The Table

On the first morning out of the valley they walk eleven miles and Kyra is happy the whole way, which she does not understand until much later and never entirely forgives herself for. Part of it is the road — after a year of a path that went up or went down and had opinions about both, a road made by people who wanted to get somewhere, with carts on it and strangers going both ways who do not look at them twice. Most of it is that Val is walking: quick, level, no stick, no hitch, no pause before she puts her weight on the right one. You're doing it again. Doing what. Watching my leg. I'm watching the road. You are watching the road through my leg. The plan is Val's and is the word south — where the roads go, where Frederick's trade came from, warmer, and away from the valley, which is the whole of it and which neither of them says. How far south? No idea; that is the honest answer and she would rather give it than a good-sounding one. The good-sounding one, when Kyra asks for it anyway: until the place we stop in doesn't know the place we left. On the last night in the hut that had seemed like a matter of weeks. The first town has a market on, and Kyra walks into it talking and finds inside a quarter of an hour that she cannot. She has a year of the village's tongue, hard-won off a barrel head, good enough by winter to make Frederick laugh at a joke she built herself — and the woman with the onions gives her the look she has seen on four hundred faces in a valley: you are making sounds and they are not sounds I use. She gets back three languages, one of them shouted across the square in obviously the same family as everything she learned and not it. Try the other one, says Val. So Kyra asks for bread in English, with Frederick's stresses, and nobody in the square has heard a syllable of it in their lives. On a wall outside town, over a loaf got by pointing and overpaid for, Val breaks it and puts half by Kyra's knee without looking at her, which is eleven months old now. Eleven miles, and everything he gave me is worth nothing. Worth nothing here, Val corrects — a different sentence, and one they are going to be saying for a while; she had assumed a small number of these and is revising. The summer is the same thing several times: work at the edge of villages, paid in food, once in a blanket, twice in nothing at all, which is a thing that can happen to two women with no man and no kin and nobody to go to about it. They sleep out, under hedges and in barns that belong to somebody. And Kyra's weather is useless — it still arrives a day ahead, and on a mountain it had meant wood in and the flock down and had kept them alive, and on a road it means she knows in advance exactly how wet she is going to be. It's the most useless gift on this planet. It's not useless. It's unsold — a thing eleven people in a valley would have paid a winter's food for, and they have spent two months walking past everybody who would want it. All summer they get poorer and nothing in particular goes wrong, and Kyra starts counting what is in the bundle every few days and stops, because the counting has begun to feel like a thing a frightened person does. Then the ninth week, a birch stand off the road, at night. Three men, no faces, and not one word spoken — which is the part Kyra goes back to: not the hands, not the knee in her back that tells her the man has a method, but the silence. She fights and is strong and fast and furious and has never in her life been in a fight. Val does not fight: she goes into the deliberate stillness, lies on her own bundle with her face down, and lets them take everything that is not underneath her — and her light does not come up anywhere, and Kyra understands exactly what that costs and is furious about it for eleven days. You could have lit. They'd have gone through that wood like their coats were on fire. Yes. And in nine days there would have been a story in four villages about a woman in a wood who burned in the dark, and it would have gone up this road ahead of us faster than we can walk. Frederick had told them what the word does — nothing for a year, then a bad winter — and Val is not handing this world a second one for a cooking iron. By daylight: the clothes they stand in, and Val's bundle entire, because she has slept on it every night and has never been asked why and has never explained — the notebook, Coote's primer, the poem book, the eleven sheets. Gone: the cutter, the comb, Frederick's knife and iron, the blanket, four coins, the tin mirror that was the only thing on the planet either of them had ever seen her own face in. And Kyra's field set, which came off a wall on the Sorren, which she signed for on the fifth day and has cleaned every fourth day since the snow without ever examining why, and which a man down that hill will sell for the metal. It's the last thing I had that I did. Everything else we've got is something somebody gave us or something we walked out with. That was mine. Val does not tell her it is all right; she puts a hand flat between her shoulder blades and leaves it. And walking south that afternoon with nothing on her back, Kyra arrives at the finding that governs the book: on the mountain they had been poor, and poor is a thing you can work at, and eleven months of it had made her hungry and never once useless. Down here she is nobody's, in a world made entirely out of whose you are. You're doing arithmetic. On what? On the nights: nine weeks to the cold, no wall, no blanket, nothing to sell. She has done it four times and it does not come out. Then stop doing it. I would like to. Ahead of them is a house with a fire in it and a kind woman who will want to know whose daughters they are.

The last night outside is the eleventh of November by the reckoning of the country they are in; Val does not know that and will not for another fortnight and will think about it afterward for a long time. What she knows is that the ground has frozen. Under a hedge on the field side of a wall — the best of four places she looked at, and not good, because the cold comes up out of the ground rather than down out of the sky — she runs the arithmetic at dusk, does not say it, remembers the arrangement, and says it anyway. Two more of these. Perhaps three. Then one of us stops being able to get up in the morning, and I would like us both to have heard me say that while we are still warm enough to discuss it. Kyra's hand comes round against her ribs and pulls, and Val lets herself be pulled back into the shape they made on a mountain in the spring. Don't let me sleep first. I never do. In the morning they ask at the church, because there is nothing else left to ask at, and Val has arrived somewhere she dislikes: their case is not that they are respectable, which they cannot prove, nor that they are useful, because everyone in that town is useful. Their case is that they have nothing whatsoever, that a house of charity is built for exactly that, and that the robbery has made them eligible for the only door on this world that has ever opened for them. That's a foul way to think about it. It is a foul way to think about it and it is also what is going to get us indoors, and I would rather be foul and indoors. The house behind the church has thirteen beds and is run by Dorothea — fifty, wide across the shoulders, with a voice trained in a room full of people — who looks at them in the passage long enough for Val to know she is being weighed by somebody good at it. What she asks is not where they are from or whose they are, but whether their feet are sound, because a person who has walked a long way in bad weather may have the beginning of something and she would rather deal with it in a doorway than in a bed. That is a very good first question. It is the only first question. Sit down. Val records the house, because she records everything. It is warm, in a way she has not been since the hull with the light up, and the warmth is not a thing either of them has to make or fetch or ration; on the third night she wakes to find she has been lying with her hands open, which she does not do. There is food twice a day, dull and enough. There is work and the work is ordered — the linen goes out on the days the linen goes out, there is a bell and the bell means a thing and the thing happens — and Val, who spent thirty years inside institutions built on that principle, had not understood until she lost one how much of her is made of knowing what the next hour contains. And Kyra is happy, which Val watches and does not remark on: Kyra in the yard with two old men who come for the soup and do not want the soup, getting a laugh out of a girl who has not spoken in a fortnight, learning the language off nine people at once, a word a person, shameless and loud and wrong, four times faster than any sensible method — so that in six weeks she can hold a conversation in a tongue that had not existed for her in October, and Val, who is more accurate and always will be, cannot. You're annoyed. I am observing that the method I have used all my life is the slower one, and that this is the second time this year the evidence has said so, and I would like a moment with that before you enjoy it. The Latin arrives by accident. A priest attached to the house reads at them, and Val notices that some of it was in Frederick's poem book wearing different clothes, and asks him about a word; he answers, asks where she heard it, writes something on a slate and turns it round — and she reads it, badly and correctly, and the man sits back with an expression she last saw on Ilen Vosse's face across a table four hundred years of light away. After that he comes more often than he is required to, which Val knows perfectly well is a catastrophe in slow preparation, and she goes on anyway, and it is not the Latin: for the first time since a storehouse in a valley there is a person in a room who wants to talk to her about something real. The questions start in the fourth week and are not an interrogation, which is what makes them fatal. Dorothea asks the way a woman asks things with her arms in a tub: where had they come from. North. North where. Is there anyone there. Was there a sickness — asked gently, because a woman who runs thirteen beds knows people arrive from the north with nobody left and does not make them say it. Val lets her believe it, is not proud of it, records it exactly, and the questions stop for eleven days. Then they start again, because they are not suspicion but hospitality: a woman who has decided two orphaned sisters came out of a plague will want the parish, so she can write; the saint's day, so she can mark it; and who baptized them, because there is something to be done about that if the answer is nobody. Four true sentences held for a year in a storehouse once a week. They do not hold for a winter across a wash tub. And in the middle of an ordinary afternoon Val discovers something about herself that rearranges a belief she has held since she was nineteen. She can lie; she has always known she can lie — to committees, to boards, to men who had the power to end her — and has thought of it as a skill, and it has never once cost her. Sitting on a bench with a woman who has put a bowl in her hands every day for eleven weeks and asked her nothing but kind things, she opens her mouth to say the name of a parish and cannot do it. Not would not. The sentence is assembled and correct and does not come out. You don't have to tell me, Dorothea says, not looking up from the mending. I want you to know I've noticed that you don't, and that I haven't pushed, and that I won't. And then the warning, because somebody should: Father Mihael is going to ask you next. He asks everyone, he has to, and he isn't unkind, and he doesn't stop. That night, in a room with eleven other people breathing in it, Val states the rule the rest of the book runs on: they will not be caught in a lie, they will be caught in the absence of one. There is nothing behind them and somebody will eventually reach behind them and find that. We can be strangers to anybody. We cannot be known, every day, by good people. Good people ask. They ask because they intend to help, and they do not stop, and they cannot be lied to for long because the lying is the thing that breaks first. That's a foul rule. It is a foul rule and it is going to govern the rest of our lives, and I am not sorry to have found it in a warm room instead of a cold one. They go the last night before the roads open, and what they argue about is the note. Kyra wants to leave four words. Val will not: anything left behind is a thing somebody can be shown — not tomorrow, but in four years, when a man comes through asking after two women with no parish and a good woman with nothing to hide takes a piece of paper out of a box to prove there was nothing wrong with them. It will be her kindness that does it, and she will never understand what she did, and I am not putting that in her house. You're right. I want you to understand that I hate it. Kyra has now left two places without saying goodbye to the person who kept them alive in it, both times correctly, and says out loud that she is going to be doing this for a very long time. Val does not tell her it is all right. A mile south, with the town still a shape behind them: say the rule again. Nowhere we have to be known daily by good people. Again. Val says it again. One winter alive, two tongues gained, one man in a yard who liked her and will remember her, and one rule discovered that is going to cost them everything they ever nearly have — the last line of which she does not give Kyra then. She gives it to her eleven years later, at a table, in a room with a lock.

It takes them six years to go four hundred miles, which Kyra works out afterward and does not tell Val, because Val will have worked it out already and will have a view. They go in stages: a place takes them for a season because there is fruit to get in or a fever going through, and they are useful and quiet and nobody's, and then the season ends and the questions start their slow assembly and they go before the assembly finishes. Eight weeks here, a winter there, once most of eleven months in a river town whose name Kyra forgets inside a year. They get better at it, which is the only thing that improves: that a woman traveling with a woman is a question and a woman traveling with her sister is an answer, and the answer holds if neither of you elaborates; that you arrive on a market day, because a stranger on a market day is weather and a stranger on a Tuesday is an event; that you name a place you came from that is real and far and small and say it the same way every time. And they learn, mostly by being wrong, how long the questions take to assemble — a fortnight in a hamlet, a season in a town, and in a city, which they have not been in, Val expects years; Kyra says she is guessing, and Val says of course she is, that is what the word expected is doing in the sentence. One small exchange in the fourth year the book plants and does not explain: coming down a valley road in bad rain, Val walking on the outside because the outside is the wet side, asks how much further today, and Kyra looks at the ridge and the smoke and the road and says not far now. It is two miles, there is a barn at the end of it, and neither of them ever thinks about that afternoon again. In the sixth year they come over a shoulder of hill in the early autumn and there is a river below with a town on it, and Kyra stops without deciding to. A bridge with a gate, mills with the water piling white against them, vines up the far hills in lines so regular that part of her wants to know who surveyed them, and three roads with carts on all of them at four in the afternoon. That's a crossing. She is already counting carts and has got to eleven and started again. I am looking at all of it, Val says, and I want you to know that you have been quietly dying for six years and I have been watching you do it, and this is the first time since the mountain that I have heard you sound like yourself. The town is Maribor, the first place on this world whose name either of them learns before deciding whether to stay. In her third week a woman selling thread tells her, as the kind of thing you tell a newcomer, that there had been a year when the town burned ten people in a single day — the woman's grandmother saw it as a girl — said the way people say a thing that happened before roads. Kyra carries it two days and then says it, and Val, sitting on the wall above the mills, gives her the version she would rather have than a warm one: then it is a story here and not a memory. That is the difference between this town and Dymná, and it is the only difference that matters, and it will last exactly as long as nothing goes wrong in this valley. And then: we should still stay. You want to stay. I want you to stay — and then, because that has come out further than she meant, she begins talking with some precision about the wine trade. The first six weeks are nothing at all, which is what nobody has told Kyra about towns: in a village you are the only stranger and everyone must decide about you within a day, and in a town nobody has to decide about you at all, so you can stand in the middle of two thousand people being entirely unnecessary to all of them. They get a corner of a loft off a widow who takes their last two coins and asks only whether they are quiet, and work the way they have for six years, arms and backs, and it feeds them and goes nowhere, and Kyra can feel it going nowhere. You've got the Latin and the — I have a language nobody here needs, a competence I am not allowed to admit to, and both hands. I know exactly, Kyra. I have been waiting for this town since the first week on that road, and I would like eleven more days before you decide it hasn't worked. Blaž Kovač has four carts and a yard off the north road and an opinion about everybody. Kyra comes in among six other people wanting a day's work and is not going to get it, being a woman and a stranger and the smallest of the six, and what she says is: not the low road. He is loading for it; don't; it will be under in three days — it will rain the day after tomorrow off the west, and rain on the hills behind him for a day and a half before any of it gets down, and that road goes under from the back: dry at his gate and gone at the bend. He takes his time looking at her. And who told you that. Nobody told me. Right, says Blaž, and turns round. It rains the day after tomorrow, off the west. He comes to the loft eleven days later, which means he has asked at least four people where she lives, which she does not enjoy knowing. He stands in the doorway with his hat on, does not come in, does not apologize, and does not — then or in the thirty-five years that follow — say the word thank to her in any language. There's a load going over the pass on the Thursday. What do you want. And Kyra, on a straw mattress with her hands black to the wrist, understands she is being apologized to in the only tongue the man has, and takes it: to be asked first. Every time. Before you load. That's not a price. It is half of it; the other half is coin, and since she does not know what it is worth he will tell her, and she will find out afterward whether he cheated her, and if he did she will still come on the Thursday and he will pay her properly from then on. You're not from here. No. He names a figure that is about two-thirds of what it should be, as she establishes within the fortnight, and corrects it without comment in the spring and never mentions it again. The first coin she is ever paid on this world is a small worn silver thing with a man's head on it, and she sits on the wall above the mills holding it a good deal longer than it warrants. It's a day and a half of carrying sacks. It's nothing. It is not nothing, and you know precisely why it isn't, and I am going to say it out loud because you won't. Eight years on this planet, in which she has been fed out of pity, given work out of pity, housed out of pity and robbed — every good thing that has happened to them here has happened because somebody looked at two women with nothing and decided to be kind. That is the first thing anybody on this world has given you because they wanted what you are. He didn't want what I am. He wanted to know if a road would flood. He wanted the thing you were born with, that you spent eleven months in a hut learning to read, and he paid you for it in metal. Then Val stands up and says she is going to get bread, and Kyra sits on the wall alone for another quarter of an hour with her eyes going, and is extremely glad afterward that Val stood up when she did. The arrangement settles within a season: he asks, she answers, he pays, and he never once in thirty-five years asks her how she knows. It is not stupidity — he is one of the sharpest men she meets on this world — it is that he has a complete category for her, a woman who is good with weather, the way another man is good with horses, and a complete category generates no questions, which makes him the safest person in that town and a man she will never be able to tell one true thing to. She finds she does not mind, and then minds that she does not mind. Val's side comes slower and sideways: a cough, four sentences about steam and a cloth that any physician on Sethal would think too obvious to write down; then the widow's sister; then a man with a hand gone bad after a nail, where Val looks at it eleven seconds too long and then says very carefully that it should be opened and washed and packed and opened again tomorrow — and does not touch it, and makes the man's wife do every part of it while she watches. Kyra comes home to find her sitting on the mattress with her hands hanging between her knees. I could have had that clean in four minutes. I talked a frightened woman through it for an hour and a half instead, badly, in a language I am still wrong in, and it will very likely be enough, and if it isn't he will lose the hand. You said the same thing about the mound. I am aware that I said the same thing about the mound. And then the difference, which she has been sitting there working out: on the mound the rule stopped her giving a dying man something from the ship, and today it stopped her using her own hands and what is in her own head — and I cannot find the line. I have been looking for it since the spring and I cannot find where the one becomes the other, and I am going to be standing in front of somebody's hand again in a month. They do not resolve it; they are still saying it ninety years later in another country in front of a different kind of harm. The man keeps the hand. In the spring of the following year they take a room of their own above a cooper: a shutter, a hearth, a floor laid by somebody who cared, and one chair. We'll get another. Not for a year, Val says, because the money is needed for the winter and because she has priced chairs and formed opinions about it. Below in the lane there are children doing whatever children do to a wall for an entire afternoon, one of them a small one with a great deal of hair belonging to the cooper's brother, called Zofka, who looks up as they carry their two bundles in and goes back to the wall, having established that they are not interesting. And the door has a lock on it — a bar and a hasp and a key handed over with a speech about not losing it — and Kyra shoots it, and stands there, and shoots it back, and shoots it again. There's nothing outside this door that has to happen tomorrow. Not a flock, not a fence, not a seventh day, not a road. I've got nowhere to be until Thursday. Val sits back on her heels across a small fire in a small room with the shutter open on a spring evening. No. Nowhere at all.

