone white with cold and whatever else. "I would have minded that very much."

Kyra turned her head then and looked at her, and for a moment neither of them said anything, and then Kyra laughed, short and surprised, the way you laugh when something lands somewhere you didn't expect it.

"You would have *minded*," Kyra said.

"Very much," Val repeated, because it was true, and it was the most she had.

· · ·

There was one bench and one fire and the cold came in under the door, so they lay down back to back on the straw with the borrowed shawls over both of them, the way you would with anyone, and Kyra was asleep almost at once, the way Kyra had always been able to sleep, instantly and entirely, like a child or a soldier.

Val was not.

She lay with her back against Kyra's back and felt her breathing, slow now, and watched the fire go down to red, and did arithmetic, because that was what she did in the dark.

She had done it every day in the first week, in the ship, when Kyra went out onto the slope at first light to look for the sixth and came back at dark without it. How long the ration would last one person with a broken leg. Whether she could get down to the trees on her own, and how. What she would do if one evening Kyra did not come back. She had worked it to the end each day, and it had come out the same each day, and she had never once said any of it aloud. It had not been something to say. It had only been a thing she had to know.

Tonight the sum went the other way.

If Kyra fell on the slope. If Kyra went down somewhere steep and did not get up, and there was the dark coming and the cold coming over the ridge, and only Val there. Val lay in the straw and did it: got her shoulder under, and her arm behind the knees, and stood. On this leg. She knew the figures for this leg. They did not permit it. She did it anyway, in her head, all the way up to the hut, and set Kyra down on the bench, and stood in the dark breathing.

Then she did it again.

She did not let herself think about why. She lay with her back against Kyra's and listened to her breathe, and the fire went down, and she carried her up the mountain a third time before she slept.

· · ·

When she woke there was gray light coming down through the smoke hole, and the straw beside her was empty and cold.

She had the sum half done before she was properly awake — how far Kyra could have gone, and which way, and how long before Val could reasonably begin to be afraid — and then the door opened and Kyra came in with the morning behind her and something held against her chest in both arms, and stood there, and did not seem to know what to say.

It was a while before Kyra said anything. "It was on the step."

It was a bundle wrapped in a square of coarse cloth and tied at the top. Kyra knelt by the bench and put it down between them and undid the knot, and inside it was a round flat loaf of dark bread, heavy as a stone, and a wedge of something pale and hard that smelled like the hut, and three small onions.

Val did not touch any of it. She looked at the cloth.

There were marks on it. Black ones, at the knot and along the edges where it had been folded: the prints of fingers and a thumb, laid down in soot, exact as a signature.

"The man at the mound," Val said.

"You can't know that."

Val lifted a corner of the cloth and turned it to the light so the prints showed, and Kyra looked, and her face did the thing it did.

Kyra sat back on her heels. "He followed us up. In the dark."

"Or he knew where we'd go. There's nowhere else up here." Val let the corner drop. "Both, probably."

Kyra laughed. It came out of her in a rush, and it was nearly something else, and then it was a laugh after all. Val did not need to count it. Kyra would have the count; Kyra always had the count. It was the sixth.

"Slowly," Val said, because Kyra was already tearing at the loaf. "Small pieces, and slowly, or it comes straight back up. That's not a figure of speech."

"I know it's not a figure of speech."

"Then eat as if you know it."

They ate slowly, sitting on the straw with the cloth between them, and it was the best thing Val had ever eaten, on either world, and she would have said so to anyone who asked. The bread was sour and dense and tasted of smoke. The pale thing was salt and sharp and made her eyes water. Kyra ate an onion whole, bite by bite, like fruit, and did not care who saw.

Val stopped before she had finished her piece, and put what was left of it down on the cloth, near Kyra's knee.

Kyra looked at it, and at her. Then she took it without asking and ate it. She knew perfectly well that Val had left it there for her. Val knew she knew. Neither of them said so, because there was nothing in it that needed saying and they were both too hungry to argue about it.

When the bread was gone Val folded the cloth, soot and all, into a neat square and set it on the bench beside her.

"We'll give that back," Val said.

Kyra wiped her hands on the borrowed skirt. "When?"

"When we have something to put in it."

#### III. Your Eyes

The cold on the high ground did not come in the way cold came in anywhere Val had lived. It came up. It rose out of the earth floor of the hut after the fire went down, and through the straw, and through the bench, and found the places the shawls did not reach, and it was patient about it in a way she found almost admirable.

They had slept back to back for four nights, because there was one bench. On the fifth the wind turned and came straight down off the snow, and the hut, which had been built for summer, let it in at every seam.

Val lay awake and measured it. She could not help that; she measured most things. The fire was a red eye in the middle of the floor. Behind her Kyra was asleep, the way Kyra slept, all at once and all the way down, and her back was the only warm thing in the world.

Then Kyra turned over.

She did it without waking, or nearly without — a long breath, a shift in the straw — and her arm came over Val's side and her hand settled flat just under Val's ribcage and pulled, once, not hard, until there was no cold air left between them.

That was all. No word. The hand stayed where it was.

Val lay very still. It was not the stillness she did on purpose, in lanes, in rooms with people in them; it was the other kind, the kind that arrives before you have decided anything. She could feel the whole length of Kyra against her back, and Kyra's breath at the back of her neck, and the hand, and the warmth coming off all of it into her like heat off a stone that has been in the sun all day.

She did not move away. There was no reason to. It was cold, and this was warmer, and a person would have to be a fool to argue with that at this altitude. She let her own hand come to rest on the shawl over Kyra's wrist, because it had to go somewhere, and she closed her eyes.

And then there was something else.

At first she took it for her own pulse. It was under the hand, under the warmth, a kind of running — steady and fast and bright, too bright, like a note held slightly sharp. She knew her own pulse. It was not that. She lay and listened to it, if *listened* was the word, and it was not; she had no word. It was the way she would have known, with her eyes shut, that a room she walked into had someone in it. Except that she had never in her life known that, not like this, not with her skin.

It was Kyra.

Not Kyra's heart. Not her breath. Something that ran through all of it at once and went on past the edges of her, a little way into the dark, the way warmth goes past the edges of a fire. It ran hot. It ran fast. And somewhere in it, faint, there was a fraying, a place where it did not quite agree with itself — the way a line on a panel frays when the thing it measures is changing faster than it can follow.

Val lay in the dark with her hand on Kyra's wrist and read it, the way she had read ten thousand panels, in order, carefully, from one edge to the other. She did not know what she was reading. She did not know how she was reading it. She knew only, with the whole of her training and none of it any use, that she could.

She did not sleep for a long time. She did not want to, in case it stopped.

· · ·

Kyra did not remember deciding anything. That was how she would have put it, if anyone had asked, and nobody did. There had been a cold night, and then there had been a hand under Val's ribs, and after that there was a hand under Val's ribs every cold night, and on the high ground in spring that was every night.

It was not something to think about. It was warmth. She had other things to think about.

Her body, for one. It had started arguing with itself.

It was not like being ill. She had been ill on Sethal, twice in her life, and knew the shape of it. This had no shape. It was an ache that lived in the long bones and moved when she wasn't looking. It was being cold in the middle of the day with the sun on her, and too warm at night under one shawl. It was waking at the wrong hour with her heart going as though she had run somewhere. It was hunger that bread did not reach. And under all of it, louder every day, was the field.

The field had been with her since the snow, a hum at the back of her skull. Now it had hands. It lay along the back of her head like a palm resting on her hair, and it told her things. North was a pull she could have walked into blindfolded. Weather came into her a day before it came over the ridge — she felt the fourth day's rain on the third, felt it arrive in her like a door closing somewhere in the house, and said so, and Val wrote it down in the ash with a stick, and the next afternoon it rained. After that Val wrote down all of them.

She did not sleep well. When she did sleep she slept like a stone, and woke with her eyes hot and gritty, as though she had spent the night staring at something bright.

And she was short with Val. She knew it and could not seem to stop.

On the sixth morning Kyra stood in the doorway with her arms full of wood. "You've moved it again."

Val did not look up from the hearth, where she was sitting with her leg out straight in front of her, sorting kindling into piles by size. "I stacked it."

"It was stacked."

"It was stacked the way you stack things," Val said, "which is to say it was in a heap near a wall."

"It was a system."

"It fell on me."

Kyra dropped her armful on the floor where the heap had been, on purpose, loudly, and stood looking at Val with her hands on her hips. Val looked back. After a moment one corner of Val's mouth moved — not a smile, Val did not do those where anyone could see, but the place a smile would have been — and Kyra felt the whole of her own temper go out of her at once, the way it always had, since they were eighteen and fighting about benches.

The charcoal man had left food twice more. Both times it was on the step at first light, wrapped in a square of cloth, and both times the cloth had his thumbprints on it. The first one sat folded on the shelf beside the cheese molds, washed in the stream and dried in the sun, the soot mostly out of it, and the other two beside it. Val would not let her give any of them back empty.

They would need something to put in them. Kyra thought about that most days, and had no answer yet.

· · ·

It happened in daylight, which Val would think about afterward. It was the middle of the day, and they were outside.

Kyra had brought water up from the stream in the wooden pail they had found under the bench, and had tripped on the doorsill with it, and gone down on one knee, and soaked the whole of her skirt from the hip to the hem. She knelt there in the doorway for a moment, looking at it.

Then she started to laugh.

It was the seventh. Val did not need to count it; she was counting it anyway. It went on longer than the others had. It went on until Kyra had to put a hand on the doorframe, and her shoulders shook, and she turned her face up toward Val, sitting on the bench outside the door in the sun with her leg on a log —

And her eyes were gold.

Val did not move. It was the stillness she did on purpose this time; she felt herself choose it, as though somebody had set her down and she had agreed. Kyra was still laughing. She did not know. Of course she did not know. There was no way for her to know.

Val made herself look properly, the way she would have looked at anything, in order.

Kyra's eyes were gray-blue, the gray of the sea under cloud. Val had known that for fifty-nine years and would have said so under oath. They were not gray-blue now. From the edge of the pupil outward they had gone to gold — not the dull yellow of a sick person's eyes but gold, clear and warm, like light through something thick and sweet, and it was brightest near the center and thinned toward the rim, where a little of the gray still showed, like weather at the edge of a sunny day.

It was the most beautiful thing Val had ever seen, and she did not know if it was killing her.

She did not say that. What she said, when Kyra's laugh had run down into breathing and Kyra was wiping her face with the back of a wet wrist, was the thing that she would have kept, on Sethal. She knew that as she said it. On Sethal she would have filed it. She would have watched for a season, and taken measurements, and said nothing until she was sure, and perhaps not then.

There were two of them. There was no room for managing.

"Kyra," Val said. "Your eyes."

Kyra looked at her, still smiling. "What about them?"

"Come here."

Something in how she said it took the smile away. Kyra got up, dripping, and came and crouched in front of the bench, and Val put her hands on either side of Kyra's face — because she needed the light on them, and needed them still — and turned it to the sun.

The gold was fading already. Val watched it go, from the rim inward, the gray coming back like a tide.

"What is it?" Kyra said. Her voice had gone small. "Val. What."

"They were gold," Val said. "When you laughed. All the way out from the pupil. Clear gold, not yellow. It's going now." She held Kyra's face a moment longer, until there was nothing left but gray. "It's gone."

"Gold."

"Yes."

"Like the sickness. The thing they thought we had."

"It isn't anything they know," Val said, as she had said in the lane, and heard how little it was worth.

Kyra's face was still between her hands. Val could feel her jaw move under her palms. "I can't see it."

"No."

"I'll never see it. There's nothing up here to see it in." Kyra's voice went up at the end, the way it did before it broke. "The stream won't hold still and the pail's too dark and there's nothing, Val, there's no *glass*, I don't know what my own face is doing—"

"I do," Val said.

Kyra stopped.

"I can see it," Val insisted. "I'll tell you. Every time. What it does and when and how long. That's what the rule is for." She took her hands away from Kyra's face, because the examination was over, and because she did not trust herself to leave them there. "I don't know what it is. I want that said. I don't know what it is and I don't know if it's harming you. But I can see it, and you'll know everything I see."

Kyra stayed crouched there in front of the bench for a long moment, wet to the hip, looking up at her.

"All right," Kyra said at last.

Val nodded, and looked away across the pasture, and put the rest of it where she put things she could not yet use: the gold, and the sea-gray under it, and the fact that she had wanted to go on looking long after there was anything to examine.

· · ·

Kyra woke in the dark and did not know why.

The fire had gone down to almost nothing, a few coals breathing under the ash. The hut was black. She lay on her side on the straw, and she knew where north was, and she knew there would be no rain tomorrow, and she did not know what had woken her until she lifted her head and looked at Val.

Val was asleep on her back, which she almost never did, with her hands folded on the shawl over her chest. And her hands were lit.

Not bright. Kyra would not have seen it in any light at all. But here, in the black hut, at the length of an arm, there was a faint pale light lying along the insides of Val's wrists, like light seen through water. It came from under the skin. It went up the inside of each forearm a little way and thinned out and was gone.

Kyra did not breathe.

She looked up from the wrists, and there was more of it at Val's throat, in the hollow above the collarbone and along it, the same faint cool light, rising and falling a little with Val's breath.

She had watched a woman in a lane put her hand over a child's mouth. She thought of that. She thought of the gold Val had seen in her own eyes, and could not see, and here was this, on Val, and Val could not see it either, not all of it, not her own throat. Two of them, and each of them carrying something on her body that she could not see, and the only person on the whole world who could see it lying an arm's length away.

There was no rule about waking someone. There was only the one rule.

She reached across the straw, and stopped short of touching. "Val."

Val woke the way she always did, completely and at once, and turned her head.

"Don't move. Look at your hands."

Val looked. Kyra watched her see it — watched her go still, the chosen kind — and then watched her lift one wrist slowly toward her face and turn it, and look at the inside of it, at the pale light lying there under the skin, for a long time.

"It's at your throat as well," Kyra said. "Here." She reached out and put two fingers on it, above the collarbone, where the light was. It was warm under her fingers — warmer than the rest of Val, a little, like a stone that has been in the sun. "And along here. Not bright."

"How bright?"

"I wouldn't see it with the fire up. I barely see it now."

Val was quiet. Then, in her panel voice, the one for readings: "Does it change?"

Kyra watched. "It came up a little. When you looked at it. It's coming up now."

"Then it's tied to something." Val turned her wrist again. "Pulse, or—" She stopped.

"Or what?"

"I don't know," Val admitted. "I want that said, too."

She sat up. Kyra reached for her, and Val put a hand out — not to push her away; to say *wait* — and got her good leg under her and found the staff in the dark and went to the hearth. She knelt by it, stiffly, with the bad leg out to one side, and fed it: the small sticks first, then the split ones, blowing on the coals until they caught, and then more, and more, until the fire was up and roaring and the whole hut was full of moving orange light, and every corner of it showed.

Then she sat back on her heels in front of it and held her wrists up in the firelight and looked at them.

There was nothing there. Only skin, and the light of the fire on it.

Kyra understood it at the same moment Val did. She saw Val understand it: saw the line of her shoulders, which had been up by her ears, come down.

"It only shows in the dark," Kyra said.

"Then we won't have the dark," Val said.

She put another split log on, and then another, and sat watching it burn with her hands open on her knees, turned up to the light, as though she needed to keep checking.

"You'll burn the whole pile by morning," Kyra observed from the bench.

"Then I'll cut more."

"On one leg."

"You'll cut more," Val amended, "and I'll stack it."

Kyra laughed. That was eight. It came out of her easier than the others had, and she was surprised by that, and did not look at it too closely.

· · ·

Val did not come back to the bench for a long time. When she did the fire was still high, and she lay down with her back to Kyra the way she had every night, facing the light, with her hands folded where she could see them.

Kyra lay behind her and looked at the back of her head, at the pale hair gone orange in the firelight, darker where it parted, and thought about the light that was under that skin somewhere, waiting for the dark.

She thought about her own eyes, which she would never see. There was nothing up here to see them in, and perhaps there never would be. For the rest of her life on this world, or however long this was, she would know what her own face was doing only because Val told her.

She found, turning it over, that she could live with that.

She put her arm over Val, and her hand under Val's ribs, and drew her back until there was no cold between them. Val's hand came and rested on her wrist, the way it had the first night, and stayed there.

Neither of them said anything. There was nothing that needed saying. The fire burned high all night, and nobody saw anything in the dark, because there was no dark to see it in.

#### IV. You Will

The wood ran out on a night Kyra had meant to cut more, which was every night, and she had not.

She woke because it was dark. That was the first thing: not the cold, which came later, but the dark, entire, the fire gone to nothing and not even a coal showing. She lay on her side on the straw and knew at once where north was and that there would be no weather tomorrow, and did not know anything else, and then she understood that the reason she could see the shape of Val's shoulder against the wall was that Val's shoulder was lit.

Val was dreaming. She was on her back, which she almost never did, and her head was turning a little from side to side on the straw, and her hands were closed on the shawl, and the light had come up in her further than Kyra had seen it. Not only the wrists now, not only the hollow of the throat. It lay along both forearms and across the collarbones and up the side of her neck under the hair, pale and cool and moving a little, like light at the bottom of clear water. In that hut, in that dark, it was enough to see her face by.

Kyra put her hand out to wake her, and outside, at the fence, a dog barked.

She did not move. The dog barked again, twice, sharp, and then there was a man's voice, low, saying one word in a way that went up at the end, and then nothing, and then a sound Kyra knew from her whole life, from lanes and yards and the slope below the ship: somebody running. Boots on frozen ground, and the dog with them, going away downhill, fast, until the dark had all of it.

The hut was built of logs. Logs had seams. Kyra looked at the wall nearest the fence and saw, now, that the seams showed faintly pale against the dark — lit from inside, by Val.

"Val." She had her hand on Val's shoulder before she decided to. "Val. Wake up."

Val woke the way she did, all at once, and went still. Kyra watched the light go down in her as she did it — watched her choose the stillness and the light obey, sinking back along the arms and out of the throat until there was only a faint thread of it at the wrists, and then not even that, and the hut was black.

"Somebody was outside," Kyra said into the dark.

A pause. Then Val's voice, very level. "Was I—"

"Yes."

"How much?"

"Enough to see through the wall." Kyra found she was holding Val's arm and did not let go. "There was a dog. And a man. He said something, and then he ran."

Val did not say anything for a long moment. Kyra could feel her breathing under her hand, too fast, being made slower on purpose.

"I let the fire go out," Val said.

"I didn't cut the wood."

"I should have woken you when it went low."

"I should have cut the wood," Kyra corrected. "Three days I've been meaning to. Don't argue with me about whose fault it is, we'll be here till morning, and I'll win."

Another silence. Then, low: "Then it's both of us."

"It's both of us," Kyra agreed.

She lay back down, still holding on. After a while, because there was only the one rule and because she wanted to know, she said, "What were you dreaming?"

She felt Val decide to answer. It took no time at all now, which was new. "The sixth," Val said. "The sound it made. And then the sound it didn't make."

Kyra did not say anything to that. There was nothing to say to that. She put her hand where it went on cold nights, under Val's ribs, and held on, and neither of them slept again until the seams of the wall went gray.

· · ·

In the morning there were tracks in the frost by the fence: a man's boots, heavy and nailed, and the prints of a dog, and all of them coming up the path from below and stopping at the poles and going back down again at a run, long and scattered, the boot-prints dragged where he had slipped.

He had dropped things. A coil of rope made of twisted green withies. A short-handled axe. A sack with something lumpy in it that neither of them opened. They lay in the frost by the fence where he had let go of them, and he had not come back for them, and Kyra stood looking at them for a while with her arms wrapped around herself.

"The owners," Val said. She had come as far as the door on the staff and stood in it, looking at the axe. "Early."

"He came up to mend something."

"The fence, I should think. And the roof." Val looked at the rope. "He'll have meant to stay a day or two. He brought his tools and something to eat."

From the edge of the pasture Kyra could see a long way down the mountain in the clear morning, down past the treeline and over the tops of the forest, and a long way down there, on the path, small and moving fast, was a figure with a dog running ahead of it. As she watched, it stopped and turned and looked back up the slope. Then it did something with its hand — touched its forehead, and its chest, and one shoulder and then the other — and turned and went on down and was gone into the trees.

"He's young," Kyra said. "He's frightened."

"He saw something."

"He saw you." Kyra turned round. "Through the wall."

"He saw a light," Val corrected, "in a hut that ought to have been empty, at night, with no fire." She looked at her own wrists, in the daylight, where there was nothing to see. "I don't know what that means to them. Nor do you."

"It means he'll tell somebody."

"Perhaps." Val shifted her weight on the staff. "Or perhaps he'll say nothing, because he'd have to explain why he dropped his axe and ran. Young men are like that on Sethal. I don't imagine it's different here." She looked back at the fence. "We don't touch those."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were looking at the axe."

"I was looking at the axe," Kyra admitted, "because we've got no wood, and it's a very good axe, and I've been cutting wood with the cutter from the ship like an idiot for a week." She let her breath go. "We don't touch them."

Val did not answer. She was looking past Kyra, up the mountain, toward the ridge and the snow above it, and her face had gone the way it went when a panel came back wrong.

"When the animals come," Val said, "there'll be more of them. On this ground. All summer."

Kyra turned and looked where she was looking. The snowfield lay above the pasture, shrinking every day now, going gray at its edges, breaking into islands. Near the top of it, where the slope met the rock, there was a long pale shape lying on its side that had not been there at the start of spring, and that caught the morning sun along its whole length like something wet.

From here, with the snow going off it, anyone could see it. Anyone who came up with a dog to mend a fence. Anyone who went up over the pasture after a strayed animal. It was the only thing on that mountain bigger than a door, and every day there was less snow around it to hide in.

"Oh," Kyra said.

"Yes."

"We can't hide that."

"No."

"Val, it's the size of a — we can't cover it, there aren't enough branches on this whole mountain, we can't move it—"

"I know."

Kyra stood there with her arms around herself and looked at the one piece of home on the whole world, lying on the snow with the sun on it, where anyone could walk up and put a hand on it. She thought about the woman at the well. She thought about the forks.

Kyra let go of her own arms. "I'm going up."

"And do what?"

"I don't know," Kyra said. "Look at it. I'll think of something when I'm looking at it. I always do."

· · ·

She went up alone. There was no question of Val coming; the right leg would not have taken her past the first steep pitch, and they both knew it, and neither of them wasted the morning saying so.

The climb took most of two hours. The snow was rotten now, going to slush under the crust, and she went through it to the knee over and over and swore at it in two languages, one of which was hers and one of which she was making up as she went. The field was loud the whole way. It always was up here, nearer the sky. North pulled at her like a hand on her sleeve.

The ship lay where it had stopped: on its side on the snowfield below a band of dark rock, a long smooth curve of grown hull, pale as a shell, scorched in long streaks where the air had burned it coming down. Farther off, across the gully, lay the patch of black snow she had found on the second morning, where something had gone on coming down in a fine drift for days. It had gone gray now, and ragged, but it was still there, a smear on the white that anyone would stop to look at.

She walked all the way round it. She did not know what she was looking for.

The port was on the upper side, where the section lay tilted. She climbed up to it without thinking, because it was the port, because she had stood at it and looked out at a world under a star before any of this. It was four inches of poor glass, and the fall had crazed it into a thousand pieces that still held together, so that when she put her face to it she saw nothing but splinters of sky and her own breath going white on it. Whatever her eyes were doing, the port was not going to tell her.

She got down again and stood in the snow with her hands hanging.

Branches, she thought. Rocks. The black snow scraped over it. None of it. It was the length of a hall and it shone.

She sat down in the snow with her back against it, because she had been walking for two hours and she was tired all the way through in the new way, the change way, the long bones aching, and because there was nowhere else to sit. The hull was cold through the wool at her back. It was always cold, up here. She put her palm flat on it beside her hip, the way you would put a hand on the flank of an animal you had been riding all day, and closed her eyes.

And felt it.

It was very small. It was under the field — under the huge wrong hum of this whole world that lived at the back of her skull and never stopped — and it was so faint that she understood at once why she had not noticed it before: she had never once been still enough, up here, with her hand on it, to hear anything under that roar. It was like hearing, across a crowded yard, somebody speaking her own language. Two words of it. Then gone under the noise, then there again.

A field. Not this world's. A small one, the right shape, the shape of home, coming out of the thing under her hand.

She did not move. She sat in the snow with her palm on the hull and her eyes shut and listened, with whatever it was she listened with now, and it went on being there.

Rask, she thought.

He had come and found her in the instrument bay on her second day with the crew, with two cups of something he had made himself that tasted like a burnt bench, and put one in her hand, and said, *You know her yet?*

*The ship?*

*You will.*

And he had looked round the bay the way a man looks round a room he has built. Nine bays, and the ninth had fought him for two years, and she was the best he had ever grown. He had been sixty-one and so pleased with himself that it was hard to be annoyed about the coffee. He had been in the third section. Nobody had answered from the third.

She had not known the ship. She had had her bench and her plates and her season's work, and the ship had been the room they happened to be in. She did not know it now. But it was under her hand, and it was the only thing on this world that spoke a word of her language, and she was more tired than she had ever been in her life.

"I don't know you," she told it, out loud. "He did. I don't."

The small field went on.

"They're going to find you," Kyra said. "People. Men with dogs and forks. They'll come up here all summer and they'll see you from anywhere on the pasture, and then they'll come and put their hands on you, and I don't know what happens after that and I don't want to know." Her voice was doing the thing it did. She let it. "I can't hide you. I've tried to think how and I can't. So if you know how — if there's anything in you that knows how — I'd be—"

She did not finish it. She did not have words for the end of it. She sat there with her palm flat on the cold hull and her eyes closed and *wanted*, with the whole of herself, the way you want something you cannot ask for in words, as if the wanting were the only language that thing had ever been grown to understand.

Under her hand, the hull shivered.

It was not a movement she could have seen. It went through the grown stuff of it along the lines where its cells met, a long low sound she felt more than heard, and she knew that sound. Everybody who had been aboard in the fold knew it. It was the sound a grown thing makes along its cell boundaries. She had heard it once before, in the dark, with Rask saying one word on an open channel.

Kyra took her hand away and scrambled up out of the snow and stood back from it, and watched.

The color went out of it. It started where her palm had been and ran outward in every direction, fast, like a stain spreading through cloth: the pale shell-color of the hull draining away to gray, and the gray going darker and mottled, the dark of wet rock, the grayish white of old snow, until the whole long curve of it was the colors of the slope it lay on. The scorch-streaks went with it. The shine went. Frost came up on it as she watched, feathering out across the surface from nowhere, and a breath of cold rolled off it that she felt on her face from three paces away, colder than the snowfield, as cold as the rock.

And then it was gone.

Not gone. She knew exactly where it was. But she stood in the snow and looked at the place where the hull was lying, the length of a hall, and she saw snow, and the band of dark rock above it, and patches of old gray ice, and shadow, and the slope going on the way a slope goes on. If she had come over the ridge at that moment and looked down, she would have seen a snowfield going to pieces under the spring sun and nothing else at all.

Kyra stood there with both hands over her mouth.

Then, because she was who she was, and because a thing nobody had measured was a thing nobody had measured, she took her hands down and closed her eyes. It was still there. Small and faint and speaking her language, under the roar. She turned her head and it was *there* — she could have walked to it blindfolded, the way she could walk north. She opened her eyes and it was snow.

She walked toward it with her hand out, into what looked like empty air over the snow, until her palm met the hull, cold as stone.

Then a new fear came, fast. "Let me in," she said. "Please. Don't — I have to be able to come back. Show me."

She wanted it, the way she had before. The shiver went through it again under her hand, and just beside her palm, where the hatch was, a thin seam of the old pale color came up through the gray, the outline of the door drawn on the snow-colored hull as if with a finger, and the door eased open along it the width of a hand, and a breath of stale warm air came out that smelled of the second section, of the bench and the old coffee and her own life.

Kyra put her forehead against the cold hull beside the open door and stayed there for a while.

"All right," she said, when she could. "All right. I know you now."

· · ·

She came down in the last of the afternoon, running where she could, through the rotten snow and over the pasture, and Val was sitting on the bench outside the hut with her leg on a log and a pile of wood beside her that had not been there that morning, cut small and ragged with the ship's cutter, which she was not supposed to be able to do on one leg.

"You cut wood," Kyra said, stopping in front of her.

"I cut some wood." Val looked up at her, and at her face, and whatever she saw there made her put the cutter down. "Tell me."

Kyra told her. She told it the way she told everything, out of order and with her hands, circling back, stopping to laugh at the wrong places because otherwise she would not get through it: the black snow, the port, sitting down, Rask and his coffee, the small field under her palm, the shiver and the color going out of it, the frost, standing in front of nothing, the seam of the door. When she came to the part where she had put her forehead on the hull she did not tell that part, and then she did, because there was only the one rule.

That was nine, somewhere in the middle of it. The laugh. She lost track of where.

Val listened to all of it without once interrupting, which Val did not do. When it was finished she sat for a long time looking up at the ridge, where there was nothing to see.

"It's a contingency," Val said at last.

"A what?"

"A preservation mode. Grown in. For a section that comes down somewhere and has to wait." Val's voice had gone slow and careful, the way it did when she was building something out loud. "It seals. It goes to the color and the temperature of what's around it so it holds its heat and nothing troubles it. Weather. Animals. It waits for recovery." She paused. "The yards would have grown it into every hull. Rask would have known it was there. Nobody briefed a crew on it because nobody ever expected a section to come down anywhere it would need to hide from anything."

"It wasn't made for this."

"No. It was made for waiting for somebody to come." Val looked at the ridge. "Nobody is coming. It hid for you anyway."

Kyra sat down on the bench beside her, suddenly and all at once, because her legs had decided to.

Kyra stared at her own open hands. "It answered me. Val. I didn't touch anything. I didn't find a panel or a — I sat there and I *wanted* it, and it answered me."

Val was quiet a moment. Then she said, with great precision, as though she were reading it off a bench, "Then it knows you."

Kyra put her face in her hands. Val let her. After a while Val's hand came and rested flat between Kyra's shoulder blades, and stayed there, and did not pat — the way it had once in a crowded hall on Sethal, a long time ago, inside a hug Val had never quite known how to give.

"He said I would," Kyra said, into her hands. "Rask. *You know her yet*, he said, and I said *the ship?* and he said—"

"You will," Val finished.

Kyra took her hands away from her face and looked at her. "How did you know he said that?"

"He said it to everybody." Val's mouth did the thing that was not quite a smile. "He said it to me on the third day. I told him I didn't intend to form a relationship with a hull."

Kyra laughed. That was ten. She was sure of that one.

They sat on the bench in the long gold end of the afternoon and looked up at the ridge, where there was snow and rock and shadow and nothing else at all. Kyra could feel it up there, though. Small and faint under the roar of the world, in the one direction on the whole mountain that sounded like home. She thought she would be able to feel it for the rest of her life.

Val picked up the cutter again and turned it over in her hands.

"Now," Val said. "About the wood."

### Summer (Part Two)

#### V. Salt

What they needed was salt. Val had known it for a week before she said it, and had spent the week making sure, because it was not the kind of thing you walked down a mountain for on a guess.

The signs were small and they were all the same sign. The ache in the legs at the end of a day that had nothing to do with the right one. The headaches. The way the charcoal man's hard pale cheese, which was salted, had become the thing both of them ate first and slowest and thought about afterward. A body could go a long way without a great many things, and she had the figures for most of them, and salt was not one it could go without for long.

"We need salt," Val said, on a morning when the pasture had gone green all at once and there were small blue flowers in it that had not been there the day before.

Kyra looked up from the hearth. "Want, or need?"

"Need. It isn't a figure of speech either."

"Nothing's a figure of speech with you."

"Very little," Val agreed.

Kyra sat back. "Then we go down." She did not say *to the village*, and did not need to; there was nowhere else. "And we give them what, for it?"

Val had thought about that too, and did not have a good answer, and said so. Then she looked at the shelf where the three squares of cloth sat folded beside the cheese molds, washed in the stream until the soot was nearly out of them, waiting to go back full.

Val kept her eyes on the shelf. "The plant."

"What plant?"

"The one you bring down from the rock by the ship."

It grew in the cracks of the dark rock above the snowfield, where nothing else grew at all: a low fleshy thing with thick blue-green leaves and a crown of small yellow flowers just starting, and a root like a knuckled fist. Kyra had first pulled one to see what it was, because she pulled everything to see what it was, and had cut the root with the cutter, and the whole second section had smelled for an hour of something blooming, sweet and strange. After that she had pulled them to look at, and brought them down to the hut in her skirt, and left them lying on the shelf because she liked the smell.

Val had held one in her hand, the second day. She had not told Kyra why she kept holding it. She did now, because there was only the one rule.

"It runs strong," Val said. "The root. When I hold it. The way you do. Most of what grows up here runs thin. That doesn't."

Kyra looked at her for a long moment. "You can feel plants."

"I can feel that one."

"Val."

"I know," Val said. "I've written it down."

She had. There was a column in the ash by the hearth, now, beside Kyra's weather: things that ran, and how. It was getting long.

· · ·

The young man's axe had gone from the fence one morning in the week after he ran, and the rope with it, and the sack. Nobody had come to the door. There were boot-prints in the dew, going up to the fence and straight back down again, and that was all. He had come for his tools at first light and taken them and gone, and whatever he had told anybody below, he had not told them enough to bring them up the mountain.

Val thought about that a good deal on the way down.

She went slowly, with the staff and Kyra's arm, and the leg complained at every step and did not give, because she had spent a week learning exactly what it would bear and was asking it for nothing more. It was downhill. Coming back up would be another matter. She had the figures for that too, and had decided not to share them with Kyra until the afternoon.

They stopped at the clearing.

The charcoal man was there. He was always there; Val had begun to think the hill needed him the way a fire needs somebody sitting by it. He saw them come out of the trees, and straightened, and did not lift the hooked pole or put it down.

Kyra went to him first. She held out the three squares of cloth, folded and clean, each one tied at the top the way he had tied them, and each one full.

He looked at the cloths. He looked at them for a long time, and then he took one and undid the knot with his black fingers, and the smell came up out of it into the clearing, sweet over the scorched sweetness of the hill.

His face changed. Val could not have said how; it was a face that did not do much. But he looked at the knuckled roots in the cloth and then up at Kyra, and then at Val, and said something, low, three words, and the middle one went up.

Then he did a thing Val had not expected. He took one root out of the cloth, only one, and put it inside his shirt. He tied the cloth up again and put it back into Kyra's hands with the other two, and closed her fingers over all three with his black ones. And he pointed with the hook down the slope, past the woodpile, toward the chimneys — and then, very deliberately, toward one chimney in particular, the one above the stone house.

"He's telling us they're worth something," Kyra said, low.

"He's telling us where," Val said.

Kyra looked at the man. She put her hand flat on her chest, the way she had in the stranger's yard, and said the word she had for it in her own language. The man looked at her hand, and did not do it back, but something went across his face that might have been the start of it.

· · ·

The village was different in green.

It was also different because of the clothes. Val had not known how much until she walked into it. The long dark skirts, the laced bodices, the white cloths over their hair: nobody took up a fork. People looked, and kept looking, and a woman at a doorway said something to another woman and both of them watched Val's staff and Val's leg all the way down the lane. But nobody put a hand over a child's mouth. They were strangers now, which was a great deal better than being a sickness.

Val kept her face closed and her eyes down and walked. It was not difficult. She had been walking through rooms that way since she was eighteen.

There was a cart in the open ground by the well, with a mule in the shafts asleep on its feet, and a man beside it with a long coat and a leather apron and a table made of a board across two barrels. On the board were bundles: bark, and dried leaves, and roots tied up with thread, and small clay pots stopped with wax. Women were bringing things to him and he was weighing them in his hand and giving them things back — a twist of something, a coin, a pinch of something from a sack — and some of the women looked pleased and most did not.

Kyra looked at Val. Val looked at the bundles on the board, and at the roots among them, and nodded.

They waited until the women had gone. Then Kyra went up to the board and put the three cloths down on it and opened them.

The man's hands stopped.

It was very quick, and he covered it very well, and Val would not have seen it at all if she had not spent her working life watching faces over benches for the moment they decided not to say something. He picked up one root and turned it over and broke a piece off the end and smelled it, and put it down, and made a face as if it were nothing much. Then he reached into a sack under the board and took out a pinch of gray salt, about as much as would cover a thumbnail, and twisted it up in a scrap of cloth, and held it out, and at the same time put his other hand flat over both open cloths and began to draw them toward him.

Kyra's hand went out to take the salt. She did not know. Of course she did not know. Val did not know either, not in words, but she had watched the whole of that man's face and she knew what the pause in his hands had meant.

"Kyra," Val said. "Wait."

Kyra stopped with her hand half out.

Somebody said something behind them. It was not loud. The dealer's head came up, and his hand stopped on the cloths, and Val turned and it was him: the man in the dark coat, coming across the open ground from the lane, not hurrying, gray in his beard.

He looked at the cloths. He looked at the dealer's hand on them. Then he looked at the two of them, and Val watched him know them — watched him place them, the lane, the storehouse, the path by the stream — and then watched his eyes go to Kyra's shoulders, where she was wearing the dark red shawl, and stop there.

It was a moment. It was not longer than a moment. His eyes came away from the shawl, and his face did not change at all, and Val filed it beside the thumb along the fold and did not know what to make of either.

He said something to the dealer. The dealer said something back, with his hands, a great deal of it. The man in the coat did not answer. He picked up one of the roots, and broke it, and held the broken end under the dealer's nose, and said one word, and waited.

The dealer took his hand off the cloths.

The man in the coat tied the cloths up again himself, all three, and put them back into Kyra's hands. Then he looked at Val, and tipped his head toward the stone house, and walked away without looking to see if they followed.

· · ·

The storehouse again, cool and smelling of wool and salt. This time he did not leave them standing at the door. He put the three cloths on a barrel head and opened them and looked at the roots for a while, turning one over, and then he went to a shelf at the back and took down a thing Val did not at first understand: a gray block the size of two fists together, rough-sided, glittering faintly where the light from the door fell on it.

He broke a corner off it with the heel of his hand and held the corner out to Val.

She put it on her tongue before she had decided to. Salt. Gray and hard and not quite clean and the best thing she had ever tasted, and her whole body answered it at once, the way a dry field answers rain. She did not close her eyes. It was a near thing.

He put the whole block down beside the roots. Then he tipped the roots out of the cloths into a basket, one cloth at a time, and folded the cloths and handed them back to Kyra, empty and square, the way they had come.

Then he took a small leather bag from his coat and opened it, and took out coins — thin, silvery, stamped with something she could not make out — and counted them into Val's palm, one at a time, slowly, where she could see every one. She counted with him. He stopped at five and looked at her. Then he looked at the door, the way the dealer had gone, and made a small sound through his nose, and counted out four more.

Nine coins, and the salt. Val closed her hand on them.

She understood exactly what he had done, and why he had done it slowly, and that he had meant her to understand it. He could not tell her what the roots were worth. So he had shown her what the other man had tried to take.

She did not know how to say so. She did the only thing she could, which was to look at him properly, in the face, for the first time, and let him see her do it.

He looked back. Then he said something — a question, it went up at the end — and waited, and when she did not answer he tried again, in something else.

The first had been the village's, which she was beginning to know the shape of if not the sense. The second was heavier, with hard edges, like gravel going over in water. When that did nothing he tried a third, which ran up and down and seemed to put all its weight at the front of every word. Then a fourth, slower, more careful, which he spoke the way you would handle something old that you did not want to break.

Val listened to all four with her whole attention, the way she would have listened to four instruments reading the same thing. They did not mean anything. But they were not the same, and she could hear exactly how they were not the same, and she found that she wanted, more than she had wanted anything since the snow except food and warmth and Kyra's leg not to be hurt, to know what they meant.

The man looked from one of them to the other. Then he shook his head at himself, as though at a joke nobody else would get, and said, in a fifth language, lighter than any of the others, with a laugh already sitting in it:

"Well. I don't suppose either of you speaks the King's English?"

Val said it back to him.

She did not decide to. It was simply there, the whole shape of it, in her mouth, and she gave it back the way she would have read a figure back off a panel to confirm it: every sound in its place, the lift and the drop, the small laugh folded into the middle of it. "Well. I don't suppose either of you speaks the King's English?"

The man stared at her.

Then he laughed. It came out of him all at once, a great surprised bark of it, and he put a hand on the barrel to steady himself, and beside Val Kyra laughed too — eleven — helplessly, with both hands over her face.

Val felt the prickle before she saw anything. Warmth, under her own wrists, faint in the daylight where nothing could show. And then Kyra took her hands down from her face, still laughing, and Val saw at the center of each eye the first clear thread of gold beginning to come up.

Val did not raise her voice. "Kyra. Your headcloth."

Kyra understood it at once. She ducked her head as if to fix the white cloth, and pulled it forward, and kept her face down while she fussed at a knot that did not need fussing, laughing into her own collar. The man was still laughing, bent over the barrel, looking at Val. He had not seen. Val watched Kyra's shoulders until they stopped shaking, and watched Kyra lift her head, and her eyes were gray.

Her own heart, she found, was going as though she had run down the mountain.

· · ·

He put his hand flat on his chest. "Frederick," he said.

Val did it back, hand on chest. "Frederick."

He nodded, pleased. Then he pointed at her, and waited.

She took her hand from her chest. "Vaelith."

He tried it. He got most of it wrong, in a friendly way, and tried again, and got more of it wrong, and then shook his head and said something that sounded like an apology and then, taking care over it, "Valeria." And then, as if trying it on her to see if it fit, "Vali."

Val considered it. It was nothing like her name. It was also, she thought, the kind of name a person here could say without looking at her twice, and that was worth more than her name was.

"Vali," Val agreed.

He turned to Kyra. Kyra said her name clearly, and he tried it and got it nearly right, and then frowned, and said, "Klára," and looked at the door, at the village beyond it, and back at her, as though he were telling her something about the village and not about her.

"Klára," Kyra repeated. She made a face at Val. "He's renamed me."

"He's disguised you," Val corrected. "It's different."

Frederick swept his hand at the door, at everything beyond it — the lane and the well and the roofs and the tower — and said a word. "Dymná."

"Dymná," Val said.

He picked up one of the knuckled roots from the barrel and held it up and said a word in the village's language, and then, in the light one, "Golden root."

"Golden root." She had it.

He touched the gray block. "Salt."

"Salt."

He looked at her for a moment as though she were a sum that had come out a different way than he expected. Then he touched his own chest again, not for his name this time, and said the word for the light language, the one he had laughed in. "English."

"English," Val said.

Frederick held up one hand with the fingers spread, and then two fingers of the other: seven. He pointed at the sun through the door, and drew its path across the sky with his finger, once, and again, and again. He pointed at them, and at the floor of the storehouse. *Seven days. Come back. Here.*

Val did not need anybody to tell her what that meant. She nodded.

He took them out the back way again, along the stream. At the edge of the trees he stopped, and did not point up the mountain this time. He only stood there, and put his hand on his chest, and waited until they had both done it back.

· · ·

They heard the bells before they were halfway up.

At first Val did not know what it was: a sound all over the lower slope at once, small and dull and many, like rain on a hollow roof, coming nearer. Then the trees thinned below them and she saw the path, the one they had come down that morning, and it was full.

Animals. Hundreds of them, pale and heavy-coated, pouring up the mountain in a slow river, with bells at the throats of some of them and dogs running along the edges and men walking behind with long staffs. The animals whose wool the skirts were made of. The men were singing, or calling; it carried up through the trees, a long falling note over and over.

"The owners," Kyra said.

"All of them." Val had already done the sum. "Today. They'll be at the hut before dark."

They went up faster than the leg liked. Val let it complain and did not listen. At the hut Kyra went through it like weather, taking what was theirs and nothing else: the rolled gray clothes, the cutter, the salt, the coins in Val's closed hand, the three folded cloths, the last of the charcoal man's bread. She scuffed the ash by the hearth until the columns of figures in it were gone. Val stood in the door and watched her do it, and then looked round the hut once more, in order, from the door round to the door: the tub, the hook, the molds on their shelf, the bench and its straw. Everything as it had been. Nothing of theirs.

Somewhere below, a dog barked, and the bells came on.

They went up onto the snow.

· · ·

The ship was where Kyra said it was. Val could not see it. She saw snow going to pieces in the evening light, and dark rock above it, and gray ice, and shadow, and she watched Kyra walk into the middle of all that with her hand out until the hand stopped against something, flat, in the empty air.

Kyra stood there a moment with her palm on nothing. Val saw her lips move, though she could not hear what she said.

Then a seam of pale color drew itself up out of the snow where Kyra's hand was, the outline of the hatch in the gray, and the door eased open, and warm stale air came out of it that smelled of the second section, and Val, who had not been inside it since the morning she had come down the mountain on a stick, stood on the snow and could not for a moment go in.

"Val," Kyra said.

"I know."

She went in.

It was the same. The bench. The lockers strapped shut along the wall. The crazed port, black now against the evening. The floor that had been a wall once, when the section lay the other way in a sky, and was a floor now because it had to be. She got herself down onto the bench with the leg out straight and sat there with her hands on her knees, and Kyra came in behind her and pulled the door to.

It went dark.

For a moment Val felt the prickle under her wrists and thought, *not here, not in front of—* and then remembered who was in front of her, and let it be. And then, while she was still letting it, a faint light came up along the curve of the ceiling, pale and even, the way the ship's light had come up every morning of the season, only dimmer, much dimmer, as though from a long way off.

Val looked up at it.

"I didn't do that," Kyra said. "I didn't ask it."

"No," Val said. "I think it did that on its own."

She sat under it with her hands open on her knees and looked at her wrists, and there was nothing there. The light was enough. The ship had given her light without being asked, and she did not know what to do with that, and she put it with the other things.

Later, when Kyra was asleep on the other bench with the red shawl over her, Val lay awake and said the new words over to herself, very quietly, the way she would have gone over a list before a fold. *Frederick. Vali. Klára. Dymná. Golden root. Salt. English.*

And then the whole of it, the first thing she had ever said on this world that anybody on it had understood — every sound in its place, the lift and the drop, the small laugh in the middle — although she did not understand one word of it herself.

*Well. I don't suppose either of you speaks the King's English?*

#### VI. The Mending

The second section had been built to hold two people for a season and had held two people for a season, and now it was a house.

Val had begun to think of it that way in the first week aboard, and had been annoyed with herself, and had gone on thinking it. The floor had been a wall. The bench she slept on had been a bench for instruments. The hatch was at the wrong angle for a door and you had to step over the frame of it, which she could not do without a hand on the edge and a moment's arrangement of the right leg, and which Kyra could do without looking.

The light came up in the mornings now. Not all of it, and not everywhere: a long soft band along what had been the ceiling and was now most of one wall, dim as a window with cloth over it, and it came up when the sky outside went gray and went down when the sky went dark. Nobody had asked it to. Kyra had gone round the whole section on the second day with her palm flat on the walls, asking, and nothing else had answered.

Kyra had her palm flat on the wall under it. "It's doing what it can."

"It's doing what's left," Val corrected.

"That's what I said."

"It isn't," Val said, "but I take the point."

There were fourteen lockers along the wall that had been a floor. Six of them had come open in the fall and were empty or nearly. Eight were shut, strapped, and did not open for either of them, and Kyra had tried the strap on the nearest with her hands and then with the cutter and then with her palm flat on the wall beside it, wanting, which by then was a method. Nothing. Val had sat and watched her do it and made no observation at all, which Kyra had said was the loudest thing anybody had ever not said.

So: a house, with eight cupboards they could not open.

It was, Val thought, still the safest room on the planet. Nobody could see it. Nobody could climb to it who did not have business on the snow. And down on the pasture, from the port, she could watch a hundred pale animals moving across the green all day like a slow tide, and the men with their long staffs, and the dogs, and in the evening the smoke going up from the hut that had been theirs.

She watched that smoke a good deal. She had not expected to mind it.

· · ·

The leg got worse, not better.

It had been getting worse since the climb up in the evening with the bells coming behind them. It got worse again on the day she walked the length of the section eleven times to see whether she could, and then sat down on the bench and put both hands on the edge of it and waited for the room to stop being interesting.

She did not say anything about that. That was the trouble; she had said it, or most of it, and the saying had not fixed anything. There was nothing to do about a leg that had knit badly. You did not put a thing like that right with rest and a strap. She had known the shape of the rest of her life since about the fourth day on this mountain, and had folded it up small, and had stopped taking it out to look at.

What she had not folded up small was the other part. If she could not climb, she could not go down. If she could not go down, then everything that happened to them among people would happen to Kyra alone, and Val would sit in a hull on a snowfield and wait to be told about it.

She was thinking about that, in the long dim afternoon, when Kyra came in over the hatch frame with her arms full of golden root and stopped.

"What," Kyra said.

"Nothing."

"Val."

Val looked at the ceiling that was a wall. "It isn't going to come right. The leg. It's knit, and it's knit wrong, and it will be this or worse for as long as I have it."

Kyra put the roots down on the bench very carefully, which was how Val knew.

"Say the rest of it," Kyra said.

"That's the rest of it."

"That's the figure. Say the rest of it."

Val was quiet for a moment. Then, because there was one rule and she had agreed to it out loud, in the cold, with nineteen reduced to two:

"I don't want to be the one who waits in the room."

Kyra sat down on the floor with her back against the lockers and looked at her for a long time.

"Then we mend it," Kyra said.

"With what? A strap and a piece of hull?"

"With the ship."

"The ship is a room with a light in it."

"The ship," Kyra said, "went the color of a mountain because I asked it to."

· · ·

Val did not sleep that night, and did not mind.

She lay on the bench with the ship's light down and the crazed port black above her and thought about growth.

Nobody on Sethal built a hull. They grew them. Ivar Rask had spent thirty years of his life doing it and had said so at every opportunity, and the thing he had said most often, in a tone that made junior people look at their hands, was that a hull was not a machine that happened to be made of living stuff; it was living stuff that had been persuaded to be a machine. It laid itself down along its own cell boundaries. It repaired itself, within limits — she had read the protocols, everyone had read the protocols — sealing small breaches out of its own substance, closing over a cut, knitting a seam that had opened in a fold.

Knitting.

She turned the word over for most of the night, from every side, in order.

A hull knits itself. That was not a metaphor and had never been one; it was in the protocols in those words, because the people who wrote the protocols had taken the word from surgeons in the first place. The lattice knew how to find a break in itself and close it. It knew how to lay down its own material along the line of a fracture and make that line stronger than the rest.

It did not know anything about bone. It had never in its life been asked to look at a woman's shin.

But it knew what a break was. And it had, somewhere in it, a thing Val had spent her whole professional life on from the other end: a way of reading what was in front of it and agreeing with it. That was what a continuity panel did. That was the entire principle of the acquired state, of coupling, of a circuit that needs both ends — you cannot hold agreement with a thing you cannot read.

The hull could read a hull. Could it read a woman?

It had read Kyra. It had gone the color of the mountain because Kyra had sat in the snow and wanted it to.

Val lay in the dark with her hands folded on her chest and felt the light come up under her own wrists, and did not stop it, because there was nobody to see and because she could not have stopped it just then if she had tried.

· · ·

"Say it again," Kyra said, "in the order you thought it."

"I have said it twice."

"Say it a third time and I'll stop asking."

So Val said it a third time, and Kyra sat on the floor with her back against the lockers and her arms around her knees and did not interrupt once, which was how Val knew she was frightened.

"It's a hull," Kyra insisted, at the end of it. "It knits hull."

"It knits *breaks*. What it knows is the difference between whole and not whole. The material is the second question."

"And if it can't tell the difference between my leg and a wall?"

Val noted the pronoun and put it away for later, where she put things she had no immediate use for.

"Then nothing happens," Val said, "because it will have nothing it recognizes. That is the likeliest outcome by a long way. I want that said first, and I want you to hold me to it: the likeliest outcome is that we sit in a hull for an afternoon and I have wasted your time."

"And the unlikeliest?"

"It recognizes it and does something I have not anticipated."

"To your leg."

"To my leg."

Kyra put her forehead down on her knees for a moment. Then she lifted it.

"You're going to do it anyway," Kyra said.

"Yes."

"Because of the waiting in the room."

"Partly." Val looked at her hands. "And partly because I have been a scientist for fifty-nine years on a world where nobody would have let me do this, and now there is nobody, and there is a question in front of me, and I am going to answer it."

Kyra laughed. It was not a happy one, and it was twelve, and Val counted it anyway.

"All right." Kyra got up off the floor. "Tell me what I do."

"You ask it."

"I don't know how I ask it. I've told you. I didn't do anything, I just—"

"You wanted it," Val said. "So want this."

· · ·

Kyra had done a great many things she did not understand in her life and had usually been able to write the method down afterward. Not this.

She sat on the floor of the second section with her back against the lockers and Val's bad leg across her lap, bare from the knee down, the skirt folded up out of the way. The ship's light was down. Val had asked for that; Val wanted to be able to see what her own body did in the dark, and would not say so, and Kyra had put the light down without making her.

Kyra folded the skirt back out of the way. "Where."

"Below the knee. Four inches. You'll feel it."

She would. She had felt it every time since the first night. She put her right hand under the calf and her left over the shin, flat, and found the place where the line of the bone did the thing it did, and settled her palm on it.

Val made a small sound. Not pain. Kyra knew all of Val's small sounds by now and this was not that one.

"All right?"

"Go on."

Kyra shut her eyes and put her other hand flat on the floor, which was a wall, which was hull.

The field of this world came up at her the way it always did, enormous and wrong, a hum with no bottom to it. Under it, faint and close, was the other one: small, the right shape, the shape of home. She had been able to find it with her eyes shut since the day it hid for her. She found it now.

*Here*, she thought, and did not know what else to think, so she thought it with everything she had. *Here. This. Under my hand. It's broken and it was set wrong and it's hers, and I did it, I set it in the dark with a strap and I've had it in my mouth every day since, and if you can — if there is anything in you that knows how—*

Nothing happened for a long time.

Then the floor shivered.

It went through the wall against her back and the hull under her palm at once, that long low sound she felt more than heard, the sound a grown thing makes along its cell boundaries, and Val's whole body went rigid under her hands.

"Val—"

"Don't move." Val's voice had gone flat and fast. "Don't take your hands off it. It's — there's something going through it. Cold. Very cold, and then not."

Kyra opened her eyes.

The floor around them had changed color. In a rough circle three feet across, centered on her left hand, the gray had gone back to the pale shell-color of the hull as it had been before it hid, and the color was moving, slow, like something breathing. And out of the surface of it, where her hand lay flat, a fine pale film had risen and run across the floor and up over Val's ankle and along the shin, and was lying on the skin over the break like frost on a window, so thin that Kyra could see the leg through it.

Val was propped on her elbows watching her own leg with an expression Kyra had seen perhaps four times in her life.

"Are you hurt?"

"No." A breath. "No. It's reading it."

"How do you know?"

"Because I've done it ten thousand times from the other end," Val said, "and it feels exactly the same from inside, which I was not expecting, and which somebody ought to have told me thirty years ago."

