Nell let out the breath she’d been holding. “Oh, that. No, I didn’t teach her. She learned in school. Didn’t they have school where you came from?”
Wista shrugged. “Not for me. I come from a little mining village, down in the southern plains. Most girls there go into the mines young, so the parents can try for a boy instead.”
It was a warm rain, but Nell felt the sick cold she’d known in the city, among the sleepers’ children.
“Did you have to go?” she asked.
Wista shook her head. “No, my ma had been, but she was so smart, she learned metalwork, so she didn’t work all the time below. That’s how she lived, she said. She made me this.” She lifted the copper pendant to show Nell. “Clever hands, my ma had. Wish I were as clever.”
Nell thought Wista was better than clever. She was nice.
“So she kept you out?” she asked.
The other girl nodded. “Said it wasn’t worth what the Domain would pay to send me. Wouldn’t listen to a word my da said about it.” She sighed and squinted out at the rain collecting in the muddy field. “She’d have liked me to read, I know, but she didn’t know how herself. She did know stories, though. Told me lots of them. Birth of the Genius, the banishing, the unchanged time. All those were good. She even knew stories they passed in the mines, about the powerful ones. That’s how I got here. When she got sick, she told me to go looking.”
Wista’s free hand went to her necklace, and she was quiet so long that at last Nell broke the silence with one of the stories Susan had read, the one about the rebel who became the Genius.
Wista laughed. “Different from the one my ma told,” she said. “She’d have liked this one better, I think.”
They walked on beneath the rain as the corn bent and the sky faded, and Nell could only wonder if maybe she fit in here after all, in this place where all the children seemed, in one way or another, to be lost and alone.
Susan had sent the little girls to supper on their own.
“They were noisy,” she said by way of explanation when Nell found her still in the room, in exactly the same spot she’d been more than an hour before. “If I could just get a little quiet, I know I could find something in here.”
Nell looked unhappily at the books.
“Maybe we should leave,” she said. “Maybe it’s just no good for us here. We can tell Max, and he’ll come — I know he will! If he’d just take a look at you —”
“Don’t you dare!” For a second, the color returned to Susan’s face. “You think I’ll be better sleeping in caves with monsters? We’re here for a reason, and we need to stay. If that means following a million crazy rules, then that’s what it means!” She shook her head, then softened a little. “I’m just tired. If I get some rest, I know I’ll do better.”
Nell grimaced. Susan sounded like somebody’s mother, like she’d aged ten years all of a sudden and would soon be a hundred if somebody didn’t stop her. She was tired, all right. But Nell worried sleep wouldn’t be enough to fix it.
By the time Kate and Jean returned, holding a new letter from Max, Susan was fast asleep on the bed, still frowning. Jean went to wake her.
“Leave her!” Nell said. “Can’t you see she needs her sleep?”
Now I’m sounding like somebody’s mother, she thought bleakly.
“But this one’s harder than the other,” Jean said. “She’d want to read it, wouldn’t she?”
“I’ll read it,” Nell said. “And we’ll show Susan when she wakes up.”
To her surprise, Jean handed the letter over. “Go on,” she said. “It’s even longer than the first one.”
Nell’s heart raced a little as she unfolded the letter. Maybe this time Max had found something worth writing about!
“‘Dear Jean,’” she began as Jean and then Kate jumped up beside her on the bed. “‘I’m sorry I haven’t been able to visit as much as I wanted. I know waiting is hard, but great discoveries take patience — I’ve read that more than once. It’s historically right there in all the books. As it is, I’m working as hard and as fast as I can.’”