They discover in the first winter in that room that neither of them knows how to do nothing, and it takes most of the winter to get any good at it. It comes on them by accident on an evening in the black end of the year: wood in, bread and a piece of hard yellow cheese, the shutter barred, the fire going, and not one thing either of them is required to do before morning. Kyra finds this almost unbearable for about a quarter of an hour. She gets up twice — once to check the shutter, which is barred, once to look at the woodpile, which she built that afternoon and which has not changed. It's still there. I know it's still there. You have looked at it twice in eleven minutes. I am keeping a record, because I am also finding this difficult and it is a great comfort to me that you are worse at it. What did we do. At home. On a night like this. You went out. Every time; there was always a thing on a terrace and Kyra was always at it. Val read, or worked, or sat in a room with Ilen and let him explain something she had understood forty minutes earlier. Neither of them has ever done this — eleven months on a mountain, six years on a road, a winter in a house with thirteen beds, and never once a warm room with nothing that had to be finished. I have no procedure for it. You want a procedure. I would like a procedure, and I am aware of how that sounds. There is one chair, so Kyra takes it on the grounds that Val had been in it and it is a matter of principle; Val gets up without any argument at all, which is suspicious, and sits down on the floor with her back against the side of the chair and her legs out toward the fire, and stays there. It is not a thing she does, and Kyra registers it and does not say it: Vaelith Sorin sits in chairs and on benches with her spine doing what spines are told, has spent thirty years in rooms where the furniture had opinions about rank, and has never in Kyra's memory simply put herself on a floor because the floor was where the other person was. After a while Kyra's hand comes off the arm of the chair onto Val's shoulder, which is at exactly the height for it, and stays, and nothing is said about it. They talk about nothing for a long time, which is the discovery of the evening: the cooper, who sings badly and only in the mornings; whether the mills are cheating the farmers and by how much, which Kyra has views on and Val has arithmetic on; Blaž's opinion of a bridge four days east, reconstructed with improvements. At one point Kyra works her hand down under the collar of Val's dress to the top of her spine because it is there, and leaves it, and Val makes a small sound of approval and goes on about mill tolls; at another Val reaches back without looking and puts her hand round Kyra's ankle and finds the bone of it and stays. Neither of these is the beginning of anything, and that is the part Kyra thinks about afterward: for eleven months on a mountain every touch had been an event, because every one had been rationed by cold or injury or the fact that one of them was dying in some slow way, and there had been no such thing as a hand on a shoulder that did not mean something. Here there is time, and the time makes everything cheap, and the cheapness is the most luxurious thing that has ever happened to her. What Val does not say, sitting on the floor with a woman's hand on the back of her neck, is that she decided at about four o'clock in the afternoon — coming up the lane with bread under her arm, looking at the light in their own window, their own, with a key and a bar on the inside, and thinking with perfect clarity and no particular heat: tonight, and I would like it to be slow, and I am going to have to be the one who starts it or she will wait for a reason. Then she bought the bread and had a conversation with the cooper's wife about a hinge, and carried it up the stairs and through the whole evening the way she carries everything, which is entirely, and it did not show on her face, because nothing shows on her face. She lets the talk about the mills run all the way out, lets the silence sit, then turns round on the floor and takes the hand off her neck and holds it. And Kyra goes still — because there is a thing Val does with her shoulders when she has arrived at a decision and is about to put it in front of people, and Kyra has known it since she was twenty-two, and has watched it across a table at Corran Vayr and across a yard at Solara and in a corridor in the last fortnight before a ship and on a mountain in the dark before it's worse than I've been telling you. It has never once in sixty-four years been a good sign. Her whole body has learned to brace against it. She braces, out of habit — and then it arrives, and it is this. Oh. What. Nothing. Say it. I wasn't going to say anything. Val turns Kyra's hand over and looks at it with the attention she gives a panel, in order, from the wrist out. I have been intending to do this since four o'clock and I have been extremely well behaved about it for six hours, and I would like some recognition. Kyra gets out of the chair. It is slow, because there is nothing to make it quick, and Val has time for the first time in her life and discovers that she wants all of it: the shutter barred, the fire down to the red, the whole length of the night with nothing on the other side of it. She takes Kyra's hair down herself, which takes a while and she takes the while — a great deal of it, heavy, going the color of wet copper where the fire gets in — and she says so, low, close to her ear, that she has been thinking about this since the middle of the afternoon, in detail and in order, which is new. You're appalling. I have been called worse things. Not by me. By you, twice, in a hut. The light comes up in her somewhere after that, and neither of them remarks on it, because it stopped being a thing that got remarked on some time in the previous autumn. You planned that. I said I had been intending it since four o'clock. Intention is not a plan. A plan has stages. Did it have stages? It had two, and I am not going to tell you what they were, and you may work them out at your leisure. And Kyra laughs into the dark and then has to lie there for a moment, because the thought arrives with no warning: she has been wanting this all day and walking about the town buying bread. It is not that it is new; it is that it was there all day under a completely ordinary face in a completely ordinary lane, and Kyra walked past it twice. How long have you been doing that. Deciding in the afternoon. Val is quiet long enough that Kyra turns her head. A while. In the morning there is frost inside the shutter and neither of them wants to be the one to get up, and the argument takes eleven minutes and is conducted entirely on the merits. Kyra loses, builds the fire, comes back with the bread, and says, in English, because they have fallen into English in that room and have not discussed it: there ought to be a word for this. She means nothing by it; she wants to say something in the morning and that is what comes out. Val sits up. That's a real problem. It isn't a problem, it's a — it is a problem and I am going to treat it as one, because you have just described a thing that exists, which we both have, which has no name in either of the two languages we have any command of. That is a gap. I was making conversation. You were making an inquiry, and I am going to help you with it, and you have nobody to blame. They start with the poem book, because it is the only book in the room that is about anything, and inside an hour find it is a bad place to start: Frederick's anthology is full of shepherds who want things and nymphs who decline them, and it has one word for the entire business. Val comes off it like a woman who has bitten a stone. I have read eleven pages and it has been used for God, for a woman's hair, for a spaniel, for a place in Kent, and as a greeting between two men who have not seen each other since Tuesday. A term that does that much work carries no information. If I say it to you, you have to guess which of nine things I mean, and the guessing is the entire problem we started with. People manage. People manage because they are surrounded by other people who will supply the context. We have no context on this world. We have each other and a room. She puts the book down: I want a word that means one thing. And Kyra, cross-legged on the bed with the bread, looks at her — hair coming down, hands flat on the covers, her whole face doing the thing it does when she has a problem worth having — and thinks she would be perfectly content to spend a considerable number of years on this. All right. How many languages are there? On this planet? I have no idea. Then we'd better start.

For four years Val is aware that they are looked at, and for four years she is wrong about why, and she records it afterward as the most instructive mistake she makes in that town. The looking is not hostile and not constant: a woman at a stall following them three seconds longer than she follows anyone else, a man on the bridge who looks, looks away, and looks again at the rail. Kyra's account is that they are foreign; Val's is structural — two women with no man, no children and no kin within four hundred miles are an unfinished sentence, and human beings cannot leave one alone, so the looking is the town waiting for the rest of it, and the rest of it is never coming. Both are true, and both are also, she eventually understands, a way of not saying the obvious thing, which every person in Maribor can see and neither of them has said out loud in eight years. She catches herself on the bridge in the fourth spring, waiting, while Kyra argues twenty feet away with a man about the price of a wheel — off the pass road that morning, hair untied, the wind off the Drava taking it across her face, putting it back with the side of her wrist without stopping talking. Val looks at her the way she looks at anything she intends to understand, in order, from the top: the hair, going the color it goes where the sun comes through the ends, which is a color Val has no word for in any language she has; the brows, which are doing the entire argument by themselves; the line from the ear under the jaw to where the collar has been pulled crooked by a bag strap; the hands; the set of her feet on the boards, which is a runner's and has not changed in seventy years. She is starting on the hands again when she notices she is starting on the hands again. It is not the discovery of anything — she has been to bed with that woman a hundred times in a room forty yards away. What arrives is a small piece of arithmetic she has avoided for eight years: she is the most remarkable-looking person in this town by some distance, and so, by every account I have ever had of it, am I, and we are standing on a public bridge in the middle of the afternoon. You've gone quiet. I have been doing a sum. On what? On nothing useful — and she does not tell her, and puts it away, and thinks about that decision a good deal afterward. It comes up the following summer in the market. Three men, not from the town — Val works it out inside a sentence: wrong boots, accent off the eastern road, and the particular loudness of men who will not be here on Friday and therefore need not be careful on Wednesday. They are not talking to them; they are talking about them, three feet away, at full volume, the way men talk in front of a horse. One has not seen anything like that in a fortnight of traveling. The second says something about the dark one's mouth and the first something about the fair one, and the third says, thoughtfully, as though arriving at an answer: but where's the man? And the first one works it out — women like that, two of them, alone, in a town, with nobody; you do not get that by accident; that is not two women who have no man, that is two women who are for something. Val stands in a market square and feels her own face doing nothing at all, which is the only thing about the next quarter of an hour she is ever satisfied with. Here is why she says nothing: there is no true sentence available, and she goes through them in order and there is not one. We are sisters is a lie the men would not believe and invites a fourth sentence; we are not for anything is an argument, and arguments with men in markets have an ending and the ending is not good; and the truth, three words long, which she has never said out loud in any room on either world, is so far outside what can be spoken on a Wednesday morning that it does not present itself as an option at all — it simply sits there, unsayable, in the space where a reply should be. She has been all her life the person in the room with the accurate answer, and she stands there and discovers that accuracy has nothing whatsoever to offer her. Kyra takes a breath and goes in. She agrees with them, which is the whole trick and which Val does not see coming: turns round with her whole face lit up and says cheerfully, in the country's language with her own accent thick over it, that of course they are, and how kind of the gentlemen to notice, and that the arrangements are not made in the square. The men go quiet in the way men do when a thing said behind a hand comes back through the front. She keeps going, and she is magnificent: no price, no name, but a great many other things — that there are people who see to it, that one does not simply walk up in a market, that it is a house matter and there are arrangements, that the gentlemen would want to speak to someone first and she could not say who, and did they intend to be in the town past Friday, because that would be a difficulty. In eleven sentences she builds an entire apparatus out of nothing, every sentence implying a man somewhere behind her, and she never once describes him. Val says nothing at all; she looks at each of the three in turn the way she has looked at a great many people across a great many tables, and lets the silence work. By the time Kyra has finished asking about Friday, the three have arrived at a shared and unspoken conclusion, which is that there is somebody in this town they do not want to annoy. They go away. Kyra holds it together as far as the corner of the lane and then has to put her hand against the wall. It is a house matter. I said it is a house matter. I don't know what that means. You said there were arrangements. Twice. You said it twice. She does the whole thing again on the stairs with improvements and a third time that evening with a different ending in which one of the men faints, and Val lets her, and does not say what she is thinking, because it is not the hour for it. In the dark lane coming back from the well, Val stops. I want to say the accurate thing. You handled that correctly and I could not have. She had four seconds, went through every sentence she had, and every one made it worse; she would have answered them truthfully in some form, because that is the only instrument she has ever owned, and it would have gone very badly with Kyra standing next to her while it did. You'd have thought of something. I would not. I have spent eleven years being the one who knows what to do in a room, and this afternoon I stood in a square and had nothing, and you had everything, and it took you about a second. And the finding: there is no true answer to what are you for. I looked. There isn't one. And I have been proceeding since we came off that mountain as though there is always a true answer somewhere if I am patient enough, and there is not, and I would rather have found that out beside you than on my own. Then — because the sentence is finished and she is not going to let it lie in a dark lane the way she would have two years ago — she puts her hand at the back of Kyra's neck under the hair and holds it and says nothing else. They stand in a lane for a while. Come inside, Kyra says eventually, in a voice that has gone somewhere else entirely. Four days later, at the table, Val puts down what she has been drafting all week. I want to build the sisters properly. We are the sisters. We've been the sisters for eleven years. We have been saying the word sisters for eleven years. That is not the same thing and Wednesday proved it. Three men looked at them for one minute and arrived at an explanation because none was supplied, and people will always arrive at an explanation; the only question is whose. So they will supply it, and it will be the same every time, and they will both know all of it: the father, where he died, the year, the parish it would have been in, why there is nobody to write to, why they came south, who paid for the road. Eleven answers. We learn them the way you learn a poem — and the details are dull, because dull details are the only ones nobody repeats. That's a liturgy. It's a lie that holds. I would rather have one of those than eleven that don't. Go on. There's more. You've got the face on. There's one more and you're going to hate it: not in front of a window. Not in the lane. Not on the stairs. Not anywhere in this town where a person can be standing that we have not looked at first. No, Kyra says. She will give Val the sisters and learn the eleven dull answers and say them in her sleep. I'm not having you tell me where I'm allowed to put my hand. She is not shouting, which is worse than shouting. That's not carefulness. That's me spending the rest of my life checking a room before I touch you, and I have watched you go sealed in front of people for seventy years and I have never once minded, and I'm not becoming it. I know. Then don't ask. Val looks at the table a moment. All right, Val says. And it is all right, for a while, and she does not raise it again for a long time — and she is right, and she knows she is right, and she would still have been right eighty-five years later in another country when a man who had loved Kyra Davan for twenty-five years sat down in front of a priest and began to explain what he had seen.