Kyra laughed. That was thirteen, and she did not care that her eyes were streaming.

The film lay on the shin for a long moment. Then it thickened along one line only — a narrow band, an inch wide, lying exactly over the place where the bone did the wrong thing — and the pale color in the floor ran up into it and stayed.

And then it began to hurt.

Kyra knew the instant it started, because Val's hands closed on the edge of the bench above her and Val's breathing changed, and Val said nothing at all, which was the worst thing she could have done.

"Tell me."

"It's fine."

"*Tell me.*"

"It's like the first night," Val said, through her teeth. "Not as bad. It's doing what you did with the strap, only from the inside, and slowly, and it doesn't stop to ask."

"I'll take my hand off."

"Don't you dare."

So Kyra did not. She sat with her palm on the break and her other hand flat on the hull and held the wanting steady, the way you hold a line in a current, and with the part of her that was not doing that she watched Val's face in the dark.

And the light came up in her. Of course it did. It came up at the wrists first, where Val's hands gripped the bench, and then along the forearms, and then at the throat, pale and cool and brighter than Kyra had yet seen it, bright enough to lay a faint edge on the underside of Val's jaw and to show the shine of sweat on her forehead and the white of her knuckles. She was lit from the inside in a dark room and she was in too much pain to arrange her face, and so it was all simply there, on it, everything, the way it never was.

Kyra looked at her. She could not have said, afterward, that she had decided to. She looked at the line of her jaw in her own light and the wet at her temples and her mouth pressed shut, and thought, with no more warning than weather: *you are the most beautiful thing on this world and it is not even close.*

Then she thought: *she's hurting*, and the other thing went where such things went, which was nowhere, and stayed there for later.

It took a long time. Val put a figure on it afterward and Kyra did not believe her.

Then the band of film thinned, and went, and drew back down the shin and over the ankle and into the floor like water going out of sand, and the pale color in the hull faded back to the gray of the mountain, and the room was only a dark room with two women in it, one of them shaking.

· · ·

The leg was not mended.

Val established that within the hour, and said so plainly, because the alternative was letting Kyra hope in the wrong direction for a week. The line of the bone was the line of the bone. It had not straightened; it was never going to straighten. Whatever the lattice had done, it had done along a single narrow band, and what it had done was make that band *agree with itself* — the way it would close a seam in its own skin — where before the two halves of the break had been two separate arguments held together by a strap.

"It's a splint," Kyra offered, from the floor.

"It's not a splint. A splint is outside," Val said. Val turned her ankle experimentally, and stopped, and did it again. "It's laid down along the break. Inside. In the bone."

"Can you stand on it?"

"Not tonight."

"Tomorrow?"

"I don't know." She met Kyra's eyes in the dark, where there was still a faint light at her own wrists and both of them could see it. "It will have to be more than once. Whatever it is, it's laid down a thread of itself along a break the length of my hand, and it did that much and then it stopped, and I think it stopped because that was all it could do at one time, not because it was finished."

"How many times?"

"I don't know that either." Val considered. "Enough that we should stop counting."

Kyra put her head back against the lockers and shut her eyes. "Every day?"

"Every second or third," Val conceded. "It has to have something to work with, and so do I, and I'm not going to ask it to hurt me on an empty stomach." She paused. "And there's the other thing."

"What other thing?"

"It read me," Val said. "For the whole of that it was reading a Sethal body in a wrong field, closely, in a way nothing has read either of us since the panels I did on the ninth day. And I have no idea what it made of what it found, because I can't ask it, and it can't tell me." She turned her ankle again, slowly. "We are both changing. Every day. And that is the instrument I am going to lie down in front of, over and over, for the whole of this summer."

Kyra opened her eyes.

"Then I'll be here every time," Kyra said.

"You'll have to be. It doesn't listen to me."

"That isn't why."

"No," Val said. "I know."

· · ·

Afterward Kyra went out onto the snow, because she could not be in the room.

It was full dark and clear and the air had the knife in it that the air always had up here after sundown. Below her the pasture was black and the hut had one orange eye where the door was, and further down the valley there was nothing at all, and above her there was more sky than any sky had a right to be.

She stood in it with her arms wrapped round herself and shook, now that there was nobody to see, which was a thing she had learned from watching Val do the opposite for fifty-nine years.

Then she looked up.

The sky over the ridge was nothing she knew. She had spent fifty years of her life on recorded sky and she could not have named one thing in it. But she had begun, in the weeks since the snow, to notice that the same shapes came back — that there was an arrangement low in the north that swung round the same point all night, and that if you watched that point for long enough it did not move at all, and that everything else went round it like water round a stone.

She found the point. She held it.

Somewhere in the great washed band that went over the whole sky, one of those smudges was hers. She had no instrument, no plate, no catalogue, no bench. She had two eyes and a number of nights ahead of her and the field of this world lying on the back of her head like a palm, and that was the whole of it.

"All right," she told the sky.

Then she went back in, over the hatch frame, where Val was asleep with her leg out straight and the light still faintly on at her wrists, and put the shawl over her, and lay down on the other bench, and did not sleep for a long time.

#### VII. Lessons

The seventh day came round, and then it kept coming round, which was how Kyra learned that a week was a thing you could live by on this world.

It took them most of the morning to get down and most of the afternoon to get back, and in between there was an hour in a storehouse with a man who pointed at things. That was the shape of it. They went every seventh day from the middle of the green season onward, and Kyra came to know the path the way she knew the halls at the institute: the place where the stream had to be crossed on two stones, the place where the trees opened and you could see the whole valley at once and had to stop whether you wanted to or not, the place where the charcoal man's clearing sent its sweet scorched smell up through the forest a hundred paces before you reached it.

They went round the clearing now, not through it. That had been Val's idea and Kyra had hated it and had agreed, because Val was right: two women who appeared at a mound every seventh day were a thing people would notice, and the charcoal man had not wanted noticing since the first morning he had let them go by.

He left food anyway. Not every week. It came when it came, on the step of the hut before the flocks arrived and afterward on a flat stone at the edge of the pasture, always in a square of cloth with black thumbprints at the knot, and Kyra always washed the cloth and left it folded on the stone with something in it. Salt, after the first week. Golden root. Once, half a loaf of the black bread Frederick sold them, which she thought was a joke he would get, and which came back the following week with three eggs in it.

Val turned one of the eggs over in her hand. "He answered you."

"He got the joke."

"He got the joke," Val agreed.

· · ·

Frederick taught the way he did everything, which was carefully and with his whole attention and as though he had all year, because he did.

He started with what a hand could reach. Bread. Salt. Water. Fire. Hand, arm, head, foot. He would put a thing on the barrel head and say it, and they would say it, and he would say it again, and then the next week he would put four things down and point at random and wait.

Kyra was quicker at first. She found that out in the second week and enjoyed it more than she was proud of. She would say the word back wrong and laugh and try again and get it, and be talking — badly, in pieces, with her hands doing most of it — while Val was still deciding whether she had the vowel right.

"You're not saying anything," Kyra said on the path, halfway up, in the third week.

"I'm listening."

"You've been listening for three weeks."

"I'll speak when I can do it correctly."

"That's how children learn," Kyra said. "Wrong. Out loud, wrong, forty times."

Val considered that for the length of a switchback. "Then I am not going to learn the way children learn," "and in four months you will still be saying *I go the village*."

Kyra threw a pine cone at her. Val, who could not run, caught it.

It was fourteen and fifteen in the same minute.

Four months later, Kyra thought afterward, she had still been saying *I go the village*.

· · ·

The hard part was not the words. The hard part was the questions.

They came in sideways and they came every week, and Frederick asked them the way a man knocks on a door he does not expect to be opened. He would hold up a thing and name it, and then, in the same tone, ask where they came from. He would draw a house on the boards in chalk and name the parts of it, and then draw a little map — the village, the mountain, a road going off the edge of the board — and tap the road and look up.

They had talked about it on the mountain before the first lesson, sitting on the floor of the second section with the light down.

"He's going to ask," Kyra had said.

"He's already asked. Twice, with his hands."

"So what do we tell him?"

Val had been quiet for a while. Then she had said: "Only things that are true."

"That's not an answer, that's a—"

"It's a method," Val said. "Listen. We cannot invent a village to have come from, because there is one, and he has been to it, or he knows a man who has. We cannot invent a family, because families have names and names have people who knew them. Everything we make up is a thing we will have to remember for as long as we are here, and remember the same way, both of us, under pressure, in a language neither of us speaks."

Kyra had put her head back against the lockers. "And the truth?"

"Not the truth. True sentences." Val had held up one finger, the way she did when there was going to be a list. "We came a long way. Everyone who came with us is dead. We cannot go back. There was a great fire and a fall. We have no family living. We do not know this country." She stopped. "Every one of those is true. Not one of them tells him anything. And when he asks again in six weeks, we will say exactly the same words, because they will still be true, and because we will not have to remember which lie we told."

"You've thought about this."

"I have thought about very little else for nine days."

Kyra had sat with it. It was clever and it was cold and it would work, and she disliked it in a way she could not put a name to for a long time afterward. Then she found the name, and it was this: a person who has come from nowhere and lost everyone and cannot say one word about either of those things is a person nobody can love. And she had just agreed to be one for as long as they were on this world.

"All right," she had said. "True sentences."

"You'll want to decorate it."

"I will not."

"Kyra."

"I will *want* to," Kyra had conceded. "I won't."

· · ·

She wanted to about once a week.

It was not lying that tempted her. It was that the true sentences came out of her mouth like stones dropped in a bowl, four of them, and then there was a silence, and a man who had been kind to them was standing in it with his hands open.

In the fifth week he asked about the fire. He had the word by then; they had done fire in the second week, with the hearth. He said it, and made a shape with his hands going up, and looked at them.

"Great fire," Kyra said. "Yes. Many dead." She counted on her fingers, all of them, and then again, and stopped at seven and did not know the word for seventeen and would not have said it anyway.

Frederick looked at her hands for a long moment.

Then he told them, in pieces, with a great many gestures, a thing it took Kyra most of the hour to piece together and that she was still piecing together on the path home: that he had been in a great city in a bad year, and that there had been a sickness there, and that it had taken — he held up his own hands, and then opened them, as if letting something go — more than a man could count. That he had walked out of it in the autumn. That he had come home.

"That's why," Val said, on the path, when Kyra had finished telling it. "In the lane. He looked at our throats and our wrists and the whites of our eyes, in that order, and then he decided we were not it."

"He's seen it."

"He's seen a great deal of it, if that is what he was telling you." Val went four steps, using the staff on the steep part, not on the flat. "And the village has not. That is the whole of the distance between him and them. He knows what the thing they are frightened of actually looks like."

Kyra walked a while.

"I told him a true sentence," Kyra said. "Many dead. And he told me his. And I'm going to have to go on telling him four sentences for a year."

Val did not say anything for most of a switchback. Then: "Yes."

"That's it? Yes?"

"You want me to say it's fair."

"I want you to say it's *hard*."

"It's hard," Val conceded. "It is the hardest thing either of us is doing, and it will go on being hard, and it does not have a solution, and I am not going to pretend to you that it does."

It was, Kyra thought, the most comforting thing anyone had said to her on this world.

· · ·

The village got used to them in the way villages do, which is to say not all at once and not entirely and not everybody.

By high summer there were four or five people who would say the greeting-word to them in the lane and not wait to see if they said it back. There was a woman with a bad hip who had begun to nod. There were the children, who followed them at a distance the first three weeks and then closer, and then — this was Kyra's doing, and she was unrepentant about it — right up, because she had taught two of them to whistle through a folded blade of grass and could not now walk down the lane without an escort.

Val had stopped in the lane to count them. "You have three."

"I have four," Kyra corrected. "One of them's behind the fence."

"You were not going to be noticed."

"I was not going to be *trouble*," Kyra said. "Nobody's frightened of a woman four children follow. That's not a mistake, that's a method."

Val did not answer, but the corner of her mouth moved.

There was also the other kind.

There was a man who came out of a doorway and went back in when he saw them. There was a woman who made a small sign with her hand when they passed — forehead, chest, shoulder, shoulder — and did it looking straight at them so they would know it was for them. And there was the tall wooden building with the tower, which every path in the place led toward, and which filled and emptied on the seventh day, and which the two of them were never in.

That was the seventh day. That was the only day Frederick could give them an hour, because it was the day nobody worked.

Kyra had worked that out in the fourth week, standing in the empty lane, listening to the singing come out of the wooden building, holding a block of salt.

"Val."

"I know. I worked it out in the second week."

"You worked it out in the second week and you didn't—"

"I was going to tell you on the path," Val said, and then, before Kyra could get it out: "I was going to tell you on the path, and that is still telling you, and if you want to have this argument I will have it, but I would rather have it above the treeline."

They had it above the treeline. It was short, and Kyra won it, and Val said "Yes, all right," twice, and afterward they sat on a rock and looked at the valley and neither of them apologized, because neither of them had needed to.

But the building sat in Kyra's mind after that.

Everybody in that valley went into it on the seventh day. Whatever they were, they were it together, in a room, once a week, out loud. And two women who lived up a mountain and could not say four sentences about themselves were not in the room, and were never going to be in the room, and everybody in the valley could count.

· · ·

The sessions went on all summer.

Every second or third day, on the floor of the second section, in the dark, with Kyra's palm on the break and her other hand flat on the hull: the shiver, the pale color running out from under her hand, the film rising and lying along the shin, the narrow band. It hurt Val every time. Every time she said it was fine, and every time Kyra made her say what it actually was, and every time Val told her, flatly, with her hands white on the edge of the bench.

By the end of the green season Val could stand on it for an hour. By the time the flowers went over she could walk the length of the section without the staff, badly, and then better than badly.

She did not use the staff on the flat any more. She used it on the steep parts of the path, and then only going down.

Kyra watched all of it and said nothing about any of it, because Val hated being watched, and instead she went up the slope every few days to the rock above the snowfield and pulled golden root and looked at the sky and came back down with her skirt full.

The change went on too.

It got worse in high summer and neither of them could say why. The ache in the long bones stopped moving around and settled. Kyra woke every night at the same hour, wide awake, her heart going, with the field lying on the back of her head like a hand pressing down. Val's hands got cold and stayed cold. There were three days in the middle of it when Val could not keep food down and did not tell her until the second day, and Kyra shouted at her, on a mountain, at altitude, and Val stood there and took it and then said, "You're right. I'm sorry. It was the second day and it should have been the first."

They kept the fire up. They did not have the dark unless they chose it.

And Kyra's eyes went gold about twice a week now, and Val told her every time — after the laugh, after the argument, after the eggs — and Kyra had begun to be able to feel it a half second before it happened, a warmth at the back of the eyes like standing too near a stove.

One evening, on the snow outside the hull, watching the light go off the far ridges, Kyra said it. "It's not sickness."

"No."

"You're sure?"

"I'm not sure of anything," Val said. "But a sickness takes. This is — " she stopped, which she almost never did, "— this is a thing being built. Badly. In a hurry. By a body that has no instructions for the place it's in and is doing its best."

"Adaptation."

"That's the word I keep not using."

"Why not?"

"Because I have nothing to support it," Val said, "and because if I'm wrong, the other word is much worse."

Kyra put her hand out. Val looked at it for a second, and then took it, and they sat on the cold hull of a ship nobody could see and watched the valley go dark, and down there, one by one, the small orange eyes came on in the roofs of Dymná.

· · ·

In the last week of the green season Frederick did a new thing.

He had them sit, which he had never done: two stools from the house, set in the storehouse door where the light was good, and he stood in front of them with his hands behind his back like a man about to make a speech, and then said it in English instead, one word at a time.

"You. Are not. From any place. I know."

Kyra felt Val go still beside her.

"No," Kyra said.

Frederick nodded, as though she had confirmed something he had worked out a long time ago and had been waiting to be polite about.

"You will not tell me," he said.

"No," Kyra said again.

He looked at them for a long moment. Then he said something they did not have, and saw that they did not have it, and tried again with fewer words.

"I do not need," he said. "I am old. I had — " a word they did not know, and he stopped, and put his hand flat on his own chest, and then held it out to one side at the height of a woman's shoulder, and then turned the hand over, empty. He did it once and did not do it again. "I do not need. You are here. That is enough."

Kyra found that she could not say anything at all.

It was Val who spoke. She had said very little English out loud all summer, and every word of it had been correct, and most of it had been nouns.

Val stood up off the stool. "Thank you. Frederick."

He blinked. Then he laughed, and turned away to the shelf and made a great business of finding something on it, and when he turned back his face was in order again.

On the path, above the treeline, Kyra said, "The hand."

"The height of a woman's shoulder," Val said. "And then empty."

"The shawl."

"The shawl," Val agreed.

Kyra walked on up. The dark red wool was around her own shoulders; it had been for four months; it had been worn soft at the edges by somebody else long before that. She had been wearing a dead woman's shawl up and down a mountain all summer and being grateful for the warmth.

"I'll give it back," Kyra said.

"He gave it to you."

"He gave it to a sick stranger he thought would die on the mountain in a week," Kyra said. "That's not the same as giving it."

"It's exactly the same as giving it," Val insisted. "He has had four months to ask for it. He hasn't. He looked at it in a yard and let it go." She stopped on the path. "Kyra. He has told us four things about himself all summer, and every one of them cost him something. Don't hand him back the fourth one."

So Kyra kept it, and wore it up the mountain, and thought about a man standing in a storehouse door turning his hand over, empty, in front of two women who had told him four sentences and would never tell him a fifth.

#### VIII. The First Time

By the end of the green season Kyra could have done the session in the dark, which was fortunate, because they did it in the dark every time.

It had a shape now. Val sat against the lockers with her right leg out along the floor and the skirt folded back above the knee. Kyra sat on the floor facing her, with that leg across her lap, her right hand under the calf and her left over the shin. The ship's light went down. She put her other hand flat on the hull, and found the small field under the roar of the world, and wanted, and after a while the floor shivered and the pale color came up under her palm and ran out across the gray.

What had changed was everything else about it.

The first time, Val had been rigid from the moment the film rose. By the fourth or fifth she had stopped bracing before it started. By the tenth she talked through it — flatly, in her panel voice, saying exactly what it was doing and where and how much, because Kyra had told her that a woman who says nothing is a woman who is lying and she would rather be lied to out loud.

And Kyra had stopped being frightened, which left room for other things.

She had time, now, in the dark, with her hands full of the same eight inches of leg for the better part of an hour. She had learned that leg the way she had learned a bench: without meaning to, and completely. The long flat of the shin. The place four fingers below the knee where the line went wrong, which she could find with her eyes shut and which she checked first every time, the way you check a knot. The ankle, narrow, with the tendon standing out along it when Val turned her foot. The calf, which had gone soft in the first weeks from not being used and was coming back now, a little at a time, under Kyra's palm.

It was the last of these that had begun to be a problem.

Kyra did not think of it as a problem. She did not think about it in words at all, which was its own kind of answer. It was simply that there had come to be a difference between the hand that was working and the other one — that at some point in the last month her right hand had gone on lying under Val's calf after the film had drawn back into the floor, and the film had been gone a while, and neither of them had said anything about it.

That night the session ran long.

"Stop," Val said, at the end of it. "It's finished."

Kyra did not let go of the leg. "It's still pale."

"That's the hull. It's finished with me," Val corrected. A breath. "Twenty minutes, perhaps. More than last time."

Kyra looked down at the leg in her lap, which she could just see in the last of the fading color, and did not let go of it.

"You'll walk down and up in a day," Kyra said.

"I walked down and up four days ago."

"You walked down and up with a stick and then lay on the bench for an hour telling me you were thinking."

"I was thinking," Val insisted.

"You were lying on a bench."

"The two are not exclusive."

Kyra laughed. It came out low, in the dark, and stopped, and in the quiet after it she was aware of her own hands, both of them, exactly where they were.

She moved the right one. That was all. It went up the back of the calf, slowly, past the place it had always stopped, and the muscle under it tightened once and let go, and Val did not say anything at all.

Kyra stopped there.

"Val."

"Yes."

It was not a question and it was not permission and it was the most direct thing either of them had ever said to the other.

And then the light came up in Val — at the throat first, and along the wrists, and up under the jaw, faint and then not faint, and Kyra saw her face, the whole of it, closed and composed and not composed at all, exactly as it had been on the night of the first mending, except that this time Val was not in any pain whatsoever.

"I can see you," Kyra said.

"I know."

"Do you want the light down?"

"No," Val said.

· · ·

It was quick. Neither of them was expecting it and neither of them was patient, and somewhere in the middle of it Kyra's eyes went, and Val saw it, and said so afterward, and Kyra had known anyway from the warmth behind them.

And afterward the room was a room again, with two women in it on the floor of a hull, and one of them lit, and neither of them saying a single word.

· · ·

Val lay on her back on the floor that had been a wall and did the only thing she knew how to do, which was to take it apart in order.

It did not come apart. That was the first finding, and it was so unlike every other finding of her life that she went back to the beginning and tried again.

She had a category for this. She had had one since she was nineteen; she had used it, over fifty-nine years, with a small number of men, all of them chosen carefully, none of them a mistake. It was a straightforward category. It had a beginning and an end and it did not travel; she had never once confused it with anything else, and nobody had ever had to ask her twice what she meant by it.

This did not go in it. She could not make it go in it. She turned it over, and turned the category over, and they were not the same shape.

She listened to Kyra breathing beside her. The light was still on her own wrists; she could see the ceiling that was a wall by it, faintly, and the edge of the bench, and she made no attempt at all to put it down.

*Second finding,* she thought, with the part of her that was still doing this. *I am not frightened.*

That was worth writing down, if there had been anything to write on. She had expected to be. She had a good deal of experience of her own machinery, and the machinery's habit, in the presence of something this large, was to go very still and very correct and start arranging the exits. It had not done that. It had gone quiet instead, the way a room goes quiet when the work in it is finished.

"You're doing arithmetic," Kyra said, from somewhere near her shoulder.

"I am not."

"Your breathing goes flat when you count."

Val considered denying it and found she could not be bothered. "I was trying to file it," she admitted.

"And?"

"There isn't a drawer."

Kyra laughed. It was the first one after, and it went through the whole room, and Val felt it happen against her arm.

"Val," Kyra said, when she had stopped. "Was that all right?"

And there it was: the question, put plainly, by the only person on the planet who would have asked it out loud, in the dark, four inches away.

Val took her time. Not to decide — she had decided; she had decided somewhere around the moment she said *no* about the light — but because Kyra deserved the accurate answer and the accurate answer had to be assembled.

"It was new," Val said.

"That isn't an answer."

"It's the beginning of one." Val turned her head. Kyra's face was there, an arm's length away, gray in the light coming off Val's own throat, with the dark hair spread out under it on the floor. "I have been alive for fifty-nine years and I have never once done anything without knowing beforehand where it was going to be put afterward. I don't know where to put this. I am not upset about it. That is the whole of the finding."

Kyra was quiet for a moment.

"Not bad," Kyra offered. "New."

"Not bad," Val agreed. "New."

"I'm going to want to say something about it in the morning."

"I know you are."

"I'm not going to know what to say."

"I know that too," Val said. "Say it anyway. That's the rule."

· · ·

They did not sleep on the floor. They did not, in fact, sleep much at all, and around what was probably the middle of the night Kyra got up and put the ship's light on — she only had to want it now, which she had stopped finding strange about a month ago — and made them both something hot out of the black bread and the last of the water, because she was ravenous, and because doing a thing with her hands was the only way she had ever been able to think.

Val sat on the bench and watched her do it.

That was new as well. Kyra felt it the whole time: not a look she could catch, because whenever she turned round Val's eyes were somewhere reasonable, but a weight, steady, across her back and her shoulders and her hands.

"You're staring."

"I'm observing."

"That's what staring is, Val, it's staring with a bench under it."

"It is entirely different," Val said, "and I have published on it."

Kyra put the cup in her hands and sat down on the floor at her feet with her back against the bench, which was a thing she had done a hundred times on two worlds, and which was different tonight, and which they both let be different without remarking on it.

They ate. The light was low and even along the curve of what had been the ceiling.

"I'm going to ask you something," Kyra said, "and you're going to want to give me the short answer."

"Ask."

"Do you want it to happen again?"

Val did not hesitate at all, which surprised both of them.

"Yes."

Kyra put her head back against Val's good knee and shut her eyes.

"All right," Kyra said. "Then that's two of us, and there's nobody else on this world to have an opinion about it."

· · ·

In the morning it rained, which Kyra had known it would since the afternoon before.

They stayed in. There was nothing else to do; the path went to mud and the visibility went to nothing, and the whole world shrank to one curved room and the sound of water finding its way across a hull.

Kyra had expected to feel strange. She had lain awake half the night waiting to feel strange about it, in the way you wait for a bruise to come up. It did not come. What came instead, at about the fourth hour of rain, was that she caught herself watching Val's hands sorting the golden root into bundles on the bench — the cool exact fingers, the way she squared the ends of each bundle before she tied it, a thing nobody had ever asked her to do — and thought, without any warning at all: *those hands.*

She looked away and then looked back, which was worse.

Kyra watched her do it again. "You've tied that one four times."

"It was uneven."

"It was tied."

"It was uneven," Val repeated, and did not look up, and Kyra watched a faint warmth come up under her wrists in the middle of a gray morning, where it could not possibly show, and understood that it was showing anyway.

So she said it. Because there was one rule, and because she had said she would, and because not saying it had become the larger risk.

"It's happening to me too," Kyra said. "I want that said."

Val's hands stopped.

"Say more of it."

"I don't have more of it. That's the whole sentence." Kyra pushed her hair back off her face with both hands and left them there a moment. "I've been on this mountain five months and I've been looking at you the whole time and last night I found out what I've been doing."

"Five months," Val said.

"Give or take."

"I can date mine," Val admitted. "The day you carried me. Coming up from the village, over your shoulder, with my face against the small of your back. You'd lost the headcloth. I catalogued the whole of the back of your neck in the dark and did not admit to myself for two months that I had done it."

Kyra stared at her.

"You *catalogued*—"

"In order," Val said. "Hairline, then the fine hairs below it, then the two cords going down into the collar, then the pulse. I could draw it."

Kyra put both hands over her face and laughed until she had to sit down on the floor, and Val sat on the bench above her with a bundle of root in her hands and the smallest possible expression on her face, and outside the rain came down on the hull of a ship nobody could see.

· · ·

Later, when the rain had thinned and the cloud came up off the valley in long torn pieces, Val went out onto the snow without the staff.

She took it slowly. Twenty paces, and turn, and twenty back, on uneven ground, in the wet. The right leg complained the whole way and did not give out. She had stopped being able to predict what it would do, which was either the most encouraging development of the summer or a reason to be extremely careful, and she intended to establish which.

Kyra came out and sat on a rock and watched her do it, with the red shawl round her shoulders and her hair loose and wet from the doorway, and said nothing whatsoever, which cost her visible effort.

Val turned at the end of the twenty paces and looked back at her.

"Say it."

"I'm not saying anything. I'm being restful and supportive."

"You are being nothing of the kind. You have wanted to say something for four minutes and it is affecting your face."

Kyra grinned. "You're limping less on the turns."

"I know."

"You're going to be able to run."

Val stood in the wet snow with the cloud coming up the valley behind her and the whole of the mountain dripping, and thought about that: about running, which she had done every week of her life since she was nine and had not done since a hull came apart at nine thousand feet.

"Yes," Val said. "I rather think I am."

And she filed the way Kyra had looked at her, saying it, and the way that had felt, and did not pretend to herself that she was filing it anywhere she could find it again.

#### IX. The Tarn

The tarn lay in a hollow of rock a quarter of an hour above the ship, on the far side of the ridge from anything, and it was the coldest water Val had ever put a hand into.

They had found it in the second week aboard and used it since, because it was that or the stream, and the stream ran down to the pasture where a hundred animals and four men were. The hollow held the sun from the middle of the morning until the middle of the afternoon. By high summer the snow was off the rock all round it, and the water, which came out of the snow, went from unbearable to merely cruel.

They went up in the warm part of the day with the soap Frederick sold them, which was gray and smelled of ash and fat and worked better than anything Val had ever used on Sethal, a fact she had reported to Kyra with the flatness of a soil sample and asked whether it was unusual.

"Is it unusual to like soap?"

"To like *this* soap. It's made of what's left over from cooking an animal and it is the best soap I have ever had, and I have used the good soap, Kyra, I had an account at the—"

"I know you had an account."

"—at the place on the fourth terrace."

"I know," Kyra said. "I bought you the lamp oil from four doors down for eleven years."

It was that kind of afternoon.

· · ·

Val went in first, because she had learned that going in second meant standing on the rock arguing with herself while somebody watched.

It took the breath straight out of her. She stood waist-deep with her hands up out of the water and made a sound she would not have made in front of any other living person, and behind her Kyra laughed and came in after her in one motion, the way Kyra did everything, and came up swearing in two languages.

"You're getting slower at that," Val observed, when she could talk.

"I'm getting *older*."

"You're not."

That stopped both of them for a moment, because it was true and neither of them had said it out loud before. Five months of this and neither of them had so much as a gray hair, and the change had done a great many things to them and had not done that.

"No," Kyra agreed. "I'm not."

She said it lightly and it did not land lightly, and Val let it go past, because there was nothing at the end of that road today.

· · ·

They washed. Val was efficient about it, as she was about most things involving her own body; she had been washing in cold water in a hurry since she was eighteen and had never once thought about it.

She thought about it that afternoon.

Kyra was standing in the shallow end with her back to the sun, working the soap through her hair with both hands, which was a long business. The hair was down past the middle of her back when it was wet and it took her the better part of a quarter of an hour, and it went dark as wet slate under water, and where the sun came into it at the edges it went the color of new copper.

Val watched her do it.

She did it the way she did everything, which was in order, and without hurrying, and with the whole of her attention. The shoulders first, because they were what was in front of her: the flat planes of them, and the way the muscle stood up along the top of each one when Kyra lifted her arms, and the two hollows at the base of her neck where the collarbone ended. The spine going down. The narrow place at the waist that had gone narrower over the summer, and which Val did not like, and filed under the change and not under this. The line of her hips, and the long muscle down the outside of each thigh that came from fifty-nine years of running up things.

And the mark.

It was there where it had always been, low on the back, on the left, above the hip, about the size of a palm. A soft bloom with a paler center and no edge you could put a finger on. They had changed in front of each other four hundred times since they were eighteen — boot rooms, wash rooms, a stone building at Ellory with no door on it — and Val had seen it a great many times and had never once looked at it.

She did not look away.

She had her own, in the same place, and the two of them were the same shape and not quite the same color, which was a thing nobody on Sethal had ever been in a position to say out loud because nobody on Sethal had ever seen both. Val had seen both. Kyra had seen both. There were two people in the universe who had, and they were standing eleven feet apart in a mountain tarn with the sun on the rock.

*Hers isn't the quiet,* Val thought, which she had known since the last year at the Vayr, since a door and Kyra's hand on it and one sentence said on the way out. *Mine is.*

And the rest of it came up behind that, in order, the way it always did when she let it start: the room, and the chairs, and the woman with the pen who had asked twice whether anybody was coming.

Val put it back. It went, the way it always went, because she had had fifty-nine years of practice and was better at it than anybody alive.

When she looked up Kyra had turned round and was looking at her.

"Your mouth went flat," Kyra said.

"It's cold."

"Your mouth goes flat when it's cold. It also goes flat when—" Kyra stopped. She wrung the water out of her hair with both hands, over one shoulder, and did not finish the sentence, and Val understood that she had just been given something: that Kyra had seen where Val had been, and had decided, standing in cold water, not to follow her there.

It was the nearest either of them had come to it in the whole of their lives.

"Thank you," Val said.

"I didn't do anything."

"I know exactly what you did."

· · ·

Afterward they sat on the warm rock with the shawls round them and their clothes drying on the stones, and Kyra combed her hair out with the wooden comb Frederick had sold them, which took another quarter of an hour, and Val lay on her back with her eyes shut and let the sun have her face.

Kyra pulled the comb through and held up what was in it. "It's going to want cutting."

"It's nowhere near."

"It's in the soup, Val."

"That is a matter for the person holding it out of the soup."

"You have a knife."

"I have a cutter made to divide cable," Val said, without opening her eyes, "and you have hair down to the middle of your back, and I am not going to be the woman who ruins it on a mountain with a tool for cable."

"You could take an inch off the ends."

"I could take an inch off the ends," Val conceded. "Not today."

"When?"

"When it's actually in the soup and not merely near the soup."

Kyra threw the comb at her. Val, with her eyes shut, did not catch it.

· · ·

The sun went off the hollow at about the fourth hour. Val sat up to pull her shift on and stopped halfway, because Kyra had gone still beside her, which Kyra did not do.

"What."

"Nothing. Don't turn round."

Val turned round.

Kyra was sitting with her knees up and her arms round them, looking at Val's back, and she did not look away when she was caught, which was the difference between the two of them in one gesture.

"It's changed," Kyra said.

Val went cold all through in a way the water had not managed.

"Changed how."

"The color. It's gone—" Kyra stopped, and started again, in the voice she used for readings, which she had learned from Val over fifty-nine years and had never once used on Val until this summer. "Paler. Not the shape. The shape's the same. The center's about the same and the outside has gone paler, and there's less difference between the two than there was."

"When?"

"I don't know. I've seen it — " Kyra's jaw worked. "I've seen it every few days since the middle of the green season and I've been looking at it every time and telling myself I was imagining it."

"For how long?"

"Six weeks. Perhaps seven."

Val sat on a rock above a tarn in the shadow of the ridge and worked very hard, for about four seconds, at not saying the first thing that came to her.

She said it anyway. That was the rule.

"You should have told me in the first week."

"I know."

"Six weeks, Kyra."

"I *know*." Kyra had her hands in her hair, both of them. "I know what I agreed to. I stood in the snow and said it and I meant it. And then I found a thing I had no business looking at, on your body, that you can't see, and every time I nearly said it I thought — " She stopped.

"Say it."

"I thought: if I tell her the mark is changing, then we are talking about the mark. And in fifty-nine years we have never once talked about the mark."

Val looked at the water.

It was, she thought, entirely fair. It was also the single largest thing either of them had said to the other on this world, and Kyra had said it sitting on a rock with wet hair, the way she said everything.

"All right," Val said.

"That's it?"

"No." Val turned so that Kyra could see her face, which took a certain amount of doing. "Look at it again. Properly. Tell me what it is now and I will tell you what it was, because I have it, I have the whole of it, and I know precisely what that mark looked like on the day I got it."

Kyra looked at her for a moment. Then she moved along the rock, and looked, and told her: color, edge, center, size against her own palm.

Val listened and did the arithmetic and put the result down where she could find it.

"It's fading," Val said. "Slowly. It has been for about two months, which puts the start of it somewhere around when the change began to be worst."

"And mine?"

"Turn round," Val said.

Kyra turned round.

Val looked at it for the first time in her life on purpose, in full daylight, with the light off the water moving on the rock behind them. Low on the back, on the left, above the hip. The same shape. Not the same color, and never had been; there was more of the gray in Kyra's, and always had been, in a way Val had noticed at eighteen in a boot room and had never had any way of describing, because nobody in the history of two worlds had ever had both to compare.

"Yours is fading too," Val said. "Less. Perhaps half as much."

Kyra put her head down on her knees.

"They're going to go," Kyra said.

"I don't know that."

"Val."

"I *don't know it*. I have two observations six weeks apart, one of them from a woman who wasn't taking notes." Val heard how that landed and did not take it back, because it was accurate, and because Kyra would have despised her for taking it back. "But yes. If it goes on at this rate, they will go."

Neither of them said anything for a while. Below them the valley was in shadow and the far ridges were still gold.

"Everyone we know is dead," Kyra said at last, "and this planet is taking the marks off us, and there won't be anything on either of us that says what we are."

"No."

"That's supposed to be good."

"It is good," Val said. "We walk down that mountain in the spring with nothing on us that anybody can read, and that is the single most useful thing that has happened to us since the snow, and I am going to say so plainly because it is true." She stopped. "And I have carried mine since I was eighteen and I find I do not want it taken off me by a planet."

Kyra lifted her head.

It was the nearest either of them had ever come to it. Val heard herself do it and did not move, and for a moment the whole thing stood open between them on a rock in the shadow, and Kyra looked at her, and did not ask.

What she said was: "Then I'll remember it."

"What?"

"Yours. The way it was." Kyra shrugged one shoulder, which was what she did instead of explaining. "You can tell me what it looked like on the day you got it, and I'll have seen it, and between the two of us it'll be somewhere. Not on you. Somewhere."

Val sat with that.

"That is not a small offer," Val said.

"It's not a small thing."

· · ·

They went down in the dusk with their hair wet and the shawls round them, and Kyra went first on the steep part out of an old habit neither of them had discussed, and at the bottom Val put her hand flat on Kyra's back, between the shoulder blades, for no reason she could have defended if anyone had asked.

Nobody asked. There was nobody on that mountain to ask, and would not be, for the rest of their lives.

Later, on the floor of the second section with the light down, Kyra put her mouth against the place on Val's back where the mark was, once, without saying anything about it, and Val lay still and let her, and the light came up under Val's skin and lit the two of them and the curve of the wall and nothing else at all.

#### X. The Fragment

Kyra saw it first from the ridge, and what she saw was a boy running the wrong way.

She had gone up for root in the early afternoon and had stopped at the top out of habit, because you could see the whole of the pasture from there: the animals spread across it like spilled meal, the dogs working the edges, the men at the low end where the water was. She had been watching that for two months and could read it now the way she read a bench. When the animals moved, there was a reason. When a dog ran, there was a reason. When a boy ran uphill in the middle of the afternoon with nothing in his hands, away from the animals, with his head down —

He was going toward the black snow.

"Val," Kyra said, to the empty ridge, and started down.

· · ·

She knew him by then. That was the worst of it.

He was the one who had come up early in the spring with a dog and a bundle of withies and had run away down the mountain in the dark, and had come back at first light for his axe and not stayed. She had watched him all summer from above: the youngest of the four men, the one who got the far side of everything, the one who ate last. He had a way of standing at the edge of the pasture in the evening looking up at the snow that she had noticed in the second week and had not liked at all.

He had been up there before, then. Perhaps four or five times. She had never caught him at it, and she had let herself believe he was looking at weather.

The black snow lay across the gully from the ship, a long smear of gray gone ragged at its edges, and it was the only thing on that mountain that did not look like the mountain. Anybody would stop for it. She had stopped for it herself, on the second morning, when it was fresh and black as a burned field and still coming down in a fine drift three days after there was anything left to fall.

By the time she got there he was already crouched in it, and he already had something in his hand.

She stopped forty feet off, behind a shoulder of rock, and made herself stand still.

It was about the size of his palm. Curved, thin at one edge and thicker at the other, dull on the outside where the atmosphere had burned it and, where he had rubbed it with his thumb, the pale shell-color underneath. He turned it over. He held it up against the light. He put his thumbnail into the broken edge and worried at it, and then scraped it along the rock, and looked at the mark it made on the rock and not the other way round, and Kyra watched a boy who had never in his life seen a material that did not scratch discover that this one did not scratch.

He looked up the slope, at the snowfield, at the place where there was nothing at all.

Then he put it inside his shirt and went down.

· · ·

Kyra came in over the hatch frame. "He has a piece of the hull."

Val put down what she was holding and did not ask any of the four questions Kyra had expected.

"How big?"

"The size of his hand. Off the drift. It's scorched on one side and clean on the other, and he's been at it with his thumb, so he knows the clean side's a color and not a stain."

"Did he see you?"

"No."

"Are you certain, or are you telling me what you want to be true?"

"I'm certain," Kyra said. "I was forty feet behind a rock and downwind of the dog."

Val sat down on the bench. She put her hands flat on her knees, which was what she did instead of pacing, and looked at the floor for the length of time it took Kyra to cross the section twice.

"All right," Val said. "Say what it is."

"It's a piece of a ship."

"To him."

Kyra stopped. "To him it's a curiosity."

"It's a curiosity that came off a mountain where two women live who came from nowhere and have no family and won't say where they're from," Val insisted. "It's a curiosity he found a hundred paces from a place he has been looking at all summer. He is going to carry it down that mountain in his shirt and show it to somebody, and the somebody is going to ask him where he got it."

"He might not."

"He might not," Val agreed. "And if he does, he will be a boy with a strange thing in his hand and a story about a light in a hut, and the two halves of that will find each other, and they will not find each other in front of us, and we will not know it has happened."

Kyra sat down on the floor with her back against the lockers.

"So we take it back."

"Yes."

"You said that very fast."

"I have been expecting this since the second morning," Val said. "Something was always going to come off that drift. I have had four months to decide what I think, and what I think is that a thing of ours cannot be down there."

"He's a boy, Val. He found a shiny thing in the snow and he's carrying it about in his shirt because it's the first interesting thing that's ever happened to him."

Val picked up what she had put down. "Yes. And I am going to take it off him anyway."

· · ·

They argued about it for most of the evening, and the argument was not about whether.

"You can't go near the hut," Kyra said.

"I can walk. I walked to the tarn and back twice this week."

"In daylight, on a path you know, with me four feet behind you. This is across a pasture in the dark with four men and three dogs on it."

"I am aware of the dogs."

"You are aware of them as a fact. I'm aware of them as three animals that have been telling each other where I am every time I come down that slope for two months." Kyra had her hands in her hair. "Val. I can do this. I know the ground, I know when they sleep, I know which of them wakes when the wind turns, and if a dog does start I can be up the slope faster than anyone on this mountain and you can't. That isn't an insult. It's the arithmetic. You taught me to do arithmetic."

Val was quiet.

"I taught you to do arithmetic," Val said at last, "and now I am going to sit in a hull and wait in a room while you do it, which is the precise thing I said I was not going to do."

"I know."

"I want that said out loud. I am not pretending to be all right about it."

"I know," Kyra said. "Say the rest of it."

"That's the rest of it." Val looked at her hands. "Go before the moon. Come back before it's light. If a dog starts, don't run at first — walk, and be an animal, and then run. If he wakes, do not let him see your face, and do not let him see your eyes, and if you have to choose, choose the eyes."

"Val—"

"And if it goes wrong," Val said, "come back without it. I would rather have the piece down there than have you down there."

Kyra crossed the section and crouched in front of the bench and put her hands on Val's knees, and Val looked at her, and neither of them said anything for a while.

"Before the moon," Kyra said. "Back before it's light."

· · ·

She went down at what she judged to be the middle of the night, in the dark, in the gray ship clothes, which she had not worn since spring and which made no sound at all against anything.

The field was loud. It had been loud all summer, a hum at the back of her skull that never stopped, and she had learned that if she stopped fighting it, it did things for her: north, and the weather, and — this was newer and she had told Val about it three weeks ago — the shape of ground in the dark. Not sight. Something more like knowing where the walls are in a room you grew up in. She came down the slope in pitch black at a walk without putting a foot wrong, and would have called that impossible in the spring, and did not stop to enjoy it.

The hut had a low fire; she could see the line of it under the door. The men slept in and around it, three of them inside and one in the fold of the hillside with the animals, and the dogs slept with the animals, and the wind was coming down off the snow, which meant it was in her face, which meant it was carrying nothing of her to any of them.

She had watched them for two months from a ridge and she knew where the young one slept. He slept apart. That had been the first thing she had noticed about him and it was the thing that made this possible.

He was on the near side of the fence, rolled in a blanket in the lee of the woodpile, with his boots beside him and his coat rolled under his head.

Kyra crouched a few feet away and breathed and waited for her heart to stop being ridiculous.

The coat.

She knew it was in the coat because she had watched him put it inside his shirt, and because a boy who wants a thing to be his own does not leave it where four other men can find it. She went the last of it the way she had gone up wet cliff paths at eighteen, on her toes, with her weight where she could take it back, and knelt by his head.

He was asleep with his mouth open. He was young. Sixteen, perhaps, or a little more. His hands were black at the knuckles from something and there was a sore at the corner of his mouth.

The coat was folded under his cheek. She got two fingers into the fold of it, along the seam where a pocket would be, and there was nothing there, and she went cold all over, and then her fingers found the other pocket, and there it was: hard, curved, the size of a palm, the weight of nothing at all.

She took it out a quarter of an inch at a time.

Halfway, he moved. Kyra stopped with her hand in his coat and her face a foot from his face and did not breathe, and he turned his head and made a small sound and settled again, and she waited for a count she lost track of, and then went on.

When it came free she put her other hand flat on the ground to steady herself and found she was shaking, which she could not afford, so she waited for that to pass too.

Then she did the thing she had not told Val about, because she had decided it on the slope on the way down and had known exactly what Val would say.

She put something in the pocket.

It was a knife. It was the small one Frederick had sold them in the fourth week, with a blade the length of her thumb and a handle of pale horn, and it was worth more than anything that boy owned. She had carried it down the mountain in her hand the whole way with the flat of it against her palm.

She got it into the pocket, and got her hand out, and backed away on her heels, and stood up, and went up the mountain in the dark with a piece of a starship inside her shirt.

· · ·

The light came up gray over the ridge as she came in, and Val was sitting on the bench exactly where she had been left, which meant she had not slept, which Kyra had known she would not.

Kyra put the fragment on the bench.

Val looked at it. Then she looked up, and whatever her face did was over before Kyra could name it, and she said, "You're shaking."

"It's cold."

"It is not cold," Val corrected, and got up, and put both arms round her.

They stood there in the dim room with the ship's light coming up slowly along the curve of the wall. Kyra put her face down into the side of Val's neck and let herself shake, which took a while, and Val's palm came flat between her shoulder blades and stayed there and did not pat.

"Tell me all of it," Val said, into her hair.

So Kyra told her all of it, standing up, still held: the fire under the door, the wind off the snow, the boy asleep with his mouth open and the sore at the corner of it, the coat, the wrong pocket, the moving, the quarter of an inch.

And then the knife.

Val went very still.

"You left him a knife."

"Yes."

"Kyra."

"I know."

"A horn-handled knife from a merchant's house," Val said, "in the pocket of a boy who owns nothing, on the same night the only interesting thing he has ever found goes missing out of the same pocket."

"I know what I did."

"Tell me why."

Kyra stepped back so she could see her face.

"Because I took something off him," Kyra said. "He found it. It was his. He carried it down a mountain in his shirt and he was going to show somebody and be, for one day in his life, the person who found a thing. And I went into his coat while he slept and took it, and I'd do it again tonight, and there is no world in which that isn't stealing." She pushed her hair back. "So he's short a curiosity and up a knife. He'll never work out which is which. And I'll be able to look at him across the pasture."

Val did not say anything for a long moment.

"That was a risk," Val said, "and it was not the arithmetic, and it is also the reason I am not going to argue with you about it."

"You're not?"

"I have been sitting on this bench for nine hours," Val said, "doing sums about a boy with a sore on his mouth, and the one I could not make come out was how a person is supposed to take a thing off a child and go on being a person. You solved it with a knife. I would not have thought of it and I would not have done it and I am glad you did."

Kyra sat down on the floor, suddenly, because her legs had finished.

"He's going to know," Kyra said. "Not what. But he's going to know something came into his coat in the night."

"Yes."

"And he's already got a light in a hut."

"He has," Val said. "And now he has one more thing he cannot explain and a knife he cannot explain either, and no way on this world to say any of it out loud without sounding like a boy who tells stories." She picked the fragment up off the bench and turned it over. "It will sit in him. All winter, probably. And one day somebody will ask him a question in the right order and it will come out."

"That's not comforting."

"I am not a comforting person," Val conceded. "But it will not come out this month, and this month is what I wanted."

· · ·

They took the fragment up the slope in the afternoon.

Kyra put it against the hull, in the empty air where the hull was, and did not know what she expected — that it would be absorbed, perhaps, or that the ship would take it back the way a body takes back a graft. Nothing happened. It was a broken piece of a thing and it stayed broken.

In the end Val found a crack in the rock band above the snowfield, deep and narrow, and they dropped it in, and Kyra heard it go down a long way and stop.

Kyra looked across the gully at the gray smear on the white. "There'll be more."

"There will be a great deal more. That drift is four hundred yards across and it has been coming down on that snow since the spring, and when the snow goes there will be pieces of our ship lying on open rock from here to the treeline." Val stood beside her, leaning on nothing, which Kyra noticed and said nothing about. "We can't gather four hundred yards of mountain."

"So what do we do?"

"We do what we did last night," Val said. "For as long as we are here. And when we leave, we leave knowing that somewhere on this mountain there are pieces of it lying in the grass, and that in a hundred years or four hundred somebody will pick one up and not know what it is."

Kyra thought about that all the way down: about a shepherd four hundred years from now, in a country with a different name, turning a piece of pale material over in his hand and putting his thumbnail into the broken edge.

"I don't like it," Kyra said, at the door.

"Neither do I," Val said. "Come inside. You've been awake for a day and a half and I have something you're going to like even less."

"What?"

"It's the seventh day tomorrow," Val said, "and you are going to walk across that pasture in daylight, past four men and three dogs, and say the greeting-word to all of them."

### Autumn (Part Three)

#### XI. The Ridge

The mending stopped working before it stopped hurting, which was how Val knew it was finished.

She had been watching for it all through the last of the warm weather. Each session was shorter than the one before: the film rose, and lay along the shin, and thickened in the narrow band, and drew back into the floor — and did less, and did less, until there came an evening at the end of the green season when the pale color came up under Kyra's palm, and ran out across the gray, and the film went over the ankle and along the shin and simply lay there, and nothing else happened at all.

Kyra kept her palm where it was. "It's reading. It's not doing anything."

"No."

"Do you want me to ask again?"

"Ask again."

Kyra asked again. The floor shivered, and the film thinned and drew back into the hull, and the gray came up across it like water closing.

Val lay on the floor that had been a wall and looked at the ceiling.

"That's it," Val said.

"That's it for tonight."

"That's it. It has done what it can do. Whatever it was able to lay down, it has laid down, and it has been able to lay down less every time for a fortnight, and tonight it has looked at the leg and decided there is nothing left in it that it recognizes as broken."

Kyra sat back on her heels.

"You don't know that."

"I know the curve," Val said, "and I have been the instrument in this experiment, which is not a thing I would recommend, and yes, I know it."

"Then get up."

Val got up.

She did it the way she did everything, in order: over onto her side, hand on the bench, good leg under her, and then — with a pause that neither of them remarked on — weight onto the right.

It held.

It had held for a month. That was not new. What was new was what it did not do: it did not send anything up into the hip, and it did not go soft under her after the first few seconds, and when she took four steps across the section and turned on it, it did not object to the turn.

She stood in the middle of the floor and did it again. Then she did it a third time, faster.

"Val."

"I'm establishing whether—"

"I know what you're establishing," Kyra said. "Your face has gone."

Val put a hand up to her own face, which was a ridiculous thing to do, and found nothing there, because there was never anything there. But the room was dim and the light had come up along her wrists, bright enough to make a shadow of her own fingers on her own cheek, and she stood in the middle of a hull with her hand on her face and let Kyra see the whole of it.

· · ·

Afterward, on the bench, Kyra found the ridge.

She was doing what she had done after every session for four months — hand under the calf, hand over the shin, checking the line the way you check a knot — and her thumb went along the front of the bone and stopped.

"That's new."

"What is?"

"Here." Kyra put Val's own fingers on it. "Under the skin. Along the break."

It was a ridge. It ran along the front of the shin for the length of a hand, a little proud of the bone on either side of it, no wider than a cord — and under Val's fingertips it was perfectly smooth and perfectly even, which nothing a body grows on its own has ever been.

"That's what it laid down," Val said.

"It's still there."

"It will always be there," Val conceded. She went along it again with two fingers, from the top to the bottom, precisely. "It isn't in the way. It isn't sore. It is a seam, and it is going to be on me for the rest of my life, and it is the only thing I will ever have that the ship made."

Kyra put her palm over it.

"Nobody can see that," Kyra said.

"No."

"You can't see it. I looked at it in the light this morning and there's nothing to look at."

"No," Val said. "You can only find it with your hands."

Kyra did not say anything to that. She left her palm where it was for a while, and Val let her, and neither of them said anything about that either.

· · ·

Kyra made her wait nine days before she would agree to the ridge.

It was the flattest ground in reach: the long shoulder above the tarn, half a mile of turf and shale that ran level for a while before it went up, with nothing on it to trip over and nothing below it to fall off. Val had asked for the pasture and been told no. Val had asked for the slope down to the treeline and been told no with considerably more feeling.

"You'll go over," Kyra said.

"I may go over."

"You'll go over, and you'll go over on the right, because that's the one that's had four months of not being used, and I'll carry you back down a mountain again in the dark, and I'd rather not do it twice in one year."

"Then you'll be there," Val said.

So Kyra was there.

It was the first morning of the cold, the first one where the breath showed. The animals had gone down off the pasture a fortnight since, in a long river of bells in the other direction, and the hut stood empty again with its door pegged shut, and the mountain had gone very quiet in a way neither of them had expected to notice.

Val took her boots off. That was not sentiment; the ship boots had been made for a deck and they were the wrong shape for turf, and she wanted to feel the ground.

"Cold," Val observed.

"It's the last day of the year you'll get away with it."

Val stood on the turf in her bare feet with the skirt kilted up through her belt and thought about the fact that she had not done this in five months.

She had run since she was nine. Not the way Kyra ran — Kyra had always been the fastest thing in any group she had ever been put in, and had run the last mile of every distance of her life as though the distance had insulted her — but Val had run every week of her life, alone, early, in the same loop, and had never once thought of it as anything but what she did with a morning.

Then a hull had come apart at nine thousand feet.

"Start," Kyra said, "by not doing anything interesting."

Val walked. Then she walked faster. Then, with no warning to herself at all, because deciding to do it was going to be worse than doing it, she ran.

The first four steps were awful. Everything in the right leg was wrong: the timing, the reach, the way her foot came down flat instead of where it should. The fifth step was less wrong. By the eighth the leg had remembered something and by the twentieth it had remembered most of it, and somewhere after that her body stopped consulting her about any of it and simply went.

Her hair came out of the cloth. Her breath went into her properly for the first time since spring, all the way down. There was cold turf under her feet and cold air going into her and the whole enormous morning tipped over and came at her, and she went up the shoulder with her arms loose and her head up and the gray light coming over the ridge, and she was, for perhaps four hundred yards, no longer a woman who had come down out of the snow on a stick.

She did not stop at the end of the flat. She turned on the right leg, hard, on purpose, to see, and it held, and she ran back.

Kyra was standing where she had left her with both hands over her mouth.

· · ·

Kyra had thought she was prepared for it.

She had watched Val walk twenty paces in the wet in high summer and had felt something go through her then. She had done the arithmetic since: the sessions, the curve, the leg holding for a month. She had known this was coming the way she knew weather.

She had not known what it would look like.

What it looked like was this. A woman going away from her up a shoulder of turf in the first cold morning of the autumn, barefoot, with her skirt kilted through her belt and her hair coming down out of the cloth and going back in the wind, running badly for four steps and then not badly, and then — Kyra saw the exact stride it happened on — not thinking about it at all. The long legs. The straight back. The hands loose and low, which was Val's, which had always been Val's, which Kyra had watched from behind at Corran Vayr when they were eighteen years old and she had been put on the seven and had spent her first month deciding whether she was going to like the pale one who never spoke in the boot room.

