I Won the Lottery and Went Back in Time!?!

Nayra had the answer on the four hundred and fifty-first day and told nobody for fifty-five.

Leon found that out on the five hundred and sixth, standing in the ward with eighty jars in front of him instead of forty, and had to sit down on the step and work out whether he was angry.

"You ran it twice."

"Ei."

"You ran the whole thing twice and did not send word downriver."

"To a man on a bank at the sixteenth hour with a knife in his hand?" Nayra was arranging the second forty in the same order as the first, which she had evidently done four or five times already. "I had one round. One round is a thing that happened once. You told me that on the sixth day with a pebble in your hand and I have been waiting a year and a half to say it back to you."

Leon put his head in his hands and laughed until it hurt, which the two women in the ward found alarming and did not comment on.

***

The four with nothing in them went cloudy in three days, all four, both rounds.

He had been quietly braced for that to go wrong, because if the empty jars had stayed clear the whole instrument was rubbish and eighty days of Vethra’s hands were wasted. They did not stay clear. They stank on the third morning exactly as broth in a warm shed ought to, and that failure is the reason anything else in the eighty means anything at all.

The harsh soap: clear, both rounds, nine days.

Which tells you nothing you can use. You already knew, and you cannot put it in a person, and Vethra said so before Leon could open his mouth.

Ash liquor: clear, both rounds.

Also useless, and also not nothing, because it is the second time this settlement has found out that the thing which stops rot on a bench is the thing that burns skin, and Leon has begun to suspect there is a rule under that which he cannot yet write.

Bark liquor: clear to the seventh day, then cloudy, both rounds. Consistent. Weak. Real.

Green mould from the store, scraped off a basket lid: cloudy by the second day.

It simply grew. Leon had put a living thing into a warm jar of food and it had eaten. He wrote that up in full and did not soften it, because it is the single funniest and most instructive thing in the whole eighty, and because in eleven years somebody will want to know why the man from another world did not simply put mould in a jar and win.

Then the one that hurt.

Green mould off the wet rock above the mineral seep, first round: clear. Nine days. The clearest jar on the shelf apart from the soap.

Second round: cloudy on the fourth day.

Leon stood and looked at those two jars for a long time.

"That is the one you wanted," Nayra said.

"Ei."

"It is why I ran it twice."

"I know why you ran it twice." He could hear that his own voice had gone flat and did not much care. "I would have written that down. I would have written the seep mould works on the fifth day and put it in four copies and sent one eleven days downriver to a camp of a hundred and thirty."

Nayra let that sit for a bit.

"And then?"

"And then in three years somebody in Low Reed packs a wound with rock scrapings because the Varu’s page said so, and dies of it, and nobody there will ever know which page killed them."

He wrote it on the honest side of the sheet, under the heading Kharun had made him put there in the autumn.

A thing that happened once did not happen. It was seen once. The second time is what makes it a thing.

Six leaves. Vethra chose all six, because Leon cannot tell one green from another and has stopped pretending.

Four of them went cloudy on schedule with the empties, which is a real result and cost nothing.

One held to the sixth day, both rounds.

And `sennat`, which grows in the wet shade on the north side of the second terrace, which nobody uses for anything, which Vethra put in mostly to fill a jar —

`sennat` held clear for nine days. Twice.

It is the only thing on that shelf that is not a poison, not a burn, and not already known, and it came from about ninety paces from where Leon was standing, and it has been there the whole time.

He did not celebrate and neither did Nayra, and when he asked her why not she gave him the answer he should have given himself.

"Because a jar is not a person, and you wrote that yourself, and I have read it about forty times."

***

Vethra came in at the eleventh hour and went along the shelf without saying anything, and stopped at the sixteenth jar, which was `orru`.

`Orru` is what she packs a wound with. She has packed wounds with it for thirty years. Her teacher packed wounds with it. There is a version of the word for the act of doing it that is not the same as the word for the leaf.

`Orru` went cloudy on the second day. Both rounds. Faster than the empties.

Nobody said anything.

Leon had been dreading this since about the fourth hour and had prepared three careful sentences about how a jar is not a person, all of them true, and he did not get to use any of them, because Vethra got there first and got there straighter.

"It does nothing."

"It might still —"

"Na. Do not." She had her hand on the jar and was not looking at anybody. "I wrote the line. Every page that says do this says how you find out whether it worked. I said it in front of Kharun and I meant it and I am not going to discover a reason it does not apply to me."

She stood there a while.

"Thirty years."

"You did not know," Nayra said.

"Ei. And I know now, and there is nobody in this settlement I can be angry with about it, which is the worst part of the whole arrangement." Vethra picked the jar up, and looked at it, and put it back down square with the others. "I am going to go on using it."

Leon opened his mouth.

"For four more days. Because half the people on this river expect it and if I stop tomorrow with no explanation they will decide the Varu has forbidden it, and then nothing else on that shelf will ever be believed." She finally turned round. "Then I am going to stand up at the fire and say it myself, in my own words, before anybody else does."

That is what she did, on the five hundred and eleventh day, and it took her about ninety seconds, and Leon has written it down twice in two different places because he does not trust himself to remember it correctly in ten years.

She did not say the leaf was useless.

She said: I have been giving people a thing that does nothing, and telling them it would help, and some of them got better anyway, and I counted those.

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