The Table

On the first morning they walked eleven miles and Kyra was happy the whole way, which she did not understand until much later and never entirely forgave herself for.

It was a good road. That was part of it. After a year of a path that went up or went down and had opinions about both, there was a road under them that had been made by people who wanted to get somewhere, running along the flat of a valley with a river beside it and carts on it and other human beings walking in both directions, none of whom looked at them twice. The sky did what it had been doing all spring. The bundle on her back had everything in it that either of them owned.

And Val was walking. That was most of it.

She was walking the way she had walked on the shoulder above the tarn in the last week — quick, level, out in front for stretches and then remembering and dropping back, with no stick and no hitch and no small pause before she put her weight on the right one. Kyra had watched a hundred people walk down that valley in eleven months and not one of them had walked like a woman who had learned it twice.

"You're doing it again," Val said.

"Doing what."

"Watching my leg."

"I'm watching the road."

"You are watching the road," Val agreed, "through my leg," and Kyra laughed out loud on a public highway in a country whose name she did not know, and a carter going the other way looked round at the sound of it.

They had one plan and it was Val's and it consisted of the word south.

The argument for it had taken her four minutes on the last night in the hut. South was where the roads went. South was where Frederick's trade had come from and where his glass had gone. South was warmer, which mattered because they now had no fixed roof and would not have one for some time. And south was away from the valley, which was the whole of it and which neither of them said.

"How far south?" Kyra had asked.

"I have no idea. That's the honest answer and I'd rather give it than a good-sounding one."

"Give me the good-sounding one anyway. I want to hear what it would have been."

Val had thought about it. "Until the place we stop in doesn't know the place we left."

Which had seemed, on the last night in the hut, like a matter of some weeks.

The first town they came to had a market on, and Kyra went into it the way she went into everything, straight in and talking.

It took a great deal less time than she expected to discover that she could not.

She had the village's tongue. She had a year of it, hard-won, learned off a barrel head and a storehouse floor, and she had got good enough at it by the winter to make Frederick laugh at a joke she had built herself. She used it on a woman with onions and the woman looked at her with an expression Kyra recognized immediately, because she had seen it on the faces of four hundred people in a valley: you are making sounds and they are not sounds I use.

She tried it on a man with rope. She tried it on a girl with cheese.

She got back three different languages, none of which was the one she had, two of which had words in them she nearly knew, and one of which was being shouted by a boy across the whole width of the square in what was obviously and hopelessly the same family of sounds as everything she had learned and was not it.

Val, who had said nothing for a quarter of an hour, said: "Try the other one."

"Here?"

"Why not here."

So Kyra stood in a market square and said, in English, with the stresses in the places Frederick had put them, that she would like to buy bread.

Nobody in the square had ever heard a syllable of it in their lives.

They sat on a wall outside the town afterward with a loaf they had got by pointing, which had cost them more than it was worth, and which Val broke and put half of by Kyra's knee without looking at her.

Kyra took it. Neither of them said anything about that either. It was eleven months old now, that one, and it had been a piece of black bread on a step in the spring.

"Eleven miles," Kyra said.

"Approximately."

"Eleven miles, and everything he gave me is worth nothing."

"Everything he gave you is worth nothing here," Val corrected. "That is a different sentence and I would like you to hear the difference in it, because we are going to be saying it for a while."

"Say the rest of it."

Val looked down the road. "The rest of it is that we are about to find out how many of these there are. I had been assuming a small number." She turned the crust over in her fingers. "I am revising."

Here is the summer, which can be told quickly, because it was the same thing several times.

They walked. When there was work at the edge of a village they took it — a hayfield, a wall, a woman who wanted her flax turned — and they were paid in food and once in a blanket and twice in nothing at all, which they discovered was a thing that could happen to two women with no man and no kin and nobody to go to about it. When there was no work they kept walking, because a place where you are not working is a place where people begin to ask what you are doing.

They slept out. That was the part Kyra had not properly imagined. On the mountain there had been a hut with a fire and then a hull with a door, and both of them had been theirs; out here there was a hedge, or a barn if they were lucky and quiet, or a stand of trees off the road, and every one of them belonged to somebody.

And her weather was no use to her at all.

She had it. It arrived as it always had, a day ahead, lying on the back of her head like a palm: rain tomorrow, from the west, a lot of it. She had built a whole year on that. On the mountain it had meant wood in and the fence checked and the flock down, and it had kept them alive.

On a road it meant she knew, a day in advance, exactly how wet she was going to be.

"It's the most useless gift on this planet," Kyra said, in a barn, in the dark, in the eighth week, with the rain doing what she had told Val it would do at noon of the previous day.

"It's not useless. It's unsold." Val was lying on her back with her hands folded on her ribs. "You have a thing that eleven people in a valley would have given you a winter's food for, and we have spent two months walking past every single person who would want it, because none of them will stop long enough to find out we exist."

"That's the same as useless."

"It is not remotely the same as useless and you know it isn't, and I would like the record to show that you are only saying it because you are wet."

Kyra put her arm over her eyes and laughed in a barn.

They went through the whole of the summer like that, and the whole of the summer they were getting poorer, and neither of them could have said on any particular day that anything had gone wrong.

That was the thing about it. On the mountain there had been a night that was the worst night, and a morning the smoke stopped, and a day the water came into the lane. Here there was nothing to point at. There was only a bundle that had been full in the spring and was not full now, and a way of counting what was in it that Kyra had started doing every few days and then stopped doing, because the counting had begun to feel like a thing a frightened person does.

She counted it in her head anyway. She could not help it. Two sets of village clothes. The gray ship clothes, rolled and tied, which they would never wear again and would never leave. The cutter. Frederick's comb, his knife, his cooking iron. The polished tin. Her field set, cleaned every fourth day since the snow.

And Val's bundle, which was smaller and was paper: the notebook in its cloth, the two books, and eleven sheets of a thing that no one on this world could read.

It happened in the ninth week, on the road, at night, and it took less time than it takes to build a fire.

They had gone off into a birch stand because the village they had passed had a dog that had not stopped, and they had not lit anything, and Kyra was asleep, which she recorded afterward with a kind of cold disgust as the single fact she could not get round.

She woke because her bundle moved.

There were three of them and it was too dark to see faces and none of them said one word. That was the part she went back to for a long time afterward. Not the hands. Not the knee that went into her back and held her down against the leaves with an ease that told her the man had done this before and had a method. The silence. They came in without speaking and they worked without speaking and one of them made a sound in his throat once, like a man moving furniture, and that was the whole of the conversation.

She fought. She was strong and she was fast and she was very, very angry, and she was also a great deal lighter than the arrangement on top of her and had never in her life been in a fight.

Val did not fight. Val, four feet away, went absolutely still — the stillness she went into under pressure, the deliberate one, the one Kyra had watched her use on Frederick and on a mound and on a bad night on a bench — and lay on her own bundle with her arms round it and her face down, and let them take everything that was not underneath her.

And her light did not come up. Not at the throat, not at the wrists. Nowhere.

Kyra, with her cheek in the leaf mold and a hand in her hair, understood exactly what that cost, and was still furious about it eleven days later.

Then they were gone, going quietly, downhill, the way people go when they have done this on this road before.

The birch stand was very quiet afterward.

"Are you hurt," Val said, from the dark.

"No."

"Kyra."

"I'm not hurt. My mouth's bleeding and I'm not hurt." She sat up. Her hands were shaking so hard she put them under her arms. "Why didn't you—"

"Say it."

"You lay there."

"I did," Val said.

"You lay there on your bundle with your face in the dirt and you let three men—"

"Yes."

"Don't do that. Don't agree with me, it's worse—" Kyra heard her own voice going up and could not get under it. "You could have lit. You could have stood up and lit like the night of the mending and they would have gone through that wood like their coats were on fire and we would have kept every single thing we own."

"Yes," Val said again. "And in nine days there would have been a story in four villages about a woman in a wood who burned in the dark, and it would have gone up this road behind us faster than we can walk, and we would have spent the next eleven years finding out what a story like that does when it gets ahead of you."

"I know that."

"I know you know it. I am saying it because you asked me to say it and because you are going to need it said again in about an hour."

Kyra sat in the leaves with her hands under her arms.

"Frederick told us what the word does," Val said, quieter. "He said it does nothing for a year and then there is a bad winter. We have been eleven weeks out of that valley. I am not going to hand this world a second one for a cooking iron."

They found what was left when it got light, which did not take long.

They had the clothes they were standing in. They had Val's bundle, entire — the notebook in its cloth, Coote's primer, the poem book, the eleven sheets — because Val had slept on it every night since the first night on the road and had never once been asked why and had never once explained.

Everything else had gone down the hill in the dark with three men who had not spoken. The cutter. The comb and the knife and the iron. The tin, which was the only thing on this planet in which either of them had ever seen her own face. The blanket. The four coins.

And the field set.

Kyra found where it had been in the bundle and did not say anything for a long time, and Val, who had come and stood beside her, did not say anything either, which was the correct thing and the only correct thing.

It had come off a wall on the Sorren. She had signed for it in a hall, on a form, on the fifth day. She had cleaned it every fourth day since the snow, on a bench, in a hull, with the light down, and had never examined why.

Somewhere down that hill a man was going to open a case and find eleven pieces of something he had no name for, made of a material nobody on this world had ever smelted, and he was going to turn them over in his hands for a while and then sell them for the metal.

"Say it," Val said.

"I've got nothing to say."

"You have a great deal to say and you are not saying it, which is my method and it does not suit you."

"Val—"

"I am not being clever. I am asking. We made an arrangement in the snow and I have been the one breaking it all year and I would rather not watch you start."

Kyra stood in a birch wood at the bottom of a country she could not name.

"It's the last thing I had that I did," Kyra said. "That's all. Everything else we've got is something somebody gave us or something we walked out with. That was mine. I earned it and I signed for it and I cleaned it and now a man on this road is going to weigh it."

Val did not tell her it was all right.

What Val did was put her hand flat between Kyra's shoulder blades, and leave it there, and let her stand in a wood in the early light with her jaw set and her eyes going, for as long as it took.

They walked south again that day, because there was nothing else to do with a day.

And here is the finding Kyra came to, somewhere in that afternoon, walking a good road in fine weather with nothing on her back at all.

On the mountain they had been poor. She had understood poor. Poor was a thing you could work at: you got wood in and you salted what you could and you went down on the seventh day and came back with what there was, and eleven months of it had made her, if anything, faintly proud. She had been hungry on that mountain and she had never once been useless on it.

Down here she was not poor. Down here she was nobody's, in a world made entirely out of whose you were, and there was not one thing she knew how to do that anybody in it would stop long enough to be shown.

She looked sideways at Val, who was walking level, in a dress somebody in Dymná had died out of, with her hair coming down and the sun on the pale of it and her whole bundle of worldly goods under one arm.

"You're doing arithmetic," Kyra said.

"I am."

"On what."

"On the nights." Val said it in the flat voice, looking ahead. "We have about nine weeks before the cold comes, and it is going to be a worse cold than the mountain because we will be in it without a wall, and we have no blanket and no knife and nothing to sell. So I am doing the arithmetic on the nights, and I have done it four times, and it does not come out."

"Then stop doing it."

"I would like to," Val said.

They went on down the road.

Behind them the summer was ending in the ordinary way, in a country neither of them could name, and ahead of them somewhere was a house with a fire in it and a kind woman who would want to know whose daughters they were — and the eleven weeks between those two things were the reason that, eleven months later, in a lane before dawn, neither of them would argue about leaving.

— end of chapter one —

The last night outside was the eleventh of November by the reckoning of the country they were in, and Val did not know that, and would not know it for another fortnight, and would think about it afterward for a long time.

What she knew was that the ground had frozen.

They were under a hedge on the field side of a wall, which was the best of the four places she had looked at, and it was not good. The cold came up out of the ground rather than down out of the sky, which was worse, and she had run the arithmetic on it at dusk and had not said the answer out loud, and had then remembered the arrangement and said it anyway.

"Two more of these," Val said. "Perhaps three. Then one of us stops being able to get up in the morning, and I would like us both to have heard me say that while we are still warm enough to discuss it."

Kyra, behind her, did not answer for a moment. Then her hand came round and went flat against Val's ribs, just under them, and pulled, and Val let herself be pulled back into the shape they had made on a mountain in the spring and had not needed since the hut.

"Better?"

"Marginally."

"You're very cold."

"I am aware of how cold I am. I have been narrating it to myself for an hour in some detail." Val shut her eyes. "Don't let me sleep first."

"I never do," Kyra said.

In the morning they went into the town and asked at the church, because there was nothing else left to ask at.

Val had turned the whole thing over on the last two miles and had arrived somewhere she disliked. Their case was not that they were respectable, because they could not prove it. Their case was not that they were useful, because everyone in that town was useful. Their case was that they had nothing whatsoever, and that a house of charity is built for exactly that, and that the robbery in the birch wood had made them eligible for the only door on this world that had ever opened for them.

She said this to Kyra on the bridge.

"That's a foul way to think about it," Kyra said.

"It is a foul way to think about it and it is also what is going to get us indoors, and I would rather be foul and indoors."

It got them indoors.

The house stood behind the church and had thirteen beds in it and was run by a woman named Dorothea.

She was perhaps fifty, wide across the shoulders, with a voice that had been trained in a room with a great many people in it, and she looked at the two of them in the passage for a considerable time before she said anything at all — long enough that Val understood she was being weighed, and long enough after that to understand she was being weighed by somebody good at it.

What Dorothea said in the end was a question about their feet.

Not where they were from, not whose they were, not what had happened. Whether their feet were sound, because a person who has walked a long way in bad weather may have the beginning of something in them, and she would rather deal with it in a doorway than in a bed.

"That is a very good first question," Val said, in the country's language, badly.

"It is the only first question," said Dorothea. "Sit down."

Here is what the house was, and Val recorded all of it, because she recorded everything.

It was warm. It was warm in a way she had not been since the hull with the light up, and the warmth was not a thing she or Kyra had to make or fetch or ration, and on the third night she woke in the dark to find that she had been lying with her hands open, which she did not do.

There was food twice a day and it was dull and there was enough of it.

There was work, and the work was ordered. The linen went out on the days the linen went out. The floors were done in a sequence. There was a bell, and the bell meant a thing, and the thing happened. Val had spent thirty years inside institutions that ran on exactly this principle and had not understood until she had lost one how much of her was built out of knowing what the next hour contained.

And there were people, and Kyra was very happy.

That was the part Val watched, and did not remark on, and put away.

She watched her in the yard with the two old men who came for the soup and did not want the soup. She watched her get a laugh out of a girl who had not spoken in a fortnight. She watched her learn the language off nine people at once, a word a person, shameless, wrong, loud, four times faster than any sensible method — and at the end of six weeks Kyra Davan could hold a conversation in a tongue she had not known existed in October, and Val, who was more accurate and would always be more accurate, could not.

"You're annoyed," Kyra said.

"I am not annoyed."

"You're extremely annoyed. It's coming off you like heat."

"I am observing," Val said, "that the method I have used all my life is the slower one, and that this is the second time this year the evidence has said so, and I would like a moment with that before you enjoy it."

Kyra took the moment. Then she enjoyed it.

The Latin arrived by accident, the way the best of it did.

There was a priest attached to the house who came on certain days, and he read at them, and Val found on the fourth or fifth occasion that a fair amount of what he was reading had been in Frederick's poem book too, wearing different clothes. Four days after that she asked him a question about a word.

He answered it. Then he asked her where she had heard it. Then he wrote something on a slate and turned it round, and she read it, badly and correctly, and the man sat back on the bench in the yard and looked at her with an expression she had seen on Ilen Vosse's face across a table in a room four hundred years and an entire sky away.

After that he came more often than the days he was required to come.

This was, Val understood perfectly well, a catastrophe in slow preparation. She went on anyway. She would have gone on if the man had been twice as dangerous, and she knew exactly why, and it was not the Latin: it was that for the first time since a storehouse in a valley there was a person in a room who wanted to talk to her about something real.

The questions started in the fourth week, and they were not an interrogation, and that was what made them fatal.

Dorothea asked them the way a woman asks things while doing something else. Sleeves pushed up, arms in a tub, talking. Where had they come from. North, Val said. A long way north, Kyra said, and made it sound enormous and cheerful and empty.

That held for a week.

Then it was: north where? And when that was turned, it was whether there was anyone there. And when that was turned, it was whether there had been a sickness, said gently, because a woman who runs a house of thirteen beds knows that people arrive from the north with nobody left and does not make them say it.

Val let her believe it.

She was not proud of that and she recorded it exactly: she did not say the words, and she let the woman arrive at them, and she watched Dorothea's face go soft with the particular pity that is reserved for the bereaved, and she said nothing at all, and the questions stopped for eleven days.

Then they started again, because they were not suspicion. They were hospitality. A woman who has decided two orphaned sisters have come out of a plague in the north will want to know the parish, so that she can write; and the saint's day, so that she can mark it; and who baptized them, because there is a thing that has to be done about that if the answer is nobody.

Four true sentences had held for a year in a storehouse once a week.

They did not hold for a winter across a wash tub.

What Val discovered about herself in that house she discovered in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, and it rearranged something she had believed since she was nineteen.

She could lie. She had always known she could lie. She had lied to committees, to boards, to her own faculty, to men who had the power to end her and who had wanted to; she had sat in long rooms and given people flawless, unfalsifiable, entirely misleading answers and had gone home and slept. She had thought of it as a skill, like the Latin. It had not once cost her.

Sitting on a bench with a woman who had put a bowl in her hands every day for eleven weeks and had asked her nothing but kind things, she opened her mouth to say the name of a parish and could not do it.

Not would not. Could not. The sentence was assembled and correct and it did not come out.

"You don't have to tell me," Dorothea said, after a while, not looking up from the mending. "I want you to know I've noticed that you don't, and that I haven't pushed, and that I won't. But I'll say the other half of it, because somebody should." She bit the thread. "Father Mihael is going to ask you next. He asks everyone, he has to, and he isn't unkind, and he doesn't stop."

"I know."

"Yes," said Dorothea. "I thought you did."

Val took it to Kyra that night, in the corner of a room with eleven other people breathing in it, in English, at a volume that would not have carried a yard.

"He asks everyone," Kyra said.

"He asks everyone. And everyone can answer him, because everyone in this house came from somewhere with a church in it, and the whole apparatus of this world runs on a man in one parish being able to write to a man in another and have an answer come back." Val had her hands flat on her knees. "We are not going to be caught in a lie. We are going to be caught in the absence of one. There is nothing behind us. Somebody is eventually going to reach behind us and find that."

Kyra was quiet for a moment.

"She's good," Kyra said. "Dorothea."

"She is the best person either of us has met on this world after Frederick, and I include in that the man who is going to have to report us, who is also good, which is the entire problem." Val looked at the dark ceiling. "We have spent a winter finding out what the rule is. Here it is. We can be strangers to anybody. We cannot be known, every day, by good people. Good people ask. They ask because they intend to help, and they do not stop, and they cannot be lied to for long because the lying is the thing that breaks first."

"That's a foul rule."

"It is a foul rule and it is going to govern the rest of our lives," Val said, "and I am not sorry to have found it in a warm room instead of a cold one."

They went on the last night before the roads opened properly, which was the practical choice, and which Val had chosen eleven days in advance and had told Kyra about on the day she chose it.

What they argued about was the note.

"Four words," Kyra said. "Thank you. That's all I want to leave. She fed us all winter and she never once—"

"I know what she never once did."

"Then let me leave it."

"No."

"Val—"

"Anything we leave behind is a thing somebody can be shown." Val said it as flatly as she had ever said anything. "Not tomorrow. In four years, when a man comes through this town asking after two women with no parish, and a good woman who has nothing to hide takes a piece of paper out of a box to prove there was nothing wrong with them. That is how it will go. It will be her kindness that does it, and she will never understand what she did, and I am not putting that in her house."

Kyra stood in the passage in the dark for a long moment.

"You're right," Kyra said.

"I know."

"I want you to understand that I hate it. I want that on the record, since you're so fond of the record." Her voice had gone flat in a way that was not her at all. "I have left one place on this planet without saying goodbye to the person who kept us alive in it, and now I'm leaving the second, and both times it was the correct thing, and I am going to be doing this for a very long time, aren't I."

Val did not tell her it was all right.

"Yes," Val said.

They went out through the yard before it was light, and the bell had not gone, and nobody saw them.

On the road, a mile south, with the town still a shape behind them, Kyra said: "Say the rule again."

"Nowhere we have to be known daily by good people."

"Again."

Val said it again.