She stood on the shoulder above the tarn with both hands over her mouth and thought: *there she is.*

And then, immediately after, with no warning and no defense and nothing whatever to do about it: *I have been looking at that for fifty-nine years.*

The thought arrived entire. It did not arrive as a discovery — that was the worst of it, or the best; there was nothing in it that was news. It was more that a door she had walked past every day of her life had turned out to have a room behind it, and the room was full of things she recognized. The boot room at eighteen. The back of a van at Coldwater. A bench four feet away for a whole season. Twenty years of a house with a spare bed in it that was always made up. *Her hands. Her mouth going flat. The way she says a true thing at the worst possible moment and then stands there while it lands.*

Val turned at the end of the flat and came back down the shoulder toward her at a run, and her face — Val's actual face, the sealed one, the one that had frightened juniors for thirty years — was wide open, and there was nobody on the mountain to see it but Kyra.

Kyra took her hands away from her mouth and did not say any of it.

Not because she couldn't. She could have; she had said a great many true things out loud on this mountain since the spring and every one of them had cost less than she expected. It was simpler than that. There was no word for it. She went through every language she had, which was one, and there was nothing in it that fitted, and what she found instead was that she did not want a word for it, because a word would have made it a thing you could put down.

So what she said, when Val pulled up in front of her with her chest going and the cold coming off her, was:

"You're still slow on the turns."

Val laughed.

It was a real one, out loud, with her head back — and Kyra, who had counted every single one since the sixth day on this mountain, lost count, permanently, in that moment, and never picked it up again.

· · ·

They sat on the shale at the top of the shoulder afterward, with the whole valley under them going from gray to color as the sun came over.

Val's feet were filthy and freezing and she did not care. Kyra had her arms round her knees.

"I want to say something," Val said, "and I would like you not to look at me while I say it."

Kyra looked out at the valley. "Go on."

"I had decided," Val said, "in the first week, sitting in that hull with my leg out in front of me, that this was the rest of it. That I would be the one who stayed. That you would go down and come back and tell me what had happened, and I would be extremely useful about it, and that would be the arrangement for however long we have, which may be a very long time." She stopped. "I had it entirely worked out. I had stopped arguing with it."

"You never said."

"No."

"Val—"

"It wasn't kept," Val said. "That's what I want to be accurate about. I'd have told you if you'd asked. You didn't ask, because you didn't know there was anything to ask, and I did not offer it, and I have been turning that over since the tarn and I think that is the same thing as keeping it." She turned her hands over on her knees. "So I am offering it now. Late."

Kyra was quiet for a moment.

"Thank you," Kyra said.

"That isn't the part I wanted to say."

"I know. Say the rest."

Val looked at the valley.

"You did not accept it," Val said. "That's the part. You never once said, *this is how it is now*. You asked a ship to mend me. You knelt on a floor in the dark three times a week for four months with your hands on a leg that was not getting better, for a long time, while I said it was fine and you knew perfectly well it was not." She stopped. "I would not have done that for me. I want that on the record. Given the same figures I would have accepted the arrangement, and been reasonable about it, and been wrong."

Kyra put her chin on her knees.

"You'd have done it for me," Kyra said.

"That is a different question."

"It isn't, though."

"No," Val admitted. "It isn't."

The sun came over the ridge behind them and went down the far side of the valley in a long line, and they watched it take the roofs of Dymná one at a time, a quarter of an hour of a morning in the last week of the green.

"We should go down," Kyra said at last. "It's the seventh day."

"It is."

"You'll want your boots."

"I'll want my boots," Val agreed, and did not move for a while, and neither did Kyra.

· · ·

They went down in the middle of the morning, and the path was different because Val was different on it: quicker, and out in front for the first stretch, and stopping halfway to wait with an expression that Kyra found genuinely unbearable.

"Don't," Kyra said.

"I haven't said anything."

"You're waiting for me."

"I am resting," Val said, "and you happen to be behind me."

The hut stood empty as they came past the top of the pasture, shut up for the winter, with the fence mended where the young man had come to mend it in the spring and the grass already coming back over the place where a hundred animals had been. Kyra looked at it and thought: *ours again, in a month*. And then, because the thought came with something else attached, she looked away down the valley at the thread of smoke going up out of the trees where the charcoal man's hill was, and did not look at Val, and did not say the other part.

The other part was that the year was turning, and that the two of them had four months of dark coming, in a hut with one fire, and that some entirely unfamiliar part of her was looking forward to it.

#### XII. Andromeda

Kyra had been working on the sky since the first clear night in the spring, and she had four things.

She had the fixed point in the north, which nothing went past and everything went round. She had the band — the great washed band of light that came over the whole sky from one horizon to the other, thickest in one direction, thin and ragged in the other, which she had understood in the second week for what it was and had not bothered to be pleased about, because every world with a sky has one and it tells you nothing about which world you are on.

She had the two smudges.

And she had the fourth thing, which she had had since the ninth night on this mountain and had never said out loud to anybody except once, badly, to Val, with nothing to say it with.

The two smudges were low in the east after dark in the spring, and they had come up higher and earlier all through the summer, and by the beginning of the cold they were riding high across the middle of the sky in the early part of the night, which was every night she had. One was a small faint oval, and the other, a long way from it, was fainter still and rounder, and you could not see either of them if you looked straight at them. You had to look a little to one side and let them come.

She had spent five months looking a little to one side.

· · ·

The work was not the looking. The work was the arithmetic, and she had it out with herself for most of the autumn.

What she knew was this. From the terraces at home, on a clear night in the dry season, you could see two faint patches in the sky that were not stars: a big one and a smaller one, in a part of the sky her whole discipline had been looking at for four hundred years. Every child on Sethal was shown them. Every first-year at the Vayr could find them before the end of a sentence. They were the neighbors. They were the only two things in the whole of that sky that anybody had ever seriously talked about going to, in the way you talk about a thing you are never going to do.

And here, on this world, in a sky she could not read at all, there were two.

A big one and a small one, faint, in the same part of one another's sky, with the same great washed band running past them.

"It isn't proof," Kyra said, on the slope outside the hull, on the third clear night in a row. "I want that said before I say anything else."

"Say it anyway."

"Every sky has smudges. They're common. There are more of them than there are stars, if you count properly, and I have nothing to count with." Kyra had her arms round her knees. "So I'm going to say a thing and you're going to hear how thin it is."

"I'll hear it," Val said, beside her, "and then I'll tell you what's wrong with it, and then you'll tell me why I'm wrong, which is how we have done everything for fifty-nine years."

So Kyra said it.

"If we were in one of them," Kyra said, "the sky would look like this."

Val did not say anything at all.

"Not *near* one of them. In it. Inside." Kyra put her hand up and drew the band across the sky with one finger, edge to edge. "That's not a river of light. That's the inside of a flat thing seen from inside it. Every one of them is like that, all the great ones, and if you are in the middle of one and you look along it you see a band, and if you look out of it you see the dark, and if you look out of it in the right direction you see — " she stopped, and moved her finger, and put it on the small faint oval overhead, "— the next one."

"You've been holding on to this."

"Since the ninth night," Kyra said. "On the slope, before we came down. I said there was a field in the fourth quadrant and I wouldn't say the rest of it, and you waited, and I said I'd say it when I could prove it." She let her breath go. "I still can't prove it. It's been five months and I've got two eyes and a rock to stand on and I'm never going to be able to prove it, Val. So I'm going to say it with nothing behind it, because the alternative is dying up here with it in my mouth."

"Say it."

"That one." Kyra pointed at the brighter of the two, the small oval, high and a little south. "That's home. Not the star. The whole of it — everything we ever knew, all of it, every world, the Vayr, the terraces, the lot — is a smear you can't look straight at, and it's that one, and I have thought so since the ninth night and have not had one single thing to support it."

"Why that one and not the other?"

"Because it's brighter and it's bigger and it's the wrong shape to be far," Kyra said. "And because ours has a small one beside it, close, and that one does too, and I can see it, and I've checked it every clear night since the spring and it's there."

Val was quiet for a long moment.

"That's not nothing," Val said.

"It's very close to nothing."

"It is not proof and it is not nothing, and those are different things." Val shifted on the cold rock. "Say the rest of it. You've got a face on."

Kyra found that her hands were shaking, which was absurd, and that her eyes had gone — she could feel the warmth behind them, the way she could now, a half second before it happened.

"If that's where we are," Kyra said, "then that light left there before there was anybody on Sethal to see it. Before the terraces. Before there was anything on Sethal worth seeing." She looked at it, small and faint and tilted, a little to one side of straight. "I'm looking at home and it isn't home. It's home from before anybody was in it."

"Yes," Val said.

"Val, they're alive right now. Genie's alive right now. Kal's alive right now, this minute, and she's — " Kyra's voice went. She let it. "She's forty. She's forty this year and she's in the lower east range being rude to somebody, and none of that light has got here yet and it never will, and I am sitting on a rock looking at the place before anybody was born in it."

Val did not tell her it was all right. Val had never once in fifty-nine years told her a thing was all right when it was not.

What Val did was put her hand flat between Kyra's shoulder blades, and leave it there, and let her cry on a mountain in the dark with both of them looking at it.

· · ·

They went down on the seventh day and Frederick had the fire in the storehouse lit, because the cold had properly come, and there was a smell of something roasting from the house.

The lesson went the way the lessons went now: quicker, with fewer things on the barrel head and more talking. Kyra could get a whole sentence out if she took a run at it. Val said very little an hour, all of it correct, most of them the difficult ones, which Frederick had stopped remarking on out loud and had not stopped noticing.

At the end of it Kyra did what she had planned on the path.

She went to the door of the storehouse and looked out and up. It was late afternoon and the sky was already going, the way it did now, and she put her finger up and drew the band across it, and then pointed, as near as she could, at the place.

"Frederick. That. In the night. Small — " she did not have the word for faint, or for cloud, and did what she always did, which was use her hands, "— like smoke. Small smoke. High. Name?"

Frederick came and stood beside her in the doorway.

He looked up. Then he looked at her.

He said something in the village's language, and then something else, longer, and then he laughed at himself and started again in English, slowly, taking the words out one at a time and setting them down where she could reach them.

"I do not know the small smoke," he said. "I know the — " he made a shape with his hands, a woman's shape, arms out, "— the stars. Behind it. Around it. There." He drew something in the air, not a line; a figure, a great tilted thing with arms. "There is a woman in the sky. She is chained. In the sea. There is a — " he did not have a word he wanted and used the village's, and then mimed it, jaws, water, enormous, "— a thing coming. Out of the water. For her."

"Chained," Kyra said. "Why?"

"Her mother," Frederick said, and shrugged, as if that explained the whole of the world, and perhaps it did. "Her mother said a wrong thing. About her. And the sea was angry, and they put the daughter on the rock." He put two fingers against his own wrists, one and then the other, showing her where the chains went. "For her mother's words."

Kyra stood very still in the doorway of a storehouse.

"Her name," Kyra said.

"Andromeda," said Frederick.

· · ·

She did not say anything about it on the path until they were above the treeline. Val let her not say anything, for an hour and a half, which was its own kind of conversation.

Then Kyra said, "A daughter on a rock. Because of what her mother said."

"I heard it."

"I asked him for a name and he gave me that."

"He gave you a story that people on this world have been telling each other for a very long time," Val said, "and which has nothing whatever to do with us, and you are going to carry it for four hundred years anyway."

"Yes," Kyra said. "I am."

They went up a way.

"Andromeda," Val said, trying it. She said it the way she said everything in that language: exactly, with the stresses in the right places, having heard it once.

"That's where they are."

"That's where they are," Val agreed. "In the smoke. Behind the woman on the rock."

· · ·

The ship was waiting for them, which was a thing Kyra had stopped finding strange.

She put her hand on the empty air where the hull was and wanted, and the seam came up pale out of the gray and the door eased open, and the light along the curve of the wall came up as they stepped over the frame — and stayed up, and then came up further, brighter than it had been since the fold, until the whole of the second section was lit the way it had been lit on an ordinary morning of the outbound run.

Both of them stopped.

Val had stopped with one hand on the frame. "That's new."

"That's very new."

And then, along the wall that had been a floor, something went *click*.

It was a small, domestic, entirely ordinary sound. It was the sound of a strap releasing on a stowage locker, and Kyra had heard it perhaps four hundred times in her life and had never once turned her head for it.

She turned her head for it now.

Six of the fourteen lockers had come open in the fall. Eight had been shut all summer, strapped and dumb, and she had tried every one of them with her hands and with the cutter and with her palm flat on the wall, wanting, which by then was a method.

The third one from the end was open by the width of a finger.

"That's mine," Kyra said.

She did not move. Val did not move either.

"Do you want me outside?"

"No." Kyra heard how fast it came out. "No. Stay. I don't know what's in it."

"You know exactly what's in it."

"I know what I put in it," Kyra said. "In a hall, with a form, on the fifth day. That isn't the same as knowing what's in it."

She crossed the section and got her fingers into the gap and pulled, and the locker door swung down, and the ship's light fell into it.

Two kilograms of personal mass. A cruelty dressed as engineering. She had spent a whole evening on those two kilograms and had ended with three books, none of them hers; a bad drawing Kal had done at six and had never been told was kept; and the plates.

The plates had weighed more than everything else together. She had taken them anyway and had not written them down on the form, and nobody had weighed her bag.

They were all there.

The books had come off their pile and gone into the corner. The plates were in their case with the strap still round it, and when she lifted it the weight of it went into her arms and up into her chest like a sound. Four seconds of a sky that no catalogue on Sethal contained, recorded on the first crewed fold by an instrument that had no business seeing anything, and eleven years of work behind them, and a finding in the record with a number on it that two people had asked her about and one of them had been being polite.

She had brought them because she had never once, in eleven years, been able to leave them in a building she was not in.

And on the top of the case, where it had slid down the inside of the locker and stopped, face up, was a piece of paper the size of both her hands.

Kyra sat down on the floor with it.

It was a drawing of four people. The tallest one had been given a great deal of hair, because that had been the identifying feature of Kyra Davan for a six-year-old, and the next tallest had no mouth at all — not a line, nothing — because Kal at six had drawn people the way she did everything, which was by deciding what mattered and leaving out the rest, and what mattered about Vaelith Sorin was that she did not say things. Genie was the one with her arms out. Kal was the small one at the end, drawn smaller than she had actually been, standing slightly apart.

There was nothing written on it. Kal had not gone in for writing on things.

"Oh," Kyra said.

Val came and sat down on the floor beside her, which she could do now, and looked at it for a long time.

"I have no mouth," Val observed.

"You've got no mouth."

"That is the most accurate portrait anybody has ever made of me."

Kyra laughed, and the laugh came apart in the middle, and she put the drawing down very carefully on the floor before anything could happen to it, and Val put an arm round her and Kyra put her face into Val's shoulder and held on to a fistful of the back of her bodice and stayed there for a long time.

Later — much later, with the light down and the drawing back in the locker and the locker shut — Kyra lay on the bench and looked at the dark curve of the ceiling.

"It gave it to me tonight," Kyra said.

"It opened a strap."

"It opened *that* strap. Tonight. The night I said it out loud."

"I know what you're doing," Val said, from the other bench, "and I am going to say the unpopular thing, which is that a hull is a hull, and it has been coming back to itself all summer, one system at a time, and tonight some part of it came far enough to let a strap go. It was going to be one of the eight. It happened to be yours."

"You don't believe that."

Val was quiet for a moment.

"No," Val admitted. "I don't. I think it is going to go on giving us things one at a time for as long as we are on this world, and I think it will do it at the worst possible moments, and I have no explanation for either of those beliefs and I am not going to pretend that I do."

"Rask would have had one."

"Rask," Val said, "would have said *I told you*, and then he would have made us drink something."

And Kyra lay in the dark in a hull that nobody could see, on a mountain, in a country with no name she knew, under a sky with a chained woman in it, and laughed until she had to put her hand over her own mouth.

#### XIII. The Mound

The smoke stopped on the fourth day after they came down to the hut for the winter, and Val noticed, because she noticed everything.

The flocks were gone by then and the door was theirs again, and the thread of smoke out of the trees below was one of the four or five things you could see from the fence, along with the roofs of Dymná and the line of the path and the shoulder of the mountain going up behind.

She stood at the fence with an armful of wood and looked at where it was not.

"Kyra."

Kyra came out and looked, and did not need it explained.

"How long?"

"Since this morning at the earliest. It was there last night; I saw it against the sunset." Val put the wood down. "It has not gone out in six months."

"It might be finished. The mound. He might have opened it."

"He might," Val said. "In which case there would be more smoke and not less, and there would be a man in the clearing with a rake, and we would be able to see him from here, because you can see the whole of that clearing from here and I have been looking at it since the spring."

Kyra was already going for the shawl.

· · ·

They went down fast, which they could do now, and Val was ahead on the steep part and did not think about that at all until afterward.

They smelled it before they were through the trees: not the sweet scorch of a mound running properly, but wood smoke gone sour and flat, and under it something else that Val's body understood before her mind did.

The clearing was wrong. The mound had come open along one side — a black gash from the crown down to the base, with the turf peeled back off it and the whole flank of it collapsed inward, and around the foot of the gash a fan of scattered charcoal and burned earth, still going in places, smoking gray. The long hooked pole lay ten feet from it.

He was in the lean-to.

He had got himself there, which told Val most of what she needed: that it had happened at the mound, and that he had been conscious afterward, and that he had crawled. He was on his side on the earth floor among his blankets, and he had pulled a piece of sacking over himself the way you do when you are cold, and he was cold, and when Kyra said something and he opened his eyes he looked at them both without any surprise at all.

Val went down on her knees beside him and put her hands where a physician's hands go, and did not need any of it.

Because she could feel him.

It came up at her the moment she touched him and she nearly took her hands away. Every living thing on this mountain ran in some fashion, and she had spent six months learning that without meaning to — the pale root running strong, the grass running thin, Kyra running hot and fast and bright as a note held sharp. This ran like a fire going down. It was still moving. It was moving in the wrong direction, steadily, the way water goes out of a cracked vessel, and it was going to keep going in that direction, and it was going to run out.

She knew that before she looked at the burns. When she did look at the burns she knew it twice.

They were on the right side of him from the hip to the shoulder and down the arm, and they were not the red kind. The skin had gone white and stiff in places and dark in others and the arm did not look like an arm, and where the flank of the mound had come down on him it had done something to his side that Val could feel with her hands and could not have fixed in a room at the institute with four people helping her.

"Val," Kyra said.

"I know."

"How bad?"

"He is going to die," Val said, in the village's language, because they had the words for *die* and *bad* and *man* and they did not have the words for anything else, and then, in her own, because she had to say it properly to somebody: "He is going to die, and it is going to take two or three days, and there is nothing in that valley that can do anything about it."

The charcoal man looked from one of them to the other.

Then he said one word, low, that did not go up at the end, and Val did not know it and understood it perfectly, because it was the same word he had said in the clearing on the first morning, when he had looked at two starving women in gray and lifted his black hand.

It was hello.

· · ·

They stayed with him.

That was decided without either of them proposing it. Kyra went up the mountain for what they had and came back before dark with the blankets off both benches and the last of the salt and the pot; Val stayed and did what could be done, which was not much and took all day: water, and keeping the good side warm, and keeping the sacking off the burns, and turning him, which was the worst part for both of them.

He did not make much noise. He made some, in the night, and Val sat by him in the dark with her hand on his good shoulder and let herself read him, over and over, because it was the only measurement she had.

On the second morning Kyra said it.

She said it outside, in the clearing, with the sour smoke still coming off the ruin of the mound, standing with her arms wrapped round herself.

"The ship could do it."

Val did not pretend not to have thought of it. That would have been a lie of the kind she had promised in the snow not to tell.

"I have been thinking about it since I put my hands on him," Val said.

"It knits."

"It knits."

"It knit your leg. Four months, three times a week, in the dark, and it laid a seam down inside a bone and now you run." Kyra's voice was going. "That is not nothing, Val, that is not — I have watched it do the thing that everybody at the institute would have told me was impossible, and it is sitting up there on that snow right now doing nothing at all, and there is a man in that lean-to who is going to be dead in three days."

"Yes."

"So say it. You're the one who has the words. Say why not."

Val stood in a cold clearing and said why not.

"Because we would have to carry him up four hundred feet of mountain," Val said, "which would kill him, and if it did not kill him we would be opening a hull in front of a conscious man. Because the lattice reads a Sethal body; it has never read anything else, and what it did to my leg it did because it found something it recognized, and I do not know what it would find in him, and neither do you, and the likeliest outcome is that it finds nothing and the second likeliest is that it finds something and does the wrong thing with it very quickly." She stopped. "And because if it worked — "

"Say that part."

"If it worked," Val said, "then a man who was crushed and burned on one day would be walking in the lane on the next seventh day, and the two women who took him up a mountain would be standing next to him."

Kyra turned away and put her hands over her face.

"I hate every single word of that," Kyra said.

"I know."

"It's all correct."

"It is all correct," Val conceded, "and it is not why."

Kyra took her hands down.

"Then say why."

"Because it does not stop." Val heard her own voice do something unfamiliar and went on anyway. "Not this. Him. If we do this for him we have decided something about every person in that valley, and about their children, and about everybody in every place we go for the rest of however long we have — that when we can, we do. And we can, Kyra. That is the whole of the problem. We are two people with a thing in the snow that mends what cannot be mended, on a world where a man can die of a fall off a roof, and if we once start there is no line anywhere after the first one. There is only how tired we are and who we happened to be standing next to."

"That's a reason not to start," Kyra said. "It's not a reason to sit in a lean-to and watch."

"No," Val agreed. "It isn't. It's only the better of the two."

· · ·

They both broke a little. Neither of them did anything.

Val's came on the second night, at the worst hour, when he was quiet and she was not. She sat with her back against the post of the lean-to and did the arithmetic she had said was impossible: the litter, cut from the woodpile; the two of them at either end; the path, and then the slope, and then the last four hundred feet, which would take until dawn. Whether he would live through it. Whether the hull would open for a stranger. Whether the film would rise for him at all.

She did it three times. It came out the same three times and then she did it a fourth time with different numbers, which was the part she was ashamed of afterward — she gave herself a stronger man and a shorter slope and a lattice that had never once refused Kyra anything, and even then, with her thumb on the scale, it did not come out.

She rubbed it out with her sleeve, the way she had on a plate in the spring, and put her head back against the post.

Kyra's came on the third morning, and Val only knew about it because Kyra told her.

"I went up," Kyra said. She had come back into the clearing with the water and she put it down and stood there. "In the night. When you were asleep."

"To the ship."

"To the ship." Kyra's jaw was set. "I put my hand on it and I stood there for about a quarter of an hour."

"And?"

"And I didn't ask it." She was not crying. She was past that. "I stood in the snow with my hand on the only thing on this world that does what I tell it, with a man dying at the bottom of the hill, and I didn't ask it, because you were right, and I'd already agreed with you, and if I'd asked it I'd have been asking it behind your back." She looked up. "And I wanted to. I want that said. I stood there wanting to for a quarter of an hour."

Val got up off the floor of the lean-to and crossed the clearing and put both arms round her, and Kyra stood in it stiffly for a moment and then did not.

"I did the sums four times," Val said, into her hair. "The fourth time I cheated. I gave myself a better man and a shorter mountain."

"Did it come out?"

"No."

"Good," Kyra said, and held on tighter, and neither of them said anything else about it for a long time.

· · ·

He died on the third afternoon, which was sooner than Val had told Kyra and exactly when she had thought.

They were both there. Kyra had his good hand. Val had two fingers against the side of his throat because she could not stop being what she was, and so she felt it happen twice: once under her fingers, in the ordinary way, and once in the other way, the field going down and down and then not being there, which was the first time she had felt that on this world and was not the last.

He had not spoken since the second night. Near the end he had said something, twice, that had the shape of a name, and Kyra had said "Yes," because there was nothing else to say and because it was probably true, whoever it was.

Afterward they sat in the lean-to on either side of him and did not move for a while.

"I don't know his name," Kyra said.

"No."

"Six months. He fed us through the whole of the spring. He put eggs in a cloth because I made a joke he couldn't hear the words of." Her voice was flat and going flatter. "And I don't know his name, and he doesn't know ours, because we gave him two that aren't."

Val looked at the black hands on the sacking.

"We could find out," Val offered. "Somebody in the village will know it."

"I'm going to ask Frederick."

"Yes."

"And then I'm going to know it," Kyra said, "and there'll be nobody to say it to."

· · ·

They carried him down.

That was Kyra's, and Val did not argue with it, although she could see every one of the things that were wrong with it. They made a litter out of two poles from the lean-to and the sacking and their own two blankets, and they carried him down the path out of the trees and across the ground by the stream and into the lane at the bottom end of Dymná in the last of the light, two women in village clothes with a dead man between them, and the village came out.

It was not like the spring. Nobody lifted a fork. But it was not nothing, either: there was a long silence in that lane, and the woman from the well put her hand over her mouth, and a man said something to another man behind his hand, and four or five people looked at the burns and then at the two of them and then at the burns again.

Frederick came down the lane without his coat on.

He looked at the charcoal man for a long moment. Then he said something to the men in the lane — short, and not loud — and they came and took the litter, and Val let go of it and found that her hands did not want to open.

"When?" Frederick said, in English.

"Three days," Val said. "The mound fell. We were with him."

"Three days," Frederick repeated.

"Yes."

He looked at her, and then at Kyra, and then at their hands, which were black to the wrist, both of them, from three days of it.

And Val watched a kind man do a sum in a lane, and watched him arrive at the wrong answer, and could see exactly which wrong answer it was: *two women who live on a mountain were in that clearing for three days, and nobody in this village knew, and the man is dead.*

He did not say it. He would not say it; she was nearly sure of that. But somebody would.

"His name," Kyra said.

Frederick turned to her.

"His name," Kyra said again. "Please."

And Frederick told her, and Kyra said it back to him, and got it slightly wrong, and said it again, and got it right.

#### XIV. Come Live with Me

His name was Ondrej, and for eleven days Kyra could not put it down.

She said it in the hut, out loud, at odd hours, because Val had asked her to say it whenever she wanted to and she had discovered that she wanted to about four times a day. She said it on the path. She said it once, badly, into the cloth of her own sleeve at the middle of the night with Val's arm over her, and Val had not said anything at all, which was right.

The village buried him on the second day after they brought him down. They did not go. Nobody had told them not to, and Frederick had come as far as the gate of his own yard when they arrived on the seventh day and had shaken his head, once, in a way that was not unkind, and they had turned round and gone back up the mountain with nothing.

"That's the first time he's done that," Val said, above the treeline.

"He's protecting us."

"He is protecting us," Val conceded, "and he is also telling us something, and you and I are going to work out which one is larger over the next few weeks whether we want to or not."

They went up in silence after that.

Halfway to the hut, Kyra said, "I keep doing a thing."

"Say it."

"I keep counting him." She was watching the path. "Seventeen and one. And then I stop, because he isn't ours, and then I start again."

Val took a while to answer.

"So do I," Val said.

· · ·

It was Val who said the rest of it, four nights later, which neither of them would have predicted.

The fire was low. Kyra had her back against the bench and her legs out and Val was sitting on the floor beside her with her arms round her knees, and they had not spoken for most of an hour, which had become a thing they could do.

"I have been unable to stop doing an arithmetic," Val said.

Kyra turned her head.

"He fell on his own mound," Val said. "Which he had built. On a mountain, alone, doing a thing he had done for thirty years. And it came down on him, and he crawled forty feet, and then he lay in a lean-to for the better part of a day and a night with nobody there." She was looking at the fire. "And the arithmetic I cannot stop doing is: what if we had gone down on the day the smoke stopped. Not the day after. What if I had looked at the fence in the morning instead of the evening."

"Val."

"I am not saying it would have changed the outcome. It would not have changed the outcome; I have been through that four times and the burns were the burns." Val's voice was entirely level, which was how Kyra knew. "I am saying he was alone for a day and a night, and that he was alone because two people who could see his smoke from their fence were not looking at it that morning, and that I will be doing this particular sum for a very long time."

Kyra sat up.

"Give me your hand."

"Why?"

"Because I'm going to say something and I want to be holding on to you when I do it."

Val gave her the hand. Kyra took it in both of hers.

"Seventeen people," Kyra said, "and I wanted one of them to be somewhere. I said that to you on the fifth day, standing in the door of a hull, and you said *I know*, and it was true and it was useless."

"I remember."

"I have never been able to put them anywhere. Not one of them. There's nothing on this mountain with a name on it and there never will be, and that's — " Kyra stopped, and started again. "And then a man fed us all spring and died in a lean-to and we carried him down a hill in the dark, and the village put him in the ground with his own people, and he is *somewhere*. I know where he is. I could walk to it."

Val's hand did not move in hers.

"And I am so angry about it," Kyra said, "that I have not been able to look at you for four days."

"Yes."

"That's it? Yes?"

"I worked it out on the second night," Val said. "You have been standing on the wrong side of every doorway I am in since the lane, which you have not done in fifty-nine years, and you have not once shouted at me, which you have also not done in fifty-nine years."

"You could have said."

"I was waiting for you to have it in words," Val said. "You always get there. You get there out loud and in the wrong order and about four days after I've seen it, and if I say it first you have to argue with me about it instead of saying it, and then it costs twice."

Kyra sat with that for a moment.

"That's the most annoying kind thing anybody's ever done to me," Kyra said.

"I am aware."

"Don't stop."

"I won't," Val said.

· · ·

They came down on the seventh day after that, and Frederick came out to the gate and did not shake his head, and took them in, and the fire was lit in the storehouse and there were three things on the barrel head.

Two of them were books.

Val knew what they were before he said anything, because she had known since a storehouse in the spring that the shelf at the back had books on it, and had been looking at them for six months with the steadiness of a woman who is not going to ask.

"For you," Frederick said. "Both. Not to keep — " he stopped, and made a face at himself, and started again. "Yes. To keep."

The first was small and thick and had been used hard. He put it in Val's hands and opened it for her at the front, where there was a page with letters on it in rows, large ones and small ones, and then pages of short words in columns, and then pages with sentences.

"A book for teaching," he said. "For children. A man in London made it. I bought it because I was a poor scholar and I am not ashamed." He tapped the columns. "Here. Every word in it, you will have. In the winter. When you cannot come down."

Val looked at the rows of letters and felt something go through her that she was going to have to examine later, in private, with the light down.

"Thank you," Val said.

The second book was different: taller, thinner, printed on better paper, and he handled it differently as well.

"This one is not for teaching," Frederick said. "This one is — " He looked for the word, in English, and did not find it, and found it in the village's language instead and then translated it with his hands: a shape in the air, and then the shape being turned over and admired. "Songs. Without the music. Men writing about — " he shrugged, enormously, and Kyra laughed for the first time in eleven days, "— fields. And girls. And how it is all very sad."

"Is it any good?" Kyra said.

"Some of it," said Frederick, "is very good, and I will not tell you which, because you are going to have four months and nothing else to do."

The third thing on the barrel head was paper.

There was not a great deal of it: a few sheets, folded once, the edges uneven and the surface furred, and a small stoppered bottle of ink and a knife and a goose quill lying on top of it.

Val did not touch that at all for a moment.

"It is dear," Frederick said, "and there is no more, so do not waste it on practicing. Practice in the ash." He pointed at the hearth. "Everybody does."

"Why?" Val said.

It came out flatter than she meant. Frederick looked at her.

"Because you want it," he said.

· · ·

They carried the whole of it up the mountain in Kyra's skirt, held up in front of her like a sack, which Val said four separate times was undignified and which Kyra said four separate times was working.

The primer went to Val. Nobody discussed that either.

She started it that night and did it the way she did everything: at the front, in order, with the ash and a stick at her elbow. The letters, all of them, large and small. Then the pairs. Then the short columns, which were words of one sound, and which she went through four times before she would go on, because on the fourth time she found that the man in London had grouped them by the sound and not by the meaning, and once she understood the principle the whole book opened out in front of her like a panel with the labels finally on it.

By the fourth night she had gone through half of it.

By the eighth night she was reading sentences out loud in the firelight in a voice that was perfectly steady and absolutely wrong, because nobody had ever told her where the stresses went in a language nobody had ever written down for her properly, and Kyra lay on the bench and listened to Vaelith Sorin read *the cat is on the mat* with the gravity of a woman signing a protocol and did not laugh, for four whole evenings, which was the single greatest act of restraint of her life.

On the ninth night she laughed.

"It's a *cat*," Kyra said, into her own hands. "Val. It's a cat and a mat. You sound like you're about to put it in the record."

"I am reading it correctly," Val insisted.

"You're reading it like a finding."

"It is a finding," Val said. "The cat is on the mat. That is a statement of fact about an object and a location, and I have no way of knowing whether the man in London intended anything else by it, and I would rather be flat than wrong."

Kyra was crying with it by then, the good kind, and Val put the book down on her knee and waited with enormous patience for her to finish, which she did not do for some time.

· · ·

The other book was Kyra's, and she was hopeless with it for the first fortnight.

She could not do what Val did. She could not go at a thing from the front, in order. She opened it in the middle and got four words in a row and then a wall, and opened it somewhere else and got a wall straight away, and threw it across the hut twice — the first time in temper and the second time to make Val look up, which worked.

What she found, eventually, was that it went better out loud.

That was the thing nobody had told her and that she would not have believed: that the shapes on the page were not the point of it, that they were instructions for a noise, and that if she made the noise badly enough for long enough the sense came up out of it the way a shape comes up out of fog. Half of it she did not understand at all. The other half she understood in the wrong way, in pieces, out of order, and by the end of the first month she had four or five of them nearly whole, and they had got into her the way a song does, whether she wanted them or not.

It was the middle of the winter's first real snow when she read one to Val on purpose.

The hut was shut. The fire was high, because it was always high now. Val was sitting against the bench with the primer face down on her knee and her eyes closed, which she did when she had done as much as her head would take.

"Don't move," Kyra said. "I've been practicing this for a fortnight and if you move I'll lose it."

Val did not move.

Kyra held the book up to the firelight and read.

She read badly. She read it the way she did everything, too fast at the start and then slowing when the sense arrived, and she got two of the words wrong and one of them twice. But the thing she was reading was a man asking a woman to come and live with him and be his love, and to prove all the pleasures that the valleys and the woods and the steep mountains yield, and Kyra Davan read it out loud in a shepherd's hut on the side of a steep mountain in the middle of a winter that was going to last four more months, to a woman who was sitting four feet away with her eyes shut.

She got to the end of it and put the book down on her knee.

Val did not open her eyes for a moment.

Then she said, "Give me the book."

"You don't know where it is."

"Give me the book, Kyra."

Kyra gave her the book. Val turned two pages — two, straight to it, which meant she had been through this book at some point when Kyra was not in the hut, which was a thing Kyra was going to want to talk about later — and read.

It was the answer. Of course it was the answer; somebody had put them next to each other on purpose, in a city neither of them would ever see. It was a woman replying to the man, and what she was telling him, in the most beautiful and the coldest way Kyra had ever heard anything put, was that the flowers fade, and the fields go to winter, and the rivers rage and the rocks grow cold, and that a promise made in spring is a promise made by somebody who has not yet seen the year go round.

Val read it in her flat, correct, wrongly-stressed English, all the way to the end, without looking up once.

Then she closed the book and put it on the floor.

Neither of them said anything for a while. The fire moved. Outside, the snow came down on a mountain in a country whose name neither of them could pronounce properly, on a hull nobody could see, on a grave in a village where a man was somewhere.

"She's right," Kyra said at last.

"She is entirely right," Val agreed.

"He's an idiot."

"He is not an idiot," Val corrected. "He is asking in the spring. Everybody asks in the spring. She is the only one of the two of them who has been outside in November."

Kyra looked at her.

"That's the thing," Kyra said. "That's the actual thing, isn't it. Anybody can say it in the spring."

"Yes."

"It's the middle of winter, Val."

"I am aware of what month it is."

"I'm just saying," Kyra said, "that it's the middle of winter, and there's four months of it coming, and the flowers have faded and the fields have gone, and the rocks are extremely cold, I've been sitting on them."

"Kyra."

"I'm still here."

Val turned her head and looked at her for a long moment in the firelight.

"I know," Val said.

And that was all either of them said about it, that night or for a long time afterward. But the light came up under Val's wrists where the sleeves ended, in a hut with the fire high, where it should not have been visible at all, and Kyra saw it anyway, because she had spent six months learning where to look.

### Winter (Part Four)

#### XV. Snow

The change went for Kyra first, and it went for her at night.

Val had expected the winter to be a matter of cold and food, and had provisioned for both. What the winter turned out to be was a series of hours between the middle of the night and the gray, in a hut, watching a woman come apart in a way neither of them had a word for and then put herself back together by morning as if nothing had happened.

It started in the first week of the real snow. Kyra woke. That was all: she woke, sat up on the bench, and said, "Something's wrong," in a voice that was entirely steady, and then sat there in the dark with her hands flat on the straw on either side of her and did not move for an hour.

"Say it," Val said.

"I can't."

"Say the nearest thing."

"It's too loud," Kyra said. "It's not a sound. It's the field. It's been lying on the back of my head since the snow and tonight it's got hold of me instead, and it's going through me, and it's going through me at the wrong — " She stopped. "There isn't a word for the thing it's wrong about."

"Rate," Val said.

"That's not it either. It's like — " Kyra's hands came up off the straw. "It's like being made to breathe at somebody else's rate. All the way down. Every part of me at once."

Val got the fire up and sat with her until it went.

It went at about the gray, all at once, the way weather goes off a ridge, and Kyra lay down and slept for four hours and got up and went out for wood and was entirely herself, and would have gone on being entirely herself for the rest of the day if Val had let her.

Val did not let her.

"It will happen again," Val said, over the fire, with the snow coming down outside.

"You don't know that."

"I have watched your body do one new thing after another since the spring and not one of them has happened once." Val turned the pot. "It will happen again, and I want to agree now, while you are able to talk about it, what we do when it does."

Kyra looked at her for a moment. Then she said, "You're frightened."

"Yes," Val said.

It stopped the argument before it started, which was why she had said it. It was also true, which was why it worked.

· · ·

It happened again four nights later, and then twice in the following week, and then, through the worst of the winter, about every third or fourth night.

They learned it the way you learn weather.

It came at the same hour, near enough — the dead hour, well after the middle of the night. It lasted between one and three hours. It was worse when the sky was clear, which made no sense at all and which Val wrote in the ash anyway, four times, until she stopped disbelieving it. It was worse after a day Kyra had spent going up onto the shoulder, and better after a day she had spent in the hut, which Kyra hated and could not argue with.

And it was better if Val was touching her.

That took three attempts to establish, because the first two times Val had done it without thinking and had not been observing properly, which she recorded as a failure on her own part in a column in the ash that nobody else would ever read.

The third time she did it deliberately.

Kyra was sitting up on the bench with her back against the wall and her breath going in short and shallow, the way it did, and Val sat down in front of her and said, "I am going to put my hand on you and I want you to tell me what happens."

"Where?"

"I don't know yet."

She started with the hands, because that was where anybody starts, and it did nothing. She tried the back of the neck, which did a little and mostly because it was a thing Kyra liked. She tried the wrists, one and then both, which did nothing at all and which annoyed her, because the wrists were where her own light came up and she had been hoping for a symmetry.

Then she put her palm flat on Kyra's breastbone.

It was not a decision so much as the next item on a list. The hand went flat, fingers spread, the heel of it just below the base of the throat — and the field under it came up at her the way it had come up the first night in the cold, when she had put a hand on a woman's ribs for warmth and found she could read her.

Except that now she knew what she was reading.

"There," Kyra said.

"Don't move."

"I'm not going to move."

Val did not move either. She sat with her hand flat on Kyra's breastbone and read her, and it was terrible: everything running too fast and too bright and pulling against itself, the whole of her going at a rate that was not hers and would not agree to be, like a room full of people all shouting a different count.

And under Val's palm, slowly, over a long time, it steadied.

Not all of it. It did not stop; it went on being wrong. But it came down out of the worst of it, and settled, and found something to keep time against, and Val understood what she was doing about an hour into it and nearly took her hand away.

She did not take her hand away.

"What is it?" Kyra said, much later, when she could.

"You're setting to me," Val said. "I think. Your timing. It can't find anything on this world to agree with, so it's agreeing with the nearest thing that isn't this world, which is my hand."

Kyra was quiet for a moment.

"Is it taking anything?"

"From me? No." Val considered it properly, because it deserved that. "No. I'm tired afterward. That's all, and I'd be tired anyway, because I'd be sitting up."

"You'd tell me."

"I would tell you," Val said, "and you would make me stop, and I would not stop, and we would have a very unpleasant four days about it. I would still tell you."

· · ·

So that was the winter.

It became a thing they did, the way everything they did became a thing they did. Kyra would wake and say *it's coming*, and Val would build up the fire, and they would sit on the bench with Kyra against the wall and Val's hand flat under her collarbone, and wait it out. Sometimes it took an hour. Once it took most of the night and Val's arm went dead to the shoulder and she did not say so.

They talked, on the good nights, because there was nothing else to do and because Kyra could not be quiet for three hours under any circumstances.

They talked about Ondrej. They talked about the boy with the knife, who had been in the lane twice in the autumn and had looked at Kyra both times and had looked away both times. They talked about Frederick, who had begun to ask, in a roundabout way that was not roundabout enough, how they were getting on for food. They talked about the poem book, and about the primer, and about whether the man in London had ever met a child.

Once, at the end of a bad one, Kyra said, "Will you tell me if it starts happening to you?"

"Yes."

"Straight away. Not the second day."

"Not the second day," Val agreed. "I have been told about the second day."

· · ·

It started happening to her in the middle of the winter, and it was not the same thing at all, which Val found she resented.

Kyra came apart at night and was whole in the morning. What happened to Val happened to her hands.

It began as clumsiness, which she noticed on the day she dropped the pot. She never dropped things. She had cool exact hands and had been told so by four different people over fifty years, and she dropped the pot and stood looking at the floor of the hut with her ears going, and Kyra said nothing whatsoever, which was worse than anything she could have said.

Within a fortnight it was not clumsiness. It was that she could not feel the difference between things. She could not tell the knife from the spoon by touch with her eyes shut, which she tested one afternoon, four times, in private, and then wrote down in the ash, and then rubbed out, and then wrote down again because rubbing it out was exactly the kind of thing she had promised not to do.

She told Kyra that night. Straight away, and not the second day.

By the deepest part of the winter she could not hold the quill.

That was the one that did it. She had been going through the primer for a month, and had begun to copy words out in the ash with a stick to learn the shapes, and one evening she took a sheet of Frederick's paper and cut the quill the way he had shown her and sat down to write a word on it, one word, to see what it was like — and her hand would not close on the quill at the angle a hand closes on a quill, and when she made it close the whole arm shook, and what came out on the paper was not a word.

She sat and looked at it for a long time.

Then she folded the sheet and put it back with the others and said, in the flattest voice Kyra had ever heard her use, "Not yet, then."

"Val—"

"It is a hand," Val said. "It will come back or it won't. There is a woman in this hut who cannot breathe at her own rate three nights a week and I am not going to sit here and grieve about handwriting."

Kyra got up off the floor and came and took both of Val's hands in both of hers and held on to them, hard, and Val let her, and neither of them said anything for a while.

"You are going to grieve about the handwriting," Kyra said at last.

"Yes."

"Do it out loud."

"I would rather not."

"I know you'd rather not. Do it anyway. I've been coming apart in front of you three nights a week for two months and you have not once suggested I do it somewhere else."

So Val did it out loud, badly, in four sentences, most of them about a notebook she had not started and had been planning in her head since the autumn: everything she knew about a body that mattered, written down before the knowing could go, because there was nobody else on this world who had it and one day there would be nobody who had it at all.

Kyra listened to all of it without saying anything.

Then she said: "Tell me the whole of it and I'll hold it till your hands come back."

"That is thirty years of work."

"Then we'd better start," Kyra said, "and we've got four months and nowhere to go."

· · ·

They went down on the clear days.

Kyra picked them. She could feel weather a day out by then with an accuracy that would have got her a paper at home and was, on that mountain, simply the difference between going and not going: she would come in from the fence in the evening and say *tomorrow*, and the next morning would come up cold and blue and still, and they would go.

It happened perhaps four times in the depth of it, and each time the village was a little different.

Not worse. That was the thing Val could not get straight. Four or five houses had gone from nodding to speaking. A woman gave Kyra a twist of something in the lane and would not take anything for it. The children were still there; one of them had learned to whistle through his fingers and did it every time he saw her, which Kyra maintained was a greeting and Val maintained was an ambush.

And underneath it, in the same lane, on the same days: the man who went back into his doorway. The woman who made the sign. A silence of about four seconds when they came into the open ground by the well, every time, before the lane started up again.

Kyra put her hood back to say it, on the path, in the snow. "They're two villages."

"They are one village in which some people have decided and some people have not."

"That's the same thing with a mean edge on it."

"It is the same thing put accurately," Val said, "and the reason I am saying it is that the ones who have not decided are going to decide eventually, and when they do, the ones who have been kind to us are going to find they have to choose between us and their neighbors, and I want us to be a long way from here before anybody has to do that."

Kyra went four steps in silence.

"Spring," Kyra said.

"Spring," Val agreed.

It was the first time either of them had said it out loud, and neither of them said anything else about it, and both of them thought about it the whole way up the mountain.

· · ·

Frederick, on the last of those days, kept Val back at the storehouse door while Kyra was loading the sack.

He had been working up to something for the whole hour and Val had watched him do it with a growing conviction that she was not going to enjoy it.

"The old woman at the end house," he said, in English, quietly. "She says a thing."

"What thing?"

"It is not a thing to repeat."

"Frederick."

He looked out at the lane, where Kyra was tying the sack shut and saying something to a child.

"She says nobody has seen you eat," he said.

#### XVI. The Stair

It came out of the notebook, in the end, which neither of them could have predicted.

They had been at it for a month by then, on the bad nights and some of the good ones: Val telling and Kyra holding. It had turned out to be the only work either of them had. Val could not write, so she recited, and Kyra had a memory that had frightened people at the institute for forty years, and they went through it in the order Val chose, which was the order she would have written it in, because she was not going to let a bad hand make her untidy.

They did the four markers first. That took eleven nights, because Val would not give Kyra a marker until Kyra could give it back to her in Val's own words, and Val's own words on the subject of the four markers had been settled over thirty years and were not going to be improved by a woman with a good memory and no discipline.

Then the drift she had drawn for Renn. Then the panel of Kyra's own, the one Val had read in the spring of a year they no longer had a number for, and then re-read on the ship, and had carried in her head ever since with the other person's consent, which had been given over a bench with a shrug.

And then one night, working down the list toward the difficult end of it, Val said: "The next one is the vault sequence."

"The what?"

"The one I did at eighteen," Val said, and stopped.

Kyra did not say anything.

They were on the floor, both of them, with their backs against the bench and the fire high and the snow doing what it had done for four days without stopping. Val's hands were in her lap, palms up, which they were most of the time now, because that was where they hurt least.

"It's a good sequence," Val said. "It is the only piece of work I did before I was twenty that I would still put in front of anybody. It took a year."

"All right."

"And I cannot say what it is for," Val said, "without saying why I wrote it."

Kyra turned her head.

"Then don't," Kyra said. "We'll do the rest and come back to it."

"That is what I have been doing for fifty-nine years," said Val.

· · ·

Kyra sat very still and did not move a muscle in her face.

She had known about the mark since a boot room at eighteen. She had known what it meant, the way everybody on Sethal knew, because everybody on Sethal could read it, and because a hundred and six invitations had gone out that year and a hundred and six people had folded them up again. She had never said one word about it in fifty-nine years. Val had never said one word about it in fifty-nine years. It was the one thing you did not do out loud, and they had both done it perfectly, all their lives, the way you get very good at a thing by never once practicing anything else.

And now Val was sitting on a floor in a hut on a mountain with her hands turned up in her lap, having walked up to it herself.

Every single thing in Kyra wanted to help. That was the whole of her, that was what she had been since she was a child: fill it, ask it, take it out of the other person's hands and carry it for them.

She put her hands flat on the floor on either side of her and did not.

The fire moved. Outside the snow came down through the smoke hole and hissed.

"Ask me," Val said.

"No."

"Kyra—"

"No," Kyra said. "You've been asked. You were asked twice by somebody with a pen, and you've spent your whole life being asked by people who thought they were being gentle about it, and I'm not going to be the last one." She kept her hands flat. "You say it or you don't say it. I'll be here either way and I'll be here the same either way, and that's the whole of what I've got."

Val looked at her for a long moment.

"You knew," Val said. "About the two."

"What two?"

"They asked me twice. You said *twice*."

Kyra shut her eyes.

"Everybody knows they ask twice," Kyra said. "It's in the pages. Every first-year at the Vayr has read the pages by the end of the second term, because somebody always has a copy and somebody always passes it round, and I read them when I was eighteen years old in a bad room with three other girls, and I have never forgotten one line of it, and I have thought about the second asking about four times a year for my entire life."

"Why."

"Because of you," Kyra said.

· · ·

Val did it badly.

That was what she noticed, doing it: that she was doing it badly, and that there was no way to do it well, and that she had once said almost exactly this to her own daughter on a wall in the cold and had made a considerably better job of it, because on that wall she had had thirty-eight years of preparation and a plan and four sentences she had written in her head on the way up.

Here she had nothing. Here she had a fire, and a woman on the floor beside her with her hands flat, not helping.

She started in the wrong place, which was the arrangement and the two families, and had to go back. She said that she had been eighteen. She said that the boy had been decent and a little stiff and had been kind to her afterward in a garden, and that none of it had been his doing.

She said that she had refused.

Then she stopped for a long time, and Kyra did not fill it, which Val had not really believed would happen.

Val looked at nothing at all. "I went up the outside stair on the fourth terrace. On my own. On a Fifthday in the fourth month."

"I know the stair."

"There were eleven chairs in the room."

Kyra made a small sound and put her hand over her own mouth and took it away again.

"They asked me whether anybody was coming," Val said. "I said no. And then the woman with the pen — she was not unkind, I want that on the record, she was doing a thing she did four times a day and she did it properly — she asked me again. And I said no again." She turned her hands over in her lap and turned them back. "And that is the whole of it. It took a little over an hour. I came out at twenty past three in the afternoon and the light was on the wall opposite and I remember thinking that it was an ordinary afternoon, and being surprised about it."

"And then?"

"Then nine days," Val said. "Alone. And then I went back to work."

The fire moved.

"I was not ashamed," Val said. "I want that said, because it is the part everybody gets wrong, including you, including in a boot room at eighteen when you saw it on my back and looked away. I was not ashamed of it then and I am not now and I would do it again tomorrow."

"I know you would," Kyra agreed.

"The reason I have never said it," Val said, "is not the procedure."

"I know."

"Say it, then. Since you know."

Kyra said it. She said it looking at the fire and not at Val, which was the only mercy available.

"You did it alone," Kyra said, "and there's no way to tell anybody you sat in that room by yourself and said no twice without telling them you had nobody to bring."

"Yes."

"And you had nobody to bring because of how you are."

"Yes," Val said. "And I have spent fifty-nine years making sure that the person I most did not want to know that was the person most likely to work it out, which is the kind of arrangement I would fail a junior for proposing."

· · ·

Kyra found that she was on her feet, which she did not remember doing.

"I was four terraces away," Kyra said.

"Kyra—"

"I was *four terraces away.* In the fourth month. I know exactly what I was doing that spring; I was doing the plateau run in the mornings and drinking with Aro's crowd in the evenings and I was eighteen and I was having the best year of my life, and you were going up an outside stair on your own with nobody at the bottom of it, and I did not know, and I would have—"

She stopped, because her voice had gone, and because the next word was going to be a thing she could not say.

"You would have come," Val said.

"I would have *come*."

"I know."

"You don't know. You've never once let anybody—"

"I know," Val said, "because I thought about asking you."

Kyra stopped dead.

"I thought about it for about a fortnight," Val said. "I had the sentence. I had worked out where I would say it, which was the low wall by the west range where you always sat, and what I would say, which was four words long, and I had worked out what you would do." She was looking at her hands. "You would have said yes before I finished. That was the difficulty. There was no version in which you thought about it, and that meant I would have been taking a whole day and a stair and a room off a person who had not been asked whether she wanted it, on the grounds that she was too decent to say no."

"That isn't a reason. That's an excuse with arithmetic on it."

"Yes," Val conceded. "It is."

Kyra sat down on the floor in front of her, hard, and took both of Val's hands in both of hers and held on to them.

"Ask me now," Kyra said.

"It was fifty-nine years ago," Val objected.

"Ask me now, Val."

Val looked at her.

Then she said, in a voice with nothing arranged in it at all: "Will you come up the stair with me."

"Yes," Kyra said.

· · ·

Afterward — a long time afterward, with the fire down to the red and both of them still on the floor because neither of them had suggested moving — Kyra said the other half of it.

"Mine isn't the quiet."

"I know. You told me at a door."

"I told you four sentences at a door and then walked down a stair and let you have twenty years with it," Kyra said. "I'm going to do it properly. Turn round."

Val turned round.

Kyra put the flat of her hand on it, low on the left, above the hip, which she had never once done, and told her: what Deyn had been, and what he had done to her skin, and the eleven days she had taken to decide, and the decision she would make again tomorrow.

Val listened to the whole of it without moving.

Then Kyra said, "Now yours."

"Mine what?"

"The tin," Kyra said. "You had it in your coat for six weeks. You told me that much in a west range with your back to me and a pipette in your hand and then you stopped, and I have never asked you for the rest of it, and I'm asking now."

Val looked at the fire.

"I mixed it at the bench," Val said. "Three shades and a sealant from a shop on the second terrace that sells to people who paint faces for a living. It took an hour and eleven minutes. You were four feet away arguing with the third season correction."

"I remember the evening."

"You matched it against nothing," Val said. "That is the part I have never said. There was no sample. I had seen your mark twice in my life, both times by accident, both times for about four seconds, and I mixed a color to it from memory at a bench and tested it on my own arm and left it on overnight." She turned her hands over in her lap. "I lay in the Marden room with your color on my arm and did not sleep, and in the morning I washed it off and put the tin in my coat, and I carried it every day for six weeks without a plan of any kind. I have never been able to account for that. I have tried."

Kyra put her forehead down on Val's shoulder.

"Don't account for it," Kyra said.

"It is not rational behavior," Val insisted.

"Val." Kyra was laughing, and it went on longer than it should have, and turned over into the other thing somewhere in the middle. "It is the least rational thing you have ever done and you did it for six weeks in a coat, and if you account for it I'll have to hit you."

Val put an arm round her and held on.

· · ·

They did not sleep. The snow stopped at some point in the night and the hut went very quiet, the way it did when the snow stopped, and the fire went down and neither of them built it up.

Kyra lifted her head off the straw. "It's gone dark."

"Yes."

"You've not touched the fire."

"No," Val said.

