Chapter 42 - Where the Army Would Stop

Aoi missed the first bell, which was unusual enough that Halwen sent someone to check.

She was awake and dressed and sitting on the floor with three sheets of paper round her and a bottle of ink she'd spilled on a fourth.

"What happened?"

"Nothing."

Unconvincing before I'd even seen her face. She rubbed at the page with a cloth and made the stain bigger.

"Stop."

"I know."

The donor office's letter lay by her knee. The twenty-four people whose mana had helped summon her had been traced. Twenty-one back with their units. Two on reduced duty. One out of service and not yet located. No deaths in the initial recovery period. Records incomplete after that. She'd read it so many times one fold was splitting.

"You wrote to them."

"Not separately. I don't know what to say separately."

She handed me the ruined page. Most of it was gone. One sentence survived.

I am the person you were made to help bring here.

I read it twice.

"Bad?"

"No."

"Then why are you doing that? The thinking-before-being-kind face."

I sat on the edge of the bed. "Because I don't know what receiving this would feel like."

"Neither do I. I keep making it about me."

"It concerns you."

"It also concerns them." Her hand hovered over a clean sheet. "I wanted to apologize. I know. That's why I haven't sent it."

I brought breakfast, and while we ate she said what she wanted them to know. That she hadn't volunteered. That she hadn't known about them. That she hoped they were recovering. That she was asking for their records because she didn't want the account to end with a mark saying returned to duty. Some might resent her. Some might never answer. One might say they'd been proud to take part. That one frightened her most.

"I wouldn't know what to say."

"You would not have to settle their feelings in your reply."

She stared at her porridge. "I hate when you make something sound easy by describing only the outside."

Deserved.

"It wouldn't be easy," I said.

She nodded. After a while she picked up the pen. I left her to it.

The next day Aoi made a mistake in the training yard. Small, by our recent standards. She asked too much of a girl named Nella.

Nella was thirteen, quick with her hands, straight brown hair cut just under her ears. She'd joined the sessions because her father traveled with a cart and she hated feeling helpless when strangers came near their camp. Aoi had been teaching distance. Where to stand. How to move away without crossing your feet. When to let go of something rather than get dragged with it. Good work.

Nella kept laughing when corrected. Aoi took the laughing for confidence and turned the pressure up. Faster approach. A hand catching the sleeve. A shouted instruction.

Nella froze. Then she started crying.

The yard went silent. I'd been crossing it with the customs papers and stopped by the well. Aoi let go of the sleeve at once.

"Nella. I'm sorry."

The girl backed away. Her father came through the gate carrying a harness, saw his daughter, saw Aoi, and dropped it.

Aoi stood absolutely still. I sent the younger kids toward Dain and waited.

She came to me afterward. Nella had gone with her father. The practice poles were on the ground.

"I thought she was enjoying it. She kept laughing. I should have asked."

I nodded. She looked at me sharply.

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"No speech?"

"Would one help?"

"No."

We picked up the poles. She racked them, then took them down again and checked the ends for splinters. There weren't any. She kept looking.

"What are you going to do?"

"Go to their room. Apologize. Tell them she doesn't have to come back. And if she does, ask what she wants to practice." She leaned the last pole against the wall. "I made it into something she had to pass."

Nella came back two days later with her father. Aoi talked to them before she touched a practice weapon. I watched from the storeroom door. Nella answered politely, mostly to the ground. Then she asked whether she could practice with Nessa instead.

Aoi said yes. At once.

Then she stood there with her mouth half open, the way people do when an explanation is already on its way up. She shut it and went to set out Nessa's chalk marks.

The session involved a cloth sack, chalk marks, and walking away. No grabbing. No shouting. Aoi took the younger children at the other end of the yard and only looked over twice. I stayed at the door longer than the accounts could afford. At the end Nella asked Nessa whether they could try again tomorrow. On her way out she glanced toward Aoi. Aoi was busy with the chalk.

That evening Aoi finished the donor letter and took it to Pell for copying. Not to me.

"Twenty-three known addresses. And one held until they find the last person. Replies private."

He wrote that on the instructions. She took out her purse.

"For postage."

The money was from teaching. She counted it herself.

The surveyors came with white stakes, and kids followed them, and by the time the first stake went in half the old village had an opinion.