They walked into a spring with their hands empty and their heads full of a language they had not owned at Christmas, and Val, doing the only kind of accounting she had, made the sum come out: one winter alive, two tongues gained, one man in a yard who had liked her and would remember her, one rule discovered that was going to cost them everything they ever nearly had.

She did not put the last line of it to Kyra. Not then.

She would put it to her eleven years later, at a table, in a room with a lock, when it turned out to matter what they had decided in a passage in the dark.

— end of chapter two —

It took them six years to go four hundred miles, which Kyra worked out afterward and did not tell Val, because Val would have worked it out already and would have had a view about it.

They went in stages. That was the shape of those years and there was not much else in them. A place would take them for a season because there was fruit to get in or a fever going through it, and they would be useful and quiet and nobody's, and then the season would end and the questions would start their slow assembly and they would go before the assembly finished. Eight weeks here. A winter there. Once, in a river town whose name Kyra forgot inside a year, most of eleven months, which was the longest and was the closest either of them came in that whole stretch to arguing about staying.

They got better at it. That was the only thing that improved.

They learned that a woman traveling with a woman is a question, and that a woman traveling with her sister is an answer, and that the answer holds if neither of you elaborates. They learned that you arrive on a market day, because a stranger on a market day is weather and a stranger on a Tuesday is an event. They learned to say the name of a place they had come from that was real and far and small, and to say it the same way every time.

And they learned, mostly from being wrong about it, how long the questions took to assemble. In a hamlet, a fortnight. In a town, a season. In a city — they had not been in a city — Val said she expected years, and Kyra said she was guessing, and Val said of course she was guessing, that was what the word expected was doing in the sentence.

In the fourth of those years they came down a valley road in bad rain with a long way still in front of them, and Val, who had been walking on the outside for two hours because the outside was the wet side, said, "How much further today."

Kyra looked at the way the ridge came down and the smoke sat and the road went.

"Not far now," Kyra said.

It was about two miles and there was a barn at the end of it, and they got into it dry enough, and neither of them ever thought about that afternoon again.

In the sixth year they came over a shoulder of hill in the early autumn and there was a river below them with a town on it.

Kyra stopped without deciding to.

It was not a great city and she knew it was not, but after six years of villages it might as well have been the coast road on a festival morning. There was a bridge with a gate on it. There were mills strung along the bank with the water piling white against them. There were vines going up the hills on the far side in lines so regular that some part of her wanted to know who had surveyed them, and there was a road coming in from the north and a road going out to the south and a third going east along the river, and on all three of them, at four in the afternoon, there were carts.

"That's traffic," Kyra said.

"That is a great deal of traffic."

"Val. That's a crossing." Kyra was already counting the carts and had got to eleven and started again. "Everything on this side has to come through that gate to get to that side. Look at the width of the road coming in. Look at how much of it's wine—"

"I am looking at all of it," Val said, "and I want you to know that you have been quietly dying for six years and I have been watching you do it, and this is the first time since the mountain that I have heard you sound like yourself."

Kyra did not have an answer to that.

The town was called Maribor. It was the first place on this world whose name either of them had learned before deciding whether to stay.

Kyra heard the story in her third week, from a woman selling thread, told as the kind of thing you tell a newcomer to give her the shape of the place.

There had been a year, a long time ago now, when the town had burned ten people in a single day. The woman's grandmother had seen it as a girl. She said it the way people say a thing that happened before roads: a flood, a comet, a bad king. Ten in one day, and afterward the town had been strange with itself for a while, and then it had not been.

Kyra carried it around for two days before she said it, and she was aware of carrying it, and that was why she said it.

"Ten," Val said.

"In one day."

"When?"

"Before her grandmother was grown. So — a long time. Sixty years, seventy."

Val was quiet for a while. They were sitting on the wall above the mills with their feet hanging and the water going under, and she had her hands flat on the stone on either side of her.

"Then it is a story here and not a memory," Val said. "That is the difference between this town and Dymná, and it is the only difference that matters, and it will last exactly as long as nothing goes wrong in this valley."

"That's not comforting."

"It was not intended to be comforting. You asked me what I thought and I am telling you, and I would rather you had it than had a warm version of it." Val turned her face to the water. "We should still stay."

"You want to stay."

"I want you to stay," Val said, and then, because that had come out further than she meant it to, began talking with some precision about the wine trade.

The first six weeks were nothing at all.

That was the thing nobody had told her about towns. In a village you are the only stranger and everyone must decide about you within a day. In a town there are strangers every hour and nobody has to decide about you at all, and so nobody does, and you can stand in the middle of two thousand people being entirely unnecessary to all of them.

They got a corner of a loft off a widow who took their last two coins and asked one question, which was whether they were quiet. They got work the way they had been getting it for six years — a day here, a day there, arms and backs — and it fed them and it did not go anywhere, and Kyra could feel it not going anywhere, which was worse than the road had been.

She said so, once, badly, on a night when she had been carrying sacks for eleven hours.

"I know," Val said.

"You don't. You've got the Latin and the—"

"I have a language nobody here needs, a competence I am not allowed to admit to, and both hands." Val was unlacing her boots. "I know exactly, Kyra. I have known for six years. I have been waiting for this town since the first week on that road, and I would like eleven more days before you decide it hasn't worked."

Blaž Kovač had four carts and a yard off the north road and an opinion about everybody.

Kyra came into the yard because a man at the gate had said they wanted hands for a load going out in the morning, and she was standing among six other people wanting the same thing, and she was not going to get it, because she was a woman and a stranger and the smallest of the six.

What she said was: "Not the low road."

Blaž did not stop what he was doing. "What?"

"You're loading for the low road along the water. Don't. It'll be under in three days."

"It's been dry a fortnight."

"It has. It's going to rain the day after tomorrow, off the west, and it's going to rain on the hills behind you for a day and a half before any of it gets down here, and that road goes under from the back. You'll have it dry at your gate and gone at the bend."

Now he stopped. He looked at her the way a man in a yard looks at a woman in a yard, and he took his time about it, and he said: "And who told you that."

"Nobody told me."

"Right," said Blaž, and turned round, and that was the end of the conversation.

It rained the day after tomorrow, off the west.

He came to the loft eleven days later, which meant he had asked at least four people where she was living, which she did not enjoy knowing.

He stood in the doorway with his hat on. He did not come in and he did not apologize and he did not, then or in the thirty-five years that followed, say the word thank to her in any language.

What he said was: "There's a load going over the pass on the Thursday. What do you want."

Kyra, sitting on a straw mattress in a loft with her hands black to the wrist, understood that she was being apologized to in the only tongue the man had, and took it.

"To be asked first," Kyra said. "Every time. Before you load."

"That's not a price."

"It's half of it." She got up. "The other half is coin, and I don't know what it's worth yet, so you're going to tell me what it's worth, and I'm going to find out afterward whether you cheated me, and if you did I'll still come on the Thursday and you'll pay me the right amount from then on."

Blaž looked at her for a moment.

"You're not from here," he said.

"No."

"No," he agreed, and named a figure that was, as she established within the fortnight, about two-thirds of what it should have been, and which he corrected without comment in the spring and never mentioned again.

The first coin she was ever paid on this world was a small worn silver thing with a man's head on it, and she sat on the wall above the mills and held it for a good deal longer than it warranted.

Val came and sat down beside her and did not say anything for some time.

"It's not even very much," Kyra said, after a while.

"No."

"It's a day and a half of carrying sacks. It's nothing."

"It is not nothing, and you know precisely why it isn't, and I am going to say it out loud because you won't." Val had her elbows on her knees and was looking at the water. "You have been on this planet for eight years. In that time you have been fed out of pity, given work out of pity, housed out of pity and robbed. Every good thing that has happened to us here has happened because somebody looked at two women with nothing and decided to be kind." She turned her head. "That is the first thing anybody on this world has given you because they wanted what you are."

Kyra found that she could not look at her.

"He didn't want what I am. He wanted to know if a road would flood."

"He wanted the thing you were born with, that you spent eleven months in a hut learning to read, and he paid you for it in metal." Val stood up. "Say it however you like. I'm going to get bread."

She went. Kyra sat on the wall by herself for another quarter of an hour with a coin in her hand and her eyes going, and was extremely glad, afterward, that Val had stood up when she did.

The arrangement settled into what it was going to be within a season, and what it was going to be was this: he asked, she answered, he paid, and he never once in thirty-five years asked her how she knew.

Kyra noticed the not-asking early and turned it over a good deal.

It was not stupidity. Blaž Kovač was one of the sharpest men she met on this world, and he could tell you to the half-day how long a load of anything would take to anywhere between three rivers. It was that he had a category for her — a woman who is good with weather, the way another man is good with horses — and the category was complete, and a complete category does not generate questions.

It made him the safest person in that town.

It also made him, she understood somewhere in the second or third year, a man she would never once be able to tell anything true to, and she found that she did not mind, and then found that she minded that she did not mind.

Val's side of it came slower and went sideways, which Kyra had expected and Val had not.

It started with the widow who owned the loft, and a cough, and Val saying four sentences about steam and a cloth that any physician on Sethal would have considered too obvious to write down. Then the widow's sister. Then a man on the same lane with a hand that had gone bad after a nail, where Val stood looking at it for eleven seconds too long and then said, very carefully, that it should be opened and washed and packed and opened again tomorrow, and did not touch it, and made the man's wife do every part of it while she watched.

Kyra came home that evening to find her sitting on the end of the mattress with her hands hanging between her knees.

"Say it."

"I could have had that clean in four minutes."

"I know."

"I talked a frightened woman through it for an hour and a half instead, badly, in a language I am still wrong in, and it will very likely be enough, and if it isn't he will lose the hand." Val's voice had gone flat. "And the reason is a rule I agreed to on a mountain about a thing I was not going to do anyway, which has now started costing somebody who isn't me."

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

"You said the same thing about the mound," Kyra said.

"I am aware that I said the same thing about the mound."

"Val, I'm not—"

"You are, and you're entitled to, and here is the difference, which I have been sitting here working out." She turned her hands over. "On the mound the rule stopped me giving a dying man something from the ship. Today it stopped me using my own hands and what is in my own head. And I cannot find the line. I have been looking for it since the spring and I cannot find where the one becomes the other, and I am going to be standing in front of somebody's hand again in a month."

They did not resolve it. It was the first time either of them had said any of it out loud, and it was not the last, and they were still saying it ninety years later in another country in front of a different kind of harm.

The man kept the hand.

In the spring of the following year they took a room of their own.

It was up a stair off a lane on the north side, above a cooper, and it had a window with a shutter and a hearth of its own and a floor that had been laid by somebody who cared, and one chair.

Kyra stood in the middle of it with her arms folded and looked at the one chair for a while.

"We'll get another."

"We will not get another for at least a year," Val said, "because we are going to need the money for the winter, and because I have looked at what a chair costs in this town and formed opinions about it."

"You've priced chairs."

"I have priced a great many things. You would be appalled."

There were children in the lane below, four or five of them, doing whatever it is children do to a wall for an entire afternoon. One of them was a small one with a great deal of hair who belonged to the cooper's brother and was called Zofka, and who looked up at the window as they were carrying their two bundles in, and went back to the wall, having established that they were not interesting.

The door had a lock on it.

That was the thing Kyra kept coming back to, all that first evening, in a way she could not have explained to anybody who had not spent eight years on the outside of every door in the world. It was not much of a lock. It was a bar and a hasp and a key the cooper's wife had handed over with a speech about not losing it.

She shot it, and stood there, and shot it back, and shot it again.

"You're going to wear it out," Val said, from the floor, where she was building a fire in a hearth that was theirs.

"There's nothing outside this door that has to happen tomorrow," Kyra said. "Do you understand that? Nothing. Not a flock, not a fence, not a seventh day, not a road. I've got nowhere to be until Thursday."

Val sat back on her heels and looked at her across a small fire in a small room with the shutter open on a spring evening.

"No," Val said. "Nowhere at all."

— end of chapter three —

They discovered in the first winter in that room that neither of them knew how to do nothing, and it took them most of the winter to get any good at it.

It came on them by accident, on an evening in the black end of the year when the cooper had shut up below and the lane was empty and the weather had come in exactly as Kyra had said it would on the Thursday. There was wood in. There was bread and there was a piece of hard yellow cheese. The shutter was barred and the fire was going and there was not one thing in the world that either of them was required to do before morning.

Kyra found this almost unbearable for about a quarter of an hour.

She got up twice. The first time she checked the shutter, which was barred. The second time she went and looked at the woodpile, which she had built herself that afternoon and which had not changed.

"It's still there," Val said, from the chair.

"I know it's still there."

"You have looked at it twice in eleven minutes. I am keeping a record, because I am also finding this difficult and it is a great comfort to me that you are worse at it."

Kyra came back and stood in the middle of the floor.

"What did we do," Kyra said. "At home. On a night like this. What did people do."

"You went out."

"I went out."

"Every time. There was always a thing on a terrace and you were always at it." Val had the poem book open on her knee and had not turned a page in some while. "I read, or I worked, or I sat in a room with Ilen and let him explain something to me that I had understood forty minutes earlier."

"So neither of us has ever done this."

"Neither of us has ever done this," Val agreed. "I have had eleven months on a mountain and six years on a road and one winter in a house with thirteen beds in it, and in the whole of that I was never once in a warm room with nothing that had to be finished. I have no procedure for it."

"You want a procedure."

"I would like a procedure," Val said, "and I am aware of how that sounds."

There was one chair, so Kyra took it, on the grounds that Val had been in it and it was a matter of principle.

Val got up without any argument at all, which was suspicious, and sat down on the floor with her back against the side of the chair and her legs out toward the fire, and stayed there.

It was not a thing she did. Kyra registered that and did not say it. Vaelith Sorin sat in chairs, on benches, on the edges of things, with her spine doing what spines are told; she had spent thirty years in rooms where the furniture had opinions about rank, and she had never in Kyra's memory simply put herself on a floor because the floor was where the other person was.

After a while Kyra's hand came down off the arm of the chair and landed on Val's shoulder, which was at exactly the height for it.

It stayed there. Nothing was said about it. They were both looking at the fire.

They talked about nothing for a long time, which was the discovery of the evening.

They talked about the cooper, who sang badly and only in the mornings. They talked about whether the mills were cheating the farmers and by how much, which Kyra had views on and Val had arithmetic on, and which took most of an hour. They talked about Blaž's opinion of a bridge four days east, delivered to Kyra at length on a Thursday and reconstructed now with improvements.

At one point Kyra worked her hand down under the collar of Val's dress to the top of her spine, because it was there, and left it, and Val made a small sound of approval and went on talking about mill tolls.

At another point Val reached back without looking and put her hand round Kyra's ankle, which was hanging beside her, and found the bone of it, and stayed there.

Neither of these things was a beginning of anything. That was the part Kyra thought about afterward. For eleven months on a mountain every touch between them had been an event, because every touch had been rationed by cold or by injury or by the fact that one of them was dying in some slow way, and there had been no such thing as a hand on a shoulder that did not mean something.

Here there was time, and the time made everything cheap, and the cheapness was the most luxurious thing that had ever happened to her.

What Val did not say, sitting on the floor of a rented room with a woman's hand on the back of her neck, was that she had decided at about four o'clock in the afternoon.

She had been coming up the lane with bread under her arm and had looked at the light in their own window — their own, with a key, with a bar on the inside — and had thought, with perfect clarity and no particular heat: tonight, and I would like it to be slow, and I am going to have to be the one who starts it or she will wait for a reason.

That was all. It had taken no time at all. She had then bought the bread and had a conversation with the cooper's wife about a hinge.

She had carried it up the stairs and through the evening the way she carried everything, which was entirely, and it had not shown on her face, because nothing showed on her face, and she had known it was there the way you know where a coin is in a pocket.

She let the talk about the mills run all the way out. Then she let the silence sit. Then she turned round on the floor, which put her looking up, and took the hand off her neck and held it.

And Kyra went still.

Because here is what Kyra Davan had recognized, and it undid her.

There was a thing Val did with her shoulders when she had arrived at a decision and was about to put it in front of people. Kyra had known it since she was twenty-two. She had watched it across a table in a long room at Corran Vayr, and across a yard at Solara, and in a corridor in the last fortnight before a ship, and on a mountain in the dark before the words it's worse than I've been telling you. It was not a good sign. It had never once in sixty-four years been a good sign. Her whole body had learned to brace against it.

She had watched it come over Val on a floor in a rented room by a fire, and had braced, out of sixty-four years of habit — and then it had arrived, and it was this.

"Oh," Kyra said.

"What."

"Nothing. Say it."

"I wasn't going to say anything." Val turned Kyra's hand over and looked at it, which she did with the same attention she gave a panel, in order, from the wrist out. "I have been intending to do this since four o'clock and I have been extremely well behaved about it for six hours, and I would like some recognition."

Kyra got out of the chair.

It was slow, because there was nothing to make it quick.

Val had time, for the first time in her life, and discovered that she wanted all of it. She wanted the shutter barred and the fire down to the red of it and the whole length of the night in front of her with nothing on the other side of it. She wanted to take Kyra's hair down herself, which took a while, and she took the while. There was a great deal of it and it was heavy and it went the color of wet copper where the fire got into it, and Val, who had been looking at it in daylight for nearly seventy years and had started looking at it differently on a mountain, put her hands all the way into it and held it and was not in any hurry whatsoever.

She said so. That was new. She said, low, close to Kyra's ear, that she had been thinking about this since the middle of the afternoon and that she had thought about it in some detail and in order, and Kyra made a noise against her shoulder that was half a laugh and not entirely.

"You're appalling."

"I have been called worse things."

"Not by me."

"By you, twice, in a hut."

And then Kyra got a hand at the back of her head and stopped her talking, which was fair, and which Val had been fairly sure was coming.

The light came up in her somewhere after that, at the throat and along the inside of the wrists, and neither of them remarked on it, because it had stopped being a thing that got remarked on some time in the previous autumn. It made the room what it had been on the night of the mending. It laid a faint edge along Kyra's cheekbone and the line of her jaw and the place where her neck went into her shoulder, all of which Val looked at, one after another, taking her time, with her hands going where they had learned to go, and she was aware of being happy in a way she had no procedure for at all.

Kyra's eyes went at some point and Val saw it and said so, afterward, and Kyra said she had known anyway.

The fire went right down. Neither of them got up to do anything about it.

"You planned that," Kyra said, a good while later.

"I don't know what you mean."

"Four o'clock. You said four o'clock."

"I said I had been intending it since four o'clock. Intention is not a plan." Val had her eyes shut. "A plan has stages."

"Did it have stages?"

"I decline to answer."

"Val."

"It had two," Val said, "and I am not going to tell you what they were, and you may work them out at your leisure."

Kyra laughed into the dark with her arm across Val's ribs, and thought — with no warning at all, the way things arrived in her — she has been wanting this all day and walking about the town buying bread, and had to lie there for a moment with that.

It was not that it was new. It was that it had been there all day, under a completely ordinary face, in a completely ordinary lane, and Kyra had walked past it twice.

"How long have you been doing that," Kyra said.

"Doing what?"

"Deciding in the afternoon."

Val was quiet for long enough that Kyra turned her head.

"A while," Val said.

In the morning there was frost inside the shutter and neither of them wanted to be the one to get up, and the argument about that took eleven minutes and was conducted entirely on the merits.

Kyra lost, and built the fire, and came back with the bread, and said, in English, because they had fallen into English in that room and had not discussed it:

"There ought to be a word for this."

"For what?"

"This." She waved the bread at the room, the fire, the bed, the lot of it. "All of it. What we are. There ought to be a word and I don't have one and I've just noticed."

She meant nothing by it. She wanted to say something in the morning and that was what came out.

Val sat up.

"That's a real problem," Val said.

"It isn't a problem, it's a—"

"It is a problem and I am going to treat it as one, because you have just described a thing that exists, which we both have, which has no name in either of the two languages we have any command of, and that is not a small observation. That is a gap." Val had her hair over one shoulder and the frost light on her and was serious. "Where would we even look."

"I was making conversation."

"You were making an inquiry," Val said, "and I am going to help you with it, and you have nobody to blame."

They started with the poem book, because it was the only book in that room that was about anything.

It was a bad place to start and they found that out inside an hour. Frederick's anthology was full of shepherds who wanted things and nymphs who declined them, and it had a word it used for the entire business, and the word was love.

Val came off it like a woman who has bitten a stone.

"No."

"You haven't even—"

"I have read eleven pages and it has been used for God, for a woman's hair, for a spaniel, for a place in Kent, and as a greeting between two men who have not seen each other since Tuesday." She turned the book round as though Kyra could be made to see it. "A term that does that much work carries no information. If I say it to you, you have to guess which of nine things I mean, and the guessing is the entire problem we started with."

"People manage."