She had not. She had noticed herself not doing it about an hour ago and had made a decision she did not entirely understand, and now the hut was dark and the light was coming up in her, and she lay on her side on the straw with Kyra in front of her and let it.

It was at her wrists and her throat. It was along her collarbones and up under her jaw and in her hands where they hurt, faint and cool, and it was enough to see by.

Kyra looked at her for a long time without saying anything at all.

"That's what it does," Kyra said at last, "when you've said something."

"Apparently."

"It came up when you asked me the question."

"I know," Val said. "I felt it start."

"You didn't put the fire on."

"No."

Kyra reached out and put two fingers on the light at Val's throat, where it was warm, the way she had the first night she had seen it — and then, because it was dark and because there was nobody on that mountain and because six months had gone past since then, she moved her hand up and put it flat against the side of Val's face.

Val turned her mouth into the palm of it.

Neither of them said anything about that either. It was, Val thought afterward, on the list of the four or five most important things that had ever happened to her, and it had taken about a second and a half, and nobody had said a single word.

#### XVII. The Haircut

Val's hands came back over about a fortnight at the end of the worst of it, and she knew they had come back because of a knot.

It was the cord on the wood sack, which had to be undone every day and which she had not been able to do since the middle of the winter, and which she had been handing to Kyra without comment in a small daily arrangement neither of them had ever acknowledged out loud. She picked it up one morning and her fingers found the loop and went into it and had it open before she had decided anything.

She stood in the doorway of the hut with a loose cord in her hand.

"Kyra."

Kyra came, and looked, and did not say any of the several things that were clearly available to her. What she did was take the cord out of Val's hand and tie it again, badly, in a granny knot, and hand it back.

Val undid it.

Kyra tied it tighter. Val undid it. Kyra tied it into something with two crossings and a tuck that Val had watched her invent on the spot, and Val turned it over twice and got her thumbnail into it and undid that as well, and looked up, and Kyra was standing in a hut on a mountain with both hands over her face.

· · ·

The paper came out that evening.

Val cut the quill again, because the first cut had gone wrong in the winter and she had not had the hand to fix it. Then she sat by the fire with a sheet of Frederick's paper on the flat of the wood-block and wrote one word.

It was not a word from the primer. She wrote *Gennive*, which nobody on this world would ever be able to read, in the letters she had spent a winter learning, which had not been made for it.

The hand was not hers. It was too large and it went uphill and the fourth letter had a tremor in it that she could see from across the room. But it was legible, and it was a name, and it was on paper.

She looked at it for a while.

"Not yet," Val said, to the fire, and folded the sheet and put it back with the others.

"You wrote something."

"I wrote a test."

"You wrote a name," Kyra said, from the bench, "because I watched your hand do it, and it's six letters and it went uphill."

Val did not say anything for a moment.

"When the snow goes," Val said, "I am going to write all of it down. The markers and the drift and your panel and — " she stopped, "— and some other things. And I want it to be in a hand I would not be ashamed of, because it is going to be the only copy, and because I intend to write it out again every few decades for as long as this goes on, and the first one sets the standard."

"That's a very Val reason."

"It is the only kind I have," Val agreed.

· · ·

The hair had been in the soup since the autumn.

It had got worse through the winter in the way everything does when there is nothing to do about it. Kyra's had grown past the middle of her back and had to be tied twice; Val's had gone paler at the ends and darker where it parted, and there was a stretch of four inches at the front that had burned off against a pot in the first week of the cold and had grown back into something that was not the same length as anything else.

"Now?" Kyra said. She said it about once a fortnight, and it had become a joke.

Val looked up from the primer.

"Now," Val said.

Kyra put down what she was holding. "Really?"

"You have twice this week put your own hair into the fire and once into the soup, and my hands work, and the cutter is sharp." Val stood up. "Sit down."

· · ·

They did it properly, because Val did not know any other way.

The bench was pulled round to the fire. A cloth over Kyra's shoulders, which was the charcoal man's, washed and washed again and kept for nothing in particular, and which neither of them said anything about. The wooden comb from Frederick. The cable cutter, sharpened on a stone all afternoon, which was still a ridiculous object for the work and was the only edge on the mountain.

"An inch," Val said. "Off the ends. That is the whole of it."

"You could take more."

"I am going to take an inch," Val said, "and in a month you will ask me why it looks the same, and I will tell you that it looks the same because I took an inch, which is what I said I would take."

"You're enjoying this."

"I am doing it carefully," Val corrected. "It is not the same thing."

Kyra sat down on the bench with her back to her and her hands in her lap, and Val put the comb into her hair, and started.

It took a long time, and Kyra talked for the first half of it.

That was the ordinary thing. She talked about the boy with the knife, who had begun to say the greeting-word in the lane and then to look immediately at the ground. She talked about the old woman at the end house, and what Frederick had said at the storehouse door, and what she thought about being a woman nobody had seen eat. She talked about whether the four children would remember them. She talked about the poem book, and about a line in it that she had decided was the worst line anybody had ever written, and recited it twice to prove it.

Val worked through it a section at a time, lifting the hair off the cloth, combing it straight down, taking the ends off level with two fingers and the cutter, and not once taking more than she had said.

Somewhere in the second half Kyra ran out of things to say.

That happened perhaps four times a year, and both of them noticed it, and neither of them filled it. The fire moved. The cutter made its small sound. The snow had stopped a day ago and the hut had that particular deadened quiet it got afterward, as though the mountain were listening to something a long way off.

Val finished.

She put the cutter down on the bench. She ran the comb through once more, from the crown down, to check the line of it.

And then she rested her palm, flat, on the top of Kyra's head.

She did it to check that she had taken it off evenly — that was the reason, that had always been the reason, a hand on the crown to feel the fall of it on both sides — and she found that she had, and that the checking had taken about a second, and that her hand was still there.

She left it there.

There was no reason for that. Val Sorin had spent fifty-nine years making sure that every single thing she did to another person had a reason attached to it that she could have produced under examination, and she stood behind a bench in a shepherd's hut with her palm on Kyra Davan's head for no reason at all, and did not take it away.

· · ·

Kyra felt it stop being about the hair.

She sat with the cloth round her shoulders and her heart going and did not move, because moving would have been a kind of answer and she did not have one yet. The hand stayed. It was warm through her hair and it was not doing anything, and there was nothing in fifty-nine years to compare it to.

Then she turned round on the bench.

Val was standing behind her with the comb still in her other hand, and her face in the firelight was the face Kyra had known for longer than most of this world's countries had existed, pale and closed and perfectly composed.

It was not composed at all. Kyra could see it. She had always been able to see it.

She stood up. The cloth fell off the bench onto the floor and neither of them looked at it.

They were the same height. They had always been the same height; it was one of the four or five facts about them that anybody who saw them together remarked on, and Kyra had never thought about it for a second in fifty-nine years and thought about it now, because it meant that when she stood up they were exactly face to face with nothing between them.

Val's hair had come loose on one side, the way it did.

Kyra put her hand up and moved it: gathered the pale weight of it off Val's cheek with two fingers and drew it back and tucked it behind her ear, the way Val had done for her in a storehouse in the spring with a stranger standing in the doorway, and the whole side of Val's neck was bare.

Kyra looked at it.

She had seen it ten thousand times. She had seen it every day for five months at four feet on a ship and every day for eleven months on a mountain, and she had never once been allowed to look at it, because Val wore her hair down and her collars high and had done both since she was eighteen for reasons Kyra now understood entirely.

She put her fingers on it, below the ear, where the light came up when Val felt something.

It was warm. Not the light; there was no light, the fire was high. It was only skin, and the cord of the muscle under it, and a pulse going much faster than Val's face was admitting to.

Kyra stroked it once, slowly, with two fingers, from behind the ear down to where the neck went into the collar.

Val's eyes closed.

That was all. She did not move and she did not say anything and she did not open them again, and Kyra stood in a hut on a mountain and watched Vaelith Sorin close her eyes and stand still and let a thing be done to her, and understood, with a clarity that arrived all at once and never afterward went away, that this was what it looked like when Val gave something up.

So Kyra leaned in.

She did it slowly. She got close enough that Val would have felt the warmth of her, and she saw Val's chin come up very slightly — the smallest movement, the beginning of the motion a person makes when they are about to be told something quietly, because that was the only thing Kyra had ever done at this distance in fifty-nine years, and because Val Sorin had spent her whole life preparing for the next sentence.

Kyra did not say anything.

She put her mouth on the side of Val's neck, just behind the ear, and kissed her.

It was soft and it took no time at all. She felt Val's whole body understand it about a half second after it happened, which was the longest half second of Kyra's life.

Then she drew back far enough to see her face.

Val's eyes were open. She was not composed. She was looking at Kyra the way she looked at a result that had come out in a way she had not predicted and was going to have to think about for a very long time, and there was nothing at all sealed about it, and neither of them said one word.

· · ·

Val kissed her on the mouth.

She did it before she had decided to do it, which had happened to her exactly twice in her life and both times on this mountain. There was no arithmetic. There was no sentence prepared and no reason she could have produced afterward under any kind of examination, and she took Kyra's face in both hands, with her fingers in the hair she had just cut, and kissed her.

Kyra made a sound against her mouth that Val was going to remember for four hundred years.

· · ·

Afterward — a good while afterward, standing in the middle of the hut with their foreheads together and neither of them entirely steady — Kyra said, "You've never done that."

"No."

"Not once. Not in — " Kyra stopped. "That's the thing I keep arriving at. You've never once put a hand on anybody without a reason for it."

"I am aware," Val conceded.

"So what was the reason?"

"There wasn't one," Val said.

Kyra laughed, and it came out shaking, and she put her arms round Val's neck and held on.

· · ·

The fire was high, and it was going to stay high, because the wood was stacked and it was the middle of the night and neither of them had any intention of going outside.

It was Val who put it out.

She did it deliberately, in front of Kyra, with the flat of the shovel and the ash from the edges, raking it over until there was nothing but a red line at the bottom and then nothing at all, and then she stood up in a hut that had not been dark since the spring and said, "I want you to see it."

"Val—"

"I have thought about this," Val said, "which will not surprise you. I have been thinking about it since the night you woke me up and told me my hands were lit. I have spent the better part of a year on this mountain keeping a fire high so that nobody could see me, and there is nobody, there has never been anybody, there is one person on this entire world and she is standing in front of me." Her voice did something Kyra had never heard it do. "And I would like, once, to not be managing it."

The last of the red went out.

And the light came up through Val.

It came up slowly. It came up at her throat first, where Kyra had put her mouth, and then her wrists, and then along her collarbones and under her hair at the temples and down the length of her arms — and then it did not stop. It went on coming, into her hands and her face and everything Kyra could see and everything she could not, until she was lit all through, softly, evenly, the color of nothing on this world, standing in the middle of a shepherd's hut in the Carpathians with her eyes open.

She was looking at Kyra. She was letting Kyra look.

Kyra could not move. She had seen the wrists and the throat and the line of her jaw in the dark on the floor of a hull; she had thought that was the thing. This was not that. This was a woman standing in a room she was lighting by herself, with nothing held anywhere, and Kyra Davan stood in front of her and understood that nobody on either world had ever seen this, and that nobody ever would, and that it was being done on purpose, for her, by a person who had never once in fifty-nine years done anything without a reason she could produce.

"Say something," Val said. "Please."

Kyra crossed the floor and put both hands on her face.

"There isn't anything," Kyra said.

And Val's eyes went, briefly, to the gold in Kyra's, which had come up somewhere in the middle of all this and which neither of them had mentioned, and she made a small sound that was almost a laugh, and turned her face into Kyra's palm, the way she had on the straw.

· · ·

It was not quick this time.

There was no floor and no session and no leg and nothing to be interrupted, and the hut was dark and warm and going to stay both, and there were four more months of winter and nowhere in the world either of them had to be.

They took their time. That was the whole of it, and it was the entire difference: that nothing about it was accidental, that neither of them was surprised, that everything either of them did was done slowly and on purpose and answered, and that the light stayed up the whole way through, so that Kyra could see everything, and Val let her.

· · ·

Much later, in the dark, with the fire out and the ash cooling and the mountain absolutely silent, Kyra said into the space between them:

"I'm going to want to say something."

"I know."

"I don't have it yet."

"I know that too," Val said.

"It's not that I don't — " Kyra stopped, and started again. "There's a thing, and it's got no word on it, and every word I try is too small, and I'm not going to put a small word on it just so I've said something."

Val was quiet for a moment.

"Good," Val said.

"Good?"

"When you have it," Val said, "I would like it to be the right one. I have waited fifty-nine years. I can wait for the word."

And in the dark Kyra found her hand and held on to it, and outside the hut the snow began again, quietly, on a mountain in a country whose name they still could not pronounce.

#### XVIII. The Flicker

Kyra felt it four days before it arrived, which was how she knew it was not weather.

Weather came into her the way a door closes somewhere in a house: one day out, always, and unmistakable, and she had been right about it so many times over the winter that Val had stopped writing it in the ash. This was not that. This came in at four days and did not resolve into anything. It was underneath the field rather than in it, the way a hand on a table is underneath the sound of the room, and it did not get nearer so much as it got more.

"Something's coming," Kyra said, on the first day.

Val looked up from the primer. "Weather?"

"No."

"Say the nearest thing."

"I can't. It's not a shape yet." Kyra put both hands flat on the bench, which she did now when she wanted to stay still. "Write it down. Today's the day I said it, and I'm saying it with nothing."

Val wrote it in the ash.

· · ·

It came up under the world on the fourth night.

Kyra woke with it. Not the way she woke on the bad nights — that was the field getting hold of her, running through her at somebody else's rate, and she knew the whole shape of that now and so did Val. This was nothing to do with her at all. This was the planet.

She lay in the dark with Val's arm over her and listened to it, if *listened* was the word, and it was not; there was no word; there was never going to be a word.

The field of this world had a note in it. It had had one since the first night in the snow, a low enormous hum that she had stopped noticing the way you stop noticing your own heartbeat, and the note had gone up.

Not much. It was the difference between a room with the door shut and the same room with the door open an inch, and she was the only person on the planet who could hear it, and she lay in a hut at the dead hour absolutely certain of two things: that it was real, and that she was never going to be able to prove it to anybody, including herself.

"You're awake," Val said.

"It's here."

"What's here?"

"The thing I said was coming." Kyra sat up. "It's not in me. It's in the world. Val, the whole field's gone up."

Val was already reaching for the tinder.

· · ·

It lasted about three weeks, and for the first fortnight Kyra was unbearable.

She knew she was. She could see herself doing it and could not stop: going out at all hours to stand on the pasture and hold still; coming back and saying the same four things in a different order; getting Val to sit with her hands on the hull one afternoon, all the way up the slope in wet snow, on the theory that a thing grown in a right field might notice a wrong one going wronger, and getting nothing, because the ship was a ship and not an instrument.

"You have no bench," Val said, on about the ninth day, "and no plate, and no meter, and nothing to compare it against, and one observer."

"I know."

"And the observer is the instrument."

"I *know*, Val."

"I am not saying it to be cruel. I am saying it because you are going to say it to yourself in four months in a much worse voice, and I would rather you heard it from me now, in daylight, with somebody sitting next to you."

Kyra put her head in her hands.

"I've done this before," Kyra said.

"I know you have."

"Four seconds of a plate and a woman who wanted it to be. That's what I said to you on the ninth night, on the slope, with eight of us left, and I was right to say it." She looked up. "And now I'm sitting on a mountain with no instrument at all telling you the field of a planet has gone up, and the only evidence is that I say so."

"Yes."

"So write it down."

"I have written it down," Val said. "Every day since the first one. Including the days you said nothing, which are also data."

· · ·

On about the fourteenth day, Val started her own column.

Kyra did not notice for two days. When she did notice she sat down on the floor and made Val read it out.

It was in the ash by the hearth, in the bad uphill hand: four short lines a day. Whether Kyra had slept. Whether the bad hour had come. What her eyes had done, and when. And — this was the one Kyra had not expected — what Val's own hands had been doing, and whether the light had come up unasked.

"You're in it."

"I am the other instrument," Val said. "There are two of us on this world and one of them is not paying attention to herself, so I have been doing it for her."

"What does it say?"

Val told her. It said that in the three weeks since the note went up, Kyra's bad hours had stopped. Not eased; stopped. There had not been one since the second night of it. It said that Kyra's eyes had gone gold four times in those weeks, all four in the evening, none of them attached to anything that had happened. It said that Val's own light had come up unasked a dozen times, which was more than the whole of the autumn, and that twice it had come up in daylight where it could not show and she had felt it anyway.

And it said that on the eleventh night, for something between one and two hours, both of them had been awake at the same time for no reason either of them could name.

Kyra sat with that.

"It's doing something to us," Kyra said.

"It is doing something to us, and it is a small something, and I want to be extremely careful about the difference between that sentence and the one you are about to say."

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"You were going to say *it's doing something to us and I don't know what*," Val said, "and then you were going to lie awake with it, and I would rather you lay awake with the accurate version."

· · ·

It went off the same way it had come on: over about four days, without an event, like a fever going out of a room.

Afterward there was a kind of flatness that neither of them had expected and both of them recognized from the institute, which was the flatness that comes after a result that is not a result.

They went down on the first clear day after, and Frederick gave them salt and asked them a question about the mountain in the winter that Kyra answered with four true sentences, and they came back up, and that night they sat by the fire and Val said, "I want to do the other thing now."

"What other thing?"

"The one we have both been not doing for three weeks."

Kyra felt her whole body go still.

"Oh," Kyra said.

"Yes."

"You've been thinking about it the whole time."

"Since the fourth night," Val said. "I have not said anything, because you were out on that pasture at all hours and because I did not want to put a word in your head that you would then hear in everything. But it has been three weeks, and it has gone, and I am not going to keep it."

She got up, and got the primer off the bench, and moved it, and sat down again, which Kyra understood to be Val arranging a room in order to say a thing.

"Neither of us has had a cycle," Val said.

There it was.

Kyra had not let herself get to it in words for three weeks. She had got near it four or five times, on the pasture, at the dead hour, and had gone round it every time the way you go round a hole in the dark.

"No," Kyra said.

"Say your figures and I'll say mine."

Kyra did the count she had done four times that week. "Mine's due. Mine was due in the autumn, near enough. I've been going on the count I've always gone on and there's nothing to count with here, but by any reckoning I've had since I was twenty, it's late, and it's not a little late."

"Mine also," Val said. "Mine was due in the middle of the winter."

The fire moved.

"We came through a fold," Kyra said. "We came down on a world that is wrong for us and we changed, all the way through, for eleven months. My eyes do a thing. Your skin does a thing. I can feel the weather and you can feel a root in your hand. Everything about us has moved."

"Yes."

"So why would that not move."

"It would be extraordinary if it had not," Val conceded.

Kyra looked at the fire for a long moment.

"Val," Kyra said. "Say the whole of it. You've got it worked out and you're being careful with me and I would rather have it."

So Val said the whole of it, in order, the way she did.

"A cycle is the body letting go of its own agreement and finding it again," Val said. "Every process in you stops holding the same time, and for the length of it you cannot hold yourself, and you lock onto an outside until the new agreement takes. On Sethal the outside is the planet. That is why nobody dies of it at home. The planet is half of it, and always was, and nobody thinks about that any more than they think about air."

"And here there's no planet."

"Here there is a field that is wrong in every particular," Val said, "and if a body went into a reset in it, it would have nothing correct to lock to. It would lock to the wrong thing, or to nothing." She stopped. "And it would not come back."

Kyra found that she had her hand over her own mouth.

"So the fact that neither of us has had one—"

"Is the single most fortunate thing that has happened to either of us since the snow," Val said. "Yes."

· · ·

They took four days over it, which for two scientists with nothing else to do was a long time.

They did it properly, sitting on the floor with the fire between them, and they argued, and Kyra shouted twice and Val did not raise her voice once, which was the most annoying thing about her and always had been.

They arrived at three possibilities and they wrote all three in the ash.

The first was that the cycles were late. Eleven months of a body being taken apart and rebuilt would delay a great many things, and a delay is not an ending, and this would mean that both of them were sitting on a mountain waiting for a thing that would kill them when it came.

The second was that the change had broken it — that whatever had been done to them in the eleven months had taken the machinery out, the way a bad winter takes a fruit tree, and that it was simply gone, along with a great deal else neither of them would ever get back.

The third was the one Val hated.

"It adapted," Kyra insisted.

"That is the word I have been avoiding all year," Val admitted.

"You avoided it in the autumn and then you used it."

"I used it about the light and the eyes, where I could see the thing happening in front of me," Val said. "This is different. This is looking at an absence and calling it a design."

"It's a body that had a thing that would kill it here," Kyra said, "and now doesn't have it."

"That is one description of the evidence. The other description of the evidence is *two women have not yet died of something*, which is a sentence you can say about absolutely anybody at any time."

Kyra threw a piece of kindling at her. Val caught it.

· · ·

In the end they went with the third, and both of them knew they had chosen it and not concluded it.

That was the part Kyra remembered afterward — not the argument, but the evening at the end of it, when Val said, "I want to record that we are deciding this," and Kyra said, "I know," and Val said, "No. I want it recorded. Say it back to me," and Kyra had said it back to her, out loud, in a hut, with nobody to hear it:

"We do not know. We have no instrument and one observer and two bodies and no controls, and what we have decided is that this planet has taken our cycles away from us, and we have decided it because the alternative is that we sit here for the rest of our lives waiting for something that we cannot survive."

"And?"

"And it isn't a finding. It's a place to stand."

"Yes," Val said. "That is exactly what it is, and I want us both to know the difference for as long as we go on standing on it."

· · ·

What Kyra did not tell her — because it was not a thing, because it was not even a thought, because there was nothing in it that could have been written in ash — was the last piece.

It came to her afterward, in the dark, on the bench, with Val asleep beside her and the wind up over the ridge.

The note had gone up. It had gone up over four days and stayed up for three weeks and gone away again, and she had a number in her head about it that she had not said out loud: the same number she had been carrying since a cold plateau at nineteen, the number out of two years of measurements that had made her name and that nobody had ever been able to explain.

Eleven.

She did not say it. She had said a thing once with nothing behind it, on this mountain, about a smudge in the sky, and had earned that; this one had nothing behind it at all, not even a shape. She lay in the dark and did the only thing she could do with it, which was to decide to be here in eleven years and find out.

Then she put her hand flat on Val's breastbone, which was the wrong way round and which Val was asleep for, and felt the steady wrong-rate hum of a woman who was going to be here too.

### Spring, 1608 (Part Five)

#### XIX. The Thaw

Val began the notebook on the first morning she woke up warm.

That was how the spring arrived that year: not with the snow going, which took another month, but with a single morning at the end of the cold when she woke and found that the hut was not trying to kill them, and lay on the bench for a while with her hands folded on her chest, doing nothing at all, which she had not done since the autumn.

Then she got up and cut the quill properly and sat down with a sheet of Frederick's paper on the wood-block.

She started with the four markers, because that was where the work started. She set them out in her own hand in the letters of a language she had learned in a hut over one winter, which was the only writing she had, and which nobody on this world would ever be able to read a word of. It took most of the morning and about a quarter of the sheet, and it was the first work of her life she had ever done with no instrument, no bench, no record to check against, and nobody to argue with her.

"You're bleeding through," Kyra said, looking over her shoulder at midday.

"The paper is soft," Val corrected. "I am compensating."

"You're compensating by writing smaller, and you're going to be reading that for four hundred years."

Val looked at it.

Then she started the line again, larger.

· · ·

It took the better part of a fortnight.

The four markers, with the drift she had drawn for Renn after he flew, which she had been right about and had never been able to prove to anybody's satisfaction. Kyra's own panel, written out with permission that had been given over a bench with a shrug and had never been withdrawn. Her own four, which she had read so many times she could have drawn them asleep. The vault sequence, which she wrote out without comment and did not explain on the page, because the page did not need it and because there was exactly one person alive who knew what it was for and she was four feet away making soup.

And then the rest of it, which was everything she knew about a body that mattered.

She wrote it small and evenly and uphill, and the hand steadied as the days went on, and by the eighth day it was nearly her own hand again, which she noticed with a satisfaction she did not mention.

On the ninth day she came to the end of what she had planned, and looked at what was left of the paper, and found that there was a little.

She sat with that for a long time.

Then she turned the sheet over and wrote, at the top, in the letters of a language her daughter would never learn: *Gennive.*

What she wrote under it was four lines long and took her the rest of the afternoon.

She did not tell Kyra what was on it. She did not hide it either; it went into the stack with the rest, and Kyra could have read it any time in the next four hundred years and never did, and that was a thing the two of them managed without one word being said about it in either direction.

· · ·

The snow went off the pasture in about a fortnight, and the valley filled up with water.

Kyra felt it coming four days out and was wrong about it, which had not happened all winter. She said rain and it was rain, and then it was rain on old snow with a warm wind behind it, and by the second day the streams were coming down off that mountain in a way neither of them had seen, brown and loud and carrying whole trees.

The path was impassable for three days. On the fourth it was passable for someone who did not mind getting wet to the hip, and on the fifth they went down, because they were out of nearly everything, and because the last of Frederick's paper was gone and Val wanted more.

They came down into a village that had water in the lower lane.

It was not a disaster. Val understood that at once, and it was important: the houses stood on the rise, and the people were out in it in a way that told her they had done this before, dragging things to higher ground with the cheerful competence of a place that has a bad spring every four or five years. Two men were driving animals up the slope. Somebody was laughing about it. The stream at the bottom of the lane, which was a stream, had become a brown thing forty feet wide going very fast.

"That'll be down by tomorrow," Kyra said.

"It will be down by tomorrow and it is eleven feet deep now."

They went up the lane to Frederick's, and Kyra bought salt, and the whole of it took about a quarter of an hour, and they were in the open ground by the well when the woman started screaming.

· · ·

Val could not have said afterward how Kyra knew where to go.

She asked her about it later and got an answer that was no answer: that the woman had been pointing, and that the ground goes where the ground goes, and that anybody could have seen it. Val had been standing four feet from her and had seen a woman screaming and a crowd of villagers running toward the wrong end of the water, and Kyra Davan had gone the other way at a dead run without breaking stride, down the side of the lower lane, over a fence, and along the bank past a dozen houses to a place where an alder had come down across the flood at an angle.

By the time Val got there the child was already against the alder, and Kyra was already in.

It was one of the four. That was the part Val's mind kept producing afterward, over and over, at the wrong moments: that it was one of the four children who had followed Kyra up and down that lane all summer, the middle-sized one, the one who could whistle through his fingers.

He had gone in above the village and had come down with the water and had fetched up in the fork of the alder, chest-deep, holding on, not shouting. He had stopped shouting; that was the thing Val noticed with the clinical part of herself that never stopped working, and it was the worst sign there was.

Kyra went in from the bank at an angle, upstream, with her arm hooked over the trunk of the alder. The water took her legs out immediately and she had expected that; she went along the trunk hand over hand with her whole body streaming out behind her and the water going over her shoulders and coming up brown around her face.

On the bank, four villagers arrived at a run and stopped, because there was nothing to do from the bank.

Val stood among them and did nothing, and would remember doing nothing.

Kyra got to him. She got one arm round him and took hold of the alder with the other and then simply stayed there for a moment, braced, with the whole weight of the water on both of them, and Val watched her mouth move and knew she was talking to him, and knew exactly what that voice sounded like.

Then she came back along the trunk with him against her chest.

It took a long time. Four hands came down off the bank at the end of it — the men had gone in to their waists and made a chain — and the child came up out of the water and was passed along it, and then Kyra came out on her hands and knees in the mud with her hair down her back and her skirt streaming.

She rolled over and sat up and the mother got to her and went down on her knees in front of her, with the child in her arms, both of them soaked, saying something over and over.

And Kyra, who had just been in a flood, looked up into that woman's face at a distance of about a foot, in the middle of the afternoon, with the whole of her body going and her heart doing what it does.

Val saw it happen from ten feet away.

The gold came up in Kyra's eyes all the way out from the pupil, clear and warm, the way it had on a bench outside a hut when she laughed at a spilled pail, and it stayed for perhaps four seconds, and the child's mother was looking directly into it.

· · ·

Nobody said anything.

That was the thing Val turned over for the rest of that day and most of the following week. Nobody said anything at all. The woman stopped talking in the middle of a word and then started again. Somebody put a blanket round Kyra. A man Val had never seen before shook Kyra's hand with both of his and said something long and fast that Kyra did not understand a word of, and the whole of the lower lane was loud with people saying what people say.

And the woman with the child in her arms had gone quiet, and had backed off two steps, and had not stopped looking.

They got Kyra up to Frederick's yard, where there was a fire. He came out and took one look and turned round and went back in for a blanket, and did not ask a single question, which Val noticed and filed.

Kyra sat on a stool by the fire with her hair dripping and started to shake about a quarter of an hour later, which was the ordinary course of it.

"You're all right," Val said.

"I know what I am."

"You are shaking because your body has finished and is now telling you about it. It will pass in an hour."

"Val." Kyra looked up. "Did they see."

There it was.

Val considered, for about a second and a half, the shape of a comforting answer. Then she discarded it, because they had promised in the snow and because Kyra would have known anyway.

"His mother saw," Val said. "At a foot. For about four seconds. I do not think anybody else was close enough or looking."

Kyra shut her eyes.

"I didn't feel it," Kyra said. "That's the thing. I've been able to feel it coming since the autumn — I get a warmth behind them, half a second, it's like standing too near a stove — and I felt nothing at all."

"You were somewhat occupied."

"Don't be kind about it."

"I am not being kind," Val said. "I am telling you that a body which has just done that is not going to be running its ordinary warnings, and that this is a finding, and that it is the most important one either of us has made this year, and I am extremely sorry about the circumstances in which we got it."

· · ·

Frederick walked them to the edge of the trees, which he had not done since the autumn.

He did it in silence for most of the way. At the stream he stopped.

"You will not come down for a while," he said.

It was not a question and it was not an instruction, and Val, who had spent eleven months learning to hear the shape of what this man was not saying, heard all of it.

"How long?"

"I do not know." Frederick looked back down the valley. "A thing has happened today that is good. Everybody saw it. In a week they will still be saying it." He stopped. "And there is a woman at the end house who has said for four months that nobody has seen you eat, and a boy who says he lost a thing on the mountain and found another thing in his coat, and a man who died in a lean-to with two women beside him, and now there is a mother who will not say what she saw, and will not stop not saying it."

"That is a great deal of English," Val said.

"I have been practicing," said Frederick, "on the way down the lane."

Kyra said, "What do they call it? The thing they are not saying."

Frederick did not answer for a moment.

"There is a word," he said. "It is a foolish word. It is a word for a woman who is old and alone and has a cat and a bad temper, and in a good year nobody means anything by it." He looked at them both. "It is not a good year. There is water in the lane."

· · ·

They went up the mountain in the last of the light and neither of them said anything until the treeline.

"You'd do it again," Val said.

"Of course I'd do it again," Kyra insisted.

"I know. I am not asking you not to." Val stopped on the path. "I want to say the accurate thing, which is that I have never been more frightened than I was standing on that bank, and that I was not frightened for the reason you think."

Kyra turned round.

"I was frightened," Val said, "because there was a moment in the middle of it when I understood that you were going to go into that water whatever it cost, and that if it cost you, you would go anyway, and that there is no version of you in which that is different. And I stood on a bank and did the arithmetic on what my life would be, and it took about a second, and it came out at nothing." She said it without any particular emphasis, which was the only way she could say it. "That is the finding. I have had eleven months to arrive at it and I arrived at it on a riverbank in a village with water in the lane."

Kyra came back down two steps and put her hands on either side of Val's face.

"I'm here," Kyra said.

"I know."

"Say the rest of it."

"That is the rest of it," Val said. "That is the whole of it, and I am aware that there is a word for it, and I have not got the word, and I would rather not hand you a small one."

Kyra laughed, wetly, and put her forehead against Val's.

"We're both doing that," Kyra said.

"I had noticed," Val conceded.

"One of us is going to say it eventually."

"Yes," Val said. "I imagine one of us is."

They went up the rest of the way in the dark, which neither of them needed a light for any more, and behind them the valley filled with the sound of a flood going down.

#### XX. No Smoke

They did not go down for three weeks, and on the day they did, Frederick was waiting at the edge of the trees.

That was how Kyra knew. He had never once come up. He was standing at the place where the path came out of the forest with his coat on and his hands behind him, and he had been standing there long enough to have been standing there on other days as well, and when he saw them he did not walk to meet them, which was the last small courtesy: he let them come to him, so that the walking was theirs.

"It is time," he said.

"Say it properly," Kyra said.

Frederick looked at her. Then he said it properly, in English, which he had been practicing again, because the words came out in order and were the right ones and cost him something.

"You must go," he said. "Not today. Soon. Before the summer."

"Who decided?"

"Nobody decides such a thing. It decides." He looked down the valley, where the water had gone off the lower lane and left the grass flattened and pale. "The pastor has asked me twice about you. He is a good man. That is the trouble; a bad one asks once and forgets. He asks me because he does not want to ask anybody else, and when he has asked me four times he will have to."

"Ask you what?"

"Where you are from. What you eat. Why you do not come." Frederick's mouth did something. "And what a woman by the water saw in the face of the woman who saved her son."

Kyra felt Val go still beside her.

"She has not said it," Frederick said. "That is the worst of it, you understand? She has not said it, and so nobody can answer it. She has told two people that she saw nothing. She has told her sister that she will not speak of it. A thing that is said can be argued with. A thing that is not said—" he opened his hands, "—grows."

Kyra said, "You would not say the word. At the stream, in the spring. You said it was a foolish word and you would not say it."

Frederick looked at the ground for a moment.

"*Bosorka*," he said.

He said it quietly, in the village's language, and then again in English, and the English one was shorter and landed harder, the way the English ones did.

"Witch," he said. "That is the word. I did not say it to you because a word that is not said is a word a person can still walk away from, and I wanted you to have the spring." He put his hands behind him again. "Now it is said. Twice in my house, by two men, in the same fortnight. So now I say it to you as well, because you should not hear it first from somebody who means it."

Kyra found that she had nothing at all.

It was a noise. That was the whole of what it was to her: four sounds in a language she had learned out of a poem book over one winter, and it did not mean anything, and it meant that a woman in a doorway would not look at her, and that a boy who had learned to whistle through his fingers would grow up in a village where two women had once been something with a name.

"What happens," Kyra said, "to a woman they call that?"

"In this valley?" Frederick did not soften it, which she was grateful for afterward and not at the time. "Nothing, for a year. Then a bad winter, or a child dies, or the water comes into the lane twice. And then it is not nothing."

"And you?" Val said. "What do you think she saw?"

It was the first time in the whole of that year that either of them had asked him a question of that kind, and Kyra heard Val do it, and understood that Val was giving him something: the chance, once, to ask.

Frederick stood at the edge of the trees for a long moment.

"I think she saw a woman pull her son out of a river," he said.

And he did not ask.

· · ·

It took them a fortnight to be ready, which was thirteen days longer than the packing required.

What they had was not much: two sets of village clothes, the gray ship clothes rolled and tied, the cutter, the comb, the knife, the cooking iron, the primer, the poem book, and the notebook in its wrapping of cloth. Kyra's field set, cleaned every fourth day since the snow, went in last and went in at the top, which she did not examine.

The rest of the fortnight was the mountain.

They went up to the ship four times in those two weeks. Twice for practical reasons and twice for none, and the fourth time Val stood in the middle of the second section with her hands open at her sides and said, "I want to be accurate about what we are doing."

"Go on."

"We are not leaving it. It is not going anywhere. The hull goes to ground, and it stays, and it is on a mountain nobody climbs in a country nobody has heard of, and we are going to come back."

"You believe that?"

"I have decided it," Val said, "which is a different thing, and we have had that conversation once already this year."

Kyra put her hand flat on the wall that had been a floor.

Under her palm, faint and steady and the right shape, was the small field she had been able to find with her eyes shut since a day in the spring when she had sat in the snow and wanted something with the whole of herself. It had not got any stronger over the year. It had not got any weaker either.

"We'll be back," Kyra said, to the wall.

· · ·

The lockers were the last thing.

Eight of them had been shut all year. One had come open on the night Kyra found which smudge was home, and had given her back three books she had not read since before the fold, a case of plates recording four seconds of a sky that no catalogue on Sethal contained, and a drawing done by a six-year-old in which one of the four figures had no mouth.

She went to it on the last morning and got the door down and took the drawing out and held it.

"You're not taking it," Val said, from the hatch.

"No."

"Tell me why, so that I know you have a reason and are not simply being brave."

Kyra looked at it for a while: the tall one with all the hair, the one with no mouth, the one with her arms out, and the small one standing slightly apart at the end.

"Because it's paper," Kyra said. "And we're going down into a country that has water in the lane every four years, and towns, and people, and we're going to be walking for a month with everything we own on our backs, and paper does not survive that. Your notebook is going to be in a cloth inside a coat for four hundred years and it is going to be a wreck by the time we're anywhere, and that one's yours to lose." She put the drawing back into the locker, face up, the way it had been. "This one isn't. This one stays in the driest, safest, coldest place on this world, where nobody can find it, and it will be exactly like that when I come back."

"That is a good reason."

"I've had a fortnight to think of one."

She shut the locker. It clicked, and she put two fingers on it for a moment, which she was not going to explain.

· · ·

Val chose the sheets in the afternoon.

The lattice record was in the second bay in a rack that had come half off the wall in the fall: sheets of the ship's own material, thin and pale and flexible, each one written through with the record of everything the hull had held during the season. There were a great many of them. Nobody had ever counted them because nobody had ever needed to.

Kyra sat on the bench and watched her go through it.

It took a long time, and it was, Kyra thought, the most Val thing she had ever watched anybody do: a woman standing at a rack for two hours in the light of a hull that had begun to give her things, taking out one sheet and holding it and putting it back, and taking out another, and putting that back, and building in her head a case for what a person keeps when she can keep almost nothing.

At the end of it she had eleven.

"Eleven," Kyra said.

"Yes."

"Why eleven?"

Val looked at the sheets in her hands for a moment.

"Because that is what would go into the wrapping," Val said.

Kyra did not say anything. She looked at Val's face and Val looked back at her, and neither of them said a single word about the eleven who had died in the fold, then or at any point in the four hundred years that followed, although both of them thought about it every single time the sheets came out of their cloth.

· · ·

They left the mountain on a clear morning at the end of the spring.

Kyra put her palm on the hull for the last time and wanted it to hide, which was unnecessary, because it had never once shown itself to anybody but her — and the hull went the color of the mountain anyway, obligingly, the way it had the first time, because she had asked.

Then the two of them stood on the snowfield and looked at nothing at all: at a slope going up to a band of dark rock, with old gray ice on it, and shadow, and a wind coming over the top.

"Eleven months," Val said.

"To the week."

"To within four days. I have the count."

"Of course you have the count," Kyra said, and took her hand, and they went down.

· · ·

Frederick had two things for them and one of them was paper, which Val had asked for and had expected to pay for and did not.

The other was in his hand when he came out of the house, and he stood in the yard turning it over for a moment before he gave it to her.

It was a piece of tin about the size of a palm, cut from something larger, with the edges turned back on themselves so they would not cut, and it had been polished on one side until it gave back the yard and the sky and, when he held it up, most of a face.

"It is not a good one," Frederick said. "A good one is glass and silver and I have not got one, and I am not going to buy one in this village, because a man who buys a glass in this village is a man who has somebody to give it to."

"Thank you," Val said, and took it.

"You have no water that holds still," he said, "on a mountain. I thought about that in the winter." He shrugged, which he had not done before; he had picked it up from Kyra, and neither of them ever told him. "A person should be able to see her own face."

Kyra was going to say something and found that she could not.

Val did it instead.

"Frederick," Val said. "My name is not Valeria."

He did not look surprised. He looked, for a moment, unbearably tired.

"I know," he said.

"Do you want it?"

He thought about it. He actually thought about it; Kyra watched him do it, standing in his own yard with his hands at his sides, a merchant's son of fifty-odd who had come home from abroad to an empty house and had spent a year teaching two strangers his fourth language for nothing at all.

"No," he said at last. "If I have it, I will say it. And then somebody will hear it." He put his hand flat on his own chest, the way Kyra had taught him without meaning to, on the first day, in a storehouse. "Go safely, Vali. Go safely, Klára."

"Go safely, Frederick," Kyra said.

They did not embrace. He put his hand out instead, the English way, and shook each of theirs once, and turned round and went into his house and shut the door, and Kyra stood in the yard and looked at the door for a moment and then did not look at it any more.

· · ·

They went out of Dymná by the path along the stream, because that was the way they had first gone, and because it took them past nobody.

The last of the village was the lower lane, which they could see from the path: the flattened grass where the water had been, and the roofs, and somebody's animals out, and at the end of it a woman standing in a doorway with a child beside her, looking up at the hill.

Kyra stopped.

"Don't," Val said.

"I'm not going to."

"You are considering it."

"I'm allowed to consider it," Kyra insisted. She looked down at the doorway for a long moment. The woman did not wave. The child did, once, with his whole arm, and his mother took his hand down.

They walked on.

· · ·

They came out above the charcoal man's clearing at midday.

Neither of them had planned that. The path went where the path went, and the trees opened, and there it was: the flat ground and the stumps cut level and old, the woodpile gone gray and settling, the lean-to with its bark roof going in on one side.

And the mound, which was a hill of earth and turf with a black gash down one flank, sunk in on itself now, with grass coming up through it.

No smoke.

Kyra stood at the edge of the clearing and looked at it.

She had come down this mountain eleven months ago starving, in gray clothes, with a woman on a stick behind her, toward a thread of smoke that went up thin and steady and did not flare or die back, and she had thought: *whatever is making that has been making it for days and means to go on.*

"Ondrej," Kyra said.

Val did not say anything for a while. Then: "Say the rest of it."

"There isn't a rest of it. That's the whole of it. That's the only one of them I can say."

They stood there.

"Seventeen," Kyra said, "and one, and I still can't put any of them anywhere. But I know where he is, and I know what he was called, and in four hundred years nobody on this world will know either of those things except us."

"Then we'll know them," Val said.

"That's not the same as somewhere."

"No," Val agreed. "It is not. It is what we have got."

· · ·

Below the clearing the path bent and went down into the trees, and before it did, there was the place where you could see the whole valley at once and had to stop whether you wanted to or not.

They stopped.

It was a clear afternoon. The valley went away below them, green and wet and new, with the roofs of Dymná in the middle of it and the plowed strips running out from the village in every direction, and beyond that the country opened and went on and on into a haze, and somewhere out in that haze were towns with names, and roads, and a sea neither of them had seen, and four hundred years.

Val took the tin out of her coat.

She did it without saying anything, and turned it over once, and then held it up to look at herself, tilting it to catch the light, and Kyra saw her face change.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"Val."

Val went on looking at it for a moment.

"I did not recognize her," Val said.

"What?"

"Not for very long. For about a second." She turned the tin a little. "I looked into it and there was a woman looking up at the sky and I thought: *who is that*. And then it was me."

Kyra came and stood beside her and looked into it too, over her shoulder, at the two of them in a piece of polished tin at arm's length: very alike, both of them, in the way that had followed them their whole lives — the same height, the same build, the same faces near enough that in poor light they had been mistaken for sisters four times on two worlds — and completely different, and both of them older in a way that had nothing at all to do with their faces, which had not changed.

"That's us," Kyra said.

"That is us."

"I'd have said I knew what we looked like."

"So would I," said Val, and put the tin away.

· · ·

They went down into the trees.

The path was soft with the spring and the light came through in pieces, and neither of them looked back, and they did not talk for a long time, and then they did, because they were going to be walking for a month and neither of them could keep quiet for more than an hour.

"South," Kyra said.

"South and then whatever there is."

"You don't know what there is."

"I know there are towns with more than one man in them who reads," Val said, "and I know that a person who can read can find out where a road goes, and I would like, at some point in the next four hundred years, to know the name of the country we came down in."

Kyra laughed.

The trees took it and gave it back off the rock above them, and she heard it come back, and thought of the sixth day on that mountain, when a woman with two doctorates had spent four hours making a fire and Kyra had laughed for the first time and it had stopped almost before it started, and neither of them had said a word about it.

She laughed again, on purpose, to see whether the mountain would take it this time.

It did.

· · ·

On a mountain, in the spring, two figures came down out of the trees toward the valley.

They came down easily, both of them, neither faster than the other, and they were talking — that was the thing; you could have heard them from a long way off, one of them talking and the other one answering, all the way down.

Below them, far down where the valley opened, there was no smoke at all.

*— end of book one —*

---

## Part Two — Detailed Summary

### Premise

Eleven months on a mountain, spring 1607 to spring 1608, in a valley in the Carpathians that nobody on Earth has yet drawn a reliable map of. Nineteen people came through the fold. Two of them are alive.

Vaelith Sorin and Kyra Davan are the survivors of the second section of a ship that came apart at nine thousand feet over a world nobody had been to. Val's right leg is broken below the knee and was set in the dark on the first night with a piece of hull and a strap. Kyra is not injured and cannot stop wanting — her body has begun doing things she has no instrument to measure and no language to describe. The ration ran out on a morning Kyra could name to the hour. The book opens with the two of them walking down off the snow toward the only smoke they can see, starving, in gray clothes with no seams where seams should be, with strength between them for about one mistake.

What they find is a charcoal burner's mound and then a village called Dymná, which takes one look at two gray-faced strangers coming out of the forest and decides, as any village in that century would, that it is plague. They are kept at the fence with a fork and a flail. One man walks up to them and does not look at their faces: he looks at their throats, their wrists, their hands and the whites of their eyes, in that order, and finds nothing, because he has seen the real thing in a city in a bad year and knows what it looks like. His name is Frederick, and he gives them village clothes, village names, and a year.

Everything that happens afterward is small and nearly all of it is domestic. A hull hides itself under a woman's palm. A leg is mended three nights a week for four months by a thing grown to repair itself. A language is learned out of a child's primer and a book of poems. Salt is bought with a root that grows in the rock above the snowline. A man dies in a lean-to with two women beside him who could have saved him and decide not to. A haircut becomes something else. And in the last part of the book a woman goes into a flood after a child and comes up out of it with her eyes gold in front of a mother who is a foot away and will never say what she saw — which is the one thing in eleven months that cannot be managed, explained or taken back, and which ends their time in that valley.

The series' first book carries all of this as backstory. *The Smoke* is the eleven months themselves, and its particular achievement is that nothing in it is delivered as explanation. Andromeda gets its name because a villager happens to know a myth about a daughter chained for her mother's words. The notebook that will be carried for four hundred years is started because a woman's hands came back. And the two people whose names the rest of the series is built on come down off that mountain at the end of it talking, in no hurry, with everything they own on their backs, and the valley below them has no smoke in it, because the man who made it is dead.

### What the book runs on

Three facts set up almost everything that happens, and all three are established in the first four chapters.

**They are changing, and nobody can tell them what into.** Kyra's eyes go gold from the pupil outward — clear gold, not the yellow of a sick person — for seconds at a time, usually when she laughs; she cannot see it herself and never will. Val's skin carries a cool pale light under it at the wrists, the throat, the collarbones, which shows only in the dark. Kyra can feel the planet's field as a hum at the back of her skull that tells her where north is and gives her tomorrow's weather a day early; Val can feel living things by touch, and discovers she can read a body with her hand the way she has read ten thousand panels. Neither of them has an instrument, a control, or a second opinion. Val will not use the word *adaptation* for most of the book, on the grounds that she has nothing to support it and the other word is much worse.

Crucially, these things are not safely invisible. The light is bright enough to show through the seams of a log wall, which is how a young shepherd comes to drop his axe and run down a mountain in the dark. The gold is bright enough for a mother on a riverbank to see at a foot. What protects Val and Kyra is not that nobody can see them; it is that they spend eleven months keeping a fire high so that there is no dark to be seen in, and that is the arrangement the last part of the book takes away from them.

**The ship answers Kyra, and they almost never use it.** The hull is grown, not built, and when Kyra sits in the snow with her palm on it and wants — wordlessly, with the whole of herself — it goes the color of the mountain and vanishes from view, a preservation mode grown into every hull for a section that comes down somewhere and has to wait for recovery. Nobody is coming. It hides for her anyway. Over a summer the same lattice lays a thread of its own material along the break in Val's shin, three nights a week, in the dark, in a great deal of pain, until she can run — leaving a seam that cannot be seen and can be found by a hand. That is the entire permitted use. When Ondrej is dying, the same machine is four hundred feet up a hill and both of them know it, and Val's reason for not going is the ethical spine of the whole series: *if we once start there is no line anywhere after the first one. There is only how tired we are and who we happened to be standing next to.*

**Nothing is kept.** On the slope, before they came down, with nineteen reduced to two, Kyra said *nothing kept, not from here on*, and Val said yes. The book treats that as a binding instrument and tests it about once a chapter: Val handing over that her leg is worse than she has been saying; Kyra admitting she watched Val's mark fade for six weeks and said nothing; Val confessing she had privately accepted being the one who waits in the room; Val saying, on a riverbank, that she did the arithmetic on a life without Kyra in it and it came out at nothing. Against that stands the **true sentences** method — *we came a long way; everyone who came with us is dead; we cannot go back; there was a great fire and a fall; we have no family living; we do not know this country* — six statements, all true, none of which tells Frederick anything. Val builds it so that they will never have to remember which lie they told. Kyra agrees to it and then works out what she has agreed to: that a person who has come from nowhere and lost everyone and cannot say one word about either is a person nobody can love.

### Principal characters

**Vaelith Sorin — "Val," called Vali in the valley.** Seventy-seven years old, a scientist of fifty-nine years' standing, and the book's reasoner. She arrives unable to stand and spends the spring on a staff cut for her at the treeline. Her method is to take everything apart in order; her habit under pressure is a chosen stillness that reads to everyone in the room as boredom and that Kyra has been able to see through since they were eighteen. She counts, she files, she does arithmetic in the dark, and she has never once in her life put a hand on another person without a reason she could produce under examination — which is why the two moments in this book when she does it anyway are the largest things in it. Her light comes up when she has said something true. Her hands fail in midwinter — first clumsiness, then the inability to tell a knife from a spoon by touch, then the quill — and come back over a fortnight, which she establishes by undoing a knot. Low on her back, on the left, above the hip, she carries the mark that means she went up the outside stair on the fourth terrace at eighteen, alone, into a room with eleven chairs, and said no twice to a woman with a pen who asked whether anybody was coming. She has a daughter, Gennive, and the one thing she writes on the back of the notebook is that name and four lines underneath it.

**Kyra Davan — "Kyra," called Klára in the valley.** The same age, the same height, the same build, and near enough the same face that in poor light they have been taken for sisters four times on two worlds. An astronomer: eleven years of work, a finding in the record with a number on it, and a case of plates recording four seconds of a sky no catalogue on Sethal contains, which she brought because she has never in her life been able to leave them in a building she was not in. She is the one who carries Val up a mountain on her shoulder, makes fires, counts laughs, pulls everything up to see what it is, and talks — out loud, in the wrong order, four days after Val has already seen it. The planet's field has hold of her: it gives her north and the weather and, by winter, the shape of ground in the dark, and it takes three nights a week off her in the dead hour, running through her at a rate that is not hers until Val's palm on her breastbone gives it something to keep time against. Her eyes go gold and she will never see it. Her mark is not the quiet; it is Deyn's, and eleven days of deciding, and a decision she would make again tomorrow. Her daughter Kal is forty this year, in the lower east range, being rude to somebody, under a light that will not reach this world for two million years.

**Frederick.** A merchant's son of fifty-odd with gray in his beard and a coat cut somewhere that is not here, who came home from abroad to an empty house. He is the only person in Dymná who walks up to two suspected plague-carriers and examines them properly, because he was in a great city in a bad year and watched it take more than a man could count. He teaches them English over a year, for nothing, out of a child's primer bought when he was a poor scholar and is not ashamed of it. He asks where they are from about once a month, the way a man knocks on a door he does not expect to be opened, and stops asking. He gives Kyra his dead wife's red shawl in the first hour of knowing her and never asks for it back; he gives them books and paper and will not take money for the paper; and at the end he gives Val a piece of polished tin, because *a person should be able to see her own face*. Offered Val's real name on the last day, he thinks about it properly and refuses it: *if I have it, I will say it. And then somebody will hear it.*

**Ondrej.** The charcoal burner, black to the elbows and the eyebrows, who is the first living person on this world either of them stands in front of. He lifts his hand when Kyra lifts hers; he points them down to the village and then, months later, points them at the one chimney where the golden root will be valued honestly. He leaves food on a step and then on a flat stone, wrapped in cloth with his thumbprints in soot at the knot, and when Kyra sends back half a loaf as a joke he returns it with three eggs in it. The book withholds his name until after he is dead. His mound comes down on him in the first week of winter; he crawls forty feet and lies in his lean-to for a day and a night before they see the smoke has stopped, and the two of them stay with him for three days and do nothing, and carry him down into the lane themselves.

**The village of Dymná.** Not quite a character and more than a setting. It goes from forks and a hand over a child's mouth, through nodding, to four or five houses that say the greeting-word first and a woman who presses a twist of something into Kyra's hand and will not be paid — and, the whole time, in the same lane on the same days, a man who steps back into his doorway, a woman who makes a sign at them on purpose so they will know it is for them, a four-second silence by the well, and an old woman at the end house who has been saying for four months that nobody has seen either of them eat. Val's summary of it is the sentence that eventually ends their stay: it is one village in which some people have decided and some people have not, and when the undecided decide, the people who have been kind will have to choose between two strangers and their neighbors.

**The young shepherd.** Unnamed. Sixteen or a little more, the youngest of four men, the one who gets the far side of everything and eats last. He sees Val's light through a wall in the spring and runs; he comes back for his axe at first light and says nothing anybody acts on. In the autumn he finds a palm-sized fragment of hull in the drift and discovers that it does not scratch, and Kyra takes it out of his coat pocket while he sleeps a quarter of an inch at a time — and leaves a horn-handled knife in its place, because she has just stolen from a child and intends to be able to look at him across a pasture. By winter he says the greeting-word in the lane and then looks immediately at the ground.

**The ship.** The second section: a curved room with a crazed port, fourteen lockers, and a floor that used to be a wall. It is in the book as a presence rather than a machine — it hides when asked, puts its light on unasked, mends a bone it has no business recognizing, and lets one strapped locker go on the night Kyra says out loud which smudge in the sky is home. Val's position is that a hull is a hull and it has been coming back to itself all summer one system at a time. Val does not believe her own position and says so.

Also in the book, entirely offstage and load-bearing: **Tolven**, who looked at fires in a line along a river and said *then we go down somewhere else*, and went down somewhere else in the sixth section, and whose rule comes down the mountain carried in the two of them; and **Ivar Rask**, who grew nine bays over thirty years, fought the ninth for two years, made coffee that tasted like a burnt bench, told everyone who came aboard *you know her yet? You will*, and was in the third section, from which nobody answered.