Nell hoped it was true. She raced on:
“Tur Kaysh says it’s important not to break concentration, and I’m trying my best not to because concentration is so important here. Maybe it is always, but it’s different here. I’m starting to understand some things. You know how at home there can be some big kids who just outweigh everybody and push them around because of that? Maybe you haven’t seen that so much yet in your grade. I have. Scientifically, it’s just body mass, right? Like this advantage they have with this body they got into, and they throw it around and make things happen (like getting people’s lunches or whatever). Well, here it’s different. Here it’s how sharp you can think that makes things happen. That is, it’s a gift to have good concentration, like the Guide says, but you have to work for it, no matter what. When I think of it like that, I think that Ganbihar is better than home in that way. Fairer, right? At home people are always saying things like it’s what’s on the inside that counts, but here it really does. The Guide says the city is like a pit that we fell into from forgetting. He means the people here, but I was thinking that it could apply back home, too. Anyway, so don’t worry, I’m learning a lot and I’m going to figure things out and then we’ll all be able to get back. Just, I’m thinking that maybe it would even be better if we could go back and forth. Maybe I’ll figure that out, too.
Your brother,
Max”
Nell sat looking at the letter a second when she’d finished. She glanced over at Susan. If Max could see Susan now, would he still want to come back to this place? She wondered.
Kate often wore a strange and penetrating look, full of yearning, as if she would readily shed her own skin and take on another’s, take Nell’s or Susan’s, if she could. Nell disliked it and Susan humored it, and Kate, unaware, went on looking with eyes like garden spades meant for digging. She wore that look now, watching Susan. Susan had gotten up from sleep no better than when she lay down. To Nell, it looked almost as if she hadn’t gotten up at all, only opened her eyes and moved to sit stiffly at the desk, still dozing. Above her, the weaving of the man emerging from the water jumped in the lamplight, but Susan, though her face was lifted to it, did not see. She had lost all pretense of busying herself, and not even a book sat open before her to hide her distraction.
“Susan? What are you looking at? Hey, Susan!”
She called two or three times and then went and nudged her sister. Only then did Susan turn, frown in Nell’s direction, and pull a book from the pile. But she only pretended to read. Nell watched her with mounting panic.
This time, Nell took Jean with her when she left the room. Jean, though not as watchful as Kate, well understood the meaning of the tight silence that filled the room and was happy to escape it.
“We’re going to get Max,” Nell said to her, and Jean’s face lit up.
It wasn’t as straightforward as that, unfortunately. Nell realized that she didn’t even know where Max slept, though she had heard that the boys were housed on one of the upper floors of the first band. Minna had told her that families inhabited the far side of the band, but this side, the side facing west, was home to all the children who had come parentless to the sanctuary. Nell could only think to knock at the door of the woman who oversaw the younger girls, Mistress Dendra.
“You knock,” she said to Jean. “She’ll expect you to ask a question.”
Mistress Dendra wore her hair in a thick black braid. She had a habit of playing with it, and Nell had seen her, taking Jean’s group through the first garden, tugging at the end of it as if leading herself around on a dark leash. Mistress Dendra was pretty, and young, and not nearly as annoying as the Shepherdess.
She opened the door, looking sleepy.
“Jean? Are you all right? Is there a problem?”
There was, but no amount of arguing would convince the young woman that she should call for Max, and
certainly not the Master Watcher, whom Nell brought up reluctantly. Boys were not allowed to visit after hours, even brothers.
And so Nell and Jean trudged back to their room, to the taut silence and the worrisome look on Susan’s face.
The next day, Nell found Mistress Meva and reminded her how much she’d like to see the weavers at work. The Shepherdess, delighted, gave her leave to go. If Max was spending all his time in the third band, Nell decided, she’d have to get closer to it.
She did not expect to be much interested in the weavers or the embroiderers or any of the other artisans, all women, who sat in the second garden, working their looms or bent over embroidery hoops in the sun. But on her way past them, she glanced at the half-made tapestries and stopped.