The Sunday dinners begin because of an administrative failure, which Kyra thinks is the funniest thing that ever happened to her and is still saying out loud four hundred years later in a booth with bad coffee in it. By the eighth or ninth year both of them are working and the work does not overlap: Kyra goes when the weather says go, gone four days and back for six on no schedule any person could write down, and Val's work comes to her, which means at night and at dawn and on the days when a child in the next lane has been sick since Thursday. They live in one room and are awake in it together, Val calculates, on something under half the evenings in a month — and things have started going unsaid, which Val learned on a shale shoulder above Dymná are very nearly the same as kept when you let them run. The pact was made in the snow by two people who had nothing but each other and the whole of every day; it has never been tested by a woman coming in at the eleventh hour too tired to take her boots off. So Val proposes a fixed evening, the way she would propose a protocol: she has thought about which day and has reasons, has a view on whether it should move if one of them is away (it should not; whoever is in the town sits at the table anyway), and has, Kyra establishes under questioning, worked out what it will cost in candles. You've costed it. I have costed it. Val. You have written a regulation for talking to me. I have written a regulation for sitting down. The talking is not regulated. The talking is what happens because we are sitting down, which is the entire problem, because we are never sitting down. Kyra says yes before she finishes the sentence, laughs about it for a week, and never once misses one. In the third year they lose the room for an evening — the cooper's wife has the house full of her sister's family for a burial — and rather than let the Sunday go they take the end of a long table at the inn by the gate. It is loud and there are eleven people on that table who are not them, and Kyra sits down with a bowl of something gray and finds she cannot say any of the four things she came to say, because every one of them is for two people and there are thirteen. And under the table, without deciding to, she puts her foot against Val's. Val does not look up; Val goes on listening to a man explain the timber trade and nods in the right places and is to all appearances a woman being polite to a stranger. Her foot does not move. They sit like that for most of an hour, and Kyra eats her soup and talks to a woman about her daughter's hands, and the entire time there is a small warm point of contact under a public table in a room full of people, and it does the whole job — she goes up the stairs afterward feeling as though they have talked for four hours. That worked. It did, Val agrees, and shoots the bar, and that is all either of them ever says about it. It is the first thing they ever have that can be done in front of other people; they have it for four hundred years; and it begins in an inn because a woman's sister had a burial. Zofka Kovač — no relation to Blaž; half the valley is a Kovač — is the child from the wall, and she comes up through those years the way the vines do on the far bank, which is to say that Kyra never once sees it happen and it happens anyway. At four she is uninterested. At seven she is on the stairs a great deal, because Val has a box with pins in it and Zofka has opinions about the pins. At eleven she is useful and knows it, delivering messages with her chin up in the manner of a person from a government. At fifteen she stops coming up for about two years for reasons Kyra understands and does not comment on. At nineteen she is married to a man from the eastern road who is better than she had been expected to get, and comes up in a dress she made and turns round once in the doorway so they can see it, and Kyra says the right things and Val says the accurate ones. At twenty-four she has two boys and no time. At thirty-one she comes up with a jug and sits down on the chair — there are two chairs by then; Val capitulated in the eleventh year — and talks for an hour and a half about her mother, who is failing, and what it is like to watch it. And somewhere in there, Kyra notices afterward without being able to date it, Zofka has stopped talking to them as though they were older than she is. Blaž prospers: four carts to six to eleven, the rented yard bought and then the one beside it, a nephew on the eastern route complained about constantly and never replaced, fat in the way men get fat when the thing they built starts working, a stick from about the twentieth year on account of a hip. He asks Kyra about the weather every week for thirty-five years and never once asks how she knows. On the day his wife dies he sends a boy up the stairs to say there will be no loads that week, which Kyra understands is the entire obituary she is going to be offered, and she stands in the lane with it a while; she goes to the burial and stands at the back, and afterward he says Thursday and she says Thursday, and that is the whole of the condolence. She thinks about that man for four hundred years and can never decide what he had been to her. The finding arrives the way all Val's worst things arrive — in the middle of ordinary work, in writing, in her own hand. She has kept the notebook since 1608: the seventeen names, the two reckonings of the year, a great many letters to Genie that will never be sent, and a running record of the people in front of her, begun in a hut when there was nothing else in the world to measure. She goes back into it that autumn to check something about a fever, finds herself reading the Zofka entries, and stops. Then she gets the light closer. A line every few years, written without meaning anything by them: the cooper's brother's child, four, in the lane. Uninterested — and then seven, and eleven, and fifteen, and nineteen and married, and twenty-four with two boys, and thirty-one with a jug and a dead mother. Twenty-seven years, eight lines, and a whole person has gone by in them. She puts the other column beside it, which takes no time at all because there is nothing in it: her own entries across the same twenty-seven years — ran the pass road and back, no difficulty. Carried the Lenart woman's boy from the water house, forty yards. Slept four hours, adequate — and Kyra's, the same. Not a slope in either. She has always known they do not change; everybody on Sethal knows that, and there is nothing in it to notice, because everybody around you is doing it too. Here nobody else is doing it. That is the whole of the finding and it is not about her body at all: Zofka will be dead inside forty years, and so will Blaž and the thread-seller's daughter and every single person either of them has spoken to in that town — and Val Sorin, at a hundred and fourteen, has perhaps three hundred years in front of her on a world where a life is sixty. She closes the book and says nothing for eight days, and knows the entire time exactly what she is doing, which is the part she cannot get round afterward: she is not gathering evidence, there is nothing further to gather, it is eight lines about a girl in a lane. She is standing between Kyra Davan and a sentence with her arms out, the way she has stood between a great many people and a great many sentences for a hundred and fourteen years. She has been happy here. She has a yard and a road and a man who pays her for what she is, and a child downstairs who has grown up in front of her, and she has not had anything like this since Solara, and I am about to walk into a room and put a number on it. On the eighth day, at the table, on a Sunday, she puts the notebook on the boards and turns it round. I have been keeping something for eight days, and I want to say that first, before the thing itself, because the eight days are the part I did wrong. Zofka was four when they took this room and is thirty-one and has a mother in the ground and two sons who will be men before they have finished arguing about a chair. I have eight lines about her in twenty-seven years and I have nothing about us, because there is nothing to write, and I have just understood what that is going to mean for the next three hundred. We knew we don't change. We knew we do not change at home, surrounded by people who also do not, where it is worth precisely nothing. Here it is the only thing about us anybody will ever be able to see. Not the light. Not your eyes. A woman across a lane gets old and we do not, and there is no version of living anywhere on this world in which that does not eventually become the thing people know about us. That's not the whole of it. Say the rest. The rest is that they are going to do this perhaps thirty more times — arrive, be useful, be liked, and go before somebody says it out loud — and every time they will leave a Blaž and a Zofka behind, and every one of them will be dead before the next town is finished, and they will not be able to write. Kyra comes round the table and crouches in front of her and takes both her hands, which are cold. Eight days. You sat at this table twice with that in you. Yes. Val, I don't care about the thirty towns. I'll care about the thirty towns tomorrow, I'll probably care about them for a century. Tonight I want to know why you did eight days on your own. And Val, who has prepared an answer about timing and evidence and not alarming a person over an incomplete finding, discovers that none of it will come out in front of that face. Because it is the only thing I know how to give you. Kyra's version arrives in her body first, the way things do: she goes out on the pass road four days later, stands looking down at a valley full of people, and understands with absolute clarity that she is going to watch every single one of them go, and their children, and their children, and that this is not a misfortune that might befall her but the actual arrangement of the rest of her life. She sits down on a rock and does not get up for some while. Val's is a different animal: she looks for the number that makes it manageable, and it will not resolve into anything she can use — three hundred years, at a town a decade, in a place where the only two permanent objects are each other. And underneath both, unsaid for a considerable time, is the other half, which Kyra says on the wall above the mills in the spring. They're all right, though. Ours. Kal is seventy-eight. Genie's seventy-eight. If the years run straight they are seventy-eight years old and they are fine, Val, they're not even halfway, they've got a house and a job and they're annoyed about something this morning. And Val, who has been doing the same one about her father: he was a hundred and five on that wall. He would be a hundred and forty-three. There is no version of the arithmetic in which he is dead. He is on that coast this morning with his hands behind his back, and he has been waiting thirty-eight years for a ship, and I cannot get a single word to him. That's not hope. I want to be clear that I'm not calling it hope. It is not hope. It is the removal of one comfort. I had been permitting myself to think of them as finished. Right. Well. They're not. They try words through all those years, the way you turn over stones: the country's word for a husband's people, rejected because it is about property; another meaning something like the one who holds the other end, used of a man you carry a beam with, which they use for three months mostly as a joke until it wears out; four in the priest's Latin, dismissed inside a fortnight, two for being about God and two about appetite; and the poem book's single overworked word, offered and handed back. Once, in the twenty-second year, Kyra brings one off a boatman from the south and watches Val's face do something complicated. What does it mean? I have no idea. Say it again. Val writes it down, looks at it, and says: no. It means I don't know what it means, which is worse, because for about four seconds I thought it might do. You liked it. I liked not knowing what it meant, which is the least defensible position I have ever held. It is Val who says they should go and Kyra who does not argue, and it takes eleven minutes on a Sunday in the thirty-fifth year. Zofka's mother is dead, Blaž has walked with a stick for fifteen years, the thread-seller is dead and her daughter runs the stall and her daughter is gray. Nobody in this town has said anything to us. That is not the same as nobody having noticed. I have been watching the gap between those two things for four years and it is closing. Zofka has noticed something she does not have a shape for; she will get one, and her sons faster, because they have known them their entire lives and they are the only thing in those lives that has not moved. Either they leave in a hurry and frighten somebody, or they go in the autumn with the roads good, having told Blaž in the spring so he can find somebody. Tell him in the spring. Give him the spring. He'll want to train whoever it is and he'll pretend he doesn't. That's all? I had prepared for an argument. I had four answers ready. Keep them. You'll need them somewhere else. The last Sunday is in the room, at the table Val made a regulation about thirty-two years earlier, and they do not mark it, which is deliberate on both sides and neither says so: they eat, and Kyra tells the story about the man at the crossing with the goat, which Val has heard perhaps eleven times and which is better every time, and Val laughs twice. Afterward Kyra washes the two bowls and puts them on the shelf they have been on for three decades, and stands there a second with her hand flat on the boards of the table, and then takes it off. They tell Zofka they are going to the coast, because there is family there; she cries, says she had known it was coming and had not known why she knew, and asks them to write. They say they will. Blaž says Thursday for the last time on a Thursday and does not come out of the yard to see them go. Then twenty years told quickly, because they are the years in which nothing goes wrong: eleven in a walled town on a river where Val keeps a still-room for an apothecary who never asks her a personal question, nine in a smaller place after it where Kyra sells weather to a man with barges. They arrive on market days, give the eleven dull answers in order, and nobody ever asks for a twelfth. They go before anyone gets a shape for it, both times, on time, with the accounts settled — and the second time Kyra does it, not Val: she comes in from the barges and says a year, perhaps two, and Val puts down what she is holding and says nothing for a moment, because it is the first time in a hundred and seventy years that Kyra Davan has proposed leaving a place she liked. And in the spring of the year they leave the barges they come down a road toward the sea with the light coming off it, and Val, walking on the outside out of habit for seventy years, says how much further? Not far now, Kyra says. It is eleven miles and a gate and a small crowded port under a hill, and it is called Trieste, and they stay for twenty-five years.

They choose Trieste for the worst reason available, which is that there is money in it, and Kyra says so out loud on the first afternoon so that neither of them can pretend afterward it had been anything else. Say the whole of it. She has spent nine years telling a man with barges which day to move a hull, and everything she knows is about water and roads and weather, and this is a place where absolutely everything that happens is water and roads and weather. I could work here for a century. That is not a small thing to have said. Then Val asks for the other half, because Kyra is the one who can see it and she wants it from her rather than from herself for once. Kyra has been counting since the gate: it is small, it looks big from the water and it isn't — under six thousand people inside one wall on one hill, half of them on the quay every morning, and one square that everything has to cross. Maribor was two thousand and lasted thirty-five years; this is three times that and will feel like a quarter of it, because they are all going to see them every single day. That's the whole sum, isn't it. That is the whole sum. A place where you are worth money is a place where you are looked at. I have not been able to find a version where you get the one without the other, and I have been looking since the barges. So Kyra sets the term herself, on a bollard at the top of the mole in the first warm week: twenty years. Then we go. Twenty is reasonable. Say it back to me in nineteen. I intend to. The town is Habsburg and has been since before there were Habsburgs worth the name and does not let you forget it, and is also entirely Italian in its mouth and its food and its arguments and does not let you forget that either: a cathedral with a lopsided front made of two older churches shoved together by somebody who ran out of money or patience, a castle the Emperor's people sit in and the town has opinions about, streets going down in a tangle to the water, salt pans, wine out of the hinterland, and a quay where every morning the whole business of the place happens — coasters for Venice and Ancona and down the Istrian shore — with Venice itself ninety miles across the water and unmentionable in polite company, taking the trade this town would like to have and having taken it for two hundred years. Kyra likes it within a fortnight and hates herself slightly for it. Nobody in Trieste ever decides to call them Valeria and Chiara; the town simply does it, the way water finds a channel. Valeria it already owns; Klára it chews for three weeks — Clara, Chlara, Chiara — and settles on the version its own mouth prefers. I'm Chiara now, apparently. Nobody asked me. Nobody asked either of us anything. That is the entire appeal of the place. And then, out of nowhere: do you realize that not one person on this planet has ever said my name? Seventy-two years — Frederick would not take Val's and Kyra never offered hers, and every human being since has called her something a village made up, and there is nobody alive anywhere who could pronounce it. I could. I know you could. I have not, though. In seventy-two years. Not once out loud, in case somebody heard it through a wall. Say it now. So Val says it, in a rented room above a lane in a Habsburg port, quietly, with the stresses in the right places, the way you say a word in your own language — and Kyra puts her face in her hands and does not say anything for a while, and Val comes and stands behind her and puts both hands on her shoulders and lets her be. The house is on a lane halfway up the hill: two rooms, a stair, a shuttered window that gets the morning. It is more than they have ever had, and that is a decision Val makes on paper first — two women who work and have no dependents and pay on the day are a thing this town understands, and a woman who lives too small in a port is a woman somebody starts wondering about. And with the house comes Marjeta: perhaps thirty, from the hinterland, flat village Slovene and enough Italian to argue about money, who does four houses on that lane and has since she was fifteen, and who arrives on the second morning without being sent for, looks at the state of the stair, and tells them what she will charge. Kyra likes her instantly, which is not the useful reaction. Every day, Val says that night, flatly. She will be in this house every day; she will see what they eat and what they don't; she will see the bed; she will know within a year whether either of them has ever been ill, and she will know it before they do, because that is what a woman who does four houses knows about the four houses. You want to send her away. I want to have looked at it properly, and I have, and I am going to say the conclusion out loud even though I dislike it. Sending her away is worse: a house on this lane without a woman in it is a house people talk about. There is no version where we are not seen. There is only a version where we are seen by one person who is paid, and a version where we are seen by everybody for free. That's not the rule. No. It is not the rule — which was stated in a passage before dawn in 1609 and made Kyra say it back on a road a mile south. She's not Dorothea. She is not Dorothea. She does not ask anything. She has asked us nothing in nine days and I have been counting. And then, since they are recording things: I am about to set aside the only rule I have ever been completely certain about, for a reason that is entirely sound, in the first month of the first place either of us has wanted to be in seventy years. Do you want me to argue? I would quite like you to argue. I'm not going to. You're right and I want to stay. The languages sort themselves out inside a season, which is to say Kyra learns to be understood and Val learns to be correct: Venetian on the quay, Italian in the town, German for the castle and anything on paper, Slovene behind the hill, which is near enough to what they carried out of Maribor that Kyra has it inside a month and finds the fact obscurely comforting. And between the two of them, with the shutter barred, English — which nobody in that town has ever heard, and which by the end of the first year they have stopped noticing they are using. It came off a barrel head in a valley from a merchant's son who had never once been out of Europe, and it is seventy years out of date, and it is theirs. Kyra tries a word off the quay in the autumn, an Istrian thing a boatman uses about a rope and a hull, and Val hears it out and says no. It's about two things being tied. It is about two things being tied by a third thing, which is a knot, and the word is about the knot. I would like a word that is about the two things. The work comes slowly and then all at once. Kyra spends eleven weeks being nobody on that quay; then one autumn morning she tells a factor she has spoken to twice not to send the small coaster down the Istrian shore that day, and he sends it, and the weather comes round out of the east at four in the afternoon, and it does not sink but it comes back in a state that costs him a great deal more than a day. He comes and finds her eleven days later — it had taken Blaž eleven days too, which she thinks about the whole way down the hill, deciding that men are the same everywhere and that eleven days is apparently how long it takes one of them to be wrong in public and then do something about it. Val's work comes in from the hinterland side, through Marjeta, who mentions in the way of such women that the family at the end of the lane has a child who will not keep anything down, and looks at nothing in particular while she says it. Val goes; the child keeps things down; and in the eleventh month of that year she sits on the end of the bed and says I have not touched anybody with my own hands in five weeks and I am extremely aware of it, and Kyra says nothing at all, because there is nothing to say that they have not said in a room over a cooper's shop sixty years before. At the end of that first year they go up above the castle on a clear winter night, which is the one thing in Trieste as good as the mountain had been: the town below and behind, the gulf in front, black and enormous with two anchored ships' lights on it, and the sky coming down to the water on three sides. It takes Kyra about four minutes to find it; it always does now. Higher than it was in Maribor. We are further south. It will go on getting higher and then it will start going down again, and in about a hundred and eighty years we will be looking at it out of a different ocean entirely and it will be somewhere else in the sky. And then: I have no idea why I said that. I have no information that supports any part of it. You're allowed to say things that aren't information. I am increasingly told so. Kyra looks at the smudge above the woman on the rock, which she has now looked at from a hut, a barn, a loft, a wall above a mill, a river town, a road, and a hill above a port — Kal somewhere under that light, alive this minute, alive tomorrow, and there is time. I like it here. I know you do. That's not me arguing for anything. Twenty years. I said twenty and I meant it. You did, Val says, and does not say the rest of it, and they go down the hill.