"People manage because they are surrounded by other people who will supply the context. We have no context on this world. We have each other and a room." Val put the book down. "I want a word that means one thing."

Kyra, cross-legged on the bed with the bread, looked at her for a moment — at her hair coming down and her hands flat on the covers and her whole face doing the thing it did when she had a problem worth having — and thought that she would be perfectly content to spend a considerable number of years on this.

"All right," Kyra said. "How many languages are there?"

"On this planet? I have no idea."

"Then we'd better start."

— end of chapter four —

For four years Val was aware that they were looked at, and for four years she was wrong about why, and she recorded it afterward as the most instructive mistake she made in that town.

The looking was not hostile and it was not constant. It was the ordinary attention of a place with two thousand people in it, most of whom had been born within a morning's walk of where they stood. A woman at a stall would follow them with her eyes for three seconds longer than she followed anyone else. A man crossing the bridge would look, and look away, and look again at the rail.

Kyra's account of it was that they were foreign.

Val's account of it was structural. Two women with no man in the house and no children and no kin within four hundred miles constitute an unfinished sentence, and human beings cannot leave an unfinished sentence alone; the looking was the town waiting for the rest of it, and the rest of it was never going to come, and that was a hazard she intended to manage.

Both of these were true. Both of them were also, she understood eventually, a way of not saying the obvious thing, which every single person in Maribor could see and neither of them had said out loud in eight years.

She caught herself at it on an afternoon in the fourth spring, on the bridge, waiting.

Kyra was twenty feet away arguing with a man about the price of a wheel, which she did roughly once a fortnight and enjoyed enormously. She had come off the pass road that morning and she had not tied her hair since, and the wind coming up the Drava was taking it across her face and she kept putting it back with the side of her wrist without stopping talking.

Val looked at her the way she looked at anything she intended to understand: in order, from the top.

The hair first, because it was moving — dark, and going the color it went where the sun came through the ends of it, which was a color Val had no word for in any language she had. Then the brows, which were doing the entire argument by themselves. Then the line from the ear down under the jaw to the place where the collar of her dress had been pulled crooked by the strap of a bag. Then the hands. Then the set of her feet on the boards, which was a runner's, and which had not changed in seventy years and would not.

She was starting on the hands again when she noticed that she was starting on the hands again.

Val turned round and looked at the water for a while.

It was not the discovery of anything. She had been to bed with that woman a hundred times in a room forty yards from where she was standing and there was no revelation available. What arrived instead was a small piece of arithmetic she had somehow avoided for eight years: she is the most remarkable-looking person in this town by some distance, and so, by every account I have ever had of it, am I, and we are standing on a public bridge in the middle of the afternoon.

The looking was not because they were foreign. The looking was not because of an unfinished sentence.

"You've gone quiet," Kyra said, arriving, having won the wheel.

"I have been doing a sum."

"On what?"

"On nothing useful," Val said, and did not tell her, and put it away, and was to think about that decision a good deal afterward.

It came up the following summer, in the market, on an ordinary morning.

There were three of them and they were not from the town. Val worked that out inside a sentence: the boots were wrong, the accent was off the eastern road, and they had the particular loudness of men who will not be here on Friday and therefore need not be careful on Wednesday.

They were not talking to Val and Kyra. That was the thing. They were talking about them, three feet away, at full volume, in the way men talk in front of a horse.

One of them said, in the country's language, that he had not seen anything like that in a fortnight of traveling.

The second one said something about the dark one's mouth, and the first one said something about the fair one, and the third said, thoughtfully, as though arriving at the answer to a question that had been troubling him: but where's the man?

And then the first one worked it out.

Women like that, he said. Two of them. Alone, in a town, with nobody. You do not get that by accident. That is not two women who have no man. That is two women who are for something.

Val stood in a market square and felt her own face doing nothing at all, which was the only thing about the next quarter of an hour that she was ever satisfied with.

Here is what Val understood in the four seconds after that, and it was the reason she said nothing.

There was no true sentence available. She went through them in order, the way she went through everything, and there was not one. We are sisters — a lie, and one the men would not believe, and one that invited a fourth sentence. We are not for anything — an argument, and arguments with men in markets have an ending and the ending is not good. The truth, which was three words long and which she had never said out loud in any room on either world, was so far outside what could be spoken on a Wednesday morning that it did not even present itself as an option; it simply sat there, unsayable, taking up the space where a reply should have been.

She had been, all her life, the person in the room with the accurate answer. She stood in that square with her hands still and discovered that accuracy had nothing whatsoever to offer her.

Kyra, beside her, took a breath and went in.

She agreed with them.

That was the whole trick and Val did not see it coming. Kyra turned round with her whole face lit up and said, cheerfully, in the country's language with her own accent thick over it, that of course they were, and how kind of the gentlemen to notice, and that the arrangements were not made in the square.

The men went quiet in the way men do when a thing they have said behind a hand comes back to them through the front.

Kyra kept going. She was magnificent. She did not say a price, and she did not say a name, and she said a great many other things — that there were people who saw to it, that one did not simply walk up in a market, that it was a house matter and there were arrangements, that the gentlemen would want to speak to someone first and she could not say who, and did they intend to be in the town past Friday, because that would be a difficulty.

In eleven sentences she built an entire apparatus out of nothing whatsoever, and every one of those sentences implied a man somewhere behind her, and she never once described him.

Val said nothing at all. She looked at each of the three of them, one after another, the way she had looked at a great many people across a great many tables, and let the silence do what it did.

By the time Kyra had finished asking whether they were staying past Friday, the three of them had arrived at a shared and unspoken conclusion, which was that there was somebody in this town they did not want to annoy.

They went away.

Kyra held it together as far as the corner of the lane and then had to stop and put her hand against the wall.

"It is a house matter," Kyra said. "I said it is a house matter. I don't know what that means. I have never in my life—"

"You said there were arrangements."

"There are arrangements, Val—"

"Twice. You said it twice."

Kyra put her forehead on the wall and laughed until she had to hold her own ribs.

She did the whole thing again on the stairs, with improvements, and a third time that evening over the fire with a different ending in which one of the men fainted, and Val let her, and did not say what she was thinking, because it was not the hour for it.

It was full dark in the lane when they came back from the well, and there was nobody, and Val stopped.

"I want to say the accurate thing."

"Oh, good," Kyra said. "I love the accurate thing."

"You handled that correctly and I could not have. That's the first part." Val had her hands at her sides. "I had four seconds and I went through every sentence I had, in order, and every one of them made it worse. I would have answered them truthfully in some form, because that is the only instrument I have ever owned, and it would have gone very badly, and you would have been standing next to me while it did."

"You'd have thought of something."

"I would not. I want that said plainly and I want it said tonight, because I have spent eleven years being the one who knows what to do in a room, and this afternoon I stood in a square and had nothing, and you had everything, and it took you about a second."

Kyra was quiet.

"There is no true answer to what are you for," Val said. "I looked. There isn't one. And I have been proceeding since we came off that mountain as though there is always a true answer somewhere if I am patient enough, and there is not, and I would rather have found that out beside you than on my own."

And then, because the sentence was finished and she was not going to let it lie there in a dark lane the way she would have let it lie two years ago, she put her hand at the back of Kyra's neck, under the hair, and held it, and did not say anything else.

They stood in a lane for a while.

"Come inside," Kyra said, eventually, in a voice that had gone somewhere else entirely.

Four days later, at the table, Val put down a thing she had been drafting in her head all week.

"I want to build the sisters properly."

Kyra looked up. "We are the sisters. We've been the sisters for eleven years."

"We have been saying the word sisters for eleven years. That is not the same thing and Wednesday proved it." Val had her hands flat on the boards. "Three men looked at us for one minute and arrived at an explanation, because we had not supplied one. People will always arrive at an explanation. The only question is whose."

"So we supply it."

"We supply it, and it is the same every time, and we both know all of it — the father, where he died, the year, the parish it would have been in, why there is no one to write to, why we came south, who paid for the road." Val counted none of it on her fingers, because she did not need to. "Eleven answers. We learn them the way you learn a poem. And when anyone asks either of us, they get the same eleven, in the same order, with the same details, and the details are dull, because dull details are the only ones nobody repeats."

"That's a liturgy."

"It's a lie that holds. I would rather have one of those than eleven that don't."

Kyra sat back. "Go on. There's more. You've got the face on."

"There's one more and you're going to hate it."

"Say it."

"Not in front of a window," Val said. "Not in the lane. Not on the stairs. Not anywhere in this town where a person can be standing that we have not looked at first."

The fire did what fires do.

"No," Kyra said.

"Kyra—"

"No. I've given you the sisters and I'll learn your eleven dull answers and I'll say them in my sleep. I'm not having you tell me where I'm allowed to put my hand." She was not shouting. It was worse than shouting. "That's not carefulness. That's me spending the rest of my life checking a room before I touch you, and I have watched you go sealed in front of people for seventy years and I have never once minded, and I'm not becoming it."

"I know."

"Then don't ask."

Val looked at the table for a moment.

"All right," Val said.

And it was all right, for a while, and she did not raise it again for a long time — and she was right, and she knew she was right, and she would still have been right eighty-five years later in another country when a man who had loved Kyra Davan for twenty-five years sat down in front of a priest and began to explain what he had seen.

— end of chapter five —

The Sunday dinners began because of an administrative failure, which Kyra thought was the funniest thing that had ever happened to her and which she was still saying out loud four hundred years later in a booth with bad coffee in it.

What happened was this. By the eighth or ninth year in that town they were both working, and the work did not overlap. Kyra was out on the roads with Blaž's carts or in his yard arguing, and she went when the weather said go, which meant she was gone for four days and back for six and gone again on no schedule any person could have written down. Val's work came to her, which meant it came at night and at dawn and on the days when a child in the next lane had been sick since Thursday.

They lived in one room and they were awake in it together, Val calculated, on something under half the evenings in a month.

And things had started going unsaid. Not kept — nothing was kept — but unsaid, which Val had learned on a shale shoulder above Dymná were very nearly the same thing when you let them run. The pact had been made in the snow by two people who had nothing but each other and the whole of every day. It had never been tested by a woman coming in at the eleventh hour too tired to take her boots off.

So Val proposed a fixed evening.

She proposed it the way she would have proposed a protocol. She had thought about which day, and had reasons; she had thought about whether it should move if one of them was away, and had a view, which was that it should not, and that whoever was in the town would sit at the table anyway. She had, Kyra established under questioning, worked out what it would cost in candles.

"You've costed it."

"I have costed it."

"You have costed the—" Kyra had to stop. "Val. You have written a regulation for talking to me."

"I have written a regulation for sitting down," Val said, with enormous dignity. "The talking is not regulated. The talking is what happens because we are sitting down, which is the entire problem, because we are never sitting down."

Kyra said yes before Val had finished the sentence, and laughed about it for a week, and never once missed one.

In the third year of it they lost the room for an evening — the cooper's wife had the whole house full of her sister's family for a burial — and rather than let the Sunday go, they went down to the inn by the gate and took the end of a long table.

It was full and it was loud and there were eleven people on that table who were not them.

Kyra sat down across from Val with a bowl of something gray and found that she could not say any of the four things she had come to say, because every one of them was for two people and there were thirteen.

And under the table, without deciding to, she put her foot against Val's.

Val did not look up. Val went on listening to a man on her left explain the timber trade, and nodded in the right places, and was to all appearances a woman being polite to a stranger in an inn.

Her foot did not move.

They sat like that for most of an hour, and Kyra ate her gray soup and made conversation with a woman about her daughter's hands, and the entire time there was a small warm point of contact under a public table in a room full of people, and it did the whole job. That was the discovery. It carried the evening. She went up the stairs afterward feeling as though they had talked for four hours.

"That worked," Kyra said, at the top.

"It did," Val agreed, and shot the bar, and that was all either of them ever said about it.

It was the first thing they ever had that could be done in front of other people, and they had it for four hundred years, and it began in an inn because a woman's sister had a burial.

Zofka Kovač — no relation to Blaž; half the valley was a Kovač — was the child from the wall, and she came up through those years the way the vines did on the far bank, which is to say that Kyra never once saw it happen and it happened anyway.

At four she was uninterested in them.

At seven she was on the stairs a great deal, because Val had a box with pins in it and Zofka had opinions about the pins.

At eleven she was useful and knew it, and would come up to say that the cooper's wife wanted to know whether the fair one was in, and would say it with her chin up, in the manner of a person delivering something from a government.

At fifteen she stopped coming up for about two years for reasons Kyra understood and did not comment on.

At nineteen she was married to a man from the eastern road who was better than she had been expected to get, and she came up the stairs in a dress she had made and stood in the doorway and turned round once so that they could see it, and Kyra said the right things and Val said the accurate ones, and Zofka went away pleased.

At twenty-four she had two boys and no time.

At thirty-one she came up with a jug of something and sat down on the chair — there were two chairs by then; Val had capitulated on chairs in the eleventh year — and talked for an hour and a half about her mother, who was failing, and how the failing went, and what it was like to watch it.

And somewhere in there, Kyra noticed afterward, without being able to put a year on it, Zofka had stopped talking to them as though they were older than she was.

Blaž prospered.

Four carts became six, and six became eleven, and he bought the yard he had been renting and then bought the one next to it. He put a nephew on the eastern route and complained about him constantly and would not replace him. He got fat in the way men get fat when the thing they built has started to work, and he walked with a stick from about the twentieth year on account of a hip.

He asked Kyra about the weather every week for thirty-five years.

He never once asked her how she knew. He never asked where she came from after the first month. On the day his wife died he sent a boy up the stairs to say there would be no loads that week, which was, Kyra understood, the entire obituary she was going to be offered, and she stood in the lane with it for a while.

She went to the burial. She stood at the back. Afterward he said, "Thursday," and she said, "Thursday," and that was the whole of the condolence.

She thought about that man for four hundred years and could never decide what he had been to her.

The finding arrived in Val in the way all her worst things arrived, which was in the middle of ordinary work, in writing, in her own hand.

She had kept the notebook since 1608. It had the seventeen names in it, and the two reckonings of the year, and a great many letters to Genie that would never be sent, and — because she was who she was — a running record of the people in front of her, begun in a hut on a mountain when there had been nothing else in the world to measure.

She went back into it that autumn for an unrelated reason, to check something about a fever, and found herself reading the Zofka entries instead, and stopped.

Then she went and got the light closer.

She had written them without meaning anything by them, a line every few years, because she wrote down what was in front of her. The cooper's brother's child, four, in the lane. Uninterested. And then seven, and eleven, and fifteen, and nineteen and married, and twenty-four with two boys, and thirty-one with a jug and a dead mother.

Twenty-seven years, eight lines, and a whole person had gone by in them.

Val sat in a room over a cooper's shop and put the other column beside it, which took no time at all, because there was nothing in it. Her own entries across the same twenty-seven years: ran the pass road and back, no difficulty. Carried the Lenart woman's boy from the water house, forty yards. Slept four hours, adequate. Kyra's, the same. Not a slope in either.

She had always known the two of them did not change. Everybody on Sethal knew that; a Sorin looked the same at twenty-two and at a hundred and fifty and there was nothing in it to notice, because everybody around you was doing it too.

Here nobody else was doing it.

That was the whole of the finding and it was not about her body at all. Zofka Kovač would be dead inside forty years. So would Blaž, and the thread-seller's daughter, and every single person either of them had spoken to in that town. And Val Sorin, at a hundred and fourteen, had perhaps three hundred years in front of her on a world where a life is sixty.

She closed the book and put it away and said nothing for eight days.

She knew, the entire time, exactly what she was doing.

That was the part she could not get round afterward. She was not confused and she was not gathering evidence — there was nothing further to gather; it was eight lines about a girl in a lane. What she was doing was standing between Kyra Davan and a sentence, with her arms out, the way she had stood between a great many people and a great many sentences for a hundred and fourteen years.

She has been happy here. That was the shape of it. She has a yard and a road and a man who pays her for what she is, and a child downstairs who has grown up in front of her, and she has not had anything like this since Solara, and I am about to walk into a room and put a number on it.

On the eighth day, at the table, on a Sunday, she put the notebook on the boards and turned it round.

"I have been keeping something," Val said, "for eight days, and I want to say that first, before the thing itself, because the eight days are the part I did wrong."

Kyra looked at her, and then at the book, and did not touch it.

"Say it."

"Zofka was four when we took this room. She is thirty-one. She has a mother in the ground and two sons who will be men before we have finished arguing about a chair." Val kept her hands flat. "I have eight lines about her in twenty-seven years and I have nothing about us, because there is nothing to write, and I have just understood what that is going to mean for the next three hundred."

"We knew we don't change."

"We knew we do not change at home, surrounded by people who also do not, where it is worth precisely nothing." Val turned her hands over. "Here it is the only thing about us anybody will ever be able to see. Not the light. Not your eyes. A woman across a lane gets old and we do not, and there is no version of living anywhere on this world in which that does not eventually become the thing people know about us."

The fire did what fires do.

"That's not the whole of it," Kyra said.

"No."

"Say the rest."

"The rest is that I have been sitting here for eight days working out that we are going to do this perhaps thirty more times," Val said. "Arrive, be useful, be liked, and go before somebody says it out loud. And every single time we will leave a Blaž and a Zofka behind us, and every single one of them will be dead before we have finished the next town, and we will not be able to write."

Kyra got up, came round the table, and crouched down in front of her.

"Eight days," Kyra said.

"Yes."

"You sat at this table twice with that in you."

"Yes."

"Val." Kyra took both her hands, which were cold. "I don't care about the thirty towns. I'll care about the thirty towns tomorrow, I'll probably care about them for a century. Tonight I want to know why you did eight days on your own."

And Val, who had prepared an answer about timing and about evidence and about not alarming a person over an incomplete finding, discovered that none of it would come out in front of that face.

"Because it is the only thing I know how to give you," Val said.

They talked about it afterward, for a long time, and then for weeks.

Kyra's arrived in her body before it arrived anywhere else, the way things did. She went out on the pass road four days later and stood looking down at a valley full of people and understood, with absolute clarity and no warning, that she was going to watch every single one of them go, and their children, and their children, and that this was not a misfortune that might befall her but the actual arrangement of the rest of her life.

She sat down on a rock and did not get up for some while.

Val's was a different animal. Val did what she always did, which was to look for the number that made it manageable, and the number would not resolve into anything she could use: three hundred years, perhaps more, at a town a decade, in a place where the only two permanent objects were each other.

And underneath both, unsaid by either of them for a considerable time, was the other half.

It was Kyra who said it, on the wall above the mills, in the spring.

"They're all right, though."

"Who are?"

"Ours." Kyra had her arms round her knees and was looking at the water. "I've been doing it since the pass road and I can't stop. Kal is seventy-eight. Genie's seventy-eight. If the years run straight they are seventy-eight years old and they are fine, Val, they're not even halfway, they've got a house and a job and they're annoyed about something this morning."

Val did not say anything for a moment.

"I have been doing the same one," she said. "About my father."

"Say it."

"He was a hundred and five on that wall. He would be a hundred and forty-three." Val looked at the water. "There is no version of the arithmetic in which he is dead. He is on that coast this morning with his hands behind his back, and he has been waiting thirty-eight years for a ship, and I cannot get a single word to him."

The mill wheel went round.

"That's not hope," Kyra said. "I want to be clear that I'm not calling it hope."

"It is not hope," Val agreed. "It is the removal of one comfort. I had been permitting myself to think of them as finished."

"Right." Kyra wiped her face with the heel of her hand. "Well. They're not."

They tried words through all of those years, in passing, the way you turn over stones.

The country's language had one that was used for a husband's people, which Val rejected because it was about property. It had another that meant something like the one who holds the other end, which was used of a man you carried a beam with; they used that one for about three months, mostly as a joke, and it wore out. The priest's Latin had four and Val dismissed all four inside a fortnight, two for being about God and two for being about appetite. Frederick's poem book kept offering its single overworked word and kept being handed back.

Once, in the twenty-second year, Kyra came up the stairs with something she had heard off a boatman from the south, said it, and watched Val's face do something complicated.

"What does it mean?"

"I have no idea. Say it again." Val wrote it down, and looked at it, and said, "No. It means I don't know what it means, which is worse, because for about four seconds I thought it might do."

"You liked it."

"I liked not knowing what it meant," Val said, "which is the least defensible position I have ever held."

It was Val who said they should go, and Kyra who did not argue, and it took about eleven minutes on a Sunday in the thirty-fifth year.

"Zofka's mother is dead. Blaž walks with a stick and has for fifteen years. The woman at the thread stall who told you about the burnings is dead and her daughter runs it and her daughter is gray." Val had the list in her head, in order, and did not need the notebook. "Nobody in this town has said anything to us. That is not the same as nobody having noticed. I have been watching the gap between those two things for four years and it is closing."