The image on the nearest loom standing upright in the garden was of a boat cresting the waves. It stood half revealed, the bottom of the picture vivid and alive. Keel up, the boat hung suspended over a stormy sea of blue and gray, waves that tossed ivory foam into an iron sky. The icy water and the ship’s hull poised above it and the red, chafed hands of people clinging to the rails were richly colored; they stood out, bright and alive, disappearing halfway up into lines of unwoven thread, shoulders and faces and mast and sail as yet unmade. But what stopped Nell was the color of the yarn that hung from the side of the loom, waiting to be drawn into the tapestry. It was all gray.
She watched as the weaver lifted a thread and pulled it through. Her fingers ran over it, tugged, and fitted it into place. As she did so, it colored, twinkling a little as the gray blushed orange and the thread settled over the others, part of a streak of sun breaking through clouds.
“How did you do that?”
The woman looked up, and the thread she was about to weave, which had begun to brighten, dulled again in her hand. Nell watched it in dismay, but the woman was untroubled.
“Weave, you mean? Are you the girl Meva sent?”
Nell nodded, and the weaver, who introduced herself as Iana, offered her a chair.
“I’m sorry to ruin your thread,” Nell said, pointing.
Iana smiled and shrugged. “Oh, that? That’s nothing. It’ll come back. Come, and I’ll show you weaving.”
She was a talkative woman tilting toward old age, with a hawkish nose and a wrinkled chin, though around her eyes a little youth remained. And in her hands there was speed and strength and nimbleness. Nell watched her work, pulling the weft back and forth over the pattern she had laid. Each time, as she consulted her paper and drew a new thread into the weave, Nell saw it bloom color.
“How do you do that?” she asked again.
The woman shrugged. Amid all her talk of the weaving, she seemed to see the colorless thread coming to life as an afterthought, a happy convenience.
“We weavers have little songs of color in our heads,” she said, tapping hers for effect. “That’s one of the first things you learn, weaving.”
“And it tells the thread what color to be?”
“Oh, no. I see that. It just gives you a little rhythm to see it by: Life is ours, and color and light, the child we form, the yarn make bright. It’s like the growing-garden song, or haven’t you learned that one yet?”
“You mean the chant of seeds?” Nell asked. She hadn’t thought of the poem as a song.
“Yes, that. Just a little help, an aid to the mind, to make the work light.”
Nell watched her a while longer, fascinated. Nearby, an embroiderer named Neetri worked pearls into a glossy cloth stretched over a large hoop. These, too, shifted and deepened in color as she worked. Nell wanted to know how it was done, but Neetri told her what Iana had, quoting an old saying that woman’s work was in her belly and hands, and remarking that the great dyers of old, all men, were known to make colors more vibrant than any others.
“But that art was lost, you know, with the flight across the sea. Perhaps in the third band they’ll discover it again, and we’ll have all the lost shades. There were colors among the ancients, that would dazzle the eyes. Not like today.”
Nell looked around the garden, freshly washed from yesterday’s rain. Drops clung to the blush-colored petals of some flowers Iana called open-palms, glinting like crystal. Shallow pools of white rain winked in the folds of the rainbow canvases the artisans used to keep the sun off. Nell looked again at the tapestry of the ship, and the embroidery that Neetri called “the birth of twins to Priya, mother of all,” a radiant scene built of beads of polished brass and gems and brilliant silks, and wondered what colors could have outshone these. But she didn’t say anything. She went back to the first band, trying to remember the words to the chant about growing, and for the moment forgetting all about Max, and even Susan.
Summer on the mountain was unlike summer in the valley, with its bright sunlight and brighter crops, the women bending to toil together in the mornings, the girls in their lines gathering the harvest in their canvas bags, skirts catching on the tall stalks to make them rustle and swing and wave beneath the cloudless sky. At the mountain cottage, the garden grew in its small glade, untouched by any but one set of hands, one patient farmer collecting the day’s harvest alone.
The exile dug carrots and turnips and a hard-skinned yam from the soil and thought that perhaps silence would have been the better way, long ago. Perhaps obedience and acceptance and dampened hopes were not such a price to pay for the vivid life of the valley, full of the company of others.
