The Lines

The ship came up through the Narrows on a hot gray morning at the end of the eighth month, and Kyra Davan stood at the rail with her hands on the wood and understood that she had stopped expecting anything, and had not noticed when.

It had taken four years and two months. Four of those years had gone in Lisbon, which had been nobody’s plan; they had come off the Venetian ship in the spring of 1706 with a bundle, two sets of papers and no money whatsoever, and Val had said a year in a voice that meant she had already done the sum and did not like it, and it had been four. Kyra had carried water in a house on a hill. Val had worked for an apothecary who paid badly and asked nothing. They had learned a fifth language between them, or Kyra had learned to be understood in it and Val had learned to be correct in it, and they had put money in a box and taken it out again, and put it in and taken it out, and then one spring they had not had to.

And now there was a harbor in front of her with more shipping in it than she had expected, and a low green island going up to a point, and on the point a town.

Val came up beside her at the rail and did not say anything for a while.

"It’s small," Val said.

"It’s a town."

"It is a small town." Val had her eyes narrowed against the glare off the water, doing the thing she did, which was counting something. "Four thousand. Five at the outside. There is a wall across the top of it and everything is below the wall, and that is all of it, and we have just crossed an ocean to arrive somewhere the size of Trieste."

Kyra looked at the side of her face.

"Say the rest."

"There is no rest. It is an observation."

"Val."

"It is an observation," Val said, "and I am going to spend some time with it before I say anything that sounds like a conclusion, because the last time I did that on a quay I was right for twenty-five years and wrong at the end, and I have not yet worked out what the useful lesson is."

The harbor was full of Germans.

Kyra worked that out before they were off the ship, and worked out most of the rest of it inside the hour, because the man at the rail beside her had been on the water for nine weeks and wanted to tell somebody about it.

Ten ships had come in that summer out of England, with something near three thousand people in them. They had been three years getting here: out of the Rhine country into Holland, out of Holland into London, and then a year in a camp on a heath outside London while the English worked out what to do with them and the pamphlets called them a parcel of vagabonds. Four hundred and seventy of them had died on the crossing or within a month of arriving. The rest were on an island in the middle of the harbor, where they were being kept until the ships’ sicknesses had run out of them, and the government had built a camp for the winter outside the wall, because there was nowhere else to put them.

Kyra stood at the rail and looked at the island and the tents on it, and did not say what she was thinking, which was that she had never in her life been so glad to see a crowd.

Val was beside her with her hands on the wood and nine weeks of salt in her hair, and the wind off the harbor had it across her face, and the sun was on the pale of it the way it had been on a road in Styria a hundred years ago. Kyra looked at that for a while and did not examine why.

Two women. No people, no trade, no town they could name, papers that had been made in a room in Venice by a man who asked nothing and charged accordingly.

In a place that had just absorbed three thousand foreigners in one summer, that was not a story. It was a Tuesday.

They came off onto the wharf in the middle of the afternoon and it happened straight away, before Kyra had both feet on the boards.

There was a boy on a line, twelve or so, barefoot, and he had the end of it round a post and was losing the argument, and a man further up shouted something at him, and the boy shouted something back.

Kyra stopped dead in the middle of a working wharf with a bundle in her arms.

It was English.

Not near to it. Not a cousin of it, the way the tongue behind the hill at Trieste had been a cousin of the one out of Maribor. It was the thing itself, in a boy’s mouth, going past her at speed and with no effort at all, about a rope.

She had heard it in exactly one place for a hundred and three years, and that place was wherever the two of them happened to be standing.

It had come off a barrel head in a valley from a merchant’s son who had wanted a woman to be able to say what she needed. It had been the language of a storehouse and a hut and a barn and a loft and a wall above a mill. It was what you said the true things in, because nobody within four hundred miles could hear them. In Maribor it had been true and in Trieste it had been more true, and by the end of the first year there they had stopped noticing they were doing it, because it was simply the language the two of them were in.

And here was a boy on a rope, and a man shouting at him, and a woman going past with a basket answering somebody over her shoulder, and two men on the next wharf doing something with a barrel, and all of it, every word, the whole quay.

Kyra did not move for long enough that somebody had to go round her.

Val had gone three steps ahead and stopped and come back, and stood in front of her with the sun behind her, and said nothing, and waited, because Val had never once in a hundred and sixty-two years asked her what was wrong when she could see what was wrong.

"They’ve got it," Kyra said.

"Yes."

"You knew. You’ve known since Lisbon."

"I knew where the ship was going and what was spoken there. I have known for four years and I did not say it." Val shifted the weight of what she was carrying. "I have been trying to find a way to say it since about the third month, and there is no version of the sentence that is not the thing you love is now the property of a harbor, so I did not say it, and I want you to know that was a decision and not an oversight."

Kyra stood on the boards in the heat and did not answer for a moment, because something underneath the first thing had just come up and asked to be looked at.

Val had said all of that out loud. On a wharf. In the afternoon, with men going past at four feet, in the language every one of them had in their mouth.

She had not dropped her voice. She had not waited. She had stood in the open and said the thing you love to another woman where anybody could hear it, and she had not noticed she was doing it, and Vaelith Sorin had not failed to notice a thing like that since she was eighteen years old.

"That’s the worst thing you’ve ever done to me," Kyra said.

"I am aware."

"I’m not angry."

"You are going to be," Val said, "in about four days, and I would rather have it then than on a wharf."

And here is the part Kyra thought about for a long time afterward, on and off, for the better part of a century.

She had expected to be robbed. That was the word that came, and she examined it later and found she could not improve on it. Something had been taken off her in a public place, in daylight, by nobody, and there was no one to be angry at and nothing to get back.

What she had not expected was the other thing, which arrived about a minute behind the first and stayed.

Every one of these people could say it. The boy on the rope could have said any of it — the whole of what had been said in a hut in the first winter, and on a wall above a mill, and in a small room on the Istrian coast on the fourth of December with a lamp they had not needed to light. It was all available. It was lying about on this wharf in the open, for free, in the mouths of people carrying barrels.

And in a hundred and three years neither of them had ever said the one thing.

Kyra picked up her bundle and got her feet going again.

The papers said Valentina and Caterina, because a man in Venice had written what a man in Venice would write.

Nobody on the wharf cared. Nobody at the customs house cared either; there was a clerk with a bad wig and a worse temper who had spent the summer processing Palatines, and two women off a Lisbon ship with Italian names and a little Dutch and a little German were the least interesting thing that had happened to him since April.

He asked four questions. Val gave him the first four of the eleven dull answers, in order, in the flat voice, and Kyra stood beside her and let her, because they were Val’s and had been since a table in Maribor.

Where from. What trade. Who waits for you here. How long do you stay.

Nobody. Awhile.

He wrote something short and did not read it back.

Outside, Kyra said, "He wrote us down."

"He wrote something down. It may have been us." Val was looking back at the door of the customs house with an expression Kyra had learned to read at Corran Vayr and had never once been wrong about. "That is the fourth piece of paper with a version of us on it, and I have stopped being able to pretend I know where any of them are."

"Four."

"Trieste. Two sets out of Venice. This." She started walking. "I do not count the first one, because a clerk’s minutes are not a piece of paper, they are a book, and it is in a strong room in a town we cannot go back to."

"You count it."

"I count it every day," Val agreed, "and I have just told you I do not, and you have caught me, and I would rather you did not do that in the first hour."

They took a room on the other side of the East River, which took Val nine days to decide and about four minutes to explain.

The village over there was Dutch and old and had a name Kyra could not get her mouth round for a month. It was farms. It had a mill and a church and a ferry, and the ferry came across on the tide and went back on the tide, and everybody on the far bank spoke Dutch to each other and kept themselves to themselves in a way that the town on the point, which was busy becoming English, had stopped doing.

"We work in the town," Val said. "We do not live in it. Whatever is said about us on a wharf does not get on a boat and follow us home, because the boat stops at dark and the people on the boat are not interested in either of us."

"It’s an hour each way."

"It is an hour in which nobody can come to the door."

Kyra thought about that on the crossing the first evening, sitting in the bottom of the boat with the town going small behind them and the water doing what water did, and came to the conclusion that she did not like it and could not fault it, which was most of what she had felt about Val’s arrangements for a hundred and sixty-two years.

She also did the other arithmetic, which Val had not offered and which Kyra had got much better at doing for herself.

She could never get at it directly. She had to go round by Val, who was a hundred and eighty this year and did not look it and never would, and then take thirty-eight off that, because thirty-eight was the gap and always had been.

Kal was a hundred and forty-two.

Which was nothing. Which was a quarter of the way, if that, and she was in a cold room at the bottom of a building somewhere being exact about something, and she would be there tomorrow, and the day after, and for a very long run of days after that.

Everybody Kyra had was alive. That was what the sum did. It came out the same way every time and it was good news every time and she had never once in her life been able to leave it alone.

She put it down and looked at the water.

The trade came about because Val went to buy paper.

There was one press in the whole province. Kyra had assumed there would be several and had been wrong, and Val had established the fact on the second day and had gone quiet about it in a way that was not restful. The man who had it was the government’s printer and had been for seventeen years, and he did every kind of work there was, because there was nobody else to do any of it: almanacs, and forms with blanks in them for the customs house, and bills of lading, and notices, and that year a prayer book which he was very pleased about and which had taken him most of a winter.

He needed hands. He always needed hands. Boys came and went and drank, and a man who could set clean type was worth something and a woman who could was worth slightly less, which Val said was an advantage and declined to explain further.

They started in the ninth month.

Kyra liked it immediately and was surprised by that. It was work you did standing up with your hands, in a room full of noise and solvent, and there was an order to it that made sense to her body within a fortnight. You held the stick in your left hand. You took the letters out of the case without looking, because looking was slow and the case was always the same, and you set them one at a time, backward, from right to left, and upside down, and at the end of a line you spaced it out until it was tight and then you started the next one.

Val was better at it inside a month and worse at it for the first week, which Kyra enjoyed more than was strictly reasonable.

"You’re reading it," Kyra said.

"I am obviously reading it."

"Don’t read it. It’s not for reading, it’s for building. If you read it you’ll fix it."

"It is spelled wrong."

"It’s spelled how he wrote it."

Val stood at the case with the stick in her hand and looked at the copy on the rail for a moment.

"This is going to be difficult for me," Val said.

And in the first week Val said the thing about it that turned out to govern the next hundred and thirty-five years, and said it the way she said everything, which was flatly, at the wrong moment, to nobody in particular.

They were shutting up at the end of a long day. Kyra was washing her hands in a bucket in the yard and Val was standing in the doorway with a sheet in her hand, looking at the bottom of it.

"There is a name on every one of these," Val said.

"There’s a name on everything. It’s a bill."

"Not the man who bought it. The man who made it." Val turned the sheet round and held it up, and Kyra came over with her hands wet and looked at the foot of it, where it said who had printed the thing and where, in letters smaller than the rest.

"It is on every sheet that leaves this building," Val said. "It is required. He may not print without leave, and he may not print without putting his name to it, and those two things are the same rule said twice. It is the only trade I have ever been in where the work is required by law to carry the name of the person who did it."

Kyra dried her hands on her skirt.

"And we’re not the person who did it."

"No." Val put the sheet down on the bench. "We set it, and we pull it, and we fold it, and it goes out into a colony with somebody else’s name at the foot of it, and there is no record anywhere that either of us was in the room."

She stood there a moment longer in the doorway with the light going behind her.

"I have been trying for two days to decide whether that is the safest thing I have ever found," Val said, "or the worst place I have ever put us, and I want you to know that I cannot do it."

Kyra looked at her.

Kyra picked up her bundle off the boards. "Both."

"That is not an answer."

"It’s the answer. You just don’t like it because it doesn’t come out to a number." Kyra picked up her shawl off the nail. "Come on. We’ll miss the boat."

They went down through the town in the dusk with the gulls going over and the whole street talking, at speed, in every direction, in the only language either of them had ever had that was theirs.

— end of chapter one —

Val did the accounting in the first week of the cold, because a new place was where she did the accounting, and because the ferry had stopped running and there was nothing else to do with a day.

They had a room over a cooper’s in the Dutch village, with a plank floor and a window that did not fit and a hearth that drew, and between them they had: the bundle, the notebook in its cloth inside a coat, two sets of papers made in Venice, eleven shillings and some coppers, four months of work behind them and no promise of any in front, and a language that had turned out to belong to everybody.

Val wrote all of it down except the last one.

"You’ve missed a thing," Kyra said, from the bed, where she had been since the light failed because it was the only warm rectangle in the province.

"I have missed nothing."

"You’ve missed the thing you’ve been not saying since the wharf." Kyra had the blanket up to her chin and her boots still on, which Val had given up arguing about in Lisbon. "Four days, you said. It’s been nine."

"I am aware of how many it has been."

"So?"

Val put the pen down.

"I am not angry," Val said, "and I would like that to be believed rather than examined, because I have spent nine days establishing it and I would rather not do it again out loud."

Here is what she had established, privately, in a cold room, with her hands inside her sleeves.

That she had known since Lisbon and had said nothing.

That the reasons she had given herself at the time had all been about Kyra — that there was nothing to be gained by four years of dreading a thing neither of them could change, that the ship was going where the ship was going, that the news would keep.

And that the reasons had been true, every one of them, and had also been the same reasons a woman gives herself when she does not want to watch somebody’s face while they hear something.

She had got that far on the fourth day.

On the seventh she had got to the part underneath it, which was that she had liked having it. Four years of knowing a thing about the two of them that Kyra did not know. Not enjoying it; she had not enjoyed a minute of it. Holding it. There had been a small hard weight in her chest since a quay in Lisbon and it had been hers, and when she put it down on a wharf in the New World it had gone, and what she had felt in the half second afterward — before the rest of it arrived, before she saw Kyra’s face do what it did — was lighter.

Val had thought about that for two days and had not liked any of it.

She had done the same thing in Trieste, in a different shape, on a boat, in the dark, with a wall put up in front of a woman who had every right to go on and had not gone on.

Two for two.

They tried, that winter, to solve it.

That was Kyra’s word and Val let it stand, although Val did not think it was a problem with a solution and had said so once, on the second evening, and had been told to stop being right for an hour.

They tried the village tongue out of Spiš first, because it was the most obscure thing either of them had and because Kyra had loved it.

It lasted four days.

"It’s gone," Kyra said, on the fourth night, furious with herself. "Val, I had a hundred words of it on a mountain and I’ve got about nine."

"You have thirty. I counted."

"That’s worse. That’s much worse than nine, because nine is a thing you’ve lost and thirty is a thing you’re going to keep losing in front of yourself for the rest of your life." She was sitting on the floor with her back against the bed, which she did when she was working at something. "And it’s all the wrong words. I’ve got the word for a sheep’s back leg and I haven’t got the word for wait."

"You have the word for wait."

"Have I."

Val said it.

Kyra said nothing for a moment, and then put her head back against the mattress and shut her eyes, and Val sat at the table and watched her do it and did not say anything either, because the word had come out of Frederick’s mouth in a storehouse and both of them had heard it there.

"That’s the other reason it won’t do," Kyra said, to the ceiling.

Val sat at the table and looked at her while she said it, and did it the way she did everything, which was in order: the brows first, dark and drawn together at the ceiling; then the hair down on the boards behind her head, dark chestnut and copper where the fire got at the ends of it; then the line from the ear down under the jaw, which was firmer than her own and always had been. It took, Val noticed afterward, a good deal longer than listening had required.

"Yes."

"Every single thing in it comes from one valley and one winter and the spring on either side of it."

"Yes."

"So we’d be doing that all the time."

"We would be doing that," Val agreed, "all the time."

They tried their own next, which lasted one evening and was worse.

Val had known it would be and had not said so, because Kyra had got as far as the idea on her own and there is a particular kind of unkindness in arriving somewhere first and waiting there.

It did not fail the way the village tongue had failed. Neither of them had lost a word of it; it came up entire, the way it did when Val was counting and not thinking, the bottom of her with everything else stacked on top.

It failed because of what was in it.

You could not say a room in it without saying the room. You could not say two people without saying the lodging requirements, the declaration, the register, the hundred and forty along the walls, the man at the front asking both of you whether you were willing. The whole apparatus came up behind every word like a cart behind a horse, and it had been built by people who were alive, this minute, four hundred years of light away, and getting on with it.

They got through most of an evening. Kyra made a joke in it at about the ninth hour, a good one, about the cooper downstairs, and it landed and they both laughed and then the laughing stopped about two seconds before it should have.

"No," Kyra said.

"No."

"Not because it hurts. I want to be accurate with you because you’re always accurate with me." She had her hands round her knees. "It’s that I can hear my mother in it. Not a thing she said. The sound of her. And I’d have her in the room every time I asked you to pass the salt, and I’d never get a minute’s peace, and in about a year I’d stop wanting to say anything at all."

Val sat with that.

"That is more accurate than anything I had," Val admitted.

The thing about Kyra’s mother was that Val had met her exactly once, for the better part of an afternoon, and could still produce her entire.

She said so, later that week, because it seemed like the sort of thing that ought to be said out loud in a cold room in a country where nobody knew either of them.

"She came at me across a room and said you’re the runner," Val said, "and before I could answer she said she wrote about you, twice, and then she went off to shout at a man about chairs, and I did not see her again for the rest of the day."

Kyra had her face in her hands.

"That’s her. That’s the whole of her, that’s—"

"She had not slept."

"She never slept. She hadn’t slept since about the year I was born." Kyra came up out of her hands, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist, which she did. "She wrote at the start of every month for fifty-nine years. Four pages, and three of them were about other people’s business, and the last one was the one she meant. Do you know what she put at the bottom of the last one I ever had?"

"No."

"Neither do I," Kyra said. "I read it on a Fourthday and I put it in a drawer and then there was a ship."

The fire settled.

"Your father cried at the parade," Val said.

"He cried three times before anything had even started. Before. There was nothing to cry at yet; there were people putting out chairs." Kyra was grinning at the floor. "And then he did it again at the actual thing, and my aunt was furious with him, and he said — Val, he said, I know, I’m not going to stop, you’d better sit somewhere else."

Val laughed, which she did perhaps twice a year, and Kyra’s head came round fast at the sound of it.

"He sat on a landing for a whole afternoon when Kal came," Kyra said. "Outside the door. Back against the wall. I told him to go and he said no, through the door, and he didn’t move for six hours, and every time I swore at him he said all right."

"What was he doing?"

"Being where I could get at him." She turned her cup round. "That’s all it was. He wasn’t helping. There was nothing to help with and he knew it. He just sat down on the floor outside a door so that if I wanted somebody, somebody was there, and he stayed there long enough that it stopped being a thing he was doing and started being a fact about the afternoon."

Val looked at her across the table for a moment.

"That is the best thing anybody has ever told me about a man," Val said.

And then Kyra asked.

Val had known it was coming from the second sentence and had let the whole thing run anyway, which she examined afterward and could not entirely account for.

"Go on, then," Kyra said. "Yours."

"I have very little."

"You’ve got a father who’s been in the Assembly since before either of us could walk and a sister who writes you nine pages, and you have never once—"

"I have Novi," Val said. "I can give you Novi for an hour and you would like all of it. That is not what you asked for and we both know it."

Kyra stopped.

"All right." She sat back against the bed. "Then the other one."

And here is what Vaelith Sorin had, at a table over a cooper’s in a Dutch village in the first winter, a hundred and eighty years into her life.

She had a woman who was dead. She had been small; she did not know how small, because she had never been able to find a way to ask that did not sound like a demand for an account. She had no face, no voice, no smell, no hand. She had the fact, in the way you have a date.

And she had one sentence.

She had been eighteen years old and standing on a promontory on the finest morning of the finest year the world had ever had, with her father’s car behind her and every steward on the intake road turning to look at it, and Vaedom Sorin had said: you’ll want to see the water side before the light goes. There’s a path along the south wall. Your mother liked it.

And then he had handed her a parcel from Novi and moved on, the way he moved on, before there was anything she could do with it.

"That’s it," Val said.

"What is."

"That is the entirety of what I have. One sentence, said in passing, on a gravel road, by a man who was thinking about something else." She had her hands flat on the table. "I have turned it over for a hundred and sixty-two years and there is nothing in it. It is not a memory. It is a piece of information about a path."

Kyra did not say anything.

That was the part Val had not prepared for. She had built it all braced for kindness — for the face Kyra made at a thing that was sad, and the hand, and the sentence about how that was a great deal to carry — and had had four answers ready, and did not need any of them, because Kyra Davan sat across a table in a cold room and did not make it sad.

What Kyra said, after a while, was: "Did you go?"

"What?"

"The path. Along the south wall. Did you go and look at the water?"

Val had to stop and find it.

"Yes," Val said. "That evening. Before the light went."

"Good," said Kyra.

And that was the whole of it, and it went through Val like the first mouthful of something hot.

She decided at some point in the following hour, and carried it for the rest of the evening under an entirely ordinary face, and did the washing-up, and banked the fire, and said two accurate things about the cooper’s accounts.

Kyra noticed at about the third hour and got it wrong.

"You’ve gone quiet."

"I have said four sentences in the last ten minutes."

"You’ve gone the other quiet." Kyra was watching her from the bed with her chin on her fist. "The one where you’ve worked something out and you’re not going to say it until you’ve got it in order. What is it, is it the money?"

"It is not the money."

"Because I can get work in the spring, I’ve been asking, there’s a woman at the mill who—"

"Kyra."

"What?"

Val crossed the room, which took four steps, and stood beside the bed and looked down at her for a second and a half, and watched Kyra Davan work out that she had been wrong about the quiet and was about to find out what it had actually been.

"Oh," Kyra said.

Her hands were freezing.

That was the first thing and it became the next four hundred years, which neither of them could have known at the time and which Val would have found absurd.

She got them inside the collar of Kyra’s shift at the back, flat against the nape, and Kyra came up off the pillow with a noise no one on Sethal had ever made.

"You absolute—"

"You are the warmest object in this province."

"You could have said—"

"I could have said," Val agreed, "and then you would have moved."

And then Kyra was laughing, with Val’s cold hands on the back of her neck and her own hands coming up into the front of Val’s shift, and the laughing turned over somewhere in the middle into something else without either of them noticing where.

Val noticed the light, though. It came up under the skin below her ear, the way it did now when she felt something, faint in the dark room, and moved on her throat.

Kyra saw it and stopped.

"Hello," Kyra said.

"Do not narrate it."

"I’m going to narrate all of it. I’ve got about four hundred years and nothing else to do." She put her thumb on the place, lightly, and left it there. "You’re lit up like the inside of a lamp and we haven’t even—"

"I am aware of the timing."

"I’m not complaining about the timing. I want to be extremely clear that I am not, at any point this evening, going to complain about the timing."

Val put her forehead down against Kyra’s shoulder for a second, which was a thing she could do now, and which she had been able to do for a hundred and three years and still did not do casually.

"Say the rest of it," Val said, into her shoulder.

"You always ask me that."

"I always want it."

So Kyra said the rest of it, which took a while, and which Val listened to the whole of with her eyes shut — and somewhere in it Kyra’s eyes went, without the half second’s warning she usually had, and neither of them stopped for that either.

Afterward, a long time afterward, with the fire down to a red line and the window doing what the window did, Kyra said:

"We solved it."

"We did not solve it."

"We did. You just haven’t noticed because it didn’t come out to a number." Kyra had one arm over her and her hand flat under Val’s ribs. "Nobody out there knows what any of it means. They’ve got all the words and they haven’t got one single thing we mean by them. That boy on the rope could say every word I said to you just now and it would be about a rope."

Val lay still and turned it over properly, because it deserved that.

"It was never the language," Val said.

"It was never the language."

"It was that there is exactly one other person who knows what I am referring to."

"And there still is," Kyra said. "There’s one. There’s been one since a barn, and there’ll be one in four hundred years, and the rest of this planet can have the whole dictionary."

Val lay in the dark in the Dutch village with the ferry frozen and no work in front of her and a hand flat under her ribs.

"I want to record," Val said, "that you arrived at that in about nine seconds and it took me a winter."