"Zofka's noticed."

"Zofka has noticed something she does not have a shape for. She will get a shape for it. Her sons will get one faster, because they have known us their entire lives and we are the only thing in their entire lives that has not moved." Val turned her cup a quarter turn. "And we will have to leave in a hurry, and it will be frightening, and somebody will be hurt by it. Or we can go in the autumn, with the roads good, having told Blaž in the spring so he can find somebody."

Kyra sat for a long moment with her hands round her own cup.

"Tell him in the spring," Kyra said. "Give him the spring. He'll want to train whoever it is and he'll pretend he doesn't."

"That's all?"

"What did you expect?"

"An argument," Val admitted. "I had prepared for one. I had four answers ready."

"Keep them," Kyra said. "You'll need them somewhere else."

The last Sunday was in the room, the two of them, at the table Val had made a regulation about thirty-two years earlier.

They did not mark it. That was deliberate on both sides and neither of them said so. They ate, and Kyra told the story about the man at the crossing with the goat, which was a story Val had heard perhaps eleven times and which was better every time, and Val laughed twice.

Afterward Kyra washed the two bowls and put them on the shelf they had been on for three decades, and stood there for a second with her hand flat on the boards of the table, and then took it off.

They told Zofka they were going to the coast, because there was family there. She cried, and said she had known it was coming and had not known why she knew, and asked them to write.

They said they would.

Blaž said "Thursday" for the last time on a Thursday and did not come out of the yard to see them go.

Here are the next twenty years, which can be told quickly because they were the years in which nothing went wrong.

They went east and then south. They did eleven years in a walled town on a river where Val kept a still-room for an apothecary who never once asked her a personal question, and nine in a smaller place after it where Kyra sold weather to a man with barges. They arrived on market days. They gave the eleven dull answers, in order, and nobody ever asked for a twelfth.

They went before anyone got a shape for it. Both times. On time, in good weather, with the accounts settled — and the second time Kyra did it, not Val: she came in from the barges one evening and said a year, perhaps two, and Val put down what she was holding and said nothing at all for a moment, because it was the first time in a hundred and seventy years that Kyra Davan had ever proposed leaving a place she liked.

They had the Sunday dinner in both of those towns. They had it in inns and at fires and once, in a bad winter, in a bed, with the bowls on the covers, and it counted.

And in the spring of the year they left the barges they came down a road toward the sea with the light coming off it, and Val, who had been walking on the outside out of habit for seventy years, said, "How much further?"

"Not far now," Kyra said.

It was eleven miles and a gate and a small crowded port under a hill, and it was called Trieste, and they stayed for twenty-five years.

— end of chapter six —

They chose it for the worst reason available, which was that there was money in it, and Kyra said so out loud on the first afternoon so that neither of them could pretend afterward that it had been anything else.

"Say the whole of it," Val said.

"The whole of it is that I have spent nine years telling a man with barges which day to move a hull, and everything I know is about water and roads and weather, and this is a place where absolutely everything that happens is water and roads and weather." Kyra was sitting on a bollard at the top of the mole with her boots off. "I could work here for a century."

"That is not a small thing to have said."

"I know what I said."

Val looked out at the gulf, where there were perhaps thirty sail of various sizes doing various things, most of them small, one of them Venetian and behaving like it.

"Then say the other half," Val said, "because you are the one who can see it, and I want it from you rather than from me for once."

Kyra had already counted. She had been counting since the gate.

"It's small," Kyra said. "It looks big from the water and it isn't. There are — what, five thousand? Six?"

"Under six. I asked at the salt house."

"Under six thousand people inside one wall on one hill, and half of them are on the quay every morning, and there is one square that everything has to cross." Kyra put her boots down on the stone. "Maribor was two thousand and we lasted thirty-five years. This is three times that and it's going to feel like a quarter of it, because they're all going to see us every single day."

"Yes."

"That's the sum, isn't it. That's the whole sum."

"That is the whole sum," Val agreed. "A place where you are worth money is a place where you are looked at. I have not been able to find a version where you get the one without the other, and I have been looking since the barges."

Kyra sat on a bollard at the top of the mole in the first warm week of that year and looked at a town where she could do the thing she was.

"Twenty years," Kyra said. "Then we go."

"Twenty is reasonable."

"Say it back to me in nineteen."

"I intend to," Val said.

The town was a Habsburg town that had been Habsburg since before there were Habsburgs worth the name, and it did not let you forget it, and it was also entirely Italian in its mouth and its food and its arguments, and it did not let you forget that either.

Above it on the hill there was a cathedral with a lopsided front, made out of two older churches shoved together by somebody who had run out of money or patience, and a castle beside it that the Emperor's people sat in and that the town had opinions about. Below that the streets went down in a tangle to the water. There were salt pans along the shore. There was wine coming down from the hinterland in quantities that made Kyra think of Maribor and then decide not to. There was a quay, and on the quay every morning there was the whole business of the place: coasters for Venice and Ancona and down the Istrian shore, and the men who loaded them, and the men who owned what was loaded, and behind all of it, ninety miles across the water and unmentionable in polite company, Venice, which took the trade this town would have liked to have and had been taking it for two hundred years.

Kyra liked it within a fortnight and hated herself slightly for it.

Nobody in Trieste ever decided to call them Valeria and Chiara. The town simply did it, the way water finds a channel.

They had come in as Valeria and Klára, because those were the names on the eleven dull answers and had been since a storehouse in a valley seventy-two years earlier. Valeria the town took without complaint, since it was already a name it owned. Klára it chewed for about three weeks — Clara, Chlara, Chiara — and then settled, the way a town settles, on the version its own mouth preferred.

Kyra came up the stairs one evening in the second month and said, "I'm Chiara now, apparently. Nobody asked me."

"Nobody asked either of us anything. That is the entire appeal of the place."

"Klára. Klara. Chiara." She dropped onto the bench. "Do you realize that not one person on this planet has ever said my name?"

Val looked up.

"Seventy-two years," Kyra said. "Frederick wouldn't take yours and I never offered mine, and every single human being since has called me something a village made up. There is nobody alive here who could pronounce it. There's nobody alive anywhere who could pronounce it."

"I could."

"I know you could."

"I have not, though," Val said. "In seventy-two years. Not once out loud, in case somebody heard it through a wall."

The room was quiet for a moment.

"Say it now," Kyra said.

So Val said it, in a rented room above a lane in a Habsburg port, quietly, with the stresses in the right places, the way you say a word in your own language.

Kyra put her face in her hands and did not say anything for a while, and Val came and stood behind her and put both hands on her shoulders and let her be.

The house was on a lane off the hill, halfway up, two rooms and a stair and a shuttered window that got the morning.

It was more than they had ever had. That was a decision Val made on paper before they took it: two women who work and have no dependents and pay on the day are a thing this town understands, and a woman who lives too small in a port is a woman somebody starts wondering about.

And with the house, in the way of such places, came Marjeta.

She was perhaps thirty, from the hinterland, with the flat Slovene of the villages behind the hill and enough Italian to argue about money. She washed and carried and swept for four houses on that lane and had done since she was fifteen, and she arrived on the second morning without being sent for, looked at the state of the stair, and told them what she would charge.

Kyra liked her instantly, which was not the useful reaction.

"Every day," Val said that night. She said it flatly and Kyra knew the tone. "She will be in this house every day. She will see what we eat and what we don't. She will see the bed. She will know within a year whether either of us has ever been ill, and she will know it before we do, because that is what a woman who does four houses knows about the four houses."

"You want to send her away."

"I want to have looked at it properly, and I have, and I am going to say the conclusion out loud even though I dislike it." Val had her hands flat on the table. "Sending her away is worse. A house on this lane without a woman in it is a house people talk about. There is no version where we are not seen. There is only a version where we are seen by one person who is paid, and a version where we are seen by everybody for free."

"That's not the rule."

"No," Val admitted. "It is not the rule."

Because the rule was the one they had made in a passage before dawn in 1609, and the rule said nowhere we have to be known daily by good people, and Val had said it twice on a road a mile south of that town and had made Kyra say it back.

"She's not Dorothea," Kyra offered.

"She is not Dorothea. She does not ask anything. She has asked us nothing in nine days and I have been counting." Val turned her cup a quarter turn. "And I want to record, since we are recording things, that I am about to set aside the only rule I have ever been completely certain about, for a reason that is entirely sound, in the first month of the first place either of us has wanted to be in seventy years."

"Do you want me to argue?"

"I would quite like you to argue."

"I'm not going to," Kyra said. "You're right and I want to stay."

The languages sorted themselves out inside a season, the way they always did, which is to say that Kyra learned to be understood and Val learned to be correct.

The quay ran on Venetian, which was Italian with the corners knocked off and a different word for half the tackle on a ship. The town ran on Italian. The Emperor's business and the castle and anything on paper ran on German. The country behind the hill, where the wine and the wood and Marjeta came from, ran on Slovene, which was near enough to what they had carried out of Maribor that Kyra had it inside a month and found the fact obscurely comforting.

And between the two of them, in the house, with the shutter barred, English.

Nobody in that town had ever heard it. It had been true in Maribor and it was more true here, where a person could hear four tongues before breakfast and still not hear that one, and by the end of the first year they had stopped noticing they were doing it. It was simply the language the two of them were in. It had come off a barrel head in a valley from a merchant's son who had never once been out of Europe, and it was seventy years out of date, and it was theirs.

Kyra tried one word out of the quay on Val in the autumn, an Istrian thing a boatman used about a rope and a hull, and Val heard it out and said no.

"It's about two things being tied."

"It is about two things being tied by a third thing," Val said. "Which is a knot, and the word is about the knot. I would like a word that is about the two things."

The work came the way it had come in Maribor, which was slowly and then all at once.

Kyra spent eleven weeks being nobody on that quay. Then there was a morning in the autumn when she stood at the top of the mole and told a factor she had spoken to twice that he should not send the small coaster down the Istrian shore that day, and he sent it, and the weather came round out of the east at four in the afternoon, and it did not sink but it came back in a state that cost him a great deal more than a day.

He came and found her eleven days later.

It had taken Blaž eleven days too, and Kyra thought about that the whole way down the hill, and decided that men were the same everywhere and that eleven days was apparently how long it took one of them to be wrong in public and then do something about it.

Val's work came in from the hinterland side, through Marjeta, who mentioned in the way of such women that the family at the end of the lane had a child who would not keep anything down, and looked at nothing in particular while she said it.

Val went. The child kept things down.

It began there, and it went the way it had gone in Maribor, and Val came home in the eleventh month of that year and sat on the end of the bed and said, "I have not touched anybody with my own hands in five weeks and I am extremely aware of it," and Kyra said nothing at all, because there was nothing to say that they had not said in a room over a cooper's shop sixty years before.

At the end of that first year they went up above the castle on a clear night in the winter, which was the one thing in Trieste that was as good as the mountain had been.

The town was below and behind, and the gulf was in front, black and enormous with the lights of two anchored ships on it, and above all of it the sky came down to the water on three sides.

It took Kyra about four minutes to find it. It always did now.

"Higher than it was in Maribor," Kyra said.

"We are further south. It will go on getting higher and then it will start going down again, and in about a hundred and eighty years we will be looking at it out of a different ocean entirely and it will be somewhere else in the sky." Val had her arms folded against the cold. "I have no idea why I said that. I have no information that supports any part of it."

"You're allowed to say things that aren't information."

"I am increasingly told so."

Kyra stood and looked at the smudge above the woman on the rock, which had left there before there was anyone on Sethal to see it, and which she had looked at from a hut, a barn, a loft, a wall above a mill, a river town, a road, and now a hill above a port.

Kal was somewhere under that light, alive, this minute, and would be alive tomorrow, and there was time.

"I like it here," Kyra said.

"I know you do."

"That's not me arguing for anything. Twenty years. I said twenty and I meant it."

"You did," Val said, and did not say the rest of it, and they went down the hill.

— end of chapter seven —

Val did the accounting in the third winter, because a new place was where she did the accounting, and because she had been putting it off since the barges, which was not like her and which she had noticed.

It took four evenings. She did it at the table with the notebook and two candles and a sheet of the cheap paper they sold on the quay, and Kyra left her to it and came in and out and said nothing, which was the correct handling and which Val was grateful for and did not say so.

What she was doing was not complicated. She was making a column.

The notebook had seventy-five years of other people in it. Frederick, dead. Ondrej, dead before that. The widow in Maribor who had taken their last two coins, dead in the fourth year. The man with the hand. Blaž, dead — she had worked that out on the road south and had not said it. Zofka, who would be seventy this year if she was anything, and who was almost certainly not.

She put them in order with the years beside them and looked down the column.

Seventy-five years. Four towns. Something over two hundred people either of them had spoken to more than twice, and she could put a line through most of them without any risk of being wrong.

She had known this since Maribor. Knowing a thing and having it in a column in your own hand are different, and she had been avoiding the column for forty years, and she saw that she had been, and wrote that down too, because it was data about herself.

Then she did the part she had come to do, which was the two markers, and the two markers were where the work stopped being work.

The first was her father.

Vaedom Sorin had walked the sea wall with her in the last month before the ship, at a moderate pace, with his hands behind his back, and he had been — she had sat down and worked this out in a loft in Maribor in about 1620 and had never improved on it — a hundred and five, or a hundred and six. Somewhere in there. He had been well. He had had nothing wrong with him at all, in the way a man of that age has nothing wrong with him, which is to say that he had perhaps three hundred years in front of him and a seat in an Assembly and an opinion about the budget.

Val wrote the figure, and added seventy-six, and looked at what came out.

A hundred and eighty-one.

She sat in front of it for a long time.

There was no version of it in which he was dead. That was the whole of the arithmetic and it took four seconds and she had been refusing to do it since about 1650. Vaedom Sorin was alive. He was on that coast this morning. He was a hundred and eighty-one years old, which on Sethal is a man with most of a life still in him, and he had spent seventy-six of those years being the father of a woman whose ship did not come back.

The second marker was two lines and she wrote them last.

G. — one hundred and sixteen. K. — one hundred and sixteen.

Kyra came in on the fourth evening with her hair wet and found her sitting in front of it.

"Finished?"

"Finished."

"And?"

Val turned the paper round.

Kyra looked at it for a long time with her chin on her fist, and Val watched her go down the column of the dead and then stop at the bottom, where the two markers were, and not move at all.

"You've written him down."

"I have written him down."

"You've never written him down."

"I have never written him down," Val agreed, "because for seventy-six years I have been carrying a figure for his death, and I built it out of nothing, and I did it because a dead man is a thing a person can finish." She put her hands flat on the boards. "And I did the sum properly on Tuesday and there isn't one. He is a hundred and eighty-one. He is well. He will very likely see three hundred and fifty, and he is going to spend every year of it not knowing, and there is no method by which I can get one word to that coast."

Kyra came round the table.

She did not say anything, which was right. She crouched down and put both hands over Val's, which were still flat on the boards, and stayed there.

"A hundred and sixteen," Kyra said, after a while.

"If the years run straight."

"They run straight." Her voice had gone somewhere flat. "I've been saying if for seventy-six years because if lets you not think about it. Kal is a hundred and sixteen. She is a hundred and sixteen and she is fine. She's in a room somewhere being quiet at somebody."

"Yes."

"She's got a house and a chair and a bad knee by now and she's got about three hundred years left, and every single one of them she is going to spend being a woman whose mother went up in a ship on a Fourthday and did not come back, and I talked over the last sentence she ever started."

Val did not tell her it was all right.

"I would rather they were dead," Kyra said, into her own arm, and then, immediately: "I don't mean that."

"I know exactly what you mean and I have meant it twice this week," Val said. "It is easier to grieve a thing than to be unable to reach one. That is not a wicked thought. It is the correct description of a worse position."

Nothing happened after that, which was the entire difficulty.

Val had expected — she examined this afterward and could not account for it — some kind of event. A day on which it became true. But it had been true since 1607, and the only thing that had changed was that she had written it on a sheet of paper from the quay, and she went on going up the hill afterward, and the town went on, and Marjeta went on beating a rug in the lane.

What she could not do was answer the question.

Val Sorin had spent her whole life converting fear into quantity: how long, how many, how much further, what is the interval. It was not a habit. It was the instrument. It was the thing she had instead of the way other people simply felt better after a while.

And the instrument now worked perfectly and gave her an answer she could not use. Three hundred years, four people, four hundred years of light. Everybody was alive. Everybody would go on being alive. And the distance between her and all four of them was a quantity with no operation attached to it.

"I don't know how to hold it," Val said, in the dark, in the fourth week of it.

"I know."

"I am not distressed. I want to be accurate about that. I am not grieving, which is the difficulty; there is nothing to grieve." Val was looking at the ceiling. "I have four living people and no road to any of them and three hundred years to sit with it, and I keep putting it down and picking it up to see whether it has become something I can work on."

Kyra was quiet for a moment.

"Mine's got a shape," Kyra said.

"Say it."

"Everyone here. That's the shape." Her voice was steady and Val, lying beside her, knew precisely what that cost. "Marjeta. The factor. Zofka, who's already dead, and I've only just worked that out this week. Everybody I am ever going to like on this planet goes in front of me, and everybody I actually love is alive four hundred years of light away and getting on with it without me." She stopped. "That's not a number either. But it's a shape."

Val turned over and put her hand flat between Kyra's shoulder blades and left it there.

The glass came into the port in the spring of the fourth year, and Kyra came up the hill at a speed that made Val put down what she was holding before she had heard a word.

"There's a Dutchman on the quay with tubes."

"With what?"

"Tubes. Glass in both ends. He's got four of them and he's selling two." Kyra was already talking with her hands. "He says — Val, he says you point it at the sky and things are bigger."

Val said, very carefully, "How much does he want."

It was a great deal. It was more than either of them had ever spent on any object on this world, and it was, Val established over two days of asking on the quay, about a third more than the same thing would have cost in Venice, and she went back and said so to the Dutchman and got some of it back.

They carried it up the hill wrapped in sacking, one at each end, like a pair of thieves.

It was not, as an instrument, very good.

Val established that in the first hour, on the moon, and said so, and then said nothing else for a long time, because the moon through eleven feet of very bad glass was still the moon with mountains on it, and she had known it had mountains on it since she was nine, and had never once looked at them with her own eye.

It took three clear nights to get to the other thing, because Kyra insisted on the moon twice and then on Jupiter, which had four points of light strung out beside it that moved from one night to the next, and about which Val had a great deal to say.

On the fourth night they turned it on the smudge.

Kyra looked first. She looked for a long time and did not say anything at all, and then stood back and made a gesture at the eyepiece that meant go on then, and Val bent to it.

It was bigger.

That was all. It was an oval of pale nothing, brighter in the middle, tilted, with soft edges that went away if you looked at them directly, and it was perhaps four times the size it was to the naked eye, and it did not resolve into anything whatsoever. There was no structure in it. There were no lights in it. There was nothing in it that you could have called a place.

Val stood up.

"It's no closer," Val said.

"I know."

"I want to be precise, because you are going to want to hear something else and I am not going to be able to give it to you." Val kept her voice flat, which was the only kindness she had. "It is larger in the field. That is an artifact of the glass. Nothing about where it is has changed and nothing about what we can do has changed, and the light coming out of that tube left before there was anybody on Sethal to see it, exactly as it did on a rock above Dymná. This instrument cannot show us home. It can show us a bigger smudge."

"I know, Val."

"Then why—"

"Because I want to look at it," Kyra said.

And that, Val found, was not an argument she had any answer to at all.

She set it up for her on the clear nights, after that, for the rest of the time they were in that town.

It was heavy and it was awkward and it wanted a wall to lie along, and Kyra could not have got it up the hill by herself, and Val never once made her ask. On nights when the sky came over she was the one who said so first and carried it back in.

She also, within a year, had a better one, because she asked the Dutchman four questions the second time he came through and then asked a Venetian glass factor eleven more, and because there turned out to be a thing that could be done with the length of the tube.

And she learned, from a Venetian in a wine shop on the quay who was pleased to find a woman who could follow him, that a German had written about that particular smudge seventy years before, and had said it was like a candle seen through a piece of horn.

Val came up the hill with that and gave it to Kyra without preamble.

"Somebody wrote it down," Kyra said.

"Seventy years ago. In a book. He gave it four lines."

Kyra sat down on the wall above the town with the glass beside her and put her hands over her mouth for a moment.

"They've noticed us," Kyra said.

"They have noticed a candle through horn."

"They've noticed, Val. Somebody on this planet looked up at where my daughter is and thought it was worth four lines." Her eyes had gone and she did not care. "Seventy years ago. And they'll write more. They'll get better glass — you got better glass in a year — and in a hundred years they'll write more, and in three hundred they'll—"

She stopped, because she had heard where the sentence was going.