Val does the accounting in the third winter, because a new place is where she does the accounting, and because she has been putting it off since the barges, which is not like her and which she has noticed. It takes four evenings at the table with the notebook and two candles and a sheet of the cheap paper they sell on the quay, and Kyra leaves her to it and comes in and out and says nothing, which is the correct handling and which Val is grateful for and does not say so. What she is doing is making a column. The notebook has seventy-five years of other people in it: Frederick, dead; Ondrej, dead before that; the widow in Maribor who took their last two coins, dead in the fourth year; the man with the hand; Blaž, dead, which she worked out on the road south and did not say; Zofka, who would be seventy this year if she is anything and almost certainly is not. She puts them in order with the years beside them and looks down the column — seventy-five years, four towns, something over two hundred people either of them has spoken to more than twice, and she can put a line through most of them without any risk of being wrong. She has known this since Maribor; knowing a thing and having it in a column in your own hand are different; she has been avoiding the column for forty years, and she sees that she has been, and writes that down too, because it is data about herself. Then she does the part she came to do, and the two markers are where the work stops being work. The first is her father. Vaedom Sorin walked the sea wall with her in the last month before the ship, at a moderate pace, with his hands behind his back, and he had been a hundred and five or a hundred and six — she worked that out in a loft in Maribor in about 1620 and has never improved on it — and he had been well, in the way a man of that age is well, which is to say with perhaps three hundred years in front of him and a seat in an Assembly and an opinion about the budget. She writes the figure, adds seventy-six, and looks at what comes out. A hundred and eighty-one. She sits in front of it for a long time. There is no version of it in which he is dead; that is the whole of the arithmetic and it takes four seconds, and she has been refusing to do it since about 1650. He is alive. He is on that coast this morning. He is a hundred and eighty-one, which on Sethal is a man with most of a life still in him, and he has spent seventy-six of those years being the father of a woman whose ship did not come back. The second marker is two lines and she writes them last: G. — one hundred and sixteen. K. — one hundred and sixteen. Kyra comes in on the fourth evening with her hair wet and finds her sitting in front of it. Finished? And? Val turns the paper round, and Kyra reads down the column of the dead and stops at the bottom and does not move. You've written him down. You've never written him down. I have never written him down, because for seventy-six years I have been carrying a figure for his death, and I built it out of nothing, and I did it because a dead man is a thing a person can finish. And she did the sum properly on Tuesday and there isn't one: he is a hundred and eighty-one. He is well. He will very likely see three hundred and fifty, and he is going to spend every year of it not knowing, and there is no method by which I can get one word to that coast. Kyra comes round the table and crouches and puts both hands over Val's, which are still flat on the boards, and stays there. A hundred and sixteen. If the years run straight. They run straight. I've been saying if for seventy-six years because if lets you not think about it. Kal is a hundred and sixteen and she is fine; she is in a room somewhere being quiet at somebody; she has a house and a chair and a bad knee by now and about three hundred years left, and every single one of them she will spend being a woman whose mother went up in a ship on a Fourthday and did not come back. And I talked over the last sentence she ever started. Val does not tell her it is all right. I would rather they were dead, Kyra says into her own arm, and then immediately: I don't mean that. I know exactly what you mean and I have meant it twice this week. It is easier to grieve a thing than to be unable to reach one. That is not a wicked thought. It is the correct description of a worse position. And then nothing happens, which is the entire difficulty. Val had expected some kind of event, a day on which it became true — and it has been true since 1607, and the only thing that has changed is that she has written it on a sheet of paper from the quay, and she goes on going up the hill afterward, and Marjeta goes on beating a rug in the lane. What she cannot do is answer the question. Val Sorin has spent her whole life converting fear into quantity — how long, how many, how much further, what is the interval — and it is not a habit but the instrument, the thing she has instead of the way other people simply feel better after a while. And the instrument now works perfectly and gives her an answer she cannot use: three hundred years, four people, four hundred years of light. Everybody is alive; everybody will go on being alive; and the distance between her and all four of them is a quantity with no operation attached to it. I don't know how to hold it. I am not distressed — I want to be accurate about that. I am not grieving, which is the difficulty; there is nothing to grieve. I have four living people and no road to any of them and three hundred years to sit with it, and I keep putting it down and picking it up to see whether it has become something I can work on. Mine's got a shape, Kyra says. Everyone here. Marjeta. The factor. Zofka, who's already dead, and I've only just worked that out this week. Everybody I am ever going to like on this planet goes in front of me, and everybody I actually love is alive four hundred years of light away and getting on with it without me. Her voice is steady and Val, lying beside her, knows precisely what that costs. That's not a number either. But it's a shape. The glass comes into the port in the spring of the fourth year, and Kyra comes up the hill at a speed that makes Val put down what she is holding before she has heard a word. There's a Dutchman on the quay with tubes. Glass in both ends. He's got four of them and he's selling two. And then, with her hands going: he says you point it at the sky and things are bigger. How much does he want. It is a great deal — more than either of them has ever spent on any object on this world, and about a third more than Venice, as Val establishes over two days of asking, after which she goes back and gets some of it off him. They carry it up the hill wrapped in sacking, one at each end, like a pair of thieves. It is not, as an instrument, very good, which Val establishes in the first hour on the moon, and says so — and then says nothing else for a long time, because the moon through eleven feet of very bad glass is still the moon with mountains on it, and she has known it had mountains on it since she was nine and has never once looked at them with her own eye. It takes three clear nights to get to the other thing, because Kyra insists on the moon twice and then on Jupiter, which has four points of light strung out beside it that move from night to night and about which Val has a great deal to say. On the fourth night they turn it on the smudge. Kyra looks first, for a long time, and says nothing, and then stands back and makes a gesture at the eyepiece that means go on then. It is bigger. That is all: an oval of pale nothing, brighter in the middle, tilted, with soft edges that go away if you look at them directly, four times the size it is to the naked eye, and it does not resolve into anything whatsoever — no structure, no lights, nothing in it you could have called a place. It's no closer. I know. I want to be precise, because you are going to want to hear something else and I am not going to be able to give it to you. It is larger in the field, and that is an artifact of the glass; nothing about where it is has changed and nothing about what they can do has changed, and the light coming out of that tube left before there was anybody on Sethal to see it, exactly as it did on a rock above Dymná. This instrument cannot show us home. It can show us a bigger smudge. I know, Val. Then why — because I want to look at it. And that, Val finds, is not an argument she has any answer to at all. She sets it up for her on the clear nights after that, for the rest of the time they are in that town: it is heavy and awkward and wants a wall to lie along, and Kyra could not have got it up the hill by herself, and Val never once makes her ask, and on nights when the sky comes over she is the one who says so first and carries it back in. She also, within a year, has a better one, because she asks the Dutchman four questions the second time he comes through and a Venetian glass factor eleven more, and because there turns out to be a thing that can be done with the length of the tube. And she learns, from a Venetian in a wine shop who is pleased to find a woman who can follow him, that a German had written about that particular smudge seventy years before and had said it was like a candle seen through a piece of horn. Val comes up the hill with that and gives it to Kyra without preamble. Somebody wrote it down. Seventy years ago. In a book. He gave it four lines. Kyra sits down on the wall with the glass beside her and puts her hands over her mouth for a moment. They've noticed us. They have noticed a candle through horn. They've noticed, Val. Somebody on this planet looked up at where my daughter is and thought it was worth four lines. Seventy years ago. And they'll write more. They'll get better glass — you got better glass in a year — and in a hundred years they'll write more, and in three hundred they'll — and she stops, because she has heard where the sentence is going. Val does not stop her getting there; she stands on a hill above a Habsburg port with her arms folded against the cold and lets her. That's not nothing. No. It is not nothing. It is the first time either of them has said anything of the kind out loud, and it will be a hundred and eighty years before there is any reason to say it again, and Val writes four lines about the evening in the notebook when they get down the hill.

Val has a man for four months in the second year, and Kyra, who has been waiting seventy-three years for this to happen again, enjoys every bit of it. He comes twice a year off the Venice boat with drugs and books and a case of things in stoppered glass, and he is called Domenico, and he is fifty and has buried a wife and has the specific dryness of a man who has spent thirty years selling to people who do not understand what they are buying. Val meets him because she goes down to the quay to argue about a price and stays to argue about what is in the jar. Kyra gets the whole thing that night, unasked, in the flat voice: there is a man on the quay and I have been thinking about him for two days and I would like you to know that before anything happens rather than afterward. Is he clever? He is not clever. He is informed, which at this point I find I will take. And then: are you going to be strange about this. I have never once been strange about this. You were strange about the man at the barges. I was strange about the man at the barges because he was boring, Val, and I had to sit through three dinners with him. Is this one boring? He knows what is actually in half the jars he sells and lies about the other half on purpose and knows I know. Then go away and stop telling me about it. It lasts the four months he is in the port and ends when the boat goes back, which both of them understood from the beginning and which is why it works; he comes through the following spring and it does not start again and neither of them makes anything of that. He brings her a book once, which Val keeps for a hundred years. What Kyra notices and does not say is that Val comes home from those evenings talkative — not about him, about anything, a woman with the lid off — and that she has not seen that in a very long time. Jakob Peršin comes up out of the hinterland with wine in their first autumn, four times a year at first and then every month, and by the third year he has a shed on the quay and a partner in Gorizia and an opinion about every skipper in the port. He is thirty-two, with a flat hinterland Slovene Kyra can follow before she can follow anybody else in that town, and that is how it starts: he hears her arguing with a Venetian in bad Italian and says something to her over the man's shoulder in a language the Venetian does not have, and it is rude, and it is accurate, and Kyra laughs out loud on the quay. You're the weather woman. I'm somebody's weather woman. I'm not yours. Not yet, says Jakob Peršin. She tells Val that night, because that is what they do and because there is nothing to tell. A wine man from behind the hill made a joke at me on the quay. Was it good? It was very good and it was at a Venetian's expense and half the mole heard it. Then I expect you'll be seeing him, Val says, and goes on with what she is doing. It takes about a year, because Kyra is not in a hurry and neither is he. What she likes about him, she works out afterward, is that he is the first person in seventy-three years on this planet who talks to her at her own speed: Blaž talked to her about loads, the factor talks about wind, Marjeta about the lane — and Jakob talks about everything, fast, over the top of her, with his hands going, and does not defer to her and does not perform at her, and when she says something he has not thought of he stops and says so. He is also, and she does not consider this a small thing, extremely good-looking in a way the hinterland produces and the town does not, and he knows it, and does not mind being told so. It is a warm year, one of the warmest she has on this world. And every part of it goes through the house, which is not a discipline by then but simply how they live: Val knows when it starts and when he is in the port and knows, because Kyra tells her over the Sunday table with her chin on her hand, the unremarkable fact that he talks in his sleep in a language he claims not to speak. German. He says he hasn't got any German. Everybody behind that hill has German and pretends not to. It's political. And then: you're happy. I'm happy. Good, Val says, and means it, and Kyra knows she means it, and that is the whole of the conversation. He asks her in the fourth year, on the mole, in the evening, having plainly worked out what he was going to say and then said it badly, which she finds she likes more than if he had done it well. She says no — kindly and immediately, because the one thing she is not going to do to that man is let him stand there while she thinks about it. Why not? And here she gives him a reason that is true: because I don't stay anywhere. That's all of it, Jakob. I've never been in one place more than — she comes within a syllable of saying thirty-five years, and does not — more than a while. I came up that road and I'll go down it. That's not a thing about you. If I were the staying sort, I'd be having a very different conversation on this mole. He takes it better than she expected, and she is slightly annoyed about that, and understands why, and is ashamed of herself. When do you go down the road. I don't know. Right, says Jakob, and puts his hands in his coat and looks at the water a while, and then says something about a skipper who has put a load of oil down in the wrong shed, and they walk back up the quay talking about the oil. And then he does not go. That is all of it, and it happens so slowly that Kyra cannot afterward point at a week in which it became a thing: he does not press her, he does not ask again, he goes on coming down with the wine and shouting at skippers and finding her on the mole, and the summer after that it is still what it has been, and the one after that. He does not marry. She notices in the sixth or seventh year, because a woman on the lane mentions it — a widow in Gorizia who would have had him, a girl in the town whose father made an approach — and Kyra says something light and goes up the hill with it sitting on her chest. She does not tell Val for two days. Then she does, because of the pact, and Val listens to the whole of it and says nothing at all for a moment. I'm not going to say anything you'll want. Say it anyway. It isn't about him and I want to be clear about that first, because you are about to hear it as though it is. Then, with her hands flat on the table, which Kyra learned to read seventy years ago and has never got used to: a man who is refused and goes is a man who was asking a question. A man who is refused and stays is a man who has decided to wait for an answer, and a person who is waiting pays attention. That is all waiting is. He will be in this port looking at you for as long as it takes, and the thing he is looking at is the only thing on this world that neither of us can afford to have looked at for a long time. He's not looking at me like that. He is looking at you with everything he has, Kyra, which is what you like about him. So what do you want. You want me to end it. I want nothing. I have raised it once and I am going to stop. And then: it is your man and your friendship and your judgment, and my judgment is not better than yours about people and never has been. I am not going to be the woman who decides what you can carry. I have done that to you twice and I am not doing it again. She gets up and goes to the window. That's the whole of it. I won't raise it again. She does not raise it again for seventeen years. Kyra sits at that table after Val has gone to bed, with the fire going down, and does the thing properly, because Val has earned that much. He has never asked her where she is from — seven years, not once, because he is a hinterland man in an Italian port where half his own people are from somewhere else and it is the least interesting question available. He has no reason to look for anything and there is nothing to look for: he is a wine man with a shed who likes her and who has been told no and has decided, in the way men of his particular sort decide things, that he would rather have the part of her he can have than none of it. And he is the only person in that town she can talk to at her own speed, and she has spent seventy-three years being slightly too slow for everybody on this planet except the woman asleep in the next room. And Val said it once, without pressing, and put it down. Kyra banks the fire and gets into the bed and lies in the dark next to her and says, to the ceiling, quietly: you're wrong about him. I know you think so. Say you heard me. I heard you, Val says, and turns over, and puts her arm across her, and that is the end of it for seventeen years.

