Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 511: Chapter 506: The Belated Birthday

Location:The Pavilion

Date/Time:9 Frostforge, 9942 AZI — Seventh Bell

Realm:Lower Realm

The Pavilion smelled like scorched sugar.

That was the first thing, before the light and before the noise, and it stopped her three steps inside the entrance hall with her hand still on the frame. She had come up three tiers of frozen stair from a foundation course with her father’s name in it, carrying two schools she was never going to be allowed to own, and now something in here had been burned.

She had made it to her courtyard with most of a bell to spare, which was the only piece of arithmetic that had gone her way all day. The courtyard had been empty. She’d checked it twice, because she always checked it twice, and then stepped through.

"You’re late," said Green.

Green was standing in the middle of the hall in a gardening apron with her arms folded, ash-blonde hair coming out of its tie, and her eyes were doing the fractured thing they did when she was working very hard at being calm.

"By eight days," Jayde said.

"And one bell. The bell is the part I can do something about."

***

They had thrown the whole thing together in about four hours.

She could see the seams. Somebody had strung lanterns down the entrance hall and run out of lanterns two-thirds of the way, so the last stretch was lit with essence-lamps borrowed off the workshop benches, still clamped to their stands. There was a table. On the table was a cake, and the cake was the source of the smell.

It was enormous, black at three of its corners, and constructed. That was the only word. Somebody had built it to hold back a hillside.

"White made it," Eden said, coming up on her left with her sleeves pushed to the elbow and flour to the wrist. "Don’t say anything about the corners."

"I wasn’t going to say anything about the corners."

"Everyone has said something about the corners."

Across the hall, White straightened up from the table with a knife in one enormous scarred hand and looked at her, steel gray, daring her.

"It’s load-bearing," Jayde said.

"It is," White said, and went back to cutting.

Four more steps, and the noise found her.

Tianxin came down the hall in a bronze-copper streak that had not yet fully worked out how corners function, hit the rug, lost the rug, recovered, and arrived at Jayde’s boots at a speed that would have taken a grown man off his feet. Behind her, Shenxin walked. He walked the whole way, slate-gray and unhurried, carrying something flat in his jaws. Huaxin came last and stopped a body-length short of everyone, as she always did.

"You missed it," Tianxin said. Her voice filled the entire hall, because it had never occurred to her to make it do anything else. "You missed it, and it was eight days ago, and nobody even said—"

"I know."

"—and Mother said we weren’t doing it and then Eden said we were doing it and then White—"

"Tianxin."

"—made a cake—"

"Tianxin." Jayde crouched. "I know. I’m sorry. I’m not going to explain why, because the reason isn’t better than the fact."

That worked, more or less. Three-year-old dragons were not children, exactly; there was a long memory sitting behind those bronze eyes that had never belonged to a hatchling. It did not stop her from being three.

"Fine," said Tianxin. "Then you have to see the crown."

***

The crown was on the mantis.

Ashborn had folded down at the far end of the hall where the ceiling ran highest, blade-arms tucked, chitin gone the dull soft color it had been going for months now. The translucence at the edges had faded almost entirely. Under the lamps he looked less like something excavated and more like something forged.

On top of his head, seated between the sensory pits, was a circle of woven greenery about as wide as a dinner plate. It had been made with enormous care. It was also, unmistakably, made out of flowers.

"Two days," Tianxin announced. "It took two days. I said I was going to and I did."

"You did." Jayde straightened up slowly. "Tianxin. Where did the flowers come from?"

The hall went interestingly quiet.

"The garden," said Tianxin, in the voice of somebody who has already decided that the conversation is going to happen anyway and would prefer to get through it at speed.

"Which part of the garden?"

"The good part."

Green made a sound behind her like a kettle deciding something.

"Nine years," Green said. "The blue ones. Nine years of splitting and re-splitting and moving them twice because the light was wrong, and I have — had — the only bed of them on this or any other world that I am aware of, and she took the lot."

"Not the lot," said Tianxin.

"The lot."

"There’s one."

"There is one," Green agreed, "and it is bent."

Ashborn did not move. He had, in fact, not moved since Jayde came in. The mantis had routed around Green’s flower beds for months, every single time, without ever once being asked twice — because he heard everything, and he had heard the condition set as a joke and taken it as law. And now he was sitting in the middle of the hall with the blue ones on his head, and there was nothing whatsoever he could do about it.