Val did not stop her getting there. She stood on a hill above a Habsburg port with her arms folded against the cold and let her.

"That's not nothing," Kyra said.

"No," Val agreed. "It is not nothing."

It was the first time either of them had said anything of the kind out loud, and it would be a hundred and eighty years before there was any reason to say it again, and Val wrote four lines about the evening in the notebook when they got down the hill.

— end of chapter eight —

Val had a man for four months in the second year, and Kyra, who had been waiting seventy-three years for this to happen again, enjoyed every bit of it.

He came twice a year off the Venice boat with drugs and books and a case of things in stoppered glass, and he was called Domenico, and he was fifty and had buried a wife and had the specific dryness of a man who has spent thirty years selling to people who do not understand what they are buying. Val met him because she went down to the quay to argue with him about a price, and stayed to argue about what was in the jar.

Kyra got the whole thing that night, unasked, in the kitchen, in the flat voice.

"There is a man on the quay and I have been thinking about him for two days and I would like you to know that before anything happens rather than afterward."

"Is he clever?"

"He is not clever. He is informed, which at this point I find I will take." Val put down the basket. "Are you going to be strange about this."

"I have never once been strange about this."

"You were strange about the man at the barges."

"I was strange about the man at the barges because he was boring, Val, and I had to sit through three dinners with him." Kyra was already grinning. "Is this one boring?"

"He knows what is actually in half the jars he sells and lies about the other half on purpose and knows I know."

"Then go away and stop telling me about it."

It lasted the four months he was in the port and ended when the boat went back, which both of them had understood from the beginning, and which was why it worked. He came through the following spring and it did not start again and neither of them made anything of that. He brought her a book once. Val kept it for a hundred years.

What Kyra noticed, and did not say, was that Val came home from those evenings talkative — not about him, about anything; a woman with the lid off — and that she had not seen that in a very long time.

Jakob Peršin came up out of the hinterland with wine in their first autumn in the port, four times a year at first and then every month, and by the third year he had a shed on the quay and a partner in Gorizia and an opinion about every skipper in the port.

He was thirty-two. He had a flat hinterland Slovene that Kyra could follow before she could follow anybody else in that town, and that was how it started: he heard her arguing with a Venetian in bad Italian, and said something to her over the man's shoulder in a language the Venetian did not have, and it was rude, and it was accurate, and Kyra laughed out loud on the quay.

"You're the weather woman," he said.

"I'm somebody's weather woman. I'm not yours."

"Not yet," said Jakob Peršin.

She told Val that night, because that was what they did, and because there was nothing to tell.

"A wine man from behind the hill made a joke at me on the quay."

"Was it good?"

"It was very good and it was at a Venetian's expense and half the mole heard it."

"Then I expect you'll be seeing him," Val said, and went on with what she was doing.

It took about a year, because Kyra was not in a hurry and neither was he.

What she liked about him, she worked out afterward, was that he was the first person in seventy-three years on that planet who talked to her at her own speed. Blaž had talked to her about loads. The factor talked to her about wind. Marjeta talked to her about the lane. Jakob talked to her about everything, fast, over the top of her, with his hands going, and he did not defer to her and he did not perform at her and when she said something he had not thought of he stopped and said so.

He was also — and she did not consider this a small thing — extremely good-looking in a way that the hinterland produced and the town did not, and he knew it, and did not mind being told so.

It was a warm year. It was one of the warmest she had on this world.

And every part of it went through the house. That was not a discipline by then; it was simply how they lived. Val knew when it started and knew when he was in the port and knew, because Kyra told her over the Sunday table with her chin on her hand, the unremarkable fact that he talked in his sleep in a language he claimed not to speak.

"Does he," Val said.

"German. He says he hasn't got any German."

"Everybody behind that hill has German and pretends not to. It's political." Val turned her cup. "You're happy."

"I'm happy."

"Good," Val said, and meant it, and Kyra knew she meant it, and that was the whole of the conversation.

He asked her in the fourth year, on the mole, in the evening, having plainly worked out what he was going to say and then said it badly, which she found she liked more than if he had done it well.

She said no.

She said it kindly and she said it immediately, because the one thing she was not going to do to that man was let him stand there while she thought about it.

"Why not?"

And here Kyra gave him a reason that was true.

"Because I don't stay anywhere," Kyra said. "That's all of it, Jakob. I've never been in one place more than — " she came within a syllable of saying thirty-five years, and did not " — more than a while. I came up that road and I'll go down it. That's not a thing about you. If I were the staying sort, I'd be having a very different conversation on this mole."

He took it well. He took it better than she had expected and she was slightly annoyed about that, and understood why she was annoyed about it, and was ashamed of herself.

"When?" he said.

"When what?"

"When do you go down the road."

"I don't know."

"Right," said Jakob, and put his hands in his coat, and looked out at the water for a while, and then said something about a skipper who had put a load of oil down in the wrong shed, and they walked back up the quay talking about the oil.

And then he did not go.

That was all of it, and it happened so slowly that Kyra could not afterward point at a week in which it had become a thing. He did not press her. He did not ask again. He went on coming down with the wine and standing in the shed and shouting at skippers and finding her on the mole, and it went on being what it had been, and the summer after that it was still what it had been, and the one after that.

He did not marry.

She noticed that in the sixth or seventh year, because a woman on the lane mentioned it — there was a widow in Gorizia who would have had him, and a girl in the town whose father had made an approach — and Kyra said something light and went up the hill with it sitting on her chest.

She did not tell Val for two days.

Then she did, because of the pact, and Val listened to the whole of it and said nothing at all for a moment.

"I'm not going to say anything you'll want," Val said.

"Say it anyway."

"It isn't about him and I want to be clear about that first, because you are about to hear it as though it is." Val had her hands flat on the table, which Kyra had learned to read seventy years ago and had never got used to. "A man who is refused and goes is a man who was asking a question. A man who is refused and stays is a man who has decided to wait for an answer, and a person who is waiting pays attention. That is all waiting is. He will be in this port looking at you for as long as it takes, and the thing he is looking at is the only thing on this world that neither of us can afford to have looked at for a long time."

"He's not looking at me like that."

"He is looking at you with everything he has, Kyra, which is what you like about him."

Kyra sat back.

"So what do you want," Kyra said. "You want me to end it."

"I want nothing. I have raised it once and I am going to stop." Val turned her hands over on the boards. "You asked me to say it and I have said it, and it is yours, and I am not going to be the woman who decides what you can carry. I have done that to you twice and I am not doing it again."

"Val—"

"It is your man and your friendship and your judgment, and my judgment is not better than yours about people and never has been." She got up and went to the window. "That's the whole of it. I won't raise it again."

She did not raise it again for seventeen years.

Kyra sat at that table for a while after Val had gone to bed, with the fire going down, and did the thing properly, because Val had earned that much.

She went through it.

He had never asked her where she was from. That was the first thing and it was not nothing: seven years, and he had never once asked, because he was a hinterland man in an Italian port and half his own people were from somewhere else and it was the least interesting question available. He had no reason to look for anything. There was nothing to look for. He was a wine man with a shed who liked her and who had been told no and had decided, in the way that men of his particular sort decide things, that he would rather have the part of her he could have than none of it.

And he was the only person in that town she could talk to at her own speed, and she had spent seventy-three years being slightly too slow for everybody on this planet except the woman asleep in the next room.

And Val had said it once, without pressing, and had put it down.

Kyra banked the fire and went in and got into the bed and lay in the dark next to her and said, to the ceiling, quietly:

"You're wrong about him."

"I know you think so."

"Say you heard me."

"I heard you," Val said, and turned over, and put her arm across her, and that was the end of it for seventeen years.

— end of chapter nine —

Kyra's mark went first, as it had always been going to, and Val's went four years after it, and neither of them said anything on the day either of them noticed.

They had been fading since the mountain. On a tarn shore in the summer of 1607 Kyra had reported that Val's was going and had admitted hiding it for six weeks, and after that there had been nothing to hide and they had simply watched — a thing low on the left, above the hip, about the size of a palm, the same shape in the same place on both of them — hers from a boy four systems out who had said the second half of the sentence, and Val's from eleven chairs on a fourth terrace, and for a hundred and forty years the only fact about either woman that the other could see with her own eyes.

By the tenth year in Trieste there was nothing on Kyra at all.

By the fourteenth there was nothing on Val either, or nothing that could be called a thing: a faint difference in the skin that you could persuade yourself out of, and that Val, who did not persuade herself out of anything, had stopped claiming to be able to see.

It came up in the dark, on an ordinary evening, in the way the worst of it always did.

Kyra had her mouth on the place where Val's had been, which was a thing she had done for eighty years and had first done on the night after the tarn, and which had started as an answer to something and had long since stopped needing one.

She stopped.

Val, who missed nothing, said: "What."

"Nothing."

"Kyra."

"It's gone," Kyra said, into her back. "That's all. I know it's gone, I've known for a year, I've been doing it anyway."

Val was quiet for a moment. Then she turned over, which took some arranging, and got a hand into Kyra's hair at the back of her head.

"Do it anyway," Val said.

"It doesn't—"

"It does not have to be for anything. That is the entire finding of the last eighty years and you were the one who found it." Val's voice had gone low and flat, which was the register she used for the things that mattered most. "There is nothing there. Put your mouth on it."

So Kyra did, and lay with her face against the place where a thing had been that only the two of them had ever known about, on a woman whose body had stopped changing before either of them was told it had, and thought, with the clarity that arrived in her like weather: the last piece of evidence that we came from anywhere is gone off both of us.

She did not say that. Val worked it out within the fortnight and said it herself, over the Sunday table, which is what the Sunday table was for.

Here is what was true in that house in the fourteenth year, and neither of them had said any of it out loud.

There were two permanent objects on this world and they were each other. Everything else in that town — Marjeta, the factor, the woman at the top end, the boy who ran the messages, the whole six thousand of them — was on a clock, and the clock was sixty years, and both of them had had the column and the four evenings with the candles and had discussed it for a month and then discussed it less and then not at all.

And they had gone on as before. Which meant that every ordinary night in that house was now a night in the one arrangement on this planet that was not temporary, and both of them knew it, and neither of them had touched the other while thinking about it.

Val was the one who did it first, because by that year Val was usually the one who did it first, and Kyra had stopped being surprised and had not stopped noticing.

She had, in fact, been noticing all day.

She had come in at noon and found Val at the table with the accounts and had said something about a skipper, and Val had answered correctly and not looked up, and Kyra had gone out again — and had got halfway down the lane before it arrived, the way it did, out of nowhere, with no warning and no argument attached: she has decided something.

She had thought, at first, that it was work.

Then she had thought about the set of the shoulders and the particular stillness of the hands on the boards, and had stood in a lane in the middle of a Tuesday in a Habsburg port and gone warm from the collarbones up, and had then had to go and talk to a man about oil.

"You've been at it since this morning," Kyra said, much later, with the shutter barred.

"I have no idea what you mean."

"I got to the bottom of the lane and had to stop."

"That is a failure of discipline on your part and not evidence of anything."

"Val."

Val looked at her for a moment. Then she said, in the flat voice, with her hands still:

"I have been thinking about you since before you came in at noon. I thought about you while you were telling me about the skipper and I did not hear the second half of it. I have thought about you at intervals all afternoon, in some detail, and once for long enough that a woman asked me twice whether her mother should take the powder at night." She did not look away. "I am telling you because you asked and because I find I would rather say it than have you work it out, and I am aware that four years ago I would have denied the whole thing."

Kyra found that she had to sit down on the edge of the bed.

"That's not fair," Kyra said.

"It is fair. It is true."

"Val, you can't just—" She stopped, and started again, and it came out with nothing on it. "Say the last part again."

"Which part."

"The powder. The woman who asked you twice."

"I did not hear her," Val said, "because I was thinking about your hands."

It was slow, and it was unhurried in a way that had nothing to do with patience, and somewhere in the middle of it the thing that neither of them had touched came into the room.

Val was the one it arrived in first. She had Kyra's hair pushed off the back of her neck and her mouth at the top of her spine and the whole length of the night in front of her, and it went through her without any warning at all: you are the only thing on this world I do not have to leave.

She had been doing the arithmetic on a finite quantity her entire life. Everything she had ever valued had come with a number on it — a term, a placement, a watch rota, a survey, a daughter at eighteen, ten years with a man who wrote out the watering for four plants. She had always known how much of a thing there was. It was how she decided what to spend.

Everything in this town had a number on it too, and she had written most of them down eleven winters ago. The house, a decade. Marjeta, thirty years, perhaps forty. The factor, less. The woman at the top end, less again.

And nothing whatsoever on the other side of it. No date, no decade, no town they would eventually have to walk out of. There was no last night in this or any other room and there never would be, because whatever room it was, in whatever century, there would be the two of them in it.

She did not know how to want something that was not going to be taken away.

What she did instead, in the absence of a method, was stop holding anything back at all — and Kyra, who had known this woman for a hundred and forty-six years and had been in this bed with her for eighty-seven, felt the difference at once and said her name in a voice that did not sound like hers.

The light came up in her somewhere after that and stayed up, all the way through, brighter than the room had any use for, and Kyra's eyes went and did not come back for a long time, and neither of them said one word about either.

Afterward Kyra lay with her head on Val's shoulder and did her own version of the same sum and did not enjoy it as much.

Joy first. That was honest and she recorded it honestly: joy, enormous, physical, the whole length of her, at the plain fact that this went on.

And then the other thing underneath it, which was that she had spent a hundred and sixty-four years being a person who finished things, and this world had just handed her a list of people she was going to have to put down half done, one after another, for the next two hundred years. Marjeta. The factor. Every one of them. She could not leave a thing unfinished; it was the whole of her temperament and her mother had said so when she was nine.

And there was exactly one thing on this planet she was never going to have to put down, and she was in bed with it.

"Say it," Val said, in the dark.

"It's not a bad one."

"Say it anyway."

"I've started saying goodbye to people before I've met them," Kyra said. "That's all. I did it to the boy on the mole last week. He's eleven and he's good and I caught myself putting him down before he'd finished telling me his name, because what's the point." She stopped. "And then I come up this hill and there's you, and you're the only door in this town I don't have to do it at."

Val thought about that for a while.

"I have the same problem from the other side," Val said. "I have been costing everything in that town since the winter of the column, in years, without deciding to."

"And?"

"And you are the only line in it with nothing in the column," Val said, "which is the most frightening arithmetic I have ever done and also the simplest."

Kyra laughed into her shoulder.

They came at the words sideways, an hour later, the way they always did.

"I've got a new one," Kyra said. "From the lane. Marjeta's cousin married in the spring and there's a word they used at it that isn't the Italian one."

"Go on."

She said it. Val turned it over for a while in the dark.

"No."

"You haven't even—"

"It's a marriage word."

"It's a good marriage word. It's about two people making a—"

"It is about two people making a promise for a life," Val said, "and I have been going through the marriage words for eleven years, in four languages, and they all have the same fault, and I did not see it until the fourth evening with the candles."

Kyra propped herself up.

"Say it."

"Every one of them has a death in it."

The room was quiet.

"That is what they are for," Val said. "Every marriage word on this planet is a wager about sixty years. Until one of us is carried out. For the rest of my days. All my life. They are not sentimental — they are precise, and what they are being precise about is that a life is short and the promise has a known length, and that is what makes it a promise at all." She had her hands folded on her ribs. "We are going to be saying it to each other in three hundred years in a country that does not exist yet. There is no word on this world built to hold that, because nobody on this world has ever needed one."

"Then it's not that they're wrong."

"They are not wrong. They are the right words for everybody except us, which is worse, and which is why I keep nearly taking them." Val turned her head. "I nearly took that one. I want that on the record. I held it for four seconds and I could see us using it."

Kyra lay back down.

"That's the second time you've nearly taken one."

"It is the fourth. I have not mentioned two of them."

"Val."

"They did not survive the night," Val said. "I have a procedure."

The shutter went gray at the edges eventually, in the way it did, and neither of them had slept much and neither of them minded.

"We're no closer," Kyra said.

"No."

"Fourteen years and four languages."

"Seventy-eight," Val corrected, with her eyes shut. "I have been counting from the room over the cooper's. Seventy-eight years and five languages, if we are being accurate, and we are no closer, and I would like to register that I am not troubled by this and that I do not entirely understand why."

Kyra put her arm over her and did not answer, because she did understand why, and because it was not yet a thing either of them could say at the hour of the morning it happened to be.

— end of chapter ten —

Kyra had refused the rule in a room over a cooper's shop seventy years before, and Val had never raised it again, and so what they had instead of a rule was a great deal of quiet engineering that Val did on her own and did not describe.

She had understood the position perfectly well. Kyra was not going to check a room before she touched her; she had said so once, at a table, with the fire going, and she had been right, and Val had put it down and had never in seventy years attempted to pick it back up.

But Trieste was under six thousand people on one hill, and the lane had four households in it, and the woman who did the washing for all four was in their house every day, and there was one square that everything crossed.

So Val built around her.

She arranged the house. The bed went where the door's angle did not reach it, and the shutter on the stair window was the one she had mended herself and did not stick. She learned which of the four households had somebody in the yard at which hours, which took a season, and she knew by the third year which window across the lane had a woman behind it at four in the afternoon. She stopped coming up the lane with Kyra when it could be helped. She came up two minutes behind her, which was invisible if you did it every day for twenty years and extremely visible if you started doing it after something had gone wrong.

None of this was discussed. Kyra knew about the shutter and the two minutes and did not know about the other eleven things, and Val had decided — in the one place where she still permitted herself to decide anything for another person — that telling her would have meant asking her, and asking her had been settled at a table in Maribor.

What they had in public was a wrist.

It arrived in the fifth year, on the quay, on a bad morning. There had been a boy off one of the coasters who had gone into the water between the hull and the stone and had not come up for a long time, and Kyra had been thirty feet away and had not been able to get there, and when it was over and the boy was on the quay coughing there was a quarter of an hour in which she was no use to anybody.

There were two hundred people on that mole.

Val came up beside her, shoulder to shoulder, facing the water like everyone else, and put two fingers on the inside of Kyra's wrist, at the seam of the sleeve, where a hand hangs.

It did not look like anything. It did not look like anything from four feet away.

She held it there for about as long as it takes to say a short prayer, which is what everybody around them was doing, and then took it away and said something about the boy's mother.

Kyra used it three weeks later, on Val, in the fish market, for no reason at all.

It became the entire vocabulary. In twenty-five years in that town it was, in public, the whole of it — two fingers at a wrist in a crowd, which either of them could do without turning her head, and which carried an astonishing amount, and which Val was privately certain nobody ever saw.

In the house it was a different arrangement entirely, and the thing Val did most often in the house was the lamp.

Kyra got headaches. She had got them since the change — a long slow pressure behind the eyes that came on the day before the weather did and had nothing to do with the weather, and that she never once mentioned, because Kyra Davan did not mention things of that kind and never had.

Val could see it. There was a way the light went in her face.

So on those evenings Val put out the lamp nearest her without being asked, and moved the other one to the far end of the table, and went on with whatever she was saying as though nothing had happened.

The first time she did it Kyra stopped talking in the middle of a sentence.

"What?"

"Nothing," Kyra said. "Go on."

She did not say anything about it for eleven years. Then, one evening in the sixteenth year, she said, out of nowhere, to the ceiling: "You've been doing the lamp since before I knew I had a face."

"I have been doing the lamp since the fourth year."

"I know," Kyra said. "I counted."

Here is the thing that went wrong between them in those years, and it was not the discipline. It was who it cost.

Val was superb at it. That was the difficulty. She had been trained in saying very little the way other children are trained in an instrument, and going sealed in a room was not an effort for her; it was the resting state, the thing she had to come out of rather than the thing she had to go into. She could stand in the fish market being pleasant to a woman for four minutes with nothing whatsoever on her face and then walk up the hill with her heart going.

Kyra could do it. She did it well. She hated every hour of it, and it took something out of her that it did not take out of Val, and the two of them did not have the same conversation about it because they were not having the same experience.

It came out once, badly, in the twelfth year, on the stairs.

Kyra had come up behind her and had put a hand on the back of her neck in the lane — which she did, because she had never agreed not to — and Val had not reacted at all. Not pulled away. Simply not reacted: had gone on up the stairs saying something about a bill.

At the top Kyra said: "Do you know what you look like when you do that?"

"When I do what?"

"Nothing. That's the answer. You look like nothing." She was not shouting. "I put my hand on you in a lane and I have known you a hundred and forty-six years and I couldn't have told from your face that anything had touched you, and you did it without thinking about it, and you'll do it again tomorrow."