Kyra's mark goes first, as it was always going to, and Val's goes four years after it, and neither of them says anything on the day either of them notices. They have been fading since the mountain: on a tarn shore in 1607 Kyra reported that Val's was going and admitted hiding it for six weeks, and after that there was nothing to hide and they simply watched — a thing low on the left above the hip, about the size of a palm, the same shape in the same place on both of them, hers from a boy four systems out who said the second half of the sentence and Val's from eleven chairs on a fourth terrace, and for a hundred and forty years the only fact about either woman that the other could see with her own eyes. By the tenth year in Trieste there is nothing on Kyra at all; by the fourteenth nothing on Val either, or nothing that can be called a thing — a faint difference in the skin you could persuade yourself out of, and that Val, who does not persuade herself out of anything, has stopped claiming to see. It comes up in the dark on an ordinary evening, the way the worst of it always does. Kyra has her mouth on the place where Val's had been, which she has done for eighty years and first did the night after the tarn, and which started as an answer to something and long since stopped needing one. She stops. Val, who misses nothing, says: what. It's gone. That's all. I know it's gone, I've known for a year, I've been doing it anyway. Val turns over, which takes some arranging, and gets a hand into Kyra's hair at the back of her head. Do it anyway. It doesn't — it does not have to be for anything. That is the entire finding of the last eighty years and you were the one who found it. And then, in the low flat register she uses for the things that matter most: there is nothing there. Put your mouth on it. So Kyra does, and lies with her face against the place where a thing had been that only the two of them ever knew about, and thinks, with the clarity that arrives in her like weather: the last piece of evidence that we came from anywhere is gone off both of us. She does not say it; Val works it out within the fortnight and says it herself over the Sunday table, which is what the Sunday table is for. Here is what is true in that house in the fourteenth year, and neither of them has said any of it out loud. There are two permanent objects on this world and they are each other; everything else in that town is on a clock, and the clock is sixty years, and both of them have had the column and the four evenings with the candles and discussed it for a month and then less and then not at all. And they have gone on as before — which means every ordinary night in that house is now a night in the one arrangement on this planet that is not temporary, and both of them know it, and neither has touched the other while thinking about it. Val does it first, because by that year Val is usually the one who does it first, and Kyra has stopped being surprised and has not stopped noticing. In fact she has been noticing all day: she came in at noon and found Val at the table with the accounts and said something about a skipper, and Val answered correctly and did not look up, and Kyra got halfway down the lane before it arrived, out of nowhere, with no argument attached — she has decided something. She thought at first it was work. Then she thought about the set of the shoulders and the stillness of the hands on the boards, and stood in a lane in the middle of a Tuesday and went warm from the collarbones up, and then had to go and talk to a man about oil. You've been at it since this morning. I have no idea what you mean. I got to the bottom of the lane and had to stop. That is a failure of discipline on your part and not evidence of anything. Val. And then she says it, flatly, with her hands still: I have been thinking about you since before you came in at noon. I thought about you while you were telling me about the skipper and I did not hear the second half of it. I have thought about you at intervals all afternoon, in some detail, and once for long enough that a woman asked me twice whether her mother should take the powder at night. She does not look away. I am telling you because you asked and because I find I would rather say it than have you work it out, and I am aware that four years ago I would have denied the whole thing. Kyra has to sit down on the edge of the bed. That's not fair. It is fair. It is true. Say the last part again. The powder. The woman who asked you twice. I did not hear her, because I was thinking about your hands. It is slow, and unhurried in a way that has nothing to do with patience, and somewhere in the middle of it the thing neither of them has touched comes into the room. Val is the one it arrives in first: she has Kyra's hair pushed off the back of her neck and her mouth at the top of her spine and the whole length of the night in front of her, and it goes through her without any warning at all — you are the only thing on this world I do not have to leave. She has been doing the arithmetic on a finite quantity her entire life; everything she has ever valued came with a number on it — a term, a placement, a watch rota, a survey, a daughter at eighteen, ten years with a man who wrote out the watering for four plants — and she has always known how much of a thing there was, because it is how she decides what to spend. Everything in this town has a number too, and she wrote most of them down eleven winters ago. And nothing whatsoever on the other side of this: no date, no decade, no town they will eventually have to walk out of, no last night in this or any other room, because whatever room it is, in whatever century, there will be the two of them in it. She does not know how to want something that is not going to be taken away. What she does instead, in the absence of a method, is stop holding anything back at all — and Kyra, who has known this woman for a hundred and forty-six years and been in this bed with her for eighty-seven, feels the difference at once and says her name in a voice that does not sound like hers. The light comes up and stays up, brighter than the room has any use for, and Kyra's eyes go and do not come back for a long time, and neither of them says one word about either. Afterward Kyra does her own version of the same sum and does not enjoy it as much. Joy first, and she records it honestly: joy, enormous, physical, the whole length of her, at the plain fact that this goes on. And then the other thing underneath — that she has spent a hundred and sixty-four years being a person who finishes things, and this world has just handed her a list of people she will have to put down half done, one after another, for two hundred years. She cannot leave a thing unfinished; it is the whole of her temperament and her mother said so when she was nine. And there is exactly one thing on this planet she will never have to put down, and she is in bed with it. Say it. I've started saying goodbye to people before I've met them. I did it to the boy on the mole last week. He's eleven and he's good and I caught myself putting him down before he'd finished telling me his name, because what's the point. And then: and then I come up this hill and there's you, and you're the only door in this town I don't have to do it at. I have the same problem from the other side. I have been costing everything in that town since the winter of the column, in years, without deciding to. And? And you are the only line in it with nothing in the column, which is the most frightening arithmetic I have ever done and also the simplest. They come at the words sideways an hour later, the way they always do: Kyra has one off the lane from Marjeta's cousin's spring wedding, and says it, and Val turns it over in the dark. No. You haven't even — it's a marriage word. It's a good marriage word. It's about two people making a — it is about two people making a promise for a life, and I have been going through the marriage words for eleven years, in four languages, and they all have the same fault, and I did not see it until the fourth evening with the candles. Say it. Every one of them has a death in it. The room is quiet. That is what they are for. Every marriage word on this planet is a wager about sixty years. Until one of us is carried out. For the rest of my days. All my life. They are not sentimental — they are precise, and what they are being precise about is that a life is short and the promise has a known length, and that is what makes it a promise at all. And: we are going to be saying it to each other in three hundred years in a country that does not exist yet. There is no word on this world built to hold that, because nobody on this world has ever needed one. Then it's not that they're wrong. They are not wrong. They are the right words for everybody except us, which is worse, and which is why I keep nearly taking them. I nearly took that one. I want that on the record. I held it for four seconds and I could see us using it. That's the second time you've nearly taken one. It is the fourth. I have not mentioned two of them. Val. They did not survive the night. I have a procedure. The shutter goes gray at the edges eventually and neither of them has slept much and neither minds. We're no closer. Fourteen years and four languages. Seventy-eight, Val corrects with her eyes shut, counting from the room over the cooper's — seventy-eight years and five languages, if we are being accurate, and we are no closer, and I would like to register that I am not troubled by this and that I do not entirely understand why. Kyra puts her arm over her and does not answer, because she does understand why, and because it is not yet a thing either of them can say at the hour of the morning it happens to be.

Kyra refused the rule in a room over a cooper's shop seventy years before and Val never raised it again, so what they have instead of a rule is a great deal of quiet engineering that Val does on her own and does not describe. She understands the position perfectly well: Kyra is not going to check a room before she touches her, she said so at a table with the fire going, and she was right. But Trieste is under six thousand people on one hill, the lane has four households in it, the woman who does the washing for all four is in their house every day, and there is one square that everything crosses. So Val builds around her. The bed goes where the door's angle does not reach it; the shutter on the stair window is the one she mended herself and does not stick; she learns which of the four households has somebody in the yard at which hours, which takes a season, and knows by the third year which window across the lane has a woman behind it at four in the afternoon. She stops coming up the lane with Kyra when it can be helped — she comes up two minutes behind her, which is invisible if you do it every day for twenty years and extremely visible if you start doing it after something has gone wrong. None of it is discussed. Kyra knows about the shutter and the two minutes and not about the other eleven things, and Val has decided — in the one place where she still permits herself to decide anything for another person — that telling her would have meant asking her, and asking her was settled at a table in Maribor. What they have in public is a wrist. It arrives in the fifth year on the quay on a bad morning: a boy off a coaster has gone into the water between the hull and the stone and has not come up for a long time, and Kyra was thirty feet away and could not get there, and when it is over and the boy is coughing on the quay there is a quarter of an hour in which she is no use to anybody. There are two hundred people on that mole. Val comes up beside her, shoulder to shoulder, facing the water like everyone else, and puts two fingers on the inside of Kyra's wrist, at the seam of the sleeve, where a hand hangs. It does not look like anything from four feet away. She holds it about as long as it takes to say a short prayer, which is what everybody around them is doing, and then takes it away and says something about the boy's mother. Kyra uses it three weeks later, in the fish market, for no reason at all. It becomes the entire vocabulary: in twenty-five years in that town it is, in public, the whole of it. In the house, the thing Val does most often is the lamp. Kyra gets headaches — has since the change, a slow pressure behind the eyes that comes the day before the weather and has nothing to do with the weather, and that she never mentions, because Kyra Davan does not mention things of that kind. Val can see it; there is a way the light goes in her face. So on those evenings she puts out the lamp nearest her without being asked and moves the other to the far end of the table and goes on with whatever she is saying as though nothing has happened. The first time, Kyra stops talking in the middle of a sentence. What? Nothing. Go on. She says nothing about it for eleven years, and then one evening in the sixteenth year, to the ceiling: you've been doing the lamp since before I knew I had a face. I have been doing the lamp since the fourth year. I know. I counted. What goes wrong between them in those years is not the discipline but who it costs. Val is superb at it, which is the difficulty: she was trained in saying very little the way other children are trained in an instrument, and going sealed in a room is not an effort but the resting state, the thing she has to come out of rather than go into. She can stand in the fish market being pleasant to a woman for four minutes with nothing on her face and then walk up the hill with her heart going. Kyra can do it, and does it well, and hates every hour of it, and it takes something out of her that it does not take out of Val — and they are therefore not having the same conversation about it. It comes out once, badly, in the twelfth year, on the stairs. Kyra has put a hand on the back of her neck in the lane, which she does, because she never agreed not to, and Val has not reacted at all: not pulled away, simply not reacted, has gone on up the stairs saying something about a bill. At the top: do you know what you look like when you do that? Nothing. That's the answer. You look like nothing. I put my hand on you in a lane and I have known you a hundred and forty-six years and I couldn't have told from your face that anything had touched you, and you did it without thinking about it, and you'll do it again tomorrow. Yes. How much of you is left in there, when you're out in that town? Because I can feel exactly how much of me is left and it isn't much and it gets less every year, and you go down that hill and you're comfortable. Val stands in her own doorway with a bill in her hand. All of it is in there. It is simply behind a door I have had since I was eighteen years old and can open and shut without looking. You are describing the single most useful thing that ever happened to me and you are correct that it is also the worst thing, and I have known both of those since a fourth terrace, and I do not have a way to only have the good half. I hate it. I know you do. I'm not going to stop hating it. I would think considerably less of you if you did. The thing that matters has already happened by then, and neither of them knows it, and it was reported and dismissed in a single evening in the tenth year. Kyra had come in late and said, from the door, with her boots still on: my eyes went with Jakob tonight. His shed. Late. There was nobody. It was dark and it was quick and I turned my head, and he didn't say anything, and I don't think he saw. You don't think. He'd have said something. He says everything. If that man had seen a woman's eyes go gold in a shed he would have been off the stool and across the floor in four seconds and would have been asking her about it every week since; he is not a man who sits on things. Val considered it for some time and found that she agreed. All right, she said. And it was all right: reported the same night under the pact, exactly as it should have been, assessed together, reasonable, based on ten years of accurate observation of a particular man — and wrong. She finds out in the seventeenth year, in the autumn, in the most ordinary way available. They are on the mole, and Jakob is talking about a skipper, and about the lamps the Venetians have started putting on the mole heads at Malamocco, and about how this town will not have one in his lifetime because this town cannot agree on the color of the sea. And then: it's a good light, that. It's not like a flame. What isn't? The one they use. Gold, but it doesn't move. Like a thing that's lit from the inside instead of the front. He drinks. You only see it once and then you know it when you see it again. Kyra says something about the Venetians; she does not remember afterward what. She walks up the hill and comes into the house and stands with her back against the door. When. Seven years ago. The shed. When did he see it again. And there it is, and Kyra has already got there, because she has had the length of the hill. I don't know. Val sits down and takes it apart out loud, because the alternative is letting Kyra watch her face and guess. He saw it seven years ago and said nothing. That is the first fact and it is the worst one. They established that he could not sit on a thing, on good evidence, and were wrong, and the way they were wrong is that he could sit on this for seven years. A man who asks is a man who wants an answer. A man who does not ask has already decided what the answer is, and has decided that he would rather have you than have it confirmed. That's not — and tonight he told you. Not asked. Told, sideways, on a mole, about a lamp, in a way that could not be answered and was not meant to be. He wanted you to know that he knows. That is not a man collecting evidence. That is a man who has been alone with something for seven years and could not carry it one more winter. The fire has gone down and neither of them has touched it. We should go. They argue for four days, and Kyra's case is not a bad one and Val never afterward pretends it was: seven years of doing nothing weighed against four seconds in a shed; nobody has heard it, and in a town of six thousand a thing like that reaches the hill inside a month; he is not devout and the priest at the cathedral bores him and he has said so in front of Val at a table; and tonight he went out of his way to say the one thing that would tell her he knew and would tell nobody else anything, which is the act of a man protecting her. And underneath it, said plainly on the third day, because Kyra Davan does not hide her reasons even when they are the weak ones: I've got three years left of what I said and I want them. I said twenty on the mole in the first week and I meant it and I'm at seventeen. I have a man I can talk to and a factor who pays me for what I am and a woman downstairs who has never asked me one question in seventeen years, and it is the best life I have had on this planet, and you are asking me to put it down eleven weeks after I finally stopped counting how long I had left of it. That is the true reason. That's the true reason. The rest is also true. But that's the one. Here is what Val does, and she thinks about it for the rest of her life. She has the figures and they have not changed: a man who has held a thing for seven years and has just stopped being able to hold it, in a town where nothing will happen for a year and then there will be a bad winter. She has said it once. She believes it entirely. And she has spent eighty years learning not to be the woman who decides what Kyra Davan can carry — she did it on a bridge and she did it for eight days with a notebook, and both times she was the one who was wrong about a person, and she stood in a room nine years ago and said out loud that her judgment about people was not better than Kyra's and never had been. It was true when she said it; it was the honest correction of a real fault; she had worked for it. All right, Val says, on the fourth day. You don't mean that. I mean the words. I do not agree with you and I am not going to pretend to. It is your man, it is your judgment, and you have three years of a thing you said out loud in front of me. I will hold to it. I would like one condition and it is not a rule and you may refuse it: when the three years are up we go. Not discussed. Not weighed again. The autumn of the twentieth year, roads or no roads. Kyra puts out her hand across the table, which is not a thing either of them does, and Val takes it. Done. Val has, at that moment, eight years left in that town and does not know it. They go up above the castle that night because it is clear, and Val carries the glass because she always carries the glass, and they stay up there until the cold gets into them. It is a good evening — that is the thing Val cannot get over afterward; it is one of the best they have in that town, Kyra laughing at something at the third hour of the morning with her head back, the smudge doing what it does, the two of them coming down the hill arguing cheerfully about whether the Venetians will ever put a lamp on the mole. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is going to be wrong for eight years. Val puts the glass back in its box and shoots the bar and goes to bed beside her, and does not lie awake, and that is the last decision either of them makes freely in the town of Trieste.

