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.

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."

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.

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."

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 —