Ressa got to the common before I did. She was reading their authority while a surveyor explained that a temporary marker did not constitute theft.

"That depends where you put it."

I liked her more every time she did that, and it was starting to be a problem.

Crown engineers, attached to the military review. Not here to measure plots. Marking a proposed withdrawal line. The army would consolidate west of the old northern road. The watch would keep a reduced guard during transition. After that, permanent defense was not guaranteed. The restored village could proceed. Residents would be told the change before accepting final obligations.

The crown wasn't canceling their homes. It was explaining how much help would be left if those homes were attacked.

I looked at the eastern tree line. The grenn hadn't received the order.

Orra asked for exact numbers. The engineers had dates and road classifications and instructions about stores to remove. The military medic asked which wounded men could travel; Halwen told him to bring his own eyes. Gerren wanted to know whether the army would take the repaired gate fittings as military property, and the inventory engineer looked like he wished he'd chosen a different education.

I called the council, and this time we didn't start with money. We started with who might die if the plans were misunderstood.

Orra laid it out. Nine soldiers could watch the gate, patrol short distances, escort essential movement, keep a response. They couldn't guarantee the whole village and the eastern lane. With fewer, even that would change.

"If we keep the wall supplied, people can retreat here. But a refuge works only if they reach it."

Ressa looked at the village map. "We don't put every household beyond shouting distance. Watch bells. Night movement rules."

"Yes."

Aoi listened. Nobody asked her to replace the missing soldiers. I noticed. So did she.

The engineers' second paper concerned the eastern pack route. Regular trade through Harrow needed a registered crossing arrangement. The crown wanted customs records, inspection access, notification of certain goods. Harrow wanted the same from the other direction. Each side called its requirements ordinary. Together they could make the route unusable.

Tamasin read both schedules and swore with impressive range.

"This is why people go around offices."

"And become smugglers," Ressa said.

"Sometimes they become merchants again once the office realizes it needs the dues."

I looked at the crossing map. The damaged bridge. The flood house. Harrow. Rookstead. Communities already using the space between official lines. The withdrawal would make that space bigger.

"We need a route conference."

Tamasin groaned. "Do we?"

"The people maintaining the crossings, the traders using them, the settlements expected to shelter travelers, and the officials who want to collect."

"And what do you expect them to agree on?"

"Perhaps very little. But at present they are charging us for several incompatible arrangements."

She considered the map and nodded, reluctantly. "I can bring traders."

Ressa looked at me. "We decide what you can offer before you go."

"Of course."

Gerren muttered something. I heard wagon repairs. The man was going to preserve that mistake past all historical relevance.

Aoi found me on the wall that night. Wet leaves and the forge's cooling charcoal. Rookstead's first houses showed lights. Farther east the trees swallowed the road.

"You're thinking about the country again."

"Yes."

"What changed?"

"The crown can recognize their houses and still decide the road is too expensive to hold. Veyr can help, but she has her own people. Harrow wants trade, not responsibility for our gate."

"And you think that responsibility should be yours."

"I think it's already arriving here, whether anyone gives me a title or not."

"That doesn't mean you have to own it. Do you understand the difference?"

"I'm trying to."

She put her elbows on the parapet. Below, somebody was coaxing the goat away from a laundry line.

"My first reply came. One of the donors. A woman. Thirty-two. She has a son. Mostly recovered. She gets tired faster than she used to."

I waited. Aoi took a folded sheet from her coat and didn't hand it over.

"She said she was glad I wrote. She thought we probably didn't know. And she asked if I was eating properly."

That last part caught in her throat.

"Will you answer?"

"Yes."

"Good."

She folded it again and looked east.

"If you build something here, don't make it another place that tells people suffering was necessary before asking whether they agreed."

I had no clever answer for that. I didn't want one.

"I won't make that promise lightly."

"That's why I'm asking you now."

She was quiet for a while. Then, still looking east: "When we find the way home. You're still coming."

It wasn't quite a question.

"Yes."

"You took a second."

"I was counting the stakes."

She looked at the white markers along the road, then at me, and didn't say whether she believed it.

Below us the goat won. Somebody shouted. Aoi laughed, wiped her face on her sleeve, and went down to help.

I stayed a while. The white stakes were still visible beside the road. By morning we'd have to decide what to put between them.