It begins, as most of the important things between them do, because Val is counting. They are above the castle on a hard clear night in the eighteenth winter with the second glass — the long one she argued a Venetian into making — lying along the wall on its bag of sand. Val is timing something: she has got interested over four winters in the fact that the four points beside Jupiter are not where they were the previous night, and has begun writing down when they go behind, which is a useless activity she defends on the grounds that she has to do something with her hands. She counts under her breath while she waits. Kyra hears it and goes still. Do that again. Count. Val, holding a number, says the next four out loud without thinking — and then hears herself, four syllables too late. They are not in English, or Italian, or German, or Slovene, or the dead village tongue out of Spiš. You always do it. When you're not thinking. You've done it for ninety years. I have not been aware of it. I know you haven't. Neither was I, the first forty times. And then: that's the bottom of you, that is. Everything else you've learned sits on top. Val stands with her hand on a very expensive piece of glass and has an extremely unwelcome thought. We've got a whole language. No — I mean we've got a whole language and we've been going round this planet for eighty years with a lamp looking for a word. She is not being funny. We've had five. English, and the village, and the country's, and the Italian, and Slovene, and I've been saying five for years and it's six, isn't it. It has always been six. So why haven't we looked in ours? You know why. I want it said. So Val says it, in the flat voice with her hand still on the glass. There are words; they both know which ones; and she is not avoiding them, she is describing them. They are not general. That is the whole of the difficulty. On Sethal a word for two people carries the entire apparatus with it: say the first one and you have said the bond — the lodging requirements, the declaration, the register, a room with a hundred and forty people in it and somebody at the front asking both of you whether you are willing. Say the second and you have said a family, which means houses and an alliance and two sets of people being pleased in a long room. I was there for the hundred and forty. I stood in it. I said yes in front of every person I was related to. And I did not, and the fourth terrace is what happens to the people who do not, and both of those facts are inside those words as well. That is what a word out of a civilization is. It is not a sound. It is the whole building, and you cannot take one room out of it. So they're the wrong words. They are the right words for something else. Accurate, precise, describing an arrangement four thousand years of people worked out and a great many of them were happy inside — and they have nothing whatever to do with what is between you and me, and if I said one to you in this town tonight I would be filing us under a heading that was built for something we have never done and are never going to do. All right. Now the other half. The one you just skipped, which I noticed, and which you knew I'd notice. Kyra gets down off the wall. There's a third thing. It isn't the bond and it isn't the family. It's the one people say to each other in a doorway, and everybody on that planet has it, and nine-year-olds say it to their mothers, and it doesn't come with a building. You know it. I know it. Every single person in my house used it and so did every single person in yours. Val does not say anything. There's nobody on this world who could understand it. Not one person. We could stand in the middle of that square at noon and say it at the tops of our voices and the whole town would hear two foreign women making a noise. Yes. Ninety years, Val. Ninety years and it's been in both our mouths the entire time and free, and we have never once. No. So say why. Because it isn't the building. You've explained the building and the building's real and it doesn't touch this one. Her voice has gone flat and careful, which in her is the equivalent of a shout. You're the one who wants a word. You've been the one who wants a word since a morning in Maribor when I said it to be pleasant. And there's one lying on the ground and you won't pick it up, and I've watched you not pick it up for ninety years, and tonight I'd like to know. The silence goes on for some time. Val discovers, standing on a hill above a Habsburg port with a telescope on a bag of sand, that she does not have it: she goes looking, in order, the way she goes looking for everything, and the answer is not in the place where her answers are. I don't know. You do. I have four explanations and all four of them are constructions. I can tell the difference. I have been assuming for ninety years that I was being careful. I have just gone and looked at the carefulness and there is nothing underneath it. And Kyra says: it's mine, then. The reason. It's mine and I've had it since the mountain and I've never given it to you. Do you want it? Yes. You asked me a question on the shoulder above the tarn. The first autumn. You'd just run the ridge for the first time on that leg and you came back and you were — she stops, and goes round it. She had four seconds and could have said any of it; she had been saying true things out loud on that mountain since the spring and every one had cost her less than she expected. I could have said it. You said I was slow on the turns. I said you were slow on the turns. Her breath goes white. And I've never told you why, and the why is this: I went through everything I had and there was nothing in it that fitted, and what I found instead was that I didn't want a word for it. Because a word would have made it a thing you could put down. Val stands very still. Say that again. A word is a handle. That's what a word is for. You put one on a thing so you can pick it up and carry it about and hand it to somebody and set it on a shelf and come back to it later. Her hands come out and then drop. Everything in my life that's had a name on it has been a thing I could put down. The bond had a name, and I said yes to it in front of a hundred and forty people, and then Emrin and I spent two years taking it apart. The chair had a name. The house had a name. I've handed back every single thing anybody ever gave me a word for. And I stood on that shoulder in the cold and understood that if I made one for this, then one day there'd be an afternoon where I set it on a shelf, and I would rather have gone off that mountain than have that afternoon exist. And so: not the bond. Not the family. Not the doorway one either, and not because it's too small — because it's a handle, and it's the best handle anyone on my world ever made, and I have been keeping it away from this for ninety years the same as you have, and I only worked out tonight that that's what I was doing. Val does not argue, which is the whole of her answer, and both of them know it and neither remarks on it: she has spent ninety years assembling a case for a word that means one thing, has been handed a reason not to have one that she had never considered and cannot fault, and the correct response to a finding you cannot fault is silence. What she says, after a while, is: Kal asked us. On the turf below the ridge at the Headland, after the last meet of the season, with four hundred people round us eating out of a tray. She said she had been asked four times that year by people in her own house and had never once had an answer, and she would like one. She is looking at the black gulf. And I stood there and did not say anything for four seconds, and you said we ran together, and I said yes. You were grateful. I have never been more grateful for a sentence in my life and I have never told you so. And then: I have thought for a hundred and twelve years that the two of us failed that girl on a hillside. I have carried it as a failure. I would like to put on the record that as of tonight I am not sure it was one. It wasn't an answer. It was the only true thing available in four seconds, in front of a witness, about a thing that has no name in six languages. I have spent a hundred and twelve years thinking I withheld something from my daughter. I withheld nothing. There was nothing there to withhold. That is worse in one way and a great deal better in another and I am going to be some time deciding which. They stop looking after that night, and nobody announces it: Kyra simply comes up the stairs one week in the following spring with something she has heard off a Greek on the quay, gets two sentences in, stops, looks at Val, and says no, I know, and puts the kettle where it goes. Eighty-two years, six languages, and a great many candidates, of which Val had nearly taken four. They do not feel defeated by it — Val examines that afterward with care, because she had expected to, and the word that keeps coming is finished: not the search but the question. They asked something for ninety years and got an answer, and the answer is that there is nothing on any shelf anywhere that is going to fit, and that they had both known it and had both been protecting it from the shelf. They stay up on the wall a while longer, because the sky is as good as it ever gets there, and Kyra puts her eye to the glass and finds the smudge and holds it a long time. It's the same. It is exactly the same. It will be the same for a very long time. That light left before there was anybody on Sethal to see it. She straightens up and rubs her eye with the back of her wrist. There was no language when that came out of there. There was nobody standing in a room asking anybody whether they were willing. There wasn't a word for anything at all yet. And Val looks at it — the small pale tilted thing a German gave four lines to — and understands she is looking at a place with no vocabulary in it whatsoever, which has made every word she has ever been handed and has not yet made the one she wants. No. Not yet. And they carry the glass down the hill between them, one at each end, the way they have for fourteen years.

They leave Trieste in the spring of the twentieth year, which is what they agreed, and they go north instead of west, which is not. The agreement had been the autumn; Val shortened it herself in February with an argument she believed at the time and examined a great deal afterward — that if they are going anyway they should do the mountain first, while they still have the money and the health of the thing, and come down the other side and go on west from there. Kyra said yes inside four seconds. Neither of them said the true version, which is that they are both going to the mountain, that the west is a direction they have never once discussed in twenty years, and that a journey with a destination in it is not a departure. It takes most of the summer: up through the Carniolan valleys and over into Styria and along the roads Kyra read for Blaž for thirty-five years, past the Drava town, which they do not enter, and north and east into country neither has crossed since they were ninety years younger and had nothing at all. It is a hard journey and also, Kyra thinks afterward, one of the happiest stretches of her life — they have money for once and use it on nothing and sleep out when the weather is fine because it is better than the inns, and Val has a stick she does not need and uses for beating things out of the way, and they talk for eleven hours a day about nothing. On a bad afternoon in the eighth week, in rain, with a pass still to cross: how much further? Not far now. It is another day and a half, and they both know it, and Val says so, and Kyra says she had been being encouraging, and Val says that encouragement is a form of inaccuracy and she would prefer a number. She gets a number. She complains about the number. The story reaches them two valleys short, at an inn below the Spiš side, from the girl who brings the food and asks where they have come from and gets four of the eleven answers and then asks whether they are going up. The high valleys. You want to be careful up there. And then she tells it, because she has an audience and it is raining: two women came down out of the snow a long time ago — before her grandmother, before her grandmother's mother — and nobody knew where from; they lived up on the mountain a whole winter where nobody could live and came down on the seventh day and bought salt; one of them could not be killed, having come down with her leg in pieces and been walking on it by the autumn; the other pulled a child out of a flood that took two men, and a woman saw her face while she was doing it, and what the woman saw was not a face. They went in the spring before anything could be done about them, which was the way with that kind. And that's a true story, because the boy grew up. Old Maroš. He was the one out of the water. He told it his whole life and he lived to be ninety-something and his people are still up there — the one who burns the charcoal on the hill above the village is his grandson's boy. What did the woman see? Gold. Eyes like a goat, but gold, and lit up. She goes away to get the bread. Neither of them touches the food. Ninety-two years, Val says on the road the next morning. Don't. I am not going to say I told you. I have never once said that to you and I am not starting on a road in the rain. What she says instead is the finding, and it is worse than either of them expected: everyone who saw them is dead — Frederick, the pastor, the mother, the shepherd, the boy out of the water, who died an old man and is still dead — and there is not one person alive on this world who has laid eyes on either of them before 1608. And the story has got better. It has a leg in it that mended and a face that was not a face and a color. We have been gone ninety-two years and we are more dangerous in that valley now than we were on the day we left it. It doesn't decay. It does not decay. That is the whole of what I have learned this week and I would like it written down somewhere. A witness dies. A story does not. It gets handed down and it gets tidier every time it changes hands, because the parts that are hard to remember fall off and the parts that are easy to tell get sharper. In ninety-two years that valley has been quietly editing us into something that can be recognized on sight. They come up above the treeline on the fourth day after that, in the early morning, and there is smoke going up out of the trees on the charcoal hill — in exactly the place, thin and steady and nearly straight in the still air, the way it had on the morning they came down out of the snow with nothing. It is not Ondrej's; Ondrej has been dead ninety-three years; and the man making it is the great-grandson of a boy Kyra pulled out of a river. He's down there. Maroš's boy's boy. Working that hill. I could walk down and buy charcoal off him. You could. Val lays it out once, sitting on the shoulder, in order, and then stops: four hundred people in that valley, the story in all of them with a color in it and a mended leg, two women described to that valley for ninety-two years by a man everybody liked, the description accurate, and neither of them changed by so much as a line. There is no version in which Kyra goes down that path and is not a woman out of a story; there is only a version in which nobody happens to be looking, and Val has no way to put a figure on that. And then: that is everything I have. It is your valley as much as mine and you have more in it than I do, and I am not going to tell you what to do with it. You want me not to go. I want you not to go and I am not asking you not to. Those are different and I have spent eighty years learning the difference and I am not throwing it away on a hillside. Take as long as you like. I'll be here. Kyra sits on that shoulder for a little under two hours. She can see the roofs, and the path down through the forest, and the place where the stream has to be crossed on two stones, and the gap where you can see the whole valley at once and have to stop whether you want to or not, and the fence of the hut on the high pasture, mended by somebody, still standing. She is not going down to see a person — that is the part she has to get to by herself and it takes the two hours; there is nobody down there to see, only a man burning charcoal who does not know her, a church with a stone in it, and four hundred people who have a story about her eyes. She wants to go down because it had been hers. That is all it is. All right, she says, and gets up. We go at night and we go to the churchyard and we don't go anywhere else, and if there's a light on in that village we turn round. Yes. Say it back. If there is a light on we turn round. And that is the first hour of a discipline Kyra Davan keeps, without exception, for the next three hundred years. The churchyard is on the near side, which is the only piece of luck in it. They go down in the dark and the village is black and the dogs do not wake and there is no light on anywhere. Frederick's stone is near the wall where a man of his standing would have been put, ninety-two years old and gone the color stone goes, with moss in the letters, and Kyra crouches and gets the moss out with her thumbnail. It says the name the village used, worn down into the valley's mouth, and the year, and nothing else — and under it an older name, his wife's, whose shawl Kyra wore up and down a mountain for eleven months and whose name she was never once told and is now standing on. She stays down there a while. When she gets up Val is standing at the foot of the stone with her hands at her sides, and Kyra knows at once what she is going to do, because she has watched that woman arrive at a decision for a hundred and fifty-two years and has never once been wrong about the shoulders. Val says her name. Her whole name, out loud, in her own language, in a churchyard in Spiš some hour after midnight — the name she offered a man in a storehouse ninety-two years earlier and watched him refuse, gently, so that he could never be made to say it. She says it once and says nothing else, and does not explain it to the stone or to Kyra. Kyra says nothing at all — then, or on the path, or at the top, or in any of the three hundred years that follow. The mountain takes two more days. The slope where the seventeen are is bare, exactly bare: grass and loose rock and four hundred yards of drift below the line where the pieces went, and no mark of any kind, and nothing to say that nineteen people came down out of the sky onto it. They do not build anything; they discussed it twice on the road and arrived at the same place both times, which is that a cairn on a bare slope is a question, and a question in that valley is the one thing they cannot leave behind. Not yet, Kyra says. No. Not yet. The hull is where they left it, and it is not there — which is the thing neither of them has been able to describe to the other on the entire journey up: the concealment has held so completely that they stand in the right place on the right shoulder with the right stones under them and there is nothing whatsoever to see. Val, who has carried the possibility that it failed for ninety-two years and never once said so, stands looking at the empty air and has to put her hand on Kyra's shoulder. You were frightened of this. Every year. You never said. There was nothing to be done about it, which is not a defense, and I know it is not a defense, and I am telling you now. Kyra puts her hand flat on the air and wants, and the seam comes up pale out of the gray. Inside it is exactly as it was, and warm, and the light comes up along the curve of the wall as they step over the frame. Kyra goes to her locker before she takes her coat off: the plates are there, the three books are there, and the drawing is there in the bottom — four figures, one with her arms out, one small one at the end drawn smaller than she actually was and standing slightly apart. She sits down on the floor with it in both hands. She's a hundred and thirty-three. If the years run straight. They run straight. You stopped saying if seventeen years ago and you have started again because we are standing in it. Her voice is doing something. Kal Davan is a hundred and thirty-three years old, and she has been a hundred and thirty-three for about as long as it took us to walk here from a port — and this is a drawing a six-year-old did of her mother, and I have looked at it three times in ninety-three years. Val sits down on the floor beside her and looks at it for a long time. I still have no mouth. You've still got no mouth. It remains the most accurate portrait anybody has ever made of me. Kyra laughs, and it comes apart in the middle the way it had the first time, and she puts the drawing back very carefully before anything can happen to it. They are there nine days, and on the sixth the ship gives them something, the way the last one came — in the middle of an ordinary hour, with a small domestic sound: a panel on the wall that had been a floor goes pale and stays, and when Val puts her hand on it a pane of the stuff comes up under her palm and holds. There is writing in it: eleven lines in the ship's own hand, in the notation the lattice uses for itself, which Val can read about a third of and Kyra about a tenth. It is a record of the fold — not the mission's record, which went out to Solara before they entered it, but what the hull itself logged in the four hundred seconds it was inside, in its own terms, for its own purposes, about what was done to it. Val sits in front of it for two days. I can read the units. I can read three of the eleven lines and I can read the units on the other eight, and one of the units is a time and it is not the time we were in there, and I cannot make the two numbers agree by any method I have. Is it broken? It is not broken. It is a hull's own account of an event, written for a reader who has the whole system behind him, and I have a notebook and a bad memory of a paper of Vosse's. And then, carefully, because Kyra is going to hear more in it than is there: somebody could read this. Not me, and not on this world, and not for a very long time. But it is not a mystery. It is a measurement, in units, taken by an instrument, of a thing that happened to us. She looks up. Every question I have ever been able to answer has looked like that at the beginning. Write it down, Kyra says. So Val copies out all eleven lines into the notebook, exactly, including the eight she cannot read, and it takes her most of a day, and she carries them off that mountain and copies them forward in her own hand for four hundred years. They come down in the last week of the autumn with the passes closing behind them and no money left to speak of — and here is how the second failure happens, so ordinary that neither of them notices at the time. They are on the Styrian road in October with winter coming and nowhere to be, and Val does the arithmetic out loud at an inn, because she does all her arithmetic that way now. Everything they own that is not on their backs is in a house in Trieste; the lease has a year to run and money in it; the glass is in a box under the bed; Kyra is owed by a factor for a season and Val by four households, and none of it can be collected by letter. To go west in November with nothing is to be two women on a road in winter again, and they did that once, in 1608, and came out of it with nothing but a notebook. One year. We go back, we sell properly, we collect what we are owed, and we go west in the autumn with money in our hands instead of walking out of a town like two people running from something. It is, she thinks afterward, the single most reasonable sentence she ever says in her life. One year, Kyra agrees. They are in Trieste for four.