### Chapter-by-chapter

#### Spring, 1607 (Part One)

**I. The Smoke** — The smoke does not behave like smoke from a fire, and Kyra has watched it all morning from the snow line down: thin, steady, nearly straight, never flaring or dying back the way a thing does when a person stops tending it. Whatever makes it has been making it for days and means to go on. She does not say so, because there is nothing to say it with yet and because Val has stopped again. Val stands with both hands on the staff Kyra cut for her at the treeline, a length of dead pine gone silver and hard, her weight on it and not on the leg, looking down the slope at the next stretch the way she looks at a problem on a panel — as though it could be solved in order if she were patient enough. *How bad.* Worse than this morning, better than the ninth day. *That isn't a number.* You didn't ask for one. Kyra laughs and it hurts her hungry ribs; it is the fourth laugh either of them has managed on this mountain and she has counted all four, because she always counts and because each came out of her like something dug up. Then Val, unasked, in the flat voice she keeps for things she would rather not say at all: it is worse than she has been telling her. *Nothing kept. Not from here on* — Kyra had said that into the cold with her voice gone and Val had said yes, and this is what it looks like, not a confession but a sentence handed across like a tool. They have no business going down at all. Tolven had looked at fires in a line along a river and said *then we go down somewhere else*, the first decision in the history of two worlds nobody had a procedure for, and Tolven went down somewhere else in the sixth section; her rule has come down the mountain anyway, carried in the two of them, and they are breaking it this morning for the oldest reason there is. The ration ran out on a morning Kyra could name to the hour, and since then there has been snow water and the pale shoots Val examined one at a time and pronounced unlikely to kill them, and then less of that. You can be very clever about hunger for a while; after that you are only hungry. So: the smoke. Where there is smoke there are people, where there are people there is food, and between them they have strength left for about one mistake. The field runs through her while she thinks it, as it has every hour since the snow — wrong, enormous, a hum at the back of her skull that does not stop and does not ask, like being homesick in her teeth, telling her where north is without telling her how she knows; she stopped asking early, the way you stop asking a sore tooth why. What they find is not a fire but a hill: a clearing somebody made on purpose, stumps cut level and old, and in the middle a mound of earth and turf taller than a man and wider than a house, breathing smoke out of small dark holes around its base and a seam near its crown, the air sweet and scorched and green at once, cut wood stacked at the clearing's edge in walls higher than Kyra's head. Val reads it from the treeline — burning inside, without enough air — and Kyra walks a slow half circle before she can stop herself, because a thing nobody has measured is a thing nobody has measured and hunger has not managed to take that out of her yet: they are starving it, it is not making heat but turning wood into carbon, which means somebody down there is working metal. *Somebody closer than that,* Val says, *is standing behind you.* The charcoal burner has been at the edge of the clearing the whole time, black to the elbows and to the eyebrows with the whites of his eyes set in his face like something in coal, a hooked pole in his hand that he neither raises nor puts down. Kyra lifts an open hand the way you would on Sethal to someone across a courtyard, feels foolish, keeps it up. He looks at her hand, at Val's leg and the staff, at the gray ship clothes with no seams where seams should be, and at Kyra's face last and longest; then lifts his own hand, slowly, the pole in the other, black to the wrist. He says one word, low, that does not go up at the end. *We're hungry,* Kyra tells him in the only language she has, and hears how it sounds in the clearing: like a noise. He points with the hook down past the woodpile to where more smoke rises in separate threads from roofs she cannot yet see — those are chimneys, Val observes; this was never the village, they followed the wrong smoke. It was the only smoke there was, Kyra says, harder than she means to, and does not know why until they are well past the woodpile: he is the first living person on this world either of them has stood in front of, he looked at them for a long time, and it was not unkind. The village lies where the valley flattens, wooden houses under silvered shingle with plowed strips running out in every direction like the lines around a sunspot, a tall wooden building with a pointed tower at the center of every path, geese in the lane, a well with a long wooden sweep, and the smell of animals and wet ground and bread that turns Kyra's stomach over so hard she has to stop. A woman at the well sees them first, and Kyra watches the whole of it happen in her body before a word is said — the bucket stopping halfway up, the rope let go, the child taken by the arm and pulled behind her skirts, the hand over the child's mouth and then over her own. It goes through the village faster than a shout would have. Doors; a man in a doorway, then two, then more; somebody with a long wooden fork, somebody else with a flail; they come as far as the last fence and no farther, most with a sleeve or a cloth held over nose and mouth, and one word goes round and round among them, hard at the front and soft at the end. Kyra hears it three times, then a fourth, and files it, because she cannot help it. *They think we're sick.* We are sick, Kyra admits. Not with anything they know. She tries anyway — hand to mouth, the plainest thing she knows, *eat, food, please* — and the whole line flinches back at once as though she had coughed on them, and she understands a moment too late: hand to mouth, of course. The anger comes up in her like a banked fire catching, useless and total, at the fences and the forks and the woman with her hand over the child's face, and at herself, and at Tolven for being right. She takes a step forward. The man with the fork lifts it. Val's hand closes on her sleeve at the elbow — not hard, it does not pull, it simply arrives and stays — and Kyra stops because it has. Val has gone still: the stillness Kyra has known since they were eighteen, the one Val does on purpose when everything in her is running as hot as it goes, face closed and composed, hands quiet on the staff, as though somebody had set her down there and she had agreed to it. Anyone in that lane would have said she felt nothing; Kyra, who has been reading that face for fifty-nine years, can see all of it — the fear and the hunger and under both of them something steadier that is nothing but Val deciding, very precisely, that Kyra is not going to be hurt in a lane full of strangers over a piece of bread. *All right,* Kyra says. *All right.* Then the man from the one house that is not like the others comes down the lane: a ground floor of stone, glass in the windows, a carved beam over the door, and out of it without hurrying an older man with gray in his beard, in a dark coat that was cut for him somewhere that is not here. He says something to the men at the fence, short and not loud; they do not like it; the fork comes down anyway. Then he does what nobody else has done and walks up to them until he is close enough to touch, and does not look at their faces. He looks, very deliberately, at their throats, under the jaw, one side and then the other; at the insides of their wrists; at their hands, turning his head to see Val's where they hold the staff; and last at their eyes, at the whites of them, the way you would look at a sky for weather. Kyra stands for it because Val does, and she knows that look on Val too — it is the look Val gives a panel. Whatever he is looking for, he does not find it, and he nods once to himself the way a man nods when a sum comes out, then walks back up the lane and at the corner of the stone house looks back and lifts two fingers — *come* — and goes round behind it. He could be, Kyra starts. He could, Val agrees; he is also the only one who came closer. The storehouse is cool and dim and smells of wool and salt and something sharp that might be leather — sacks, bolts of cloth on a shelf, barrels with marks burned into their lids — and he leaves them inside the door and goes into the house another way, and Kyra counts the barrels, because it is that or think. He comes back with his arms full and lays the clothes out on a barrel head one piece at a time, as if making sure of them himself: two long skirts of heavy dark wool, two shifts of rough pale linen, two laced bodices, two shawls, and two lengths of white cloth folded into squares. At the second shawl he stops with it in his hands — a dark red, worn soft at the edges — and holds it a moment longer than he has held anything else, and his thumb moves once along the fold. Kyra does not know what that is. She knows what it looks like. He puts it down with the rest, points at their gray clothes and at the pile, then turns his back and walks to the door and stands in it looking out at the yard with his hands behind him. *He's keeping watch,* Val says. He's giving us the room, Kyra says; it's the same thing. Val sits on a barrel to do it, because of the leg, and Kyra kneels and does the leg for her: the soft ship boot off, the gray cloth worked down past the knee and over the bad place below it and the boot back on again, slowly, with Val's hand flat on Kyra's shoulder for balance and her breath held in a way she would have denied. Kyra does not look at the place low on Val's back, on the left, above the hip, which she first saw in a boot room when they were eighteen and has spent most of the years since not looking at, which is its own kind of looking. The bodices lace up the front; Val does her own fast and exact and then does Kyra's without asking, because Kyra is making a knot of hers, her cool hands going up the laces one crossing at a time as if she were closing a seam. Kyra understands the white cloths without being told — every woman in the lane wore one — and ties Val's at the nape, tucking the bleached ends in with her fingers along Val's temple, one piece and then another, while Val holds still for it and says nothing at all, and Kyra's fingers stay at the edge of her face longer than the hair needs; she lets it go through and does not ask it what it was. *You look like somebody's aunt,* Val says. I'm somebody's — and Kyra stops, because the rest of it is *mother*, and it is not a word she can say on this world yet, not in a storehouse, not with a stranger at the door. Val does not say anything; she reaches out and tucks the end of Kyra's headcloth back where it belongs. The boots stay on, because there is nothing else to climb a mountain in and the skirts come to the ground. Val folds the gray clothes — sleeves in, the seams that are not seams matched — rolls them tight and ties the roll with one of its own sleeves: *we don't leave these. Anywhere.* I *know*, Val. The man turns from the door and looks the whole of it over, the skirts and the bodices and the white cloth and the rolled bundle under Val's arm, and something in his face eases, and he gives the same nod he gave in the lane. He takes them out through the back of the yard, through a gate and down a path along a stream that runs behind the houses and away from the lane, where nobody is, and at the end of it where the trees begin he stops and points up the valley toward the forest and the mountain above it, and does not need a word to say it: *go.* It is not unkind. It is not anything else, either. Kyra puts her hand flat on her chest, over the place where a person on Sethal says a thing like this, and says thank you in her own language, and feels again how it sounds; he looks at her hand for a long moment, then puts his own hand flat on his chest, in the same place, the way she had. Then he goes back along the stream and the gate shuts behind him. They go up slowly, and stop often, and keep going, and the light is going off the valley when they pass the clearing again. The charcoal man is at the edge of it with his hooked pole, a darker shape against the dark wood, and he watches them come up out of the trees in village clothes with the gray roll under Val's arm; he does not lift his hand this time and neither does Kyra, and when she looks back from the far side he is still watching. Well above the clearing, when there is nobody left to hear it, Val lays out what the man in the coat did: under the jaw, then the wrists, then the hands, then the eyes, in that order — he knows a sickness that shows in those places and was making certain they did not have it. *And we don't.* Not that one, Val concedes. Kyra thinks about that for most of the next stretch, and about the red shawl, and about his thumb along the fold of it, and gets nowhere with any of it. They came down for food and are going back up with clothes — a village's way of saying *go* and one man's way of saying something else, on the same afternoon, without a word either of them could understand — and she will have to carry it up the mountain and look at it later, when there is light and something in her stomach. Near the treeline Val's leg begins to go, and Kyra feels it before Val says anything, through the arm Val gave her, a hitch and then a give, and Val says her name and nothing else, because that is the rule now. *I know,* Kyra says. *You don't* — I do. Below them, far down where the valley opens, the charcoal man's hill goes on breathing out its one thin thread of smoke, straight up into the still evening, as though nothing on the mountain had changed at all.

**II. The Carry** — The leg goes the way Val calculated it would, which is no comfort at all. She had done the arithmetic on the way down that morning, as she does everything, and arrived at a figure for how much of a day the right leg had in it; the village used more than its share, and by the time the clearing is behind them she can feel the figure running out through the arm Kyra holds, a little with every step, like water through a bad seam. A short way below the last of the trees the knee above the break simply declines to do what it is asked. She sits down — it is not a decision, the path comes up to meet her — the staff goes over sideways into the needles, and the rolled bundle of ship clothes stays under her arm because she has held it that way so long her arm has forgotten how to do anything else. *Tell me.* It isn't going to take my weight. *For now, or for tonight?* There is a fraction of a second in which Val considers the smaller answer and finds she no longer remembers how to give it to this woman: for tonight. Kyra sits back on her heels and in the last of the light Val watches her think — the brows first, dark and drawn hard together, the way they have drawn together over every problem Kyra has ever been handed since they were eighteen and the problems were small. Kyra's whole face works on a thing, and Val has never been able to decide whether that is a flaw or the finest instrument on two worlds. The ship is above the snow line; Val does not need to say it and does not. At their pace it is most of the night away, in the dark, with the cold that comes over the ridge every evening already starting down, and one of them unable to stand. Then Kyra remembers the hut on the open ground above the trees, which they passed that morning while Val was looking at her feet — *I was looking at the path* — *you were looking at your feet, and there's a hut, and it's closer than the ship.* She stands and brushes the needles off the dark skirt as if she had worn one all her life. *Up.* I can't. *I didn't ask you to.* She puts the staff into Val's free hand, crouches, gets her shoulder under Val's middle and her arm behind Val's knees, careful of the right one, and with a sound Val last heard her make lifting a crate of instruments onto a bench at the institute, she stands up with her. The world turns over: the path above Val's head, the sky somewhere past her feet, her face against the small of Kyra's back, the bundle crushed between them, the staff dragging a line in the needles. *This,* Val says into the wool, *is undignified.* You can file a correction — somebody on this mountain will read it. *I'd have to find somebody to file it with.* You'll find me. I'll be the one underneath you. Afterward she remembers very little of the climb, and what she remembers she remembers the way she remembers a fold: in pieces, in the wrong order, with the important parts missing. Kyra's breathing, which is the whole of the sound on the slope, going ragged and steadying and going ragged again. Kyra stopping, setting her down against a rock, standing with her hands on her knees saying nothing, picking her up again. The cold coming. And, with a precision she does not know what to do with, the back of Kyra's neck: the headcloth slipped in the first steep stretch with nobody's hands free to fix it, the hair come out from under it, dark chestnut and copper where the last light catches it, heavy and damp at the roots from the effort, and under it a hand's width from Val's face the hairline, the fine dark hairs below it, the two long cords going down into the collar of the borrowed shift and moving when she breathes, and a pulse just to one side that she can see as well as she could have counted it. She catalogues all of it in order, the way she would read a panel, and only when Kyra sets her down for the third time does she understand she has been doing nothing else since the trees and has no idea how long that was. She looks away into the dark and puts the fact where she puts facts she has no use for yet. The hut is low, silver-weathered logs under shingles held down against the wind by stones, a fence of rough poles round a stretch of trampled ground, the whole place smelling of old smoke and animals and something sour Val cannot place; the door is held with a wooden peg through a loop, and Kyra works it out one-handed with Val still over her shoulder and does not ask for help and does not need any. Inside is entirely dark and a little warmer than outside, which is all it has to offer and is enough. Kyra finds the bench along the wall by walking into it, puts Val down onto straw that crackles and smells of summer, then stands in the middle of the dark breathing like a woman who has carried another woman up a mountain. *Thank you.* Don't. *I was only* — I know what you were only; give me a moment and then you can thank me with a straight face and I'll let you. Val gives her the moment. It is a long one. Then Kyra finds the hearth — a ring of flat stones mid-floor under a hole in the roof — and the dry wood somebody stacked against the back wall and left, and makes a fire in a fraction of the time it took her on the sixth day below the ship, when she spent four hours proving that a woman with two doctorates could, eventually, make one. *That was fast.* I've been practicing. *You have not.* In my head. By firelight the hut turns out to be a place somebody cares about: a great hooped wooden tub scrubbed pale, a black iron hook hanging over the hearth from a crossbeam, shelves of ladles and bowls and carved blocks hollowed and patterned inside with stars and wheels and little lines, like seals or molds, everything washed and turned over to dry and put away, the ash under Kyra's new fire long cold. Val reads the room from the door round to the door again, because she cannot get up and looking is what she has: somebody keeps animals up here, not now — when there's grass, she would think, since the snow is barely off the ground, there is wool caught on the fence and no dung in the pen that isn't a season old, and they make something from the milk, which is the smell. *So we have until there's grass.* We have until whoever this belongs to comes back, Val corrects, which is not the same thing; it depends on the weather and on whether they are the kind of people who come early. *The weather's going to hold,* Kyra says, then looks surprised at herself and does not explain it, and Val does not ask. There has been a good deal of that since the snow. Kyra kneels by the bench and asks to see the leg, and Val moves the hem of the dark skirt past her right knee and Kyra looks at it in the firelight a long time without touching. It is not a good thing to look at: the bruising gone the dull greens and yellows of something old, the swelling up again from the day, and below the knee the shin doing a thing no shin should do — not much, a slight wrongness in the line as though whoever drew it had been jostled, but it is there and it is going to stay there and they both know it. Kyra puts her hands on it very lightly, one either side of the break, the way you lay hands on a bench to feel whether a pump is running; Val holds still; the hands are warm from the fire and stay where they are longer than looking needs, and Val notices that too and puts it with the other thing. *I set it badly.* You set it in the dark, on the first night, with a piece of hull and a strap, while I told you what to do in a voice I'm told was not at its best. It's set; how well is a separate question. *It's the only question.* It's a question for when we have something better than a strap — we don't, so it will wait. Kyra's hands come away but she does not get up; she stays on her knees with her arms around them looking into the fire, and Val looks at her looking and then says the thing she has carried up the mountain since the lane: *I was afraid down there.* I know. You went still. *You saw that.* I always see that — you go still, and everybody in the room thinks you're bored, and I think, there she goes. Val considers it; it is accurate, which is the worst thing that can be said about it. *I thought they were going to hurt you.* They were going to try. *Yes. I would have minded that very much.* Kyra turns her head, and for a moment neither says anything, and then Kyra laughs, short and surprised, the way you laugh when something lands somewhere you didn't expect. *You would have minded.* Very much, Val repeats, because it is true and it is the most she has. There is one bench and one fire and the cold comes in under the door, so they lie down back to back on the straw under both borrowed shawls, the way you would with anyone, and Kyra is asleep almost at once, the way Kyra has always been able to sleep, instantly and entirely, like a child or a soldier. Val is not. She lies with her back against Kyra's and feels her breathing and watches the fire go down to red and does arithmetic, because that is what she does in the dark. She had done it every day of the first week in the ship, when Kyra went out at first light to look for the sixth and came back at dark without it: how long the ration would last one person with a broken leg, whether she could get down to the trees alone and how, what she would do if one evening Kyra did not come back. She worked it to the end each day, and it came out the same each day, and she never once said any of it aloud — it was not something to say, only a thing she had to know. Tonight the sum goes the other way. If Kyra falls on the slope, goes down somewhere steep and does not get up, with the dark coming and the cold coming over the ridge and only Val there. She does it: gets her shoulder under, her arm behind the knees, and stands. On this leg. She knows the figures for this leg and they do not permit it. She does it anyway, in her head, all the way up to the hut, and sets Kyra down on the bench and stands in the dark breathing. Then she does it again. She does not let herself think about why; she carries her up the mountain a third time before she sleeps. She wakes to gray light down through the smoke hole and the straw beside her empty and cold, and has the sum half done before she is properly awake — how far Kyra could have gone, which way, how long before Val could reasonably begin to be afraid — and then the door opens and Kyra comes in with the morning behind her holding something against her chest in both arms, and does not seem to know what to say. *It was on the step.* A bundle in a square of coarse cloth, tied at the top: a round flat loaf of dark bread heavy as a stone, a wedge of something pale and hard that smells like the hut, three small onions. Val does not touch any of it; she looks at the cloth. There are black marks on it, at the knot and along the folded edges — the prints of fingers and a thumb, laid down in soot, exact as a signature. *The man at the mound.* You can't know that. Val turns a corner to the light so the prints show, and Kyra looks, and her face does the thing it does: he followed them up, in the dark. Or he knew where they would go, Val says; there is nowhere else up here. Both, probably. Kyra's laugh comes out in a rush and is nearly something else before it is a laugh after all, and Val does not need to count it — Kyra will have the count, Kyra always has the count. It is the sixth. *Slowly,* Val says, because Kyra is already tearing at the loaf; small pieces, and slowly, or it comes straight back up, and that is not a figure of speech. *I know it's not a figure of speech.* Then eat as if you know it. They eat slowly, sitting on the straw with the cloth between them, and it is the best thing Val has ever eaten on either world and she would say so to anyone who asked: the bread sour and dense and tasting of smoke, the pale thing salt and sharp enough to make her eyes water, and Kyra eating an onion whole, bite by bite, like fruit, and not caring who sees. Val stops before she has finished her piece and puts what is left of it down on the cloth near Kyra's knee; Kyra looks at it, and at her, and takes it without asking and eats it, knowing perfectly well it was left there for her, and Val knowing she knows, and neither of them saying so, because there is nothing in it that needs saying and they are both too hungry to argue about it. When the bread is gone Val folds the cloth, soot and all, into a neat square and sets it on the bench beside her. *We'll give that back.* When? *When we have something to put in it.*

**III. Your Eyes** — The cold on the high ground does not come in the way cold comes in anywhere Val has lived: it comes *up*, out of the earth floor after the fire goes down, through the straw and the bench, finding the places the shawls do not reach, and it is patient about it in a way she finds almost admirable. They have slept back to back for four nights because there is one bench. On the fifth the wind turns and comes straight down off the snow and the hut, which was built for summer, lets it in at every seam. Val lies awake and measures it, because she measures most things; the fire is a red eye in the middle of the floor and behind her Kyra is asleep, all at once and all the way down, and her back is the only warm thing in the world. Then Kyra turns over — without waking, or nearly, a long breath and a shift in the straw — and her arm comes over Val's side and her hand settles flat just under Val's ribcage and pulls, once, not hard, until there is no cold air left between them. That is all. No word. The hand stays where it is. Val lies very still, and it is not the stillness she does on purpose in lanes and in rooms with people in them but the other kind, the kind that arrives before you have decided anything. She does not move away — there is no reason to; it is cold and this is warmer and a person would have to be a fool to argue with that at this altitude — and lets her own hand come to rest on the shawl over Kyra's wrist because it has to go somewhere. And then there is something else. At first she takes it for her own pulse: under the hand, under the warmth, a kind of running, steady and fast and bright, too bright, like a note held slightly sharp. She knows her own pulse; it is not that. She lies and listens to it, if *listened* were the word, and it is not; she has no word. It is the way she would have known with her eyes shut that a room she walked into had someone in it, except that she has never in her life known that, not like this, not with her skin. It is Kyra — not her heart, not her breath, something that runs through all of it at once and goes on past the edges of her a little way into the dark, the way warmth goes past the edges of a fire. It runs hot. It runs fast. And somewhere in it, faint, there is a fraying, a place where it does not quite agree with itself, the way a line on a panel frays when the thing it measures is changing faster than it can follow. Val reads it the way she has read ten thousand panels, in order, carefully, from one edge to the other, not knowing what she is reading or how she is reading it, knowing only — with the whole of her training and none of it any use — that she can. She does not sleep for a long time, and does not want to, in case it stops. Kyra does not remember deciding anything; that is how she would put it if anyone asked, and nobody does. There was a cold night, and then there was a hand under Val's ribs, and after that there is a hand under Val's ribs every cold night, and on the high ground in spring that is every night. It is not something to think about. It is warmth. She has other things to think about — her body, for one, which has started arguing with itself. It is not like being ill; she has been ill twice in her life on Sethal and knows the shape of it, and this has no shape. It is an ache that lives in the long bones and moves when she isn't looking; being cold in the middle of the day with the sun on her and too warm at night under one shawl; waking at the wrong hour with her heart going as though she had run somewhere; hunger that bread does not reach. And under all of it, louder every day, the field. It has been with her since the snow as a hum at the back of her skull, and now it has hands: it lies along the back of her head like a palm resting on her hair, and it tells her things. North is a pull she could walk into blindfolded. Weather comes into her a day before it comes over the ridge — she feels the fourth day's rain on the third, feels it arrive in her like a door closing somewhere in the house, and says so, and Val writes it down in the ash with a stick, and the next afternoon it rains. After that Val writes down all of them. She does not sleep well, and when she does she sleeps like a stone and wakes with her eyes hot and gritty, as though she had spent the night staring at something bright. And she is short with Val, and knows it, and cannot seem to stop. *You've moved it again.* I stacked it. *It was stacked.* It was stacked the way you stack things, which is to say it was in a heap near a wall. *It was a system.* It fell on me. Kyra drops her armful on the floor where the heap had been, on purpose, loudly, and stands with her hands on her hips, and Val looks back, and after a moment one corner of Val's mouth moves — not a smile, Val does not do those where anyone can see, but the place a smile would have been — and Kyra feels the whole of her temper go out of her at once, the way it always has, since they were eighteen and fighting about benches. The charcoal man has left food twice more, both times on the step at first light, both times wrapped in a square of cloth with his thumbprints on it, and the washed and sun-dried cloths sit folded on the shelf beside the cheese molds, because Val will not let her give any of them back empty. They will need something to put in them. Kyra thinks about that most days and has no answer yet. It happens in daylight, which Val will think about afterward. Kyra has brought water up from the stream in the wooden pail they found under the bench, tripped on the doorsill, gone down on one knee and soaked her skirt from hip to hem, and she kneels there in the doorway looking at it — and then starts to laugh. It is the seventh; Val does not need to count it and is counting it anyway. It goes on longer than the others, until Kyra has to put a hand on the doorframe and her shoulders shake, and she turns her face up toward Val sitting on the bench in the sun with her leg on a log — and her eyes are gold. Val does not move; it is the chosen stillness this time, and she feels herself choose it. Kyra is still laughing. She does not know. Of course she does not know; there is no way for her to know. So Val makes herself look properly, in order. Kyra's eyes are gray-blue, the gray of the sea under cloud; Val has known that for fifty-nine years and would say so under oath. They are not gray-blue now. From the edge of the pupil outward they have gone to gold — not the dull yellow of a sick person's eyes but gold, clear and warm, like light through something thick and sweet, brightest near the center and thinning toward the rim where a little of the gray still shows, like weather at the edge of a sunny day. It is the most beautiful thing Val has ever seen, and she does not know if it is killing her. She does not say that. And here is where the book's rule gets made: on Sethal she would have kept it, and she knows that as she speaks — she would have filed it, watched for a season, taken measurements, said nothing until she was sure and perhaps not then. There are two of them. There is no room for managing. *Kyra. Your eyes.* What about them? *Come here.* Something in how she says it takes the smile away, and Kyra comes dripping and crouches in front of the bench and Val puts her hands on either side of her face — because she needs the light on them and needs them still — and turns it to the sun. The gold is already fading, and Val watches it go from the rim inward, the gray coming back like a tide. *What is it? Val. What.* They were gold, Val says, when you laughed, all the way out from the pupil, clear gold, not yellow; it's going now. It's gone. *Gold. Like the sickness. The thing they thought we had.* It isn't anything they know, Val says, as she said in the lane, and hears how little it is worth. Kyra's face is still between her hands, her jaw moving under Val's palms: *I can't see it. I'll never see it. There's nothing up here to see it in* — the stream won't hold still and the pail's too dark and there's no *glass*, and she doesn't know what her own face is doing. *I do,* Val says, and Kyra stops. I can see it. I'll tell you. Every time — what it does and when and how long. That's what the rule is for. She takes her hands away, because the examination is over and because she does not trust herself to leave them there, and adds the part she wants said: she does not know what it is, and does not know if it is harming her, but she can see it, and Kyra will know everything she sees. *All right,* Kyra says at last. Val nods and looks away across the pasture and puts the rest of it where she puts things she cannot yet use: the gold, and the sea-gray under it, and the fact that she wanted to go on looking long after there was anything to examine. Then the mirror of it, that night. Kyra wakes in the dark not knowing why — the fire down to a few coals breathing under ash, the hut black — knows where north is and that there will be no rain tomorrow, and does not know what woke her until she lifts her head and looks at Val. Val is asleep on her back, which she almost never does, hands folded on the shawl over her chest, and her hands are lit. Not bright; Kyra would not see it in any light at all. But here, at the length of an arm, there is a faint pale light lying along the insides of Val's wrists, like light seen through water, coming from under the skin, going a little way up the inside of each forearm and thinning out and gone. Kyra does not breathe. She looks up and there is more of it at Val's throat, in the hollow above the collarbone and along it, the same faint cool light rising and falling a little with Val's breath. She thinks of the woman in the lane with her hand over a child's mouth. She thinks of the gold Val saw in her eyes and she cannot see, and here is this on Val, and Val cannot see it either, not all of it, not her own throat: two of them, each carrying something on her body she cannot see, and the only person on the whole world who can see it lying an arm's length away. There is no rule about waking someone. There is only the one rule. *Val.* Val wakes completely and at once. *Don't move. Look at your hands.* Val looks, and Kyra watches her see it — watches her go still, the chosen kind — then lift one wrist slowly to her face and turn it and look at the pale light under the skin for a long time. It is at her throat as well, Kyra says, and puts two fingers on it above the collarbone, where it is warmer than the rest of Val, a little, like a stone that has been in the sun. *How bright?* I wouldn't see it with the fire up. I barely see it now. Then the panel voice, the one for readings: *does it change?* It came up a little when you looked at it. It's coming up now. *Then it's tied to something.* Pulse, or — and she stops. *Or what?* I don't know. I want that said, too. She sits up, puts a hand out when Kyra reaches for her — not to push her away; to say *wait* — gets her good leg under her, finds the staff in the dark and goes to the hearth, and kneels stiffly with the bad leg out to one side and feeds it: small sticks, then split ones, blowing on the coals until they catch, then more, and more, until the fire is up and roaring and the whole hut is full of moving orange light and every corner of it shows. Then she sits back on her heels and holds her wrists up in the firelight and looks at them. There is nothing there. Only skin, and the light of the fire on it. Kyra understands it at the same moment Val does, and sees her understand it — sees the line of her shoulders, which had been up by her ears, come down. *It only shows in the dark.* Then we won't have the dark, Val says, and puts on another split log, and another, and sits watching it burn with her hands open on her knees, turned up to the light, as though she needs to keep checking. *You'll burn the whole pile by morning.* Then I'll cut more. *On one leg.* You'll cut more, Val amends, and I'll stack it. Kyra laughs; that is eight, and it comes out of her easier than the others had, and she is surprised by that and does not look at it too closely. Val does not come back to the bench for a long time, and when she does the fire is still high and she lies down with her back to Kyra facing the light, hands folded where she can see them. Kyra lies behind her looking at the back of her head, at the pale hair gone orange in the firelight and darker where it parts, and thinks about the light under that skin somewhere, waiting for the dark; and about her own eyes, which she will never see, because there is nothing up here to see them in and perhaps never will be — for the rest of her life on this world, or however long this is, she will know what her own face is doing only because Val tells her. She finds, turning it over, that she can live with that. She puts her arm over Val and her hand under Val's ribs and draws her back until there is no cold between them, and Val's hand comes and rests on her wrist the way it did the first night and stays there. Neither of them says anything; there is nothing that needs saying. The fire burns high all night, and nobody sees anything in the dark, because there is no dark to see it in.

**IV. You Will** — The wood runs out on a night Kyra had meant to cut more, which is every night, and she had not. She wakes because it is dark — that is the first thing, not the cold, which comes later, but the dark, entire, the fire gone to nothing and not even a coal showing — and knows at once where north is and that there will be no weather tomorrow, and then understands that the reason she can see the shape of Val's shoulder against the wall is that Val's shoulder is lit. Val is dreaming, on her back, her head turning a little from side to side on the straw, her hands closed on the shawl, and the light has come up in her further than Kyra has seen it: not only the wrists, not only the hollow of the throat, but along both forearms and across the collarbones and up the side of her neck under the hair, pale and cool and moving a little, like light at the bottom of clear water. In that hut, in that dark, it is enough to see her face by. Kyra puts her hand out to wake her, and outside at the fence a dog barks. She does not move. The dog barks again, twice, sharp, and then a man's voice, low, saying one word in a way that goes up at the end, and then nothing, and then a sound Kyra knows from her whole life, from lanes and yards and the slope below the ship: somebody running. Boots on frozen ground and the dog with them, going away downhill, fast, until the dark has all of it. The hut is built of logs. Logs have seams. Kyra looks at the wall nearest the fence and sees, now, that the seams show faintly pale against the dark — lit from inside, by Val. She wakes her, and watches the light go down as Val chooses the stillness, sinking back along the arms and out of the throat until there is only a faint thread at the wrists and then not even that, and the hut is black. *Somebody was outside.* A pause; then Val's voice, very level: *was I* — yes. *How much?* Enough to see through the wall. There was a dog. And a man. He said something, and then he ran. Val does not speak for a long moment and Kyra can feel her breathing under her hand, too fast, being made slower on purpose. *I let the fire go out.* I didn't cut the wood. *I should have woken you when it went low.* I should have cut the wood — three days I've been meaning to; don't argue with me about whose fault it is, we'll be here till morning and I'll win. Another silence, then, low: *then it's both of us.* It's both of us, Kyra agrees. She lies back down, still holding on, and after a while, because there is only the one rule and because she wants to know, asks what Val was dreaming. She feels Val decide to answer, and it takes no time at all now, which is new: *the sixth. The sound it made. And then the sound it didn't make.* There is nothing to say to that. She puts her hand where it goes on cold nights, under Val's ribs, and holds on, and neither of them sleeps again until the seams of the wall go gray. In the morning there are tracks in the frost by the fence — a man's heavy nailed boots and the prints of a dog, all of them coming up the path from below, stopping at the poles, and going back down at a run, long and scattered, the boot-prints dragged where he slipped. He has dropped things: a coil of rope made of twisted green withies, a short-handled axe, a sack with something lumpy in it that neither of them opens. They lie in the frost where he let go of them and he has not come back for them. *The owners,* Val says from the doorway, looking at the axe. *Early.* He came up to mend something — the fence, Val should think, and the roof; he will have meant to stay a day or two, since he brought his tools and something to eat. From the edge of the pasture Kyra can see a long way down in the clear morning, past the treeline and over the tops of the forest, and far down on the path, small and moving fast, is a figure with a dog running ahead of it. As she watches it stops and turns and looks back up the slope, and does something with its hand — touches its forehead, and its chest, and one shoulder and then the other — and turns and goes on down into the trees. *He's young. He's frightened.* He saw something. *He saw you. Through the wall.* He saw a light, Val corrects, in a hut that ought to have been empty, at night, with no fire; she looks at her own wrists in the daylight where there is nothing to see, and says she does not know what that means to them, and nor does Kyra. *It means he'll tell somebody.* Perhaps — or perhaps he will say nothing, because he would have to explain why he dropped his axe and ran; young men are like that on Sethal and she does not imagine it is different here. *We don't touch those.* I wasn't going to. *You were looking at the axe.* I was looking at the axe, Kyra admits, because we've got no wood, and it's a very good axe, and I've been cutting wood with the cutter from the ship like an idiot for a week. We don't touch them. Val does not answer; she is looking past Kyra up the mountain toward the ridge and the snow above it, and her face has gone the way it goes when a panel comes back wrong. *When the animals come, there'll be more of them. On this ground. All summer.* Kyra turns and looks where she is looking. The snowfield above the pasture is shrinking every day now, going gray at its edges, breaking into islands, and near the top of it where the slope meets the rock there is a long pale shape lying on its side that was not there at the start of spring, catching the morning sun along its whole length like something wet. From here, with the snow going off it, anyone could see it: anyone who comes up with a dog to mend a fence, anyone who goes up over the pasture after a strayed animal. It is the only thing on that mountain bigger than a door, and every day there is less snow around it to hide in. *Oh,* Kyra says. Yes. *We can't hide that.* No. It is the size of a — they cannot cover it, there aren't enough branches on the whole mountain, they cannot move it. *I know.* Kyra stands with her arms around herself looking at the one piece of home on the whole world, lying on the snow with the sun on it where anyone could walk up and put a hand on it, and thinks about the woman at the well, and about the forks. Then she lets go of her own arms: *I'm going up.* And do what? *I don't know. Look at it. I'll think of something when I'm looking at it. I always do.* She goes alone; there is no question of Val coming, the right leg would not take her past the first steep pitch, and neither of them wastes the morning saying so. The climb takes most of two hours through snow gone rotten and slushy under the crust, and she goes through to the knee over and over and swears at it in two languages, one of which is hers and one of which she is making up as she goes. The field is loud the whole way, as it always is up here nearer the sky; north pulls at her like a hand on her sleeve. The ship lies where it stopped: on its side on the snowfield below a band of dark rock, a long smooth curve of grown hull, pale as a shell, scorched in long streaks where the air burned it coming down; and farther off across the gully the patch of black snow she found on the second morning, where something went on coming down in a fine drift for days, gone gray now and ragged but still a smear on the white that anyone would stop to look at. She walks all the way round it without knowing what she is looking for. The port is on the upper side where the section lies tilted, and she climbs to it without thinking, because it is the port, because she stood at it and looked out at a world under a star before any of this — four inches of poor glass that the fall has crazed into a thousand pieces still holding together, so that when she puts her face to it she sees nothing but splinters of sky and her own breath going white. Whatever her eyes are doing, the port is not going to tell her. She gets down and stands in the snow with her hands hanging. Branches, she thinks. Rocks. The black snow scraped over it. None of it: it is the length of a hall and it shines. So she sits down in the snow with her back against it, because she has been walking two hours and is tired all the way through in the new way, the change way, the long bones aching, and because there is nowhere else to sit. The hull is cold through the wool at her back, as it always is up here, and she puts her palm flat on it beside her hip, the way you would put a hand on the flank of an animal you had been riding all day, and closes her eyes. And feels it. Very small, under the field — under the huge wrong hum of this whole world that lives at the back of her skull and never stops — so faint that she understands at once why she never noticed it before: she has never once been still enough, up here, with her hand on it, to hear anything under that roar. It is like hearing, across a crowded yard, somebody speaking her own language. Two words of it. Then gone under the noise, then there again. A field. Not this world's. A small one, the right shape, the shape of home, coming out of the thing under her hand. Rask, she thinks — who came and found her in the instrument bay on her second day with the crew with two cups of something he had made himself that tasted like a burnt bench, put one in her hand and said *you know her yet? The ship? You will,* and looked round the bay the way a man looks round a room he has built. Nine bays, and the ninth had fought him for two years, and she was the best he had ever grown; he had been sixty-one and so pleased with himself that it was hard to be annoyed about the coffee. He had been in the third section. Nobody had answered from the third. She had not known the ship — she had had her bench and her plates and her season's work, and the ship had been the room they happened to be in — and she does not know it now. But it is under her hand, and it is the only thing on this world that speaks a word of her language, and she is more tired than she has ever been in her life. *I don't know you,* she tells it out loud. *He did. I don't.* The small field goes on. So she tells it the rest: they are going to find you, people, men with dogs and forks; they will come up here all summer and see you from anywhere on the pasture and come and put their hands on you, and she does not know what happens after that and does not want to know. She cannot hide it; she has tried to think how and she cannot. So if it knows how — if there is anything in it that knows how — she would be. She does not finish it. She does not have words for the end of it. She sits with her palm flat on the cold hull and her eyes closed and *wants*, with the whole of herself, the way you want something you cannot ask for in words, as if the wanting were the only language that thing had ever been grown to understand. Under her hand, the hull shivers. It is not a movement she could have seen; it goes through the grown stuff of it along the lines where its cells meet, a long low sound she feels more than hears, and she knows that sound — everybody who was aboard in the fold knows it, the sound a grown thing makes along its cell boundaries; she heard it once before, in the dark, with Rask saying one word on an open channel. She scrambles up out of the snow and stands back and watches. The color goes out of it, starting where her palm had been and running outward in every direction, fast, like a stain spreading through cloth: the pale shell-color draining to gray, the gray going darker and mottled, the dark of wet rock, the grayish white of old snow, until the whole long curve of it is the colors of the slope it lies on. The scorch-streaks go with it. The shine goes. Frost comes up on it as she watches, feathering out across the surface from nowhere, and a breath of cold rolls off it that she feels on her face from three paces away, colder than the snowfield, as cold as the rock. And then it is gone. Not gone — she knows exactly where it is — but she stands in the snow and looks at the place where the hull is lying, the length of a hall, and sees snow, and the band of dark rock above it, and patches of old gray ice, and shadow, and the slope going on the way a slope goes on. Anyone coming over the ridge at that moment would have seen a snowfield going to pieces under the spring sun and nothing else at all. Kyra stands with both hands over her mouth. Then, because she is who she is and because a thing nobody has measured is a thing nobody has measured, she takes her hands down and closes her eyes: it is still there, small and faint and speaking her language under the roar, and when she turns her head it is *there* — she could walk to it blindfolded, the way she can walk north. She opens her eyes and it is snow. She walks toward it with her hand out, into what looks like empty air over the snow, until her palm meets the hull, cold as stone. Then a new fear comes, fast: *let me in. Please. Don't — I have to be able to come back. Show me.* She wants it the way she had before, and the shiver goes through it again, and just beside her palm where the hatch is a thin seam of the old pale color comes up through the gray, the outline of the door drawn on the snow-colored hull as if with a finger, and the door eases open along it the width of a hand, and a breath of stale warm air comes out that smells of the second section, of the bench and the old coffee and her own life. Kyra puts her forehead against the cold hull beside the open door and stays there a while. *All right,* she says, when she can. *All right. I know you now.* She comes down in the last of the afternoon, running where she can, and Val is on the bench outside the hut with her leg on a log and a pile of wood beside her that was not there that morning, cut small and ragged with the ship's cutter, which she is not supposed to be able to do on one leg. *You cut wood.* I cut some wood — and Val looks up at her face and whatever she sees there makes her put the cutter down. *Tell me.* Kyra tells it the way she tells everything, out of order and with her hands, circling back, stopping to laugh at the wrong places because otherwise she will not get through it: the black snow, the port, sitting down, Rask and his coffee, the small field under her palm, the shiver and the color going out of it, the frost, standing in front of nothing, the seam of the door. When she comes to the part where she put her forehead on the hull she does not tell that part, and then she does, because there is only the one rule. That is nine, somewhere in the middle of it; she loses track of where. Val listens to all of it without once interrupting, which Val does not do, and when it is finished sits a long time looking up at the ridge where there is nothing to see. *It's a contingency,* she says at last. A what? *A preservation mode. Grown in. For a section that comes down somewhere and has to wait* — it seals, it goes to the color and the temperature of what is around it so it holds its heat and nothing troubles it, weather, animals; it waits for recovery. The yards would have grown it into every hull. Rask would have known it was there. Nobody briefed a crew on it because nobody ever expected a section to come down anywhere it would need to hide from anything. *It wasn't made for this.* No. It was made for waiting for somebody to come. Nobody is coming. It hid for you anyway. Kyra sits down on the bench beside her, suddenly and all at once, because her legs have decided to, and stares at her own open hands: it answered her; she didn't touch anything, didn't find a panel — she sat there and *wanted* it, and it answered. Val is quiet a moment, then says, with great precision, as though reading it off a bench: *then it knows you.* Kyra puts her face in her hands and Val lets her, and after a while Val's hand comes and rests flat between her shoulder blades and stays there and does not pat — the way it had once in a crowded hall on Sethal, a long time ago, inside a hug Val had never quite known how to give. *He said I would. Rask. You know her yet, he said, and I said the ship? and he said* — *you will,* Val finishes. *How did you know he said that?* He said it to everybody; he said it to me on the third day, and I told him I didn't intend to form a relationship with a hull. Kyra laughs; that is ten, and she is sure of that one. They sit in the long gold end of the afternoon looking up at the ridge, where there is snow and rock and shadow and nothing else at all, and Kyra can feel it up there, small and faint under the roar of the world, in the one direction on the whole mountain that sounds like home, and thinks she will be able to feel it for the rest of her life. Val picks up the cutter again and turns it over in her hands. *Now. About the wood.*

#### Summer (Part Two)

**V. Salt** — What they need is salt. Val has known it for a week before she says it, and spent the week making sure, because it is not the kind of thing you walk down a mountain for on a guess. The signs are small and they are all the same sign: the ache in the legs at the end of a day that has nothing to do with the right one, the headaches, the way the charcoal man's hard pale cheese — which is salted — has become the thing both of them eat first and slowest and think about afterward. A body can go a long way without a great many things, and she has the figures for most of them, and salt is not one it can go without for long. She says so on a morning when the pasture has gone green all at once and there are small blue flowers in it that were not there the day before. *Want, or need?* Need. It isn't a figure of speech either. *Nothing's a figure of speech with you.* Very little, Val agrees. *Then we go down* — Kyra does not say *to the village* and does not need to, there is nowhere else — *and we give them what, for it?* Val has thought about that too and does not have a good answer and says so; then she looks at the shelf where the three squares of cloth sit folded beside the cheese molds, washed in the stream until the soot is nearly out of them, waiting to go back full. Keeping her eyes on the shelf: *the plant.* What plant? *The one you bring down from the rock by the ship.* It grows in the cracks of the dark rock above the snowfield where nothing else grows at all: a low fleshy thing with thick blue-green leaves and a crown of small yellow flowers just starting, and a root like a knuckled fist. Kyra first pulled one to see what it was, because she pulls everything to see what it is, and cut the root with the cutter, and the whole second section smelled for an hour of something blooming, sweet and strange; after that she pulled them to look at and brought them down in her skirt and left them on the shelf because she likes the smell. Val had held one in her hand on the second day and had not told Kyra why she kept holding it. She does now, because there is only the one rule: *it runs strong. The root. When I hold it. The way you do. Most of what grows up here runs thin. That doesn't.* Kyra looks at her a long moment. *You can feel plants.* I can feel that one. *Val.* I know. I've written it down. She has: there is a column in the ash by the hearth now, beside Kyra's weather — things that run, and how — and it is getting long. The young man's axe had gone from the fence one morning in the week after he ran, and the rope with it, and the sack; nobody came to the door, there were boot-prints in the dew going up to the fence and straight back down again, and that was all. He came for his tools at first light and took them and went, and whatever he told anybody below, he did not tell them enough to bring them up the mountain. Val thinks about that a good deal on the way down. She goes slowly, with the staff and Kyra's arm, and the leg complains at every step and does not give, because she has spent a week learning exactly what it will bear and is asking it for nothing more; it is downhill, and coming back up will be another matter, and she has the figures for that too and has decided not to share them with Kyra until the afternoon. They stop at the clearing. The charcoal man is there — he is always there; Val has begun to think the hill needs him the way a fire needs somebody sitting by it — and he sees them come out of the trees and straightens and does not lift the hooked pole or put it down. Kyra goes to him first and holds out the three squares of cloth, folded and clean, each tied at the top the way he tied them, and each one full. He looks at the cloths a long time, then takes one and undoes the knot with his black fingers, and the smell comes up out of it into the clearing, sweet over the scorched sweetness of the hill. His face changes; Val could not have said how, it is a face that does not do much, but he looks at the knuckled roots and then up at Kyra and then at Val and says three words, low, the middle one going up. Then he does a thing Val had not expected: he takes one root out of the cloth, only one, and puts it inside his shirt, ties the cloth up again and puts it back into Kyra's hands with the other two and closes her fingers over all three with his black ones — and points with the hook down the slope past the woodpile toward the chimneys, and then, very deliberately, at one chimney in particular, the one above the stone house. *He's telling us they're worth something,* Kyra says, low. He's telling us where, Val says. Kyra puts her hand flat on her chest the way she had in the stranger's yard and says the word she has for it in her own language; the man looks at her hand and does not do it back, but something goes across his face that might have been the start of it. The village is different in green, and different because of the clothes — Val had not known how much until she walks into it. The long dark skirts, the laced bodices, the white cloths over their hair: nobody takes up a fork. People look, and keep looking, and a woman at a doorway says something to another woman and both of them watch Val's staff and Val's leg all the way down the lane. But nobody puts a hand over a child's mouth. They are strangers now, which is a great deal better than being a sickness. Val keeps her face closed and her eyes down and walks, which is not difficult; she has been walking through rooms that way since she was eighteen. There is a cart by the well with a mule asleep on its feet in the shafts and a man beside it in a long coat and leather apron with a table made of a board across two barrels, and on the board are bundles — bark, dried leaves, roots tied with thread, small clay pots stopped with wax — and women are bringing him things and he is weighing them in his hand and giving back a twist of something, a coin, a pinch of something from a sack, and some of the women look pleased and most do not. Kyra looks at Val; Val looks at the roots among the bundles and nods. They wait until the women have gone, then Kyra puts the three cloths on the board and opens them. The man's hands stop. It is very quick and he covers it very well, and Val would not have seen it at all if she had not spent her working life watching faces over benches for the moment they decide not to say something. He picks up one root, turns it over, breaks a piece off the end and smells it, puts it down and makes a face as if it were nothing much. Then he reaches into a sack under the board and takes out a pinch of gray salt, about as much as would cover a thumbnail, twists it up in a scrap of cloth and holds it out — and at the same time puts his other hand flat over both open cloths and begins to draw them toward him. Kyra's hand goes out to take the salt. She does not know; of course she does not know. Val does not know either, not in words, but she has watched the whole of that man's face and knows what the pause in his hands meant. *Kyra. Wait.* Kyra stops with her hand half out. Somebody says something behind them, not loudly; the dealer's head comes up and his hand stops on the cloths, and Val turns and it is him, the man in the dark coat, coming across the open ground from the lane, not hurrying, gray in his beard. He looks at the cloths. He looks at the dealer's hand on them. Then he looks at the two of them and Val watches him know them — place them, the lane, the storehouse, the path by the stream — and then watches his eyes go to Kyra's shoulders, where she is wearing the dark red shawl, and stop there. It is a moment, no longer than a moment; his eyes come away from the shawl and his face does not change at all, and Val files it beside the thumb along the fold and does not know what to make of either. He says something to the dealer; the dealer says a great deal back, with his hands; the man in the coat does not answer, but picks up one of the roots and breaks it and holds the broken end under the dealer's nose and says one word, and waits. The dealer takes his hand off the cloths. The man in the coat ties all three cloths up again himself and puts them back into Kyra's hands, then looks at Val and tips his head toward the stone house and walks away without looking to see if they follow. In the storehouse he does not leave them at the door this time. He puts the three cloths on a barrel head and opens them and looks at the roots a while, turning one over, then goes to a shelf at the back and takes down a thing Val does not at first understand: a gray block the size of two fists together, rough-sided, glittering faintly where the light from the door falls on it. He breaks a corner off with the heel of his hand and holds it out to her. She puts it on her tongue before she has decided to. Salt — gray and hard and not quite clean and the best thing she has ever tasted, and her whole body answers it at once, the way a dry field answers rain. She does not close her eyes. It is a near thing. He puts the whole block down beside the roots, tips the roots out into a basket one cloth at a time, folds the cloths and hands them back to Kyra empty and square the way they came. Then he takes a small leather bag from his coat and counts coins into Val's palm — thin, silvery, stamped with something she cannot make out — one at a time, slowly, where she can see every one. She counts with him. He stops at five and looks at her. Then he looks at the door, the way the dealer went, and makes a small sound through his nose, and counts out four more. Nine coins, and the salt. Val closes her hand on them, and understands exactly what he has done and why he did it slowly and that he meant her to understand it: he cannot tell her what the roots are worth, so he has shown her what the other man tried to take. She does not know how to say so. She does the only thing she can, which is to look at him properly, in the face, for the first time, and let him see her do it. He looks back. Then he says something — a question, it goes up at the end — and waits, and when she does not answer he tries again in something else. The first had been the village's, which she is beginning to know the shape of if not the sense; the second is heavier, with hard edges, like gravel going over in water; when that does nothing he tries a third, which runs up and down and seems to put all its weight at the front of every word; then a fourth, slower, more careful, which he speaks the way you would handle something old you did not want to break. Val listens to all four with her whole attention, the way she would have listened to four instruments reading the same thing. They do not mean anything. But they are not the same, and she can hear exactly how they are not the same, and she finds that she wants, more than she has wanted anything since the snow except food and warmth and Kyra's leg not to be hurt, to know what they mean. The man looks from one of them to the other, then shakes his head at himself as though at a joke nobody else would get, and says, in a fifth language, lighter than any of the others, with a laugh already sitting in it: *Well. I don't suppose either of you speaks the King's English?* Val says it back to him. She does not decide to; it is simply there, the whole shape of it, in her mouth, and she gives it back the way she would read a figure back off a panel to confirm it — every sound in its place, the lift and the drop, the small laugh folded into the middle of it. The man stares at her. Then he laughs, all at once, a great surprised bark of it, and puts a hand on the barrel to steady himself, and beside Val Kyra laughs too — eleven — helplessly, with both hands over her face. Val feels the prickle before she sees anything: warmth under her own wrists, faint in the daylight where nothing could show. And then Kyra takes her hands down, still laughing, and Val sees at the center of each eye the first clear thread of gold beginning to come up. Val does not raise her voice. *Kyra. Your headcloth.* Kyra understands at once, ducks her head as if to fix the white cloth, pulls it forward and keeps her face down while she fusses at a knot that does not need fussing, laughing into her own collar; the man is still laughing, bent over the barrel, looking at Val. He has not seen. Val watches Kyra's shoulders until they stop shaking, and watches her lift her head, and her eyes are gray. Her own heart, she finds, is going as though she had run down the mountain. Then the names. He puts his hand flat on his chest: *Frederick.* Val does it back. He nods, pleased, then points at her and waits. *Vaelith.* He tries it, gets most of it wrong in a friendly way, tries again, gets more of it wrong, shakes his head and says something that sounds like an apology and then, taking care over it, *Valeria* — and then, as if trying it on her to see if it fits, *Vali.* Val considers it: it is nothing like her name, and it is also the kind of name a person here could say without looking at her twice, and that is worth more than her name is. *Vali,* Val agrees. He turns to Kyra, who says her name clearly, and he gets it nearly right and then frowns and says *Klára*, and looks at the door, at the village beyond it, and back at her, as though telling her something about the village and not about her. *He's renamed me,* Kyra says, making a face. He's disguised you, Val corrects; it's different. Frederick sweeps his hand at everything beyond the door — the lane and the well and the roofs and the tower — and says a word: *Dymná.* Then the lesson begins in earnest: he holds up a knuckled root and says a word in the village's language and then, in the light one, *golden root*; he touches the gray block: *salt.* He looks at her a moment as though she were a sum that has come out a different way than he expected, then touches his own chest again, not for his name this time, and names the light language he laughed in: *English.* He holds up one hand with the fingers spread and then two fingers of the other — seven — points at the sun through the door and draws its path across the sky once, and again, and again, then points at them and at the floor of the storehouse. *Seven days. Come back. Here.* Val nods. He takes them out the back way along the stream and at the edge of the trees stops, and does not point up the mountain this time; he only stands there and puts his hand on his chest and waits until they have both done it back. They hear the bells before they are halfway up. At first Val does not know what it is — a sound all over the lower slope at once, small and dull and many, like rain on a hollow roof, coming nearer — and then the trees thin below them and she sees the path they came down that morning, and it is full. Animals, hundreds of them, pale and heavy-coated, pouring up the mountain in a slow river with bells at the throats of some of them and dogs running along the edges and men walking behind with long staffs: the animals whose wool the skirts are made of. The men are singing, or calling; it carries up through the trees, a long falling note over and over. *The owners,* Kyra says. All of them, Val says, having already done the sum: today, and they will be at the hut before dark. They go up faster than the leg likes and Val lets it complain and does not listen. At the hut Kyra goes through it like weather, taking what is theirs and nothing else — the rolled gray clothes, the cutter, the salt, the coins in Val's closed hand, the three folded cloths, the last of the charcoal man's bread — and scuffs the ash by the hearth until the columns of figures in it are gone. Val stands in the door and watches her do it, then looks round the hut once more in order, from the door round to the door: the tub, the hook, the molds on their shelf, the bench and its straw. Everything as it had been. Nothing of theirs. Somewhere below a dog barks, and the bells come on. They go up onto the snow. The ship is where Kyra says it is, and Val cannot see it: she sees snow going to pieces in the evening light, dark rock above it, gray ice, shadow, and she watches Kyra walk into the middle of all that with her hand out until the hand stops against something, flat, in the empty air. Kyra stands a moment with her palm on nothing, and Val sees her lips move though she cannot hear what she says. Then a seam of pale color draws itself up out of the snow where Kyra's hand is, the outline of the hatch in the gray, and the door eases open, and warm stale air comes out that smells of the second section, and Val, who has not been inside it since the morning she came down the mountain on a stick, stands on the snow and cannot for a moment go in. *Val.* I know. She goes in. It is the same: the bench, the lockers strapped shut along the wall, the crazed port black now against the evening, the floor that had been a wall once when the section lay the other way in a sky and is a floor now because it has to be. She gets herself down onto the bench with the leg out straight and sits with her hands on her knees, and Kyra comes in behind her and pulls the door to. It goes dark. For a moment Val feels the prickle under her wrists and thinks *not here, not in front of* — and then remembers who is in front of her, and lets it be. And then, while she is still letting it, a faint light comes up along the curve of the ceiling, pale and even, the way the ship's light came up every morning of the season, only dimmer, much dimmer, as though from a long way off. *I didn't do that,* Kyra says. *I didn't ask it.* No, Val says. I think it did that on its own. She sits under it with her hands open on her knees and looks at her wrists and there is nothing there; the light is enough. The ship has given her light without being asked, and she does not know what to do with that, and she puts it with the other things. Later, when Kyra is asleep on the other bench with the red shawl over her, Val lies awake and says the new words over to herself very quietly, the way she would have gone over a list before a fold — *Frederick. Vali. Klára. Dymná. Golden root. Salt. English* — and then the whole of it, the first thing she has ever said on this world that anybody on it understood, every sound in its place, the lift and the drop, the small laugh in the middle, although she does not understand one word of it herself: *Well. I don't suppose either of you speaks the King's English?*