Jayde looked at him for a moment.

"He knows," she said.

"He has known for two hours," Isha said. He was leaning against a pillar with his tails arranged around him and his arms folded, golden eyes bright with something he was making no effort to hide. "He has not shifted so much as a joint plate in all of that time. I have watched a great many bindings hold in my life, and I have never seen anything hold like that."

"Take it off him."

"Absolutely not."

"Isha."

"You misunderstand me." Isha pushed off the pillar. "I forbade the crown. I forbade it out loud, in this hall, in front of witnesses, on the day the name was chosen. It has been an extremely long time since anybody ignored me that comprehensively." He inclined his head toward Tianxin with real gravity. "The workmanship is also good. The weave will hold six days and then go brittle at the joins, which is roughly four days longer than I would have predicted from a person who cannot yet count to six."

"I can count to six."

"You have never once demonstrated it."

***

Shenxin put the flat thing down on the floor in front of Jayde and sat back on his haunches with his tail wrapped over his feet.

It was a sheet of workshop slate. There was writing on it. The writing was very small, very even, and organized into a numbered column.

"I have six," he said.

"Six what?"

"Metrics." He said the word carefully and correctly. "For assessing whether a late birthday counts."

Jayde sat down on the floor. It seemed like the appropriate response.

"Go on."

"Alphabetical," Shenxin said, and she saw Eden turn away and put a hand over her mouth. "Attendance. Cake. Gifts. Naming — that means whether anybody says out loud what day it actually is, because if nobody says it then it hasn’t happened. Then Songs. Then Timing." A pause. "Timing is the one we fail."

"Timing’s the one you fail."

"Eight days." He looked up at her. His eyes were the flat gray of the shale off the north face, and there was nothing in them that was three years old at all. "But five of six is a pass. I checked."

"Against what?"

"Against nothing. There isn’t anything to check against. Nobody has written down how late is too late." He resettled his feet. "So I decided five of six."

She read the slate again. Attendance was ticked. Cake was ticked. Gifts had a small mark beside it she couldn’t interpret. Naming was blank.

"Nobody’s said it," she said.

"No."

"Shenxin."

"It is a metric," he said. "I am not going to say it myself. That would be the same as ticking my own box."

She looked at that small gray face for a moment and thought about a headmaster who had spent ten thousand years running a calculation because there was nothing else he could do with the answer, and put the thought somewhere it could not get onto her face.

"On the first of Frostforge," Jayde said, loudly enough for the hall, "the three of you turned three. All of you. Out loud, on the record, and eight days late, which is my fault and nobody else’s."

Tianxin shrieked. Shenxin leaned forward and drew a very careful tick beside Naming with one claw, and then sat back and let out a breath that his whole body had apparently been holding.

***

[I could have carried you.]

Reiko had arrived at some point without her noticing, which was standard, and was sitting at her hip at about the size of a large hound with his tail curled around his feet. The mercury rune ran bright and unhidden down his flank. In here, he never bothered.

You’ve been sitting on this for a while.

[Since the ridge.] Silver eyes, unblinking. [You needed something that could take your weight across broken ground for a day and a half. I can be whatever size the ground requires. I have been telling you this since before that thing had a name.]

You’d have hated it.

[I would have hated it enormously. That is not the point.]

What’s the point?

[The point is that it cannot argue.] A long, aggrieved pause. [I have made four separate cases. Each of them was better than anything it has ever said, because it has never said anything. And somehow I am the one losing.]

Across the hall the mantis sat under a crown of stolen flowers with his blade-arms folded, patient as masonry.

Reiko.

[Yes.]

You’re jealous of a person who has never spoken.

[I am aware of how it sounds.] He shifted his weight against her leg, which was as close as he came to an admission. [It also lets Huaxin sit on it.]

It lets Huaxin sit on you.

[That is different. I permit that. It simply allows it, which is not the same thing, and I would like the distinction noted.]

***

Eden found her at the far end of the table with a slate already in her hand, which meant she had been waiting an hour and a half to ask.

"How did it go?"

The hall was still loud. Tianxin was explaining the crown to White at volume, from the beginning, for the third time.

"He agrees," Jayde said. "All of it. Both schools."

Eden’s hand stopped on the slate.