"You took a winter because you were trying to build one. I just noticed we already had it." Kyra’s mouth was somewhere near her ear. "That’s the whole difference between us and it always has been and I have no intention of changing it."

"Nor have I."

"Go to sleep, Sorin."

Val did not, for some time. She lay with her eyes open in the dark and thought about a path along a south wall that she had walked once at eighteen, before the light went, on the last evening of her childhood — and about a man sitting on the floor outside a door for six hours doing nothing whatsoever, on purpose, so that somebody would be there.

She put them side by side and found, for the first time in a hundred and sixty-two years, that she did not want to trade.

— end of chapter two —

They went to Boston because the printer said there were newspapers there and none here, which was not advice and was not meant kindly. It was the flat fact of the trade, said by a busy man to two women who had asked him a question, and Val turned it over for a fortnight and found nothing wrong with any part of it.

They were four years getting there, which was longer than the road. Val had wanted money in hand and a reason to arrive, and they went up the sound in stages and worked in two towns on the way, and by the time they came into Boston the names on the papers had changed twice and Caterina was gone for good.

The town had three newspapers and a printing house every third street, and Val stood at the top of the long hill on the first afternoon and looked down it and said nothing for some time.

"Go on," Kyra said.

"It is four times the size of Trieste."

"Is that the good news or the bad news?"

"It is the only news," Val said, "and I have decided to treat it as a fact rather than a verdict, and I would like you to hold me to that in about twenty years."

Nathan Tremaine printed at the sign of the Bible and Anchor, in Cornhill, and put out a weekly sheet called the Boston Intelligencer, and did every other kind of work that came through the door because the sheet by itself would not have kept a cat.

He was in his late thirties when they came to him and he did not ask them anything.

That was the first thing Val noticed and she noticed it with her whole body, because it was the third town in a row where the first hour had been questions. Tremaine looked at Kyra’s hands, and then at the line Val set for him standing up at a strange case in a cold room, and then at the clock, and said that he paid on Saturdays and did not pay for talking.

He was not a warm man. He was exact about the work and indifferent to almost everything else, and he had a way of saying a thing once and then declining to say it again that Val recognized within the week and found restful in a way she did not examine.

His wife ran the front of the house and the accounts. Sarah Tremaine was thirty-five and quick and never still, and she took to Kyra inside a month the way people took to Kyra, and she talked — to Kyra, at Kyra, across the counter, about the town and the price of paper and her sister in Charlestown — and Kyra gave her back about a third of what she was given and made it sound like all of it.

There were three children. Joshua was apprenticed to his father at twelve and set type beside Kyra from the second year. Thankful was the middle one and was quiet and had her father’s hands. Mercy was small and was always underfoot in the press room and had been told about it four hundred times.

They lived above the shop.

Val was given a key in the fourth year. There was no ceremony about it. Tremaine came out into the yard with it in his hand and said that somebody who was not him needed to be able to open the place in the morning, and put it into her palm, and went back inside before she had got a whole sentence together.

She walked to the ferry that evening with it in her fist and did not put it in her pocket until she was on the water.

"He gave you a key," Kyra said.

"He gave me a key."

"To the house."

"The shop is the house," said Val. "There is one door."

Kyra looked at her for a while with the harbor going past.

"Say the thing you’re not saying."

"I have no thing I am not saying." Val watched the town come. "I am aware of what a key is. I am aware that we have a rule about being known daily by good people, and that I made it, and that I have just been handed the physical article. And I have decided that a printer who has never once asked me where I was born is not Dorothea’s house, and that I would like to be wrong about that in a small way rather than a large one."

The pox came into the town in the spring of the seventh year, off a ship out of the Indies, and by the summer it had all of it.

Val had seen it before. She had seen it in Maribor and in the walled town on the river and once, badly, in a village outside Lisbon, and she knew what it did and in what order and how long it took, and she knew, standing in a press room in Cornhill in May, exactly what was going to happen to this town and approximately how many.

She was right about both, which was no use to anybody.

And the town began, that same summer, to argue.

There was a way of giving it to a well person on purpose — a cut in the arm, matter out of a sick one, a small sickness instead of a large one — and a minister in the town had got it out of a book and out of a man he owned, who had it from his own country, where it had been done for longer than anybody in Boston had been alive. A physician had tried it on his own son and two others in June and had published the fact.

The town went up like paper.

It was not a medical argument. Val established that inside a fortnight and it was the thing about the whole business she never got over. It was an argument about whether a man might put his hand between God and a judgment, and the physicians were mostly against, and the ministers were mostly for, which was backward and which nobody in the town appeared to find remarkable. A new sheet started up in August for the sole purpose of fighting it. Somebody put a device through the minister’s window in November with a paper tied to it, and it did not go off.

And all of it came through the Bible and Anchor, because everything printed in that town came through one shop or another and Tremaine took the work that came.

Val set both sides of it.

She stood at the case and put the argument together backward, letter by letter, a line at a time, and she set the pamphlet that said the practice was a Mahometan superstition and she set the broadside that said it had saved two hundred souls already, and she spaced out each line until it was tight and started the next one, and she did not say one word about any of it in the shop or out of it.

Kyra watched her do it for four months.

"You’ve gone flat," Kyra said, one night, on the water.

"I am setting type."

"You’re setting type like a woman holding her breath."

Val looked at the wake for a while.

"There is a thing I know," Val said, "which about forty people in this town also believe, for the wrong reasons, on the wrong evidence, having got it out of a book and a man’s memory. They are right. They are going to be shouted down, and the shouting is going to be printed, and I am going to set it."

"Then don’t set it."

"Then I am a woman with opinions in a print shop, and by the spring I am a woman who was asked where she learned them." Val put her hands back inside her sleeves. "I have run it every way I can and it comes out the same every time, and I would very much like you to tell me I am wrong."

Kyra did not.

That was the worst part of the crossing and Val thought about it for a long time afterward, because Kyra Davan had never once in her life failed to argue, and she sat in the bottom of a ferry with her arms folded and looked at the water and said nothing at all.

Val asked Tremaine in September.

She had prepared it for four days. She had it down to a thing a woman in a press room could plausibly have thought of on her own: that the physician’s people were not dying, that the count was in the sheets he himself was printing, that it cost a guinea and they had it.

He heard it out standing, with a stick of type in his hand, and did not interrupt.

"No," Tremaine said.

"May I ask—"

"You may not." He put the stick down. "Not because I think you’re a fool. I’ve watched you do sums in your head that I do on paper and I’d rather have you than any journeyman in this street. But I’ve three children and I am not going to be the man who cut them open on a maybe, and when you’re a mother you may make that decision for your own."

He picked the stick back up.

"Now set the Widow Pratt’s notice," he said, "because she’s coming at noon."

Val set the Widow Pratt’s notice.

Joshua went first, in October, and it was fast, and it was the one she could not have stopped.

He came out in it on a Tuesday and was gone inside nine days, and Val was in the room for nine of them, and there was nothing in any of the four hundred years behind her that would have changed one hour of it. That was the mercy and she knew it was the mercy and she still had to go and stand in the yard twice.

Sarah went in November, of sitting up with her own children, which is how it took most of the women it took.

Val was there for that too. She had been in the house more or less continuously since October, because she had a key and a reason and because Tremaine had stopped pretending the shop was running, and she sat with Sarah Tremaine for two nights and did the things there were to do, which were not many and which she did perfectly, and at some point in the second night she understood that she was watching a woman do exactly what she herself did, without any protection at all, because nobody had ever told her there was such a thing.

Val could not tell her either.

She thought about that in the yard, in the cold, at about the fourth hour, with her hands inside her sleeves and her back against the boards.

Then she went back in.

Thankful turned the corner in December.

She did. That was what Val went back to for four hundred years and could never get to come out any other way. The fever broke on the ninth day and the pustules scabbed and dried and came away in the second week, and the girl sat up and ate and complained about the light, and the whole sequence went exactly as it goes in the cases that live.

Val said so.

She said it out loud, in the room, to Nathan Tremaine, on an afternoon in the last week of the year, and she said it in the flat voice with her hands at her sides and no hedge anywhere in the sentence, because she had been asked a direct question by a man who had buried two people in nine weeks and she was not going to make him work for it.

"She has turned it," Val said. "She will be weak into the spring and she will be marked, and she will live."

And Thankful Tremaine was eleven years old and lived five more weeks and died of the other thing, the one that comes after, that gets in through the places where the skin was, that has nothing to do with the pox at all and takes the ones who have already won.

Val was in the room for that as well.

There was no corner to turn. The girl went down over four days with a fever of a different shape entirely, and Val knew what it was on the first evening and knew precisely what would have stopped it and could not have made it in that town with that century’s hands, and there was no argument to prepare and no man to persuade and nothing whatsoever to do except be in the room.

She stayed. She did the things there were to do.

Nathan Tremaine did not say anything to her about the sentence, then or ever.

That was the part Val could not put down. He did not reproach her and he did not absolve her; he simply went on employing her, and paid her on Saturdays, and never once in the four years that followed referred to the afternoon in the last week of the year when she had stood in his house with her hands at her sides and told him his daughter would live.

Neither of them took it.

They were in that house for four months, in and out, at all hours, in rooms where the air was thick with it, and Kyra sat on the stairs with Mercy for an entire night in November, and neither of them so much as ran a temperature.

Nobody remarked on it. That was what Val kept behind her teeth all winter and did not produce even on the water: in a town where half the people had it, two women who did not were not a wonder. They were luck. Every street had somebody who had walked through it and come out the other side, and Boston in that winter had no attention left over for anybody who was upright.

They had got away with it because the town was too busy dying to count.

Val understood that clearly, standing in the yard at the Bible and Anchor in the first week of the new year, and she put it in the notebook that night in four lines, and it was the first entry she had made in a year.

Nathan Tremaine opened the shop in January.

He opened it because a sheet comes out on a Monday, and because there was nothing else in the world for him to do at seven in the morning, and he set that week’s Intelligencer himself with a girl of eight sitting on a stool in the corner of the press room where she had been told four hundred times not to sit.

Val came in at first light and found him at the case with the lamp still going.

He did not look up.

"There’s the Boylston notice and two bills of lading," Tremaine said. "And the Widow Pratt again. Take the lading."

"Yes."

"Mercy stays where she is."

"Yes," Val said.

And she went to the second case and took the stick in her left hand and began to set, backward, from right to left, one letter at a time, and the child in the corner watched her do it and did not say anything, and neither did anybody else, and that was the whole of the morning.

— end of chapter three —

Val went to the island in February, and did not ask anybody whether she should, and did not announce it.

Kyra found out on the fourth day from a man at the ferry stairs who wanted to know whether the tall fair one was any relation, because she had been going out on the pest boat every morning that week and there was a good deal of opinion about it in the town.

The town had a house out there for the ones nobody would take in. It had been a hospital for about forty years in the way a shed is a barn, and it had a keeper and a woman who cooked and no physician at all, because the physicians were in Cornhill arguing in print, and by the winter it had more people in it than the arrangement had ever been built for.

Kyra stood at the top of the stairs with the harbor going gray-green below her and worked out, in about four seconds, all of it.

She did not go out there that day. She went back up the hill and set type until dark and got on the ferry home, and Val came in at the ninth hour smelling of vinegar with her hands scrubbed raw, and neither of them said one word about it.

That went on for six weeks.

Here is what Kyra Davan did about it, which she was never entirely satisfied with and could not at any point think of a better version of.

She did not ask Val to stop. She had learned that lesson on a road in Styria and had learned it again on a wall above a mill, and she had a rule of her own by then, which was that she did not stand between Vaelith Sorin and a thing Vaelith Sorin had decided she owed.

She did not go out there either, at first. That was the harder half and she thought about it every morning.

What she did was make the room warm.

She had the fire up before Val came in and she kept something hot on it and she took the scrubbing brush away on the second week and did Val’s hands herself, sitting on the floor with the bowl between her knees, and she talked — about the shop, about the Widow Pratt, about a man on the ferry who had opinions about Rhode Island — and required nothing back.

Val let her.

That was all Kyra had, and she gave it every night for six weeks, and on the last night of the sixth week Val stopped her in the middle of it with a hand round her wrist and said, "Come out with me tomorrow," and Kyra said yes before the sentence had finished landing.

The house was worse than she had built it.

That was not the pox. Kyra had seen the pox all winter in Cornhill and had sat on stairs with it and had carried water up to it and it held no surprises for her by February. It was the other thing — the poor of a town, at the end of a bad year, put on an island in a building with one hearth, by people who had done what the law required of them and had then gone home.

She worked. She was good at it and she knew she was and it was the only comfortable thing about the day.

And twice in the nine hours she came round a corner and found Val at the far end of a room with her sleeves up and the pale hair tied back hard and the gray light off the water on the side of her face, and both times Kyra had to go and do something else for a minute.

And she watched Val Sorin move through that building for nine hours, and something went through her at about the fourth hour that she had no name for and put down carefully for later.

It was not admiration. She had admired her since a hillside at eighteen and knew exactly what that felt like.

It was that Val was not there.

She was doing it all correctly — better than correctly, better than anyone in the building, with the whole of that mind bent down onto a room full of things she could not fix — and she was not in her face. There was nothing behind it at all. It was the face from the north yard and the face from a long room at Solara and the face from a boat out of Trieste, and Kyra had spent a hundred and seventy-four years learning that the amount of nothing was the measurement.

They sat down on the seaward side at about the eighth hour because Val made her, with the water in front of them and the town over the water, and ate what they had brought.

"You’ll go on going," Kyra said.

"Until it empties. It will empty; it is already emptying. Another month."

"I’m coming."

"I know you are." Val turned her cup a quarter turn on the stone, which she did. "I would like to say something about that and I have not got a way of saying it that does not embarrass us both, so I am going to say a smaller thing instead and you can have the rest of it by inference."

"Say the smaller thing."

"The room being warm," Val said, "has been the only thing that got me back onto that boat every morning for six weeks, and I have not thanked you for it, and I am aware I have not."

Kyra looked at the water for a while.

And then she asked, because she had been carrying it up the stairs of that building all day and because she asked things the way she did everything, which was straight out and without arranging it first.

"What happened in the two days?"

Val did not tense.

Kyra was listening for it — she had been listening for it for sixteen years — and there was nothing. Nothing in the shoulders, nothing in the hands, nothing anywhere.

"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."

The gulls went over.

Kyra sat with her back against the wall of a pest house on an island in a harbor four thousand miles from Trieste and felt the whole of her go cold in a way the wind had nothing to do with.

Because she knew the answer.

Not the shape of it. Not the sense of it. The answer — the words, in that order, with the pause in the same place, in a different room and in a different order and by the evening — she had had it once before, lying in the dark in a Venetian town on the Istrian coast with her arm strapped, and it had come out of Val’s mouth just now the way a thing comes out that has been put somewhere and taken out again.

"Say it again," Kyra said.

"Why?"

"Because I want to hear it again."

And Val Sorin said it again, and it was the same. Every word. The same pause.

"That’s learned," Kyra said.

"It is accurate."

"I didn’t say it wasn’t accurate. I said it’s learned. You’ve written that down somewhere and you’ve got it by heart and you say it the way I give the dull answers." Kyra had her hands flat on the stone on either side of her. "How long have you had it?"

"Val."

"How long."

"Since the ship," Val said. "I wrote it in Venice, in the days before the ship, with the notebook, and I have had it since, and I have never once had to think about it, and that is the point of it and I am not going to pretend otherwise to you on a rock."

Kyra shut her eyes.

"That’s worse," Kyra said. "You understand that’s worse."

"I understand that it is worse. I have understood since the evening I wrote it." Val was looking out at the water with her hands round her knees. "It does not follow that I have anything better."

They went back on the boat in the dark and neither of them said anything for most of it.

Kyra did the arithmetic about a thousand times over the following month and it always came out the same way. There was a pact. It had been made in the snow in the first winter and it had held for a hundred and fifteen years and it had two words in it and one of them was nothing.

And she could put that in front of Val tomorrow and Val would not argue with a syllable of it, and would agree, and would apologize, and would then give her the same paragraph in the same words at the next asking, because the paragraph was not a refusal. That was where she got to at the end of the month and it was the thing that made her stop.

The paragraph was a wall that Val had built once, in a room in Venice, so that she would never again have to build one in front of Kyra’s face.

It was, in its own appalling way, a kindness.

Kyra did not accept it and did not fight it. She put it where she put things, which was nowhere, and stayed there for later, and asked her again in about four years in a different country, and got the same paragraph, and by about the fourth time she had stopped expecting anything else and had not stopped asking.

The rule came in the spring, in the yard at the Bible and Anchor, and it did not come from the island.

Tremaine had a new apprentice by then and a woman in from Charlestown for the front of the house, and Mercy Tremaine was nine and had been put to the folding, which she was too small for and did anyway.

Val stood in the yard with the key in her hand and looked at it.

"I am going to say a thing and I would like you to hear the whole of it before you answer," Val said.

"Go on."

"We do not take a key again."

Kyra leaned on the doorpost.

"That’s not about the pox."

"No." Val turned it over. "I have been trying for three months to work out what I got wrong here, and it is not the town and it is not the trade and it is not the pox, because the pox came off a ship and would have come off that ship if we had never existed. What I got wrong was that I was in the house."

"You were in the house because he handed you a key."

"He handed me a key because I let myself be somebody a man would hand a key to." Val put it in her pocket. "Dorothea’s house was a year and it nearly finished us and I made a rule about it and the rule was nowhere we have to be known daily by good people, and I have kept that rule for a hundred and fourteen years by refusing roofs. And then a printer walked out into a yard with a piece of iron and I put my hand out."

"You’d do it again."

"I would do it again tomorrow, which is the difficulty." She was looking at the shop door. "So the rule has to be about the object, because I cannot be trusted with the reasoning. Not a key. Not a room in anybody’s house. Not a place at a table that is laid for us. We work, we are paid on Saturdays, and we are not trusted with anything that opens."

Kyra thought about it.

"And what do we do," Kyra said, "when somebody hands us one anyway."

"We are already gone by then," said Val.

They were three more years in Boston and they were quiet ones.

Mercy Tremaine grew. That was the fact Kyra watched, and she watched it on purpose, because she had watched Zofka’s boys do it in Maribor and had not known at the time what she was looking at, and she knew now.

The girl went from nine to twelve in front of them. She got tall and then got taller and went from underfoot to useful to indispensable, and she took over the folding and then the front counter, and somewhere in the twelfth year she stopped calling Kyra by her first name and started calling her by the other one, which is what a child does when it notices it has become a young woman and the women around it have not become anything at all.

Val marked the date of that. Kyra found the line in the notebook years later and could not look at it for long.

They went in the autumn, on time, in good weather, with the accounts settled, and they told Tremaine they had people in the Jerseys, and he took it the way he took everything, which was once, without comment, and he paid them both to the end of the week and said that if the Jerseys did not answer they knew where the door was.

Mercy cried, which nobody had expected, least of all Mercy.

Kyra crouched down in the doorway of the press room and said something to her that she never repeated to Val and never wrote down and remembered perfectly for four hundred years, and then stood up and picked up her bundle and went.

They walked out of Boston on a Tuesday with the harbor on their left.

"Say the good-sounding one," Kyra said.

"I have no good-sounding one."

"You’ve always got a good-sounding one. It’s the only vice you’ve got."

Val walked a few paces.

"Until the place we stop in doesn’t know the place we left," Val said.

"You used that one in 1608."

"It was a good one in 1608," said Val, "and I have not had a better one since, and I have had a hundred and seventeen years to think of one."

— end of chapter four —

The five years between are not worth much and can be told quickly, because they were the years in which nothing happened, which is the only kind of year Val Sorin had ever learned to be grateful for.

They went south and inland and worked in four places. A binder’s in Burlington for two winters. A man in Trenton who printed nothing at all and sold paper, ink, almanacs and spectacles, and who was the single dullest human being either of them had met on this world and about whom Kyra could still do a whole evening’s imitation a century later. Then two summers of nothing in particular, on a river, doing work Val did not write down.

They gave the dull answers on market days. Nobody ever asked for a twelfth.

And in the autumn of the fifth year Val did the accounting at an inn on the Delaware road and said that the place to go was Philadelphia, and gave four reasons, and the fourth one was the true one and she said it last, which was her habit.

It was new. That was all of it. The town was younger than either of them had been when they left the Vayr; there was nobody in it whose grandfather had been born there; half the people on any street had arrived inside ten years and knew it about each other and did not find it worth remarking on.

"Nobody there has a history," Val said. "Which means nobody there is looking for yours."

Hannah Snowden had a press on Front Street and did not want to talk about it.

She was fifty-one and had been a widow for nine years, and the shop had come to her the way a shop comes to a woman, which is with a great deal of advice attached. Val heard three versions of that story in her first fortnight without asking for any of them, and the versions agreed on the facts and disagreed on everything else, and what the facts came to was that Snowden had buried a husband who drank and had then gone through his books in a week and found out what he had been doing with the Assembly work, and had stopped doing it, and had been solvent inside two years.

She was small and upright and moved like somebody who had a list. She wore good plain clothes and a plain cap and the Quaker speech, although Val established within the month that she was not in unity with the Meeting and had not been for some time, and that this was not a subject.

The hiring took about six minutes.

She looked at Kyra’s hands. She gave Val a stick and a case and a piece of copy and watched her set nine lines of it standing up, which was the length of time it took, and then took the stick and read the type backward off it without moving her lips.

"Thee sets clean," Snowden said. "Where from?"

And Val, braced, with the first four in her mouth, said the first one.

Snowden nodded and put the stick down.

"Saturdays," Snowden said. "Six at the case, and thee’ll fold when there’s folding, and I do not pay for talk. Start Monday."

That was all.

It took Val four months to believe it.

She would not have admitted the four months to anybody and did admit them, eventually, to Kyra, on the water stairs, in the following spring.

Because she had been waiting. That was what those months were: a woman standing at a case in a warm room waiting for the second question, and the third, and the one that comes at the end of a long day when a person has decided they like you. She had the whole apparatus ready. She had the sister story, built at a table in Maribor out of three men in a market, and she had the eleven in order, and she had four years of Lisbon behind her to account for and a shape for how to account for it.

And Hannah Snowden never asked.

Not where they had been. Not whether there were people. Not why two women in their twenties were journeymen instead of married, which was the question every other employer on this continent had got to inside a season and which Snowden appeared not to have noticed there was anything to ask about.

She talked, but she talked about paper.

She talked about the mill at Germantown and the price of rags and the man in New Castle who owed her for a year’s almanacs, and about the Assembly work, and about a font she wanted out of London and was not going to get, and she talked to Val about all of it as one printer to another, at length, for thirty-five years, and in all that time she did not once ask her a question about herself.

"She’s the coldest woman I’ve ever liked," Kyra said, on the stairs, in the spring.

"She is not cold."

"Val, she didn’t ask me my name. She asked my hands."

"She asked your name on the Monday, because she had to write it in a book." Val had her arms round her knees. "That is precisely my point and I have been three months getting to it. She asks what she requires and she does not ask what she does not require, and there is no second category in her at all. It is not coldness. It is that she has decided what is hers to know."

Kyra thought about that.

"You’ve fallen in love with her," Kyra said.

"I have not."

"You have. You’ve gone the way you went about the Venetian and the length of the tube."

"I am going to answer that seriously," Val said, "because it is a serious thing and you have said it in the wrong voice on purpose, which you do when you have noticed something before I have."

"Go on then."

Val looked at the river for a while.

"I made a rule in a yard in Boston," Val said. "No key. No room in anybody’s house. No place at a table laid for us. And I said it as though it were a thing I could do, and what I have found out in four months is that I did not know it was possible. I thought the price of not being known was that there would be nobody. I have been thinking that since Dorothea’s house, and I have been wrong for a hundred and twenty-three years, and there is a woman on Front Street who has worked beside me every day since Monday and who does not know one true thing about me and is not withholding anything."

"That’s the safest thing you’ve ever found."

"It is the safest thing I have ever found," Val agreed, "and I have been waiting four months for the bill, and there isn’t one, and I do not know what to do with my hands."