The one year takes four, and Kyra could give an account of every month of it, and not one of the months has anything wrong in it. The lease has a year to run and then the cooper who holds the head of it dies and his son wants a name on the paper before winter, and it is easier to sign for three than to argue. The factor loses two coasters in the same season and cannot pay her out and pays her in instalments, and the instalments run into the following year. Val has four households and then six, because a woman who has attended a family for twenty years is not a person you can simply stop using, and two of the six are people she will not leave in the middle of something. And every autumn they say the autumn. That is the shape of it and the whole confession: they do not decide to stay; they decide eleven separate small reasonable things, in order, over four years, and each one is correct. The fever comes up out of the hinterland in the ninth month of the twenty-fifth year and is in the town by the tenth. It is not the plague and everybody says so constantly, which is what a town says: a fever that takes the very young and the very old and leaves everybody in between on their backs for a fortnight, and there is no treating it, and Val says so to every person who asks her, plainly, in four languages. She goes anyway — eleven weeks, four hours of sleep a night, and Kyra comes home from the quay twice to find her sitting on the stairs with her boots on. Most of them live. Three do not, on that lane, and one of the three is a child of two at the top end, whose mother came to the door herself on the first night and asked for the fair one by name. Val had gone, and had done nothing that any woman in that lane could not have done, because there was nothing to do, and had sat on the floor of that room for a night and a day, and the child had died in the morning. She comes home and sits down and says: I want to say the accurate thing, which is that I could not have saved that child on Sethal either. I know. It is the first time in ninety-eight years that I have been able to say that, and I would like you to notice that it has not helped in the slightest. Frederick had told them in a storehouse in 1608 exactly what the word does: nothing for a year, and then a bad winter, or a child dies, or the water comes into the lane twice. And then it is not nothing. Kyra thinks about that sentence perhaps four times in ninety-seven years, and not once in the autumn of 1705. She sees Jakob on the tenth of November, on the quay, in the afternoon. He is fifty-seven and looks it and has for some time — heavy in the shoulders, narrow in the face, hair gone the iron color hinterland men went, a cough in the winters that he makes jokes about — and he is leaning on the rail by his own shed doing nothing, which is not like him. Chiara. Jakob. And then he says nothing for a moment, which is very much not like him, and Kyra waits, because in twenty-five years she has learned that if you wait he will eventually say four things at once. How old are you? She laughs, because it is such an odd thing and because laughing is what she does. You're not supposed to ask. I'm asking. Thirty-one — one of the eleven answers, which has been thirty-one for a while and was twenty-six when they came, and which Val moves every few years the way you move a stone in a wall. Jakob nods slowly, looking at the water. That's what you said when I met you. And Kyra goes cold from the back of the neck down. I said twenty-six when you met me. You did. You said twenty-six, and I was thirty-two, and I remember thinking she's young for a woman doing that work. And I'm fifty-seven. He turns round. I'm fifty-seven, Chiara. Jakob — that's all. I'm not asking you anything else. I'm going up. I'll see you. He goes up the quay toward the hill, and Kyra watches him and notices — because she notices everything about roads and about people who walk on them — that he is walking the way a man walks when he has somewhere to be and does not want to arrive. She tells Val that night, on the stairs, before her coat is off, the whole of it in order, in English, including the laugh and the cold down the back of her neck. Val listens without moving. We go. Yes. Kyra — I said yes. Her hands are shaking and she puts them flat on the table to stop them. Don't do the part where you convince me. I'm there. I was there on the quay before he finished. Val sits down and lays it out in order, out loud, as she has done everything for sixty years: the money with the factor written off, four months' work gone; two households she cannot leave, one of them the woman at the top end who has just buried a child, whom she will see tomorrow and tell she is called away, which the woman will believe, because people are called away; the lease abandoned; the glass left; they take what they walked in with and the notebook and the sheets and go down to the mole and take whatever is going anywhere. And I would like it to be the day after tomorrow. Why not tomorrow? Because there is nothing going out tomorrow. I looked in the eighth month and I have looked every month since, and there is a Venetian on the Friday. Kyra looks at her. You've been looking every month. Since the eighth month of last year. I have not mentioned it because you would have heard it as pressure, and it was not pressure, it was arithmetic, and I did not want to be a woman standing in a doorway holding a sailing list. Val. I am aware. We can discuss it on the boat. The Friday is the twentieth. They come for them on the eighteenth. Kyra is on the coast road three miles east, coming back from a factor's yard with nothing in her hands. There are four of them and a cart, and they are not soldiers and not the castle: town men with staves, the kind a magistracy puts on a road when it wants somebody and does not expect trouble, and one of them she has seen at the fish market for twenty years and could not have named. They do not touch her — that is what she comes back to afterward, more than anything else in that day: they are awkward. They have come out on a cold road to fetch a woman half the port knows by sight, and the one at the front says her name, and then, reading off a paper, the whole of the name on the eleven answers, and then says a sentence he has plainly been given, about a complaint, and about the town's court, and about her being required. A complaint from whom? It doesn't say. You're holding the paper. It doesn't say, the man says unhappily, and turns it round to show her, and it does not say. She gets on the cart. She has four miles to think about it and thinks about exactly one thing, which is that if they came for her on a road at the eastern end of the town, somebody else has gone up the hill. They put her in a room on the ground floor of a building behind the square with a barred window at head height and a bench and a door locked from the outside by a man who apologizes while he does it. She is there most of two days. Nobody hurts her; nobody speaks to her at all on the first day except a boy who brings bread. On the second a clerk comes in with a board on his knee and asks her a list of questions in Italian, and Kyra Davan answers every one with an answer out of the eleven, and understands the entire shape of what has happened to her from the order in which he asks them. Where she was born. Her parish. Her father's name, whether he is living, where he is buried. How long she has been in the town, who had known her before she came, whether anybody in the town had known her people. He writes it all down; he is not hostile; he does not look up. Then he asks how old she is. Thirty-one. He writes it. Then: and the other woman. Valeria. She is your sister. She's my sister. The elder or the younger? The elder. By how much? And Kyra sits in a locked room behind a square and answers that too, and the whole of her goes quiet inside, because she has just been told four things: that Val is in this building; that whoever brought this brought both of them; that the questions are not about a fever and not about a child, because nobody has asked her one word about either; and that somebody has told the court how old they say they are. On the evening of the second day the clerk comes back with four more questions, and the last is whether she has ever been to the hinterland above Gorizia in the spring of any year, and she says no, and he writes it, and goes away. It is after that, in the dark on a bench with her back against a cold wall, that Kyra puts it together — not the whole of it, and not the word, which she will not hear for another nine days, but the shape. Nobody has asked about the child; nobody has asked about the fever; two women have been taken off a road and out of a house on the same afternoon by men with a paper that does not say who complained, and the only questions put to her in two days are about where she came from and how old she is and how much older her sister is. Somebody who has known her a long time has gone to somebody and said a thing about her age. She goes through every person in that town who could have done it, in order, the way Val would have — the factor, the cooper's son, the woman at the top end who has just buried a child, Marjeta, the priest at the cathedral who has never once been told anything, the men she has argued with on the mole for twenty-five years. It takes her a long time to get there, because she does not want to. She gets there somewhere in the small hours, and she does not cry and does not shout, and she sits very still with her hands in her lap. I'm fifty-seven, Chiara. He had not been asking her a question on that quay. He had been saying goodbye.

It takes eleven days, and Val understands the machine on the fourth, and the understanding is the only thing she has and she uses all of it. It is not the castle, which she gets within an hour: the castle is the Emperor's and the Emperor's people have nothing to do with this. It is the town's own court, in the town's own building behind the square, with the town's own men in it — a judge who had been a merchant and is now something else, two who sit with him and say almost nothing, a man who does the physical part and is paid by the day, and a clerk. The clerk is Zorzi: perhaps forty, Venetian by his mouth and entirely Triestine by his coat, with a board and a good hand, and he writes down everything. Val watches him for four days before she understands that he is the most important man in that room and that nobody in it knows it, including him. The charge, when it is read, is harm — it has to be, and that is what she works out on the fourth day, and it reorganizes everything: this court cannot proceed against two women for being what they are, only for what they have done to somebody, so somebody has to have been harmed, and the complaint has been assembled backward from a conclusion to find one. The harm is the fever: three dead on one lane, and a woman at the top end who asked for the fair one by name and buried a child in the morning. Nobody says that woman complained. Nobody says she did not. And around the harm, in the reading, is a second thing that is not a charge and is in every sentence: that the accused are foreign and kinless and have no parish; that neither has married in twenty-five years; that neither has been ill in twenty-five years, in a town that has buried a fifth of itself twice in that time; and that a man of good standing has deposed that the younger gave her age as twenty-six in the year he met her and as thirty-one in this year, and that he had been thirty-two then and is fifty-seven now. They do not name him in the reading. Val does not need them to. On the fourth day the judge stops asking her about the fever and starts asking about Kyra, and does not go back. He has a theory and it is not a stupid one given what he has: two women inseparable for twenty-five years, one who does the talking and one who does the doctoring, neither accountable before 1680, and in his experience one of two such women is the principal and the other is held. He wants to know which, and asks it eleven different ways over four days — which of you decides; which speaks for the house; who chose the town; when she is not with you, where is she; has she ever forbidden you anything; has she ever required anything of you that you did not wish to do. And Val Sorin, who spent thirty years being questioned by committees, sits in front of that table and gives him accurate, complete, truthful answers that take a very long time. She learns the rules from the inside, because there is nothing else to learn, and nobody tells her them: she gets them by watching what the room does and does not do. On the second day the judge put a question and one of the two men beside him said something in German, quietly, and the judge rephrased it; she noted that. On the third day the man who does the physical part came in and was sent out again, and Zorzi wrote a line about it. By the fifth day she has the shape: there is a code, old and imperial, and it is the reason this town has a table and a clerk instead of a mob. It says what must be present before a court can do certain things; it says how a question may be put; it says a man may be asked what was in his hand and may not be asked whether it was a knife. And it says — she is certain by the sixth day, from the way the judge's mouth goes when she uses it — that there are intervals. So she uses all of it, badly, with no book and no training and no idea of a single article number, for one purpose only. That question contains its own answer. You have asked me whether she instructed me to go to the house at the top end. I have not said that anybody instructed me. You have put the instruction into the question. I will answer a question that does not contain it. The judge looks at her for rather a long time. Then he rephrases it. It costs him about forty seconds, and Val has eleven days of them to collect, and she collects every one. They want a confession — that is the whole of it, and it takes her until the fifth day to see how completely. Everything else in that building is preliminary: the men beside the judge, the depositions, the questions about parishes, the man paid by the day, all of it exists to produce two women saying out loud, in that room, in front of the clerk, what they have done and how. The court cannot finish without it; a great many things can be believed about them and none of the believing is worth anything on Zorzi's paper without the sentences in their own mouths. And here is the difficulty, which Val turns over for four nights and finds genuinely, blackly funny at about the eleventh hour of the seventh: they could not have confessed if they had wanted to. The court does not want we did it; it wants the details — the meeting, the compact, the place, the names of others, the form of the thing, what was said and in what order — precisely because no innocent person could know them. And Val Sorin has never in a hundred and seventy-five years heard one word of any of it. She does not know what this world believes witches do. She has no folklore; neither has Kyra; between them they have the whole biology of a planet four hundred years of light away and not one syllable of what a woman in Trieste is supposed to say at a table. The only thing that could have ended it is a thing they are incapable of inventing. On the eighth day they bring Kyra into the room. Val has not seen her in eight days; she has heard her twice through a wall, which is worse. They put Val in a chair against the side wall, four feet from the table, with a man standing beside her, and Kyra in the middle of the floor. And the judge says, reasonably, to both of them and to neither, that a difficulty has arisen: each woman has given the same account, the court cannot determine from two identical accounts which is the principal, and there are means of determining it. Val says: there is a provision about intervals. Sit down. You have used the provision four times in eight days, so I know that you know it, and I am asking on her behalf and I would like it written that I asked. Zorzi's pen does not stop. Sit her down, the judge says. Kyra is very good — that is not the word and there is no better one. She is accurate and she is calm and she gives the eleven answers in the same order she has given them for eighty-five years, and when they begin she says nothing at all that is not one of the eleven. Val sits four feet away with her hands on her knees and watches, and does not look away, because looking away is a thing she could be seen to do. The gold comes about a quarter of an hour in, the way it always comes under strain, which is without the half-second warning, and Kyra's head is down and her hair is over most of her face, and the only two people in a position to see it are the man doing the work and the judge. The man doing the work stops and steps back. There is a silence of a kind Val has never heard in any room on either world. Then the judge says, very quietly, again — and it is not to the man. It is to Kyra. He wants to see it twice. The question comes in the middle of that. He does not build up to it: he has been looking at Kyra for some minutes, and then turns in his chair and looks at Val and asks, in the voice of a man asking a clerk for a date: what is she to you? And Val Sorin, who sat in a market square in Maribor eighty-five years earlier and discovered that accuracy had nothing to offer her, finds that this time it has one thing. We ran together. The judge waits. She does not add anything. That is not an answer. It is the whole of the answer. We ran together. Eleven miles a week for sixty years, on a coast road, before either of us came here. Her hands are flat on her knees and her voice is level, which is not courage and is simply the only setting it has. You have asked me what she is to me and I have told you and you do not like the size of it. I cannot help that. I have given you a true thing. The judge looks at her a moment and turns back, because it is useless to him — and in the corner of that room Zorzi writes down four words in Italian in a good clear hand, and understands nothing whatsoever about them, and they are in his minutes to this day. The light does not come then. That is the part Val never afterward manages to explain to herself, and she tries for four hundred years. It does not come while Kyra's eyes are gold in front of eleven men; it does not come when the judge says again; it does not come at any point in the hour and a half that follows, through all of which Val sits in a chair against a wall with her hands flat on her knees and her face doing nothing, which is the single most useful thing that ever happened to her and is also the worst thing. It comes afterward — in the quiet at the end, when it is over for the day and the man has gone out and the judge is saying something about the hour, when nothing whatsoever is happening, and Kyra is on the floor getting her breath and lifts her head and finds Val across four feet of boards and does not say anything. That is all. She looks at her. And the light comes up in Val Sorin at the throat and along the insides of both wrists in a room with eleven men in it, because it has never once in ninety-eight years answered pain, and has never answered fear, and it answers this, and always has, and she has known that since a hut on a mountain and has spent a century making sure nobody ever saw it. She puts both hands flat on the table beside her chair, palms down. She does not reach. She sits there and lets a roomful of strangers look at what is coming out of her wrists, and does not go one inch toward the woman on the floor, because the only thing left that she can do for her is not to give them the picture. Zorzi writes it down. He writes about three lines. They take Kyra out first. Then they take Val, and not back to the room she had been in. Two days. On the eleventh day the judge makes a finding. Val is brought up for it and Kyra is not, and she stands in front of the table and listens to a man read out a document Zorzi has written, and the document says a great many things, and the only word in it that matters is one she has heard once before, in a different language, at the edge of a wood, from a man who had been trying to warn her. Strega. Ninety-seven years and four hundred miles, and it is the same word. There is no confession, and the finding says so in a clause, in the flat administrative voice such documents use: that the accused has not confessed, and that the court has before it the depositions, the matter of the ages, the matter of the sicknesses, and two occurrences observed by the court itself in the presence of its officers. The last part is a date. It is in the square, and it is in eight days. The judge reads it out and then asks her, because he is required to, whether she has anything to say. You have written down everything I have said for eleven days. You did not believe one word of it and you wrote it all down anyway, and in four hundred years somebody is going to read it who is not you. The judge says that the accused is to be removed. And Val Sorin, going out between two men with her hands bound in front of her, passes within a yard of a clerk of the court who is capping his ink, and looks at him, and thinks, with complete clarity and no hope attached to it whatsoever: you are the only honest instrument in this building and you have no idea.