**VI. The Mending** — The second section had been built to hold two people for a season and had held two people for a season, and now it is a house. Val began thinking of it that way in the first week aboard, was annoyed with herself, and went on thinking it. The floor had been a wall; the bench she sleeps on had been a bench for instruments; the hatch is at the wrong angle for a door and you have to step over the frame of it, which she cannot do without a hand on the edge and a moment's arrangement of the right leg, and which Kyra does without looking. The light comes up in the mornings now — not all of it and not everywhere, a long soft band along what had been the ceiling and is now most of one wall, dim as a window with cloth over it, coming up when the sky outside goes gray and going down when the sky goes dark. Nobody asked it to; Kyra went round the whole section on the second day with her palm flat on the walls, asking, and nothing else answered. *It's doing what it can.* It's doing what's left, Val corrects. *That's what I said.* It isn't, Val says, but I take the point. There are fourteen lockers along the wall that had been a floor: six came open in the fall and are empty or nearly, eight are shut and strapped and do not open for either of them, and Kyra tried the strap on the nearest with her hands and then with the cutter and then with her palm flat on the wall beside it, wanting, which by now is a method. Nothing. Val sat and watched her do it and made no observation at all, which Kyra said was the loudest thing anybody had ever not said. So: a house, with eight cupboards they cannot open. It is, Val thinks, still the safest room on the planet — nobody can see it, nobody can climb to it who does not have business on the snow — and from the port she can watch a hundred pale animals moving across the green pasture all day like a slow tide, and the men with their long staffs, and the dogs, and in the evening the smoke going up from the hut that had been theirs. She watches that smoke a good deal. She had not expected to mind it. The leg gets worse, not better. It has been getting worse since the climb up in the evening with the bells coming behind them, and worse again on the day she walks the length of the section eleven times to see whether she can, then sits down on the bench and puts both hands on the edge of it and waits for the room to stop being interesting. She does not say anything about that, and that is the trouble: she has said it, or most of it, and the saying has not fixed anything. There is nothing to do about a leg that has knit badly; you do not put a thing like that right with rest and a strap. She has known the shape of the rest of her life since about the fourth day on this mountain, and folded it up small, and stopped taking it out to look at. What she has not folded up small is the other part: if she cannot climb she cannot go down, and if she cannot go down then everything that happens to them among people will happen to Kyra alone, and Val will sit in a hull on a snowfield and wait to be told about it. She is thinking about that in the long dim afternoon when Kyra comes in over the hatch frame with her arms full of golden root and stops. *What.* Nothing. *Val.* Val looks at the ceiling that is a wall: it is not going to come right, the leg; it has knit and it has knit wrong and it will be this or worse for as long as she has it. Kyra puts the roots down on the bench very carefully, which is how Val knows. *Say the rest of it.* That's the rest of it. *That's the figure. Say the rest of it.* Val is quiet a moment; then, because there is one rule and she agreed to it out loud, in the cold, with nineteen reduced to two: *I don't want to be the one who waits in the room.* Kyra sits down on the floor with her back against the lockers and looks at her a long time. *Then we mend it.* With what? A strap and a piece of hull? *With the ship.* The ship is a room with a light in it. *The ship,* Kyra says, *went the color of a mountain because I asked it to.* Val does not sleep that night and does not mind. She lies on the bench with the ship's light down and the crazed port black above her and thinks about growth. Nobody on Sethal builds a hull; they grow them, and Ivar Rask spent thirty years of his life doing it and said so at every opportunity, and the thing he said most often, in a tone that made junior people look at their hands, was that a hull is not a machine that happens to be made of living stuff but living stuff that has been persuaded to be a machine. It lays itself down along its own cell boundaries. It repairs itself within limits — she has read the protocols, everyone has read the protocols — sealing small breaches out of its own substance, closing over a cut, *knitting* a seam that has opened in a fold. Knitting. She turns the word over for most of the night, from every side, in order. A hull knits itself: that is not a metaphor and never has been one, it is in the protocols in those words, because the people who wrote the protocols took the word from surgeons in the first place. The lattice knows how to find a break in itself and close it, how to lay down its own material along the line of a fracture and make that line stronger than the rest. It does not know anything about bone. It has never in its life been asked to look at a woman's shin. But it knows what a break is, and it has somewhere in it the thing Val has spent her whole professional life on from the other end: a way of reading what is in front of it and agreeing with it — which is what a continuity panel does, the entire principle of the acquired state, of coupling, of a circuit that needs both ends, because you cannot hold agreement with a thing you cannot read. The hull can read a hull. Can it read a woman? It read Kyra; it went the color of the mountain because Kyra sat in the snow and wanted it to. Val lies in the dark with her hands folded on her chest and feels the light come up under her own wrists, and does not stop it, because there is nobody to see and because she could not have stopped it just then if she had tried. In the morning: *say it again, in the order you thought it.* I have said it twice. *Say it a third time and I'll stop asking.* So Val says it a third time and Kyra sits on the floor with her arms around her knees and does not interrupt once, which is how Val knows she is frightened. *It's a hull. It knits hull.* It knits *breaks* — what it knows is the difference between whole and not whole; the material is the second question. *And if it can't tell the difference between my leg and a wall?* Val notes the pronoun and puts it away for later, where she puts things she has no immediate use for. Then nothing happens, she says, because it will have nothing it recognizes, and that is the likeliest outcome by a long way; she wants that said first, and wants to be held to it — the likeliest outcome is that they sit in a hull for an afternoon and she has wasted Kyra's time. *And the unlikeliest?* It recognizes it and does something she has not anticipated. *To your leg.* To my leg. Kyra puts her forehead down on her knees, then lifts it. *You're going to do it anyway.* Yes. *Because of the waiting in the room.* Partly — and partly because she has been a scientist for fifty-nine years on a world where nobody would have let her do this, and now there is nobody, and there is a question in front of her, and she is going to answer it. Kyra laughs; it is not a happy one, and it is twelve, and Val counts it anyway. *All right. Tell me what I do.* You ask it. *I don't know how I ask it. I've told you. I didn't do anything, I just* — you wanted it, Val says. So want this. Kyra has done a great many things she did not understand in her life and has usually been able to write the method down afterward; not this. She sits on the floor of the second section with her back against the lockers and Val's bad leg across her lap, bare from the knee down, the skirt folded up out of the way, and the ship's light down — Val asked for that, because Val wants to be able to see what her own body does in the dark and will not say so, and Kyra put the light down without making her. *Where.* Below the knee. Four inches. You'll feel it. She will; she has felt it every time since the first night. She puts her right hand under the calf and her left over the shin, flat, finds the place where the line of the bone does the thing it does, and settles her palm on it. Val makes a small sound — not pain; Kyra knows all of Val's small sounds by now and this is not that one. *All right?* Go on. Kyra shuts her eyes and puts her other hand flat on the floor, which is a wall, which is hull. The field of this world comes up at her the way it always does, enormous and wrong, a hum with no bottom to it, and under it faint and close is the other one, small and the right shape, the shape of home, which she has been able to find with her eyes shut since the day it hid for her. She finds it now. *Here,* she thinks, and does not know what else to think, so she thinks it with everything she has: *here, this, under my hand; it's broken and it was set wrong and it's hers, and I did it, I set it in the dark with a strap and I've had it in my mouth every day since, and if you can — if there is anything in you that knows how* — Nothing happens for a long time. Then the floor shivers: that long low sound she feels more than hears, going through the wall against her back and the hull under her palm at once, the sound a grown thing makes along its cell boundaries, and Val's whole body goes rigid under her hands. *Val* — *don't move.* Val's voice has gone flat and fast: don't take your hands off it; there's something going through it, cold, very cold, and then not. Kyra opens her eyes. The floor around them has changed color: in a rough circle three feet across, centered on her left hand, the gray has gone back to the pale shell-color of the hull as it was before it hid, and the color is moving, slow, like something breathing. And out of the surface of it where her hand lies flat a fine pale film has risen and run across the floor and up over Val's ankle and along the shin, and is lying on the skin over the break like frost on a window, so thin that Kyra can see the leg through it. Val is propped on her elbows watching her own leg with an expression Kyra has seen perhaps four times in her life. *Are you hurt?* No. A breath. No. It's reading it. *How do you know?* Because I've done it ten thousand times from the other end, Val says, and it feels exactly the same from inside, which I was not expecting, and which somebody ought to have told me thirty years ago. Kyra laughs; that is thirteen, and she does not care that her eyes are streaming. The film lies on the shin a long moment, then thickens along one line only — a narrow band an inch wide, lying exactly over the place where the bone does the wrong thing — and the pale color in the floor runs up into it and stays. And then it begins to hurt. Kyra knows the instant it starts, because Val's hands close on the edge of the bench above her and her breathing changes and she says nothing at all, which is the worst thing she could have done. *Tell me.* It's fine. ***Tell me.*** It's like the first night, Val says through her teeth; not as bad; it's doing what you did with the strap, only from the inside, and slowly, and it doesn't stop to ask. *I'll take my hand off.* Don't you dare. So Kyra does not. She sits with her palm on the break and her other hand flat on the hull and holds the wanting steady, the way you hold a line in a current, and with the part of her that is not doing that she watches Val's face in the dark. And the light comes up in her; of course it does. It comes up at the wrists first where Val's hands grip the bench, then along the forearms, then at the throat, pale and cool and brighter than Kyra has yet seen it, bright enough to lay a faint edge on the underside of Val's jaw and show the shine of sweat on her forehead and the white of her knuckles. She is lit from the inside in a dark room and she is in too much pain to arrange her face, and so it is all simply there on it, everything, the way it never is. Kyra looks at her. She could not have said afterward that she decided to. She looks at the line of her jaw in her own light and the wet at her temples and her mouth pressed shut, and thinks, with no more warning than weather: *you are the most beautiful thing on this world and it is not even close.* Then she thinks: *she's hurting* — and the other thing goes where such things go, which is nowhere, and stays there for later. It takes a long time. Val puts a figure on it afterward and Kyra does not believe her. Then the band of film thins and goes, drawing back down the shin and over the ankle and into the floor like water going out of sand, and the pale color in the hull fades back to the gray of the mountain, and the room is only a dark room with two women in it, one of them shaking. The leg is not mended. Val establishes that within the hour and says so plainly, because the alternative is letting Kyra hope in the wrong direction for a week. The line of the bone is the line of the bone; it has not straightened and is never going to straighten. Whatever the lattice did, it did along a single narrow band, and what it did was make that band *agree with itself* — the way it would close a seam in its own skin — where before the two halves of the break had been two separate arguments held together by a strap. *It's a splint,* Kyra offers from the floor. It's not a splint; a splint is outside. Val turns her ankle experimentally, stops, does it again: it's laid down along the break. Inside. In the bone. *Can you stand on it?* Not tonight. *Tomorrow?* I don't know — and she meets Kyra's eyes in the dark, where there is still a faint light at her own wrists and both of them can see it. It will have to be more than once: whatever it is, it has laid down a thread of itself along a break the length of her hand, and it did that much and then stopped, and she thinks it stopped because that was all it could do at one time, not because it was finished. *How many times?* I don't know that either. Enough that we should stop counting. *Every day?* Every second or third, Val concedes; it has to have something to work with, and so does she, and she is not going to ask it to hurt her on an empty stomach. And then the other thing: it read her. For the whole of that it was reading a Sethal body in a wrong field, closely, in a way nothing has read either of them since the panels she did on the ninth day — and she has no idea what it made of what it found, because she cannot ask it and it cannot tell her. They are both changing, every day, and that is the instrument she is going to lie down in front of, over and over, for the whole of this summer. *Then I'll be here every time.* You'll have to be. It doesn't listen to me. *That isn't why.* No, Val says. I know. Afterward Kyra goes out onto the snow, because she cannot be in the room. It is full dark and clear with the knife in the air that is always up here after sundown; below her the pasture is black and the hut has one orange eye where the door is, and further down the valley there is nothing at all, and above her there is more sky than any sky has a right to be. She stands in it with her arms wrapped round herself and shakes, now that there is nobody to see, which is a thing she has learned from watching Val do the opposite for fifty-nine years. Then she looks up. The sky over the ridge is nothing she knows; she has spent fifty years of her life on recorded sky and could not name one thing in it. But she has begun, in the weeks since the snow, to notice that the same shapes come back — that there is an arrangement low in the north that swings round the same point all night, and that if you watch that point long enough it does not move at all, and everything else goes round it like water round a stone. She finds the point. She holds it. Somewhere in the great washed band that goes over the whole sky, one of those smudges is hers. She has no instrument, no plate, no catalogue, no bench: two eyes and a number of nights ahead of her and the field of this world lying on the back of her head like a palm, and that is the whole of it. *All right,* she tells the sky. Then she goes back in over the hatch frame, where Val is asleep with her leg out straight and the light still faintly on at her wrists, and puts the shawl over her, and lies down on the other bench, and does not sleep for a long time.

**VII. Lessons** — The seventh day comes round, and then it keeps coming round, which is how Kyra learns that a week is a thing you can live by on this world. It takes them most of the morning to get down and most of the afternoon to get back, and in between there is an hour in a storehouse with a man who points at things; that is the shape of it. They go every seventh day from the middle of the green season onward, and Kyra comes to know the path the way she knew the halls at the institute: the place where the stream has to be crossed on two stones, the place where the trees open and you can see the whole valley at once and have to stop whether you want to or not, the place where the charcoal man's clearing sends its sweet scorched smell up through the forest a hundred paces before you reach it. They go round the clearing now, not through it — Val's idea, which Kyra hated and agreed to, because Val is right: two women who appear at a mound every seventh day are a thing people would notice, and the charcoal man has not wanted noticing since the first morning he let them go by. He leaves food anyway, not every week, when it comes it comes: on the step of the hut before the flocks arrive and afterward on a flat stone at the edge of the pasture, always in a square of cloth with black thumbprints at the knot. Kyra always washes the cloth and leaves it folded on the stone with something in it — salt, after the first week; golden root; once, half a loaf of the black bread Frederick sells them, which she thinks is a joke he will get, and which comes back the following week with three eggs in it. *He answered you,* Val says, turning an egg over. He got the joke. *He got the joke,* Val agrees. Frederick teaches the way he does everything, carefully and with his whole attention and as though he had all year, because he does. He starts with what a hand can reach: bread, salt, water, fire, hand, arm, head, foot. He puts a thing on the barrel head and says it, and they say it, and he says it again, and the next week he puts four things down and points at random and waits. Kyra is quicker at first; she finds that out in the second week and enjoys it more than she is proud of, saying the word back wrong and laughing and trying again and getting it, talking badly, in pieces, with her hands doing most of it, while Val is still deciding whether she has the vowel right. *You're not saying anything,* Kyra says on the path in the third week. I'm listening. *You've been listening for three weeks.* I'll speak when I can do it correctly. *That's how children learn* — wrong, out loud, wrong, forty times. Val considers that for the length of a switchback: then I am not going to learn the way children learn — *and in four months you will still be saying* I go the village. Kyra throws a pine cone at her; Val, who cannot run, catches it. It is fourteen and fifteen in the same minute. Four months later, Kyra thinks afterward, she had still been saying *I go the village.* The hard part is not the words; the hard part is the questions. They come in sideways and they come every week, and Frederick asks them the way a man knocks on a door he does not expect to be opened — holding up a thing and naming it and then, in the same tone, asking where they came from; drawing a house on the boards in chalk and naming the parts of it, and then drawing a little map, the village, the mountain, a road going off the edge of the board, and tapping the road and looking up. They had settled it on the mountain before the first lesson, on the floor of the second section with the light down. *He's going to ask.* He's already asked. Twice, with his hands. *So what do we tell him?* Val had been quiet a while, then: only things that are true. *That's not an answer, that's a* — it's a method, Val said, and held up one finger, the way she does when there is going to be a list. They cannot invent a village to have come from, because there is one, and he has been to it or knows a man who has. They cannot invent a family, because families have names and names have people who knew them. Everything they make up is a thing they will have to remember for as long as they are here, and remember the same way, both of them, under pressure, in a language neither of them speaks. *And the truth?* Not the truth. True sentences: *We came a long way. Everyone who came with us is dead. We cannot go back. There was a great fire and a fall. We have no family living. We do not know this country.* Every one of those is true. Not one of them tells him anything. And when he asks again in six weeks they will say exactly the same words, because they will still be true, and because they will not have to remember which lie they told. *You've thought about this.* I have thought about very little else for nine days. Kyra sat with it: it is clever and it is cold and it will work, and she disliked it in a way she could not name for a long time afterward. Then she found the name, and it was this — a person who has come from nowhere and lost everyone and cannot say one word about either of those things is a person nobody can love, and she had just agreed to be one for as long as they were on this world. *All right. True sentences.* You'll want to decorate it. *I will not.* Kyra. *I will* want *to,* Kyra conceded. *I won't.* She wants to about once a week. It is not lying that tempts her; it is that the true sentences come out of her mouth like stones dropped in a bowl, four of them, and then there is a silence, and a man who has been kind to them is standing in it with his hands open. In the fifth week he asks about the fire — he has the word by then, they did fire in the second week with the hearth — and says it, and makes a shape with his hands going up, and looks at them. *Great fire. Yes. Many dead.* She counts on her fingers, all of them, and then again, and stops at seven, and does not know the word for seventeen and would not have said it anyway. Frederick looks at her hands a long moment. Then he tells them, in pieces, with a great many gestures, a thing it takes Kyra most of the hour to piece together and that she is still piecing together on the path home: that he had been in a great city in a bad year, and there had been a sickness there, and it had taken — he holds up his own hands and then opens them, as if letting something go — more than a man could count; that he had walked out of it in the autumn; that he had come home. *That's why,* Val says on the path when Kyra has finished telling it. *In the lane. He looked at our throats and our wrists and the whites of our eyes, in that order, and then he decided we were not it.* He's seen it. *He's seen a great deal of it, if that is what he was telling you.* Val goes four steps, using the staff on the steep part, not on the flat: and the village has not — that is the whole of the distance between him and them; he knows what the thing they are frightened of actually looks like. Kyra walks a while. *I told him a true sentence. Many dead. And he told me his. And I'm going to have to go on telling him four sentences for a year.* Val does not say anything for most of a switchback. Then: *Yes.* That's it? Yes? *You want me to say it's fair.* I want you to say it's *hard.* It's hard, Val concedes: it is the hardest thing either of them is doing, and it will go on being hard, and it does not have a solution, and she is not going to pretend to Kyra that it does. It is, Kyra thinks, the most comforting thing anyone has said to her on this world. The village gets used to them the way villages do, which is to say not all at once and not entirely and not everybody. By high summer there are four or five people who will say the greeting-word to them in the lane and not wait to see if they say it back; a woman with a bad hip who has begun to nod; and the children, who follow them at a distance the first three weeks and then closer, and then — this is Kyra's doing and she is unrepentant about it — right up, because she has taught two of them to whistle through a folded blade of grass and cannot now walk down the lane without an escort. *You have three,* Val says, stopping to count them. I have four — one of them's behind the fence. *You were not going to be noticed.* I was not going to be *trouble*, Kyra says; nobody's frightened of a woman four children follow. That's not a mistake, that's a method. Val does not answer, but the corner of her mouth moves. There is also the other kind: a man who comes out of a doorway and goes back in when he sees them; a woman who makes a small sign with her hand when they pass — forehead, chest, shoulder, shoulder — and does it looking straight at them so they will know it is for them. And there is the tall wooden building with the tower, which every path in the place leads toward, which fills and empties on the seventh day, and which the two of them are never in. That is the seventh day: the only day Frederick can give them an hour, because it is the day nobody works. Kyra works that out in the fourth week, standing in the empty lane listening to the singing come out of the wooden building, holding a block of salt. *Val.* I know. I worked it out in the second week. *You worked it out in the second week and you didn't* — I was going to tell you on the path, Val says, and then, before Kyra can get it out: I was going to tell you on the path, and that is still telling you, and if you want to have this argument I will have it, but I would rather have it above the treeline. They have it above the treeline; it is short, and Kyra wins it, and Val says *yes, all right* twice, and afterward they sit on a rock and look at the valley and neither of them apologizes, because neither of them needed to. But the building sits in Kyra's mind after that: everybody in that valley goes into it on the seventh day, and whatever they are they are it together, in a room, once a week, out loud — and two women who live up a mountain and cannot say four sentences about themselves are not in the room and are never going to be in the room, and everybody in the valley can count. The sessions go on all summer: every second or third day on the floor of the second section, in the dark, with Kyra's palm on the break and her other hand flat on the hull — the shiver, the pale color running out from under her hand, the film rising and lying along the shin, the narrow band. It hurts Val every time. Every time she says it is fine, and every time Kyra makes her say what it actually is, and every time Val tells her, flatly, with her hands white on the edge of the bench. By the end of the green season Val can stand on it for an hour; by the time the flowers go over she can walk the length of the section without the staff, badly, and then better than badly. She does not use the staff on the flat any more — only on the steep parts of the path, and then only going down. Kyra watches all of it and says nothing about any of it, because Val hates being watched, and instead goes up the slope every few days to the rock above the snowfield to pull golden root and look at the sky, and comes back down with her skirt full. The change goes on too, and gets worse in high summer, and neither of them can say why. The ache in the long bones stops moving around and settles. Kyra wakes every night at the same hour, wide awake, her heart going, with the field lying on the back of her head like a hand pressing down. Val's hands get cold and stay cold. There are three days in the middle of it when Val cannot keep food down and does not tell her until the second day, and Kyra shouts at her, on a mountain, at altitude, and Val stands there and takes it and then says: *you're right. I'm sorry. It was the second day and it should have been the first.* They keep the fire up; they do not have the dark unless they choose it. And Kyra's eyes go gold about twice a week now, and Val tells her every time — after the laugh, after the argument, after the eggs — and Kyra has begun to be able to feel it a half second before it happens, a warmth at the back of the eyes like standing too near a stove. One evening on the snow outside the hull, watching the light go off the far ridges, Kyra says it: *it's not sickness.* No. *You're sure?* I'm not sure of anything, Val says — but a sickness takes, and this is, she stops, which she almost never does, this is a thing being built. Badly. In a hurry. By a body that has no instructions for the place it's in and is doing its best. *Adaptation.* That's the word I keep not using. *Why not?* Because I have nothing to support it, Val says, and because if I'm wrong, the other word is much worse. Kyra puts her hand out; Val looks at it for a second and then takes it, and they sit on the cold hull of a ship nobody can see and watch the valley go dark, and down there, one by one, the small orange eyes come on in the roofs of Dymná. In the last week of the green season Frederick does a new thing. He has them sit, which he has never done — two stools from the house set in the storehouse door where the light is good — and stands in front of them with his hands behind his back like a man about to make a speech, and then says it in English instead, one word at a time: *You. Are not. From any place. I know.* Kyra feels Val go still beside her. *No,* Kyra says. Frederick nods, as though she has confirmed something he worked out a long time ago and has been waiting to be polite about. *You will not tell me.* No, Kyra says again. He looks at them a long moment, then says something they do not have, and sees that they do not have it, and tries again with fewer words: *I do not need. I am old. I had* — a word they do not know, and he stops, and puts his hand flat on his own chest, and then holds it out to one side at the height of a woman's shoulder, and then turns the hand over, empty. He does it once and does not do it again. *I do not need. You are here. That is enough.* Kyra finds that she cannot say anything at all. It is Val who speaks — Val, who has said very little English out loud all summer, every word of it correct and most of it nouns. She stands up off the stool: *Thank you. Frederick.* He blinks. Then he laughs, and turns away to the shelf and makes a great business of finding something on it, and when he turns back his face is in order again. On the path above the treeline: *the hand.* The height of a woman's shoulder, Val says. And then empty. *The shawl.* The shawl, Val agrees. Kyra walks on up with the dark red wool around her own shoulders, where it has been for four months, worn soft at the edges by somebody else long before that: she has been wearing a dead woman's shawl up and down a mountain all summer and being grateful for the warmth. *I'll give it back.* He gave it to you. *He gave it to a sick stranger he thought would die on the mountain in a week. That's not the same as giving it.* It's exactly the same as giving it, Val insists; he has had four months to ask for it and he hasn't; he looked at it in a yard and let it go. And then, stopping on the path: Kyra — he has told us four things about himself all summer, and every one of them cost him something. Don't hand him back the fourth one. So Kyra keeps it, and wears it up the mountain, and thinks about a man standing in a storehouse door turning his hand over, empty, in front of two women who have told him four sentences and will never tell him a fifth.

**VIII. The First Time** — By the end of the green season Kyra could do the session in the dark, which is fortunate, because they do it in the dark every time. It has a shape now: Val against the lockers with her right leg out along the floor and the skirt folded back above the knee, Kyra facing her with that leg across her lap, right hand under the calf and left over the shin, the ship's light down, her other hand flat on the hull, the small field found under the roar of the world, the wanting, and after a while the shiver and the pale color coming up under her palm and running out across the gray. What has changed is everything else about it. The first time Val had been rigid from the moment the film rose; by the fourth or fifth she had stopped bracing before it started; by the tenth she talks through it, flatly, in her panel voice, saying exactly what it is doing and where and how much, because Kyra told her that a woman who says nothing is a woman who is lying and she would rather be lied to out loud. And Kyra has stopped being frightened, which leaves room for other things. She has time now, in the dark, with her hands full of the same eight inches of leg for the better part of an hour, and she has learned that leg the way she learned a bench: without meaning to, and completely. The long flat of the shin. The place four fingers below the knee where the line goes wrong, which she can find with her eyes shut and checks first every time, the way you check a knot. The ankle, narrow, with the tendon standing out along it when Val turns her foot. The calf, which went soft in the first weeks from not being used and is coming back now, a little at a time, under Kyra's palm. It is the last of these that has begun to be a problem. Kyra does not think of it as a problem; she does not think about it in words at all, which is its own kind of answer. It is simply that there has come to be a difference between the hand that is working and the other one — that at some point in the last month her right hand has gone on lying under Val's calf after the film has drawn back into the floor, and the film has been gone a while, and neither of them has said anything about it. That night the session runs long. *Stop. It's finished.* Kyra does not let go of the leg. *It's still pale.* That's the hull. It's finished with me, Val corrects. A breath. Twenty minutes, perhaps. More than last time. Kyra looks down at the leg in her lap, which she can just see in the last of the fading color, and does not let go of it. *You'll walk down and up in a day.* I walked down and up four days ago. *You walked down and up with a stick and then lay on the bench for an hour telling me you were thinking.* I was thinking. *You were lying on a bench.* The two are not exclusive. Kyra laughs, low, in the dark, and it stops, and in the quiet after it she is aware of her own hands, both of them, exactly where they are. She moves the right one. That is all. It goes up the back of the calf, slowly, past the place it has always stopped, and the muscle under it tightens once and lets go, and Val does not say anything at all. Kyra stops there. *Val.* Yes. It is not a question and it is not permission and it is the most direct thing either of them has ever said to the other. And then the light comes up in Val — at the throat first, and along the wrists, and up under the jaw, faint and then not faint — and Kyra sees her face, the whole of it, closed and composed and not composed at all, exactly as it had been on the night of the first mending, except that this time Val is not in any pain whatsoever. *I can see you.* I know. *Do you want the light down?* No, Val says. It is quick; neither of them is expecting it and neither of them is patient, and somewhere in the middle of it Kyra's eyes go, and Val sees it and says so afterward, and Kyra had known anyway from the warmth behind them. And afterward the room is a room again, with two women in it on the floor of a hull, and one of them lit, and neither of them saying a single word. Val lies on her back on the floor that had been a wall and does the only thing she knows how to do, which is to take it apart in order. It does not come apart. That is the first finding, and it is so unlike every other finding of her life that she goes back to the beginning and tries again. She has a category for this — she has had one since she was nineteen, and has used it over fifty-nine years with a small number of men, all of them chosen carefully, none of them a mistake. It is a straightforward category: it has a beginning and an end and it does not travel; she has never once confused it with anything else, and nobody has ever had to ask her twice what she meant by it. This does not go in it. She cannot make it go in it. She turns it over, and turns the category over, and they are not the same shape. She listens to Kyra breathing beside her, the light still on her own wrists, enough to see the ceiling that is a wall by, faintly, and the edge of the bench, and she makes no attempt at all to put it down. *Second finding,* she thinks, with the part of her that is still doing this: *I am not frightened.* That is worth writing down, if there were anything to write on. She had expected to be. She has a good deal of experience of her own machinery, and the machinery's habit in the presence of something this large is to go very still and very correct and start arranging the exits. It has not done that. It has gone quiet instead, the way a room goes quiet when the work in it is finished. *You're doing arithmetic,* Kyra says from somewhere near her shoulder. I am not. *Your breathing goes flat when you count.* Val considers denying it and finds she cannot be bothered: I was trying to file it. *And?* There isn't a drawer. Kyra laughs — the first one after, and it goes through the whole room, and Val feels it happen against her arm. *Val. Was that all right?* And there it is: the question, put plainly, by the only person on the planet who would have asked it out loud, in the dark, four inches away. Val takes her time — not to decide, she decided somewhere around the moment she said *no* about the light, but because Kyra deserves the accurate answer and the accurate answer has to be assembled. *It was new.* That isn't an answer. *It's the beginning of one.* Val turns her head; Kyra's face is there an arm's length away, gray in the light coming off Val's own throat, with the dark hair spread out under it on the floor. She has been alive for fifty-nine years and has never once done anything without knowing beforehand where it was going to be put afterward; she does not know where to put this; she is not upset about it; that is the whole of the finding. Kyra is quiet a moment. *Not bad. New.* Not bad, Val agrees. New. *I'm going to want to say something about it in the morning.* I know you are. *I'm not going to know what to say.* I know that too, Val says. Say it anyway. That's the rule. They do not sleep on the floor, and do not in fact sleep much at all, and around what is probably the middle of the night Kyra gets up and puts the ship's light on — she only has to want it now, which she stopped finding strange about a month ago — and makes them both something hot out of the black bread and the last of the water, because she is ravenous and because doing a thing with her hands is the only way she has ever been able to think. Val sits on the bench and watches her do it. That is new as well, and Kyra feels it the whole time: not a look she can catch, because whenever she turns round Val's eyes are somewhere reasonable, but a weight, steady, across her back and her shoulders and her hands. *You're staring.* I'm observing. *That's what staring is, Val, it's staring with a bench under it.* It is entirely different, Val says, and I have published on it. Kyra puts the cup in her hands and sits down on the floor at her feet with her back against the bench, which is a thing she has done a hundred times on two worlds, and which is different tonight, and which they both let be different without remarking on it. They eat; the light is low and even along the curve of what had been the ceiling. *I'm going to ask you something, and you're going to want to give me the short answer.* Ask. *Do you want it to happen again?* Val does not hesitate at all, which surprises both of them: *yes.* Kyra puts her head back against Val's good knee and shuts her eyes. *All right. Then that's two of us, and there's nobody else on this world to have an opinion about it.* In the morning it rains, which Kyra has known it would since the afternoon before, so they stay in; there is nothing else to do, the path goes to mud and the visibility to nothing, and the whole world shrinks to one curved room and the sound of water finding its way across a hull. Kyra had expected to feel strange — she lay awake half the night waiting to feel strange about it, the way you wait for a bruise to come up — and it does not come. What comes instead, at about the fourth hour of rain, is that she catches herself watching Val's hands sorting the golden root into bundles on the bench, the cool exact fingers, the way she squares the ends of each bundle before she ties it, a thing nobody has ever asked her to do, and thinks without any warning at all: *those hands.* She looks away and then looks back, which is worse. *You've tied that one four times.* It was uneven. *It was tied.* It was uneven, Val repeats, and does not look up, and Kyra watches a faint warmth come up under her wrists in the middle of a gray morning, where it could not possibly show, and understands that it is showing anyway. So she says it, because there is one rule, and because she said she would, and because not saying it has become the larger risk: *it's happening to me too. I want that said.* Val's hands stop. *Say more of it.* I don't have more of it. That's the whole sentence. Kyra pushes her hair back off her face with both hands and leaves them there a moment: she has been on this mountain five months and has been looking at Val the whole time and last night she found out what she has been doing. *Five months,* Val says. Give or take. *I can date mine,* Val admits: the day you carried me, coming up from the village, over your shoulder, with my face against the small of your back — you'd lost the headcloth; I catalogued the whole of the back of your neck in the dark and did not admit to myself for two months that I had done it. Kyra stares at her. *You* catalogued — *in order,* Val says. Hairline, then the fine hairs below it, then the two cords going down into the collar, then the pulse. I could draw it. Kyra puts both hands over her face and laughs until she has to sit down on the floor, and Val sits on the bench above her with a bundle of root in her hands and the smallest possible expression on her face, and outside the rain comes down on the hull of a ship nobody can see. Later, when the rain has thinned and the cloud comes up off the valley in long torn pieces, Val goes out onto the snow without the staff. She takes it slowly: twenty paces, and turn, and twenty back, on uneven ground, in the wet. The right leg complains the whole way and does not give out. She has stopped being able to predict what it will do, which is either the most encouraging development of the summer or a reason to be extremely careful, and she intends to establish which. Kyra comes out and sits on a rock and watches her do it, with the red shawl round her shoulders and her hair loose and wet from the doorway, and says nothing whatsoever, which costs her visible effort. Val turns at the end of the twenty paces and looks back at her. *Say it.* I'm not saying anything. I'm being restful and supportive. *You are being nothing of the kind. You have wanted to say something for four minutes and it is affecting your face.* Kyra grins: *you're limping less on the turns.* I know. *You're going to be able to run.* Val stands in the wet snow with the cloud coming up the valley behind her and the whole of the mountain dripping, and thinks about that — about running, which she has done every week of her life since she was nine and has not done since a hull came apart at nine thousand feet. *Yes,* Val says. *I rather think I am.* And she files the way Kyra looked at her, saying it, and the way that felt, and does not pretend to herself that she is filing it anywhere she can find it again.

**IX. The Tarn** — The tarn lies in a hollow of rock a quarter of an hour above the ship, on the far side of the ridge from anything, and it is the coldest water Val has ever put a hand into. They found it in the second week aboard and have used it since, because it is that or the stream, and the stream runs down to the pasture where a hundred animals and four men are. The hollow holds the sun from the middle of the morning until the middle of the afternoon, and by high summer the snow is off the rock all round it and the water, which comes out of the snow, has gone from unbearable to merely cruel. They go up in the warm part of the day with the soap Frederick sells them, which is gray and smells of ash and fat and works better than anything Val has ever used on Sethal — a fact she reports to Kyra with the flatness of a soil sample, asking whether it is unusual. *Is it unusual to like soap?* To like *this* soap. It's made of what's left over from cooking an animal and it is the best soap I have ever had, and I have used the good soap, Kyra, I had an account at the — *I know you had an account.* — at the place on the fourth terrace. *I know,* Kyra says. *I bought you the lamp oil from four doors down for eleven years.* It is that kind of afternoon. Val goes in first, because she has learned that going in second means standing on the rock arguing with herself while somebody watches. It takes the breath straight out of her; she stands waist-deep with her hands up out of the water and makes a sound she would not have made in front of any other living person, and behind her Kyra laughs and comes in after her in one motion, the way Kyra does everything, and comes up swearing in two languages. *You're getting slower at that,* Val observes, when she can talk. I'm getting *older.* *You're not.* That stops both of them for a moment, because it is true and neither of them has said it out loud before: five months of this and neither of them has so much as a gray hair, and the change has done a great many things to them and has not done that. *No,* Kyra agrees. *I'm not.* She says it lightly and it does not land lightly, and Val lets it go past, because there is nothing at the end of that road today. They wash. Val is efficient about it, as she is about most things involving her own body; she has been washing in cold water in a hurry since she was eighteen and has never once thought about it. She thinks about it that afternoon. Kyra is standing in the shallow end with her back to the sun, working the soap through her hair with both hands, which is a long business — the hair is down past the middle of her back when it is wet and takes her the better part of a quarter of an hour, and it goes dark as wet slate under water, and where the sun comes into it at the edges it goes the color of new copper. Val watches her do it, and does it the way she does everything, in order, without hurrying, with the whole of her attention: the shoulders first, because they are what is in front of her, the flat planes of them and the way the muscle stands up along the top of each one when Kyra lifts her arms and the two hollows at the base of her neck where the collarbone ends; the spine going down; the narrow place at the waist that has gone narrower over the summer, which Val does not like and files under the change and not under this; the line of her hips, and the long muscle down the outside of each thigh that comes from fifty-nine years of running up things. And the mark. It is there where it has always been, low on the back, on the left, above the hip, about the size of a palm: a soft bloom with a paler center and no edge you could put a finger on. They have changed in front of each other four hundred times since they were eighteen — boot rooms, wash rooms, a stone building at Ellory with no door on it — and Val has seen it a great many times and has never once looked at it. She does not look away. She has her own, in the same place, and the two of them are the same shape and not quite the same color, which is a thing nobody on Sethal has ever been in a position to say out loud because nobody on Sethal has ever seen both. Val has seen both. Kyra has seen both. There are two people in the universe who have, and they are standing eleven feet apart in a mountain tarn with the sun on the rock. *Hers isn't the quiet,* Val thinks, which she has known since the last year at the Vayr, since a door and Kyra's hand on it and one sentence said on the way out. *Mine is.* And the rest of it comes up behind that, in order, the way it always does when she lets it start: the room, and the chairs, and the woman with the pen who had asked twice whether anybody was coming. Val puts it back. It goes, the way it always goes, because she has had fifty-nine years of practice and is better at it than anybody alive. When she looks up Kyra has turned round and is looking at her. *Your mouth went flat.* It's cold. *Your mouth goes flat when it's cold. It also goes flat when* — Kyra stops. She wrings the water out of her hair with both hands over one shoulder and does not finish the sentence, and Val understands that she has just been given something: that Kyra saw where Val had been and decided, standing in cold water, not to follow her there. It is the nearest either of them has come to it in the whole of their lives. *Thank you,* Val says. I didn't do anything. *I know exactly what you did.* Afterward they sit on the warm rock with the shawls round them and their clothes drying on the stones, and Kyra combs her hair out with the wooden comb Frederick sold them, which takes another quarter of an hour, and Val lies on her back with her eyes shut and lets the sun have her face. *It's going to want cutting,* Kyra says, holding up what is in the comb. It's nowhere near. *It's in the soup, Val.* That is a matter for the person holding it out of the soup. *You have a knife.* I have a cutter made to divide cable, Val says without opening her eyes, and you have hair down to the middle of your back, and I am not going to be the woman who ruins it on a mountain with a tool for cable. *You could take an inch off the ends.* I could take an inch off the ends. Not today. *When?* When it's actually in the soup and not merely near the soup. Kyra throws the comb at her; Val, with her eyes shut, does not catch it. The sun goes off the hollow at about the fourth hour, and Val sits up to pull her shift on and stops halfway, because Kyra has gone still beside her, which Kyra does not do. *What.* Nothing. Don't turn round. Val turns round. Kyra is sitting with her knees up and her arms round them, looking at Val's back, and she does not look away when she is caught, which is the difference between the two of them in one gesture. *It's changed.* Val goes cold all through in a way the water had not managed. *Changed how.* The color. It's gone — Kyra stops, and starts again, in the voice she uses for readings, which she learned from Val over fifty-nine years and has never once used on Val until this summer — paler. Not the shape; the shape's the same. The center's about the same and the outside has gone paler, and there's less difference between the two than there was. *When?* I don't know. I've seen it every few days since the middle of the green season and I've been looking at it every time and telling myself I was imagining it. *For how long?* Six weeks. Perhaps seven. Val sits on a rock above a tarn in the shadow of the ridge and works very hard, for about four seconds, at not saying the first thing that comes to her. She says it anyway. That is the rule. *You should have told me in the first week.* I know. *Six weeks, Kyra.* I *know* — Kyra has her hands in her hair, both of them — I know what I agreed to; I stood in the snow and said it and I meant it. And then I found a thing I had no business looking at, on your body, that you can't see, and every time I nearly said it I thought — she stops. *Say it.* I thought: if I tell her the mark is changing, then we are talking about the mark. And in fifty-nine years we have never once talked about the mark. Val looks at the water. It is, she thinks, entirely fair. It is also the single largest thing either of them has said to the other on this world, and Kyra has said it sitting on a rock with wet hair, the way she says everything. *All right,* Val says. That's it? *No.* Val turns so that Kyra can see her face, which takes a certain amount of doing: look at it again, properly; tell me what it is now and I will tell you what it was, because I have it, I have the whole of it, and I know precisely what that mark looked like on the day I got it. Kyra looks at her a moment, then moves along the rock, and looks, and tells her: color, edge, center, size against her own palm. Val listens and does the arithmetic and puts the result down where she can find it. *It's fading. Slowly. It has been for about two months, which puts the start of it somewhere around when the change began to be worst.* And mine? *Turn round.* Kyra turns round, and Val looks at it for the first time in her life on purpose, in full daylight, with the light off the water moving on the rock behind them: low on the back, on the left, above the hip, the same shape, not the same color and never had been — there is more of the gray in Kyra's and always has been, in a way Val noticed at eighteen in a boot room and has never had any way of describing, because nobody in the history of two worlds has ever had both to compare. *Yours is fading too. Less. Perhaps half as much.* Kyra puts her head down on her knees. *They're going to go.* I don't know that. *Val.* I *don't know it.* I have two observations six weeks apart, one of them from a woman who wasn't taking notes — Val hears how that lands and does not take it back, because it is accurate and because Kyra would have despised her for taking it back. But yes: if it goes on at this rate, they will go. Neither of them says anything for a while; below them the valley is in shadow and the far ridges are still gold. *Everyone we know is dead,* Kyra says at last, *and this planet is taking the marks off us, and there won't be anything on either of us that says what we are.* No. *That's supposed to be good.* It is good, Val says: they walk down that mountain in the spring with nothing on them that anybody can read, and that is the single most useful thing that has happened to them since the snow, and she is going to say so plainly because it is true. And then she stops: *and I have carried mine since I was eighteen and I find I do not want it taken off me by a planet.* Kyra lifts her head. It is the nearest either of them has ever come to it; Val hears herself do it and does not move, and for a moment the whole thing stands open between them on a rock in the shadow, and Kyra looks at her, and does not ask. What she says is: *then I'll remember it.* What? *Yours. The way it was.* Kyra shrugs one shoulder, which is what she does instead of explaining: you can tell me what it looked like on the day you got it, and I'll have seen it, and between the two of us it'll be somewhere. Not on you. Somewhere. Val sits with that. *That is not a small offer.* It's not a small thing. They go down in the dusk with their hair wet and the shawls round them, and Kyra goes first on the steep part out of an old habit neither of them has discussed, and at the bottom Val puts her hand flat on Kyra's back, between the shoulder blades, for no reason she could have defended if anyone had asked. Nobody asks. There is nobody on that mountain to ask, and will not be, for the rest of their lives. Later, on the floor of the second section with the light down, Kyra puts her mouth against the place on Val's back where the mark is, once, without saying anything about it, and Val lies still and lets her, and the light comes up under Val's skin and lights the two of them and the curve of the wall and nothing else at all.

**X. The Fragment** — Kyra sees it first from the ridge, and what she sees is a boy running the wrong way. She had gone up for root in the early afternoon and stopped at the top out of habit, because you can see the whole pasture from there — the animals spread across it like spilled meal, the dogs working the edges, the men at the low end where the water is — and she has been watching that for two months and can read it now the way she reads a bench. When the animals move there is a reason; when a dog runs there is a reason; and when a boy runs uphill in the middle of the afternoon with nothing in his hands, away from the animals, with his head down — he is going toward the black snow. *Val,* Kyra says, to the empty ridge, and starts down. She knows him by then, and that is the worst of it: he is the one who came up early in the spring with a dog and a bundle of withies and ran away down the mountain in the dark and came back at first light for his axe and did not stay. She has watched him all summer from above — the youngest of the four men, the one who gets the far side of everything, the one who eats last — and he has a way of standing at the edge of the pasture in the evening looking up at the snow that she noticed in the second week and did not like at all. He has been up there before, then; perhaps four or five times. She never caught him at it, and she let herself believe he was looking at weather. The black snow lies across the gully from the ship, a long smear of gray gone ragged at its edges, and it is the only thing on that mountain that does not look like the mountain. Anybody would stop for it; she stopped for it herself on the second morning, when it was fresh and black as a burned field and still coming down in a fine drift three days after there was anything left to fall. By the time she gets there he is already crouched in it and already has something in his hand. She stops forty feet off behind a shoulder of rock and makes herself stand still. It is about the size of his palm: curved, thin at one edge and thicker at the other, dull on the outside where the atmosphere burned it and, where he has rubbed it with his thumb, the pale shell-color underneath. He turns it over. He holds it up against the light. He puts his thumbnail into the broken edge and worries at it, then scrapes it along the rock and looks at the mark it makes on the rock and not the other way round — and Kyra watches a boy who has never in his life seen a material that does not scratch discover that this one does not scratch. He looks up the slope, at the snowfield, at the place where there is nothing at all. Then he puts it inside his shirt and goes down. Kyra comes in over the hatch frame: *he has a piece of the hull.* Val puts down what she is holding and does not ask any of the four questions Kyra expected. *How big?* The size of his hand. Off the drift. It's scorched on one side and clean on the other, and he's been at it with his thumb, so he knows the clean side's a color and not a stain. *Did he see you?* No. *Are you certain, or are you telling me what you want to be true?* I'm certain. I was forty feet behind a rock and downwind of the dog. Val sits down on the bench and puts her hands flat on her knees, which is what she does instead of pacing, and looks at the floor for the length of time it takes Kyra to cross the section twice. *All right. Say what it is.* It's a piece of a ship. *To him.* Kyra stops. To him it's a curiosity. *It's a curiosity that came off a mountain where two women live who came from nowhere and have no family and won't say where they're from,* Val insists; it's a curiosity he found a hundred paces from a place he has been looking at all summer. He is going to carry it down that mountain in his shirt and show it to somebody, and the somebody is going to ask him where he got it. *He might not.* He might not, Val agrees — and if he does, he will be a boy with a strange thing in his hand and a story about a light in a hut, and the two halves of that will find each other, and they will not find each other in front of us, and we will not know it has happened. Kyra sits down on the floor with her back against the lockers. *So we take it back.* Yes. *You said that very fast.* I have been expecting this since the second morning, Val says: something was always going to come off that drift; she has had four months to decide what she thinks, and what she thinks is that a thing of theirs cannot be down there. *He's a boy, Val. He found a shiny thing in the snow and he's carrying it about in his shirt because it's the first interesting thing that's ever happened to him.* Val picks up what she had put down. *Yes. And I am going to take it off him anyway.* They argue about it for most of the evening, and the argument is not about whether. *You can't go near the hut.* I can walk. I walked to the tarn and back twice this week. *In daylight, on a path you know, with me four feet behind you. This is across a pasture in the dark with four men and three dogs on it.* I am aware of the dogs. *You are aware of them as a fact. I'm aware of them as three animals that have been telling each other where I am every time I come down that slope for two months.* Kyra has her hands in her hair: Val, I can do this — I know the ground, I know when they sleep, I know which of them wakes when the wind turns, and if a dog does start I can be up the slope faster than anyone on this mountain and you can't. That isn't an insult. It's the arithmetic. You taught me to do arithmetic. Val is quiet. *I taught you to do arithmetic,* she says at last, *and now I am going to sit in a hull and wait in a room while you do it, which is the precise thing I said I was not going to do.* I know. *I want that said out loud. I am not pretending to be all right about it.* I know, Kyra says. Say the rest of it. *That's the rest of it.* Val looks at her hands, and then gives her the instructions: go before the moon; come back before it's light; if a dog starts, don't run at first — walk, and be an animal, and then run; if he wakes, do not let him see your face, and do not let him see your eyes, and if you have to choose, choose the eyes. *Val* — *and if it goes wrong, come back without it. I would rather have the piece down there than have you down there.* Kyra crosses the section and crouches in front of the bench and puts her hands on Val's knees, and Val looks at her, and neither of them says anything for a while. *Before the moon. Back before it's light.* She goes down at what she judges to be the middle of the night, in the dark, in the gray ship clothes, which she has not worn since spring and which make no sound at all against anything. The field is loud, as it has been all summer, and she has learned that if she stops fighting it, it does things for her: north, and the weather, and — this is newer, and she told Val about it three weeks ago — the shape of ground in the dark. Not sight; something more like knowing where the walls are in a room you grew up in. She comes down the slope in pitch black at a walk without putting a foot wrong, and would have called that impossible in the spring, and does not stop to enjoy it. The hut has a low fire, a line of it visible under the door; the men sleep in and around it, three inside and one in the fold of the hillside with the animals, and the dogs sleep with the animals, and the wind is coming down off the snow, which means it is in her face, which means it is carrying nothing of her to any of them. She has watched them for two months from a ridge and knows where the young one sleeps. He sleeps apart — that was the first thing she noticed about him and it is the thing that makes this possible. He is on the near side of the fence, rolled in a blanket in the lee of the woodpile, his boots beside him and his coat rolled under his head. Kyra crouches a few feet away and breathes and waits for her heart to stop being ridiculous. The coat: she knows it is in the coat because she watched him put it inside his shirt, and because a boy who wants a thing to be his own does not leave it where four other men can find it. She goes the last of it the way she went up wet cliff paths at eighteen, on her toes, with her weight where she can take it back, and kneels by his head. He is asleep with his mouth open. He is young — sixteen, perhaps, or a little more. His hands are black at the knuckles from something and there is a sore at the corner of his mouth. The coat is folded under his cheek, and she gets two fingers into the fold of it along the seam where a pocket would be, and there is nothing there, and she goes cold all over, and then her fingers find the other pocket, and there it is: hard, curved, the size of a palm, the weight of nothing at all. She takes it out a quarter of an inch at a time. Halfway, he moves. Kyra stops with her hand in his coat and her face a foot from his face and does not breathe, and he turns his head and makes a small sound and settles again, and she waits for a count she loses track of, and then goes on. When it comes free she puts her other hand flat on the ground to steady herself and finds she is shaking, which she cannot afford, so she waits for that to pass too. Then she does the thing she has not told Val about, because she decided it on the slope on the way down and knew exactly what Val would say: she puts something in the pocket. It is the small knife Frederick sold them in the fourth week, with a blade the length of her thumb and a handle of pale horn, and it is worth more than anything that boy owns, and she has carried it down the mountain in her hand the whole way with the flat of it against her palm. She gets it into the pocket, gets her hand out, backs away on her heels, stands up, and goes up the mountain in the dark with a piece of a starship inside her shirt. The light comes up gray over the ridge as she comes in, and Val is sitting on the bench exactly where she was left, which means she has not slept, which Kyra knew she would not. Kyra puts the fragment on the bench. Val looks at it, then looks up, and whatever her face does is over before Kyra can name it, and she says: *you're shaking.* It's cold. *It is not cold,* Val corrects, and gets up, and puts both arms round her. They stand there in the dim room with the ship's light coming up slowly along the curve of the wall, and Kyra puts her face down into the side of Val's neck and lets herself shake, which takes a while, and Val's palm comes flat between her shoulder blades and stays there and does not pat. *Tell me all of it,* Val says into her hair. So Kyra tells her all of it, standing up, still held: the fire under the door, the wind off the snow, the boy asleep with his mouth open and the sore at the corner of it, the coat, the wrong pocket, the moving, the quarter of an inch. And then the knife. Val goes very still. *You left him a knife.* Yes. *Kyra.* I know. *A horn-handled knife from a merchant's house, in the pocket of a boy who owns nothing, on the same night the only interesting thing he has ever found goes missing out of the same pocket.* I know what I did. *Tell me why.* Kyra steps back so she can see her face: because I took something off him. He found it. It was his. He carried it down a mountain in his shirt and he was going to show somebody and be, for one day in his life, the person who found a thing. And I went into his coat while he slept and took it, and I'd do it again tonight, and there is no world in which that isn't stealing. So he's short a curiosity and up a knife; he'll never work out which is which; and she will be able to look at him across the pasture. Val does not say anything for a long moment. *That was a risk,* she says, *and it was not the arithmetic, and it is also the reason I am not going to argue with you about it.* You're not? *I have been sitting on this bench for nine hours doing sums about a boy with a sore on his mouth, and the one I could not make come out was how a person is supposed to take a thing off a child and go on being a person. You solved it with a knife. I would not have thought of it and I would not have done it and I am glad you did.* Kyra sits down on the floor, suddenly, because her legs have finished. *He's going to know. Not what. But he's going to know something came into his coat in the night.* Yes. *And he's already got a light in a hut.* He has, Val says — and now he has one more thing he cannot explain and a knife he cannot explain either, and no way on this world to say any of it out loud without sounding like a boy who tells stories. She picks the fragment up and turns it over: it will sit in him, all winter probably, and one day somebody will ask him a question in the right order and it will come out. *That's not comforting.* I am not a comforting person, Val concedes. But it will not come out this month, and this month is what I wanted. They take the fragment up the slope in the afternoon, and Kyra puts it against the hull, in the empty air where the hull is, not knowing what she expects — that it will be absorbed, perhaps, or that the ship will take it back the way a body takes back a graft. Nothing happens. It is a broken piece of a thing and it stays broken. In the end Val finds a crack in the rock band above the snowfield, deep and narrow, and they drop it in, and Kyra hears it go down a long way and stop. *There'll be more,* Kyra says, looking across the gully at the gray smear on the white. *There will be a great deal more.* That drift is four hundred yards across and has been coming down on that snow since the spring, and when the snow goes there will be pieces of their ship lying on open rock from here to the treeline — Val standing beside her, leaning on nothing, which Kyra notices and says nothing about. They cannot gather four hundred yards of mountain. *So what do we do?* We do what we did last night, Val says, for as long as we are here. And when we leave, we leave knowing that somewhere on this mountain there are pieces of it lying in the grass, and that in a hundred years or four hundred somebody will pick one up and not know what it is. Kyra thinks about that all the way down: about a shepherd four hundred years from now, in a country with a different name, turning a piece of pale material over in his hand and putting his thumbnail into the broken edge. *I don't like it,* Kyra says at the door. Neither do I, Val says. Come inside. You've been awake for a day and a half and I have something you're going to like even less. *What?* It's the seventh day tomorrow, Val says, and you are going to walk across that pasture in daylight, past four men and three dogs, and say the greeting-word to all of them.