"He isn’t chartering them. A new school can be closed by anybody with standing, and everybody has standing, so they go inside Obsidian’s own instrument — written in with the Trial Tower, so that closing a school for six-year-olds means arguing the Academy never lawfully existed." She turned her cup a quarter turn and did not drink out of it. "He’s drafting. I put the subject list in myself, on the foundation course, in the cold, because he wouldn’t guess at words he didn’t have."

"Then we won." Eden was watching her face. "You don’t look like we won."

"It isn’t mine. Faculties of Obsidian belong to the governing council and the council doesn’t answer to me any more than it answers to the Temple. I can propose. So can a bursar." She heard how flat it came out and left it flat. "And I can’t teach in it without a post, and I can’t hold a post without standing an examination in front of the whole tier, as a Grade 2 Elite student called Ashford."

Green had come up on the other side, still in the gardening apron. "That is going to be extremely public."

"Yes."

"Good," said White, from somewhere behind all of them, and did not elaborate.

Eden was writing already. She had that particular quiet about her that meant the problem had gone into her hands and would not be coming back out for some while.

"Nine years," she said. "Six to fifteen. Letters, numbers, measure, materials, bodies, soil, maps, records, instruments and courts, with cultivation braided through all of it." She looked up. "Jayde. What do they read from?"

And there it was.

She had built the argument, and won the argument, and written the words into an instrument that would outlive everyone standing in this hall — and she had not once, in the whole of that afternoon, thought about the fact that there was nothing to open on the first morning.

"Nothing," she said. "There isn’t a primer on this world."

"There has to be something."

"There’s sect manuals for people who already read, and there’s ledgers, and there’s treatises written by adults for adults who were taught privately by other adults." Isha had come to the edge of the table, and she noticed him arrive and kept going. "Show me one book on Doha that was written for a child who cannot yet read it. Not simplified. Not abridged. Written for. Nobody has ever needed one, because the only children who were ever taught were taught by somebody standing next to them."

Green sat down slowly on the bench.

"So we write them," Eden said.

"We write all of them. First book and second book for every strand, and then a teacher’s copy for every one of those, because there is no point handing a village a primer and no way to use it." Jayde took the slate off her, looked at what was already on it, and handed it back. "And they have to be in the measures this world actually uses, and the seasons this world actually has, and the crops that grow in the low provinces, or the first farmer who opens one throws it in a fire, and he is right to."

"How many books?"

"Do the arithmetic and don’t say it out loud." She glanced down the hall at the wreckage of the cake and the small bronze-copper shape asleep against White’s boot.

Eden did the arithmetic anyway, silently, and her eyebrows went up and stayed there.

"Who teaches the teachers?" Green said.

"That’s the second problem, and it’s worse than the first. Four hundred and eleven of the survivors have taken posts, and every one of them is going onto the military side, because that’s what they know." Jayde put both hands flat on the table. "The lower school needs a different animal entirely, and there are none of them, anywhere, because the job has never existed on this world."

"Then the first book is not a primer," Isha said.

Everyone looked at him.

"You will need a book that teaches a person how to teach," he said. "Before the letters. Before anything. Otherwise you have written four hundred beautiful volumes and handed them to people who will read them aloud to children in the order the pages fall out." His tails resettled. "I have watched a great many workings fail. Almost none of them failed at the working."

Nobody said anything for a moment. Behind them, Tianxin reached the part of the story where the flowers were obtained, and White made a sound that was not quite a cough.

"Tomorrow," Jayde said. "First light, the workshop. You, me, Green, and whoever else can hold a pen."

"Not now?"

"No. The three of them turned three eight days ago and I have already missed it once."

Eden looked at her for a second, and then wrote one more line on the slate and turned it around.

Book One, page one.

"What goes on it?" she said.

Jayde opened her mouth and found that she did not have the first idea.

***

Zhi did not come out of the doorway.

Jayde noticed it late and all at once, which was how she noticed most things now — that the pale coiled length she’d registered on the way in had not moved from the archway in a quarter of an hour, and that the scales along its back had gone the flat chalk white she had only seen twice before.

Eden was already crossing the hall. She stopped at the arch and crouched, and put her hand out flat, and did not touch.

Jayde came over and stood a careful distance back.

"Not tonight," Eden said quietly.

"It’s the mantis."

Eden didn’t look up. Her hand stayed where it was. "Not fear of Ashborn, exactly. It’s older than that. Something in one of the earlier lives ended with the clicking, and I don’t get pictures, I just get — " she turned her hand over — "the shape of the thing that comes next. And the shape is the same."