Silence had been the choice then, and the exile had refused it.
Now there was neither company nor silence. The roiling mist had washed all away, and even in the empty garden on the hill there was no peace.
To the soundless voice the seed,
To the silent singer the flower.
Rouse the fruit
And draw the sleeper to light.
Sitting on her bed the day after her visit with the weavers, Nell recited the poem in her head, trying to make the words stick:
Grayfleck stone to the tammery,
For open-palm hint of sea.
Silverwhite to the urlis,
Firesand for the redlace tree. . . .
She’d thought of it all day after the weaver had mentioned it, and because the woman had named the small pink-tinged flowers open-palm. Another long night with Susan’s silence and no sign of Max had given her time to think again about the color blossoming in the weaver’s hand, about the songs that had seemed to her, until then, to mean nothing. The next morning, when the girls chanted the seeds, Nell had listened to the poem with a different ear. To her surprise, she found she knew the words already, having said them often enough now without thinking. At dinner in the garden, she’d plucked an open-palm, and now she sat on the edge of her bed with the delicate thing cupped in her hands. Evening flamed outside, and clouds like red coals burned above the western mountain, but Nell kept her eyes on the flower, wondering what Iana had meant by “an aid to the mind.”
For open-palm hint of sea.
She had never heard of silverwhite or firesand, but the sea she knew. She remembered the sky hard as polished brass over the water, the rush and slap of the surf, the hot sand gritty beneath her feet. And the air — there was that, too — the salt-and-sour tang the wind carried as it blew chilly against her wet skin.
Was all that hint of sea?
To the soundless voice the seed . . .
She’d gone over it so many times the song ran on its own inside her head tonight, a soothing rhythm, something like the sea itself, the long sibilant inhale and exhale of the tide.
She lifted the flower and examined it closely. Five flat rosy petals surrounded a creamy center attached to a long, firm green stalk. Unlike a rose or a tulip, the flower opened flat to the sky, which Nell guessed was the reason for its name. But what of the sea? She brought the flower to her face and breathed. Beneath the faint smell of vanilla was an even fainter edge, the brisk aroma of air blown from the ocean.
To the silent singer the flower. . . .
After Max ha
d made peaches, and Susan had drawn water out of nothing, Nell had tried to think of something for long enough, and with enough concentration, to make it take shape in the air. Max said that Susan had the knack of thinking of things fully, without distraction. But if this was the key, it was one Nell could not seem to find. She noticed things. In the forest, she had often forced herself to sit and try to forget the sharp odor of the barren ground and the calls of hawks and the shadows cast by leaves in the dirt. She tried not to see Kate drawing with a stick and Jean swinging her filthy doll and the way Max’s hair stood up in wild lumps after he ran his fingers through it. And yet she was drawn to it all, no matter how she tried to quiet herself and shut the door to the world so she could think of one thing alone.
Despair began to edge in on her as she sat on the bed, thinking all this. Hunched over, she stared unhappily at the flower. All her life the twins had run just ahead of her, telling her to keep quiet and keep to her place, reminding her of how much she didn’t know. She’d never listened to them before. Remembering this, Nell shoved aside the dark, useless thoughts. Forget Susan! she said to herself fiercely. Susan was even now walking the library blindly, listening so hard to one thing that she couldn’t think! And Max — where was he? So taken with the one thing that he had forgotten them these past two nights. She straightened in disgust. There were other ways — always other ways — and she would be better at them. The best!
Abruptly, she stopped pushing aside all the things she saw and let herself look at them, unworried. There was the golden tapestry above the desk, and there the window, ablaze. And here the pink-palmed flower, open in her hand and smelling of the sea. She gazed at it and thought, I see all of it; I won’t be blind. But I can see it like I do sitting on the front porch, letting the world go by. I can collect it and hold it, to think about later. Like I did with the chant of seeds, listening and not knowing I’d heard.
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