"Yes."

"Doesn't that—" Kyra stopped. "How much of you is left in there, when you're out in that town? Do you know? Because I can feel exactly how much of me is left and it isn't much and it gets less every year, and you go down that hill and you're comfortable."

Val stood in her own doorway with a bill in her hand.

"All of it is in there," Val said. "It is simply behind a door I have had since I was eighteen years old and can open and shut without looking. You are describing the single most useful thing that ever happened to me and you are correct that it is also the worst thing, and I have known both of those since a fourth terrace, and I do not have a way to only have the good half."

Kyra looked at her for a moment.

"I hate it," Kyra said.

"I know you do."

"I'm not going to stop hating it."

"I would think considerably less of you if you did," Val said.

The thing that mattered had already happened by then, and neither of them knew it, and it had been reported and dismissed in a single evening in the tenth year.

Kyra had come in late and said, from the door, in English, with her boots still on: "My eyes went with Jakob tonight."

"Where?"

"His shed. Late. There was nobody." She sat down and pulled at a lace. "It was dark and it was quick and I turned my head, and he didn't say anything, and I don't think he saw."

"You don't think."

"He'd have said something. He says everything." Kyra got the boot off. "If that man had seen a woman's eyes go gold in a shed he would have been off the stool and across the floor and asking me about it in four seconds, and he'd have been asking me about it every week since. He's not a man who sits on things."

Val considered that for some time and found that she agreed with it.

"All right," Val said.

And it was all right. It was reported the same night, under the pact, exactly as it should have been, and they assessed it together, and their assessment was reasonable and was based on ten years of accurate observation of a particular man, and it was wrong.

She found out in the seventeenth year, in the autumn, in the most ordinary way available.

They were on the mole. Jakob was talking about a skipper, and about the lamps the Venetians had started putting on the mole heads at Malamocco, and about how this town would not have one in his lifetime because this town could not agree on the color of the sea.

And then he said: "It's a good light, that. It's not like a flame."

"What isn't?"

"The one they use." He was looking out at the water. "Gold, but it doesn't move. Like a thing that's lit from the inside instead of the front." He drank. "You only see it once and then you know it when you see it again."

Kyra said something about the Venetians. She did not remember afterward what.

She walked up the hill and came into the house and stood with her back against the door.

"When," Val said.

"Seven years ago. The shed."

"When did he see it again."

And there it was, and Kyra had already got there, because she had had the length of the hill.

"I don't know," Kyra said.

Val sat down.

She did the thing she did, which was to take it apart in order, and she said the pieces out loud as she got them because the alternative was letting Kyra watch her face and guess.

"He saw it seven years ago and said nothing. That is the first fact and it is the worst one. We established that he was a man who could not sit on a thing, and we established it on good evidence, and we were wrong, and the way we were wrong is that he could sit on this for seven years." She had her hands flat. "A man who asks is a man who wants an answer. A man who does not ask has already decided what the answer is, and has decided that he would rather have you than have it confirmed."

"That's not—"

"And tonight he told you. Not asked. Told, sideways, on a mole, about a lamp, in a way that could not be answered and was not meant to be." Val looked up. "He wanted you to know that he knows. That is not a man collecting evidence. That is a man who has been alone with something for seven years and could not carry it one more winter."

The fire had gone down. Neither of them had touched it.

"We should go," Val said.

They argued for four days.

Kyra's case was not a bad one and Val never afterward pretended that it had been.

He had known for seven years and had done nothing, which was seven years of evidence about his character weighed against four seconds in a shed. He had not told anyone; if he had, they would have heard it — in a town of six thousand a thing like that reaches the hill inside a month. He was not devout and never had been, and the priest at the cathedral bored him, and he had said so in front of Val at a table. He had, tonight, gone out of his way to say the one thing that would tell her he knew and would tell nobody else anything at all, which was the act of a man protecting her, not preparing anything.

And underneath all of it, said on the third day, plainly, because Kyra Davan did not hide her reasons even when they were the weak ones:

"I've got three years left of what I said and I want them."

"Kyra—"

"I said twenty on the mole in the first week and I meant it and I'm at seventeen. I know exactly what the arithmetic is." She had her hands round a cup she was not drinking from. "I have a man I can talk to and a factor who pays me for what I am and a woman downstairs who has never asked me one question in seventeen years, and it is the best life I have had on this planet, and you are asking me to put it down eleven weeks after I finally stopped counting how long I had left of it."

Val said nothing for a moment.

"That is the true reason," Val said.

"That's the true reason. The rest is also true. But that's the one."

Here is what Val did, and she thought about it for the rest of her life.

She had the figures. She had had them for four days and they had not changed: a man who had held a thing for seven years and had just stopped being able to hold it, in a town where nothing would happen for a year and then there would be a bad winter. She had said it once. She believed it entirely.

And she had spent eighty years learning not to be the woman who decides what Kyra Davan can carry. She had done it on a bridge and she had done it for eight days with a notebook, and both times she had been the one who was wrong about a person, and she had stood in a room nine years ago and said out loud that her judgment about people was not better than Kyra's and never had been.

It was true when she said it. It was the honest correction of a real fault. She had worked for it.

"All right," Val said, on the fourth day.

"You don't mean that."

"I mean the words. I do not agree with you and I am not going to pretend to." Val put her hands on the table. "It is your man, it is your judgment, and you have three years of a thing you said out loud in front of me. I will hold to it. I would like one condition and it is not a rule and you may refuse it."

"Say it."

"When the three years are up we go. Not discussed. Not weighed again. The autumn of the twentieth year, roads or no roads."

Kyra put out her hand across the table, which was not a thing either of them did, and Val took it.

"Done," Kyra said.

Val had, at that moment, eight years left in that town and did not know it.

They went up above the castle that night because it was clear, and Val carried the glass because she always carried the glass, and they stayed up there until the cold got into them.

It was a good evening. That was the thing Val could not get over afterward. It was one of the best they had in that town: Kyra laughing at something at the third hour of the morning with her head back, and the smudge doing what it did, and the two of them coming down the hill arguing cheerfully about whether the Venetians would ever put a lamp on the mole.

Nothing was wrong. Nothing was going to be wrong for eight years.

Val put the glass back in its box and shot the bar on the door and went to bed beside her, and did not lie awake, and that was the last decision either of them made freely in the town of Trieste.

— end of chapter eleven —

It began, as most of the important things between them did, because Val was counting.

They were above the castle on a hard clear night in the winter of the eighteenth year, with the second glass — the long one, the one she had argued a Venetian into making — lying along the top of the wall on its bag of sand. The gulf was black. The town was two dozen points of light below and behind them and a smell of woodsmoke coming up.

Val was timing something. She had got interested, over four winters, in the fact that the four points beside Jupiter were not where they had been the previous night, and had begun writing down when they went behind, which was a useless activity that she defended on the grounds that she had to do something with her hands.

She counted under her breath while she waited.

Kyra, sitting on the wall with her boots against the stone, heard it and went still.

"Do that again."

"Do what?"

"Count."

Val, who had been holding a number, said the next four out loud without thinking about it — and then heard herself, four syllables too late.

They were not in English. They were not in Italian or German or Slovene or the dead village tongue out of Spiš.

"You always do it," Kyra said. "When you're not thinking. You've done it for ninety years."

"I have not been aware of it."

"I know you haven't. Neither was I, the first forty times." Kyra had her arms round her knees. "That's the bottom of you, that is. Everything else you've learned sits on top."

Val stood with her hand on a very expensive piece of glass and had an extremely unwelcome thought.

"We've got a whole language," Kyra said.

"Yes."

"No. I mean we've got a whole language and we've been going round this planet for eighty years with a lamp looking for a word." She was not being funny. "We've had five. English, and the village, and the country's, and the Italian, and Slovene, and I've been saying five for years and it's six, isn't it. It's always been six."

"It has always been six," Val agreed.

"So why haven't we looked in ours?"

The wind came off the gulf.

"You know why," Val said.

"I want it said."

So Val said it, because she had been asked and because the alternative was letting the two of them go on not saying it for another century, and she said it in the flat voice with her hand still on the glass.

"There are words. You know the ones I mean and I know the ones you mean and neither of us is going to say them tonight, and I want to be clear that I am not avoiding them — I am describing them." She turned round. "They are not general. That is the whole of the difficulty. On Sethal a word for two people carries the entire apparatus with it. Say the first one and you have said the bond: the lodging requirements, the declaration, the register, a room with a hundred and forty people in it and somebody at the front asking both of you whether you are willing. Say the second and you have said a family, which means houses and an alliance and two sets of people being pleased in a long room."

"I was there for the hundred and forty," Kyra said. "I stood in it."

"I know you did."

"I said yes in front of every person I was related to."

"And I did not," Val said, "and the fourth terrace is what happens to the people who do not, and both of those facts are inside those words as well. That is what a word out of a civilization is. It is not a sound. It is the whole building, and you cannot take one room out of it."

Kyra was quiet for a while.

"So they're the wrong words."

"They are the right words for something else. They are accurate, and precise, and they describe an arrangement that four thousand years of people worked out and that a great many of them were happy inside." Val put her hands in her sleeves against the cold. "And they have nothing whatever to do with what is between you and me, and if I said one to you in this town tonight I would be filing us under a heading that was built for something we have never done and are never going to do."

"All right," Kyra said. "Now the other half."

"Which other half."

"The one you just skipped, which I noticed, and which you knew I'd notice." She got down off the wall. "There's a third thing. It isn't the bond and it isn't the family. It's the one people say to each other in a doorway, and everybody on that planet has it, and nine-year-olds say it to their mothers, and it doesn't come with a building. You know it. I know it. Every single person in my house used it and so did every single person in yours."

Val did not say anything.

"There's nobody on this world who could understand it," Kyra said. "Not one person. Not the priest, not Marjeta, not Jakob, not a man with a book in Venice. We could stand in the middle of that square at noon and say it at the tops of our voices and the whole town would hear two foreign women making a noise."

"Yes."

"Ninety years, Val. Ninety years and it's been in both our mouths the entire time and free, and we have never once."

"No."

"So say why. Because it isn't the building. You've explained the building and the building's real and it doesn't touch this one." Kyra's voice had gone somewhere flat and careful, which in her was the equivalent of a shout. "You're the one who wants a word. You've been the one who wants a word since a morning in Maribor when I said it to be pleasant. And there's one lying on the ground and you won't pick it up, and I've watched you not pick it up for ninety years, and tonight I'd like to know."

The silence went on for some time.

Val discovered, standing on a hill above a Habsburg port with a telescope on a bag of sand, that she did not have it. She went looking, in order, the way she went looking for everything, and the answer was not in the place where her answers were.

"I don't know," Val said.

"You do."

"I have four explanations and all four of them are constructions. I can tell the difference." She was aware of her own hands. "I have been assuming for ninety years that I was being careful. I have just gone and looked at the carefulness and there is nothing underneath it."

And Kyra said: "It's mine, then."

"What is?"

"The reason. It's mine and I've had it since the mountain and I've never given it to you." She came and stood in front of her. "Do you want it?"

"Yes."

"You asked me a question on the shoulder above the tarn," Kyra said. "The first autumn. You'd just run the ridge for the first time on that leg and you came back and you were — " she stopped, and went round it. "And I stood there and I had about four seconds to say something, and I could have said any of it. I'd been saying true things out loud on that mountain since the spring and every single one of them had cost me less than I expected. I could have said it."

"You said I was slow on the turns."

"I said you were slow on the turns." Kyra's breath went white. "And I've never told you why, and the why is this: I went through everything I had and there was nothing in it that fitted, and what I found instead was that I didn't want a word for it. Because a word would have made it a thing you could put down."

Val stood very still.

"Say that again."

"A word is a handle. That's what a word is for. You put one on a thing so you can pick it up and carry it about and hand it to somebody and set it on a shelf and come back to it later." Kyra had her hands out, and then dropped them. "Everything in my life that's had a name on it has been a thing I could put down. The bond had a name, and I said yes to it in front of a hundred and forty people, and then Emrin and I spent two years taking it apart. The chair had a name. The house had a name. I've handed back every single thing anybody ever gave me a word for. And I stood on that shoulder in the cold and understood that if I made one for this, then one day there'd be an afternoon where I set it on a shelf, and I would rather have gone off that mountain than have that afternoon exist."

The wind did what it did.

"So no," Kyra said. "Not the bond. Not the family. Not the doorway one either, and not because it's too small — because it's a handle, and it's the best handle anyone on my world ever made, and I have been keeping it away from this for ninety years the same as you have, and I only worked out tonight that that's what I was doing."

Val did not argue.

That was the whole of her answer and both of them knew it and neither of them remarked on it. She had spent ninety years assembling a case for a word that meant one thing, and had been handed a reason not to have one that she had never considered and could not fault, and the correct response to a finding you cannot fault is silence.

What she said, after a while, was: "Kal asked us."

"I know she did."

"On the turf below the ridge at the Headland, after the last meet of the season, with four hundred people round us eating out of a tray. She said she had been asked four times that year by people in her own house and had never once had an answer, and she would like one." Val was looking at the black gulf. "And I stood there and did not say anything for four seconds, and you said we ran together, and I said yes."

"You were grateful."

"I have never been more grateful for a sentence in my life and I have never told you so." Val turned round. "And I have thought for a hundred and twelve years that the two of us failed that girl on a hillside. I have carried it as a failure. I would like to put on the record that as of tonight I am not sure it was one."

Kyra looked at her.

"It wasn't an answer," Kyra said.

"It was the only true thing available in four seconds, in front of a witness, about a thing that has no name in six languages." Val said it without any weight on it. "I have spent a hundred and twelve years thinking I withheld something from my daughter. I withheld nothing. There was nothing there to withhold. That is worse in one way and a great deal better in another and I am going to be some time deciding which."

They stopped looking after that night.

Nobody announced it. There was no evening on which either of them said that the thing was finished; Kyra simply came up the stairs one week in the following spring with something she had heard off a Greek on the quay and got two sentences into it before she stopped, and looked at Val, and Val looked back, and Kyra said, "No, I know," and put the kettle where it went.

Eighty-two years, six languages, and a great many candidates, of which Val had nearly taken four.

They did not feel defeated by it. Val examined that afterward with some care, because she had expected to, and the word that kept coming was finished — not the search, but the question; they had asked something for ninety years and had got an answer, and the answer was that there was nothing on any shelf anywhere that was going to fit, and that they had both known it and had both been protecting it from the shelf.

They stayed up on the wall a while longer, because the sky was as good as it ever got there.

Kyra put her eye to the glass and found the smudge and held it, and did not say anything for a long time.

"It's the same," Kyra said.

"It is exactly the same. It will be the same for a very long time."

"That light left before there was anybody on Sethal to see it." Kyra straightened up and rubbed her eye with the back of her wrist. "There was no language when that came out of there. There was nobody standing in a room asking anybody whether they were willing. There wasn't a word for anything at all yet."

Val looked at it — the small pale tilted thing that a German had given four lines to — and understood that she was looking at a place with no vocabulary in it whatsoever, which had made every word she had ever been handed, and which had not yet made the one she wanted.

"No," Val said. "Not yet."

And they carried the glass down the hill between them, one at each end, the way they had for fourteen years.

— end of chapter twelve —

They left Trieste in the spring of the twentieth year, which was what they had agreed, and they went north instead of west, which was not.

The agreement had been the autumn. Val had shortened it herself, in February, with an argument she believed at the time and examined a great deal afterward: that if they were going anyway, they should do the mountain first, while they still had the money and the health of the thing, and come down the other side of it and go on west from there.

Kyra had said yes inside four seconds.

Neither of them had said the true version, which was that they were both going to the mountain, and that the west was a direction they had never once discussed in twenty years, and that a journey with a destination in it is not a departure.

It took them most of the summer.

They went up through the Carniolan valleys and over into Styria and along the roads Kyra had read for Blaž for thirty-five years, past the Drava town, which they did not enter, and then north and east into country neither of them had crossed since they were ninety years younger and had nothing at all.

It was a hard journey and it was also, Kyra thought afterward, one of the happiest stretches of her life. They walked. That was all. They had money for once and they used it on nothing and slept out when the weather was fine because it was better than the inns, and Val had a stick that she did not need and used for beating things out of the way, and they talked for eleven hours a day about nothing.

On a bad afternoon in the eighth week, in rain, with a pass still to cross, Val said, "How much further?"

"Not far now," Kyra said.

It was another day and a half, and they both knew it, and Val said so, and Kyra said she had been being encouraging, and Val said that encouragement was a form of inaccuracy and that she would prefer a number.

She got a number. She complained about the number.

The story reached them two valleys short.

They had stopped at an inn on the road below the Spiš side, and the girl who brought the food had heard them talking and had asked, in the way of such girls, where they had come from, and Kyra had given four of the eleven answers and got a fifth question, which was whether they were going up.

"Up where?"

"The high valleys." The girl put the jug down. "You want to be careful up there."

And then she told them the story, because she had an audience and it was raining.

There had been, a long time ago now — before her grandmother, before her grandmother's mother — two women who came down out of the snow. Nobody knew where from. They lived up on the mountain a whole winter where nobody could live and came down on the seventh day and bought salt. One of them could not be killed; she had come down with her leg in pieces and had been walking on it by the autumn. The other one pulled a child out of a flood that took two men, and a woman saw her face while she was doing it, and what the woman saw was not a face.

They had gone in the spring, before anything could be done about them, which was the way with that kind.

"And that's a true story," the girl said, with enormous satisfaction, "because the boy grew up. Old Maroš. He was the one out of the water. He told it his whole life and he lived to be ninety-something and his people are still up there — the one who burns the charcoal on the hill above the village is his grandson's boy."

Kyra said, "What did the woman see?"

"Gold," said the girl. "Eyes like a goat, but gold, and lit up."

She went away to get the bread.

Neither of them touched the food.

"Ninety-two years," Val said, on the road, the following morning.

"Don't."

"I am not going to say I told you. I have never once said that to you and I am not starting on a road in the rain." She was walking with her hands behind her back, which she did when she was assembling something. "I am going to say what the actual finding is, because it is not the one either of us expected and it is worse."

"Go on."

"Everyone who saw us is dead. Every single one. Frederick, the pastor, the mother, the shepherd, the boy out of the water — the boy out of the water died an old man and he is still dead, and there is not one person alive on this world who has laid eyes on either of us before the year 1608." Val stopped on the road. "And the story has got better. It has a leg in it that mended and a face that was not a face and a color. We have been gone ninety-two years and we are more dangerous in that valley now than we were on the day we left it."

Kyra stood in the rain and worked through it.

"It doesn't decay," Kyra said.

"It does not decay. That is the whole of what I have learned this week and I would like it written down somewhere." Val's voice had gone very flat. "A witness dies. A story does not. It gets handed down and it gets tidier every time it changes hands, because the parts that are hard to remember fall off and the parts that are easy to tell get sharper. In ninety-two years that valley has been quietly editing us into something that can be recognized on sight."

They came up above the treeline on the fourth day after that, in the early morning, and there was smoke going up out of the trees on the charcoal hill.

Kyra stood and looked at it for a long time.

It was in exactly the place. It went up thin and steady and nearly straight in the still air, the way it had on the morning they came down out of the snow with nothing, and it was not Ondrej's, and Ondrej had been dead for ninety-three years, and the man making it was the great-grandson of a boy Kyra had pulled out of a river.

"He's down there," Kyra said.

"He is down there."

"Maroš's boy's boy. Working that hill." Kyra had her arms folded. "I could walk down and buy charcoal off him."

"You could."

Val laid it out once, on the shoulder, sitting down, in order, and then she stopped.

There were perhaps four hundred people in that valley. The story was in all of them and it had a color in it and a mended leg. Two women had been described to that valley for ninety-two years by a man everybody had liked, and the description was accurate, and neither of them had changed by so much as a line. There was no version in which Kyra went down that path and was not a woman out of a story; there was only a version in which nobody happened to be looking, and Val had no way to put a figure on that.

And then she said: "That is everything I have. It is your valley as much as mine and you have more in it than I do, and I am not going to tell you what to do with it."

"You want me not to go."

"I want you not to go and I am not asking you not to. Those are different and I have spent eighty years learning the difference and I am not throwing it away on a hillside." Val had her hands on her knees. "Take as long as you like. I'll be here."

Kyra sat on the shoulder above Dymná for a little under two hours.

She could see the roofs. She could see the line of the path down through the forest, and the place where the stream had to be crossed on two stones, and the gap in the trees where you could see the whole valley at once and had to stop whether you wanted to or not. She could see the fence of the hut on the high pasture, mended by somebody, still standing.