"How long has this been happening?"

"Since the first day in the workshop. It hasn’t got worse. It hasn’t got better either."

The white was not shifting. Zhi’s wings were flat against the body, and the head was down, and nothing about any of it was theatrical; it was just an animal that had been eaten once, holding very still, four rooms away from the thing that ate it.

"I can move Ashborn," Jayde said.

The sentence did not get finished.

At the far end of the hall, the mantis rose — no gather, no wind-up, straight up off his folded joints in one long unhurried motion that put every conversation in the room on pause. He turned. He walked the full length of the entrance hall away from them, past the table and the lanterns and the essence-lamps still clamped in their stands, and lowered himself again in the last corner, as far from the archway as the room permitted, with the crown still balanced between his sensory pits and not one flower out of place.

Then he folded down and did not move again.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"He heard you," Eden said.

"He heard me start."

Zhi came through the arch about a minute later, low, along the wall, and the chalk began to bleed out of the scales somewhere around the third lantern, and by the time the serpent reached Eden’s ankles it had gone the deep still blue it went when nothing was wrong.

Jayde looked down the hall at the corner where the mantis sat.

File that, she thought, and could not have said, if asked, whether she meant it kindly.

***

Later, when the cake had been reduced to structural ruins, and Tianxin had fallen asleep mid-argument on the rug with her crownless head on White’s boot, Huaxin did the thing she does.

She had spent the whole evening at the edge of it. That was normal. Pearl-cream and quiet, sitting a body-length back from every conversation with her amber eyes going from face to face, and Jayde had long ago stopped mistaking it for shyness. The youngest one watched like a physician on a ward.

Now she got up, crossed the hall, and climbed into her mother’s lap.

Yinxin was in human form, in the gray robe, sitting against the wall with her long silver-white hair down and her eyes half shut. She had been that way for most of an hour. She had made a fuss of the crown, and eaten a piece of the cake, and told Tianxin twice that she was proud of her, and Jayde — who had spent years learning to read a dragon and still got it wrong regularly — had not thought a single thing about any of it.

Huaxin put one small pale hand flat on her mother’s sternum.

"Tired," she said.

It was the only word she had said all night. Huaxin was three years old and had not been speaking for long, and she used words the way a careful person uses money.

Yinxin’s hand came up and settled on the back of her daughter’s head.

"It has been a long month," she said.

The pause before it was very short. It was there.

Jayde sat where she was with her back against the table leg and did not move her face at all, because there was one caster on this world for a working that took forty minutes and could not be interrupted, and there were eighty-eight nests left, and three of them were coming up through the floor of the world inside fifteen months, and the entire contingency plan for what happened afterward was currently asleep on White’s boot, drooling.

She had known it for four days. She had said it out loud in a room full of people who agreed with her.

She had not, until this exact moment, sat six feet from it.

***

"You didn’t tell anyone," she said, much later.

Yinxin didn’t open her eyes. Huaxin had gone to sleep against her, and Shenxin had arranged himself along her leg with his slate still under one foreleg, and neither of them was going to be moved by anything short of the mountain.

"On the day," Jayde said. "The first. You knew, and you said nothing, and you let it go past."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because you were in a forecourt in the snow with a list," Yinxin said, "putting names to a hundred and ninety-seven boxes, and a great many families were watching you do it." She opened her eyes then, golden and entirely calm. "I have three children, and they are going to have a very great many birthdays. I did the arithmetic. It was not difficult arithmetic."

Jayde looked at the ceiling of the hall for a while.

"Somebody worked it out anyway," she said.

"Eden worked it out this afternoon and told White, and White stopped what he was doing and began making a cake, and I want you to understand that I did not ask either of them." Yinxin’s mouth moved very slightly. "That is what a household is. You did not build it. You collected it. There is a difference, and you have never been able to see it."

"I didn’t bring them anything."

"No."

"I had a room full of gifts I could have brought, and I forgot every one of them, and I walked in here with a storage ring and a headache and nothing in my hands."

"Yes."

Jayde thought about the four things on the list after this one, and about an old man at the bottom of his own mountain telling her she did not get to keep the thing she had asked for.

Jayde unlaced her boots and set them against the wall.

"Then I’ll stay," she said.

Yinxin closed her eyes again.

"That is a gift," she said. "It is also the first sensible thing you have said since you came through the door."

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