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

It took Doran six days to find out who had told Sevik Two-Boats about the wall, and the answer was everybody, and he was six days finding it because he kept looking for one person.

He came up to the works on the three hundred and twelfth day with the ledger-hide and a face Leon had not seen on him before, which was not anger and was not embarrassment and turned out to be something closer to a man watching a load he tied himself come apart in the water.

"There is nobody to be angry with."

He sat down, which he did not do.

Then he read it out, in order, the way he read a debt, and it took a long time and got worse the whole way through.

On the thirty-fifth day the council sent word to four camps that a counting party had come and gone and what they had counted. We told them.

On the forty-first Doran himself carried that message and stayed three nights in four different places and answered every question he was asked, correctly, because a man who is asking four camps for help does not get to be careful.

On the fiftieth, six hundred people stood on this terrace and ate. They saw the wall. They saw the granary. They saw the racks and the water chain and the terrace edge and how many shelters there are and how many people came out of them.

On the hundred and second, at Low Reed, five camps said their stores aloud and nobody lied, and Retharu’s number went into four other people’s heads and one of them was Havek’s.

On the hundred and forty-seventh, four young people arrived to spend a season here and were shown everything, because you cannot teach somebody wound care and hide the rest of the settlement from them.

And in between all of that, for eight months, Retharu’s own people had walked up and down this river being useful.

"Every one of those was right. I would do all of them again. That is the part I have been sitting with for six days."

Leon had nothing to add and knew it.

Every disclosure was correct at the moment it was made. There is no single one you could take back without breaking something that is now load-bearing. And the sum of them is a stranger who ties up at our landing knowing what to offer.

"Sevik did not need a traitor. He needed to listen for eight months on a river where we have been shouting."

He rolled the hide and did not roll it back.

"And the last one is the one nobody is going to want to say out loud."

Nayra took it standing.

Doran did not soften it and she would not have let him. Four students. A season. They had been in the granary and the store and the ward and the works, they had been at the trough counting, they had been on the platform when the box was opened and counted aloud in front of twenty people, and one of them had written things on bark for eleven days because she wanted an old woman to notice her.

Nobody had told them not to talk. Nobody could have. A person you have taught for a season goes home and tells their camp what they saw, because that is the entire point of teaching them.

"Say the rest of it," Nayra said.

"There is no rest of it. That is what I am telling you." Doran put the hide down on the mat. "Your school is the best thing this settlement has done and it is also four people who know exactly what we have. Both of those are true and neither one cancels the other and I am not asking you to stop."

Nayra was quiet for a while.

"Then what are you asking."

"Nothing yet. I wanted you to hear it from me before you heard it from somebody who thinks it is a fault."

Her survey came in the same afternoon and it was smaller than anybody wanted.

A hundred and seventy-four people. Forty-one who can carry a load for four days and arrive able to work.

And of those forty-one, nine she would not send twice in a season, for nine separate reasons she gave in nine sentences without notes, and two of the nine were people Kharun had assumed were his best.

Thirty-two.

Kharun took the number and did not argue with any part of it, which was the loudest thing he did all week.

***

Veya settled it three evenings later, and she did it in about eleven words, and Leon wrote them down.

"You cannot un-tell. You can only decide what you say next."

Doran had got there before her, which she plainly knew and did not mind, and he laid it out on the ground the way he laid out everything.

Four camps know Retharu.

Retharu knows what four camps chose to say out loud at Low Reed in the middle of a wet season, which is not the same thing and is not close.

There is already a mechanism and nobody has used it for anything but water. Each camp names a holder. The five walk each other’s lines once a season. It was written thin so it could be enforced, and it has been enforced twice, and it works.

Doran flattened his hand on the ground. "Widen it. Not the water. Everything. If they hold our number, we hold theirs, and the day somebody comes up a landing knowing what to offer, he has walked past four people who could have told us he was coming."

Kharun asked what four camps would say to that.

"Three will say yes because it costs them nothing and makes them feel counted. One will say no." Doran did not have to name which. "And the one that says no will have told us something worth more than the other three put together."

Nara asked for it herself on the three hundred and sixteenth day, in front of the whole healing platform, in a voice that went up at the end the way it always did.

She wanted to be the holder at Havek’s camp.

She said the case badly and completely. She was going home in a season anyway. She had already told people things — she said that part first, without being asked, and Leon watched Vethra’s face change while she said it. She was the person who had counted washers for twenty days because nobody stopped her, and she was, she said, quite good at it, and she was going to keep doing it whether anybody gave her the job or not.

So they might as well make it a job.

Nayra let her finish and did not rescue her once.

Then she asked one question.

"What do you do when Havek tells you not to send something?"

Nara had clearly not thought about that, and did not pretend to have, and stood there working through it in front of thirty people for what felt to Leon like a very long time.

"I send that he told me not to."

Doran made a sound.

Nayra let it sit for a moment longer, and then reached over and took Nara’s hands and turned them over and looked at the knuckles, which were still cracked and were never going to be entirely right again, and put them down.

"Then you had better learn to write properly first," she said. "You have a season."

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