Chapter 134 — "Express"

He got four words down and stopped.

Aina.

You’re an hour—

He looked at that for a while.

Then folded the sheet in half, put it aside, and started again.

Aina.

Sixty-one days. There was a fault at Vell. It arrived this morning.

Stopped.

Folded it. Set it on the first one.

Started again.

By the fourth attempt he had established that the problem was not the opening.

The problem was that there were two years behind it, and every sentence he put on the page had to somehow account for all of them, and no sentence could, and every sentence that tried came out sounding like it had been written by someone considerably worse at this than he was.

By the seventh attempt he had a small stack.

By the eleventh he had a large one.

"You’ve folded fourteen," said Tax, from the sill.

"I’m aware."

"You folded the last one before you’d finished the word."

"I’m aware."

Tax looked out the window. Waited a decent interval.

"What’s on the fourteenth."

"Nothing."

"Kael."

"Her name."

"That’s not nothing."

"It’s four letters."

"It’s four letters you’ve written fourteen times," said Tax, "which is a great deal more than four letters."

He wrote it at some point past the middle of the night, in the end, and only because he’d got tired enough to stop managing it.

He wrote about the noble path being finalised, which she knew. He wrote about the building three roads east, which she didn’t, and gave her nothing about what happened inside it, because he wasn’t sure he could explain it and was fairly sure he wasn’t allowed to.

He wrote about Daren’s bench. At length. He knew she’d want the length.

He wrote Mira writes to Daren and I’ve known for a year and assumed you knew and I’m sorry.

He did not write anything about Eren.

He looked at that absence for a long time and left it exactly as it was, because writing who is Eren would be one thing and writing nothing at all would be another, and he had decided — somewhere around the eleventh folded sheet — that he was not going to be a man who asked that in a letter.

At the bottom he wrote:

It’s not fine. You put an ellipsis in front of it. You’ve done that for fifteen years and I’ve never seen it in your handwriting before.

Three years is three years. It doesn’t get shorter because you were brave about it in writing.

Then, underneath:

I’m an hour younger and I’m going to be an hour younger for the rest of my life and you’ve never once let it go, and I have never once wanted you to.

— K

He read it back.

It was, by a considerable margin, the most he had ever said to anyone.

He put it in the slot before he could reconsider.

The schedule card had four rates.

Standard — fourteen days.

Priority — nine.

Direct — five.

Express — same day.

He looked at the fourth one.

Then at the price beside it.

It was, per sheet, more than his family had earned in a month before the recognition came through. He looked at that number and felt something complicated that he decided not to inspect.

He paid it.

Tax watched him pay it.

Tax did not say anything, but the silence had a shape to it, and that shape was roughly she’s going to notice.

"She’ll notice," said Tax, eventually, in case the shape hadn’t been clear.

"Yes."

"She’ll notice within about four seconds."

"Yes."

"That’s the entire point of what you just did."

Kael closed the front slot.

"Yes," he said.

Kestral. Four days after assessments.

The devices at Kestral were in the administrative wing, in a room with nine of them along one wall, because a combat academy that took foreign students had to be reachable.

Students got messages at midday. That was the arrangement. You went, you queued, you took whatever was in your slot, you left.

Seraphina did not queue.

She had learned in the first month that if you went at ten past the hour instead of on it, there was no queue at all, and that this was one of the small unglamorous advantages of paying attention to things.

The clerk looked up.

"Valois."

"Yes."

He looked at his ledger. Then looked at it again.

Then looked at her with an expression she couldn’t place.

"There’s one for you."

"Right."

"It’s express."

She stopped.

The clerk turned the ledger around and pointed at a line, apparently because he wanted a witness.

"Express," he said again. "Same-day. It went in at Ardenhouse at second bell and it landed here at second bell. That’s — we get maybe four of those a year. Usually it’s someone’s father dying."

"Nobody’s father is dying."

"Well," said the clerk, "somebody paid like one was."

She took it outside.

She did not open it in the administrative wing, or in the corridor, or in the yard, because there were people in all of those places and she had made a rapid and entirely uncharacteristic assessment about her own face.

She went to the wall at the eastern edge.

It was empty. It was the middle of the day; it was always empty in the middle of the day; that was, she realised, why she had chosen it and not the other reason.

She sat down.

Looked at the sheet.

Aina.

She had not seen his handwriting in two years.

She had seen it exactly twice in her whole life before that — a note on a gate post, and a folded thing at fifteen that she had never told anyone about — and she had forgotten, entirely, how small it was. How level. Every letter the same height. Like a man who had decided that if he was going to write at all he was going to be contained about it.

She read the whole thing.

Then read it again.

Then got to the bottom, to the two lines about the ellipsis and the hour, and put the paper down on her knees and looked out at the flat grey country for a while with her jaw doing something she was not going to examine in daylight.

Sixty-one days.

He’d had it for one.

He’d had it for one day and paid — she did the arithmetic, and then did it again because the first answer seemed unlikely, and then stopped doing arithmetic.

"That’s a face."

She did not turn around.

"Go away."

"I’ve been standing here eleven seconds—"

"Eren."

"—which is my usual eleven seconds, I want to stress that this is a standard eleven seconds, and normally you say something by four—"

"Eren."

He came and sat down.

Not close. He left a gap. He always left a gap and she had never noticed him doing it until this exact moment, and noticing it now was inconvenient.

He looked at the paper on her knees. Then at the flat country. Then at nothing.

"Good news or bad news."

"I don’t know yet."

"That’s the worst kind."

"Yes."

He nodded slowly, as though this were a reasonable state of affairs.

They sat.

"It came express," she said.

"Mm."

"Same-day express. The clerk showed me the ledger. He turned the ledger round."