#### Autumn (Part Three)

**XI. The Ridge** — The mending stops working before it stops hurting, which is how Val knows it is finished. She has been watching for it all through the last of the warm weather: each session shorter than the one before, the film rising and lying along the shin and thickening in the narrow band and drawing back into the floor — and doing less, and doing less, until there comes an evening at the end of the green season when the pale color comes up under Kyra's palm and runs out across the gray and the film goes over the ankle and along the shin and simply lies there, and nothing else happens at all. Kyra keeps her palm where it is. *It's reading. It's not doing anything.* No. *Do you want me to ask again?* Ask again. Kyra asks again; the floor shivers, and the film thins and draws back into the hull, and the gray comes up across it like water closing. Val lies on the floor that had been a wall and looks at the ceiling. *That's it.* That's it for tonight. *That's it. It has done what it can do.* Whatever it was able to lay down it has laid down, and it has been able to lay down less every time for a fortnight, and tonight it has looked at the leg and decided there is nothing left in it that it recognizes as broken. *You don't know that.* I know the curve, Val says, and I have been the instrument in this experiment, which is not a thing I would recommend, and yes, I know it. *Then get up.* Val gets up. She does it the way she does everything, in order: over onto her side, hand on the bench, good leg under her, and then — with a pause neither of them remarks on — weight onto the right. It holds. It has held for a month; that is not new. What is new is what it does not do: it does not send anything up into the hip, it does not go soft under her after the first few seconds, and when she takes four steps across the section and turns on it, it does not object to the turn. She stands in the middle of the floor and does it again, and then a third time, faster. *Val.* I'm establishing whether — *I know what you're establishing. Your face has gone.* Val puts a hand up to her own face, which is a ridiculous thing to do, and finds nothing there, because there is never anything there — but the room is dim and the light has come up along her wrists, bright enough to make a shadow of her own fingers on her own cheek, and she stands in the middle of a hull with her hand on her face and lets Kyra see the whole of it. Afterward, on the bench, Kyra finds the ridge. She is doing what she has done after every session for four months, hand under the calf and hand over the shin, checking the line the way you check a knot, and her thumb goes along the front of the bone and stops. *That's new.* What is? *Here.* Kyra puts Val's own fingers on it: under the skin, along the break. It is a ridge, running along the front of the shin for the length of a hand, a little proud of the bone on either side of it, no wider than a cord — and under Val's fingertips it is perfectly smooth and perfectly even, which nothing a body grows on its own has ever been. *That's what it laid down.* It's still there. *It will always be there,* Val concedes, going along it again with two fingers, from the top to the bottom, precisely: it isn't in the way, it isn't sore; it is a seam, and it is going to be on her for the rest of her life, and it is the only thing she will ever have that the ship made. Kyra puts her palm over it. *Nobody can see that.* No. *You can't see it. I looked at it in the light this morning and there's nothing to look at.* No, Val says. You can only find it with your hands. Kyra does not say anything to that. She leaves her palm where it is for a while, and Val lets her, and neither of them says anything about that either. Kyra makes her wait nine days before she will agree to the ridge — the long shoulder above the tarn, the flattest ground in reach, half a mile of turf and shale that runs level for a while before it goes up, with nothing on it to trip over and nothing below it to fall off. Val had asked for the pasture and been told no; Val had asked for the slope down to the treeline and been told no with considerably more feeling. *You'll go over.* I may go over. *You'll go over, and you'll go over on the right, because that's the one that's had four months of not being used, and I'll carry you back down a mountain again in the dark, and I'd rather not do it twice in one year.* Then you'll be there, Val says. So Kyra is there. It is the first morning of the cold, the first one where the breath shows. The animals went down off the pasture a fortnight since, in a long river of bells in the other direction, and the hut stands empty again with its door pegged shut, and the mountain has gone very quiet in a way neither of them expected to notice. Val takes her boots off — not sentiment; the ship boots were made for a deck and are the wrong shape for turf, and she wants to feel the ground. *Cold,* Val observes. It's the last day of the year you'll get away with it. Val stands on the turf in her bare feet with the skirt kilted up through her belt and thinks about the fact that she has not done this in five months. She has run since she was nine — not the way Kyra runs, Kyra having always been the fastest thing in any group she was ever put in, and having run the last mile of every distance of her life as though the distance had insulted her, but Val has run every week of her life, alone, early, in the same loop, and has never once thought of it as anything but what she does with a morning. Then a hull came apart at nine thousand feet. *Start,* Kyra says, *by not doing anything interesting.* Val walks. Then she walks faster. Then, with no warning to herself at all, because deciding to do it is going to be worse than doing it, she runs. The first four steps are awful: everything in the right leg is wrong, the timing, the reach, the way her foot comes down flat instead of where it should. The fifth step is less wrong. By the eighth the leg has remembered something and by the twentieth it has remembered most of it, and somewhere after that her body stops consulting her about any of it and simply goes. Her hair comes out of the cloth. Her breath goes into her properly for the first time since spring, all the way down. There is cold turf under her feet and cold air going into her and the whole enormous morning tips over and comes at her, and she goes up the shoulder with her arms loose and her head up and the gray light coming over the ridge, and she is, for perhaps four hundred yards, no longer a woman who came down out of the snow on a stick. She does not stop at the end of the flat; she turns on the right leg, hard, on purpose, to see, and it holds, and she runs back. Kyra is standing where she left her with both hands over her mouth. Kyra had thought she was prepared for it. She had watched Val walk twenty paces in the wet in high summer and felt something go through her then; she has done the arithmetic since — the sessions, the curve, the leg holding for a month — and has known this was coming the way she knows weather. She had not known what it would look like. What it looks like is this: a woman going away from her up a shoulder of turf in the first cold morning of the autumn, barefoot, with her skirt kilted through her belt and her hair coming down out of the cloth and going back in the wind, running badly for four steps and then not badly, and then — Kyra sees the exact stride it happens on — not thinking about it at all. The long legs. The straight back. The hands loose and low, which is Val's, which has always been Val's, which Kyra watched from behind at Corran Vayr when they were eighteen years old and she had been put on the seven and had spent her first month deciding whether she was going to like the pale one who never spoke in the boot room. She stands on the shoulder above the tarn with both hands over her mouth and thinks: *there she is.* And then, immediately after, with no warning and no defense and nothing whatever to do about it: *I have been looking at that for fifty-nine years.* The thought arrives entire. It does not arrive as a discovery — that is the worst of it, or the best; there is nothing in it that is news. It is more that a door she has walked past every day of her life has turned out to have a room behind it, and the room is full of things she recognizes: the boot room at eighteen; the back of a van at Coldwater; a bench four feet away for a whole season; twenty years of a house with a spare bed in it that was always made up. *Her hands. Her mouth going flat. The way she says a true thing at the worst possible moment and then stands there while it lands.* Val turns at the end of the flat and comes back down the shoulder toward her at a run, and her face — Val's actual face, the sealed one, the one that has frightened juniors for thirty years — is wide open, and there is nobody on the mountain to see it but Kyra. Kyra takes her hands away from her mouth and does not say any of it. Not because she cannot; she could have, she has said a great many true things out loud on this mountain since the spring and every one of them cost less than she expected. It is simpler than that: there is no word for it. She goes through every language she has, which is one, and there is nothing in it that fits, and what she finds instead is that she does not want a word for it, because a word would have made it a thing you could put down. So what she says, when Val pulls up in front of her with her chest going and the cold coming off her, is: *you're still slow on the turns.* Val laughs — a real one, out loud, with her head back — and Kyra, who has counted every single one since the sixth day on this mountain, loses count, permanently, in that moment, and never picks it up again. They sit on the shale at the top of the shoulder afterward with the whole valley under them going from gray to color as the sun comes over. Val's feet are filthy and freezing and she does not care; Kyra has her arms round her knees. *I want to say something, and I would like you not to look at me while I say it.* Kyra looks out at the valley. *Go on.* Val had decided, in the first week, sitting in that hull with her leg out in front of her, that this was the rest of it — that she would be the one who stayed; that Kyra would go down and come back and tell her what had happened, and she would be extremely useful about it, and that would be the arrangement for however long they have, which may be a very long time. She had it entirely worked out. She had stopped arguing with it. *You never said.* No. *Val* — *it wasn't kept,* Val says; that is what she wants to be accurate about. She would have told her if she had asked. Kyra did not ask, because she did not know there was anything to ask, and Val did not offer it, and Val has been turning that over since the tarn and thinks that is the same thing as keeping it. So she is offering it now. Late. Kyra is quiet a moment. *Thank you.* That isn't the part I wanted to say. *I know. Say the rest.* Val looks at the valley: *you did not accept it.* That's the part. Kyra never once said *this is how it is now*; she asked a ship to mend her; she knelt on a floor in the dark three times a week for four months with her hands on a leg that was not getting better, for a long time, while Val said it was fine and she knew perfectly well it was not. *I would not have done that for me. I want that on the record. Given the same figures I would have accepted the arrangement, and been reasonable about it, and been wrong.* Kyra puts her chin on her knees. *You'd have done it for me.* That is a different question. *It isn't, though.* No, Val admits. It isn't. The sun comes over the ridge behind them and goes down the far side of the valley in a long line, and they watch it take the roofs of Dymná one at a time, a quarter of an hour of a morning in the last week of the green. *We should go down. It's the seventh day.* It is. *You'll want your boots.* I'll want my boots, Val agrees, and does not move for a while, and neither does Kyra. They go down in the middle of the morning, and the path is different because Val is different on it: quicker, out in front for the first stretch, and stopping halfway to wait with an expression Kyra finds genuinely unbearable. *Don't.* I haven't said anything. *You're waiting for me.* I am resting, Val says, and you happen to be behind me. The hut stands empty as they come past the top of the pasture, shut up for the winter, with the fence mended where the young man came to mend it in the spring and the grass already coming back over the place where a hundred animals had been. Kyra looks at it and thinks: *ours again, in a month.* And then, because the thought comes with something else attached, she looks away down the valley at the thread of smoke going up out of the trees where the charcoal man's hill is, and does not look at Val, and does not say the other part. The other part is that the year is turning, and that the two of them have four months of dark coming, in a hut with one fire, and that some entirely unfamiliar part of her is looking forward to it.

**XII. Andromeda** — Kyra has been working on the sky since the first clear night in the spring, and she has four things. She has the fixed point in the north, which nothing goes past and everything goes round. She has the band — the great washed band of light that comes over the whole sky from one horizon to the other, thickest in one direction, thin and ragged in the other — which she understood in the second week for what it was and did not bother to be pleased about, because every world with a sky has one and it tells you nothing about which world you are on. She has the two smudges. And she has the fourth thing, which she has had since the ninth night on this mountain and has never said out loud to anybody except once, badly, to Val, with nothing to say it with. The two smudges were low in the east after dark in the spring and have come up higher and earlier all through the summer, and by the beginning of the cold they ride high across the middle of the sky in the early part of the night, which is every night she has: one a small faint oval, the other a long way from it, fainter still and rounder, and you cannot see either of them if you look straight at them — you have to look a little to one side and let them come. She has spent five months looking a little to one side. The work is not the looking; the work is the arithmetic, and she has it out with herself for most of the autumn. What she knows is this: from the terraces at home, on a clear night in the dry season, you could see two faint patches in the sky that were not stars, a big one and a smaller one, in a part of the sky her whole discipline had been looking at for four hundred years. Every child on Sethal was shown them. Every first-year at the Vayr could find them before the end of a sentence. They were the neighbors — the only two things in the whole of that sky anybody had ever seriously talked about going to, in the way you talk about a thing you are never going to do. And here, on this world, in a sky she cannot read at all, there are two: a big one and a small one, faint, in the same part of one another's sky, with the same great washed band running past them. *It isn't proof,* Kyra says, on the slope outside the hull on the third clear night in a row. *I want that said before I say anything else.* Say it anyway. *Every sky has smudges. They're common. There are more of them than there are stars, if you count properly, and I have nothing to count with.* So she is going to say a thing and Val is going to hear how thin it is. *I'll hear it,* Val says beside her, *and then I'll tell you what's wrong with it, and then you'll tell me why I'm wrong, which is how we have done everything for fifty-nine years.* So Kyra says it: *if we were in one of them, the sky would look like this.* Val does not say anything at all. Not *near* one of them. In it. Inside. Kyra puts her hand up and draws the band across the sky with one finger, edge to edge: that is not a river of light, that is the inside of a flat thing seen from inside it — every one of them is like that, all the great ones, and if you are in the middle of one and look along it you see a band, and if you look out of it you see the dark, and if you look out of it in the right direction you see, and she stops, and moves her finger, and puts it on the small faint oval overhead, the next one. *You've been holding on to this.* Since the ninth night, Kyra says: on the slope, before they came down, when she said there was a field in the fourth quadrant and would not say the rest of it, and Val waited, and she said she would say it when she could prove it. She still cannot prove it. It has been five months and she has two eyes and a rock to stand on and she is never going to be able to prove it — so she is going to say it with nothing behind it, because the alternative is dying up here with it in her mouth. *Say it.* *That one.* She points at the brighter of the two, the small oval, high and a little south. *That's home.* Not the star — the whole of it, everything they ever knew, all of it, every world, the Vayr, the terraces, the lot, is a smear you cannot look straight at, and it is that one, and she has thought so since the ninth night and has not had one single thing to support it. *Why that one and not the other?* Because it's brighter and it's bigger and it's the wrong shape to be far. And because ours has a small one beside it, close, and that one does too, and she can see it, and she has checked it every clear night since the spring and it is there. Val is quiet a long moment. *That's not nothing.* It's very close to nothing. *It is not proof and it is not nothing, and those are different things.* Val shifts on the cold rock: say the rest of it; you've got a face on. Kyra finds that her hands are shaking, which is absurd, and that her eyes have gone — she can feel the warmth behind them, the way she can now, a half second before it happens. *If that's where we are, then that light left there before there was anybody on Sethal to see it. Before the terraces. Before there was anything on Sethal worth seeing.* She looks at it, small and faint and tilted, a little to one side of straight: *I'm looking at home and it isn't home. It's home from before anybody was in it.* Yes, Val says. *Val, they're alive right now. Genie's alive right now. Kal's alive right now, this minute, and she's* — Kyra's voice goes, and she lets it — *she's forty. She's forty this year and she's in the lower east range being rude to somebody, and none of that light has got here yet and it never will, and I am sitting on a rock looking at the place before anybody was born in it.* Val does not tell her it is all right. Val has never once in fifty-nine years told her a thing was all right when it was not. What Val does is put her hand flat between Kyra's shoulder blades and leave it there, and let her cry on a mountain in the dark with both of them looking at it. They go down on the seventh day and Frederick has the fire in the storehouse lit, because the cold has properly come, and there is a smell of something roasting from the house. The lesson goes the way the lessons go now: quicker, with fewer things on the barrel head and more talking. Kyra can get a whole sentence out if she takes a run at it; Val says very little an hour, all of it correct, most of them the difficult ones, which Frederick has stopped remarking on out loud and has not stopped noticing. At the end of it Kyra does what she planned on the path. She goes to the door of the storehouse and looks out and up — it is late afternoon and the sky is already going, the way it does now — and puts her finger up and draws the band across it, and then points, as near as she can, at the place. *Frederick. That. In the night. Small* — she does not have the word for faint, or for cloud, and does what she always does, which is use her hands — *like smoke. Small smoke. High. Name?* Frederick comes and stands beside her in the doorway. He looks up. Then he looks at her. He says something in the village's language, and then something else, longer, and then laughs at himself and starts again in English, slowly, taking the words out one at a time and setting them down where she can reach them. *I do not know the small smoke. I know the* — he makes a shape with his hands, a woman's shape, arms out — *the stars. Behind it. Around it. There.* He draws something in the air, not a line; a figure, a great tilted thing with arms. *There is a woman in the sky. She is chained. In the sea. There is a* — he does not have a word he wants and uses the village's, and then mimes it, jaws, water, enormous — *a thing coming. Out of the water. For her.* *Chained,* Kyra says. *Why?* *Her mother,* Frederick says, and shrugs, as if that explained the whole of the world, and perhaps it does. *Her mother said a wrong thing. About her. And the sea was angry, and they put the daughter on the rock.* He puts two fingers against his own wrists, one and then the other, showing her where the chains went. *For her mother's words.* Kyra stands very still in the doorway of a storehouse. *Her name.* *Andromeda,* says Frederick. She does not say anything about it on the path until they are above the treeline, and Val lets her not say anything for an hour and a half, which is its own kind of conversation. Then: *a daughter on a rock. Because of what her mother said.* I heard it. *I asked him for a name and he gave me that.* He gave you a story that people on this world have been telling each other for a very long time, Val says, and which has nothing whatever to do with us, and you are going to carry it for four hundred years anyway. *Yes,* Kyra says. *I am.* They go up a way. *Andromeda,* Val says, trying it — she says it the way she says everything in that language, exactly, with the stresses in the right places, having heard it once. *That's where they are.* That's where they are, Val agrees. In the smoke. Behind the woman on the rock. The ship is waiting for them, which is a thing Kyra has stopped finding strange. She puts her hand on the empty air where the hull is and wants, and the seam comes up pale out of the gray and the door eases open, and the light along the curve of the wall comes up as they step over the frame — and stays up, and then comes up further, brighter than it has been since the fold, until the whole of the second section is lit the way it was lit on an ordinary morning of the outbound run. Both of them stop. Val has stopped with one hand on the frame. *That's new.* That's very new. And then, along the wall that had been a floor, something goes *click*. It is a small, domestic, entirely ordinary sound: the sound of a strap releasing on a stowage locker, which Kyra has heard perhaps four hundred times in her life and has never once turned her head for. She turns her head for it now. Six of the fourteen lockers came open in the fall; eight have been shut all summer, strapped and dumb, and she has tried every one of them with her hands and with the cutter and with her palm flat on the wall, wanting, which by then was a method. The third one from the end is open by the width of a finger. *That's mine,* Kyra says. She does not move. Val does not move either. *Do you want me outside?* No. Kyra hears how fast it comes out. No. Stay. I don't know what's in it. *You know exactly what's in it.* I know what I put in it, Kyra says: in a hall, with a form, on the fifth day. That isn't the same as knowing what's in it. She crosses the section and gets her fingers into the gap and pulls, and the locker door swings down, and the ship's light falls into it. Two kilograms of personal mass — a cruelty dressed as engineering. She had spent a whole evening on those two kilograms and ended with three books, none of them hers; a bad drawing Kal had done at six and has never been told was kept; and the plates. The plates had weighed more than everything else together; she took them anyway and did not write them down on the form, and nobody weighed her bag. They are all there. The books have come off their pile and gone into the corner. The plates are in their case with the strap still round it, and when she lifts it the weight of it goes into her arms and up into her chest like a sound: four seconds of a sky that no catalogue on Sethal contained, recorded on the first crewed fold by an instrument that had no business seeing anything, and eleven years of work behind them, and a finding in the record with a number on it that two people had asked her about and one of them had been being polite. She brought them because she has never once, in eleven years, been able to leave them in a building she was not in. And on top of the case, where it has slid down the inside of the locker and stopped, face up, is a piece of paper the size of both her hands. Kyra sits down on the floor with it. It is a drawing of four people. The tallest has been given a great deal of hair, because that had been the identifying feature of Kyra Davan for a six-year-old, and the next tallest has no mouth at all — not a line, nothing — because Kal at six drew people the way she does everything, which is by deciding what matters and leaving out the rest, and what mattered about Vaelith Sorin was that she did not say things. Genie is the one with her arms out. Kal is the small one at the end, drawn smaller than she actually was, standing slightly apart. There is nothing written on it; Kal has never gone in for writing on things. *Oh,* Kyra says. Val comes and sits down on the floor beside her, which she can do now, and looks at it for a long time. *I have no mouth,* Val observes. You've got no mouth. *That is the most accurate portrait anybody has ever made of me.* Kyra laughs, and the laugh comes apart in the middle, and she puts the drawing down very carefully on the floor before anything can happen to it, and Val puts an arm round her and Kyra puts her face into Val's shoulder and holds on to a fistful of the back of her bodice and stays there a long time. Later — much later, with the light down and the drawing back in the locker and the locker shut — Kyra lies on the bench and looks at the dark curve of the ceiling. *It gave it to me tonight.* It opened a strap. *It opened* that *strap. Tonight. The night I said it out loud.* I know what you're doing, Val says from the other bench, and I am going to say the unpopular thing, which is that a hull is a hull, and it has been coming back to itself all summer, one system at a time, and tonight some part of it came far enough to let a strap go; it was going to be one of the eight, and it happened to be yours. *You don't believe that.* Val is quiet a moment. *No. I don't.* She thinks it is going to go on giving them things one at a time for as long as they are on this world, and she thinks it will do it at the worst possible moments, and she has no explanation for either of those beliefs and is not going to pretend that she does. *Rask would have had one.* Rask, Val says, would have said *I told you*, and then he would have made us drink something. And Kyra lies in the dark in a hull that nobody can see, on a mountain, in a country with no name she knows, under a sky with a chained woman in it, and laughs until she has to put her hand over her own mouth.

**XIII. The Mound** — The smoke stops on the fourth day after they come down to the hut for the winter, and Val notices, because she notices everything. The flocks are gone by then and the door is theirs again, and the thread of smoke out of the trees below is one of the four or five things you can see from the fence, along with the roofs of Dymná and the line of the path and the shoulder of the mountain going up behind. She stands at the fence with an armful of wood and looks at where it is not. *Kyra.* Kyra comes out and looks and does not need it explained. *How long?* Since this morning at the earliest. It was there last night; I saw it against the sunset. Val puts the wood down: it has not gone out in six months. *It might be finished. The mound. He might have opened it.* He might, Val says — in which case there would be more smoke and not less, and there would be a man in the clearing with a rake, and they would be able to see him from here, because you can see the whole of that clearing from here and she has been looking at it since the spring. Kyra is already going for the shawl. They go down fast, which they can do now, and Val is ahead on the steep part and does not think about that at all until afterward. They smell it before they are through the trees: not the sweet scorch of a mound running properly but wood smoke gone sour and flat, and under it something else that Val's body understands before her mind does. The clearing is wrong. The mound has come open along one side — a black gash from the crown down to the base, the turf peeled back off it and the whole flank of it collapsed inward, and around the foot of the gash a fan of scattered charcoal and burned earth, still going in places, smoking gray. The long hooked pole lies ten feet from it. He is in the lean-to. He has got himself there, which tells Val most of what she needs: that it happened at the mound, that he was conscious afterward, and that he crawled. He is on his side on the earth floor among his blankets and he has pulled a piece of sacking over himself the way you do when you are cold, and he is cold, and when Kyra says something and he opens his eyes he looks at them both without any surprise at all. Val goes down on her knees beside him and puts her hands where a physician's hands go, and does not need any of it — because she can feel him. It comes up at her the moment she touches him and she nearly takes her hands away. Every living thing on this mountain runs in some fashion, and she has spent six months learning that without meaning to: the pale root running strong, the grass running thin, Kyra running hot and fast and bright as a note held sharp. This runs like a fire going down. It is still moving. It is moving in the wrong direction, steadily, the way water goes out of a cracked vessel, and it is going to keep going in that direction, and it is going to run out. She knows that before she looks at the burns. When she does look at the burns she knows it twice. They are on the right side of him from the hip to the shoulder and down the arm, and they are not the red kind: the skin has gone white and stiff in places and dark in others and the arm does not look like an arm, and where the flank of the mound came down on him it has done something to his side that Val can feel with her hands and could not have fixed in a room at the institute with four people helping her. *Val.* I know. *How bad?* *He is going to die,* Val says, in the village's language, because they have the words for *die* and *bad* and *man* and they do not have the words for anything else — and then, in her own, because she has to say it properly to somebody: he is going to die, and it is going to take two or three days, and there is nothing in that valley that can do anything about it. The charcoal man looks from one of them to the other. Then he says one word, low, that does not go up at the end, and Val does not know it and understands it perfectly, because it is the same word he said in the clearing on the first morning, when he looked at two starving women in gray and lifted his black hand. It is hello. They stay with him. That is decided without either of them proposing it. Kyra goes up the mountain for what they have and comes back before dark with the blankets off both benches and the last of the salt and the pot; Val stays and does what can be done, which is not much and takes all day — water, keeping the good side warm, keeping the sacking off the burns, and turning him, which is the worst part for both of them. He does not make much noise. He makes some, in the night, and Val sits by him in the dark with her hand on his good shoulder and lets herself read him, over and over, because it is the only measurement she has. On the second morning Kyra says it, outside, in the clearing, with the sour smoke still coming off the ruin of the mound, standing with her arms wrapped round herself. *The ship could do it.* Val does not pretend not to have thought of it; that would be a lie of the kind she promised in the snow not to tell. *I have been thinking about it since I put my hands on him.* It knits. *It knits.* It knit your leg — four months, three times a week, in the dark, and it laid a seam down inside a bone and now you run. Kyra's voice is going: that is not nothing, Val, that is not — I have watched it do the thing that everybody at the institute would have told me was impossible, and it is sitting up there on that snow right now doing nothing at all, and there is a man in that lean-to who is going to be dead in three days. *Yes.* So say it. You're the one who has the words. Say why not. Val stands in a cold clearing and says why not. Because they would have to carry him up four hundred feet of mountain, which would kill him, and if it did not kill him they would be opening a hull in front of a conscious man. Because the lattice reads a Sethal body; it has never read anything else, and what it did to her leg it did because it found something it recognized, and she does not know what it would find in him, and neither does Kyra, and the likeliest outcome is that it finds nothing and the second likeliest is that it finds something and does the wrong thing with it very quickly. And then she stops: *and because if it worked* — *say that part* — if it worked, then a man who was crushed and burned on one day would be walking in the lane on the next seventh day, and the two women who took him up a mountain would be standing next to him. Kyra turns away and puts her hands over her face. *I hate every single word of that.* I know. *It's all correct.* It is all correct, Val concedes — and it is not why. Kyra takes her hands down. *Then say why.* Because it does not stop. Val hears her own voice do something unfamiliar and goes on anyway: not this; him. If they do this for him they have decided something about every person in that valley, and about their children, and about everybody in every place they go for the rest of however long they have — that when they can, they do. *And we can, Kyra. That is the whole of the problem.* They are two people with a thing in the snow that mends what cannot be mended, on a world where a man can die of a fall off a roof, and *if we once start there is no line anywhere after the first one. There is only how tired we are and who we happened to be standing next to.* *That's a reason not to start,* Kyra says. *It's not a reason to sit in a lean-to and watch.* No, Val agrees. It isn't. It's only the better of the two. They both break a little. Neither of them does anything. Val's comes on the second night, at the worst hour, when he is quiet and she is not. She sits with her back against the post of the lean-to and does the arithmetic she has said was impossible: the litter, cut from the woodpile; the two of them at either end; the path, and then the slope, and then the last four hundred feet, which would take until dawn. Whether he would live through it. Whether the hull would open for a stranger. Whether the film would rise for him at all. She does it three times, and it comes out the same three times, and then she does it a fourth time with different numbers, which is the part she is ashamed of afterward — she gives herself a stronger man and a shorter slope and a lattice that has never once refused Kyra anything, and even then, with her thumb on the scale, it does not come out. She rubs it out with her sleeve, the way she had on a plate in the spring, and puts her head back against the post. Kyra's comes on the third morning, and Val only knows about it because Kyra tells her. *I went up.* She has come back into the clearing with the water and she puts it down and stands there. *In the night. When you were asleep.* To the ship. *To the ship.* Her jaw is set. *I put my hand on it and I stood there for about a quarter of an hour.* And? *And I didn't ask it.* She is not crying; she is past that. *I stood in the snow with my hand on the only thing on this world that does what I tell it, with a man dying at the bottom of the hill, and I didn't ask it, because you were right, and I'd already agreed with you, and if I'd asked it I'd have been asking it behind your back.* She looks up. *And I wanted to. I want that said. I stood there wanting to for a quarter of an hour.* Val gets up off the floor of the lean-to and crosses the clearing and puts both arms round her, and Kyra stands in it stiffly for a moment and then does not. *I did the sums four times,* Val says into her hair. *The fourth time I cheated. I gave myself a better man and a shorter mountain.* Did it come out? *No.* *Good,* Kyra says, and holds on tighter, and neither of them says anything else about it for a long time. He dies on the third afternoon, which is sooner than Val had told Kyra and exactly when she had thought. They are both there: Kyra has his good hand, Val has two fingers against the side of his throat because she cannot stop being what she is, and so she feels it happen twice — once under her fingers in the ordinary way, and once in the other way, the field going down and down and then not being there, which is the first time she has felt that on this world and is not the last. He has not spoken since the second night. Near the end he says something, twice, that has the shape of a name, and Kyra says *yes*, because there is nothing else to say and because it is probably true, whoever it was. Afterward they sit in the lean-to on either side of him and do not move for a while. *I don't know his name.* No. *Six months. He fed us through the whole of the spring. He put eggs in a cloth because I made a joke he couldn't hear the words of.* Her voice is flat and going flatter. *And I don't know his name, and he doesn't know ours, because we gave him two that aren't.* Val looks at the black hands on the sacking. *We could find out. Somebody in the village will know it.* I'm going to ask Frederick. *Yes.* And then I'm going to know it, Kyra says, and there'll be nobody to say it to. They carry him down. That is Kyra's, and Val does not argue with it although she can see every one of the things that are wrong with it. They make a litter out of two poles from the lean-to and the sacking and their own two blankets, and they carry him down the path out of the trees and across the ground by the stream and into the lane at the bottom end of Dymná in the last of the light — two women in village clothes with a dead man between them — and the village comes out. It is not like the spring; nobody lifts a fork. But it is not nothing either: there is a long silence in that lane, and the woman from the well puts her hand over her mouth, and a man says something to another man behind his hand, and four or five people look at the burns and then at the two of them and then at the burns again. Frederick comes down the lane without his coat on. He looks at the charcoal man for a long moment, then says something to the men in the lane, short and not loud, and they come and take the litter, and Val lets go of it and finds that her hands do not want to open. *When?* Frederick says, in English. Three days, Val says. The mound fell. We were with him. *Three days,* Frederick repeats. Yes. He looks at her, and then at Kyra, and then at their hands, which are black to the wrist, both of them, from three days of it. And Val watches a kind man do a sum in a lane, and watches him arrive at the wrong answer, and can see exactly which wrong answer it is: *two women who live on a mountain were in that clearing for three days, and nobody in this village knew, and the man is dead.* He does not say it. He will not say it; she is nearly sure of that. But somebody will. *His name,* Kyra says. Frederick turns to her. *His name. Please.* And Frederick tells her, and Kyra says it back to him, and gets it slightly wrong, and says it again, and gets it right.

**XIV. Come Live with Me** — His name was Ondrej, and for eleven days Kyra cannot put it down. She says it in the hut, out loud, at odd hours, because Val has asked her to say it whenever she wants to and she has discovered that she wants to about four times a day. She says it on the path. She says it once, badly, into the cloth of her own sleeve at the middle of the night with Val's arm over her, and Val does not say anything at all, which is right. The village buries him on the second day after they bring him down. They do not go: nobody has told them not to, and Frederick comes as far as the gate of his own yard when they arrive on the seventh day and shakes his head, once, in a way that is not unkind, and they turn round and go back up the mountain with nothing. *That's the first time he's done that,* Val says above the treeline. *He's protecting us.* He is protecting us, Val concedes — and he is also telling us something, and you and I are going to work out which one is larger over the next few weeks whether we want to or not. They go up in silence after that. Halfway to the hut: *I keep doing a thing.* Say it. *I keep counting him.* She is watching the path. *Seventeen and one. And then I stop, because he isn't ours, and then I start again.* Val takes a while to answer. *So do I,* Val says. It is Val who says the rest of it four nights later, which neither of them would have predicted. The fire is low; Kyra has her back against the bench and her legs out and Val is sitting on the floor beside her with her arms round her knees, and they have not spoken for most of an hour, which has become a thing they can do. *I have been unable to stop doing an arithmetic.* Kyra turns her head. He fell on his own mound, Val says — which he had built, on a mountain, alone, doing a thing he had done for thirty years. And it came down on him, and he crawled forty feet, and then he lay in a lean-to for the better part of a day and a night with nobody there. She is looking at the fire. *And the arithmetic I cannot stop doing is: what if we had gone down on the day the smoke stopped. Not the day after. What if I had looked at the fence in the morning instead of the evening.* *Val.* I am not saying it would have changed the outcome; it would not have changed the outcome, she has been through that four times and the burns were the burns. Her voice is entirely level, which is how Kyra knows. *I am saying he was alone for a day and a night, and that he was alone because two people who could see his smoke from their fence were not looking at it that morning, and that I will be doing this particular sum for a very long time.* Kyra sits up. *Give me your hand.* Why? *Because I'm going to say something and I want to be holding on to you when I do it.* Val gives her the hand; Kyra takes it in both of hers. *Seventeen people, and I wanted one of them to be somewhere. I said that to you on the fifth day, standing in the door of a hull, and you said* I know, *and it was true and it was useless.* I remember. *I have never been able to put them anywhere. Not one of them. There's nothing on this mountain with a name on it and there never will be, and that's* — Kyra stops, and starts again. *And then a man fed us all spring and died in a lean-to and we carried him down a hill in the dark, and the village put him in the ground with his own people, and he is* somewhere. *I know where he is. I could walk to it.* Val's hand does not move in hers. *And I am so angry about it that I have not been able to look at you for four days.* Yes. *That's it? Yes?* I worked it out on the second night, Val says: you have been standing on the wrong side of every doorway I am in since the lane, which you have not done in fifty-nine years, and you have not once shouted at me, which you have also not done in fifty-nine years. *You could have said.* I was waiting for you to have it in words. You always get there — out loud and in the wrong order and about four days after I've seen it, and if I say it first you have to argue with me about it instead of saying it, and then it costs twice. Kyra sits with that a moment. *That's the most annoying kind thing anybody's ever done to me.* I am aware. *Don't stop.* I won't, Val says. They come down on the seventh day after that, and Frederick comes out to the gate and does not shake his head, and takes them in, and the fire is lit in the storehouse and there are three things on the barrel head. Two of them are books. Val knows what they are before he says anything, because she has known since a storehouse in the spring that the shelf at the back had books on it, and has been looking at them for six months with the steadiness of a woman who is not going to ask. *For you. Both. Not to keep* — he stops, and makes a face at himself, and starts again. *Yes. To keep.* The first is small and thick and has been used hard. He puts it in Val's hands and opens it for her at the front, where there is a page with letters on it in rows, large ones and small ones, and then pages of short words in columns, and then pages with sentences. *A book for teaching. For children. A man in London made it. I bought it because I was a poor scholar and I am not ashamed.* He taps the columns: *here. Every word in it, you will have. In the winter. When you cannot come down.* Val looks at the rows of letters and feels something go through her that she is going to have to examine later, in private, with the light down. *Thank you,* Val says. The second book is different — taller, thinner, printed on better paper — and he handles it differently as well. *This one is not for teaching. This one is* — he looks for the word in English and does not find it, and finds it in the village's language instead and then translates it with his hands, a shape in the air and then the shape being turned over and admired — *songs. Without the music. Men writing about* — he shrugs, enormously, and Kyra laughs for the first time in eleven days — *fields. And girls. And how it is all very sad.* *Is it any good?* Kyra says. *Some of it,* says Frederick, *is very good, and I will not tell you which, because you are going to have four months and nothing else to do.* The third thing on the barrel head is paper. There is not a great deal of it: a few sheets, folded once, the edges uneven and the surface furred, and a small stoppered bottle of ink and a knife and a goose quill lying on top of it. Val does not touch that at all for a moment. *It is dear,* Frederick says, *and there is no more, so do not waste it on practicing. Practice in the ash.* He points at the hearth. *Everybody does.* *Why?* Val says. It comes out flatter than she means. Frederick looks at her. *Because you want it,* he says. They carry the whole of it up the mountain in Kyra's skirt, held up in front of her like a sack, which Val says four separate times is undignified and which Kyra says four separate times is working. The primer goes to Val; nobody discusses that either. She starts it that night and does it the way she does everything: at the front, in order, with the ash and a stick at her elbow. The letters, all of them, large and small. Then the pairs. Then the short columns, which are words of one sound, and which she goes through four times before she will go on, because on the fourth time she finds that the man in London has grouped them by the sound and not by the meaning, and once she understands the principle the whole book opens out in front of her like a panel with the labels finally on it. By the fourth night she has gone through half of it. By the eighth night she is reading sentences out loud in the firelight in a voice that is perfectly steady and absolutely wrong, because nobody has ever told her where the stresses go in a language nobody has ever written down for her properly — and Kyra lies on the bench and listens to Vaelith Sorin read *the cat is on the mat* with the gravity of a woman signing a protocol and does not laugh, for four whole evenings, which is the single greatest act of restraint of her life. On the ninth night she laughs. *It's a* cat. *Val. It's a cat and a mat. You sound like you're about to put it in the record.* I am reading it correctly, Val insists. *You're reading it like a finding.* It *is* a finding, Val says. The cat is on the mat. That is a statement of fact about an object and a location, and I have no way of knowing whether the man in London intended anything else by it, and I would rather be flat than wrong. Kyra is crying with it by then, the good kind, and Val puts the book down on her knee and waits with enormous patience for her to finish, which she does not do for some time. The other book is Kyra's, and she is hopeless with it for the first fortnight. She cannot do what Val does; she cannot go at a thing from the front, in order. She opens it in the middle and gets four words in a row and then a wall, and opens it somewhere else and gets a wall straight away, and throws it across the hut twice — the first time in temper and the second time to make Val look up, which works. What she finds eventually is that it goes better out loud. That is the thing nobody has told her and that she would not have believed: that the shapes on the page are not the point of it, that they are instructions for a noise, and that if she makes the noise badly enough for long enough the sense comes up out of it the way a shape comes up out of fog. Half of it she does not understand at all; the other half she understands in the wrong way, in pieces, out of order, and by the end of the first month she has four or five of them nearly whole, and they have got into her the way a song does, whether she wants them or not. It is the middle of the winter's first real snow when she reads one to Val on purpose. The hut is shut; the fire is high, because it is always high now; Val is sitting against the bench with the primer face down on her knee and her eyes closed, which she does when she has done as much as her head will take. *Don't move. I've been practicing this for a fortnight and if you move I'll lose it.* Val does not move. Kyra holds the book up to the firelight and reads. She reads badly — the way she does everything, too fast at the start and then slowing when the sense arrives, and she gets two of the words wrong and one of them twice. But the thing she is reading is a man asking a woman to come and live with him and be his love, and to prove all the pleasures that the valleys and the woods and the steep mountains yield, and Kyra Davan reads it out loud in a shepherd's hut on the side of a steep mountain in the middle of a winter that is going to last four more months, to a woman sitting four feet away with her eyes shut. She gets to the end of it and puts the book down on her knee. Val does not open her eyes for a moment. Then: *give me the book.* You don't know where it is. *Give me the book, Kyra.* Kyra gives her the book. Val turns two pages — two, straight to it, which means she has been through this book at some point when Kyra was not in the hut, which is a thing Kyra is going to want to talk about later — and reads. It is the answer. Of course it is the answer; somebody put them next to each other on purpose, in a city neither of them will ever see. It is a woman replying to the man, and what she is telling him, in the most beautiful and the coldest way Kyra has ever heard anything put, is that the flowers fade, and the fields go to winter, and the rivers rage and the rocks grow cold, and that a promise made in spring is a promise made by somebody who has not yet seen the year go round. Val reads it in her flat, correct, wrongly-stressed English, all the way to the end, without looking up once. Then she closes the book and puts it on the floor. Neither of them says anything for a while. The fire moves. Outside, the snow comes down on a mountain in a country whose name neither of them can pronounce properly, on a hull nobody can see, on a grave in a village where a man is somewhere. *She's right,* Kyra says at last. She is entirely right, Val agrees. *He's an idiot.* He is not an idiot, Val corrects. He is asking in the spring. Everybody asks in the spring. She is the only one of the two of them who has been outside in November. Kyra looks at her. *That's the thing. That's the actual thing, isn't it. Anybody can say it in the spring.* Yes. *It's the middle of winter, Val.* I am aware of what month it is. *I'm just saying that it's the middle of winter, and there's four months of it coming, and the flowers have faded and the fields have gone, and the rocks are extremely cold, I've been sitting on them.* Kyra. *I'm still here.* Val turns her head and looks at her for a long moment in the firelight. *I know,* Val says. And that is all either of them says about it, that night or for a long time afterward. But the light comes up under Val's wrists where the sleeves end, in a hut with the fire high, where it should not have been visible at all, and Kyra sees it anyway, because she has spent six months learning where to look.

#### Winter (Part Four)

**XV. Snow** — The change goes for Kyra first, and it goes for her at night. Val had expected the winter to be a matter of cold and food and had provisioned for both; what the winter turns out to be is a series of hours between the middle of the night and the gray, in a hut, watching a woman come apart in a way neither of them has a word for and then put herself back together by morning as if nothing had happened. It starts in the first week of the real snow. Kyra wakes — that is all; she wakes, sits up on the bench, and says *something's wrong* in a voice that is entirely steady, and then sits there in the dark with her hands flat on the straw on either side of her and does not move for an hour. *Say it.* I can't. *Say the nearest thing.* *It's too loud.* It's not a sound. It's the field. It's been lying on the back of my head since the snow and tonight it's got hold of me instead, and it's going through me, and it's going through me at the wrong — she stops. There isn't a word for the thing it's wrong about. *Rate,* Val says. That's not it either. It's like — Kyra's hands come up off the straw — it's like being made to breathe at somebody else's rate. All the way down. Every part of me at once. Val gets the fire up and sits with her until it goes. It goes at about the gray, all at once, the way weather goes off a ridge, and Kyra lies down and sleeps for four hours and gets up and goes out for wood and is entirely herself, and would have gone on being entirely herself for the rest of the day if Val had let her. Val does not let her. *It will happen again,* Val says over the fire, with the snow coming down outside. *You don't know that.* I have watched your body do one new thing after another since the spring and not one of them has happened once. Val turns the pot: it will happen again, and I want to agree now, while you are able to talk about it, what we do when it does. Kyra looks at her a moment. Then: *you're frightened.* *Yes,* Val says. It stops the argument before it starts, which is why she said it. It is also true, which is why it works. It happens again four nights later, and then twice in the following week, and then, through the worst of the winter, about every third or fourth night. They learn it the way you learn weather. It comes at the same hour, near enough — the dead hour, well after the middle of the night. It lasts between one and three hours. It is worse when the sky is clear, which makes no sense at all and which Val writes in the ash anyway, four times, until she stops disbelieving it. It is worse after a day Kyra has spent going up onto the shoulder and better after a day she has spent in the hut, which Kyra hates and cannot argue with. And it is better if Val is touching her. That takes three attempts to establish, because the first two times Val did it without thinking and was not observing properly, which she records as a failure on her own part in a column in the ash that nobody else will ever read. The third time she does it deliberately. Kyra is sitting up on the bench with her back against the wall and her breath going short and shallow, the way it does, and Val sits down in front of her and says: *I am going to put my hand on you and I want you to tell me what happens.* Where? *I don't know yet.* She starts with the hands, because that is where anybody starts, and it does nothing. She tries the back of the neck, which does a little and mostly because it is a thing Kyra likes. She tries the wrists, one and then both, which does nothing at all and which annoys her, because the wrists are where her own light comes up and she had been hoping for a symmetry. Then she puts her palm flat on Kyra's breastbone. It is not a decision so much as the next item on a list: the hand goes flat, fingers spread, the heel of it just below the base of the throat — and the field under it comes up at her the way it came up the first night in the cold, when she put a hand on a woman's ribs for warmth and found she could read her. Except that now she knows what she is reading. *There,* Kyra says. *Don't move.* I'm not going to move. Val does not move either. She sits with her hand flat on Kyra's breastbone and reads her, and it is terrible: everything running too fast and too bright and pulling against itself, the whole of her going at a rate that is not hers and will not agree to be, like a room full of people all shouting a different count. And under Val's palm, slowly, over a long time, it steadies. Not all of it; it does not stop, it goes on being wrong. But it comes down out of the worst of it, and settles, and finds something to keep time against — and Val understands what she is doing about an hour into it and nearly takes her hand away. She does not take her hand away. *What is it?* Kyra says, much later, when she can. *You're setting to me,* Val says. I think. Your timing. It can't find anything on this world to agree with, so it's agreeing with the nearest thing that isn't this world, which is my hand. Kyra is quiet a moment. *Is it taking anything?* From me? No. Val considers it properly, because it deserves that. No. I'm tired afterward. That's all, and I'd be tired anyway, because I'd be sitting up. *You'd tell me.* I would tell you, Val says, and you would make me stop, and I would not stop, and we would have a very unpleasant four days about it. I would still tell you. So that is the winter. It becomes a thing they do, the way everything they do becomes a thing they do: Kyra wakes and says *it's coming*, and Val builds up the fire, and they sit on the bench with Kyra against the wall and Val's hand flat under her collarbone, and wait it out. Sometimes it takes an hour. Once it takes most of the night and Val's arm goes dead to the shoulder and she does not say so. They talk, on the good nights, because there is nothing else to do and because Kyra cannot be quiet for three hours under any circumstances. They talk about Ondrej. They talk about the boy with the knife, who has been in the lane twice in the autumn and has looked at Kyra both times and looked away both times. They talk about Frederick, who has begun to ask, in a roundabout way that is not roundabout enough, how they are getting on for food. They talk about the poem book, and about the primer, and about whether the man in London has ever met a child. Once, at the end of a bad one, Kyra says: *will you tell me if it starts happening to you?* Yes. *Straight away. Not the second day.* Not the second day, Val agrees. I have been told about the second day. It starts happening to her in the middle of the winter, and it is not the same thing at all, which Val finds she resents. Kyra comes apart at night and is whole in the morning; what happens to Val happens to her hands. It begins as clumsiness, which she notices on the day she drops the pot. She never drops things. She has cool exact hands and has been told so by four different people over fifty years, and she drops the pot and stands looking at the floor of the hut with her ears going, and Kyra says nothing whatsoever, which is worse than anything she could have said. Within a fortnight it is not clumsiness: it is that she cannot feel the difference between things. She cannot tell the knife from the spoon by touch with her eyes shut, which she tests one afternoon, four times, in private, and then writes down in the ash, and then rubs out, and then writes down again because rubbing it out is exactly the kind of thing she has promised not to do. She tells Kyra that night — straight away, and not the second day. By the deepest part of the winter she cannot hold the quill. That is the one that does it. She has been going through the primer for a month and has begun to copy words out in the ash with a stick to learn the shapes, and one evening she takes a sheet of Frederick's paper and cuts the quill the way he showed her and sits down to write a word on it, one word, to see what it is like — and her hand will not close on the quill at the angle a hand closes on a quill, and when she makes it close the whole arm shakes, and what comes out on the paper is not a word. She sits and looks at it for a long time. Then she folds the sheet and puts it back with the others and says, in the flattest voice Kyra has ever heard her use: *not yet, then.* *Val* — *it is a hand,* Val says. *It will come back or it won't. There is a woman in this hut who cannot breathe at her own rate three nights a week and I am not going to sit here and grieve about handwriting.* Kyra gets up off the floor and comes and takes both of Val's hands in both of hers and holds on to them, hard, and Val lets her, and neither of them says anything for a while. *You are going to grieve about the handwriting,* Kyra says at last. Yes. *Do it out loud.* I would rather not. *I know you'd rather not. Do it anyway. I've been coming apart in front of you three nights a week for two months and you have not once suggested I do it somewhere else.* So Val does it out loud, badly, in four sentences, most of them about a notebook she has not started and has been planning in her head since the autumn: everything she knows about a body that matters, written down before the knowing can go, because there is nobody else on this world who has it and one day there will be nobody who has it at all. Kyra listens to all of it without saying anything. Then she says: *tell me the whole of it and I'll hold it till your hands come back.* That is thirty years of work. *Then we'd better start,* Kyra says, *and we've got four months and nowhere to go.* They go down on the clear days. Kyra picks them: she can feel weather a day out by then with an accuracy that would have got her a paper at home and is, on that mountain, simply the difference between going and not going — she comes in from the fence in the evening and says *tomorrow*, and the next morning comes up cold and blue and still, and they go. It happens perhaps four times in the depth of it, and each time the village is a little different. Not worse — that is the thing Val cannot get straight. Four or five houses have gone from nodding to speaking. A woman gives Kyra a twist of something in the lane and will not take anything for it. The children are still there; one of them has learned to whistle through his fingers and does it every time he sees her, which Kyra maintains is a greeting and Val maintains is an ambush. And underneath it, in the same lane, on the same days: the man who goes back into his doorway. The woman who makes the sign. A silence of about four seconds when they come into the open ground by the well, every time, before the lane starts up again. Kyra puts her hood back to say it, on the path, in the snow: *they're two villages.* They are one village in which some people have decided and some people have not. *That's the same thing with a mean edge on it.* It is the same thing put accurately, Val says — and the reason she is saying it is that the ones who have not decided are going to decide eventually, and when they do, the ones who have been kind to them are going to find they have to choose between them and their neighbors, and she wants the two of them a long way from here before anybody has to do that. Kyra goes four steps in silence. *Spring,* Kyra says. *Spring,* Val agrees. It is the first time either of them has said it out loud, and neither of them says anything else about it, and both of them think about it the whole way up the mountain. Frederick, on the last of those days, keeps Val back at the storehouse door while Kyra is loading the sack. He has been working up to something for the whole hour and Val has watched him do it with a growing conviction that she is not going to enjoy it. *The old woman at the end house,* he says in English, quietly. *She says a thing.* What thing? *It is not a thing to repeat.* Frederick. He looks out at the lane, where Kyra is tying the sack shut and saying something to a child. *She says nobody has seen you eat,* he says.