The crew came with the shop and stayed longer than anybody had any business staying.

Isaac Colby was fifty and had been at a case since he was twelve and could set faster than any of them and was already losing the small type, and knew it, and had a way of tipping a sheet toward the window that everybody in that room ended up copying without noticing. He had an opinion about everything and gave them all every week.

Jonas Meade was thirty and ran the press and was strong and slow and pleasant, and had a wife on Second Street and four children in eight years and then five.

Robert Tice came in the second year at fourteen, as an apprentice, with wrists like a bird’s, and was frightened of Snowden and of Colby and of the press and of Kyra, in that order, until about four months in, when he stopped being frightened of Kyra and became something considerably more inconvenient for two years.

They were the crew. There were others and they came and went, boys mostly, and drank, and went to sea or to the country or to another shop, and the three of them stayed.

Val put that in the notebook in the third year and did not write anything under it, and knew perfectly well what it meant and wrote it anyway.

The names changed on the Delaware road, in the autumn, before they came into the town.

Val had done it out of a register. She had spent an evening in Burlington with a parish book she had no business having and had counted, and had come out with the two commonest women’s names in the province and the fourth commonest surname, on the grounds that the first three surnames were all attached to families somebody might know.

Kyra heard the result and put her head down on the table.

"Mary."

"Mary is the commonest name in this colony by a factor of three. There is no house on any street in Philadelphia without one in it. A woman called Mary is not a woman, she is a noise people make in a shop."

"And you’re Ann."

"I am Ann."

"Ann." Kyra was laughing into the wood. "You’re a two-hundred-year-old woman from four hundred years of light away and you’ve got the same name as a cat."

"That is the entire object of the exercise," said Val.

They turned two hundred that year.

Val did the sum on a Sunday because she did all her sums, and put it down in the notebook in one line, and did not say anything about it for three days, and then said it on the stairs because saying nothing for three days was the sort of thing she had promised in a hut she would stop doing.

"Two hundred," Kyra said. "That’s half."

"That is half of a long one. Teor Casse had four hundred and six and his was the longest anybody could point to in the district."

"Half, then." Kyra had her chin on her hand. "Say the other half."

"There is no other half."

"There’s always an other half with you and you always say it four days late."

Val turned her cup a quarter turn.

"A hundred and twenty-three of them have been here."

Kyra did not answer that for a while.

"And a hundred and eighty-two of them have been you," Kyra said, "and I’d like that entered next to it, because you only ever put one column in that book."

The other thing that year came off a London paper eighteen months out of date, in a bundle Snowden had bought for the rag value.

Val read it standing up at the counter and then sat down on a bale, which she did not do.

She brought it back that night and gave it to Kyra without preamble, which was also a thing she did.

"An Englishman has measured how fast light goes."

Kyra put down what she was holding.

"How fast is it."

"Fast." Val had the sheet in both hands. "He has a number. It is a bad number and I can tell it is bad and I cannot tell by how much, because the instrument he used is described in one sentence by a man who did not understand it."

"But he’s got one."

"He has got one, and it is the right order of thing, and that is the part I want you to hear." She sat down on the edge of the bed. "There is a planet here where nobody knew four hundred years ago that light went at any speed at all, and there is now a man on it who has put a figure on it and published the figure, and other men are going to argue with the figure, which is how it gets better."

Kyra was watching her face.

"There’s something else."

"There is something else and I am deciding whether to tell you."

"Tell me."

"He was not looking for it." Val put the sheet down on her knees. "He was trying to measure how far away a star is. That was the work — years of it, pointing an instrument at one star and waiting for it to move the way it should move if the ground under him were going round. And it did not move the way it should. And what he found instead was this, which he was not looking for, and which is larger."

"And the distance?"

"He proved it cannot be done," Val said. "Not by him. Not with anything anybody on this world has got. He has shown that whatever that star’s distance is, it is further off than his instrument can see the difference, and he has published that too, which I want on the record as the single most honest thing I have read on this planet."

The stove did what the stove did.

"So he’s got the speed and not the distance," Kyra said.

"He has got the speed and not the distance."

"Which half is that?"

Val looked at her hands for a moment.

"It is the wrong half. You can know exactly how fast a thing travels and it tells you nothing whatsoever about how far away it is. It tells you how long it would take if you knew. It is an answer that is waiting for a question nobody on this world can ask yet."

Kyra reached over and took the sheet off her knees and looked at it, which she could not read, and held it anyway.

"How long have you had that number in your head," Kyra said. "Ours, I mean. From home."

"Since I was nine."

"And they’ve had theirs for eighteen months."

"Eighteen months," Val agreed.

And Kyra Davan sat on a bed in a rented room on Front Street with a London newspaper in her hands, and did not say the thing that both of them were thinking, and neither did Val, and it was the first time on that continent that either of them had had to work at it.

— end of chapter five —

The good years at the Front Street press were good in a way Kyra Davan had no practice at, and it took her about four years to work out what was wrong with them, and what was wrong with them was nothing.

They were not Maribor. She got that straight early and was glad of it and said so once, on a hot night in the second summer, sitting on the step with the door open behind her and the smell of the shop coming out.

Maribor had been a table. It had been Sundays and two bowls and a woman’s boys growing up in a lane and thirty-five years of being loved by people they were lying to, and it had been the best of that century and it had ended the way it had to.

This was work.

They went in at six. They came out when the work was out, which on a Wednesday was the middle of the night, because the sheet went on Thursday and there is a particular hour of a Wednesday in a printing house when everybody in the room stops being anybody and becomes a pair of hands. Kyra loved that hour. She had run cross-country for four years at the Vayr and had never once been able to explain to anybody what the last mile was for, and she found it again at thirty past two in the morning on Front Street with her arms aching and Colby swearing at the furniture and Snowden coming through with a lamp and saying nothing at all.

Nobody in that room knew one true thing about them.

Nobody in that room was owed one.

"That’s the whole of it," Kyra said, on the step. "We can be in it up to here and it costs nothing, because there’s nothing in it to give away."

Val sat down beside her with the cold coming off her.

"Say it again in the winter," Val said, "and I will believe you."

Kyra said it again in the winter.

The German work came in through the back and it was Val’s from the first week.

There was a whole country behind Philadelphia that did not speak English and had no intention of learning any. They had come in off the ships for thirty years and they were up the Schuylkill and out at Germantown and away west of that, and they had their own presses and their own almanacs and their own preachers arguing in print with their own other preachers, and the work spilled over into every shop in town when their own were full.

Snowden took it because it paid and set none of it, and she handed all of it to the one woman in her shop who could read it.

Kyra watched her do that and was pleased, for about two years.

Val’s German was a hundred and thirty years old. She had it off Frederick and off a valley in Spiš and off thirty-five years of the Emperor’s business on paper in Maribor, and it was, Val said, roughly what a man in Philadelphia would sound like if he had learned to speak from a lawyer who had died before his grandfather was born. The Germantown men found her extremely funny. They came in to hear her say things.

And she went out there. And that was where it sat. There was a papermaker’s at Germantown and a bindery and two presses, and about once a fortnight Val Sorin put on her coat and went up the road for the day and came back after dark with ink on her cuff and an account of some argument or other, and told it well, and Kyra laughed in the right places.

Here is what Kyra did about it, and she was not proud of the first eighteen months.

She noticed. That was unavoidable; she noticed everything about that woman and always had.

Then she noticed that she was noticing, which took longer, and happened on a Tuesday in the fourth year when Val came in late and cheerful and said four sentences about a man called Sauer and a font, in a language Kyra had about nine words of, before she caught herself and went back into English mid-sentence and apologized.

The apology was the thing. Kyra sat with that for a week.

Then she did what she did, which was say it out loud at the worst available moment, which in her case was not a failing but a method.

"I’ve got something and you’re going to hate it," Kyra said.

They were on the stairs. Val put down the cup.

"Go on."

"You’ve got a language I haven’t got."

"I have four languages you have not got."

"You’ve got a language you live in that I haven’t got, up a road, one day a fortnight, with people who find you funny." Kyra had her hands out. "And I lost mine on a wharf in 1710 and I’ve never once said anything about it since, and I thought I’d put it down, and I hadn’t, and that’s not your fault and I’m not asking you to stop and I’m saying it because if I don’t say it, in about nine years I’ll be somebody who thinks something and doesn’t say it, and I have met that woman and I am not going to be her."

Val sat perfectly still for a moment.

"That is the best sentence anybody has ever said to me," Val said, "and I want to be clear that I am not going to be able to respond to it at that level."

"You don’t have to—"

"I am going to try anyway. Sit down."

Kyra sat down.

"I have been going up that road for four years," Val said, "and I have been enjoying it and I have not examined why, and I am going to do it now, out loud, badly. Here it is. I am not funny. I have never been funny in any language I was raised in. In German I am funny by accident, because I am a hundred and thirty years out of date and I sound like a document, and men who would not look at me twice in this town laugh when I open my mouth up there. And I have been going up the road to be a person who is laughed at, which I have wanted since I was about fourteen years old, and which I have never once had anywhere else on either of two worlds except in a room with you."

Kyra did not say anything.

"So it is not a language," Val said. "It is a costume. And you have had the actual thing since a north yard and you can have it whenever you want it, and I am not going to stop going to Germantown, and I would like you to come with me in the spring and find out how bad the food is."

"That’s the worst offer I’ve ever had."

"It is the only one I have got."

Kyra came in the spring and every third or fourth time after that for thirty years, and understood about nine words of it the whole while, and sat in warm rooms full of a language she had no grip on at all and watched Vaelith Sorin be laughed at, and it was, Kyra said afterward, one of the better things she did with that century.

What she mostly watched was the face. Val laughing was a thing that happened about four times a year and it happened in the eyes before anywhere else, and in a low room at Germantown with the lamps going the blue-gray of them went nearly transparent, and the pale hair was orange at the edges from the fire, and Kyra sat with her hands round a cup and was perfectly happy and did not think about it at all.

Colby’s hands went in the ninth year.

It was the small type first, which he had been losing since before they came, and then it was the spacing, and then one morning in the tenth year he put a stick down half full and stood looking at it, and Kyra came round the case and took it off him and finished it and put it on the stone and said nothing whatsoever, and Isaac Colby said nothing whatsoever, and that was the arrangement from then on.

He stayed four more years at the folding and then went to his daughter in Chester.

Jonas Meade got fat and then got thin again in a way nobody liked, and buried two of the five and had two more, and ran that press for twenty-six years and never once broke a sheet.

And Robert Tice, who had come in at fourteen with wrists like a bird’s and had spent two years being in love with Kyra in a manner visible from the street, got over it, got married, got out of his time, got a case of his own, got a belly, got gray, and was foreman of that shop at forty with two apprentices of his own and a way of tipping a sheet toward the window that he had off Isaac Colby and thought was his.

Kyra watched it happen from four feet away.

That was the thing about a shop. In Maribor she had watched Zofka’s boys grow up in a lane at a hundred yards, twice a week, in the street, and it had taken her by surprise every single time. Here she stood next to it for six days out of seven and it still took her by surprise, which she had not expected and which told her something she did not like about how the surprise worked.

It was not that they got old. She knew they got old. It was that they got old in order, without any of them noticing, and that the noticing was the only part she was ever going to be asked to do.

Val told her about the papermaker on a Sunday, in the kitchen, before anything had happened, in the flat voice.

"There is a man at Germantown and I have been thinking about him for about a month and I would like you to know that before rather than afterward."

Kyra put down the knife.

"A month."

"A month."

"That’s twice what you took over the Venetian."

"The Venetian was on a quay and I could see him every day and it was therefore an easier question. This has taken four separate journeys and a great deal of standing about in a mill." Val was turning her cup. "His name is Matthias. He is a papermaker and he is forty-four and his wife has been dead six years and he has a grown son who runs the vats. He is not clever and he is not informed. He is extremely good at one thing and he is funny about it, which I did not know was available."

"Is he kind?"

"He is kind."

"Then go on," said Kyra Davan, "and I want the whole of it on Sundays."

And here is the part worth putting down, because of what was said about it in a much later century by people who were not there.

Kyra checked.

She did it deliberately, that same evening, the way she had done it in a cold station on a plateau when she was twenty and had caught herself envying a woman coming back from a pump house. She sat down with it on purpose and went through herself looking for the thing, and it was not there.

Not the smallest piece of it. She did not want the papermaker, and she did not want Val not to have him, and when she got to the bottom of it what she found instead was a kind of enormous ridiculous gladness that Vaelith Sorin was going to be taken to bed by a man who thought paper was interesting.

She told her so on the Sunday, at some length, and Val put both hands over her face.

It went on for two years and some months. It ended well, which almost nothing does, because Matthias asked her to come and live at the mill and Val said no and said it immediately, and gave him the reason, which was true and which was Kyra’s from a mole in Trieste: that she did not stay anywhere.

And every part of it went through the house. That was not a discipline by then. It was simply how they lived.

— end of chapter six —

The postmaster of Philadelphia kept his office in his own printing house on Market Street, which meant that every printer in the town had business with him about twice a week, and that the business was conducted across a counter by a man in a leather apron who had ink under his nails and no more standing in that colony than anybody else in the trade.

Val had been going in there for fifteen years before she formed an opinion about him, which was a long time for her and which she noticed.

He was forty-six the year of the kite and he had been many things and was at that point mostly a postmaster and a man who had made money and given the shop to a younger partner. He was heavy and quick and talked to everybody. He talked to the boy who swept. He talked to Val about the Germantown work, at length, twice, and got four things right about it that nobody else in the town had bothered to notice, and then said something about the people up there that she filed and did not answer.

What Val thought about him, when she finally had it in order, was this: that he was the first person she had met on this world who was interested in everything for no reason.

Not for money. He had money. Not for standing. He gave things away. He was interested the way a child is interested, all day, in whatever was in front of him, and he wrote every bit of it down, and that last part was the reason Val Sorin went across that counter for fifteen years and gave him the first four answers and nothing else whatsoever.

Kyra ruined it in about four seconds on a Thursday in April, and neither of them ever fully agreed afterward about how bad it was.

She had gone for the London bag because Val was at the case, and it was raining, and the postmaster came out from the back and said something pleasant about the weather being set in for the week, and Kyra Davan, with a wet bag in her arms and her mind on four other things, said:

"It’ll break tomorrow after noon. There’s a change coming up behind it."

And then heard herself.

He did not go still, which is what a dangerous man does. He put his hands on the counter and leaned on them and said, "Will it," with an entirely open face, and asked her how she knew.

Kyra gave him the true answer dressed as the ordinary one, which she was good at. Her joints. The pressure. Her grandmother had it and she had it and it was no use to anybody because it did not come with a number.

"It came with a number," the postmaster said. "You said after noon."

"After noon is not a number."

"After noon is a great deal more of a number than most people give me." He was delighted. That was what she could not get past when she came back up the hill. He was not suspicious and he was not humoring her; he was pleased, the way a man is pleased when a thing turns out to be more interesting than he expected. "I should like to know whether you are right. May I ask you next week?"

"You may ask me anything you like," said Kyra, "and I’ll be wrong half the time."

"Then I should like to know which half," he said.

It broke on the Friday after noon.

He asked her again six weeks later, across the counter, without preamble, in front of two other people: whether she had anything for him about the coming week.

And that was the part Val could not put down.

"He remembered," Val said, on the stairs.

"He remembered a thing about the weather."

"He remembered a woman." Val had her hands inside her sleeves. "Six weeks. A man who sees forty people a day and reads every newspaper in this continent and runs the post for four colonies remembered, six weeks later, without a note in front of him, that the tall woman from Snowden’s says when the rain will stop."

Kyra sat down on the step below her.

"Say the rest of it."

"There is no rest of it. That is the whole of the difficulty and it does not go anywhere." Val looked out at the yard. "He is not going to denounce you. He is not going to think anything about it at all except that it is interesting. And in ten years, or twenty, somebody will say to him, do you recall two women at the Front Street press, and he will recall us, because he recalls everything, and he will say something accurate and kind and entirely ruinous, and he will never know he has done it."

"I’m sorry."

"Do not be sorry. I have been standing at a case for forty-two years next to a woman who cannot pass a man in a doorway without finding out something true about him, and it is the single best thing about my life, and I am not going to complain that it has a cost." Val was quiet for a moment. "I would simply like the cost to be somewhere I can see it."

In June he told her what he meant to do about the lightning.

He told everybody. That was the whole character of the man and it was why the town both liked him and could not take him seriously. He stood behind his own counter with a wet parcel in his hand and explained, to Val and to a carter and to the boy who swept, that he intended to find out whether the matter in a thundercloud was the same matter he had been drawing off glass for four years, and that he was going to do it with a kite, because a kite would go where a steeple would not.

Val stood on the other side of the counter with her hands on the strap of the bag.

He had it right. That was what she had not been ready for. He had the silk ribbon and he had the doorway and he had worked out for himself that the wet twine would carry and the dry ribbon would not, and he said all of it in about ninety seconds in the flat pleased voice of a man describing a cart he had built, and every part of it was correct.

He had one thing wrong and it was not about the kite.

"They are doing it in France," he said. "And in Germany, and I am told in Petersburg. Off the printed account. A man writes to me from Leipzig with a drawing." He was extremely happy about this. "It is the best part of the whole business. I put the thing in a book and now there are men in six countries standing out in the weather on my say-so."

And Val Sorin stood in a post office in Philadelphia in June and did the arithmetic.

Not on the kite. On the six countries. On how many men, and how many of them would have the ribbon and the doorway and how many would have read it in translation or at second hand or in a coffee house from a man who had it off somebody else, and how many would be standing in the wet holding the wet end because nobody had told them which end was which.

She had it in about four seconds. She had had it since she was nine years old.

She said, "Thank you for the bag," and picked it up and went out into the rain.

She wrote four lines in the notebook that night and none of them were about lightning.

What she wrote was the question, which she had been turning over the whole walk up and which she did not answer that night or in the two hundred years after it: whether there is any difference between telling a man a thing and asking him the question that makes him find it.

Because she had had one. It had arrived fully formed while he was still talking and it had been four words long and it had been entirely answerable out of what any woman in a printing house could have observed, and it would have gone into the next printed account, and the next printed account went to six countries.

She had not asked it.

She was not sure, walking up the hill, whether that had been the rule or cowardice, and she was still not sure in a kitchen in Portland with the radio on.

The notice came through the shop the following August, in a London paper, eleven lines long and set solid at the bottom of a column.

A professor in Petersburg had been killed. He had been at his instrument in a storm with a colleague beside him, and the colleague had lived, and the professor had not, and the paper gave his name and the date and observed that the practice was now to be reconsidered in that city.

Val read it standing up at the counter, the way she read everything, and then set it, because it was going in Snowden’s sheet on Thursday and she was the compositor.

She put it in herself, one letter at a time, backward, from right to left, and spaced the last line out until it was tight.

Kyra found her in the yard afterward and did not ask anything. She came and stood next to her with her shoulder against the boards and stayed there until Val was ready to go in, which took a while, and the two of them did not say one word about it then or on the water or ever.

The pamphlet came in three years later, out of Boston, at the back of somebody else’s argument about the French.

It was not new. Val established that within a week: the thing had been written four years before and had gone round in manuscript among his friends and had now been printed without much of his say in it, at the end of another man’s work, where anybody might come on it who had bought the other man’s work for other reasons.

Snowden had it off the Boston bag and left it on the counter.

Val read it there.

It was mostly about population and most of the population part was correct, which she noted at the time and went back to afterward with a kind of cold admiration, because the man had done a piece of arithmetic on a whole continent in his head and had got it nearly right and nobody on this world would understand how good it was for another century.

And in the twenty-third paragraph he asked why the Palatine Boors should be suffered to swarm into their settlements, and by herding together establish their language and manners to the exclusion of ours.

Val stood at the counter and read the paragraph twice.

Then she went back to the case.

Kyra had it that night and Val watched her get to it, and it took about a page and a half.

She did not say anything for a while. Then she put it down on her knees.

"Ten ships," Kyra said.

"Ten."

"Four hundred and seventy of them died on the water. They put the rest on an island in the harbor until the sickness ran out and then they built them a camp outside the wall because there was nowhere else, and I walked past it in the first winter, and it was the reason nobody looked at us. Those are the boors."

"Those are the boors."

"He’s met them. He does the German work in this town, he’s printed for them, he’s the one who—" She stopped. "Has he met them?"

"He has met a great many of them and has been complained about by most of them and will lose an election over this in a year or two." Val took the sheet back and folded it. "He also, four years after he wrote it, took that paragraph out of the reprints and put nothing in its place and has never said why."

"Is that better?"

"I do not know what it is," Val said. "It is not better and it is not nothing and I have no category for a man who is ashamed of a sentence and will not say so."

Kyra sat with her arms round her knees.

"We’re not going to say anything to him," Kyra said.

"No."

"Because to say anything we’d have to say why we care."

"Because to say anything," Val agreed, "we would have to say why we care, and there is no version of that sentence that ends with us still working on Front Street."

They sat there in the dark for a while with the stove going.

"He asks me about the weather every six weeks," Kyra said. "He’ll ask me on Tuesday. He’ll be pleased to see me."

"He will."

"And I’ll tell him, and he’ll write it down, and he’ll be kind about it."

"He will do all of that," said Val, "and none of it will be a lie, and he will go home and write nine pages about something else entirely, and that is what this planet is, and I have had a hundred and forty-eight years of it and I am not finished being surprised."

— end of chapter seven —

The comet came back in the spring, on the day a dead man had said it would, and Kyra Davan found out about it from a boy selling papers in the street.

She went up the hill at a speed that made Val put down what she was holding before she had heard a word.

"There’s a comet."

"There is a comet. It has been in three of the last four bags and I was going to bring it up the hill this evening."

"Val—"

"I know what it is," Val said. "Sit down for a moment before you say it, because I want you to say it properly and you will say it badly if you say it now."

Kyra sat down on a bale of paper.

"A man worked it out."

"A man worked it out."

"And then he died."

"He died seventeen years after he published, at eighty-five, and he had written down in a book what would happen after he was dead and had asked, in print, that when it came back the people who saw it would remember that an Englishman had been the one to say so." Val had her hands flat on her knees. "It came back. It was late and he had said it might be late and he had said by roughly how much and he was right about that too."

Kyra sat on the bale with her hands round the edge of it.

"They can do that."

"They can do that."

"Val, they can point at a bit of sky and say a year."

"They can point at a bit of sky and say a year," Val agreed, "and the man who did it has been in the ground since before we came to this town, and it made no difference whatever, because the arithmetic does not care whether the person who did it is alive."

They went out to look at it on four nights in April, up past the last houses on the north road where there was nothing between them and the dark, and on the fourth night they lay on their coats on the cold ground and did not talk about it at all.

It was not much to look at. Kyra said so and Val agreed and neither of them moved for about an hour.

She did not look at it for most of that hour. She looked sideways instead, at a profile against a sky with no moon in it — the straight nose, the high place under the eye, the mouth gone flat with concentration — and thought, with no more warning than weather: two hundred and eleven years, and I have never once got tired of that.

They came back down the road after midnight with the whole town asleep and got in through the yard and up the stairs with their boots in their hands like a pair of thieves, and Kyra was still laughing about something Val had said at the top of the road, and then Val shut the door and put her back against it and did not light the lamp.

"Oh," Kyra said.

"I have been deciding since the second night."

"The second—" Kyra put both hands over her face. "You lay on a hill for two hours on the second night with your arms folded and you had already—"

"I had already."

"And you said nothing."

"I said a great deal about the comet."

It went on for most of what was left of the night and the best of it was the talking.

That was the thing Kyra could never get across to herself afterward, when she tried to work out why that particular night stayed. It was not the best one. There had been better and there would be a great many better, and she knew it at the time.

It was that somewhere in the middle of it Val got onto the subject of a boot room.

"I want to say a thing," Val said, into her hair, "and it is going to take a while and I am going to do it badly and I would like you not to look at me while it happens."

"I can’t see you. It’s pitch dark."

"That is why I have chosen now."