She was not going down to see a person. That was the part she had to get to by herself and it took the two hours. There was nobody down there to see. There was a man burning charcoal who did not know her, and a church with a stone in it, and four hundred people who had a story about her eyes.

She wanted to go down because it had been hers. That was all it was.

"All right," Kyra said, and got up. "We go at night and we go to the churchyard and we don't go anywhere else, and if there's a light on in that village we turn round."

"Yes."

"Say it back."

"If there is a light on we turn round," Val said.

And that was the first hour of a discipline that Kyra Davan kept, without exception, for the next three hundred years.

The churchyard was on the near side, which was the only piece of luck in it.

They went down in the dark, on the path, the two of them, at a pace that would have surprised anybody watching, and the village was black and the dogs did not wake and there was no light on anywhere.

Frederick's stone was where a man of his standing would have been put, near the wall, and it was ninety-two years old and had gone the color stone goes, and there was moss in the letters.

Kyra crouched and got the moss out with her thumbnail.

It said his name — the one the village had used, the German one worn down into the valley's mouth — and the year, and nothing else. There was another name under it, older, which was his wife's, and the shawl Kyra had worn up and down a mountain for eleven months had been that woman's, and Kyra had never once been told her name and was now standing on it.

She stayed down there a while.

When she got up Val was standing at the foot of the stone with her hands at her sides, and Kyra knew at once what she was going to do, because she had watched that woman arrive at a decision for a hundred and fifty-two years and had never once been wrong about the shoulders.

Val said her name.

Her whole name, out loud, in her own language, in a churchyard in Spiš at some hour after midnight — the name she had offered a man in a storehouse ninety-two years earlier and had watched him refuse, gently, so that he could never be made to say it.

She said it once. She did not say anything else. She did not explain it to the stone and she did not explain it to Kyra.

Kyra said nothing at all — then, or on the path, or at the top, or in any of the three hundred years that followed.

The mountain took them two more days.

The slope where the seventeen were was bare. It was exactly bare. There was grass on it and a good deal of loose rock and four hundred yards of drift below the line where the pieces had gone, and no mark of any kind, and nothing to say that nineteen people had come down out of the sky onto it.

They did not build anything. They had discussed it twice on the road and had arrived at the same place both times, which was that a cairn on a bare slope is a question, and a question in that valley was the one thing they could not leave behind.

Kyra stood on it for a long time with her hands in her sleeves.

"Not yet," Kyra said.

"No," Val agreed. "Not yet."

The hull was where they had left it, and it was not there.

That was the thing neither of them had been able to describe to the other on the entire journey up: the concealment had held so completely that they stood in the right place, on the right shoulder, with the right stones under them, and there was nothing whatsoever to see. Gray rock, gray snow at the top of the gully, a shoulder of mountain in a country full of them.

Val, who had carried the possibility that it had failed for ninety-two years and had never once said so out loud, stood and looked at the empty air and had to put her hand on Kyra's shoulder.

"You were frightened of this," Kyra said.

"Every year."

"You never said."

"There was nothing to be done about it," Val said, "which is not a defense, and I know it is not a defense, and I am telling you now."

Kyra put her hand flat on the air where the hull was and wanted, and the seam came up pale out of the gray.

Inside it was exactly as it had been, and it was warm, and the light came up along the curve of the wall as they stepped over the frame.

Kyra went to her locker before she took her coat off.

The plates were there. The three books were there. The drawing was there, in the bottom, a bad drawing done by a child of six who had never been told it was kept — four figures, one with her arms out, one small one at the end drawn smaller than she had actually been and standing slightly apart.

She sat down on the floor with it in both hands.

"She's a hundred and thirty-three," Kyra said, after a while.

"If the years run straight."

"They run straight. You stopped saying if seventeen years ago and you have started again because we are standing in it." Her voice was doing something. "Kal Davan is a hundred and thirty-three years old, and she has been a hundred and thirty-three for about as long as it took us to walk here from a port." "And this is a drawing a six-year-old did of her mother, and I have looked at it three times in ninety-three years."

Val sat down on the floor beside her, which she could do now and had been able to do for ninety-three years, and looked at it for a long time.

"I still have no mouth," she observed.

"You've still got no mouth."

"It remains the most accurate portrait anybody has ever made of me."

Kyra laughed, and it came apart in the middle, the way it had the first time, and she put the drawing back in the locker very carefully before anything could happen to it.

They were there nine days, and on the sixth the ship gave them something.

It came the way the last one had, which was in the middle of an ordinary hour, with a small domestic sound. A panel on the wall that had been a floor went from gray to the pale shell-color and stayed there, and when Val put her hand on it a pane of the stuff came up under her palm and held.

There was writing in it. Not much. Eleven lines, in the ship's own hand, in the notation the lattice used for itself, which Val could read about a third of and Kyra could read about a tenth.

It was a record of the fold.

Not the mission's record — that had gone out to Solara before they ever entered it. This was what the hull itself had logged in the four hundred seconds it had been inside, in its own terms, for its own purposes, about what had been done to it.

Val sat in front of it for two days.

"I can read the units," Val said, at the end of the second. "I can read three of the eleven lines and I can read the units on the other eight, and one of the units is a time and it is not the time we were in there, and I cannot make the two numbers agree by any method I have."

"Is it broken?"

"It is not broken. It is a hull's own account of an event, written for a reader who has the whole system behind him, and I have a notebook and a bad memory of a paper of Vosse's." Val put her hands flat on the floor. "I want to be extremely careful about what I say next, because you are going to hear more in it than is there."

"Say it anyway."

"Somebody could read this. Not me, and not on this world, and not for a very long time. But it is not a mystery. It is a measurement, in units, taken by an instrument, of a thing that happened to us." She looked up. "Every question I have ever been able to answer has looked like that at the beginning."

Kyra did not say anything for a moment.

"Write it down," Kyra said.

So Val copied out all eleven lines into the notebook, exactly, including the eight she could not read, and it took her most of a day, and she carried them off that mountain and copied them forward, in her own hand, for four hundred years.

They came down in the last week of the autumn with the passes closing behind them and no money left to speak of.

And here is how the second failure happened, which was so ordinary that neither of them noticed it at the time.

They were on the Styrian road in October with winter coming and nowhere in the world to be, and Val did the arithmetic out loud at an inn, because she did all her arithmetic that way now.

They had no money. Everything they owned that was not on their backs was in a house in Trieste. The house was on a lease with a year to run and money in it. The glass was in a box under the bed. Kyra was owed by a factor for a season's work, and Val was owed by four households, and none of that could be collected by letter. To go west from here in November with nothing was to be two women on a road in winter again, and they had done that once, in 1608, and had come out of it with nothing but a notebook.

"One year," Val said. "We go back, we sell properly, we collect what we are owed, and we go west in the autumn with money in our hands instead of walking out of a town like two people running from something."

It was, she thought afterward, the single most reasonable sentence she ever said in her life.

"One year," Kyra agreed.

They were in Trieste for four.

— end of chapter thirteen —

The one year took four, and Kyra could have given an account of every month of it, and not one of the months had anything wrong in it.

The lease had a year to run and then the cooper who held the head of it died and his son wanted a name on the paper before winter, and it was easier to sign for three than to argue. The factor Kyra worked for lost two coasters in the same season and could not pay her out, and paid her in instalments, and the instalments ran into the following year. Val had four households and then six, because a woman who has attended a family for twenty years is not a person you can simply stop using, and two of the six were people she would not leave in the middle of something.

And every autumn they said the autumn.

That was the shape of it and it is the whole confession. They did not decide to stay. They decided eleven separate small reasonable things, in order, over four years, and each one of them was correct.

The fever came up out of the hinterland in the ninth month of the twenty-fifth year and was in the town by the tenth.

It was not the plague and everybody said so constantly, which is what a town says. It was a fever that took the very young and the very old and left everybody in between on their backs for a fortnight, and there was no treating it, and Val said so to every single person who asked her, plainly, in four languages.

She went anyway. She went for eleven weeks and she slept perhaps four hours a night, and Kyra came home from the quay to find her sitting on the stairs with her boots on twice.

Most of them lived.

Three did not, on that lane, and one of the three was a child of two at the top end, whose mother had come to the door herself on the first night and had asked for the fair one by name.

Val had gone. She had done nothing that any woman in that lane could not have done, because there was nothing to do, and she had sat on the floor of that room for a night and a day, and the child had died in the morning.

She came home and sat down on the bench and said, "I want to say the accurate thing, which is that I could not have saved that child on Sethal either."

"I know."

"It is the first time in ninety-eight years that I have been able to say that, and I would like you to notice that it has not helped in the slightest."

Frederick had told them, in a storehouse, in the spring of 1608, exactly what the word did. 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.

Kyra thought about that sentence perhaps four times in ninety-seven years, and not once in the autumn of 1705.

She saw Jakob on the tenth of November, on the quay, in the afternoon.

He was fifty-seven and looked it and had for some time. He had got heavy in the shoulders and narrow in the face, which is a thing that happens to men who work outdoors and drink indoors, and his hair had gone the iron color that hinterland men went, and he had a cough in the winters now that he made jokes about.

He was leaning on the rail by his own shed doing nothing, which was not like him.

"Chiara."

"Jakob."

And then he did not say anything for a moment, which was very much not like him, and Kyra stood there with the wind coming off the water and waited, because in twenty-five years she had learned that if you waited he would eventually say four things at once.

"How old are you?" he said.

She laughed, because it was such an odd thing, and because laughing was what she did.

"You're not supposed to ask."

"I'm asking."

"Thirty-one," Kyra said. It was one of the eleven answers. It had been thirty-one for a while and had been twenty-six when they came, and Val moved it every few years in the way you move a stone in a wall.

Jakob nodded slowly, looking at the water.

"That's what you said when I met you," he said.

Kyra's whole body went cold from the back of the neck down.

"I said twenty-six when you met me."

"You did." He was still looking at the water. "You said twenty-six, and I was thirty-two, and I remember thinking she's young for a woman doing that work. And I'm fifty-seven." He turned round. "I'm fifty-seven, Chiara."

"Jakob—"

"That's all. I'm not asking you anything else." He pushed off the rail. "I'm going up. I'll see you."

He went up the quay toward the hill, and Kyra watched him go, and noticed — because she noticed everything about roads and about people who walked on them — that he was walking the way a man walks when he has somewhere to be and does not want to arrive.

She told Val that night. Of course she told Val that night.

She told her on the stairs before she had her coat off, the whole of it, in order, in English, including the laugh and including the cold down the back of her neck.

Val listened to all of it without moving.

"We go," Val said.

"Yes."

"Kyra—"

"I said yes." Kyra's hands were shaking and she put them flat on the table to stop them. "Don't do the part where you convince me. I'm there. I was there on the quay before he finished."

Val sat down.

"Then here is what it takes," Val said. "The money with the factor I will write off; it is four months' work and it is gone. There are two households I cannot leave, and one of them is the woman at the top end who has just buried a child, and I will go to her tomorrow and tell her I am called away, which she will believe, because people are called away." She was doing it in order, out loud, as she had done everything for sixty years. "The lease can be abandoned. The glass cannot come. We take what we walked in with and the notebook and the sheets and we go down to the mole and we take whatever is going anywhere, and I would like it to be the day after tomorrow."

"Why not tomorrow?"

"Because there is nothing going out tomorrow. I looked in the eighth month and I have looked every month since, and there is a Venetian on the Friday."

Kyra looked at her.

"You've been looking every month."

"Since the eighth month of last year," Val said. "I have not mentioned it because you would have heard it as pressure, and it was not pressure, it was arithmetic, and I did not want to be a woman standing in a doorway holding a sailing list."

"Val."

"I am aware," Val said. "We can discuss it on the boat."

The Friday was the twentieth.

They came for them on the eighteenth.

Kyra was on the coast road three miles east, coming back from a factor's yard with nothing in her hands.

There were four of them and a cart, and they were not soldiers and they were not the castle; they were town men with staves, the kind a magistracy puts on a road when it wants somebody and does not expect trouble, and one of them she had seen at the fish market for twenty years and could not have named.

They did not touch her.

That was what she came back to, afterward, more than anything else in that day: they were awkward. They had come out on a cold road to fetch a woman half the port knew by sight, and the one at the front said her name — Chiara, and then, reading off a paper, the whole of the name on the eleven answers — and then said a sentence he had plainly been given, about a complaint, and about the town's court, and about her being required.

"A complaint from whom?"

"It doesn't say."

"You're holding the paper."

"It doesn't say," the man said, unhappily, and turned it round to show her, and it did not say.

She got on the cart.

She had four miles to think about it and she thought about exactly one thing, which was that if they had come for her on a road at the eastern end of the town, then somebody else had gone up the hill.

They put her in a room on the ground floor of a building behind the square with a barred window at head height and a bench and a door that was locked from the outside by a man who apologized while he did it.

She was there for most of two days.

Nobody hurt her. Nobody spoke to her at all on the first day except a boy who brought bread. On the second day a clerk came in and sat down with a board on his knee and asked her, in Italian, a list of questions, and Kyra Davan answered every one of them with an answer out of the eleven, and understood the entire shape of what had happened to her from the order in which he asked them.

He asked where she was born. He asked her parish. He asked her father's name and whether he was living and where he was buried. He asked how long she had been in the town and who had known her before she came and whether anybody in the town had known her people.

She gave him the eleven answers and he wrote them all down, and he was not hostile, and he did not look up.

Then he asked how old she was.

"Thirty-one."

He wrote it.

Then he said: "And the other woman. Valeria. She is your sister."

"She's my sister."

"The elder or the younger?"

"The elder."

"By how much?"

And Kyra sat in a locked room behind a square and answered that too, and the whole of her went quiet inside, because she had just been told four things.

That Val was in this building. That whoever had brought this had brought both of them. That the questions were not about a fever and not about a child, because nobody had asked her one word about the fever or the child.

And that somebody had told the court how old they said they were.

On the evening of the second day the clerk came back and asked her four more questions, and the last one was whether she had ever been to the hinterland above Gorizia in the spring of any year, and she said no, and he wrote it, and went away.

It was after that, in the dark, sitting on a bench with her back against a cold wall, that Kyra put it together — not the whole of it, and not the word, which she would not hear for another nine days, but the shape.

Nobody had asked about the child. Nobody had asked about the fever. Two women had been taken off a road and out of a house on the same afternoon by men with a paper that did not say who had complained, and the only questions anybody had put to her in two days were about where she came from and how old she was and how much older her sister was.

Somebody who had known her a long time had gone to somebody and said a thing about her age.

She sat in the dark and went through every person in that town who could have done it, in order, the way Val would have — the factor, the cooper's son, the woman at the top end who had buried a child, Marjeta, the priest at the cathedral who had never once been told anything, the men she had argued with on the mole for twenty-five years.

It took her a long time to get there, because she did not want to.

She got there somewhere in the small hours, and when she had it she did not cry and she did not shout, and she sat very still on a bench in a locked room in Trieste with her hands in her lap.

I'm fifty-seven, Chiara.

He had not been asking her a question on that quay.

He had been saying goodbye.

— end of chapter fourteen —

It took eleven days, and Val understood the machine on the fourth, and the understanding was the only thing she had and she used all of it.

It was not the castle. That was the first fact and she got it within an hour: the castle was the Emperor's and the Emperor's people had nothing to do with this. It was the town's own court, in the town's own building behind the square, with the town's own men in it — a judge who had been a merchant and was now something else, two who sat with him and said almost nothing, a man who did the physical part and was a servant of the court and was paid by the day, and a clerk.

The clerk was called Zorzi. He was perhaps forty and Venetian by his mouth and entirely Triestine by his coat, and he had a board and a good hand and he wrote down everything.

Val watched him for four days before she understood that he was the most important man in that room and that nobody in it knew it, including him.

The charge, when it was read, was harm.

It had to be. That was the thing she worked out on the fourth day and it reorganized everything: this court could not proceed against two women for being what they were. It could proceed against them for what they had done to somebody, and so somebody had to have been harmed, and the complaint had been assembled backward from a conclusion to find one.

The harm was the fever. Three dead on one lane and a woman at the top end who had asked for the fair one by name and had buried a child in the morning. Nobody had said that woman had complained. Nobody said she had not.

And around the harm, in the reading, there was a second thing that was not a charge and was in every sentence: that the two accused were foreign and kinless and had no parish; that neither had married in twenty-five years; that neither had been ill in twenty-five years, in a town that had buried a fifth of itself twice in that time; and that a man of good standing had deposed that the younger had given her age as twenty-six in the year he met her and as thirty-one in this year, and that he had been thirty-two then and was fifty-seven now.

They did not name him in the reading. Val did not need them to.

On the fourth day the judge stopped asking her about the fever and started asking her about Kyra, and did not go back.

He had a theory. He was not a stupid man and it was not a stupid theory, given what he had: two women, inseparable for twenty-five years, one of whom did the talking and one of whom did the doctoring, neither of whom could account for herself before 1680. In his experience one of two such women is the principal and the other is held. He said so. He wanted to know which.

He asked it eleven different ways over four days.

Which of you decides. Which of you speaks for the house. Who chose the town. When she is not with you, where is she. Has she ever forbidden you anything. Has she ever required anything of you that you did not wish to do.

And Val Sorin, who had spent thirty years being questioned by committees, sat in front of that table and gave him accurate, complete, truthful answers that took a very long time.

She learned the rules from the inside, because there was nothing else to learn.

Nobody told her them. She got them the way she got everything: by watching what the room did and did not do. On the second day the judge had put a question to her and one of the two men beside him had said something in German, quietly, and the judge had rephrased it. She noted that. On the third day the man who did the physical part had come in and had been sent out again, and Zorzi had written a line about it.

By the fifth day she had the shape.

There was a code. It was old and it was imperial and it was the reason this town had a table and a clerk instead of a mob. It said what had to be present before a court could do certain things. It said how a question might be put. It said that a man may be asked what was in his hand and may not be asked whether it was a knife. And it said — she was certain of this by the sixth day, from the way the judge's mouth went when she used it — that there were intervals.

So she used all of it, badly, with no book and no training and no idea of a single article number, and she used it for one purpose only.

"That question contains its own answer," Val said, on the sixth day. "You have asked me whether she instructed me to go to the house at the top end. I have not said that anybody instructed me. You have put the instruction into the question. I will answer a question that does not contain it."

The judge looked at her for rather a long time.

Then he rephrased it.

It cost him about forty seconds, and Val had eleven days of them to collect, and she collected every one.

They wanted a confession. That was the whole of it, and it took her until the fifth day to see how completely.

Everything else in that building was preliminary. The men beside the judge, the depositions, the questions about parishes, the man paid by the day — all of it existed to produce one thing, which was two women saying out loud, in that room, in front of the clerk, what they had done and how. The court could not finish without it. A great many things could be believed about them and none of the believing was worth anything on Zorzi's paper without the sentences in their own mouths.

And here was the difficulty, which Val turned over for four nights and found genuinely, blackly funny at about the eleventh hour of the seventh:

They could not have confessed if they had wanted to.

The court did not want we did it. The court wanted the details — the meeting, the compact, the place, the names of others, the form of the thing, what was said and in what order. Details that no innocent person could know, which is precisely why they were wanted.

Val Sorin had never in a hundred and seventy-five years heard one word of any of it. She did not know what this world believed witches did. She had no folklore. Neither had Kyra. Between them they had the whole biology of a planet four hundred years of light away and not one syllable of what a woman in Trieste was supposed to say at a table.

The only thing that could have ended it was a thing they were incapable of inventing.

On the eighth day they brought Kyra into the room.

Val had not seen her in eight days. She had heard her twice through a wall, which was worse.

They put Val in a chair against the side wall, four feet from the table, with a man standing beside her. They put Kyra in the middle of the floor. And the judge said, reasonably, to both of them and to neither, that a difficulty had arisen: that each woman had given the same account, and that the court could not determine from two identical accounts which of them was the principal, and that there were means of determining it.

Val said: "There is a provision about intervals."

"Sit down."

"You have used the provision four times in eight days, so I know that you know it, and I am asking on her behalf and I would like it written that I asked."

Zorzi's pen did not stop.

"Sit her down," the judge said.

Kyra was very good.

That is not the word and there is no better one. She was accurate, and she was calm, and she gave the eleven answers in the same order she had given them for eighty-five years, and when they began she did not say anything at all that was not one of the eleven.

Val sat four feet away with her hands on her knees and watched, and she did not look away, because looking away was a thing she could have been seen to do.

The gold came about a quarter of an hour in.

It came the way it always came under strain, which was without the half-second warning, and Kyra's head was down and her hair was over most of her face, and the only two people in that room in a position to see it were the man doing the work and the judge.

The man doing the work stopped and stepped back.

There was a silence of a kind Val had never heard in any room on either world.