The door opens on the fourth night after the finding, at some hour past the second, and the man who opens it does not say his name and does not say anything else either. Val has been awake — for most of four nights, sitting with her back against the wall, doing an arithmetic that comes out the same way every time — and she hears the bar go and thinks: they have moved it up. The man in the doorway is perhaps fifty, with a lamp with a cloth over most of it, and so frightened that she can see it in the way he holds the door. He says: come. Where is the other — come. Kyra is in the passage. She is standing up, which Val has not been certain of for a fortnight, and holding the wall with one hand, and when she sees Val her face does something that Val does not let herself look at for more than a second, because there is a man with a lamp waiting. They go down a passage and through a yard and out of a small door in a wall into a lane, and it takes perhaps four minutes, and at no point does the man say a word that is not come or wait or, once, not that way. In the lane he points down the hill, then goes back through the door and pulls it shut behind him. They never learn his name, or what he had been given, or what he had been told, or whether he had a wife — and Val, trained from the age of nine to find out who is responsible for a thing, tries for four hundred years to construct him out of four minutes and a lamp and never manages it. Somebody's paid for that. Somebody has paid an enormous amount for that. It isn't money. Look at him — that wasn't a man doing a thing for money, that was a man doing a thing he'd decided — I know what it was. Val has her arm round her, taking weight, because Kyra has got eleven paces down the lane and has stopped pretending she does not need to. We will work out who later and we will have a very long time to do it. Can you walk? Can you walk for an hour? Val, I can walk to Venice if the alternative is a square. Marjeta is at the bottom of the lane, in a doorway, with a bundle — which is how they find out who it had been, and it takes about a second and a half, and neither of them ever afterward describes what that second and a half had in it. She has their coats. She has bread and a cheese and a stone bottle. She has the notebook in its cloth, and the eleven sheets, which had been in a box under a floorboard in a house the court went through twice, and which she got out of it somehow and never explains. There's a boat at the third hour. Small. Coasting for Capodistria and then down. He knows there'll be two. He doesn't know anything else and he isn't going to. Marjeta — don't. She pushes the bundle at Kyra. There isn't time and I've thought about what I want to say and it isn't much. They stand in a doorway at the bottom of a lane on a hill in the dark. Twenty-five years I've done that house. Nobody in it was ever ill. Nobody in it was ever cruel to me, and nobody in it ever once asked me about anybody else's house, which you'd have to have done four houses to know is worth something. She looks at them both. That's all I've got. That's what I know about you and it's what I'll know in thirty years. Then she puts her hand flat on her own chest, once, and takes it away. Kyra makes a sound. It is the gesture — four fingers and a palm on the breastbone, the thing she did in a storehouse in a valley in 1607 with no language at all, because it was the only thanks she had, and which a man called Frederick gave back to her a hundred times and used at the end instead of goodbye. Kyra never taught anybody that; it is not hers and never was. It is simply the thing a human being does with her hand when there is nothing to say and she means it, on any world, in any century — and two women have come four hundred years of light to find out that a woman in a doorway in Trieste will do it too. He put his hand on my back, Marjeta says. What? Her. She jerks her chin at Val, who has gone to the corner to look down the hill. When they came. I was in the kitchen and I couldn't — I was no use at all, I was standing there with a cloth in my hand like a fool, and they were putting her hands together and she stopped, and she came over and put her hand flat on my back, here, between the shoulders, and held it there. With them standing in my kitchen. Her mouth goes. She was the one being taken, and she came and did that to me. And then she said, it will be all right, Marjeta, which was a lie, and I've had it in my head for a fortnight and it's the reason I went and found that man. So don't thank me. She did it. She just doesn't know she did it. Kyra stands there with a bundle in her arms and cannot say anything at all. Go on, says Marjeta. It's the third hour. They cannot take her — that is gone through on the way down and takes four sentences. She has a mother in the hinterland and two sisters and four houses and a whole life within nine miles of a hill, and she is a woman of fifty-five who has never been on a boat, and a servant of two convicted women vanishing on the same night as the women would be the first thing anybody looked for in the morning. Her only protection is to be exactly where she has been, doing exactly what she has been doing, saying she knows nothing. It is not enough protection and both of them know it and neither says so. They do not find out. That is the whole of it and it has to be said plainly, because it is the largest single thing either of them carries out of Europe: they are on a boat at the third hour and gone from that coast inside a week, and they never go back, and there is no way on this world in 1705 for two women with no name to find out what has happened to a woman in Trieste. Val tries three times over the next eleven years, through people, sideways, carefully, and gets nothing, and stops. The town is the worst part of the walk down and it is not dangerous, which Kyra had not expected. It is two hours before dawn and there is nobody: the port sleeps the way ports sleep, badly and in shifts, and there are two men on the quay with a brazier and a dog somewhere and a light above the salt house, and not one human being in that town is looking for two women, because two women are behind a locked door with a date on them. They come down past the fish market, and past the corner where a factor found her eleven days after he had been wrong, and past the bottom of the street where Val put her hand at the back of her neck in the dark in the fourth year. Every stone of it. Twenty-five years. And halfway down, at the turn where the lane from the eastern quarter comes in, Kyra stops. Jakob's house is the third on the left, forty yards up, and there is a light in it — he has never in twenty-five years been asleep before the fourth hour and he is fifty-seven now and sleeps less, and Kyra knows with absolute certainty and no evidence at all that he is sitting in that room. She is walking up the lane before she has decided anything. Val does not say a word; she stops at the corner with the bundle and lets her go. Kyra gets perhaps fifteen yards with her hands in fists and every single thing she has to say to him coming up her throat in order: whether he knows what they did to her; what he had thought was going to happen; that she said no on a mole because she does not stay anywhere and that it had been true and he had made it true; that she is leaving tonight and will never come back and he has got what he asked for; and the only real thing she has ever wanted to say to any human being on this planet, which is you have known me for twenty-five years and you have never once met me. She stops. She stands in the middle of a lane in the dark, fifteen yards short of a lit window, and does the thing she learned to do above a treeline in Spiš five years earlier, which is the arithmetic. Anything she says, he can repeat. That is all of it. It is not mercy and has nothing to do with forgiveness and she is not, standing there, capable of either: it is that a man who has gone to a priest with what he had would go again with whatever she gave him, and would not even be wrong to, and every word out of her mouth in that room is a word that would be in a building behind the square by noon, where there is a clerk with a good hand and four hundred people who have been told what two foreign women are. And the thing it would reach is not her. She turns round and goes back down the lane. Val has not moved from the corner. She does not ask. She does not look up the lane. She takes the bundle onto her other arm and puts her hand out, and Kyra takes it, and they go down the hill. She never asks — not that night on the water, not in the four hundred years afterward, not once — and Kyra, who cannot leave a thing unfinished and has now left two, understands by about the second hour of the following morning that the not-asking is the largest thing anybody has ever done for her. The boat is small and smells of salt fish and the master looks at them once and then does not look at them again for nine hours, which is worth every coin Marjeta spent on him. They go out past the mole in the dark on the last of the ebb. There is no wind to speak of and the men are at the sweeps, and the town goes from a shape to a scatter of four or five lights to nothing at all, and neither of them watches it go, because they are both sitting in the bottom of the boat with their backs against the same thwart and Kyra's head on Val's shoulder and Val's arm round her — and the first thing either of them says, about an hour out, is Kyra asking whether there is any of the bread.

They are four days at Capodistria in a room over a rope-walk, and Val does not sleep for the first two, and on the third she makes Kyra take her shirt off. Kyra has been managing — which is the word Val uses for it in her own head and never out loud — and on the third afternoon Val comes up the stairs with a jar of something and a strip of cloth and puts them on the table. Now. Val. I have been looking at how you are holding your left arm for four days and I have not said anything because you needed to walk and you were walking. We are not walking today. Sit down and take it off. Kyra sits on the edge of the bed and works her way out of it, and it takes some time. Val looks at her a long moment without touching her. Say it. The shoulder will come back. It is out of the place it wants and has been for a fortnight and I am going to be extremely unpleasant to you for about a minute. The hands are the hands. Two of the joints are not going to be the shape they were and they are going to ache in the cold for the rest of a very long life. Her voice is completely level. The rest is bruising and it is the sort of bruising that goes. That's the whole of it? That is the whole of it, and you will notice that I have given it to you in about eleven seconds, which is what I would have done on Sethal, and which is the only kindness available in this room. Then she puts her hands on her. It takes a long time and it hurts, and Kyra swears at her twice in a language nobody on that coast has ever heard, and at one point has her forehead against Val's collarbone and her fist closed in the back of Val's dress. And somewhere after the shoulder — the worst of it done, Kyra breathing, Val still holding her upper arm because she has not yet worked out how to let go of it — something goes in Val, without warning, of a kind that has never gone in her before. She has been holding for a fortnight; she can see it happening and cannot do anything about it. She held in a room with eleven men, and in two days she does not intend to describe, and in a passage, and in a lane, and on a boat, and up a stair, and she has held for three days in this room while a woman with two ruined fingers walked about being cheerful — and she has just put her hands on the actual body of it and found out what has been done to it, one joint at a time, in order, the way she finds out everything. Val. Give me a moment. Val — I am asking for a moment, Kyra, and I would like you to give it to me, because I have not had one since the eighteenth of November and I do not know what is going to happen. What happens is that Kyra puts her good arm round her and holds on, and Val Sorin comes apart on the edge of a bed in a rented room above a rope-walk in Capodistria, without any noise at all, for about a quarter of an hour. Kyra cries afterward, and she cries quietly, which Val had not known she could do — and that is the thing that undoes the rest of it. Kyra Davan cries the way she does everything, out loud, with her whole face, in front of whoever is there, and has since she was nine; and she lies in the dark that night with her back against Val's front and Val's arm over her and cries without making a sound, for a long time, the way a person does who has learned in the last fortnight that somebody might be listening. Val does not tell her it is all right. She's still there. Yes. She's in that house this minute doing somebody's stair and they'll have asked her already, they'll have had her in that building the morning after — yes. Don't just say yes. There is nothing else that is true. I have gone through it four hundred times in four days and there is no version in which we take her and no version in which we go back, and I am not going to give you a warm sentence about a woman I cannot help, because you would know it was one. Then say the thing you're not saying. You've had it since the boat. Val lies in the dark a while. I am going to be very careful how I say this, because it is the only large thing I have and I do not want to make it bigger than it is. And then: I stood in that lane at the corner and watched you walk up toward his house, and I did not say one word, and I had already decided that if you went in I was going with you, and I want you to know that I had not decided what I would do when I got there. You'd have stopped me. No. That is the part. She went through it standing at that corner, in about four seconds, the way she does, and could not find the version where she stops her, and could not find the version where she stands outside either. I found that I did not care what it cost. That has never happened to me. I have not in a hundred and seventy-five years been a person who does not care what a thing costs, and I stood at a corner in Trieste and was one, and I have been carrying it since Tuesday because I do not know what to do with a fact about myself that is that size. Kyra turns over, which hurts, and does it anyway. It is not like the room over the cooper's shop and not like the fourteenth year: Val reaches first, which by then is simply what happens, but there is nothing considered in it and nothing decided at four in the afternoon — it comes up out of her the way weather comes up in Kyra, which is the wrong way round and neither of them remarks on it until much later. It is careful, because it has to be, and the care is not a limitation: Val has spent a century learning the exact geography of that body and she uses all of it, every place she knows is whole, and she says so, into her hair, in English, with none of the flatness left in her voice at all. There is crying in it, both of them, at different points, and neither stops for it. The light comes up early and stays up and gets into everything, and at some point Kyra's eyes go and do not come back, and the two of them lie in a small room in a Venetian town on the Istrian coast with a lamp they have not needed to light, and it is the fourth of December in the year 1705, and they are alive. Afterward Kyra asks her, into Val's shoulder, in the dark, the way she asks everything, straight out and without arranging it first. What happened in the two days? Val does not tense; Kyra is listening for it and there is nothing. They put me in a different room, and they asked me the same eleven questions in a different order, and on the second day they stopped asking, and it was over by the evening, and I was not damaged in any way that has lasted. It is accurate. Every word of it is accurate. Kyra lies there and turns it over and finds she cannot get a single finger under any part of it. That's not an answer. It is a complete answer to the question you asked. Val. I am not going to say any more about it tonight — and her voice is perfectly steady — and I am aware of exactly what I am doing, and I am doing it anyway. Kyra lies in the dark. She could go on; she has every right to go on, there is a pact made in the snow in 1607, and this is the first time in ninety-eight years that Val Sorin has put a wall up in front of her and told her it is a wall. All right. Thank you. Not all right forever. All right tonight. I understand the difference. Kyra asks her again eleven times in the next four hundred years — on a wagon, in a fever hospital, in a kitchen in Portland with the radio on, on a porch in the rain — and gets the same accurate, complete, useless answer every time, in the same words, which is how she eventually understands that Val wrote it out and learned it. They come into Venice on the sixth day in fog, and it is the largest thing either of them has seen since the terraces, and neither says much about it: Kyra stands at the rail with her arm strapped and looks at a city sitting on water like a thing put there by somebody who had not consulted anybody, and says that Blaž would have had an opinion, and does not say anything else. They are eleven days in Venice and Val does four things — sells what Marjeta put in the bundle that was not theirs to keep; buys two sets of papers off a man in the Ghetto who asks no questions and charges accordingly; finds a ship; and writes in the notebook for an entire evening. What she writes is the names of three people: a clerk, a woman, and a man with a lamp. She has two of them. The ship is Dutch and going out through the Straits for Lisbon and then across, and it is the twenty-second of December, and they stand at the after rail in the middle of a cold clear morning and watch Europe go. It goes slowly, which is the part neither of them expected — most of a day: a low brown line with weather on it, then a lower one, then the suggestion of one — and they stay up there for all of it because neither can think of a reason to go below. They do not talk about Trieste. They talk about the ship, and the Dutchman's four languages, and whether the mate is as frightened of the master as he appears to be, and at some point about a man in Maribor who walked with a stick and said Thursday instead of everything else. And in the middle of the afternoon, with the last of it going, Val puts both hands on the rail and looks at the water and says, to nobody, in English: not far now. Kyra turns her head. There is nothing to walk to — that is the first thing, and it takes about a second: they are on a ship in the middle of a sea with four thousand miles in front of them and no road and nothing to arrive at, and there is no question in front of it and nobody has asked how much further, and the woman who has said it has spent ninety-eight years objecting to inaccuracy in every form it takes. And it is a lie. It has always been a lie. It is what you say to somebody who is tired and has a long way to go, and Kyra has said it to her on eleven roads in a hundred years with her legs aching and the light going, and has never once meant the distance. Kyra stands at the rail of a Dutch ship and understands that she has been handed the thing they spent eighty-two years and six languages looking for, by a woman who did not go looking for it at all, and did not find it, and simply picked up something that was already lying between them and turned it round. She does not cry. She is surprised about that afterward. Not far now, Kyra says. Val nods once, at the water. That is the whole of it. Neither of them says anything else about it that day, and neither ever discusses it — not on that crossing, not in Boston, not in Missouri, and not in a booth on Route 9 four hundred years later, where a waitress calls them girls and one of them says it across a table about the weather and the other one says it back. The sun goes and the cold comes up off the water and the coast is gone. They stand at the rail a while longer with four feet of Dutch ship between them and the mate eleven paces away, because there are men on that deck and there will be men on every deck and in every street and at every table from this day forward, and both of them have learned in a building behind a square exactly what a thing seen becomes in a clerk's good hand. Val puts her hand flat on the rail. Kyra puts hers beside it, a palm's width away, not touching. They stand like that until it is properly dark.