Kyra started laughing and had to stop.

"Go on then."

"You know about the second year," Val said. "The thing I told you in your kitchen, about the — " she stopped, and Kyra felt her decide to be exact, which was the most Val thing that had ever happened in a bed, "— about the considerable irritation."

"I know about the considerable irritation. I have thought about it once a decade for a hundred and ninety years and it has never once failed to improve my day."

"Then here is the part I did not tell you, and I have known it since about a fortnight after the boot room, and I said nothing about it for fifty-eight years."

Kyra went still.

"It was not about a body," Val said.

She got the rest of it out in about four minutes, flat, in the dark, with her face where Kyra could not see it.

That she had known at nineteen, in a boot room at Corran Vayr with sleet coming through a window that did not shut, that there was one place in the world where a comparison between the two of them could land, and had landed it, and had gone on landing it for a season and a half. That she had never once been confused about the fact.

And that she had spent the following twenty years, and then thirty more, being entirely confused about what the fact had been standing in for — and had got to the bottom of it at some point in her forties, alone, on a coast road, and had looked at it, and had put it away, and had not taken it out again until a shoulder of turf above a tarn in the first autumn.

"Fifty-eight years," Kyra said.

"Fifty-eight years."

"You had it at nineteen."

"I had a version of it at nineteen that I could not have named and would have denied under questioning. I had the whole of it in my forties." Val’s voice was perfectly steady, which was how Kyra knew what it was costing. "And you were bonded, and then you were not bonded, and then you had a chair and a man and a daughter, and at no point in any of that was there an hour in which the correct thing to do was hand you that."

"Val."

"I have gone through it. I have gone through it approximately four hundred times and every time I get the same answer, which is that I was right, and I would like to be able to tell you I regret it and I cannot, because the version where I said it is a version where I am not here."

Kyra lay in the dark and did the arithmetic, which took no time at all.

Fifty-eight years between a boot room and a hut on a mountain. And then a hundred and fifty-two more to tonight. And in all of that, the woman beside her had carried the thing and worked it out and put it away and had never once, in either direction, made it Kyra’s problem.

"Right," Kyra said. "I’m going to say four things and then I’m going to stop, because it’s the middle of the night and you’ve just done the bravest thing I’ve ever watched you do and I’m not going to ruin it with a speech."

"Four is acceptable."

"One. I heard all of it."

"Yes."

"Two. You were right, and I hate it, and I’d have made an absolute disaster of it at twenty and so would you."

"Yes."

"Three." Kyra got up onto one elbow. "Fifty-eight years, Sorin. Fifty-eight. I have got to be allowed to be furious about that and it has got nothing to do with whether you were right, and I am going to be furious about it on and off for about a century and you are going to have to take it."

"I will take it."

"Four." She put her hand flat on the side of Val’s face in the dark and found that the light had come up under it, faint, along the jaw, and had been there for some time. "Four is that I have never in my life been given anything better and I would like the record to show I said so within the hour."

Val did not say anything for a moment.

"The record shows it," Val said.

Five years later a Frenchman put a number on it.

The news came into the shop in the summer with everything else, in a bag of Continental papers that had come up from the Wilmington boat, and Val read it at the counter and brought it home and did not hand it over until they had eaten, which was how Kyra knew it was one of the large ones.

"There is a man in Paris," Val said, "who hunts comets."

"Good for him."

"He is extremely good at it and he has a difficulty, which is that when you sweep the sky for comets you keep stopping on things that look like comets and are not. Smudges. Faint tilted things that do not move." Val had the sheet folded in her hands. "They have wasted years of his life. So he has begun a catalogue."

Kyra put down what she was holding.

"A catalogue of what."

"A catalogue of things that are not comets," Val said. "A list of every faint object in the sky that has ever fooled anybody, with its place written down, so that no astronomer in Europe ever has to waste a night on one of them again. It is a list of nuisances. It is a list of things you are to look at once, establish are nothing, and never look at again."

The room was quiet.

"And?" Kyra said.

"Ours is on it."

Kyra sat down.

"It is the thirty-first entry," Val said. "He has it as a nebula in the belt of the woman in the sky. He gives it a place to the minute and a date and he says it is tilted and brighter in the middle and has no stars in it that anybody can resolve, which is precisely what the Dutchman’s glass showed us on a hill in Trieste eighty years ago, and he is quite right and there is nothing whatever wrong with a single word of it."

"He’s put my daughter on a list of things to ignore."

"He has put a smudge on a list of things to ignore. He has never in his life heard of your daughter and will not, and nobody on this planet will for a very long time." Val sat down on the other side of the table. "And I want to say the other thing before you get to it on your own, because you are going to get to it on your own and I would rather you had it from me."

"Say it."

"It has a number now."

Kyra looked at her.

"It had four lines from a German in a book," Val said, "and now it has a number and a place to the minute, and when the next man comes and the next glass comes he will not have to find it. He will look up the number. That is what a catalogue is. It is the thing that stops people having to start."

Kyra sat up that night for a long time after Val had gone to sleep.

She thought about the Frenchman, who had never heard of any of them, sweeping a sky for the thing he wanted and writing down the things he did not want so that he would not be bothered by them again.

She thought about Frederick in a doorway with his hands going, making the shape of a woman with her arms out: there is a woman in the sky. She is chained. In the sea. For her mother’s words.

She had asked him why, and he had shrugged as if it explained the world, and perhaps it did.

A daughter on a rock, because her mother had said a wrong thing about her.

Kyra Davan had said a great many things out loud in two hundred and thirty-four years and had never once in her life been able to stop, and had stood up in a room in front of a hundred and forty people because she would rather be seen entirely than be safe, and her daughter was a hundred and ninety-six years old this summer and was somewhere in the lower east range being exact about something, and there was no light anywhere in the universe that would show it.

Entry thirty-one.

"It should have been eleven," Kyra said, to nobody, in the dark.

Hannah Snowden died in the winter, at eighty-six, in her own bed over the shop, of nothing in particular.

She had been at the case on the Thursday. She had gone through the New Castle account with Val on the Friday and had been sharp about it. On the Sunday she did not come down and on the Tuesday she was dead, and the nephew came from Wilmington inside the week and stood in the middle of the press room with his hat in his hands looking at the furniture.

Val did not say anything at the burying.

She did not say anything on the walk back either, and Kyra let her have it, and it was not until they were in the room with the door shut that she got it, and it came out in the flattest voice Kyra had heard her use in fifty years.

"I do not know what I am supposed to be feeling."

Kyra waited.

"I worked beside that woman for thirty-five years," Val said. "I saw her six days in seven. I know what she thought about every printer in this colony and every paper mill on this river and I know she was not in unity with her Meeting and I know she could not abide her sister. And I do not know one single thing about her, because she never told me one, because she never asked me one, and that was the arrangement, and it was the best arrangement I have ever had on this world, and I have nothing at all to put my hands on."

"That’s grief," Kyra said.

"It cannot be grief. There is nothing in it."

"Val." Kyra came and stood in front of her. "Thirty-five years of somebody not asking you a single question is the kindest thing anybody on this planet has ever done for you, and she did it every day, on purpose, without once letting you thank her for it. That’s what you’ve got to put your hands on. That’s the whole of it and it’s enormous and you’re allowed to be wrecked."

Val stood there.

"I am going to need to sit down," Val said.

The nephew kept them on until the spring and was perfectly civil and changed four things in the first month, and by the second month Val had the accounting done and was not hiding it.

They went in the autumn, on time, in good weather, with everything settled.

Colby was fifteen years dead. Meade had the rheumatism and a grandson at the folding. Robert Tice, foreman, fifty-one, gray, with Isaac Colby’s way of tipping a sheet toward the window, came out into the yard and shook hands with both of them and said that he had been at that case since he was fourteen and that the two of them had not changed a particle, and laughed, and went back inside.

Kyra stood in the yard for a second after he had gone.

"Boston," Kyra said.

"Boston," said Val.

— end of chapter eight —

Boston was Val’s, and she said so at the time, and she said it again a great many times in the century that followed, and never once let anybody else carry any part of it.

The Philadelphia end had been ordinary. The nephew was civil and changed four things and then a good many more, and by the second spring the shop on Front Street was a shop where a man from Wilmington decided what went in the sheet, and there was work in that town for two women who could set clean type and there was no longer any reason for it to be that work.

They could have gone anywhere. That was what Val went back to.

She did the accounting in the winter and laid it out on the table on a Sunday in four columns, which Kyra sat through with her chin on her fist, and at the end of it Val said Boston and gave the reasons, and the reasons were these.

They had a trade history there, forty years old, with a house that still existed under a different name. They had the sound of the place in their mouths. There were four papers in it now and two more starting and it was the only town on the continent where a compositor could choose an employer. And it was three times the size it had been when they left.

"Say the last one again," Kyra said.

"Three times the size."

"That’s the one you’ve been leaning on since the second column."

"It is the one that does the work," Val agreed. "Everything else is convenience."

They came in on a coaster in the spring and it was not the town they had left.

It had gone up the hill. The hill had been pasture with a beacon on it and it was streets now. There was a spire where the ropewalk had been and a long wharf out into the harbor half a mile long with warehouses standing on it, and the North End was solid building where there had been gardens, and Kyra stood at the top of Cornhill and turned all the way round twice.

"It’s a city."

"It is a town of about sixteen thousand people," said Val, "which is two-thirds of Trieste’s province and a fifth of Philadelphia, and I would like that on the record because I am going to be quoted on it."

The sign of the Bible and Anchor was a tallow chandler’s.

Val stood in front of it for perhaps four seconds and then went on up the street, and did not say anything about it until the following week.

She spent six weeks checking and did not tell Kyra she was doing it.

That was not concealment; she would have said so if asked, and she examined the distinction afterward at some length and was not entirely satisfied with the outcome. It was that the work was hers. She had made the arithmetic and if the arithmetic was wrong she wanted to be the one who found out.

So she walked.

She walked the burying grounds first, all four of them, in order, on Sundays, with a bunch of something in her hand so as to look like a woman visiting, and she read stones.

Nathan Tremaine was at the Granary, under his wife and two of his children, and had gone in 1744 at sixty-six, which was a long life for a printer and a good deal longer than Val had expected.

Joshua and Thankful were on the same stone as their mother, three names cut at three different times by three different hands, and the last of the three was the shallowest and had gone the color stone goes.

Mercy was not there.

It took Val another three weeks to find her, because Mercy Tremaine had not been Mercy Tremaine since she was nineteen years old, and there is no way to look for a woman’s married name except to ask, and Val was not going to ask.

She found it in the end in a way that was entirely characteristic and that she was slightly ashamed of: she went through the shop’s own advertisements in the bound files of the paper, year by year, until she found the notice of the sale of Nathan Tremaine’s press in 1745, executors named, and one of the executors was a Boston cooper with a wife who signed her consent, and the wife’s given name was Mercy.

The stone was at Copp’s Hill.

It said her married name and her husband’s and the year, which was 1763, and under it there were two children who had gone before her, and under those there was a line of scripture that Val read four times without taking in a word of.

She stood in front of it in the wind off the harbor and did the arithmetic, which she did not want to do and did anyway, because she had never in her life been able to leave one alone.

Mercy Tremaine had been eight years old in a house where three people died between October and December.

She had lived another forty-two years after that. She had married a cooper at nineteen and had buried two children and had been alive in this town for the whole time Val Sorin was setting type on Front Street and arguing about paper with a woman who never asked her anything.

Fifty years. Start to finish. A whole one.

And the last time Val had seen her she had been twelve years old, crying in the doorway of a press room, and Kyra had crouched down in front of her and said something nobody else had ever heard.

Val put the flowers down because she had them in her hand and there was nothing else to do with them, and then stood there a while longer with her hands at her sides, and did not light, because there was nothing in it that her body recognized as feeling and everything in it that her body recognized as arithmetic.

That, she thought, walking down the hill, is the difficulty with being right.

She told Kyra that night and got about nine sentences in before Kyra stopped her.

"Six weeks."

"Six weeks."

"You’ve been going out on Sundays for six weeks with a bunch of greens in your hand and I thought you were walking."

"I was walking."

"Val."

"I have not concealed it and I would have answered if you had asked, and I am aware of precisely how much that sentence is worth, having said the other version of it to you on a wharf in 1710." Val had her hands flat on the table. "I did it alone because if the answer had been bad I did not want you to have it at the same moment I did. That is the whole of the reason and it is not a good one and I am not going to dress it."

Kyra looked at her for a long moment.

"Was it bad?"

"No," Val said. "She had fifty years and a husband and four children and she buried two of them and she died in her own bed in her own town, and the stone is a good one, and somebody paid for it."

Kyra put her face in her hands.

"Don’t," Val said.

"I’m not. I’m going to in about a minute but I’m not yet." She came up. "Take me on Sunday."

"Yes."

Here is the arithmetic that Val Sorin did in the summer of that year, and it is worth setting out in full, because of what is usually said about it.

The question was whether anybody in that town could recognize them.

She went at it properly. They had left in the autumn of 1725. Anybody who had known them then as an adult — Tremaine’s crew, the men in the other shops, the women at the market, the landlord, the ferryman — would now be past seventy, and Boston was not a town in which a great many people were past seventy. She put that population at a few hundred in a town of sixteen thousand and she put the number of them who had ever exchanged four sentences with a journeywoman at a case at a dozen or fewer.

Then there were the children. That was the larger group and she gave it the most time. Anybody who had been a child in 1725 was now between fifty and sixty-five and there were a great many of them and they were the ones running the town.

And children do not remember journeywomen.

That was the conclusion and she tested it four ways before she would use it. A child of nine in a press room in 1721 knows her father’s hands and the smell of the ink and the noise the press makes and whether the woman at the second case is kind. She does not know her face at forty-five years’ distance. She does not carry it. The only person in Boston who had ever looked at Val Sorin long enough to keep her was twelve years old in a doorway in 1725 and had been under a stone at Copp’s Hill for three years.

Val worked all of that out over about six weeks and wrote it in the notebook in nine lines and underlined nothing, because she did not underline.

She was right.

That is the thing that has to be set down without hedging, because of everything that came after. She was right about all of it. Not one person in the town of Boston recognized either of them, then or in the nine years that followed, and no part of what happened to them had anything whatsoever to do with a face.

They took work at a printing house off Dock Square that did job work and a weekly and was run by a man in his fifties with two sons and a grievance, and Val gave the eleven and was not asked for a twelfth.

And she made the second argument in the yard on the first Saturday, unprompted, because Kyra had not raised it and Val could see her not raising it.

"I am going to answer the thing you are not asking."

"I’m not asking it because I know what you’re going to say."

"Then let me say it and you can tell me which part is wrong." Val had her hands inside her sleeves. "The rule is the key. No key, no room in anybody’s house, no place at a table laid for us. It has held for forty-five years and I have not once been near breaking it and I am not going to break it here, and the reason I am not going to break it here is structural rather than a matter of my character, which is the only kind of reason I trust."

"Go on."

"Nathan Tremaine could hand me a key because Nathan Tremaine was a man with one press and one door and a family living over it. There is no such man in this town any more. There are four papers and a dozen shops and every one of them has a partner and a clerk and two apprentices and a night man, and nobody in a building like that hands anybody anything, because there is always somebody else who already has it." She looked at the door. "A town of sixteen thousand cannot make us family. It has not got the shape."

Kyra thought about it for a while.

"That’s good," Kyra said.

"It is good. It is the best piece of reasoning I have done on this world and I would defend every step of it now."

"Then why have you got that face?"

Val did not answer for a moment.

"Because I made the same face in Trieste," Val said, "in the eighth month of the first year, standing in a yard, having just proved something, and I was right about that as well."

The regiments came in October of the third year and everything in that town changed shape in about a fortnight.

They came off the transports at the Long Wharf with the fifes going and marched up King Street past the Town House in the afternoon with nobody in the streets, which Val understood at once was a thing the town had arranged, and they camped on the Common, and after that there were men in red in every street in Boston and the town began to be a different kind of place to live in.

It was not violence. There was some and it was ugly and it was not the point.

What it was, was that everybody in that town began asking everybody else the same question, and they did not ask it out loud.

Where do you stand.

They asked it with subscriptions, and with what you bought and would not buy, and with which shop you gave your work to, and with whether you went to a particular meeting, and with the way a man looked at a sheet as it came off the press to see whose name was on the bottom of it. And every person in Boston answered it four times a day whether they meant to or not, and the answers were being kept.

Val Sorin, who had spent a hundred and sixty-one years being a woman about whom nobody had an opinion, stood at a case in a print shop off Dock Square in the autumn of 1768 and understood, with total clarity and about seven years too late to be useful, that she had chosen the one trade in the colonies in which there was no possible way to have no opinion.

"Say it," Kyra said, on the stairs.

"You know what it is."

"I want it said."

"A press is not an invisible place," said Val. "It is the place where the town says what it thinks, and every sheet has a name at the foot of it, and I have been standing in the middle of that for fifty-eight years telling myself it was a trade."

— end of chapter nine —

The soldiers came into the shop on a wet Tuesday in April, three weeks after the thing in King Street, and Kyra Davan was at the second case with a stick in her left hand and her back to the door.

She heard them before she turned, because you always hear boots in a press room; the floor is a drum. There were three. A lieutenant, who was about twenty-four and had a cold, and two men who stayed by the door and looked at the ceiling.

Wigglesworth came out of the back. He was the master and he had two sons and a grievance and he was, Kyra had established in the first month, a man who was afraid of precisely one thing in the world, which was being on the wrong side of whoever came through the door next.

They wanted a broadside. Not the town’s version and not the army’s; a third one, four days old, with a dozen depositions on it and no printer’s name at the foot, which was itself an offense and which everybody in Boston had been doing for two years.

Wigglesworth said, truthfully, that it had not come off his press.

The lieutenant believed him, which Kyra could see, and then went on anyway, because he had been sent and had to come back with something. He asked who else set for him. He asked about the apprentices. He asked whether either of the sons had been out on the Monday.

And then he looked down the room and said, "And her?"

"Mary Ward," Kyra said, because she was asked, and because it was the fourth of the eleven and it was true in the only way that mattered.

"How long here?"

"Four years in the town. Two in this shop."

"Before?"

"Philadelphia."

"Doing what?"

"This," said Kyra, and held up the stick, and one of the men by the door laughed and stopped.

The lieutenant did not laugh. He had a small book out of his coat and he was writing, and he did it badly and slowly with his hand curled round the pencil against the damp, and it took him a while.

He wrote her name. He wrote the shop. He wrote Philadelphia. He asked her to say the name again because of the spelling and she said it again and he wrote that.

Then he thanked her, because he was twenty-four and had been brought up properly, and put the book back inside his coat and went out into the rain with his two men behind him.

The whole of it took four minutes.

Val had been in the yard with the lye and came in at the end of it and got the last thirty seconds, and said nothing at all for the rest of the afternoon, and Kyra let her have it.

It came out on the stairs.

"He wrote it down."

"He wrote down Mary Ward, Wigglesworth’s, four years in the town, two in the shop, Philadelphia before." Kyra had her boots off. "Which is five true things and no useful ones, and in a week he won’t be able to pick me out of a room."

"That is not the difficulty."

"I know it’s not the difficulty. Say the difficulty."

Val sat down on the step below her, which she did when she was going to be a while.

"There is a book," Val said. "It is a small book and it is in a coat and the coat belongs to a lieutenant who will be posted somewhere else inside a year and will throw the book in a drawer. And in that book there is a page with our shop on it, and four lines, and one of them is a name that is not yours."

"And?"

"And I have spent a hundred and sixty-three years on this world making certain that there is nothing anywhere with either of us written on it, and I have failed at that exactly twice." Val had her hands flat on her knees. "Once in a strong room in Trieste, in a good hand, in a book that will outlast this town. And once this afternoon, in pencil, in the wet, by a boy with a cold, because you were asked a question and you answered it correctly."

Kyra sat with that.

"What should I have done?"

"Exactly what you did," Val said. "There was nothing else. That is the entire problem and I have been in the yard for two hours failing to find a different end to it."

Here is what Kyra could not have known in April, and what Val did not say on the stairs because she had not worked it out either.

It was not the book.

The lieutenant went to Castle William in the summer and to New York the following year and the small book went wherever such books go. Nobody ever looked at it. Not one thing that happened afterward came out of it.

What happened that afternoon was that Kyra Davan found out how the question was going to be asked.

Not by a man with a grudge. Not by a physician with a lamp or a clerk with a good hand or anybody who had decided anything about her at all. By a polite boy with a cold who had been sent and who had to come back with something, standing in a doorway in the rain, going down a list.

Name. How long. Before that. Doing what.

She would answer those four questions a dozen more times over the following five years, to four different kinds of men, and the last time she answered them there would be a pass at the end of it and Val would not be in the room.

The peak came in 1772 and Kyra had it on a Thursday.

It was the usual. It was always the usual; that was what she could never get anybody to understand, including Val, including herself. Nothing hurt. Nothing showed. The ground under the town went slightly wrong in a way that had no direction in it, and everything she could feel about north went soft at the edges for four days, and her eyes went twice in the shop for no reason at all and she had to put her face in a cloth.

Val wrote the date in the notebook.

She had written every one of them since a mountain, in the same hand, in a column, with nothing next to them, because there was nothing to put next to them and she was not going to invent a column.

"Sixteen," Val said.

"Sixteen."

"The next is in eleven years, which is the only thing I know about this that has never once been wrong."

Kyra put her head on Val’s shoulder at the table, which she did perhaps twice a decade.

"Say the other thing," Kyra said.

"There is no other thing."

"There’s always another thing."

Val turned her cup a quarter turn.

"In eleven years," Val said, "this town will be something we cannot presently imagine, and you will still put your face in a cloth on a Thursday, and I will still write the date, and that is the only appointment either of us is ever going to keep."

The plates came from the North End.

There were two men in Boston who could cut copper properly and the shop used both of them, and Kyra went for the work about once a month because Wigglesworth would not pay a boy and because she liked the walk.

The one at the head of Clark’s Wharf was a silversmith by trade and did the engraving because a man in that business does four things to keep a family, and he also drew teeth, which Kyra found out from a woman in the street and did not mention to him for two years.

He was about forty and he talked at a great pace and he was the single busiest human being Kyra had met on this continent, and there were always four people in that shop and three of them were not customers.

The trade was entirely dull. A masthead. A cut for a broadside. A trade card for a hatter. Plates back and forth in a wrapped board with a docket, money on the counter, and a conversation about whether the paper would take it that both of them enjoyed more than was reasonable.

Val came with her twice.

The second time was in the autumn of 1774 and there were four men in the shop and they were not talking about silver.

They were talking about the country. About whether word could be got out to Charlestown and up the road quickly if it had to be, and about a man who could ride, and about how long a thing takes when a town is shut.

Kyra was at the counter with the board under her arm and was not listening to any of it, because she had heard a dozen versions of that conversation in four months and they all ended the same way, which was somebody saying that a man on a horse was worth ten committees.

Val was by the window looking at a proof.

And the silversmith, who was polite and quick and could carry two conversations, said something across the shop to the room in general about the whole thing hanging on one man getting out of the town.

And Val Sorin said, without looking up:

"Then it is not a message."

The room did not exactly stop. Somebody said something else. But the silversmith turned round, because he was a man who noticed when a thing had been said, and he said, "Ma’am?"

And Val put the proof down.

"A message with one carrier is not a message," Val said. "It is a hope. If the man is taken, nothing has been sent, and nobody on the other side knows anything has happened, which is worse than knowing nothing, because they will go on waiting."

"And what would you have?"

"A second one, going by a different road, that does not need a man." Val’s voice was exactly what it always was, which was flat and unhurried and slightly too exact for a print shop. "Something that can be read from the other side of the water by somebody who is looking, before anyone in the town knows anything is happening at all. And the meaning agreed now, in a quiet week, in daylight, when nobody is frightened — because a thing agreed while people are frightened is agreed wrongly, and half of them will not have been told."

The silversmith looked at her for about two seconds.

"That’s water and a steeple," he said.

