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

Anev started at first light on the four hundred and twenty-sixth day, and by the middle of the morning Leon had understood that the entire rehearsal had been aimed at a thing she was never going to do.

The question she never asked was how many.

Not once. Not the people, not the baskets, not the panels, not the rows. Doran stood on that council ground with four numbers he had spent forty days making true and was not asked for one of them all day.

What she did instead was walk.

She asked to be shown the water, and was, and went slowly, and at the sixth hour she happened to be standing at the trough with her cup for about a quarter of an hour, which is the hour when everybody who has been at the timber ground comes down.

She asked which roofs had been done since the wet. Somebody proudly told her fourteen.

A question about whether the children were all born here got her a long friendly answer with names in it.

She asked, courteously, how many were buried, and where, and was walked up to the ground above the second terrace, and stood there, and counted nine without appearing to count anything.

Then she asked after the healer.

Leon watched Nayra be introduced to a woman who had just worked out, from a patch of ground, that a hundred and seventy-four people had lost nine in fourteen months on a river where a camp of ninety expects six, and he watched Nayra understand it about a heartbeat late.

Vethra understood it immediately, and got very interested in a drying rack.

***

Doran caught the second one and Leon caught the third.

At the third hour she asked Nesh how long the racks take to fill.

At the sixth she asked a woman at the trough whether the drying was hard work in the wet.

At the ninth she asked one of the children how often the big frames get turned.

Three people, three hours apart, three sets of words, and not one of them a question about a number, and all three answers arriving at the same twenty baskets per frame per three days.

Nobody wrote anything down. That was the part Doran could not get past.

Four of her people carried loads, sat where they were told, ate what they were given, and made no mark on anything all day. No hide. No bark. Nothing to lose and nothing to leave behind and nothing anybody could ask to see.

"She is carrying it," Doran muttered, at about the tenth hour, from a bad angle behind the granary. "All of it. In her head."

"You do that."

"I do that for a settlement I sleep in. She is doing it for the fourth one this season."

Halu came down the path at the eleventh hour with the ward bundle and the limp, and Anev watched him the whole way without any expression at all, and asked whether he had been hurt here.

Kharun told her the leg was broken here and set here.

Anev looked at Nayra for the first time that day, said nothing at all, and let it go.

***

They took the evening apart on the platform after, the six of them, and it did not improve.

"She has not asked for a single number," Doran opened with.

"She does not need one," Leon said. "She has been building them all day out of things nobody would think to lie about."

"Na. Worse than that." Doran had the hide out and had written nothing on it. "She has spent a day finding out whether our numbers agree with each other. And they did. Forty different mouths, and they agreed, all day, because we rehearsed."

Leon did not immediately follow, and then did, and it went through him like cold water.

"Two people give a stranger the same number for the store," Doran went on, "and that is luck. Forty do, and it is not luck, and there is only one thing it can be."

Vethra, from the edge of the platform, quietly: "It means somebody sat everybody down and agreed what a basket is."

"Ei."

"So the rehearsal told her." Kharun had not moved. "The rehearsal is the thing that told her."

"The rehearsal told her the truth, which is what I built it to do." Doran rolled the hide up unused. "I only did not understand until the middle of this afternoon that a place where the numbers agree is a place that has somebody in it whose work is making numbers agree. She has been counting me all day."

Veya said nothing at all for a while, and then one thing, with her hands still.

"She has been counting all of us, and she will be right, and there is no version of today where she is not."

***

It ended in the ordinary way, at dusk, with the children.

One of Anev’s young people, who had been carrying loads all day and was about sixteen and perfectly friendly, sat down near the wall where six of them were working through Kel’s eleven letters, and asked what they were doing.

Ket-li, who is seven, and who has never in her life been asked a question by a stranger she did not want to answer well, told her.

The field came first. The thin rows came up thin and the fat rows came up fat, and row eleven came up fat when it should have come up thin, and the reason anybody knows that is a strip of bark she wrote the row numbers on before a single seed went in, and that is how they found out the grey seed was the bad seed.

It took about forty seconds.

Leon was eleven paces away with a bucket in his hand and did not get there.

Anev was on the path above, going up to where they had put her for the night, and she stopped walking, and she stood there for rather a long time in the last of the light, listening to a seven-year-old explain a controlled trial.

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