Then the judge said, very quietly, "Again," and it was not to the man.

It was to Kyra. He wanted to see it twice.

The question came in the middle of that.

He did not build up to it. He had been looking at Kyra for some minutes and then he turned in his chair and looked at Val, and asked, in Italian, in the voice of a man asking a clerk for a date:

"What is she to you?"

And Val Sorin, who had sat in a market square in Maribor eighty-five years earlier and discovered that accuracy had nothing to offer her, found that this time it had one thing.

She said: "We ran together."

The judge waited. Val did not add anything.

"That is not an answer."

"It is the whole of the answer. We ran together. Eleven miles a week for sixty years, on a coast road, before either of us came here." Her hands were flat on her knees and her voice was level, which was not courage and was simply the only setting it had. "You have asked me what she is to me and I have told you and you do not like the size of it. I cannot help that. I have given you a true thing."

The judge looked at her for a moment and then turned back, because it was useless to him, and in the corner of that room Zorzi wrote down four words in Italian in a good clear hand, and understood nothing whatsoever about them, and they are in his minutes to this day.

The light did not come then.

That is the part Val never afterward managed to explain to herself, and she tried for four hundred years. It did not come while Kyra's eyes were gold in front of eleven men. It did not come when the judge said again. It did not come at any point in the hour and a half that followed, through all of which Val sat in a chair against a wall with her hands flat on her knees and her face doing nothing, which was the single most useful thing that had ever happened to her and was also the worst thing, and she had known both of those since a fourth terrace.

It came afterward.

It came in the quiet at the end, when it was over for the day and the man had gone out and the judge was saying something to one of the two beside him about the hour — when nothing whatsoever was happening — and Kyra was on the floor in the middle of the room getting her breath, and lifted her head, and found Val across four feet of boards, and did not say anything.

That was all. She looked at her.

And the light came up in Val Sorin at the throat and along the insides of both wrists in a room with eleven men in it, because it had never once in ninety-eight years answered pain, and it had never answered fear, and it answered this, and always had, and she had known that since a hut on a mountain and had spent a century making sure nobody ever saw it.

She put both hands flat on the table beside her chair, palms down.

She did not reach.

She sat in that chair with her hands flat on wood and let a roomful of strangers look at what was coming out of her wrists, and did not go one inch toward the woman on the floor, because the only thing left that she could do for her was not to give them the picture.

Zorzi wrote it down. He wrote about three lines.

They took Kyra out first.

Then they took Val, and not back to the room she had been in.

Two days.

On the eleventh day the judge made a finding.

Val was brought up for it and Kyra was not, and she stood in front of the table and listened to a man read out a document that Zorzi had written, and the document said a great many things, and the only word in it that mattered was one she had heard once before, in a different language, at the edge of a wood, from a man who had been trying to warn her.

Strega.

Ninety-seven years and four hundred miles, and it was the same word.

There was no confession. The finding said so, in a clause, in the flat administrative voice such documents use — that the accused had not confessed, and that the court had before it the depositions, the matter of the ages, the matter of the sicknesses, and two occurrences observed by the court itself in the presence of its officers.

The last part was a date.

It was in the square, and it was in eight days, and the judge read it out and then asked her, because he was required to ask her, whether she had anything to say.

Val looked at the man for a moment.

"You have written down everything I have said for eleven days," Val said. "You did not believe one word of it and you wrote it all down anyway, and in four hundred years somebody is going to read it who is not you."

The judge said that the accused was to be removed.

And Val Sorin, going out between two men with her hands bound in front of her, passed within a yard of a clerk of the court who was capping his ink, and looked at him, and thought, with complete clarity and no hope attached to it whatsoever: you are the only honest instrument in this building and you have no idea.

— end of chapter fifteen —

The door opened on the fourth night after the finding, at some hour past the second, and the man who opened it did not say his name and did not say anything else either.

Val had been awake. She had been awake for most of four nights, sitting with her back against the wall, doing an arithmetic that came out the same way every time, and she heard the bar go and thought: they have moved it up.

The man in the doorway was perhaps fifty and had a lamp with a cloth over most of it and was so frightened that she could see it in the way he held the door.

He said, "Come."

"Where is the other—"

"Come."

Kyra was in the passage.

She was standing up, which Val had not been certain of for a fortnight, and she was holding on to the wall with one hand, and when she saw Val her face did something that Val did not let herself look at for more than a second, because there was a man with a lamp waiting.

They went down a passage and through a yard and out of a small door in a wall into a lane, and it took perhaps four minutes, and at no point did the man say one word that was not come or wait or, once, not that way.

In the lane he stopped and pointed down the hill, and then turned round and went back through the door in the wall and pulled it shut behind him.

They never learned his name. They never learned what he had been given or what he had been told or whether he had a wife, and Val, who had been trained from the age of nine to find out who was responsible for a thing, tried for four hundred years to construct him out of four minutes and a lamp and never managed it.

"Somebody's paid for that," Kyra said, in the lane.

"Somebody has paid an enormous amount for that."

"It isn't money. Look at him — that wasn't a man doing a thing for money, that was a man doing a thing he'd decided—"

"I know what it was." Val had her arm round her, taking weight, because Kyra had got about eleven paces down the lane and had stopped pretending she did not need to. "We will work out who later and we will have a very long time to do it. Can you walk?"

"I can walk."

"Can you walk for an hour?"

"Val, I can walk to Venice if the alternative is a square."

Marjeta was at the bottom of the lane, in a doorway, with a bundle.

That was how they found out who it had been, and it took about a second and a half, and neither of them ever afterward described what that second and a half had in it.

She had their coats. She had bread and a cheese and a stone bottle, and she had the notebook in its cloth, and she had the eleven sheets, which had been in a box under a floorboard in a house that the court had gone through twice, and which she had got out of it somehow and had never explained.

"There's a boat at the third hour," Marjeta said. "Small. Coasting for Capodistria and then down. He knows there'll be two. He doesn't know anything else and he isn't going to."

"Marjeta—"

"Don't." She pushed the bundle at Kyra. "There isn't time and I've thought about what I want to say and it isn't much."

They stood in a doorway at the bottom of a lane on a hill in the dark.

"Twenty-five years I've done that house," Marjeta said. "Nobody in it was ever ill. Nobody in it was ever cruel to me, and nobody in it ever once asked me about anybody else's house, which you'd have to have done four houses to know is worth something." She looked at them both. "That's all I've got. That's what I know about you and it's what I'll know in thirty years."

Then she put her hand flat on her own chest, once, and took it away.

Kyra made a sound.

It was the gesture. It was the whole of it — four fingers and a palm on the breastbone, the thing she had done in a storehouse in a valley in 1607 with no language at all, because it was the only thanks she had, and which a man called Frederick had given back to her a hundred times and had used at the end instead of goodbye.

Kyra had never taught anybody that. It was not hers. It had never been hers; it was simply the thing a human being does with her hand when there is nothing to say and she means it, on any world, in any century, and two women had come four hundred years of light to find out that a woman in a doorway in Trieste would do it too.

"He put his hand on my back," Marjeta said.

Kyra said, "What?"

"Her." Marjeta jerked her chin at Val, who had gone to the corner to look down the hill. "When they came. I was in the kitchen and I couldn't — I was no use at all, I was standing there with a cloth in my hand like a fool, and they were putting her hands together and she stopped, and she came over and put her hand flat on my back, here, between the shoulders, and held it there. With them standing in my kitchen."

Marjeta's mouth went.

"She was the one being taken," Marjeta said, "and she came and did that to me. And then she said, it will be all right, Marjeta, which was a lie, and I've had it in my head for a fortnight and it's the reason I went and found that man. So don't thank me. She did it. She just doesn't know she did it."

Kyra stood in the doorway with a bundle in her arms and could not say anything at all.

"Go on," said Marjeta. "It's the third hour."

They could not take her. That was gone through on the way down and it took four sentences.

She had a mother in the hinterland and two sisters and four houses and a whole life within nine miles of a hill, and she was a woman of fifty-five who had never been on a boat, and a servant of two convicted women disappearing on the same night as the women would be the first thing anybody looked for in the morning. Her only protection was to be exactly where she had been, doing exactly what she had been doing, saying she knew nothing.

It was not enough protection and both of them knew it and neither said so.

They did not find out. That is the whole of it and it has to be said plainly, because it is the largest single thing either of them carried out of Europe. They were on a boat at the third hour and gone from that coast inside a week, and they never went back, and there was no way on this world in the year 1705 for two women with no name to find out what had happened to a woman in Trieste.

Val tried three times over the next eleven years, through people, sideways, carefully, and got nothing, and stopped.

The town was the worst part of the walk down and it was not dangerous, and Kyra found that she had not expected that.

It was two hours before dawn and there was nobody. That was all. The port slept the way ports sleep, which is badly and in shifts, and there were two men on the quay with a brazier and a dog somewhere and a light in the window above the salt house, and not one human being in that town was looking for two women, because two women were behind a locked door with a date on them.

They came down past the fish market and past the corner where a factor had found her eleven days after he had been wrong, and past the bottom of the street where Val had put her hand at the back of her neck in the dark in the fourth year.

Every stone of it. Twenty-five years.

And halfway down, at the turn where the lane from the eastern quarter came in, Kyra stopped.

Jakob's house was the third on the left, forty yards up.

There was a light in it. He had never in twenty-five years been asleep before the fourth hour and he was fifty-seven now and slept less, and Kyra knew, with absolute certainty and no evidence at all, that he was sitting in that room.

She was walking up the lane before she had decided anything.

Val did not say a word. Val stopped at the corner with the bundle and let her go, and Kyra got perhaps fifteen yards up that lane with her hands in fists and every single thing she had to say to him coming up her throat in order.

She was going to ask him whether he knew what they did to her.

She was going to ask him what he had thought was going to happen. She was going to tell him that she had said no on a mole because she did not stay anywhere and that it had been true and he had made it true, that she was leaving tonight and would never come back, and that he had got what he asked for. She was going to say the only real thing she had ever wanted to say to any human being on this planet, which was you have known me for twenty-five years and you have never once met me.

She stopped.

She stood in the middle of a lane in the dark, fifteen yards short of a lit window, and did the thing she had learned to do above a treeline in Spiš five years earlier, which was the arithmetic.

Anything she said, he could repeat.

That was all of it. It was not mercy and it had nothing to do with forgiveness and she was not, standing there, capable of either. It was that a man who had gone to a priest with what he had would go again with whatever she gave him, and would not even be wrong to, and every word out of her mouth in that room was a word that would be in a building behind the square by noon, where there was a clerk with a good hand and four hundred people who had been told what two foreign women were.

And the thing it would reach was not her.

She turned round and went back down the lane.

Val had not moved from the corner.

She did not ask. She did not look up the lane. She took the bundle onto her other arm and put her hand out, and Kyra took it, and they went down the hill.

She never asked. Not that night on the water, not in the four hundred years afterward, not once — and Kyra, who could not leave a thing unfinished, and who had left two, understood by about the second hour of the following morning that the not-asking was the largest thing anybody had ever done for her.

The boat was small and smelled of salt fish and the master looked at them once and then did not look at them again for nine hours, which was worth every coin Marjeta had spent on him.

They went out past the mole in the dark on the last of the ebb.

There was no wind to speak of and the men were at the sweeps and the town went from a shape to a scatter of four or five lights to nothing at all, and neither of them watched it go, because they were both sitting in the bottom of the boat with their backs against the same thwart and Kyra's head on Val's shoulder and Val's arm round her, and the first thing either of them said, about an hour out, was Kyra asking whether there was any of the bread.

— end of chapter sixteen —

They were four days at Capodistria in a room over a rope-walk, and Val did not sleep for the first two of them, and on the third she made Kyra take her shirt off.

It was not a thing either of them discussed beforehand. Kyra had been managing — she had been managing since the lane, which was the word Val used for it in her own head and never out loud — and on the third afternoon Val came up the stairs with a jar of something and a strip of cloth and put them on the table and said, "Now."

"Val."

"I have been looking at how you are holding your left arm for four days and I have not said anything because you needed to walk and you were walking." Val set the lamp where she wanted it. "We are not walking today. Sit down and take it off."

Kyra sat down on the edge of the bed, and worked her way out of it, and it took some time.

Val looked at her for a long moment without touching her.

"Say it," Kyra said.

"The shoulder will come back. It is out of the place it wants and it has been for a fortnight and I am going to be extremely unpleasant to you for about a minute. The hands are the hands. Two of the joints are not going to be the shape they were and they are going to ache in the cold for the rest of a very long life." Her voice was completely level. "The rest is bruising and it is the sort of bruising that goes."

"That's the whole of it?"

"That is the whole of it," Val said, "and you will notice that I have given it to you in about eleven seconds, which is what I would have done on Sethal, and which is the only kindness available in this room."

Then she put her hands on her.

It took a long time and it hurt, and Kyra swore at her twice in a language nobody on that coast had ever heard, and at one point had her forehead against Val's collarbone and her fist closed in the back of Val's dress.

And somewhere after the shoulder — with the worst of it done, and Kyra breathing, and Val still holding her upper arm because she had not yet worked out how to let go of it — something went in Val, without warning, of a kind that had never gone in her before.

She had been holding for a fortnight. That was what it was and she could see it happening and could not do anything about it. She had held in a room with eleven men, and in two days she did not intend to describe, and in a passage, and in a lane, and on a boat, and up a stair, and she had held for three days in this room while a woman with two ruined fingers walked about being cheerful — and she had just put her hands on the actual body of it and found out what had been done to it, one joint at a time, in order, the way she found out everything.

"Val," Kyra said.

"Give me a moment."

"Val—"

"I am asking for a moment, Kyra, and I would like you to give it to me, because I have not had one since the eighteenth of November and I do not know what is going to happen."

What happened was that Kyra put her good arm round her and held on, and Val Sorin came apart on the edge of a bed in a rented room above a rope-walk in Capodistria, without any noise at all, for about a quarter of an hour.

Kyra cried afterward. She cried quietly, which Val had not known she could do.

That was the thing that undid the rest of it. Kyra Davan cried the way she did everything, out loud, with her whole face, in front of whoever was there, and had since she was nine; and she lay in the dark that night with her back against Val's front and Val's arm over her, and cried without making a sound, for a long time, the way a person does who has learned in the last fortnight that somebody might be listening.

Val did not tell her it was all right.

"She's still there," Kyra said, eventually.

"Yes."

"She's in that house this minute doing somebody's stair and they'll have asked her already, they'll have had her in that building the morning after—"

"Yes."

"Don't just say yes."

"There is nothing else that is true," Val said. "I have gone through it four hundred times in four days and there is no version in which we take her and no version in which we go back, and I am not going to give you a warm sentence about a woman I cannot help, because you would know it was one."

Kyra was quiet.

"Then say the thing you're not saying."

"Which thing."

"You've had it since the boat. You've been carrying it round this room for three days and you keep nearly putting it down."

Val lay in the dark for a while.

"I am going to be very careful how I say this, because it is the only large thing I have and I do not want to make it bigger than it is." She had her arm over her and did not move it. "I stood in that lane at the corner and watched you walk up toward his house, and I did not say one word, and I had already decided that if you went in I was going with you, and I want you to know that I had not decided what I would do when I got there."

"You'd have stopped me."

"No," Val said. "That is the part. I went through it standing at that corner, in about four seconds, the way I do, and I could not find the version where I stop you, and I could not find the version where I stand outside either." A breath. "I found that I did not care what it cost. That has never happened to me. I have not in a hundred and seventy-five years been a person who does not care what a thing costs, and I stood at a corner in Trieste and was one, and I have been carrying it since Tuesday because I do not know what to do with a fact about myself that is that size."

Kyra turned over, which hurt, and did it anyway.

It was not like the room over the cooper's shop and it was not like the fourteenth year.

Val reached first, which by then was simply what happened, but there was nothing considered in it and nothing decided at four in the afternoon; it came up out of her the way weather came up in Kyra, which was the wrong way round and neither of them remarked on it until much later.

It was careful, because it had to be — one shoulder, two fingers, a fortnight of bruising — and the care was not a limitation. Val had spent a century learning the exact geography of that body and she used all of it, every place she knew was whole, and she said so, into her hair, in English, with none of the flatness left in her voice at all.

There was crying in it. Both of them, at different points, and neither stopped for it.

The light came up early and stayed up and got into everything, and at some point Kyra's eyes went and did not come back, and the two of them lay in a small room in a Venetian town on the Istrian coast with a lamp they had not needed to light, and it was the fourth of December in the year 1705, and they were alive.

Afterward Kyra asked her.

She asked it into Val's shoulder, in the dark, and she asked it the way she asked everything, straight out and without arranging it first.

"What happened in the two days?"

Val did not tense. Kyra was listening for it and there was nothing.

"They put me in a different room," Val said, "and they asked me the same eleven questions in a different order, and on the second day they stopped asking, and it was over by the evening, and I was not damaged in any way that has lasted."

It was accurate. Every word of it was accurate. Kyra lay there and turned it over and found that she could not get a single finger under any part of it.

"That's not an answer."

"It is a complete answer to the question you asked."

"Val."

"I am not going to say any more about it tonight," Val said, and her voice was perfectly steady, "and I am aware of exactly what I am doing, and I am doing it anyway."

Kyra lay in the dark.

She could have gone on. She had every right to go on; there was a pact, made in the snow in 1607, and this was the first time in ninety-eight years that Val Sorin had put a wall up in front of her and told her it was a wall.

"All right," Kyra said.

"Thank you."

"Not all right forever. All right tonight."

"I understand the difference," Val said.

Kyra asked her again eleven times in the next four hundred years — on a wagon, in a fever hospital, in a kitchen in Portland with the radio on, on a porch in the rain — and got the same accurate, complete, useless answer every time, in the same words, which was how she eventually understood that Val had written it out and learned it.

They came into Venice on the sixth day in fog, and it was the largest thing either of them had seen since the terraces.

Neither of them said much about it. Kyra stood at the rail with her arm strapped and looked at a city sitting on water like a thing that had been put there by somebody who had not consulted anybody, and said that Blaž would have had an opinion, and did not say anything else.

They were eleven days in Venice and Val did four things: sold what Marjeta had put in the bundle that was not theirs to keep, bought two sets of papers off a man in the Ghetto who asked no questions and charged accordingly, found a ship, and wrote in the notebook for an entire evening.

What she wrote was the names of three people: a clerk, a woman, and a man with a lamp.

She had two of them.

The ship was Dutch and going out through the Straits for Lisbon and then across, and it was the twenty-second of December, and they stood at the after rail in the middle of a cold clear morning and watched Europe go.

It went slowly. That was the part neither of them had expected. It went for most of a day — a low brown line with weather on it, and then a lower one, and then the suggestion of one — and they stayed up there for all of it because neither of them could think of a reason to go below.

They did not talk about Trieste.

They talked about the ship, and about the Dutchman's four languages, and about whether the mate was as frightened of the master as he appeared to be, and at some point about a man in Maribor who had walked with a stick and said Thursday instead of everything else.

And in the middle of the afternoon, with the last of it going, Val put both hands on the rail and looked at the water and said, to nobody, in English:

"Not far now."

Kyra turned her head.

There was nothing to walk to. That was the first thing, and it took about a second. They were on a ship in the middle of a sea with four thousand miles in front of them and no road and nothing to arrive at, and there was no question in front of it and nobody had asked how much further, and the woman who had said it had spent ninety-eight years objecting to inaccuracy in every form it took.

And it was a lie. It had always been a lie. It was what you say to somebody who is tired and has a long way to go, and Kyra had said it to her on eleven roads in a hundred years with her legs aching and the light going, and had never once meant the distance.

Kyra stood at the rail of a Dutch ship and understood that she had been handed the thing they had spent eighty-two years and six languages looking for, by a woman who had not gone looking for it at all, and had not found it, and had simply picked up something that was already lying between them and turned it round.

She did not cry. She was surprised about that afterward.

"Not far now," Kyra said.

Val nodded once, at the water.

That was the whole of it. Neither of them said anything else about it that day, and neither of them ever discussed it — not on that crossing, not in Boston, not in Missouri, not in a booth on Route 9 four hundred years later, where a waitress called them girls and one of them said it across a table about the weather and the other one said it back.

The sun went and the cold came up off the water and the coast was gone.

They stood at the rail a while longer with four feet of Dutch ship between them and the mate eleven paces away, because there were men on that deck and there would be men on every deck and in every street and at every table from this day forward, and both of them had learned in a building behind a square exactly what a thing seen becomes in a clerk's good hand.

Val put her hand flat on the rail.

Kyra put hers beside it, a palm's width away, not touching.

They stood like that until it was properly dark.

— end of book eleven —