"It is whatever is high and on your own side of the water," said Val, "and I know nothing whatever about it and I would like my plate."

And he laughed, and got her the plate, and that was the whole of it.

Kyra thought about it on the walk back for perhaps a minute and a half.

What she thought was: that is the most Val has said to a stranger since Philadelphia, and she said it because somebody was being imprecise, and she cannot help it, and she has been unable to help it since a courtyard in her first week.

It did not occur to her that anything had happened. Nothing had. A woman in a print shop had made a remark about how to send a message and a busy man had agreed with her and gone to fetch a copper plate.

Val did not mention it on the walk, or that evening, or at any point in the four hundred years that followed.

Kyra never asked her about it, because there was nothing to ask about.

The other engraver was on the south side and was called Ebenezer Gale and he was sixty-one.

He had come to it late, out of the printing side, and he cut a clean slow line and he did maps and bookplates and forms, and forms were the half of his trade that mattered, because a garrison town runs on forms and somebody has to cut them.

He was a widower. He said so in the first month, unprompted, in the manner of a man who has decided to get a fact out of the way, and he had a daughter married into a merchant house in Halifax and a son in the ground and nobody else.

Kyra liked him at once and did not fully work out why until much later, and the reason was that Ebenezer Gale asked questions and did not want answers. He asked how she was and whether the walk had been wet and what she thought of the paper, and he asked it the way a man says good morning, and if you gave him a real answer he was pleased and if you gave him nothing he was equally pleased and neither made any difference.

He and the silversmith knew each other and were civil. They had been at the same trade in the same small town for thirty years and there was not room in Boston for two men who cut copper to pretend the other did not exist. They sent each other work when they were full. They disagreed about everything else in the world and did it quietly, in a town where almost nobody was doing it quietly any more.

Kyra said that out loud to Val in the sixth year, walking up from the south side with a docket in her hand.

"Those two are the last civil men in Boston."

"They are the last two men in Boston with a trade that requires them to hold still for nine hours," said Val. "It may be the same thing."

— end of chapter ten —

The town shut on a Wednesday.

Val was at the case when the first of it came up the street, which was not news but noise — a particular running that a town does not do for anything else — and by the afternoon there were four versions of what had happened at Lexington and none of them agreed, and by the evening the country was on the neck of land at Roxbury and nothing was going in or out of Boston except by the King’s boats.

She went and stood at the end of the wharf at the third hour of the morning with Kyra beside her and looked across at the mainland, which was two hundred yards of water and entirely out of reach, and did not say anything for a long time.

"Say it," Kyra said.

"It is a peninsula."

"I know it’s a peninsula."

"I have known it was a peninsula for nine years and I have written it down twice and I have never once let it mean anything." Val had her hands inside her sleeves. "There is one road and it is a quarter of a mile long and there is an army sitting on it. Everything else is water."

"Val."

"I chose this town because it was big," Val said. "I did the arithmetic on sixteen thousand people and I did it correctly, and I did not do any arithmetic at all on the shape of the ground, because the shape of the ground is your department and I did not ask you."

Kyra took that and did not use it, then or ever, which Val thought about a great deal afterward.

The town met on the Saturday and made its bargain, and the bargain was this.

Every man in Boston would carry his arms to the selectmen and give them up. In exchange the inhabitants might leave — with their effects, by the Neck or by the ferry — and those who stayed would be protected.

It was announced in the street and it was printed by Thursday and Val set part of it.

And then the machinery came out from behind it, one piece at a time, over about three weeks, the way machinery does.

You could not simply go. You gave your name to the selectmen. The selectmen made a list and returned the list to the town major, who was an officer of the garrison, and the town major wrote the pass — for a person, or for a family — and until he wrote it you were not going anywhere, and nobody told you when he would write it or in what order or on what grounds.

Then the guards were put on the ferry and the Neck, and everything leaving the town was opened. Trunks. Boxes. Beds. Val watched a sergeant take a loaf of bread and half a pound of chocolate off a woman with three children on the ferry stairs in the first week of May, because the order said provisions and a loaf is a provision, and the woman did not argue, because by then nobody argued.

Merchandise first. Then provisions. Then, in the fifth week, medicine.

They gave their names on the same morning, in the same queue, to the same clerk, and the clerk wrote them one under the other.

Val had thought about that queue for two days beforehand and had gone through every version of it and had found no way round it, and she stood in it for three hours with her hat off and watched a town put itself on a list.

She could not get past it. It was voluntary. Every person in that line had come of their own accord and was waiting patiently to be written down, because being written down was the only way out, and the alternative to being written down was a winter in a town with an army in it.

She gave the first four. The clerk did not ask for a fifth.

Then they went home and waited, and the passes began to come, and about twelve thousand people left that town over the next four months.

Kyra’s came on the ninth of June.

Val’s did not.

She went to ask on the Monday and was sent to the town major’s office on the Tuesday, and stood in front of a lieutenant she had never seen and gave her name and waited while a man went through a bundle, and came back and said that the major had marked it and it was not going forward at present.

"May I know why."

"You may not."

And then he looked at her for a second, because he was a man of about thirty who had been in that office for six weeks handing out no, and he said, in a different voice, "You’re the one at Wigglesworth’s who does the doctoring."

Val said nothing at all.

"There’s four hundred in this town sick with something," he said, "and there’s the other thing in the North End they aren’t calling by its name yet, and there’s nine physicians left where there were twenty in April. He’s not letting any of you out and he’s not going to write it down as a reason. Don’t come back on Thursday."

She did the arithmetic out loud at the table that night, because she did all her arithmetic out loud now.

"You go," Val said.

"No."

"I have not finished. When I have finished you may say no and I will hear it properly." She had the pass on the table between them and had not touched it. "Here it is. The paper in front of you is dated and it is signed and the guards at the Neck are honoring them this week and there is no guarantee whatever that they will be honoring them next week, because the terms have already been altered four times and every alteration has gone one way."

"And you?"

"I am not getting one. Not this month and not in the autumn. He has three hundred women in this town who can nurse and he is losing physicians and there is smallpox in the North End, and the moment he begins letting the ones who can nurse walk out over the Neck he has a garrison town with no medicine in it and ten thousand civilians he cannot feed or physic." Val turned her cup a quarter turn. "I would do the same. That is the part I want you to hear. If I were the major I would do exactly the same and I would not write down the reason either."

Kyra had both hands flat on the table.

"Then I stay."

"Then you stay in a town that is going to starve, with no work, no standing and no pass, and when the pass window shuts — and it will shut — you are in here for the duration of whatever this is, and so am I, and we have gained nothing whatsoever except that we are in the same building."

"That’s not nothing."

"No," Val agreed. "It is not nothing. It is the only thing on the other side of the scale and I am not going to pretend it weighs less than it does."

The fire did what the fire did.

"Say the rest," Kyra said.

"The rest is that it is eleven miles to Watertown and there are four presses out there already and they are printing for the Provincial Congress and they will take you before you have got your coat off." Val looked at the table. "You are the better compositor and you always have been and I have never said it to you in sixty-five years. Out there you are worth something. In here you are a mouth."

Kyra did not argue.

That was the worst of it and Val had not prepared for it. She had built four answers to four objections and had them in order and did not use one of them, because Kyra Davan sat at that table for about a minute with her hands flat on the wood and then said, "All right," and got up and began to sort what she could carry.

And Val understood, watching her cross the room, that she had just been agreed with by a woman who had been told to leave by the person she would not leave, and that the agreement had cost more than any argument would have, and that it had been given at once and without terms so that Val would not have to stand there and win.

In Trieste it had gone the other way. In Trieste Val had said leave and Kyra had said not yet and Val had let it go, and had been right, and it had cost them everything.

Here Val said go and Kyra went.

And Val was right about that too.

They took her out by the ferry on the eleventh of June with a bundle and a cloth and nothing else, because medicine was forbidden and Val had put four things in the bundle that would have been called medicine by anybody who knew what they were and were called nothing at all by a sergeant.

The guard opened the bundle on the stairs. He put his hand through it, took out a comb, looked at it, put it back, and waved her on.

There were about forty people going out on that boat and some of them were crying and most of them were not, and there was a woman ahead of them in a good coat who had been arguing with her husband since the top of the street and was now not speaking to him at all.

Val took the whole of her in, once, in order, because she did not know when she would do it again: the dark hair pinned up hard for travelling, the strong brows, the gray-blue of the eyes that were the gray of the sea under cloud, the jaw that was firmer than her own and always had been. She catalogued it standing on a wharf with her hands at her sides and her face doing nothing whatsoever, and found she had been at it a great deal longer than was safe.

Val stood four feet from her with her hands at her sides and her face exactly as it always was, because there was a sergeant at the rail and two men behind him and everyone on the stairs could see them.

"Write to Gale," Val said. "Not to me. He is south side and he has post and it will be looked at either way, and anything you write to him can be about paper."

"Paper."

"Paper, and the weather, and how much you are being paid, and nothing else. If there is a thing you need me to know it goes in what the weather is doing." Val did not move her hands. "And I will do the same, and neither of us will say one true sentence for as long as this takes, and that is how we will know each other’s alive."

Kyra looked at her for a moment.

"How long," Kyra said.

"I have no idea. That is the honest answer and I would rather give it to you than a good-sounding one."

"Give me the good-sounding one anyway."

And Val Sorin stood on the ferry stairs in Boston with a sergeant six feet away and her hands at her sides and said, flatly, in the voice she used for logistics:

"Not far now."

Kyra put her hand on the rail and went down onto the boat.

The window shut in the third week of July.

Gage stopped the passes, or the passes stopped, which is not the same thing and which nobody in the town could tell apart. It was said afterward that the loyalists had gone to him and told him that if he let the town out he lost the only thing keeping the country from burning the place, and Val heard four versions of that and believed all four, because they were not exclusive.

What it meant was that the names on the selectmen’s list stopped becoming passes.

Val was on that list. She stayed on it for eight months.

She worked.

Wigglesworth shut the press in August because there was no paper and no rags to make any and no market, and after that Val Sorin had no trade at all in the town of Boston and had instead the other thing, which nobody in the town had ever known she had and which everybody in the town knew by September.

She did not put up a sign. There was no need. It went the way it always went, which was one woman to another woman, and by the end of the summer she was going into four houses a day and by November it was nine.

She did the ordinary things. She could not do the other things and there was no argument to be had with anybody about it, because there was nothing in that town to make them out of.

She kept a book.

That was new and she knew it was new and she did it anyway. Names, streets, what it was, what she did, what happened. It was the first record she had made of another human being since a mountain, and she wrote it in the back of the notebook, and she told herself four separate times that she would burn it when this was over.

She registered every Monday.

That is the thing about a garrison town that nobody outside one ever understands. There was no persecution. Nobody accused her of anything. There was an officer in a room off King Street with a ledger, and every person in the town whose business took them about it was required to be in that ledger, and once a week Val Sorin walked down and stood in a line and gave her name to a corporal who had written it thirty times already and was bored.

Name. Where lodging. What occupation. Who can vouch.

Ebenezer Gale vouched for her in September and again in January.

He did it the second time after a man from the customs had asked in the office what a woman with no husband and no family and no property was doing walking into nine houses a day in a town under siege, and had said the word informer out loud, in a room, in front of a clerk.

Gale was sixty-two and had a daughter in Halifax and a shop full of forms he was cutting for the garrison, and he went down to King Street on a Tuesday and put his name against hers and walked home.

He never mentioned it to her.

She found out from the corporal, who thought it was a pleasant thing to tell somebody.

Here is the town that winter, and it can be told quickly.

There was no firewood, so they took the town apart. The old North meeting house came down in November and went into the stoves of the people who had pulled it down, and after that anything wooden that nobody was living in went the same way — fences, wharves, two churches, a rope walk, and the trees.

There was no food that was not salt.

And in November the smallpox, which had been in the North End since the summer and which the army had not wanted named, came up through the whole town at once, because a town goes indoors in November.

Val was in it from the second week.

She was very good. That is worth putting down because of what came afterward: there was not a woman in Boston that winter who did more or did it better, and there were four hundred people alive in the spring who would not have been.

She did not light once between June and March.

She noted that at some point in February, in the way she noted everything, and wrote nothing next to it, because there was nothing to write.

There were eleven letters.

They came through Gale, months apart, in no order, and they were about paper and the weather and what she was being paid.

The weather in Watertown was hard in October. It was hard again in the week before Christmas. There was a mild spell in January that did not last. Twice there was no weather in the letter at all, and both times Val read it four times looking for it and did not find it, and put the letter in the notebook and went back out.

Val wrote nine. She did not know whether any of them arrived and never found out, because that was not a thing a person could ask.

By February she was working sixteen hours and sleeping in her clothes and eating whatever the house she was in put in front of her, and she had stopped writing in the book except for the names, and she had stopped going down to the wharf at night, which she had done every night until Christmas.

She was entirely functional. Everything she did she did correctly.

She gave the corporal the four answers on a Monday in February and he did not look up, and she walked back up King Street past the stoves going in the houses that had been a meeting house, and she thought, in an ordinary voice, with no feeling of any kind attached to it: I am doing this well.

And she was.

That was the thing neither she nor anybody else in that town noticed for another six weeks, because there was nobody left in Boston who had ever seen Vaelith Sorin any other way.

— end of chapter eleven —

On the morning of the fifth of March the town woke up and there was a fort on Dorchester Heights that had not been there on the fourth.

Val was in a house in the North End with a woman who had been four days dying and who did not die, and she heard it from the street before she saw it: a particular kind of quiet that a garrison makes when every officer in it has gone up onto a roof.

She went and looked, because everybody looked.

It was not much to see from that distance. A shape on a hill where there had been no shape, with the sun coming up behind it, and the guns in it pointed down at the town and at the ships in the harbor, and there had been two thousand men on that hill in one night in a frost, and nobody in Boston had heard a thing.

Val stood in the street and did the arithmetic in about four seconds and then said, to a woman beside her who had asked nothing, "They will go."

"They’ll never."

"They will go," Val said, "and it will be inside a fortnight, and you should get whatever you have off the wharves today."

It was the only piece of advice she gave anybody in Boston that was not medical, and it was wrong by one day.

What followed was not a withdrawal. It was a house being emptied by people who had been given no notice.

They took what would go and they broke what would not. Guns went into the harbor. Carts went into the harbor. A general’s coach went into the harbor with the wheels still on it and was talked about for a hundred years. They opened the stores on the Long Wharf and what could not be carried was thrown down and trodden through, and by the third day there was salt and flour and sugar in the mud of that street and nobody picking it up, because there were men with bayonets on both ends of it.

And along the length of it, in and out, went the other procession.

There were about a thousand people in that town who could not stay.

Not the army. The town’s own — the ones who had taken the King’s side and been right about it for eight years and were now wrong by the length of a fortnight. Customs men. Merchants. Two members of the Council. A man who had sat in the same pew for forty years. Three printers. Shopkeepers, clerks, the wives and the children and the servants and the servants’ children, coming down to the wharves with what they had, to stand in a line in the wet and be told there was not room.

Val watched a woman argue for nine minutes for a chest and lose, and put it down on the stones and walk onto the boat without it.

It went on for four days.

She found Ebenezer Gale on the third day, at the head of the Long Wharf, sitting on a box.

He was sixty-two and he looked ninety. He had a portmanteau and a roll of tools and nothing else, and he had been on that wharf since before light, and he had his hat on his knees.

"They’ll not take the press," he said.

"No."

"Thirty-one years." He turned the hat round. "It’s a good press. It’ll be someone’s by Friday."

She sat down on the box next to him because there was nowhere else and because he did not stand up, and they sat there for a while with it all going past.

He told her the arrangements, because a man on a wharf tells you the arrangements. Halifax. His daughter and her husband had a house and there was a room in it and they had written twice. He had the letters. He showed her the letters.

"You’ll write," Gale said.

"I will write."

"I’ll be at Watson’s wharf, the north side, ask anyone." He put the letters away. "Ma’am."

"Yes."

And here Ebenezer Gale looked up at her for the first time in that conversation.

"What are you here for?"

Val did not move.

"I’ve been asking myself since September," he said, "and I’ll not be seeing you again, so I’m asking. There’s four hundred people in this town alive because of you and I’d put money on the number. You’ve no husband. You’ve no children. You’ve no property in the place and no church in it and you’d a pass on that list in June that never came, and everybody in this town is here for somebody." He had the hat in both hands. "Everybody. That’s what a town is. And I’ve watched you for nine months and I cannot find who yours is."

The wind came up the wharf.

Val Sorin sat on a box beside a man who was going to Nova Scotia in the morning and had a complete answer, and the complete answer was: she got a pass on the ninth of June and I made her take it and she is up the road at Watertown and I have had eleven letters about the weather.

She heard the whole sentence in her head with the pauses in it.

And there was a clerk from the customs somewhere on that wharf who had said the word informer in a room in January, and there were two men from the garrison at the top of the stairs, and there was a woman four feet away with a child and both ears, and it was the third of March in the year 1776 in the town of Boston.

"I am here because there is work," Val said. "There has been more of it than one woman can do since August, and it is not finished, and there is nowhere else I am needed as much. That is the whole of it."

Every word of it was true.

Ebenezer Gale looked at her for about two seconds with his hat in his hands, and Val watched him decide not to say the thing he had decided to say, and then he nodded and put his hat on and stood up and picked up the portmanteau.

"Aye," he said.

He went down the wharf. She did not watch him onto the boat, because a boat takes an hour and there is nothing to see, and because a woman standing at the head of a wharf watching one man is a woman somebody asks about.

They sailed on the seventeenth and they did not go.

That was the part nobody had warned the town about and the part Val had not allowed for. The fleet came out of the harbor with the wind wrong and anchored in the road below the castle, and there it sat.

A hundred and twenty sail. The whole garrison, and every loyalist out of Boston, in the water, four miles off, visible from the top of any hill in the town, in the rain and then in a clear spell and then in the rain.

For ten days.

The country came into the town on the eighteenth. The country stood on the hills and looked at the ships. The ships did not move.

Val went up to the burying ground at Copp’s Hill on the twenty-second because there was an hour and because the light was going, and stood among the stones with the harbor below her, and looked at a hundred and twenty ships lying at anchor with a man on one of them.

She knew which anchorage. She did not know which ship and there was no way of knowing and it did not matter, because both were exactly as far away as each other, which is to say four miles of water and a fleet and an army and the entire apparatus of a war.

He was alive. He was four miles off. He would be in Halifax inside a fortnight and he would live in a room in his daughter’s house and she would be able to write to him and he would write back, and she would never in four hundred years see him again.

Val stood in a burying ground in the wind and did that arithmetic and it came out the same as the other one.

Her father was two hundred and seventy-four that spring. Genie and Kal were two hundred and eight. Alive, all three, this minute, going about it, four hundred years of light away, and she had their names and their street and no way whatsoever to get to them.

She had never once put the two things side by side before.

She put them side by side on the twenty-second of March and looked at them for a while and then went down the hill and back to work, because there was a house in Salem Street with two children in it.

The last ships left the road on the twenty-seventh.

The town that came back was not the town that had left.

They let the army in first and then they let the people in, and they were careful about who, because the smallpox was still in the North End and the whole country outside had been terrified of it for a year. The order was that nobody came into Boston who had not had it.

Val heard that on the nineteenth and understood what it meant inside a second.

She did not do anything about it. There was nothing to do about it. She went on working, and registered on the Monday out of habit to a corporal who was no longer there, and by the end of the week she had stopped going down to the wharf.

Kyra came in on the twenty-ninth.

She came in the way she came into everything, which is to say by not consulting anybody: over the Neck, in a cart, with a man from Watertown who had a paper about paper, and a story about having had it as a child in the Jerseys that nobody examined, because by the twenty-ninth nobody was examining anything.

It was the middle of the afternoon. It was raining and then it stopped.

Val was in Cornhill with a basket, coming down the street from the top, and she saw a woman standing outside a tallow chandler’s that had been a printing house, in a wet coat, with a bundle.

Here is what Vaelith Sorin observed, in order, standing in a public street in Boston on the twenty-ninth of March in the year 1776.

That the woman outside the chandler’s was Kyra Davan.

That she had lost weight and had got it in the face, where it showed most, and that her hair was tied up in a way she had never worn it in a hundred and sixty-nine years, which meant she had been doing something that required it.

That the chestnut had gone dull the way hair goes on short rations, and that there was copper in it anyway where the light came off the wet street.

That she was standing still, which Kyra did not do.

That there were perhaps forty people in Cornhill and four of them were soldiers of the country’s army, and that the correct thing was to walk down the street at an ordinary pace and say an ordinary thing, and that she was going to do that, and that she had already begun.

That her own hands were not steady, which was a fact about her hands.

And that there was light coming up under the skin of her throat and along the jaw, in the afternoon, in the open, in front of a street full of people — visible, if anybody had been looking, from four doors away.

Val noted that.

She noted it the way she had noted everything since June: accurately, at a small distance, in a voice with nothing in it. It had not happened for nine months. It was happening now. It was extremely dangerous and she was doing nothing about it and she could not, at that moment, produce the feeling it was reporting.

She walked down the street at an ordinary pace with a basket in her hand.

Kyra turned and saw her.

And what Val Sorin thought, in the last four steps, with her own throat lit up like a lamp in a public street and a war two hundred yards behind her, was:

I will have to tell her about the book.

— end of chapter twelve —

The first thing Val said to her, in the street, in the wet, after eleven months, was:

"I have to tell you about a book."

Kyra had crossed four feet of Cornhill with both arms already coming up and she stopped with them halfway and said, "What?"

"There is a book. I began it in September and I have written in it nearly every day since and it is in the back of the notebook, and I should have burned it in December and I did not, and I am telling you now because I am not going to be a woman who has a thing in a drawer."

The light was still up under her throat. It was in the open, in the afternoon, in a street with soldiers in it, and Val had not once put her hand to her collar.

Kyra put both arms round her anyway, in front of all of them, and held on.

Val stood in it correctly and put one hand flat between her shoulder blades and did not, at any point in the following minute, stop talking about the book.

That was how Kyra knew, and it took about nine seconds, and she carried the knowledge for four days before she could get any part of it into words even for herself.

It was not the weight. She had expected the weight; she had seen what a besieged town does to a body and Val had come out of it thin and gray the way everybody had.

It was not that she was cold. She was not cold. She was, over the following week, kind in every particular — she asked after Watertown and listened to the answers and remembered them, she got them a room, she fed her, she was funny twice.

It was that the first sentence out of her mouth after a war and a winter had been an administrative disclosure.

Not you’re alive. Not I did not know for four months. Not anything at all.

A book, and where it was, and why she had not burned it, and the fact that she was not going to be a woman with a thing in a drawer — which was a sentence about Kyra, about the pact, about 1607, and which Val had said in a public street with her throat lit up like a lamp and no idea that any of it was happening.

The book had four hundred and nine names in it.

Kyra read it through in one sitting on the second night, because Val put it in front of her and said she might as well, and it was the single worst thing she read in four hundred years on that planet.

Name. Street. What it was. What was done. What happened.

There were children in it. There were whole households on one page. There were nine entries in a row in the first week of January in the same three streets, and after them a line in Val’s hand, in the margin, in smaller letters than the rest, which said: ran out of vinegar, four days.

That was the only thing in it that was not a fact.

"Why did you keep it," Kyra said.

"Because a person who dies in a town like that in a winter like that is a number by the spring." Val was at the window with her back to the room. "There were four hundred and nine of them and nobody was counting, and it is the only place in the world it is written down, and in about two hundred years somebody will want it and there will be nothing."

"You’ll never give it to anybody. You can’t."

"No," Val agreed. "That is the difficulty and I have had it since September and I have no answer to it whatsoever."

She turned round.

"I kept a record I cannot produce, of people I could not save, in a town I should not have been in," Val said, in a voice with nothing in it at all, "and it is the most useful thing I did that year, and I would do it again tomorrow. Put it back in the cloth."

They were out of Boston by the end of April.