"That’s a lot of ledger."

"It’s four days from here to anywhere by the fastest normal route. This went in at second bell and arrived at second bell."

Eren was quiet for a moment.

"That’s a considerable amount of money," he said.

"Yes."

"For paper."

"Yes."

He looked at the horizon.

"Well," he said, "somebody’s had an idea about you."

She turned to look at him.

He was still watching the flat grey country, entirely relaxed, cup nowhere in evidence, hands open on his knees — and his face was doing exactly nothing.

Not the deadpan nothing.

The other one.

And she found, with some annoyance, that after two years she could tell the difference and had absolutely no idea what to do with the information.

"Eren."

"Hm."

"You’re not going to ask who it’s from."

"No."

"Why not."

He thought about it for slightly longer than the question required.

"Because you’d tell me," he said, "and I don’t want it that way round."

He didn’t say anything else after that, which she found she was grateful for and also somehow could not stand.

She looked at the paper on her knees.

"It’s from home."

"Mm."

"That’s not — I’m not being cagey, it genuinely is from home, that’s the accurate description."

"I didn’t say anything."

"You said mm."

"Mm is a sound. It’s the sound of a person sitting on a wall."

She turned to look at him properly.

He was still watching the horizon with the total unbothered calm of a man who had never in his life wanted anything, which she had believed for two years and had stopped believing about four days ago on a stair and had not yet worked out what to do with.

"You’re going to make me say it," she said.

"I’m actively not making you say it. That’s the entire thing I’m doing right now. It’s taking effort."

"Eren—"

"It’s from Kael," he said.

The name landed on the wall between them.

She hadn’t said it out loud at Kestral. Not once. Not in two years — not to Mira, not to anyone, not even in the letters to Daren where she wrote is he well and left the he to fend for itself.

"How do you know that name."

"You’ve never said it."

"Then how—"

"Because you’ve never said it," said Eren. "Four hundred and six people in this academy and you talk about all of them. You talk about Torin. You have twenty minutes of material about a man whose entire personality is a gate. And there’s a person you have never once mentioned in two years, and people don’t do that by accident."

She sat with that.

"So you didn’t know the name."

"I didn’t know the name until about four seconds ago," he agreed. "You said it with your face."

"I didn’t say anything—"

"You said it enormously."

Mira found them an hour later, which meant she’d been looking, which meant she’d heard about the ledger.

She sat down on Seraphina’s other side without asking and put a cup into her hand without asking, and then said, entirely without preamble:

"The clerk turned the ledger round."

"He did."

"He’s turned the ledger round twice in four years. Once for a death and once for a wedding."

"That’s not comforting, Mira."

"It wasn’t offered as comfort," said Mira, and Seraphina made a strangled noise, because that was Tax’s line, that was a crow’s line four hundred miles away, and there was no possible way Mira could know that and she had said it anyway.

Eren, mildly: "What."

"Nothing."

"You made a noise."

"It’s nothing."

He let it go, which was new.

Mira did not let it go, which was not.

"Express," she said. "Same-day. From your home nation."

"Yes."

"Do you know what that costs."

"I have an idea what it costs."

"You have an idea," Mira agreed, "and I have the figure, because I looked it up at midday, because I heard about the ledger before you’d left the administrative wing." She drank. "It’s forty-one silver marks per sheet."

Seraphina put her cup down very carefully on the stone.

"...Forty-one."

"Per sheet."

"That’s—"

"That’s a horse," said Mira. "That’s a reasonable horse. He sent you a horse."

She didn’t sleep much.

That wasn’t unusual — she hadn’t slept properly since the rise — but this was a different flavour of it, and she recognised the flavour and disliked it.

At some point past the middle of the night she got up and lit the lamp and sat down at the desk and got as far as writing Kael.

Then stopped.

Because the letter she wanted to write was in the trunk.

All of it. Every night for two years. The sleeve that wouldn’t sit right and the porridge and the fourth day on rotation where nothing had happened and how that had been worse. The bit about you’d have gone down the slope and then the correction, no, you wouldn’t, you’d have stood there doing nothing with your whole face. Seven hundred pages of it.

And now she’d had one letter back and it had cost a horse, and everything she actually wanted to say to him had already been said, at length, repeatedly, to a room.

She sat looking at the trunk.

The lid hadn’t closed properly since March.

I could send them.

She examined that thought for about four seconds and then put it somewhere it would not be found again, because seven hundred sheets at forty-one silver marks was a sum that did not exist, and because standard rate would take fourteen days and arrive in a crate, and because the true objection — the actual one, underneath the arithmetic — was that he would read all of them and then know, and knowing was a thing she had spent two years successfully preventing.

She wrote four lines instead.

Read them.

Tore them up.

Wrote three.

Kael.

Sixty-one days is not your fault and I’m not going to let you carry it, so put it down.

You paid forty-one silver marks to tell me my punctuation is bad.

I have not stopped thinking about that all day and I am not going to tell you how it made me feel, because you already know, because you always already know, and it is the single most irritating thing about you.

— S

She looked at the last line for a long time.

Then went to the administrative wing at first bell, which was four hours before it opened, and stood outside in the cold until the clerk arrived.

He looked at her.

Then at the sheet in her hand.

"Rate," he said.

"Express."

The clerk’s eyebrows moved perhaps a millimetre, which for a man who had turned a ledger round twice in four years was practically a shout.

"Same-day," he said.

"Same-day."

He wrote it in the book.

She watched him write it.

Forty-one silver marks, she thought, and I’d have paid it twice, and then walked out into the yard and did not examine that either, because the stack of things she wasn’t examining had reached a height where adding one more made almost no difference at all.