**XVI. The Stair** — It comes out of the notebook, in the end, which neither of them could have predicted. They have been at it for a month by then, on the bad nights and some of the good ones: Val telling and Kyra holding. It has turned out to be the only work either of them has. Val cannot write, so she recites, and Kyra has a memory that frightened people at the institute for forty years, and they go through it in the order Val chooses, which is the order she would have written it in, because she is not going to let a bad hand make her untidy. They do the four markers first; that takes eleven nights, because Val will not give Kyra a marker until Kyra can give it back to her in Val's own words, and Val's own words on the subject of the four markers were settled over thirty years and are not going to be improved by a woman with a good memory and no discipline. Then the drift she drew for Renn. Then the panel of Kyra's own, the one Val read in the spring of a year they no longer have a number for, and then re-read on the ship, and has carried in her head ever since with the other person's consent, which had been given over a bench with a shrug. And then one night, working down the list toward the difficult end of it, Val says: *the next one is the vault sequence.* The what? *The one I did at eighteen,* Val says, and stops. Kyra does not say anything. They are on the floor, both of them, with their backs against the bench and the fire high and the snow doing what it has done for four days without stopping, and Val's hands are in her lap, palms up, which they are most of the time now, because that is where they hurt least. *It's a good sequence. It is the only piece of work I did before I was twenty that I would still put in front of anybody. It took a year.* All right. *And I cannot say what it is for without saying why I wrote it.* Kyra turns her head. *Then don't. We'll do the rest and come back to it.* *That is what I have been doing for fifty-nine years,* says Val. Kyra sits very still and does not move a muscle in her face. She has known about the mark since a boot room at eighteen. She has known what it meant, the way everybody on Sethal knew, because everybody on Sethal could read it, and because a hundred and six invitations went out that year and a hundred and six people folded them up again. She has never said one word about it in fifty-nine years. Val has never said one word about it in fifty-nine years. It is the one thing you do not do out loud, and they have both done it perfectly, all their lives, the way you get very good at a thing by never once practicing anything else. And now Val is sitting on a floor in a hut on a mountain with her hands turned up in her lap, having walked up to it herself. Every single thing in Kyra wants to help — that is the whole of her, that is what she has been since she was a child: fill it, ask it, take it out of the other person's hands and carry it for them. She puts her hands flat on the floor on either side of her and does not. The fire moves. Outside the snow comes down through the smoke hole and hisses. *Ask me,* Val says. *No.* *Kyra* — *no,* Kyra says. *You've been asked. You were asked twice by somebody with a pen, and you've spent your whole life being asked by people who thought they were being gentle about it, and I'm not going to be the last one.* She keeps her hands flat. *You say it or you don't say it. I'll be here either way and I'll be here the same either way, and that's the whole of what I've got.* Val looks at her for a long moment. *You knew. About the two.* What two? *They asked me twice. You said* twice. Kyra shuts her eyes. *Everybody knows they ask twice. It's in the pages. Every first-year at the Vayr has read the pages by the end of the second term, because somebody always has a copy and somebody always passes it round, and I read them when I was eighteen years old in a bad room with three other girls, and I have never forgotten one line of it, and I have thought about the second asking about four times a year for my entire life.* *Why.* *Because of you,* Kyra says. Val does it badly. That is what she notices, doing it: that she is doing it badly, and that there is no way to do it well, and that she once said almost exactly this to her own daughter on a wall in the cold and made a considerably better job of it, because on that wall she had thirty-eight years of preparation and a plan and four sentences she had written in her head on the way up. Here she has nothing. Here she has a fire, and a woman on the floor beside her with her hands flat, not helping. She starts in the wrong place, which is the arrangement and the two families, and has to go back. She says that she had been eighteen. She says that the boy had been decent and a little stiff and had been kind to her afterward in a garden, and that none of it had been his doing. She says that she refused. Then she stops for a long time, and Kyra does not fill it, which Val had not really believed would happen. Val looks at nothing at all. *I went up the outside stair on the fourth terrace. On my own. On a Fifthday in the fourth month.* I know the stair. *There were eleven chairs in the room.* Kyra makes a small sound and puts her hand over her own mouth and takes it away again. *They asked me whether anybody was coming. I said no. And then the woman with the pen — she was not unkind, I want that on the record, she was doing a thing she did four times a day and she did it properly — she asked me again. And I said no again.* She turns her hands over in her lap and turns them back. *And that is the whole of it. It took a little over an hour. I came out at twenty past three in the afternoon and the light was on the wall opposite and I remember thinking that it was an ordinary afternoon, and being surprised about it.* *And then?* *Then nine days. Alone. And then I went back to work.* The fire moves. *I was not ashamed. I want that said, because it is the part everybody gets wrong, including you, including in a boot room at eighteen when you saw it on my back and looked away. I was not ashamed of it then and I am not now and I would do it again tomorrow.* *I know you would,* Kyra agrees. *The reason I have never said it is not the procedure.* I know. *Say it, then. Since you know.* Kyra says it, looking at the fire and not at Val, which is the only mercy available. *You did it alone, and there's no way to tell anybody you sat in that room by yourself and said no twice without telling them you had nobody to bring.* Yes. *And you had nobody to bring because of how you are.* *Yes,* Val says. *And I have spent fifty-nine years making sure that the person I most did not want to know that was the person most likely to work it out, which is the kind of arrangement I would fail a junior for proposing.* Kyra finds that she is on her feet, which she does not remember doing. *I was four terraces away.* *Kyra* — *I was* four terraces away. *In the fourth month. I know exactly what I was doing that spring; I was doing the plateau run in the mornings and drinking with Aro's crowd in the evenings and I was eighteen and I was having the best year of my life, and you were going up an outside stair on your own with nobody at the bottom of it, and I did not know, and I would have* — she stops, because her voice has gone, and because the next word is going to be a thing she cannot say. *You would have come,* Val says. *I would have* come. *I know.* *You don't know. You've never once let anybody* — *I know,* Val says, *because I thought about asking you.* Kyra stops dead. *I thought about it for about a fortnight. I had the sentence. I had worked out where I would say it, which was the low wall by the west range where you always sat, and what I would say, which was four words long, and I had worked out what you would do.* She is looking at her hands. *You would have said yes before I finished. That was the difficulty. There was no version in which you thought about it, and that meant I would have been taking a whole day and a stair and a room off a person who had not been asked whether she wanted it, on the grounds that she was too decent to say no.* *That isn't a reason. That's an excuse with arithmetic on it.* *Yes,* Val concedes. *It is.* Kyra sits down on the floor in front of her, hard, and takes both of Val's hands in both of hers and holds on to them. *Ask me now.* It was fifty-nine years ago, Val objects. *Ask me now, Val.* Val looks at her. Then she says, in a voice with nothing arranged in it at all: *Will you come up the stair with me.* *Yes,* Kyra says. Afterward — a long time afterward, with the fire down to the red and both of them still on the floor because neither of them has suggested moving — Kyra says the other half of it. *Mine isn't the quiet.* I know. You told me at a door. *I told you four sentences at a door and then walked down a stair and let you have twenty years with it. I'm going to do it properly. Turn round.* Val turns round. Kyra puts the flat of her hand on it, low on the left, above the hip, which she has never once done, and tells her: what Deyn had been, and what he had done to her skin, and the eleven days she took to decide, and the decision she would make again tomorrow. Val listens to the whole of it without moving. Then Kyra says: *now yours.* Mine what? *The tin.* You had it in your coat for six weeks. You told me that much in a west range with your back to me and a pipette in your hand and then you stopped, and I have never asked you for the rest of it, and I'm asking now. Val looks at the fire. *I mixed it at the bench. Three shades and a sealant from a shop on the second terrace that sells to people who paint faces for a living. It took an hour and eleven minutes. You were four feet away arguing with the third season correction.* *I remember the evening.* *You matched it against nothing.* That is the part she has never said: there was no sample. She had seen Kyra's mark twice in her life, both times by accident, both times for about four seconds, and she mixed a color to it from memory at a bench and tested it on her own arm and left it on overnight. *I lay in the Marden room with your color on my arm and did not sleep, and in the morning I washed it off and put the tin in my coat, and I carried it every day for six weeks without a plan of any kind. I have never been able to account for that. I have tried.* Kyra puts her forehead down on Val's shoulder. *Don't account for it.* It is not rational behavior, Val insists. *Val.* Kyra is laughing, and it goes on longer than it should and turns over into the other thing somewhere in the middle. *It is the least rational thing you have ever done and you did it for six weeks in a coat, and if you account for it I'll have to hit you.* Val puts an arm round her and holds on. They do not sleep. The snow stops at some point in the night and the hut goes very quiet, the way it does when the snow stops, and the fire goes down and neither of them builds it up. Kyra lifts her head off the straw. *It's gone dark.* Yes. *You've not touched the fire.* *No,* Val says. She has not. She noticed herself not doing it about an hour ago and made a decision she does not entirely understand, and now the hut is dark and the light is coming up in her, and she lies on her side on the straw with Kyra in front of her and lets it. It is at her wrists and her throat; it is along her collarbones and up under her jaw and in her hands where they hurt, faint and cool, and it is enough to see by. Kyra looks at her a long time without saying anything at all. *That's what it does,* Kyra says at last, *when you've said something.* Apparently. *It came up when you asked me the question.* I know. I felt it start. *You didn't put the fire on.* No. Kyra reaches out and puts two fingers on the light at Val's throat, where it is warm, the way she had the first night she saw it — and then, because it is dark and because there is nobody on that mountain and because six months have gone past since then, she moves her hand up and puts it flat against the side of Val's face. Val turns her mouth into the palm of it. Neither of them says anything about that either. It is, Val thinks afterward, on the list of the four or five most important things that have ever happened to her, and it took about a second and a half, and nobody said a single word.

**XVII. The Haircut** — Val's hands come back over about a fortnight at the end of the worst of it, and she knows they have come back because of a knot. It is the cord on the wood sack, which has to be undone every day and which she has not been able to do since the middle of the winter, and which she has been handing to Kyra without comment in a small daily arrangement neither of them has ever acknowledged out loud. She picks it up one morning and her fingers find the loop and go into it and have it open before she has decided anything. She stands in the doorway of the hut with a loose cord in her hand. *Kyra.* Kyra comes, and looks, and does not say any of the several things that are clearly available to her. What she does is take the cord out of Val's hand and tie it again, badly, in a granny knot, and hand it back. Val undoes it. Kyra ties it tighter. Val undoes it. Kyra ties it into something with two crossings and a tuck that Val watches her invent on the spot, and Val turns it over twice and gets her thumbnail into it and undoes that as well, and looks up, and Kyra is standing in a hut on a mountain with both hands over her face. The paper comes out that evening. Val cuts the quill again, because the first cut went wrong in the winter and she did not have the hand to fix it. Then she sits by the fire with a sheet of Frederick's paper on the flat of the wood-block and writes one word. It is not a word from the primer. She writes *Gennive*, which nobody on this world will ever be able to read, in the letters she has spent a winter learning, which were not made for it. The hand is not hers: it is too large and it goes uphill and the fourth letter has a tremor in it that she can see from across the room. But it is legible, and it is a name, and it is on paper. She looks at it for a while. *Not yet,* Val says, to the fire, and folds the sheet and puts it back with the others. *You wrote something.* I wrote a test. *You wrote a name,* Kyra says from the bench, *because I watched your hand do it, and it's six letters and it went uphill.* Val does not say anything for a moment. *When the snow goes, I am going to write all of it down. The markers and the drift and your panel and* — she stops — *and some other things. And I want it to be in a hand I would not be ashamed of, because it is going to be the only copy, and because I intend to write it out again every few decades for as long as this goes on, and the first one sets the standard.* *That's a very Val reason.* It is the only kind I have, Val agrees. The hair has been in the soup since the autumn, and has got worse through the winter in the way everything does when there is nothing to do about it: Kyra's has grown past the middle of her back and has to be tied twice; Val's has gone paler at the ends and darker where it parts, and there is a stretch of four inches at the front that burned off against a pot in the first week of the cold and has grown back into something that is not the same length as anything else. *Now?* Kyra says — she says it about once a fortnight, and it has become a joke. Val looks up from the primer. *Now,* Val says. Kyra puts down what she is holding. *Really?* *You have twice this week put your own hair into the fire and once into the soup, and my hands work, and the cutter is sharp.* Val stands up. *Sit down.* They do it properly, because Val does not know any other way: the bench pulled round to the fire; a cloth over Kyra's shoulders, which is the charcoal man's, washed and washed again and kept for nothing in particular, and which neither of them says anything about; the wooden comb from Frederick; the cable cutter, sharpened on a stone all afternoon, which is still a ridiculous object for the work and is the only edge on the mountain. *An inch. Off the ends. That is the whole of it.* You could take more. *I am going to take an inch,* Val says, *and in a month you will ask me why it looks the same, and I will tell you that it looks the same because I took an inch, which is what I said I would take.* *You're enjoying this.* I am doing it carefully, Val corrects. It is not the same thing. Kyra sits down on the bench with her back to her and her hands in her lap, and Val puts the comb into her hair, and starts. It takes a long time, and Kyra talks for the first half of it. That is the ordinary thing. She talks about the boy with the knife, who has begun to say the greeting-word in the lane and then to look immediately at the ground. She talks about the old woman at the end house, and what Frederick said at the storehouse door, and what she thinks about being a woman nobody has seen eat. She talks about whether the four children will remember them. She talks about the poem book, and about a line in it she has decided is the worst line anybody has ever written, and recites it twice to prove it. Val works through it a section at a time, lifting the hair off the cloth, combing it straight down, taking the ends off level with two fingers and the cutter, and not once taking more than she said. Somewhere in the second half Kyra runs out of things to say. That happens perhaps four times a year, and both of them notice it, and neither of them fills it. The fire moves. The cutter makes its small sound. The snow stopped a day ago and the hut has that particular deadened quiet it gets afterward, as though the mountain were listening to something a long way off. Val finishes. She puts the cutter down on the bench. She runs the comb through once more, from the crown down, to check the line of it. And then she rests her palm, flat, on the top of Kyra's head. She does it to check that she has taken it off evenly — that is the reason, that has always been the reason, a hand on the crown to feel the fall of it on both sides — and she finds that she has, and that the checking took about a second, and that her hand is still there. She leaves it there. There is no reason for that. Val Sorin has spent fifty-nine years making sure that every single thing she does to another person has a reason attached to it that she could have produced under examination, and she stands behind a bench in a shepherd's hut with her palm on Kyra Davan's head for no reason at all, and does not take it away. Kyra feels it stop being about the hair. She sits with the cloth round her shoulders and her heart going and does not move, because moving would be a kind of answer and she does not have one yet. The hand stays. It is warm through her hair and it is not doing anything, and there is nothing in fifty-nine years to compare it to. Then she turns round on the bench. Val is standing behind her with the comb still in her other hand, and her face in the firelight is the face Kyra has known for longer than most of this world's countries have existed, pale and closed and perfectly composed. It is not composed at all. Kyra can see it. She has always been able to see it. She stands up; the cloth falls off the bench onto the floor and neither of them looks at it. They are the same height — they have always been the same height, it is one of the four or five facts about them that anybody who sees them together remarks on, and Kyra has never thought about it for a second in fifty-nine years and thinks about it now, because it means that when she stands up they are exactly face to face with nothing between them. Val's hair has come loose on one side, the way it does. Kyra puts her hand up and moves it: gathers the pale weight of it off Val's cheek with two fingers and draws it back and tucks it behind her ear, the way Val did for her in a storehouse in the spring with a stranger standing in the doorway, and the whole side of Val's neck is bare. Kyra looks at it. She has seen it ten thousand times — every day for five months at four feet on a ship and every day for eleven months on a mountain — and she has never once been allowed to look at it, because Val wears her hair down and her collars high and has done both since she was eighteen for reasons Kyra now understands entirely. She puts her fingers on it, below the ear, where the light comes up when Val feels something. It is warm. Not the light; there is no light, the fire is high. It is only skin, and the cord of the muscle under it, and a pulse going much faster than Val's face is admitting to. Kyra strokes it once, slowly, with two fingers, from behind the ear down to where the neck goes into the collar. Val's eyes close. That is all: she does not move and she does not say anything and she does not open them again, and Kyra stands in a hut on a mountain and watches Vaelith Sorin close her eyes and stand still and let a thing be done to her, and understands, with a clarity that arrives all at once and never afterward goes away, that this is what it looks like when Val gives something up. So Kyra leans in. She does it slowly. She gets close enough that Val would have felt the warmth of her, and she sees Val's chin come up very slightly — the smallest movement, the beginning of the motion a person makes when they are about to be told something quietly, because that is the only thing Kyra has ever done at this distance in fifty-nine years, and because Val Sorin has spent her whole life preparing for the next sentence. Kyra does not say anything. She puts her mouth on the side of Val's neck, just behind the ear, and kisses her. It is soft and it takes no time at all, and she feels Val's whole body understand it about a half second after it happens, which is the longest half second of Kyra's life. Then she draws back far enough to see her face. Val's eyes are open. She is not composed. She is looking at Kyra the way she looks at a result that has come out in a way she had not predicted and is going to have to think about for a very long time, and there is nothing at all sealed about it, and neither of them says one word. Val kisses her on the mouth. She does it before she has decided to do it, which has happened to her exactly twice in her life and both times on this mountain. There is no arithmetic. There is no sentence prepared and no reason she could have produced afterward under any kind of examination, and she takes Kyra's face in both hands, with her fingers in the hair she has just cut, and kisses her. Kyra makes a sound against her mouth that Val is going to remember for four hundred years. Afterward — a good while afterward, standing in the middle of the hut with their foreheads together and neither of them entirely steady — Kyra says: *you've never done that.* No. *Not once. Not in* — she stops. *That's the thing I keep arriving at. You've never once put a hand on anybody without a reason for it.* I am aware, Val concedes. *So what was the reason?* *There wasn't one,* Val says. Kyra laughs, and it comes out shaking, and she puts her arms round Val's neck and holds on. The fire is high, and it is going to stay high, because the wood is stacked and it is the middle of the night and neither of them has any intention of going outside. It is Val who puts it out. She does it deliberately, in front of Kyra, with the flat of the shovel and the ash from the edges, raking it over until there is nothing but a red line at the bottom and then nothing at all, and then she stands up in a hut that has not been dark since the spring and says: *I want you to see it.* *Val* — *I have thought about this,* Val says, *which will not surprise you. I have been thinking about it since the night you woke me up and told me my hands were lit. I have spent the better part of a year on this mountain keeping a fire high so that nobody could see me, and there is nobody, there has never been anybody, there is one person on this entire world and she is standing in front of me.* Her voice does something Kyra has never heard it do. *And I would like, once, to not be managing it.* The last of the red goes out. And the light comes up through Val. It comes up slowly: at her throat first, where Kyra put her mouth, and then her wrists, and then along her collarbones and under her hair at the temples and down the length of her arms — and then it does not stop. It goes on coming, into her hands and her face and everything Kyra can see and everything she cannot, until she is lit all through, softly, evenly, the color of nothing on this world, standing in the middle of a shepherd's hut in the Carpathians with her eyes open. She is looking at Kyra. She is letting Kyra look. Kyra cannot move. She has seen the wrists and the throat and the line of her jaw in the dark on the floor of a hull; she had thought that was the thing. This is not that. This is a woman standing in a room she is lighting by herself, with nothing held anywhere, and Kyra Davan stands in front of her and understands that nobody on either world has ever seen this, and that nobody ever will, and that it is being done on purpose, for her, by a person who has never once in fifty-nine years done anything without a reason she could produce. *Say something,* Val says. *Please.* Kyra crosses the floor and puts both hands on her face. *There isn't anything,* Kyra says. And Val's eyes go, briefly, to the gold in Kyra's, which has come up somewhere in the middle of all this and which neither of them has mentioned, and she makes a small sound that is almost a laugh, and turns her face into Kyra's palm, the way she had on the straw. It is not quick this time. There is no floor and no session and no leg and nothing to be interrupted, and the hut is dark and warm and going to stay both, and there are four more months of winter and nowhere in the world either of them has to be. They take their time. That is the whole of it, and it is the entire difference: that nothing about it is accidental, that neither of them is surprised, that everything either of them does is done slowly and on purpose and answered, and that the light stays up the whole way through, so that Kyra can see everything, and Val lets her. Much later, in the dark, with the fire out and the ash cooling and the mountain absolutely silent, Kyra says into the space between them: *I'm going to want to say something.* I know. *I don't have it yet.* I know that too, Val says. *It's not that I don't* — she stops, and starts again. *There's a thing, and it's got no word on it, and every word I try is too small, and I'm not going to put a small word on it just so I've said something.* Val is quiet a moment. *Good,* Val says. *Good?* *When you have it, I would like it to be the right one. I have waited fifty-nine years. I can wait for the word.* And in the dark Kyra finds her hand and holds on to it, and outside the hut the snow begins again, quietly, on a mountain in a country whose name they still cannot pronounce.

**XVIII. The Flicker** — Kyra feels it four days before it arrives, which is how she knows it is not weather. Weather comes into her the way a door closes somewhere in a house: one day out, always, and unmistakable, and she has been right about it so many times over the winter that Val has stopped writing it in the ash. This is not that. This comes in at four days and does not resolve into anything; it is underneath the field rather than in it, the way a hand on a table is underneath the sound of the room, and it does not get nearer so much as it gets *more*. *Something's coming,* Kyra says on the first day. *Weather?* No. *Say the nearest thing.* I can't. It's not a shape yet. Kyra puts both hands flat on the bench, which she does now when she wants to stay still. *Write it down. Today's the day I said it, and I'm saying it with nothing.* Val writes it in the ash. It comes up under the world on the fourth night. Kyra wakes with it — not the way she wakes on the bad nights, which is the field getting hold of her and running through her at somebody else's rate, and she knows the whole shape of that now and so does Val. This has nothing to do with her at all. This is the planet. She lies in the dark with Val's arm over her and listens to it, if *listened* were the word, and it is not; there is no word; there is never going to be a word. The field of this world has a note in it. It has had one since the first night in the snow, a low enormous hum she stopped noticing the way you stop noticing your own heartbeat — and the note has gone up. Not much. It is the difference between a room with the door shut and the same room with the door open an inch, and she is the only person on the planet who can hear it, and she lies in a hut at the dead hour absolutely certain of two things: that it is real, and that she is never going to be able to prove it to anybody, including herself. *You're awake,* Val says. *It's here.* What's here? *The thing I said was coming.* Kyra sits up. *It's not in me. It's in the world. Val, the whole field's gone up.* Val is already reaching for the tinder. It lasts about three weeks, and for the first fortnight Kyra is unbearable. She knows she is; she can see herself doing it and cannot stop — going out at all hours to stand on the pasture and hold still; coming back and saying the same four things in a different order; getting Val to sit with her hands on the hull one afternoon, all the way up the slope in wet snow, on the theory that a thing grown in a right field might notice a wrong one going wronger, and getting nothing, because the ship is a ship and not an instrument. *You have no bench,* Val says on about the ninth day, *and no plate, and no meter, and nothing to compare it against, and one observer.* I know. *And the observer is the instrument.* I *know*, Val. *I am not saying it to be cruel. I am saying it because you are going to say it to yourself in four months in a much worse voice, and I would rather you heard it from me now, in daylight, with somebody sitting next to you.* Kyra puts her head in her hands. *I've done this before.* I know you have. *Four seconds of a plate and a woman who wanted it to be. That's what I said to you on the ninth night, on the slope, with eight of us left, and I was right to say it.* She looks up. *And now I'm sitting on a mountain with no instrument at all telling you the field of a planet has gone up, and the only evidence is that I say so.* Yes. *So write it down.* *I have written it down,* Val says. *Every day since the first one. Including the days you said nothing, which are also data.* On about the fourteenth day Val starts her own column. Kyra does not notice for two days, and when she does notice she sits down on the floor and makes Val read it out. It is in the ash by the hearth, in the bad uphill hand: four short lines a day. Whether Kyra has slept. Whether the bad hour has come. What her eyes have done, and when. And — this is the one Kyra had not expected — what Val's own hands have been doing, and whether the light has come up unasked. *You're in it.* *I am the other instrument,* Val says. *There are two of us on this world and one of them is not paying attention to herself, so I have been doing it for her.* *What does it say?* Val tells her. It says that in the three weeks since the note went up, Kyra's bad hours have stopped — not eased; stopped; there has not been one since the second night of it. It says that Kyra's eyes have gone gold four times in those weeks, all four in the evening, none of them attached to anything that happened. It says that Val's own light has come up unasked a dozen times, which is more than the whole of the autumn, and that twice it has come up in daylight where it could not show and she felt it anyway. And it says that on the eleventh night, for something between one and two hours, both of them were awake at the same time for no reason either of them could name. Kyra sits with that. *It's doing something to us.* *It is doing something to us, and it is a small something, and I want to be extremely careful about the difference between that sentence and the one you are about to say.* I wasn't going to say anything. *You were going to say* it's doing something to us and I don't know what, *and then you were going to lie awake with it, and I would rather you lay awake with the accurate version.* It goes off the same way it came on: over about four days, without an event, like a fever going out of a room. Afterward there is a kind of flatness neither of them expected and both of them recognize from the institute, which is the flatness that comes after a result that is not a result. They go down on the first clear day after, and Frederick gives them salt and asks them a question about the mountain in the winter that Kyra answers with four true sentences, and they come back up, and that night they sit by the fire and Val says: *I want to do the other thing now.* What other thing? *The one we have both been not doing for three weeks.* Kyra feels her whole body go still. *Oh,* Kyra says. Yes. *You've been thinking about it the whole time.* *Since the fourth night,* Val says. She has not said anything, because Kyra was out on that pasture at all hours and because she did not want to put a word in her head that she would then hear in everything. But it has been three weeks, and it has gone, and she is not going to keep it. She gets up and gets the primer off the bench and moves it and sits down again, which Kyra understands to be Val arranging a room in order to say a thing. *Neither of us has had a cycle,* Val says. There it is. Kyra has not let herself get to it in words for three weeks; she has got near it four or five times, on the pasture, at the dead hour, and has gone round it every time the way you go round a hole in the dark. *No,* Kyra says. *Say your figures and I'll say mine.* Kyra does the count she has done four times that week: hers is due — hers was due in the autumn, near enough; she has been going on the count she has always gone on and there is nothing to count with here, but by any reckoning she has had since she was twenty, it is late, and it is not a little late. *Mine also,* Val says. *Mine was due in the middle of the winter.* The fire moves. *We came through a fold,* Kyra says. *We came down on a world that is wrong for us and we changed, all the way through, for eleven months. My eyes do a thing. Your skin does a thing. I can feel the weather and you can feel a root in your hand. Everything about us has moved.* Yes. *So why would that not move.* It would be extraordinary if it had not, Val concedes. Kyra looks at the fire a long moment. *Val. Say the whole of it. You've got it worked out and you're being careful with me and I would rather have it.* So Val says the whole of it, in order, the way she does. *A cycle is the body letting go of its own agreement and finding it again.* Every process in you stops holding the same time, and for the length of it you cannot hold yourself, and you lock onto an outside until the new agreement takes. On Sethal the outside is the planet. *That is why nobody dies of it at home. The planet is half of it, and always was, and nobody thinks about that any more than they think about air.* *And here there's no planet.* *Here there is a field that is wrong in every particular,* Val says, *and if a body went into a reset in it, it would have nothing correct to lock to. It would lock to the wrong thing, or to nothing.* She stops. *And it would not come back.* Kyra finds that she has her hand over her own mouth. *So the fact that neither of us has had one* — *is the single most fortunate thing that has happened to either of us since the snow,* Val says. *Yes.* They take four days over it, which for two scientists with nothing else to do is a long time. They do it properly, sitting on the floor with the fire between them, and they argue, and Kyra shouts twice and Val does not raise her voice once, which is the most annoying thing about her and always has been. They arrive at three possibilities and write all three in the ash. The first is that the cycles are late: eleven months of a body being taken apart and rebuilt would delay a great many things, and a delay is not an ending, and this would mean that both of them are sitting on a mountain waiting for a thing that will kill them when it comes. The second is that the change has broken it — that whatever was done to them in the eleven months has taken the machinery out, the way a bad winter takes a fruit tree, and that it is simply gone, along with a great deal else neither of them will ever get back. The third is the one Val hates. *It adapted,* Kyra insists. *That is the word I have been avoiding all year,* Val admits. *You avoided it in the autumn and then you used it.* *I used it about the light and the eyes, where I could see the thing happening in front of me,* Val says. *This is different. This is looking at an absence and calling it a design.* *It's a body that had a thing that would kill it here, and now doesn't have it.* *That is one description of the evidence. The other description of the evidence is* two women have not yet died of something, *which is a sentence you can say about absolutely anybody at any time.* Kyra throws a piece of kindling at her. Val catches it. In the end they go with the third, and both of them know they have chosen it and not concluded it. That is the part Kyra remembers afterward — not the argument, but the evening at the end of it, when Val said *I want to record that we are deciding this*, and Kyra said *I know*, and Val said *no, I want it recorded; say it back to me*, and Kyra said it back to her, out loud, in a hut, with nobody to hear it: *We do not know. We have no instrument and one observer and two bodies and no controls, and what we have decided is that this planet has taken our cycles away from us, and we have decided it because the alternative is that we sit here for the rest of our lives waiting for something that we cannot survive.* *And?* *And it isn't a finding. It's a place to stand.* *Yes,* Val says. *That is exactly what it is, and I want us both to know the difference for as long as we go on standing on it.* What Kyra does not tell her — because it is not a thing, because it is not even a thought, because there is nothing in it that could have been written in ash — is the last piece. It comes to her afterward, in the dark, on the bench, with Val asleep beside her and the wind up over the ridge. The note went up. It went up over four days and stayed up for three weeks and went away again, and she has a number in her head about it that she has not said out loud: the same number she has been carrying since a cold plateau at nineteen, the number out of two years of measurements that made her name and that nobody has ever been able to explain. Eleven. She does not say it. She has said a thing once with nothing behind it, on this mountain, about a smudge in the sky, and had earned that; this one has nothing behind it at all, not even a shape. She lies in the dark and does the only thing she can do with it, which is to decide to be here in eleven years and find out. Then she puts her hand flat on Val's breastbone, which is the wrong way round and which Val is asleep for, and feels the steady wrong-rate hum of a woman who is going to be here too.

#### Spring, 1608 (Part Five)

**XIX. The Thaw** — Val begins the notebook on the first morning she wakes up warm. That is how the spring arrives that year: not with the snow going, which takes another month, but with a single morning at the end of the cold when she wakes and finds that the hut is not trying to kill them, and lies on the bench for a while with her hands folded on her chest doing nothing at all, which she has not done since the autumn. Then she gets up and cuts the quill properly and sits down with a sheet of Frederick's paper on the wood-block. She starts with the four markers, because that is where the work starts, setting them out in her own hand in the letters of a language she learned in a hut over one winter, which is the only writing she has, and which nobody on this world will ever be able to read a word of. It takes most of the morning and about a quarter of the sheet, and it is the first work of her life she has ever done with no instrument, no bench, no record to check against, and nobody to argue with her. *You're bleeding through,* Kyra says, looking over her shoulder at midday. *The paper is soft,* Val corrects. *I am compensating.* *You're compensating by writing smaller, and you're going to be reading that for four hundred years.* Val looks at it. Then she starts the line again, larger. It takes the better part of a fortnight: the four markers, with the drift she drew for Renn after he flew, which she was right about and has never been able to prove to anybody's satisfaction; Kyra's own panel, written out with permission that was given over a bench with a shrug and has never been withdrawn; her own four, which she has read so many times she could draw them asleep; the vault sequence, which she writes out without comment and does not explain on the page, because the page does not need it and because there is exactly one person alive who knows what it is for and she is four feet away making soup. And then the rest of it, which is everything she knows about a body that matters. She writes it small and evenly and uphill, and the hand steadies as the days go on, and by the eighth day it is nearly her own hand again, which she notices with a satisfaction she does not mention. On the ninth day she comes to the end of what she has planned, and looks at what is left of the paper, and finds that there is a little. She sits with that for a long time. Then she turns the sheet over and writes, at the top, in the letters of a language her daughter will never learn: *Gennive.* What she writes under it is four lines long and takes her the rest of the afternoon. She does not tell Kyra what is on it. She does not hide it either; it goes into the stack with the rest, and Kyra could have read it any time in the next four hundred years and never does, and that is a thing the two of them manage without one word being said about it in either direction. The snow goes off the pasture in about a fortnight and the valley fills up with water. Kyra feels it coming four days out and is wrong about it, which has not happened all winter: she says rain and it is rain, and then it is rain on old snow with a warm wind behind it, and by the second day the streams are coming down off that mountain in a way neither of them has seen, brown and loud and carrying whole trees. The path is impassable for three days; on the fourth it is passable for someone who does not mind getting wet to the hip, and on the fifth they go down, because they are out of nearly everything, and because the last of Frederick's paper is gone and Val wants more. They come down into a village that has water in the lower lane. It is not a disaster, and Val understands that at once, and it is important: the houses stand on the rise, and the people are out in it in a way that tells her they have done this before, dragging things to higher ground with the cheerful competence of a place that has a bad spring every four or five years. Two men are driving animals up the slope. Somebody is laughing about it. The stream at the bottom of the lane, which is a stream, has become a brown thing forty feet wide going very fast. *That'll be down by tomorrow,* Kyra says. *It will be down by tomorrow and it is eleven feet deep now.* They go up the lane to Frederick's and Kyra buys salt, and the whole of it takes about a quarter of an hour, and they are in the open ground by the well when the woman starts screaming. Val could not have said afterward how Kyra knew where to go. She asks her about it later and gets an answer that is no answer: that the woman had been pointing, and that the ground goes where the ground goes, and that anybody could have seen it. Val had been standing four feet from her and had seen a woman screaming and a crowd of villagers running toward the wrong end of the water, and Kyra Davan had gone the other way at a dead run without breaking stride — down the side of the lower lane, over a fence, and along the bank past a dozen houses to a place where an alder had come down across the flood at an angle. By the time Val gets there the child is already against the alder, and Kyra is already in. It is one of the four. That is the part Val's mind keeps producing afterward, over and over, at the wrong moments: that it is one of the four children who followed Kyra up and down that lane all summer, the middle-sized one, the one who can whistle through his fingers. He went in above the village and came down with the water and has fetched up in the fork of the alder, chest-deep, holding on, not shouting. He has stopped shouting — that is the thing Val notices with the clinical part of herself that never stops working, and it is the worst sign there is. Kyra goes in from the bank at an angle, upstream, with her arm hooked over the trunk of the alder. The water takes her legs out immediately and she has expected that; she goes along the trunk hand over hand with her whole body streaming out behind her and the water going over her shoulders and coming up brown around her face. On the bank four villagers arrive at a run and stop, because there is nothing to do from the bank. Val stands among them and does nothing, and will remember doing nothing. Kyra gets to him. She gets one arm round him and takes hold of the alder with the other and then simply stays there for a moment, braced, with the whole weight of the water on both of them, and Val watches her mouth move and knows she is talking to him, and knows exactly what that voice sounds like. Then she comes back along the trunk with him against her chest. It takes a long time. Four hands come down off the bank at the end of it — the men have gone in to their waists and made a chain — and the child comes up out of the water and is passed along it, and then Kyra comes out on her hands and knees in the mud with her hair down her back and her skirt streaming. She rolls over and sits up and the mother gets to her and goes down on her knees in front of her, with the child in her arms, both of them soaked, saying something over and over. And Kyra, who has just been in a flood, looks up into that woman's face at a distance of about a foot, in the middle of the afternoon, with the whole of her body going and her heart doing what it does. Val sees it happen from ten feet away. The gold comes up in Kyra's eyes all the way out from the pupil, clear and warm, the way it had on a bench outside a hut when she laughed at a spilled pail, and it stays for perhaps four seconds, and the child's mother is looking directly into it. Nobody says anything. That is the thing Val turns over for the rest of that day and most of the following week: nobody says anything at all. The woman stops talking in the middle of a word and then starts again. Somebody puts a blanket round Kyra. A man Val has never seen before shakes Kyra's hand with both of his and says something long and fast that Kyra does not understand a word of, and the whole of the lower lane is loud with people saying what people say. And the woman with the child in her arms has gone quiet, and has backed off two steps, and has not stopped looking. They get Kyra up to Frederick's yard, where there is a fire. He comes out and takes one look and turns round and goes back in for a blanket, and does not ask a single question, which Val notices and files. Kyra sits on a stool by the fire with her hair dripping and starts to shake about a quarter of an hour later, which is the ordinary course of it. *You're all right,* Val says. I know what I am. *You are shaking because your body has finished and is now telling you about it. It will pass in an hour.* *Val.* Kyra looks up. *Did they see.* There it is. Val considers, for about a second and a half, the shape of a comforting answer; then discards it, because they promised in the snow and because Kyra would have known anyway. *His mother saw. At a foot. For about four seconds. I do not think anybody else was close enough or looking.* Kyra shuts her eyes. *I didn't feel it. That's the thing. I've been able to feel it coming since the autumn — I get a warmth behind them, half a second, it's like standing too near a stove — and I felt nothing at all.* *You were somewhat occupied.* Don't be kind about it. *I am not being kind,* Val says. *I am telling you that a body which has just done that is not going to be running its ordinary warnings, and that this is a finding, and that it is the most important one either of us has made this year, and I am extremely sorry about the circumstances in which we got it.* Frederick walks them to the edge of the trees, which he has not done since the autumn, and does it in silence for most of the way. At the stream he stops. *You will not come down for a while.* It is not a question and it is not an instruction, and Val, who has spent eleven months learning to hear the shape of what this man is not saying, hears all of it. *How long?* *I do not know.* Frederick looks back down the valley. *A thing has happened today that is good. Everybody saw it. In a week they will still be saying it.* He stops. *And there is a woman at the end house who has said for four months that nobody has seen you eat, and a boy who says he lost a thing on the mountain and found another thing in his coat, and a man who died in a lean-to with two women beside him, and now there is a mother who will not say what she saw, and will not stop not saying it.* *That is a great deal of English,* Val says. *I have been practicing,* says Frederick, *on the way down the lane.* Kyra says: *what do they call it? The thing they are not saying.* Frederick does not answer for a moment. *There is a word. It is a foolish word. It is a word for a woman who is old and alone and has a cat and a bad temper, and in a good year nobody means anything by it.* He looks at them both. *It is not a good year. There is water in the lane.* They go up the mountain in the last of the light and neither of them says anything until the treeline. *You'd do it again,* Val says. *Of course I'd do it again,* Kyra insists. *I know. I am not asking you not to.* Val stops on the path. *I want to say the accurate thing, which is that I have never been more frightened than I was standing on that bank, and that I was not frightened for the reason you think.* Kyra turns round. *I was frightened because there was a moment in the middle of it when I understood that you were going to go into that water whatever it cost, and that if it cost you, you would go anyway, and that there is no version of you in which that is different. And I stood on a bank and did the arithmetic on what my life would be, and it took about a second, and it came out at nothing.* She says it without any particular emphasis, which is the only way she can say it. *That is the finding. I have had eleven months to arrive at it and I arrived at it on a riverbank in a village with water in the lane.* Kyra comes back down two steps and puts her hands on either side of Val's face. *I'm here.* I know. *Say the rest of it.* *That is the rest of it. That is the whole of it, and I am aware that there is a word for it, and I have not got the word, and I would rather not hand you a small one.* Kyra laughs, wetly, and puts her forehead against Val's. *We're both doing that.* I had noticed, Val concedes. *One of us is going to say it eventually.* Yes, Val says. I imagine one of us is. They go up the rest of the way in the dark, which neither of them needs a light for any more, and behind them the valley fills with the sound of a flood going down.

**XX. No Smoke** — They do not go down for three weeks, and on the day they do, Frederick is waiting at the edge of the trees. That is how Kyra knows. He has never once come up. He is standing at the place where the path comes out of the forest with his coat on and his hands behind him, and he has been standing there long enough to have been standing there on other days as well, and when he sees them he does not walk to meet them, which is the last small courtesy: he lets them come to him, so that the walking is theirs. *It is time,* he says. *Say it properly,* Kyra says. Frederick looks at her. Then he says it properly, in English, which he has been practicing again, because the words come out in order and are the right ones and cost him something. *You must go. Not today. Soon. Before the summer.* *Who decided?* *Nobody decides such a thing. It decides.* He looks down the valley, where the water has gone off the lower lane and left the grass flattened and pale. *The pastor has asked me twice about you. He is a good man. That is the trouble; a bad one asks once and forgets. He asks me because he does not want to ask anybody else, and when he has asked me four times he will have to.* *Ask you what?* *Where you are from. What you eat. Why you do not come.* Frederick's mouth does something. *And what a woman by the water saw in the face of the woman who saved her son.* Kyra feels Val go still beside her. *She has not said it. That is the worst of it, you understand? She has not said it, and so nobody can answer it. She has told two people that she saw nothing. She has told her sister that she will not speak of it. A thing that is said can be argued with. A thing that is not said* — he opens his hands — *grows.* Kyra says: *you would not say the word. At the stream, in the spring. You said it was a foolish word and you would not say it.* Frederick looks at the ground for a moment. *Bosorka,* he says. He says it quietly, in the village's language, and then again in English, and the English one is shorter and lands harder, the way the English ones do. *Witch. That is the word. I did not say it to you because a word that is not said is a word a person can still walk away from, and I wanted you to have the spring.* He puts his hands behind him again. *Now it is said. Twice in my house, by two men, in the same fortnight. So now I say it to you as well, because you should not hear it first from somebody who means it.* Kyra finds that she has nothing at all. It is a noise — that is the whole of what it is to her, four sounds in a language she learned out of a poem book over one winter, and it does not mean anything, and it means that a woman in a doorway will not look at her, and that a boy who has learned to whistle through his fingers will grow up in a village where two women were once something with a name. *What happens,* Kyra says, *to a woman they call that?* *In this valley?* Frederick does not soften it, which she is grateful for afterward and not at the time. *Nothing, for a year. Then a bad winter, or a child dies, or the water comes into the lane twice. And then it is not nothing.* *And you?* Val says. *What do you think she saw?* It is the first time in the whole of that year that either of them has asked him a question of that kind, and Kyra hears Val do it, and understands that Val is giving him something: the chance, once, to ask. Frederick stands at the edge of the trees for a long moment. *I think she saw a woman pull her son out of a river,* he says. And he does not ask. It takes them a fortnight to be ready, which is thirteen days longer than the packing requires. What they have is not much: two sets of village clothes, the gray ship clothes rolled and tied, the cutter, the comb, the knife, the cooking iron, the primer, the poem book, and the notebook in its wrapping of cloth. Kyra's field set, cleaned every fourth day since the snow, goes in last and goes in at the top, which she does not examine. The rest of the fortnight is the mountain. They go up to the ship four times in those two weeks — twice for practical reasons and twice for none — and the fourth time Val stands in the middle of the second section with her hands open at her sides and says: *I want to be accurate about what we are doing.* Go on. *We are not leaving it. It is not going anywhere. The hull goes to ground, and it stays, and it is on a mountain nobody climbs in a country nobody has heard of, and we are going to come back.* *You believe that?* *I have decided it,* Val says, *which is a different thing, and we have had that conversation once already this year.* Kyra puts her hand flat on the wall that had been a floor. Under her palm, faint and steady and the right shape, is the small field she has been able to find with her eyes shut since a day in the spring when she sat in the snow and wanted something with the whole of herself. It has not got any stronger over the year. It has not got any weaker either. *We'll be back,* Kyra says, to the wall. The lockers are the last thing. Eight of them have been shut all year; one came open on the night Kyra found which smudge was home, and gave her back three books she had not read since before the fold, a case of plates recording four seconds of a sky that no catalogue on Sethal contained, and a drawing done by a six-year-old in which one of the four figures has no mouth. She goes to it on the last morning and gets the door down and takes the drawing out and holds it. *You're not taking it,* Val says from the hatch. No. *Tell me why, so that I know you have a reason and are not simply being brave.* Kyra looks at it for a while: the tall one with all the hair, the one with no mouth, the one with her arms out, and the small one standing slightly apart at the end. *Because it's paper. And we're going down into a country that has water in the lane every four years, and towns, and people, and we're going to be walking for a month with everything we own on our backs, and paper does not survive that. Your notebook is going to be in a cloth inside a coat for four hundred years and it is going to be a wreck by the time we're anywhere, and that one's yours to lose.* She puts the drawing back into the locker, face up, the way it had been. *This one isn't. This one stays in the driest, safest, coldest place on this world, where nobody can find it, and it will be exactly like that when I come back.* *That is a good reason.* *I've had a fortnight to think of one.* She shuts the locker. It clicks, and she puts two fingers on it for a moment, which she is not going to explain. Val chooses the sheets in the afternoon. The lattice record is in the second bay in a rack that came half off the wall in the fall: sheets of the ship's own material, thin and pale and flexible, each one written through with the record of everything the hull held during the season. There are a great many of them; nobody has ever counted them because nobody has ever needed to. Kyra sits on the bench and watches her go through it. It takes a long time, and it is, Kyra thinks, the most Val thing she has ever watched anybody do: a woman standing at a rack for two hours in the light of a hull that has begun to give her things, taking out one sheet and holding it and putting it back, and taking out another, and putting that back, and building in her head a case for what a person keeps when she can keep almost nothing. At the end of it she has eleven. *Eleven,* Kyra says. Yes. *Why eleven?* Val looks at the sheets in her hands for a moment. *Because that is what would go into the wrapping,* Val says. Kyra does not say anything. She looks at Val's face and Val looks back at her, and neither of them says a single word about the eleven who died in the fold, then or at any point in the four hundred years that follow, although both of them think about it every single time the sheets come out of their cloth. They leave the mountain on a clear morning at the end of the spring. Kyra puts her palm on the hull for the last time and wants it to hide, which is unnecessary, because it has never once shown itself to anybody but her — and the hull goes the color of the mountain anyway, obligingly, the way it had the first time, because she asked. Then the two of them stand on the snowfield and look at nothing at all: at a slope going up to a band of dark rock, with old gray ice on it, and shadow, and a wind coming over the top. *Eleven months,* Val says. To the week. *To within four days. I have the count.* Of course you have the count, Kyra says, and takes her hand, and they go down. Frederick has two things for them and one of them is paper, which Val had asked for and expected to pay for and does not. The other is in his hand when he comes out of the house, and he stands in the yard turning it over for a moment before he gives it to her: a piece of tin about the size of a palm, cut from something larger, with the edges turned back on themselves so they will not cut, polished on one side until it gives back the yard and the sky and, when he holds it up, most of a face. *It is not a good one,* Frederick says. *A good one is glass and silver and I have not got one, and I am not going to buy one in this village, because a man who buys a glass in this village is a man who has somebody to give it to.* *Thank you,* Val says, and takes it. *You have no water that holds still,* he says, *on a mountain. I thought about that in the winter.* He shrugs, which he has not done before; he has picked it up from Kyra, and neither of them ever tells him. *A person should be able to see her own face.* Kyra is going to say something and finds that she cannot. Val does it instead. *Frederick. My name is not Valeria.* He does not look surprised. He looks, for a moment, unbearably tired. *I know,* he says. *Do you want it?* He thinks about it. He actually thinks about it; Kyra watches him do it, standing in his own yard with his hands at his sides, a merchant's son of fifty-odd who came home from abroad to an empty house and has spent a year teaching two strangers his fourth language for nothing at all. *No,* he says at last. *If I have it, I will say it. And then somebody will hear it.* He puts his hand flat on his own chest, the way Kyra taught him without meaning to, on the first day, in a storehouse. *Go safely, Vali. Go safely, Klára.* *Go safely, Frederick,* Kyra says. They do not embrace. He puts his hand out instead, the English way, and shakes each of theirs once, and turns round and goes into his house and shuts the door, and Kyra stands in the yard and looks at the door for a moment and then does not look at it any more. They go out of Dymná by the path along the stream, because that is the way they first went, and because it takes them past nobody. The last of the village is the lower lane, which they can see from the path: the flattened grass where the water had been, and the roofs, and somebody's animals out, and at the end of it a woman standing in a doorway with a child beside her, looking up at the hill. Kyra stops. *Don't,* Val says. I'm not going to. *You are considering it.* I'm allowed to consider it, Kyra insists. She looks down at the doorway for a long moment. The woman does not wave. The child does, once, with his whole arm, and his mother takes his hand down. They walk on. They come out above the charcoal man's clearing at midday. Neither of them has planned that; the path goes where the path goes, and the trees open, and there it is: the flat ground and the stumps cut level and old, the woodpile gone gray and settling, the lean-to with its bark roof going in on one side. And the mound, which is a hill of earth and turf with a black gash down one flank, sunk in on itself now, with grass coming up through it. No smoke. Kyra stands at the edge of the clearing and looks at it. She came down this mountain eleven months ago starving, in gray clothes, with a woman on a stick behind her, toward a thread of smoke that went up thin and steady and did not flare or die back, and she had thought: *whatever is making that has been making it for days and means to go on.* *Ondrej,* Kyra says. Val does not say anything for a while. Then: *say the rest of it.* *There isn't a rest of it. That's the whole of it. That's the only one of them I can say.* They stand there. *Seventeen,* Kyra says, *and one, and I still can't put any of them anywhere. But I know where he is, and I know what he was called, and in four hundred years nobody on this world will know either of those things except us.* *Then we'll know them,* Val says. *That's not the same as somewhere.* No, Val agrees. It is not. It is what we have got. Below the clearing the path bends and goes down into the trees, and before it does there is the place where you can see the whole valley at once and have to stop whether you want to or not. They stop. It is a clear afternoon. The valley goes away below them, green and wet and new, with the roofs of Dymná in the middle of it and the plowed strips running out from the village in every direction, and beyond that the country opens and goes on and on into a haze, and somewhere out in that haze are towns with names, and roads, and a sea neither of them has seen, and four hundred years. Val takes the tin out of her coat. She does it without saying anything, and turns it over once, and then holds it up to look at herself, tilting it to catch the light, and Kyra sees her face change. *What?* Nothing. *Val.* Val goes on looking at it for a moment. *I did not recognize her.* What? *Not for very long. For about a second.* She turns the tin a little. *I looked into it and there was a woman looking up at the sky and I thought:* who is that. *And then it was me.* Kyra comes and stands beside her and looks into it too, over her shoulder, at the two of them in a piece of polished tin at arm's length: very alike, both of them, in the way that has followed them their whole lives — the same height, the same build, the same faces near enough that in poor light they have been mistaken for sisters four times on two worlds — and completely different, and both of them older in a way that has nothing at all to do with their faces, which have not changed. *That's us,* Kyra says. That is us. *I'd have said I knew what we looked like.* So would I, says Val, and puts the tin away. They go down into the trees. The path is soft with the spring and the light comes through in pieces, and neither of them looks back, and they do not talk for a long time, and then they do, because they are going to be walking for a month and neither of them can keep quiet for more than an hour. *South,* Kyra says. *South and then whatever there is.* *You don't know what there is.* *I know there are towns with more than one man in them who reads,* Val says, *and I know that a person who can read can find out where a road goes, and I would like, at some point in the next four hundred years, to know the name of the country we came down in.* Kyra laughs. The trees take it and give it back off the rock above them, and she hears it come back, and thinks of the sixth day on that mountain, when a woman with two doctorates spent four hours making a fire and Kyra laughed for the first time and it stopped almost before it started, and neither of them said a word about it. She laughs again, on purpose, to see whether the mountain will take it this time. It does. And then the last image, from outside both of them: on a mountain, in the spring, two figures come down out of the trees toward the valley. They come down easily, both of them, neither faster than the other, and they are talking — that is the thing; you could have heard them from a long way off, one of them talking and the other one answering, all the way down. Below them, far down where the valley opens, there is no smoke at all.

### Themes and structure

**The shape.** Twenty chapters in five seasonal parts, running spring to spring: *Spring, 1607* (four chapters), *Summer* (six), *Autumn* (four), *Winter* (four), *Spring, 1608* (two). This is the first book in the series divided into parts at all, and the division does real work, because the seasons are the plot. Almost nothing happens because a character decides it is time. The ration runs out, so they go down. The flocks come up on a particular afternoon with a river of bells behind them, so the hut stops being theirs and they move into the ship. The flocks go down a fortnight before the first frost, so the hut becomes theirs again and the winter can be a winter. The mound comes down in the first week of the cold. The thaw puts water in the lane, and the water puts a child in an alder, and the child puts gold in Kyra's eyes in front of a witness. Even the romance is seasonal: it happens in high summer because a leg has stopped needing mending and a hand has nothing left to do, and it is completed in the deepest part of winter because there are four months of dark coming and nowhere to be.

The two-chapter last part is the shortest and the fastest, and it is where every consequence lands.

**Restraint as the actual subject.** The rest of the series is about people who use what they have. This one is about two people who refuse to, and it keeps the refusal dramatic rather than passive by giving them exactly one occasion on which it is unbearable — Ondrej — and then letting them not. Both of them break privately and neither of them acts: Val does the carry sums four times, and cheats on the fourth, giving herself a stronger man and a shorter slope and a lattice that has never refused Kyra anything, and even then it does not come out; Kyra climbs to the ship in the night with the man still alive and stands with her hand on the hull for a quarter of an hour and does not ask, because asking would have been asking behind Val's back. They tell each other both of these things afterward. *Good,* Val says, when Kyra says it did not come out.

The mended leg is the counter-example that proves the rule rather than breaking it: they do use the lattice, slowly, over four months, on something that can pass for a long recovery, and what it leaves behind — a cord-thin, perfectly even seam that no eye can see and a hand can find — is the exact size of the margin they are allowed. *You can only find it with your hands.*

**Being seen.** Gold eyes and light under the skin are not a safety device, and the book is careful about that. Kyra cannot see her own eyes and never will: there is no glass on the mountain, the stream will not hold still, the pail is too dark, and the port is crazed into a thousand pieces. What she has instead is Val's promise to tell her every time — *that's what the rule is for* — and that is the whole relationship in one arrangement: two people each carrying something on her body that she cannot see, with the only person who can see it lying an arm's length away. The payoff is Val putting out a fire that has been kept high for a year and standing in a dark hut lit from the inside with nothing held anywhere, on purpose, so that one person can look. The cost is the riverbank, where the thing that cannot be hidden is seen by the wrong person at a foot, and *Bosorka* arrives in the last chapter like a door closing on everything that came before it.

Frederick's tin, handed over at the gate on the last day, is the book's answer to its own device and its most generous moment: a man who has spent a winter noticing that two women who live on a mountain have no still water gives one of them a piece of polished metal with the edges turned back so it will not cut. Val looks into it and does not recognize herself for about a second.

**True sentences, and the prose that comes out of them.** The six-sentence method is a survival protocol that turns into a style. Claims are made no larger than the evidence; comfort is not offered where it cannot be backed; *I don't know* is said out loud and on the record. Val's best lines are all refusals to overclaim — *it is not proof and it is not nothing, and those are different things*; *I am not a comforting person, but it will not come out this month, and this month is what I wanted*; and, after four days of argument about why two women's cycles have stopped on a world where a reset would kill them, the sentence that is the book's whole epistemology: *it isn't a finding. It's a place to stand.* Val insists on both of them knowing the difference for as long as they go on standing on it.

The same instinct governs the two poems. Kyra learns to read out loud, badly, because the shapes are instructions for a noise and the sense comes up out of the noise like a shape out of fog, and what she reads to Val in the first real snow is a man inviting a woman to come and live with him among the valleys and the woods and the steep mountains. Val takes the book, turns straight to the facing page — which means she has been through it alone at some point, which Kyra notices — and reads the reply: that the flowers fade and the fields go to winter and the rivers rage and the rocks grow cold. *She's right. He's an idiot.* *He is not an idiot. He is asking in the spring. Everybody asks in the spring. She is the only one of the two of them who has been outside in November.* Neither poem is quoted; both are given by attribution and argument, which is exactly how the novel handles everything it respects.

**Two people who have known each other for fifty-nine years.** The love story is the book's engine and its slowest-moving part, and it works because almost all of it is retrospective. Nothing is discovered; a door they have both walked past every day turns out to have had a room behind it, full of things they already recognize — a boot room at eighteen, the back of a van at Coldwater, a bench four feet away for a season, twenty years of a house with a spare bed always made up. Val can date hers to the carry in chapter II, when she catalogued the back of Kyra's neck in order, in the dark, and did not admit it to herself for two months. Kyra's arrives on a turf shoulder in the first cold morning of the autumn, watching Val run again, and arrives entire: *I have been looking at that for fifty-nine years.*

The two confessional chapters are the book's peak and they are structurally identical: one woman stops managing, and the other one does not help. Kyra sits on a floor with her hands flat and refuses to ask — *you've been asked; you were asked twice by somebody with a pen, and I'm not going to be the last one* — and Val walks up to the stair on her own and says it badly, because there is no way to say it well. And then the retroactive repair, which is the single most characteristic thing in the novel: not a declaration but a fifty-nine-years-late invitation, asked and answered in nine words. *Will you come up the stair with me.* *Yes.* Afterward they both refuse to name it, repeatedly and on principle, because every available word is too small — and Val, who has waited fifty-nine years, says she can wait for the word.

**Prequel discipline.** Everything the series needs from this year is here and none of it is announced. The name Andromeda arrives because a villager knows a myth about a woman chained in the sea for something her mother said, and Kyra hears her own situation in it and keeps the word. The mouthless drawing comes out of a locker because a strap lets go, and is deliberately left behind, because paper does not survive a month of walking and the coldest driest safest place on the planet is a hull nobody can see. The notebook — the four markers, the drift drawn for Renn, Kyra's panel, the vault sequence, everything Val knows about a body that matters — is begun on the first warm morning, in the letters of a language learned over one winter from a children's primer, which is the only writing she has and which nobody on this world will ever read. Val intends to copy it out again every few decades, which is the first time the reader is told plainly how long this is going to be.

And the eleven lattice sheets, chosen in two hours at a rack by a woman building a case for what a person keeps when she can keep almost nothing, get the book's best withheld line. *Why eleven?* *Because that is what would go into the wrapping.* Neither of them ever says one word about the eleven who died in the fold — not then, and not in the four hundred years that follow, although both of them think about it every time the sheets come out of their cloth.

**The title.** The smoke is Ondrej's: a column over a charcoal mound that goes up thin and steady and does not flare or die back, which is how Kyra knows in the first paragraph that somebody is tending it and means to go on. It is the first evidence of people on this world, the first kindness, and the thing they walk toward when they have strength for one mistake. In the last chapter they come out above the same clearing by accident, because the path goes where the path goes, and the mound is a sunken hill with grass growing through the gash in its flank. The book ends on the absence of its own title image, seen from outside both of them: two figures coming down out of the trees toward a valley, neither faster than the other, talking the whole way, and below them no smoke at all.