Val managed it the way she managed everything now, which is to say perfectly. She got what was owed from two houses that owed it. She sold four things. She had a cart arranged and a road chosen and a reason prepared for anybody who asked and nobody did, and they went out over the Neck past the broken works with everything they owned in one cart, in good weather, on time, with the accounts settled.

There was not one thing wrong with any of it.

Kyra sat on the tail of the cart and watched the town go and thought: she has not said Gale’s name since I came in.

Here is what the next two years were like, and it is hard to set down because nothing happened in them and that was the trouble.

Val worked. Val was accurate. Val was never once unkind — Kyra went over that many times afterward, looking for a single instance, and there was not one. She did the arithmetic out loud at tables. She made four good decisions about where they went and one excellent one. She slept. She ate when she was told to.

She laughed twice in two years, both times at things Kyra said, both times about a second later than she would have in 1770.

And she was, that whole time, the most beautiful thing on that continent, which Kyra noticed the way you notice weather and found unbearable, because the face was exactly the face — the pale hair, the blue-gray, the softly angular line of it that had not moved since a courtyard — and there was nobody behind it.

And she was not there.

Kyra could not have proved it to anybody. That was what she found intolerable. If she had been asked to produce evidence she would have had: the timing of two laughs, and a woman who answered questions and did not ask them, and the fact that Vaelith Sorin had not once in two years said a single thing she had not been required to say.

Which was, Kyra understood perfectly well, a description of Val Sorin at eighteen.

She had come back as the woman she had been before any of it. Before a mountain, before a storehouse, before a barrel head and a merchant’s son. Sealed, exact, economical, giving nothing, entirely functional, and not distressed about it in any way, because a woman who is not there does not know she is not there.

And she was comfortable.

That was the thing Kyra could not forgive, and she did not know who to put it on.

She tried once.

It was in the autumn of the second year, in a rented room over a smith’s, and Kyra had been circling it for a fortnight and had decided that morning to do it badly rather than not at all.

"I want to tell you about the winter," Kyra said.

"Watertown."

"Not Watertown. The other part."

Val put down what she was holding and turned round and gave Kyra her entire attention, which she did, and which was the problem.

She was ready. She was going to listen to all of it. She was going to be accurate and patient and she was not going to interrupt and at the end she was going to say something true.

And there was nothing behind her face.

Kyra stood in the middle of that room with the whole thing in her mouth — the November, and the reports coming out with the refugees and stopping being about who was alive, and the four months, and the thing underneath the four months that she had not said to any living creature —

— and looked at a woman who was going to receive it perfectly and could not be reached by it.

"It’ll keep," Kyra said.

"You have started it twice."

"I know. It’ll keep." She picked the basket back up. "Ask me again in a bit."

Val did not ask her again.

Not that year, or the next, or in the eighteen after it, and Kyra never once held that against her, because she understood exactly why: she had said it’ll keep to a woman who took sentences at their weight, and the woman had filed it, and the filing was correct.

They settled in the fourth year in a town on a river in the interior with nine hundred people in it and no wharf, no barracks, no committee worth the name and no press.

That last was Val’s and she said it once, at the table.

"We are not going back into a shop."

"For how long?"

"I do not know. Some years." She had the accounts in front of her. "It is the only trade I have ever loved and I have been in it for sixty-six years and I got us into a town with one road out of it because a press looked like a place to be invisible, and I would like some time in which the thing I do all day cannot be read by anybody."

So Val doctored, openly, for the first time on that world — in a country town where there was nobody else within nine miles and nobody had the slightest interest in where she had learned it — and Kyra did whatever there was, which that first year was a dairy and the next year was better.

It was a good town. That has to be said. They were four years in it and Kyra liked it and made three friends she was careful about and kept a garden that was talked about, and Val was well thought of in a way she had never once been anywhere.

And every evening the woman who came in at dusk and washed her hands and sat down and gave a correct account of the day was a woman Kyra Davan had known for two hundred and thirty-four years and could not get at.

The planet came in the winter of the sixth year, in an almanac, nine months out of date.

Kyra was the one who found it, because she had got into the habit of reading anything that came into the house since Boston, and she read it twice and then took it to the table without a word and put it down open and waited.

Val read it standing up.

Then she sat down, which she had not done at speed since Philadelphia.

"There is a new planet," Val said.

"There’s a new planet."

"An Englishman in Bath has found a — " she read it again, "— he found it in March of last year and he took it for a comet and reported it as a comet, and it was not a comet. It does not have the motion. He has been arguing about it with the Royal Society for a year and they have had four other men put instruments on it and they agree with him. It is a planet." Val put the sheet flat on the table with both hands. "There is a world going round that sun that nobody on this planet knew was there."

Kyra stood absolutely still, because something was happening and she did not want to be the reason it stopped.

"Seventeen years ago," Val said, "a Frenchman made a list of things that are not comets so that nobody would waste a night on them. And an Englishman has now found a thing he thought was a comet and it turned out to be larger than anything anybody had put on any list at all."

"They keep getting the category wrong."

"They keep getting the category wrong in both directions, which is the correct way to be wrong, and it means the instruments have got better than the expectations, and that has never once happened on this world before." She was turning the sheet round. "I want the year. He found it in March. What is the date."

"It’ll be in the back."

"Find it," Val said.

And Kyra Davan stood in a kitchen in a town of nine hundred people in the interior of Massachusetts, seven years after the ferry stairs, and watched Vaelith Sorin go through an almanac at speed with both hands looking for a date to write in a column —

— and understood, before Val did, and with her eyes going and nothing whatever to do about it, that the woman was still in there and had been all along and had simply been waiting for something worth writing down.

"Thirteenth," Kyra said. "March the thirteenth."

Val wrote it in the notebook, in the column, in the same hand.

Then she sat and looked at it for a while.

"Kyra," Val said.

"Mm."

"Ask me again. About the winter."

Kyra stood at the end of the table with the almanac in her hand.

And here is the thing she did, for the best reason she ever had, and went over perhaps four hundred times in the following nineteen years without ever finding the place where she could have done otherwise.

It was the first good evening since the ferry stairs. It was the first hour in seven years in which Vaelith Sorin had wanted something. And what Kyra had to give her, if she opened her mouth, was four months of a winter in which she had stopped being sure what the two of them were — which was not a story about Watertown at all, and which would land in that woman, on that evening, like a hand on a burn.

"Not tonight," Kyra said. "You’ve got a planet."

Val looked at her for a moment.

"All right."

And Kyra put the almanac down and went and stood behind her chair and put both arms round her from above, with her chin on the top of her head, and stayed there while Val turned the page back and read it again from the beginning.

She did not say it that night.

There was no night like that one for some time after, and then there was, and by then it had a size it had not had before; and then it had been a year, and then four; and at no point in any of it did she decide not to.

— end of chapter thirteen —

The journey is not worth setting down and Val did not set it down.

What is worth setting down is that on a morning at the end of July, eighty-nine years after the last time, two women came up out of the gully onto the shoulder above the tarn and stood on the right stones and looked at nothing at all.

The concealment had held. It had held for a hundred and eighty-two years.

Val stood on the shoulder with her hands inside her sleeves and did not put her hand on anybody this time, because she had learned in 1700 exactly how long that fear took to go and had decided somewhere on the Atlantic that she was going to feel it and say nothing.

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

The valley had forgotten them, which was the thing Val had come up expecting and had not been ready for.

They had gone down on the third evening, because they always went down, and it was not Dymná any more in any sense that mattered. There were forty families in it and a stone church where the wooden one had been and a road that went somewhere. The old part of the burying ground had been walled off from the new part and the wall ran through it.

Frederick’s stone was inside the wall, and the moss was back, and Kyra got it out with her thumbnail again and said nothing at all this time.

Nobody looked at them twice. There was nobody in that valley who had ever heard of a woman who came out of the forest with a stick, and nobody whose grandmother had told them, and nobody who would have cared if they had.

Val had spent a hundred and eighty-two years being careful of one village.

"They don’t know," Kyra said, on the path.

"No."

"Not forgiven. They’ve just — " she made a gesture with her hand, opening it. "Gone."

"That is the arithmetic and I have had it since 1700 and I have never once believed it until this afternoon." Val was watching the ground. "Every person who could have hanged us has been under a stone for a hundred years, and the thing that would have hanged us is under the same stones, and there is nobody up here now but forty families and a road."

"Is that good?"

Val walked a while.

"It is what we wanted and I find I do not like it," Val said. "And I have no argument for that and I am not going to construct one."

Kyra went to her locker on the first evening, before she took her coat off, which she had done three times now.

The plates were there. The three books were there. The drawing was there, in the bottom: four figures, one with her arms out, one small one at the end drawn smaller than she had been and standing slightly apart, and one with all the hair, and one with no mouth.

She sat down on the floor with it in both hands, the way she had, and Val sat down beside her.

"Two hundred and twenty-one," Kyra said.

"Two hundred and twenty-one."

"That’s her age and she’s a hundred and eighty-five years off it being remarkable, and I’ve looked at this four times in a hundred and eighty-two years." She turned it a little to the light. "She’d be appalled. She’d be absolutely appalled that anybody kept it."

"She would."

"Say the thing."

"I still have no mouth," Val said.

"You’ve still got no mouth."

"It remains the most accurate portrait anybody has ever made of me," said Val, and Kyra laughed, and it came apart in the middle the way it always did, and she put the drawing back into the bottom of the locker very carefully, face up, the way it had been.

They were a fortnight on the mountain and it came on the eighth, in the middle of an ordinary hour, with a small domestic sound.

Val was at the bench with the notebook open and the copied lines on the page in front of her, comparing them against the panel for the fourth time in eighty-nine years, which was what she had come up to do and which she had never expected to yield anything.

The floor made a noise like a latch.

Then the curve of the wall above the crazed port went from gray to the pale shell-color, in a band about four feet long, and held.

Kyra came across the section fast and stopped.

"Don’t," Val said. "Not yet. Let it finish."

It took about a minute. When it had finished there was a shape in the pale color, and the shape was not writing.

It was a line, and an angle, and three figures at the end of it.

Val looked at it for a very long time without touching it, and then put the flat of her hand under it the way you put your hand under a thing you are afraid of dropping, and the pane came up and held.

"It knows where home is," Val said.

Kyra did not say anything at all.

"That is what this is. It is a bearing. It is the direction, from this rock, to the system we came out of, expressed against three references it can still see, and it has been working on it since we walked out of here in 1608." Val’s voice had gone completely flat, which was how Kyra knew. "It has had a hundred and eighty-one years and a broken hull and no crew and half its instruments, and it has been quietly solving for where it is, and this morning it finished."

"Val—"

"There is no distance in it," Val said.

The light on the wall did not change.

"Say that again."

"There is no distance in it. There is no route in it. There is nothing in it about how a thing might get from here to there and there is nothing in it about how far." Val had her hand still under the pane. "It is a direction. It is the most valuable object on this planet and it is a direction, and if I went outside tonight and stood on that snow I could point at it with my arm."

She did go outside.

Kyra came with her, and they stood on the shoulder above the tarn at about the second hour of the morning with the whole sky doing what it does at eight thousand feet, and Val put her arm up.

She was not pointing at the smudge. That was what Kyra got wrong for about four seconds and then got right, and the getting-right went through her like cold water.

The smudge was up and to the left, where it had been since a rock above Dymná in 1607.

Val’s arm was somewhere else entirely — lower, and east, at a patch of sky with four ordinary stars in it and nothing whatever remarkable about it at all.

"That’s not it."

"That is it," Val said. "That is where it is now. The other one is where it was, and the light showing it to you left before there was anybody on Sethal to see it, and I have been telling you that for a hundred and eighty-two years and this is the first time in my life I have been able to put the two of them in the sky at the same moment."

Kyra stood in the snow and looked from one to the other and back.

"How far apart are they."

"Perhaps the width of your hand."

"And the difference between them is—"

"Four hundred years," said Val. "Give or take. That is the whole of the difference. One of them is a picture and one of them is an address, and they are the width of your hand apart, and neither of them is any use to us whatsoever."

Here is what Val Sorin did not say on that mountain, and did not say on the ship, and did not say for the following seventy-five years.

She had, by then, three of them.

A speed with no distance, off an Englishman who had been hunting a distance and failed and published the failure. A bearing with no distance, off a hull that had spent a hundred and eighty-one years getting it. And she was entirely certain, standing in the snow at two in the morning, that the third would come the same way — that somebody on this world would one day measure how far away a star was and it would be the wrong star and the method would fail at the range that mattered, and she would have three quarters of an answer and no way to assemble it.

She was right about that, and it took another forty-nine years.

What she did not say was the other thing, which was that three quarters is not the same as none.

She had it in her mouth on the shoulder above the tarn with her arm still half up and Kyra four feet away in the snow, and she put it back, because it was not a finding and because saying it would have been giving Kyra Davan a thing to carry that had no floor under it, and because she had made a rule about that in a shed on a plateau when she was twenty and had broken it exactly once in her life and it had cost them a decade.

She wrote four lines in the notebook and none of them were the sentence.

They came down in the second week of August and went west, and on the way through they stopped for an afternoon at a village outside Windsor and stood at a fence.

There was a man there who had built a telescope forty feet long.

It was in a wooden frame the size of a barn, on its side, with a gallery and a ladder and a windlass and a boy whose whole employment was turning it, and it had been finished that summer, and people came out from London on the coach to look at the thing that looked at things.

They stood at the fence for about an hour with perhaps thirty other people.

"Could he see it," Kyra said.

"He can see it. He has probably seen it a hundred times. It is the twenty-sixth object on the Frenchman’s list in his part of the sky and he will have gone over the whole list, because a man who builds that does the list first." Val had her hands on the rail. "He will see an oval of pale nothing, brighter in the middle, tilted, with soft edges, about four times the size it is to your eye — which is precisely what we saw through eleven feet of very bad Dutch glass on a wall in Trieste in 1684."

"That’s not—"

"It is four times the glass and a hundred and five years and it is the same object and it has not moved and it will not." Val’s hands did not move on the rail. "And he found a planet with a smaller one, because he was looking at the near things, and the near things are where this world is going to get everything it gets for the next two centuries."

Kyra looked at the frame in the field for a while.

"You’re not disappointed."

"I am extremely disappointed and it is not the relevant fact." Val took her hands off the rail. "Eighty-nine years ago on that mountain I told you somebody could read those lines. Not me and not on this world and not for a very long time." She turned round. "There is a man in a field in England with a barn full of mirror and a boy on a windlass and the Royal Society arguing with him, and he is doing it for the same reason you look at the smudge, which is that he wants to."

They were four months getting back and it was an ordinary crossing.

Val stood at the after rail on the ninth day out with the notebook inside her coat in its cloth, and in it there were eleven lines of the ship’s own hand copied four times in eighty-nine years, and under them now a line, and an angle, and three figures.

And a column of dates with nothing beside them.

And four hundred and nine names.

— end of chapter fourteen —

It was a Tuesday in the second week of November and there was nothing whatever remarkable about any part of it.

They had two rooms over a saddler’s in a town whose name does not matter and which neither of them ever went back to. Kyra had been out at the back with the line and had brought the things in half dry because the light had gone, and she was folding them on the table, and Val was at the other end of it with the accounts and a cup, and the stove was going, and downstairs a man was hammering something that he had been hammering since four o’clock.

Val put her cup down and looked at the window.

"It’s going to turn," Val said. "In the night. There’s been a smell off it since about noon and it has got stronger since the light went."

And Kyra Davan stood at the end of a table with a shirt in her hands and could not go on folding it.

"Say that again," Kyra said.

"The weather?"

"Yes."

Val looked at her for a moment and then said it again, in exactly the same words, because she was a woman who said things again in exactly the same words.

Kyra put the shirt down.

"I’m going to tell you a thing," Kyra said, "and it’s going to take a long time and I’ve had it for nineteen years and I want you to sit there and not get up."

Val sat there and did not get up.

"There were two letters with no weather in them," Kyra said.

"I know. I looked four times."

"I know you looked. I could tell you’d looked from the next one." She had both hands flat on the table now. "There was no weather in them because I couldn’t put any in. That was all of it. I sat down to write you a letter about paper and how much I was being paid and what the sky was doing, and I could not get one true thing into the weather, because the only true things I had were not about weather at all, and if I’d started I’d have put all of it on a page that a garrison clerk was going to read."

"What were the true things?"

"That’s what this is," said Kyra. "Sit there."

Here is what she told her, and it took about forty minutes and Val did not say one word in any of it.

That until November she had been all right. That she had work she was good at and eleven miles between her and the Neck and a room in a house with three other women in it, and that the reports came out with the refugees and she got them the way everybody got them, at third hand, four days old, and that they were about who was alive.

That in November they stopped being about who was alive.

That when the pox came up through the whole town at once the reports became numbers, because that is what reports become, and the numbers came out over the lines in the mouths of people who had walked a long way in the cold and did not know anybody’s name and were not asked for any.

That she had gone twice to the picket at Roxbury with a story and had been turned back both times, and the second time by a man who was kind about it, and that the kindness was the part she could not get past for about a month.

That she had one fact.

"You can’t take it," Kyra said. "That’s the fact. That’s the whole of the fact and I have had it since a house in Cornhill in 1721 and I have never once doubted it in seventy-four years."

"You did not doubt it."

"I doubted it in the fourth week of November," said Kyra, "at about the third hour of the morning, in a bed in a house in Watertown, and I have never told anybody that and I am telling you now."

She got up then and walked the length of the room and came back, because she could not do the next part sitting down.

"It wasn’t that I thought you were dead," Kyra said. "I want to be exact, because you’re always exact with me and I’ve had nineteen years to get it right. I did not think you were dead. I thought: I don’t know whether we can die."

Val did not move at all.

"We came off a mountain with two things on us that weren’t ours," Kyra said. "You light. I go gold. Neither of us asked for either of them and we’ve never once found the bottom of why, and the marks we came here with went away in about a year and we watched them go and we do not know why that happened either. This planet changed us without consulting either of us. And I sat up in the dark in the fourth week of November and thought: if it can put a thing in, it can take a thing out, and I do not actually know — not know, not the way I know north — that the woman in that town cannot take the smallpox."

The man downstairs stopped hammering.

"And under that," Kyra said, "which is the part I’ve never got to the end of, was the other one. Which was that I have built the whole of four hundred years on a thing I’ve never examined. Not that we’re safe. That we’re the same. That whatever we are, we’re it together, and it holds, and it’s the one thing on this world that isn’t going to be taken off us." She had her arms folded and her hands up under them. "And for four months I did not know that. And I found out what I am when I don’t know that, and I did not like her, Val, and she is still in me somewhere and she has been in me since 1776."

Val got up.

She did not say anything. She went to the stove and put a piece of wood in it that did not need putting in, and then she stood there with her back to the room and her hands on the front of the stove, which was too hot to have hands on.

Kyra waited.

She had waited for that woman on a gravel road at eighteen and on a coach at thirty-eight and in a north yard in the dark and on a wall above the Vayr for nine weeks, and she had gotten better at it, and she waited now for about a minute and a half and did not fill it.

"There was a man on a wharf," Val said, to the stove.

"On the third of March in 1776 I sat on a box at the head of the Long Wharf with Ebenezer Gale, who was going to Nova Scotia in the morning and who had put his name against mine twice in a room in King Street and had never once mentioned it to me."

"I know about Gale."

"You do not know this." Val’s hands were still on the stove. "He asked me what I was there for."

Kyra did not say anything.

"He said that everybody in a town is there for somebody, and that that is what a town is, and that he had watched me for nine months and could not find who mine was." Val’s voice had nothing in it at all, which was how Kyra knew. "He was sixty-two years old. He had lost a press he had worked thirty-one years, and a town, and a country, and he was sitting on a box in the wet with his hat in his hands, and he had one question left and he spent it on me."

"What did you say?"

"I said there was work."

The stove ticked.

"It was true," Val said. "Every word of it was true and I chose it because it was true, and he knew exactly what I had done and he put his hat on and said aye and went down the wharf, and he was on the water for ten days where I could see him and I could not get to him, and he died in Halifax in 1784 in his daughter’s house and I found out in a letter from her in the following spring."

"Val—"

"I have had the answer in my mouth for nineteen years," said Val. "I have had it since the box. It was four words long and I could not say it on that wharf because there were two men from the garrison at the top of the stairs, and I have not said it since, and I am going to say it now, because you have just told me that for four months you did not know whether the thing between us holds."

She took her hands off the stove and turned round.

"It holds," Val said.

And Kyra Davan, standing in the middle of a room over a saddler’s with a half-folded shirt on the table beside her, watched the most careful woman on two worlds walk across the floor and stop four feet away with nothing prepared.

That was how she knew.

Not the words. The words came after. It was that for two hundred and forty-seven years Vaelith Sorin had arrived at every sentence that mattered having built it first — in a north yard, in a locked room, on a sea wall, on a ferry stairs, in a room in Venice with a notebook — and she had a paragraph for the two days that she had written out and learned by heart so that she would never have to build another one in front of Kyra’s face.

And there was nothing behind this. She was not reciting. She had come across the floor with her hands empty and her face open and she was going to have to make it up as she went, and she had not done that in front of anybody since she was eighteen years old.

Val said it in English.

That was the thing Kyra took out of that room and kept for the rest of her life, and she could never explain it to herself in any way that sounded like a reason. Not in the language they had been raised in, which had a word for the bond and a word for the family and a room with a hundred and forty people in it behind every syllable. Not in the tongue out of a valley in Spiš that had come off a barrel head from a merchant’s son. In English — the language that had been stolen off them on a wharf in 1710 by a boy tying a rope, that every carter and fishwife on that continent had in their mouth, that was worth nothing and was lying about in the street for free.

"I love you," Val said.

And took it back.

Kyra did not say anything for a moment, which she would not have believed of herself.

She had the lamp behind her and Val was four feet away with it full on her, and Kyra looked at that face — fair and open and not composed in any particular — and thought that in two hundred and forty-seven years she had never been allowed to see it in good light at the moment it was doing something.

Then she said it back, and it was not difficult, and it had not been difficult for about a hundred and eighty-eight years, and that was the difference between them and always had been.

"Say it again," Kyra said.

"I am going to say it a great many times," said Val, "and I would like to establish now, before anything else happens, that I have been able to say it since a boot room and I did not, and that is the last thing I am ever going to keep."

"That’s not—"

"It is an accurate statement and I have thought about it for nineteen years."

"You’ve thought about it for two hundred and forty-seven," Kyra said.

And Val Sorin opened her mouth to correct her, and did not, because it was true.

It was short.

Neither of them was composed and neither of them pretended to be, and there was a shirt on the floor that had been half folded and a stove going and a man downstairs who had started hammering again, and Val’s hands were shaking, which Kyra had felt exactly twice in four hundred years.

She went first, the way she did now — across the floor and with her hands, before Kyra had finished getting her breath — and she did not decide it hours in advance and did not carry it under an ordinary face, and that was itself the thing, and Kyra understood it while it was happening and said so out loud afterward, badly, at length.

Val’s light was up before either of them had got to the other side of the room.

Afterward, in the dark, with the stove down:

"Nineteen years," Kyra said.

"Nineteen years."

"You didn’t decide not to."

"I did not decide not to. I want that established." Val had her face somewhere near Kyra’s collarbone. "There was never an evening large enough, and every year it did not get said it got bigger, and I have understood the mechanism perfectly well for about fifteen of the nineteen and it made absolutely no difference to my ability to do anything about it."

Kyra lay and looked at the ceiling.

"Me too."

"I know."

"No, you don’t, you can’t — Val, I turned you down. In the kitchen. With the almanac. You asked me and I said not tonight."

"I know you did," said Val. "You said you’ve got a planet, and you were right, and I have been grateful for it for thirteen years and have never been able to think of a way to say so that did not open all of it."

The stove ticked.

"We’re ridiculous," Kyra said.

"We are two of the most careful people who have ever lived," Val agreed, "and we have just spent nineteen years each protecting the other from a sentence, and I would like it on the record that we arrived at the same place by the same method and neither of us knew."

"It’s on the record."

"Thank you."

Kyra turned over and put her hand flat under Val’s ribs, the way she had on a mountain in the first winter and on a boat out of Trieste and in a Venetian town on the Istrian coast on the fourth of December.

"Not far now," Kyra said, to nothing at all.

And Val Sorin, who was two hundred and sixty-five years old and four hundred years of light from home and had exactly nowhere to be, said it back.

— end of chapter fifteen —

Here is what changed, and it was not large and it did not happen all at once and Val was not able to describe any of it for about four years.

She said things.

That was the whole of it. Not many things and not loudly and not in front of anybody. But there began to be, from about the spring after the saddler’s, a class of sentence that Vaelith Sorin had carried in her chest for two hundred and sixty years and had disposed of by other means — an accurate observation, a piece of work done, a thing moved out of the way before it was needed — and now, perhaps twice a week, one of them came out of her mouth instead.

She was appallingly bad at it. She said them at the wrong moments. She said one across a table in a public room and had to leave. She said one to the back of Kyra’s head in a cart and Kyra had to ask her to repeat it because of the wheels, and she repeated it, exactly, which cost her a great deal more than the first time.

And Kyra did not make a single thing of any of them.

That was the arrangement and neither of them ever discussed it. Val said a thing; Kyra took it, entire, without ceremony, the way you take a cup somebody hands you; and the next one came a little easier. It went on like that for twenty-one years.

They went back into a shop in the third year, in a town in the Connecticut valley, and Val was glad about it in a way she found slightly humiliating.

It was job work and a weekly with four hundred subscribers and a master who was seventy and did not come downstairs much. Kyra ran the press with a boy. Val set and kept the accounts and doctored on the side, and the town had opinions about that and the opinions were pleasant, and nobody at any point in seventeen years asked either of them anything.

They were the best years either of them had on that continent.

Val wrote that down in 1813, which she almost never did about a thing that was still happening, and then looked at the sentence for a while and added four words under it: say this to her.

She did. It took her until the following March.

The man came in the seventh year and lasted four months and his name is not important, and Val gave Kyra all of it at the table before anything had happened, in the flat voice, as she had done with the Venetian and with Matthias.

"It will not be long," Val said. "I want to say that at the start rather than discover it at the end. He is pleasant and he is forty-one and he is going to Hartford in the spring and I have done the arithmetic and I am content with it."

"You’ve never said it won’t be long before."

"I have never known it before."

And that was true and it was also the beginning of something else, which neither of them named for another fifty years: that the men had begun to be shorter. Not worse. Shorter. There had been twenty-five years of Jakob on a mole in Trieste and four months of a Venetian and two years of a papermaker at Germantown and now this, and the curve went one way and both of them could see it and neither of them said anything, because there was nothing in it to be sorry about and nothing in it to fix.

Kyra had one the following year that lasted a season and was, Kyra said, extremely good and entirely finished.

The rule about dusk was made in the second month, on paper, at a table, by Val, alone, and it was arithmetic.

It went like this.

Her light answered feeling. It had done since a hut on a mountain and she had had a hundred and ninety-five years to establish the pattern and it had never once been wrong: not pain, not fear, not effort, not cold. Feeling. It came up under the skin below the ear and along the jaw and the throat and it lasted as long as the thing that caused it.

In full daylight it was invisible. She had tested that in four different rooms over two centuries and was certain of it.

In an evening room with a fire it was a warmth on the skin that a person would take for a warmth on the skin.

In the dark it was a lamp.

So: nothing after the light went. Not once, not with anybody, not for any reason, in four hundred years if it took four hundred years.

She wrote the reasoning out in nine lines, read it twice, and burned the page, because the reasoning was the most dangerous object she had ever made.

And from that spring, for the rest of her life on that world, Vaelith Sorin was gone by dusk.

It was not difficult. That was the part she had not expected. It became a habit inside a month and a fact inside a year, and men took it for modesty or for a woman with somewhere to be, and not one of them in two hundred years ever asked her about it twice.

The other thing about that arrangement, which Val did not write down and did not say out loud for a very long time, was this.

There was one room on that planet where it did not apply.

She could sit in the dark in it with the lamp out and the fire down and be seen entirely, by the one person who had ever seen it and had never once in a hundred and ninety-nine years said a word about it in front of anybody — and the rule she had written out on a page and burned had not one clause in it about that room, because it had never needed one.

She got to the bottom of that in about 1806, at a table, with a cup.

Then she went and said it, badly, at the wrong moment, and Kyra took it entire without ceremony and did not make a single thing of it.

The settee came into the house in the twelfth year and neither of them had asked for it.

It came out of a dead woman’s parlor in part payment of a debt and the master sent it down because he had nowhere to put it, and it was too large for the room and had a hard back and a bolster that would not stay anywhere, and Kyra sat on it the first evening and said that she had not sat on a piece of furniture with an opinion since Trieste.

Val did not sit on it.

Val sat down on the floor in front of it with her back against the front edge of it and her legs out and the accounts on her knees, because the light from the fire was better down there and because the settee was at the wrong height for writing, and stayed there for about two hours.

And somewhere in the second hour Kyra, who was reading, put her hand down over the edge of the settee onto Val’s shoulder without looking up from the page.

It was there for perhaps a minute. Then it went away, and came back four minutes later, and went away again.

Neither of them said anything about it that evening or ever.

It happened the next night, and the night after that, and in a house in the Willamette valley a hundred and thirty-five years later, and on a porch in Oregon after that, and by about the fourth evening in the Connecticut valley in 1806 it had stopped being a thing either of them noticed and had become the shape of an evening.

The lamp came a year after the settee and was Val’s and had a reason and then did not need one.

There were two on that table. The one at the far end did for the room. The one at the near end was at her elbow and put its light straight up the side of her face, and on the fourth or fifth evening she reached over without any thought at all and turned it down and then out, and went on writing by the other one.

Kyra looked up.

"Can you see?"

"I can see perfectly well."

"You’ve just put out the only one that’s any use to you."

"I have put out the one that is pointing at me," said Val, and heard herself, and stopped writing.

The fire did what the fire did.

"Val."

"It is a habit and it is nine days old and I have only this moment found out I have it." She had her hand still on the lamp. "There is nobody in this house but you. There is nobody who is going to come in. I have written a rule about dusk and I have kept it for five years and it was correct and it had a reason, and I have now begun keeping it in a room where it does not apply, against a person it has never applied to."

Kyra put the book down.

Val looked at her down the length of the table in the light of the lamp she had just put out and the one she had not. The dark hair over one shoulder. The brows. The warm cast under the skin that Val had no word for in any of six languages and had stopped looking for one.

"So put it back on."

Val did not move for a moment.

Then she reached over and turned the lamp back up, and the light came up the side of her face, and she sat in it with her hand flat on the table and did not look at the other end of the room for about nine seconds.

"Right," Kyra said, and picked the book back up, and that was the whole of it.

She turned it out again the following week, and the week after, and went on turning it out for four hundred years, and Kyra never once mentioned it again — because it was not the rule any more by then, it was the hand on the shoulder and the floor in front of the settee, and there is no difference in a very long life between a thing you do for a reason and a thing you do.

The last of the good years had a piece of news in it and it was three sentences long and Val nearly missed it.

It came in the winter of 1815 in a bound number of a foreign journal that had been sitting in the master’s back room since the autumn, and she read it standing up between two other things.

A Bavarian had put sunlight through a prism, which everybody had been doing for a hundred and fifty years, and had put a good enough glass behind it, which nobody had, and had found that the band of color was not continuous.

There were lines in it. Dark ones. Hundreds of them, in fixed places, always the same, and he had mapped five hundred and seventy-four of them and had lettered the large ones and had published the map.

And he said, at the end, that he did not know what they were.

Val read it twice and wrote four lines in the notebook and put the journal back on the pile.

She did not sit down. She did not say anything at the table that evening. It went into the column with the comet and the catalogue and the planet and the speed of light, in the same hand, with nothing beside it, and she could not have said at the time why she had bothered.

That was the fifth entry.

It would be forty-nine years before anybody found out what the lines were, and she would read it on the other side of a continent at three hundred and thirty-four years old, and would have to put her hand on the back of a chair.

— end of chapter sixteen —

The winter was mild, which everybody remarked on at the time and nobody thought anything of, and the spring did not come.

That is all of it and it is difficult to make it sound like anything. There was snow in April and it went. There was a week at the end of April that was warm enough to put things in, and half the valley put things in, and then at the beginning of May the cold came back across the whole of New England at once and there was a black frost that killed what was in the ground and took the buds off the trees.

Kyra Davan felt it coming four days before it arrived and did not say so, because she had said so about a thousand times in two hundred years and it was never any use to anybody.

She said the other thing instead, at the table, on the second of May.

"It’s this year."

Val looked up.

"You are certain."

"It started in my knees on Tuesday and it’s in my hands now and north went soft this morning." Kyra had her hands round her cup. "Get the book."

And Val got the notebook and turned to the column and wrote the date under the one that said 1805, in the same hand, with nothing beside it, because there was never anything to put beside it.

"Twenty," Val said.

"Twenty."

That was on the second of May. The snow came on the sixth of June.

Six inches of it, on level ground, in the second week of June, over the north — and the people of that valley went out in the morning and stood in their own fields in it and did not say very much.

Kyra stood in the road outside the shop with her arms folded and looked at a hayfield under snow.

She did not think anything at all for about a minute. That was worth recording afterward, because of the four months that followed: there was a minute in which she looked at it the way anybody looked at it, which was as weather, and then the minute ended.

The fog came with it, or had been there since May and nobody had named it.

It was not a fog. That was why it took the whole country until July to agree that there was something to talk about. There was no damp in it and it did not lie in the low ground and it did not burn off, and you could look straight at the sun through it at noon in July with your naked eye and see the whole disc, dull red, with no more trouble than looking at the moon.

It did that from May until nearly October.

The light under it was wrong in a way that nobody had a word for. Things had their color and did not have their brightness. Kyra went out at the fourth hour one morning in July to a house nine miles up the valley and came back at noon and said that she had spent the whole ride unable to work out what time it was, and she was a woman who had never in her life not known what time it was.

And every month of that year had a hard frost in it. Every one. June, July, August. The corn went twice and was put in twice and went the third time in the last week of August with a frost that killed it standing, and after that there was no argument about the year and there was no corn.

The woods burned in September because of the drought, and the smoke went into the fog, and for about ten days you could not see the hill from the shop.

Kyra did the arithmetic in the first week of August, alone, at night, and once she had done it she could not stop doing it.

It went like this.

She had twenty of them. They came on the same interval and they had never once been wrong and they had never once, in two hundred and nine years, been attached to anything whatsoever.

And this one had a hemisphere attached to it.

She sat with that at the third hour of the morning in a hot room with the window open onto a valley that smelled of burning, and turned it over, and every way she turned it the same sentence came back: what if it has been building.

Twenty of them. Each one a little further into whatever this was. Nothing to see for two centuries because the effect was small and the world is large — and then a year when something in it finally came up over the edge of what a planet can absorb, and the corn went, and there were people in that valley eating things they did not name.

She did not tell Val for nine days.

When she did tell her it came out badly and all at once, standing up, in the middle of the room, at about the ninth hour of the evening.

Val listened to the whole of it without moving.

"Right," Val said. "May I have four weeks?"

"For what?"

"For the only thing I am any good at," said Val. "Do not agree to anything and do not stop thinking about it. Give me four weeks."

She took five.

What she did in them was write to nine people and read everything that came into that town and go twice to Hartford, and she came back in the middle of September with a bundle under her arm and put it on the table and went through it in order, standing, in the flat voice, for about half an hour.

There was frost in June in Quebec and in Virginia. There was snow in Vermont and in the Berkshires on the same two days. There was a failed harvest in England, and one in France, and one in the Rhine country, where they were eating things that were not food and there was a word for the year in German already. There was a sun that could be looked at in London in July, and a man in Bologna who had been writing about it since the spring.

And there was a letter in a Philadelphia paper, four lines long, from a ship’s master, reporting that the sea between Java and Celebes had been full of floating pumice in the autumn of the year before last, in rafts, for days, and that he had never seen the like.

"It is not a valley," Val said. "It is not this continent. It is everything above the equator and some of what is below it, and it began in the summer of 1815, which was ten months before your knees. It did not start with you and it is not shaped like you and it is not the size of you."

Kyra sat at the table for a long time.

"That’s not the question," Kyra said.

Val put the bundle down.

"Say it, then."

"The question isn’t whether I froze Vermont." Kyra had her hands flat on the wood. "The question is that there is a thing in my body that arrives every eleven years and I do not know what it is, I have never known what it is, nobody on either world knows what it is, and for four months this summer I have had a way to find out what it can do and it turned out to be look what happened. And you’ve just taken that away from me, and I’m glad, and I want you to understand that nothing has changed."

"Nothing has changed."

"Nothing has changed. I still don’t know what I am. I have not known since a cold store on a plateau when I was forty and I have got two centuries further on and I know exactly as much." She looked up. "And neither do you and you can’t prove anything about it, and don’t."

Val did not say anything for a moment.

Then she picked up the notebook and opened it to the column and put it on the table in front of her, face up.

"Look at it."

"I’ve seen it."

"Look at it properly. Twenty dates in one hand over two hundred and nine years and not one word beside any of them." Val had two fingers on the page. "I did not keep that column because it was interesting. I have never once in my life recorded a thing because it was interesting. I kept it because if there was ever going to be something to put beside one of those dates I intended to be the person who found it, and I have looked every single time — in a valley, in a town, in two cities, in a besieged garrison, with every instrument and every newspaper and every dull acquaintance I have ever had."

She took her fingers off the page.

"There is nothing there," Val said. "That is not an absence of evidence. That is two hundred and nine years of a woman looking as hard as she can, and it is the only thing I have got, and I am aware that it does not answer the question you actually asked."

"It doesn’t."

"No." Val shut the notebook. "So I am going to say the other thing instead, and it is not evidence and you may do what you like with it."

Kyra waited.

"I do not know what you are," Val said. "I have not known since a plateau. I have had two hundred and forty-six years to find out and I have not found out, and I have stopped expecting to, and at no point in any of it has it made the smallest difference to anything I have ever done about you."

The fire did what the fire did.

"That’s the worst argument you’ve ever made," Kyra said.

"It is not an argument."

"I know." Kyra put her face in her hands and left it there. "I know it isn’t."

The year ended and the next one came in cold and then, in about the middle of April, simply stopped being wrong.

There was a spring. It was ordinary. Nobody in that valley ever entirely trusted one again.

And in the spring of 1817 the roads west filled up.

It had been coming for thirty years and everybody said afterward that the year had only pushed it, and everybody was right and it does not matter, because what Kyra saw from the door of a printing house in the Connecticut valley in the spring of 1817 was a road with carts on it going one way from the middle of March until the snow.

Families. Whole ones. With the bedding on the top and a cow behind and four children on the tail, out of towns that had been there since before either woman came to this continent, going to New York state and to Ohio and to places nobody in that valley could have found on a map, because there had been no corn and because somebody’s cousin had written.

Kyra stood in the door and watched it for the better part of two years.

"They’re all going," Kyra said, one evening, to Val, who was at the case.

"A great many of them are going."

"It’s the whole country. It’s every road." She had her arms folded in the doorway. "Val, there is a continent out there and none of these people have seen any of it and they are getting on a cart about it anyway."

Val set four more characters and put the stick down.

"Yes," Val said.

And neither of them said anything else about it for twenty-eight years.

— end of chapter seventeen —

The town had been a farm five years before, and it had four thousand people in it and a canal and a road and no history whatsoever, and Val Sorin stood at the top of the new bridge on the first afternoon and had the same feeling she had had on a wharf in 1710 and did not recognize it for about a fortnight.

It was not a town that had grown. It had been decided.

A company had bought a river and a fall of thirty feet and had put the mills along it in a line, and behind the mills they had put the streets, and along the streets they had put the houses the workers lived in, which the company also owned; and all of it was five years old and was still going up, and there were men laying brick on three sides of her while she stood there.

"Say it," Kyra said.

"There is nobody here."

"There’s four thousand people here."

"There is nobody here from here," said Val. "There is not one person in this town whose grandmother is buried in it. There cannot be. The oldest thing in it is the canal and the canal is five years old."

The other fact took a week and Val did not say it out loud until the Sunday.

The mills ran on women.

Not chiefly. Not mostly. On women, by design, as a matter of published corporate intention — six or seven in ten of everybody at a loom or a frame in that town, and the company had gone looking for them, in the hill country of New Hampshire and Vermont and Maine, on farms, with agents and a wagon.

They were between fifteen and thirty. The great weight of them were between eighteen and twenty-four.

They came for two or three years and then they went home and married, and the company knew that and had built the whole arrangement around it: boarding houses, four or six to a room, with a matron in each who was answerable; a bell at half past four; a curfew at ten; attendance at a church of your own choosing, required, in writing; and a contract, signed, for twelve months.

A girl came off a wagon from Sanbornton at seventeen and was a name in a book inside the hour.

Kyra walked down Merrimack Street among four hundred of them on the first Monday and was not looked at once. Val watched her go — the dark head at the same height as all the others, the same age, the same coat — and understood that she had brought them to the one town on this world where the most remarkable-looking woman she had ever seen was invisible.

Val laid it out at the table on the Sunday in order, in the flat voice, and it took her about nine minutes, and at the end of it she said, to the table:

"This is the safest place we have ever lived."

"Go on."

"Everyone on the street is our apparent age. Not near it — it. There are thousands of women in this valley between eighteen and twenty-five and we are two of them, and nobody in this town will ever look at either of us and think she does not change, because the entire population turns over in three years and there is no one here long enough to hold the thought." She had her hands flat. "In Dymná we were watched by one valley for eleven months. In Maribor we were watched by one woman for thirty-five years and it nearly killed us. Here nobody is watched by anybody, because nobody is here long enough to be worth watching."

Kyra did not answer for a while.

Then Kyra said, "Why do they leave?"

"Because they marry."

"That’s what they do after. Why do they leave?"

Val did not have it, and she went and got it, because that is what she did.

It took her six weeks and it was not difficult; the company published a good deal and the girls talked to Kyra in the street and Kyra had four of them in the house inside a month.

Fourteen hours at a loom, six days. Half past four to half past seven with two halts. The lint in the air in a weaving room, which nobody had a word for and which everybody described the same way. The heat in July with the windows shut, because the threads broke if the air was dry, so the air was kept wet, and the rooms in August were what they were.

Three years was what a girl gave.

It was not a rule. Nobody wrote it anywhere. It was simply the number that came out the other end: they arrived at eighteen, and they were extremely good at it by twenty, and at twenty-one or twenty-two something began to go — the cough, or the ears, or the hands, or the thing in the chest that the girls called the mill fever and the physicians called four different names — and at twenty-three they went home to the farm with money in a box, which was more money than any other work in that country would have given them, and they were not well again in quite the same way and they did not say so.

Val brought all of it back to the table in six weeks and put it down.

"So," Kyra said.

"So."

"Say the sentence again."

Val looked at the page for a moment.

"This is the safest place we have ever lived," Val said, "because it is built out of three years of eight thousand girls, and they are used up on a schedule, and the schedule is why nobody here is old enough to notice us."

"There it is."

"I want it on the record that I had it on the Sunday and did not say it."

"I know you did," said Kyra. "That’s why I asked you the question instead of telling you the answer."

They stayed eighteen years.

That is the shape of it and it wants saying at the start, because everything that happened in that town happened inside a decision they took at that table in the first autumn and never revisited.

They could not fix it. There was no version of two women in a boarding house fixing the New England textile industry, and both of them knew it inside four minutes, and Val said the thing out loud that neither of them ever got entirely comfortable with: that the girls were better off there than they had been on the farms, that this was demonstrably true, that the company knew it was true and had built a whole argument on it, and that a true thing in the mouth of a man who profits by it is the hardest object on any world.

So they stayed, and they were careful, and they were useful in the four or five small ways that were available, and for eighteen years Kyra Davan had young women in her kitchen at all hours and fed them and listened to them and never once told any of them anything true about herself.

Val thought that cost her more than the whole of Trieste, and never said so.

They signed the register in the second week.

That was the part Val had not allowed for and it went through her in the office of a boarding house on Jackson Street on a wet Tuesday with a pen in her hand.

The company did not merely employ you. It housed you, and to house you it wrote you down: name, age, birthplace, parents living or dead, nearest relation and the town they were in, previous employment, the church you would attend, the date you came in, and a line at the bottom for the date you went out, which was left blank and which was the only honest thing on the page.

The matron was perhaps fifty and kind and read the questions off the form in a voice that had read them four hundred times.

Val answered all of it.

She gave the dull answers, in order, and where they did not reach she gave the sister story, which had been built at a table in Maribor two hundred and twelve years earlier by two women who had been asked in a market what they were for, and which had never once failed in all that time. And she watched a woman in a cap write it into a ruled book and blot it, and put the book on a shelf with nine others exactly like it.

She walked out into Jackson Street and stood on the step.

"That’s the fourth," Kyra said, beside her.

"That is the fifth. You are forgetting the customs house in New York, which I have never once forgotten."

"Is it bad?"

Val looked down the street at the mills.

"It is a ledger in a boarding house owned by a corporation," Val said, "and the corporation will be here in a hundred years and the book will be in a cellar, and there is a page in it with both of us on it and a blank at the bottom, and in eighteen years a woman will write a date in that blank and shut it." She put her hands in her sleeves. "It is the most complete account of me that has ever existed on this planet and everything on it is a lie except the date."

There was printing in that town and a great deal of it, because a company that runs eight thousand people generates paper the way a mill generates lint.

They were at a shop on Merrimack Street inside a month: forms, handbills, the corporations’ regulations, a weekly, almanacs, and — from the fourth year — a good deal of work for the girls themselves, who had money and could read and had nothing to spend either on.

Val had not set type in nine years and her hands knew it and got over it in a week.

And Kyra came home in the fifth year with something folded in her apron and put it on the table and did not say what it was, and stood there with her arms folded until Val opened it.

It was four pages, badly printed, on bad paper, by somebody else’s shop.

There were three poems in it and a piece about a mother in Vermont and a piece about a broken frame, and every word of it had been written by women who were at a loom at half past four the next morning.

"There are nine of these," Kyra said. "This is the third one. They do it in the evenings in the boarding houses and they pay for the printing out of their own money."

Val read it standing up.

"Who prints it?"

"Not us. Which I mind," Kyra said, "more than I expected to."

The peak came the year after they arrived and passed without incident, which after 1816 was the only thing either of them wanted from it.

Kyra had it for four days in the ordinary way and Val wrote the date in the column under the one from the bad year, in the same hand, with nothing beside it.

Twenty-one.

"Nothing," Kyra said, at the end of the week.

"Nothing," Val agreed, and shut the book, and neither of them ever raised the subject again in four hundred years.

— end of chapter eighteen —

Lucy Bonney came off the wagon from Gilmanton at seventeen with a box and a bonnet she had made herself and a way of looking at a room before she came into it, and she was in Kyra’s kitchen inside a month because she had got a splinter of brass in the back of her hand and the matron had sent her.

She was small and sandy and had her father’s chin and knew it. She had been the best reader in a district school of forty and had been told so once, by a woman who left the following spring, and had carried it for six years the way you carry the only thing anybody ever handed you.

Kyra got the brass out and put a cloth on it and asked her what she was reading.

They were four hours.

After that she came on Sundays, and then on Sundays and Thursdays, and by the second year she brought other girls, who came for the kitchen and stayed for the argument, and there were nine of them in that room one evening and Val came home and stood in the doorway with her hat in her hand and could not get to the table.

Lucy wrote.

That was the thing Kyra had worked out inside a fortnight and had said nothing about for four months, because a person who has been told once at nine years old that she is good at something will not survive being told it twice by a stranger.

She wrote in the half hour before the bell and at the ends of Sundays, on paper she bought, and she wrote about her mother and about a frame and about a girl who had gone home to Sanbornton in the spring and had not been well; and she gave the first of it to Kyra in the third year folded into four, and stood at the other end of the room while it was read, and did not pretend to be doing anything else.

It was not good. Kyra could see that and could also see the other thing, which was that it was not good in the way a thing is not good when the person doing it has never once been shown how and has worked it out alone.

"Who have you shown this to?"

"Nobody."

"Show me the next one," Kyra said, and did not say anything else, and Lucy Bonney went back to the boarding house and did not sleep much.

The cut came in February of the seventh year.

It was a wage reduction of about an eighth, announced by the corporations together, and it fell on the piece rates in a way that took more from the fastest hands than the slow ones, which the girls worked out inside two days and which nobody had expected them to.

They turned out on a Friday.

It was about eight hundred and it did not hold. Kyra stood in the door of the shop on Merrimack Street in the wet and watched them come down the street four abreast with their bonnets on, and it was not what the town had been told a turnout was; it was extremely orderly and rather quiet and somebody near the back was laughing.

They went up onto the common and there were speeches.

And at some point in the middle of it a girl got up on the step of the counting house and made one, and it was Lucy Bonney of Gilmanton, aged twenty, and Kyra Davan stood a hundred feet back in a crowd of two thousand with her hands in her sleeves and listened to the whole of it.

It was a good speech. It was better than good; it had the thing in it that cannot be taught, which is that she was not performing being angry and was simply angry and had arranged her sentences beforehand anyway.

She said that they had been told they were the daughters of freemen. She said that a woman who takes a cut without saying so has agreed to it. She said four other things and one of them was about her mother.

The crowd made the noise a crowd makes.

And Kyra Davan, who had said no out loud in a north yard at eighteen with thirty people listening, and who had put herself on a list for a woman she did not at that point even like, stood in the wet on the common at Lowell at three hundred and four years of age and did not open her mouth.

It failed in about a fortnight.

They went back in at the reduced rate, most of them, because the alternative was going home and because there was no fund and because it was February. Some did not go back and went home instead, and the mills filled the places off the next wagon, and by April there was nothing in that town to show it had happened except what was in the offices.

Lucy went back in.

She was moved, in the same week, from the weaving room she had been in for three years to a room in another mill on the other side of the canal, which was not a demotion and was not explained and which cost her the four women she ate with.

Nobody said anything to her about the step of the counting house. Nobody said anything to her at all.

They did it again two years later and it was larger and it failed as well.

That one was about the boarding houses. The corporations raised the rent on the beds, which came out of wages that had already been cut, and this time it was fifteen hundred and upwards and they formed an association with a constitution and officers and a subscription, which was a great deal more frightening to the men in the offices than eight hundred girls on a common had been.

Lucy was an officer of it.

Her name was on the constitution and the constitution was printed — not by their shop, which Kyra minded, and which she said out loud at the table in a way she did not usually say things about work.

It held longer. It went into a second month. And then it came apart the way those things come apart, which is not in a moment but over four or five weeks, with a girl going back in here and two there and nobody blaming anybody out loud.

By the autumn of that year Lucy Bonney could not get a place in any mill in Lowell.

There was no announcement. There was no list on any wall. There was a thing between the offices of a dozen corporations that everybody in that town knew about and nobody could produce, and a girl whose name was on a printed constitution went to the counting house of a mill that was hiring and was told there was nothing.

She tried four of them.

She came to the kitchen on a Tuesday in November to say she was going home.

She was twenty-two. She had been there five years. She had a box and forty dollars and a character from nobody, and she sat at that table with her hands round a cup and was entirely composed about it, and told Kyra that her mother was not well and that it was as good a time as any, and that Gilmanton was not the worst place in the world.

Kyra said the things there were to say.

And here is what she did not do, and she went through it perhaps four hundred times in the following sixty years without ever finding the version where she did it.

She did not go to the offices. She had been in that town nine years and knew four of the men in them and could have gone. She did not put her own name to anything. She did not stand up in the counting house, which she had been thinking about for a fortnight and had planned out and could see, entire, the way she had always been able to see it.

She had one reason and it was not fear and it was not prudence.

It was Trieste.

A name on a printed sheet had cost them everything in 1705 and a name in a pencil notebook had nearly cost them the whole of Boston, and there was a page in a ruled book on Jackson Street with a blank at the bottom of it, and Kyra Davan had understood on a wet common at three hundred and four that the one thing she could not spend on Lucy Bonney was the only thing she had that would have been any use.

Val had said so. That was the other part.

Val had said it in the spring between the two turnouts, at the table, without being asked, in the flat voice: that if Kyra wanted to stand up in front of that town she should, and that Val would manage the rest of it, and that she had thought about it for a month and was not going to say another word on the subject either way.

She never did.

And Kyra did not do it, and it was hers, and she had wanted it to be Val’s and it was not.

Lucy went on the Thursday.

Kyra walked her down to the wagon office and carried the box and they did not say very much. At the office Lucy put her hand on Kyra’s arm, which she had never done, and said that she had not thanked her for the Sundays and was not going to, because thanking somebody made a thing finished and she would rather it was not.

Then she got up on the wagon.

"Keep writing," Kyra said.

"There’s nothing to write about in Gilmanton."

"There’s a whole town of people in Gilmanton," said Kyra, "and every one of them has got something in them nobody’s put down, and you’re the only one up there who can do it."

Lucy Bonney looked down at her from the wagon.

"That’s the second time," Lucy said.

And the wagon went.

Kyra looked for her for sixty years.

She did it the way Val had done it for Mercy Tremaine, which is to say badly and privately and without ever once calling it looking. She read the Gilmanton notices when a New Hampshire paper came through the shop. She read the county lists. In the forties she read every page of every number of the thing the mill girls printed in that town, four hundred pages of it, looking for a hand she would have known in nine words.

It was not there.

A woman’s name changes. That is the whole of it and Kyra had known it since a burying ground at Copp’s Hill in 1766 and it had never once been any use to her.

Lucy Bonney of Gilmanton, aged twenty-two, went up the Mammoth Road on a Thursday in November in the year 1836 with a box and forty dollars, and Kyra Davan never found out one single thing about the remaining sixty years of her life.

— end of chapter nineteen —

Val decided at about the second hour of the afternoon, standing at a case with a stick in her hand, in the middle of setting a notice about a lost dog.

She finished the notice. She set two more and a bill of fare and went through the Saturday accounts with the master and corrected him twice and was pleasant about it, and walked home at six with Kyra beside her talking about a girl in Hamilton number three who had put a boy in the canal, and laughed in the right places, and had an entirely ordinary face on for four hours.

Kyra worked it out at the table.

"You’ve gone still."

"I have been still since Thursday. You are three days behind."

"You have not been still since Thursday, I’d have — " Kyra stopped, and put her chin on her hand, and looked at her. "Thursday."

"Thursday."

"What’s on Thursday?"

"Nothing whatever is on Thursday," said Val. "That is the point of it. There is no occasion, there is nothing wrong, nobody is leaving and nobody has died and the town is exactly as it was last week, and I have been deciding for three days about a thing that requires no decision at all, which is how I know it is a large one."

They were three hundred and eight years old that autumn and had been lovers for two hundred and thirty-one of them.

That is the arithmetic and it wants putting down here, because of what Val said afterward and because of the thing neither of them had ever once done.

They had been alone for all of it. Two hundred and thirty-one years with no third person in any room where it mattered, which meant there was nobody on either world who could have told either of them that there was anything they had not tried.

And they had done it in the dark. Every time.

Not by agreement. Nobody had ever said it. It had simply been the shape of the thing from a hut on a mountain in the first autumn, because a hut on a mountain in the first autumn had a fire and the fire went down; and then it had been rooms with shutters, and then rooms with lamps you put out, and then a rule written in nine lines and burned; and two hundred and thirty-one years is long enough for a habit to stop looking like one.

She said it first, which was the whole of the difference.

They were at the table and the lamp at Val’s end was burning and she had not turned it down, and Kyra had noticed that at about the third minute and had said nothing, and was waiting.

"I want to leave it on," Val said.

Kyra did not say anything at all.

"I have been three days at it and I can give you the whole of the reasoning, which is short. I have spent two hundred and thirty-one years being looked at by you in the dark, and the dark is my arrangement, and I made it for a reason that was correct and is still correct outside this room and has never once been true inside it." Val had both hands flat on the table. "And I have never in my life been seen doing anything. Not on a course, not in a hall, not in a room with a hundred and forty people in it, because I did not go into that room. There is one thing on two worlds that I have ever done with my whole self and I have done all of it with the light out."

"Val—"

"I have not finished and if I stop I will not start again." She did not look away. "I am not frightened of you seeing it. I want to be exact, because you will assume I am and I am not. I am frightened of watching you watch me, and of having nowhere to put my face, and of being in the middle of a thing I cannot govern with somebody looking at me while it happens."

The lamp did what the lamp did.

"And I would like to do it anyway," Val said.

Kyra put her hand across the table and turned Val’s hand over and put her thumb in the palm of it, which she had done perhaps four hundred times in three hundred years.

"Say the rest," Kyra said.

"There is no rest."

"There’s always—"

"There is no rest. That is the entire thing and I have been three days getting it into nine sentences." Val’s voice was not flat. That was the part Kyra noticed and did not remark on. "I am two hundred and ninety years past a courtyard and I have just asked you for something out loud and I did not construct it first, and I would like that noticed at some point but not now."

"It’s noticed," Kyra said.

They talked for two hours before anything happened, and most of it was the Vayr.

Not the boot room; they had had the boot room in 1759 and it was old ground and comfortable by then. What came out at that table was the three weeks on the cliff path that nobody had ever gone back over, which was the grind.

Six in the morning, on the cliff path, in the dark, for three weeks. Eleven miles a day at Rhone Tellis’s pace groups, fifth and sixth in the first group, side by side, not speaking, because the north yard had happened and neither of them was going to be the one who spoke first.

"I used to get there early," Kyra said.

"I know you did."

"You don’t know why."

"I know you got there ten minutes early every morning for three weeks and stood at the top of the steps doing nothing, and I have had two hundred and ninety years to think about it and I have four theories."

"Give me the fourth."

"The fourth is that you wanted to see me come up the path," said Val, "and that you would have denied it under any form of questioning available at the time, including from yourself."

Kyra put her face in her hands.

"It’s the fourth one," Kyra said, into them.

"I know it is the fourth one."

"How long have you known?"

"Since about the ninth day of the three weeks," Val said. "I came up that path at six in the morning and you were at the top of the steps looking down it and I thought: she is waiting for something, and then I thought, no, and then I put it somewhere and did not go back to it for fifty-nine years."

And Kyra gave hers, which was longer and worse and took about forty minutes.

That she had hated her at eighteen and had known inside a week that the hating was the wrong shape for what it was and had not had a single tool for finding out what the right shape was.

That she had gone home at the end of that year and had written to her mother about a girl in her house whose name she did not put in, four pages, and had burned it.

That on the day of the Headland, on her hands and knees on the grass with two thousand people on the ridge, the thing she had felt when a pair of legs stopped in front of her and stood there with their back to the crowd had not been gratitude, and she had spent about nineteen years calling it gratitude.

That she had been bonded at the time and had meant it.

That she had gone on meaning it, and had married nobody, and had taken the quiet in a room on the fourth terrace on her own, and had stood in front of a hundred and forty people nine days after the worst morning of her life because she would rather be seen entirely than be safe — and that she had done all of it, the whole apparatus, in front of everybody, and had never once in fifty-nine years let the one person in the world she actually wanted to be seen by see any of it.

"That’s the thing," Kyra said. "That’s the actual thing and I’ve had it since a shoulder of turf above a tarn and I have never said it in one piece before. I made a whole life out of being looked at and I never let you look."

Val did not say anything for a while.

"We are the same," Val said.

"We’re the opposite."

"We are the same and we arrived from opposite sides, which is not the same as being opposite." She turned her hand over under Kyra’s. "You would rather be seen entirely than be safe, by everybody, except by me. I would rather not be seen by anybody at all, except by you, and I have spent two hundred and thirty-one years turning the light out anyway."

She left it on.

And here is what neither of them had known and could not have known, because there was nobody on two worlds to tell them and nothing to compare it to.

That it is a different act.

Not more. Different — different the way a language is different from another language, with things in it that do not exist in the other one and things missing that they had always had. There was no dark to be in. There was nowhere for a face to go. Everything that either of them did arrived twice, once in the body and once across four inches of lit air in the other one’s face, and there was no interval between the two and no possibility of deciding what to do with it first.

Val did not look away.

She had the whole of it in front of her for the first time in two hundred and thirty-one years, lit: the dark hair down and copper where the lamp got into it, the strong brows, the gray-blue gone almost black, the warm cast along the cheekbone and the jaw and the place where the neck went into the shoulder. She had known every part of that since a courtyard at eighteen. She had never once seen it doing this.

That was what she had decided on the Thursday and she did not know until she was in the middle of it what she had actually agreed to, which was that at the exact point where she had gone quiet and put her face somewhere for two hundred and thirty-one years, she would instead be looking at Kyra Davan and Kyra Davan would be looking at her.

She held it. She held the whole of it.

And she talked.

That was not decided. That came up out of her in the middle of it without any governing at all — not sentences, most of it, and none of it accurate, and a good deal of it Kyra’s name — and it was the first time in three hundred and eight years that anything had come out of Vaelith Sorin’s mouth that she had not built first.

Her light was up the whole time and there was a lamp on and it made no difference to either of them whatsoever.

Afterward Kyra cried, which was not unusual, and then talked, which was.

"I’m going to say this now and badly," Kyra said, "because if I wait until the morning I’ll make it neat and you’ll take the neat version and I want you to have the other one."

Val, who had her face in Kyra’s shoulder and her eyes shut and could not have constructed a sentence at that moment to save her life, said nothing.

"Three hundred and eight years," Kyra said. "You were eighteen when I met you and you had a face on that I could not get behind, and I have spent two hundred and ninety years getting behind it an inch at a time, and every single inch of it you gave me. Every one. There was never a day when I took anything off you." Her hand was flat between Val’s shoulder blades. "A hut. A wall above a mill. A boat out of Trieste. A stove in a room over a saddler’s. You have opened a door about nine times in three centuries and every time it cost you something I could see and every time you did it anyway and then stood there like a woman waiting to be told she had done it wrong."

"Kyra."

"I’m not finished. This is the appreciating part and you’re going to lie there and take it." She was still crying and did not stop. "Tonight you left a lamp on and looked at me for the whole of it and talked the entire way through, and you have never done any one of those three things in two hundred and thirty-one years, and you did all three on the same night, on purpose, having thought about it since Thursday, and nobody asked you to."

Val turned her face further in.

"Say something," Kyra said.

And Val Sorin said, into her shoulder, with nothing constructed and her eyes still shut:

"I did not know it was going to be like that."

"No."

"I would like to do it again."

"Yes," said Kyra Davan. "You would."

The other thing came ten days later and it was four lines in a Boston paper and Val read it at the counter.

A man in Königsberg had measured how far away a star is.

Not a guess. Not an order of magnitude. A measurement, of one star in the Swan, made with an instrument built by the Bavarian who had mapped the dark lines in sunlight and had not known what they were, by watching the star move against the ones behind it as the ground under him went round the sun — the same motion an Englishman had gone looking for in 1728 and failed to find and got the speed of light instead.

Bessel had found it. It was a third of a second of arc. It had taken him a year of nights.

The number he got was about ten years of light.

Val stood at that counter and did the arithmetic that she had been waiting a hundred and ten years to be able to do, which took her about four seconds, and it came out: the light leaving that star tonight would arrive in the reign of somebody not yet born, and the light arriving tonight had left when she was two hundred and ninety-eight.

Ten years. A star you can see with your eye on any clear night from any door in that town.

She brought it home and gave it to Kyra without preamble, which she did.

"He’s measured one."

"He has measured one."

"Ours?"

"He cannot do ours," Val said, "and I can show you why on a piece of paper in about nine lines, and the reason is not that he is not good enough. The method works by watching a thing shift against the things behind it, and the further away the thing is the less it shifts, and ours does not shift at all. It has not shifted since 1607. It will not shift for anybody, ever, with anything on this world, because at that distance there is nothing to measure."

Kyra sat down at the table.

"So it’s no good to us."

"It is no good to us," Val agreed.

And then she stood in her own kitchen in a mill town in Massachusetts with a four-line notice in her hand and did not say the other thing, which she had had since a shoulder above a tarn in 1789 and had not said then either.

That there were now three of them.

A speed, off a man who had failed at exactly this. A bearing, off a hull that had spent a hundred and eighty-one years getting it. And now a distance — the wrong distance, to the wrong star, by a method that would never reach — but a distance, measured, by somebody, on a planet that had not known light had a speed when she arrived on it.

She put the notice in the notebook.

It went in the column under the Bavarian, in the same hand, with nothing beside it.

And Val Sorin, who had left a lamp on ten days earlier and had not looked away, stood in her kitchen and found that the two things were exactly the same size in her chest, and that she would not have been able to explain that to anybody living, and that there was one person four feet away who would not have needed it explained.

She did not say that either.

— end of chapter twenty —

The last number of the thing the mill girls printed came out in December and nobody in that town made anything of it.

There had been five years of it. It had gone to England and been argued about in London and a man had put it in a book, and there were women in that valley who had been in it and had been proud of it and had said so, and there were others who had thought it a soft arrangement that never once mentioned fourteen hours or the lint, and both of those had been true at the same time for five years, which is the ordinary condition of a thing.

Kyra bought the last number on the street and read it through in one sitting and did not find the hand she was looking for.

She had not expected to. She had been looking for nine years.

The town had begun to change underneath them in about 1843 and by the end of 1845 it was a different place with the same buildings in it.

The corporations had stopped needing to send wagons into New Hampshire. They did not need to send anything anywhere; people were arriving on their own and would take less, because they had come off a boat and had nowhere to go back to.

There were four Irish families in the row behind the Merrimack by the spring and forty by the autumn, and by the following year a whole part of that town was a thing nobody had planned, built out of what could be got, on ground the company had not troubled about.

The girls kept coming for a while yet and then did not.

And the arrangement Val had described at a table in 1827 — three years of a girl, on a schedule, with the schedule the reason nobody in that town was ever old enough to notice anything — began to come apart, because the new ones did not leave after three years.

They had nowhere to leave to.

Kyra said it in October, on the step, with her arms folded.

"It’s been twenty-eight years."

Val, who was doing something with the latch, did not turn round.

"Since what?"

"Since you set four characters and put the stick down and said yes, and neither of us said one word about it after that." Kyra had her chin up. "Twenty-eight years, Val. I’ve watched that road since 1817 and I have never once said anything and neither have you, and I’m saying it now."

Val put the latch down.

"Say the whole of it."

"I want to go west."

"How far west?"

"I don’t know," said Kyra. "That’s the honest answer and I’d rather give it to you than a good-sounding one."

And Val Sorin laughed out loud, once, in a doorway in Lowell, which was a thing she did perhaps twice a year.

It took them eight months and most of it was Val.

They were not going out on a cart with a cow behind it. Val established that on the second evening with a piece of paper, and she was not unkind about the people who did and she was extremely clear that two women alone with no men and no relations and no destination were a different arithmetic entirely, and that they would go the way they had always gone, which was in stages, with money, arriving in places on market days.

So: winter in Lowell, working. Spring to get down to New York. Summer on the canal and the lakes, which was a thing that had not existed when they came to that continent and now went the whole way to a place called Chicago. And after that whatever there was, in stages, with the object of being somewhere on the Missouri in a year or two with everything in order and no hurry on them.

"And then?" Kyra said.

"And then we find out what a wagon company is and whether they will take two women, and I expect the answer is that they will take anybody who can pay and cook and does not complain, and I have been told there is a great deal of complaining."

"You’ve been asking."

"I have been asking since about the fourth of October," said Val, "and I have four letters out, and I would like it noticed that I did not tell you I was doing it."

"It’s noticed."

They gave notice at the shop in the spring and the master was sorry about it in a way that was genuine and lasted about a week.

They went down to Jackson Street on the Thursday, because the house had to be given up and there was a book for it.

The matron was not the woman who had written them in. That one had gone to a son in Andover in the thirties. This one was about forty and had a bad hip and was pleasant about everything, and she got the ledger down off the shelf and turned it round on the counter and went back eighteen years with her thumb.

She found the page. She wrote the date into the blank at the bottom of it and blotted it and shut the book and put it back on the shelf with the nine others, and said something agreeable about the weather.

Kyra watched Val watch her do it.

Neither of them said anything about it in the street. At the top of Merrimack Street Val stopped and looked back down the hill for about four seconds, which she did not do, and Kyra did not ask her about that either.

Kyra went round the boarding houses on the last Sunday and there was nobody in them she had known for more than four years.

That was what Lowell cost, in the end, and she had not been able to see it coming in 1827 and could see nothing else by 1845: eighteen years in one town, and nine hundred young women through that kitchen, and not one single person left in the place to say goodbye to.

She said so on the step that night, badly, and cried about it, and Val sat down on the step beside her and put an arm round her and did not say anything at all for about ten minutes, and then said:

"Nine hundred of them got a warm room and somebody who listened to the whole of it and did not repeat any of it."

"That’s not—"

"It is not nothing either," Val said. "You have had that sentence said to you by me four times in two hundred years and you have not once accepted it, and I am going to keep saying it, and one of these centuries you are going to hear it."

The last night in that house was the fourth of June and the boxes were done by dark.

They sat on the floor, because the settee had gone to a woman on Suffolk Street in the second week and the chairs had gone with it. Val sat with her back against the wall where the settee had been, from habit, and after a while noticed she had done it and said so, and Kyra put a hand down on her shoulder from nowhere at all and left it there.

The lamp was on. Neither of them turned it out.

And somewhere in the middle of that, with nothing whatever leading to it, Kyra said:

"You said this would happen."

"I have said a great many things would happen."

"You said it on a hill. Above the castle, at Trieste, in the third year, with the glass on the wall and the gulf underneath us and the cold coming up." Kyra had her head back against the wall. "You said it would go on getting higher and then start going down again, and that in about a hundred and eighty years we’d be looking at it out of a different ocean entirely and it would be somewhere else in the sky."

Val did not say anything.

"And then you said: I have no idea why I said that. I have no information that supports any part of it."

"I have no memory of any of that whatsoever."

"I know you haven’t."

"I would have written it down."

"You didn’t write it down," said Kyra, "because you thought it was nothing. You stood on a wall and said the only prophecy either of us has ever made on this world and then apologized for it, and I have had it in my head for a hundred and sixty-two years and I have never once mentioned it, because you’d have gone and looked for the information."

Val sat against the wall with her hands round her knees.

"A hundred and eighty years from the third year at Trieste," Val said.

"Do the sum."

"I am doing the sum." A pause of about four seconds. "Eighteen years."

"Eighteen years," Kyra agreed.

They went out of Lowell on the morning of the sixth of June in the year 1845, on the early coach to Boston, with four boxes and a notebook in a cloth inside a coat.

It was a good morning. The mills were going and the bell had gone at half past four and the whole town was at work as they came down Merrimack Street, and there were eight thousand people in those buildings and not one of them looked up.

Kyra looked back at it once from the coach and then did not.

They were on the road two days later, west out of Boston, walking the first stage because the coach did not go until noon and Val wanted the morning.

It was flat and it was easy and the country was full of people going in both directions.

Val walked on the outside with the box under her arm and her hair coming down out of the pins, and the June sun was on the pale of it, and she was three hundred and fifteen years old and looked twenty-two and would look twenty-two on a wagon in Missouri and on a ridge above a lake and in a kitchen in Portland with the radio on.

Kyra Davan, who was three hundred and fifteen years old and had two thousand miles of continent in front of her and eighteen years to a different ocean, walked along a Massachusetts road in June beside a woman she had known for two hundred and ninety-seven years, and was happy the whole way, and understood it perfectly well at the time, which was new.

"How much further?" Kyra said, which was not a real question and both of them knew it.

And Val Sorin, who had a bearing with no distance and a speed with no distance and a distance to the wrong star, and who was two thousand miles and eighteen years and four hundred years of light from anywhere she wanted to be, shifted the box under her arm and said:

"Not far now."

— end of book twelve —