A Witness Not Myself

A Witness Not Myself

Last day of the light. The courtyard, before I ask.

I have prepared everything except the asking.

The bag is beneath the bench beside me, packed closely enough now that I could carry it without rearranging anything before the lower gate. That has not always been true. I packed it once on the fourth day of the light, discovered by evening that I had included several things whose only purpose was to make the journey resemble a brief absence, and emptied it again. Yesterday I tried with less imagination. What remains is practical, light enough to carry, and sufficiently ordinary that I could still return every piece to its place before supper and leave no evidence that I had intended anything at all.

I am not sure whether I find that reassuring.

The first entry in these pages was written six days ago. I read it again this morning, along with everything that followed, and resisted the urge to improve several passages now that I know more than I did when I wrote them. There are questions I would phrase differently. In one place I spent nearly half a page pursuing an explanation I no longer find especially convincing, and elsewhere I passed over something that now seems obvious enough to be irritating.

I have left both alone. If these pages are to be useful to me, then the woman who wrote them must be allowed to know only what she knew at the time. There would be little point in keeping an account of uncertainty and then correcting the uncertainty once it becomes embarrassing.

That principle seemed considerably more academic when I applied it to other people.

I began writing because I thought I was preparing to ask my mother for permission to travel south. That remains true, though it has become less complete with each day I have spent avoiding her. I have copied what I am willing to carry from the archive, considered the roads available to me, checked the provisions twice and then once more after deciding twice should have been sufficient. I have found legitimate work whenever legitimate work presented itself and, when it did not, displayed an admirable capacity for inventing more.

There is very little left to prepare.

My mother is inside the house. I know where she is likely to be at this hour, and I have known for most of the afternoon. Nothing prevents me from going to her except the fact that once I do, the question will have an answer.

I had expected the journey itself to frighten me more.

I have traveled before, though always on House business and never far enough that returning required thought. There is a particular simplicity in being sent somewhere. Somebody else has already decided that you should go. The work is known before the road begins, and however unfamiliar the place at the end of it may be, there is still a direction in which home lies.

This would not be that.

If my mother agrees, I would be traveling because I asked to. I would be going south after something I have seen only in dreams and in records that refuse to agree with one another, with no work waiting there that House Veyr has assigned and no certainty that what I find will justify having gone at all. I have spent most of my life requiring better evidence from other people before permitting them a conclusion.

Apparently I am willing to make exceptions where my own life is concerned.

That is not entirely fair. There are reasons for going, and I will set them down where they belong. What I am less inclined to dress as reason is the simpler fact that I want to go. I want to know what is there. I want to stand somewhere I have not already been told how to stand and ask a question without first deciding which answer will be considered appropriate.

It has taken me most of the week to write that without immediately qualifying it.

Wanting something for myself has never been forbidden in this house. Nobody would phrase a rule so badly. There are only expectations, duties, matters that must be finished first, and the understanding that a Veyr does not mistake curiosity for necessity. By the time all of those have been considered, wanting becomes a private thing and therefore harmless.

I have been very good at making mine harmless.

That is part of what has made this week difficult. I know how to live here. I know what is expected of me and what can be safely ignored. I know which doors are merely closed and which are closed in the particular way that means knocking will produce nothing except embarrassment for everyone involved. There are subjects my mother will discuss if approached directly and others that require enough patience that the answer is almost not worth what it takes to obtain. Ilseth can avoid a question for an astonishing length of time without technically refusing it. My aunts are less skillful, though they compensate with confidence.

None of this is new to me. That may be the problem.

For years I mistook understanding the arrangement for belonging comfortably within it. I knew where I was useful, so I rarely examined where I was absent. If instruction stopped, I found a book. If a conversation ended when I entered, I learned not to enter so abruptly the next time. If a question made someone uncomfortable, I assumed there must be a better way to ask it.

I became very good at finding the better way.

Only recently have I started wondering why so much of my life required one.

I do not mean that as an indictment of House Veyr. I am not certain I could write one honestly even if I intended to. This is my family, and whatever else becomes true in the pages that follow will not make that false. They taught me nearly everything I know, including enough to recognize when an answer has been arranged rather than given. There is an unfortunate symmetry in that which I am trying not to enjoy.

Nor do I believe every silence around me has contained some hidden cruelty. People are allowed privacy. Families fail one another without conspiracy. Sometimes a lesson ends because the teacher is tired, a door closes because the room beyond it is occupied, and a question receives no answer because nobody has one worth giving.

The difficulty begins when the same explanations are required too often.

I have not decided what conclusion belongs there.

Perhaps that is why I have been more comfortable writing these pages than speaking to my mother. Paper permits uncertainty without regarding it as disrespect.

Morrow, for his part, has regarded most of the week as an opportunity to demonstrate how little assistance a person can offer while remaining technically involved. He is on the courtyard rail now, close enough to inspect the bag whenever he chooses and determined not to acknowledge that it exists. Three days ago, when I asked whether he thought I should pack, he told me that packing and leaving were separate decisions and that I had a habit of asking him for answers to questions I had already divided incorrectly.

I informed him that this was an unnecessarily complicated way of refusing to answer.

He said I was improving.

I have not forgiven him.

He has not told me to go south. I want that stated accurately, even here. Morrow rarely tells me to do anything when he believes he can make me understand the choice well enough to make it myself. He asks questions, objects to my reasoning when he finds it poor, and has an almost offensive willingness to let me remain wrong until I can identify the error without him.

For eleven years, that has been how he taught me.

There were times I would have preferred instruction to education. He has never shown much interest in the preference.

I trust him because of that, among other reasons. I trust that when he gives me an answer, he believes I have exhausted the better option of finding it myself. I trust that he will tell me when my reasoning is unsound even if the conclusion happens to favor him. I trust him in ways I have never needed to enumerate before, and the act of writing them down makes the confidence look stranger than it feels.

Perhaps all confidence does when examined closely enough.

I am not examining that one further tonight.

There are already enough questions waiting for me inside the house.

My mother may refuse.

I have written those words several times this week, although the possibility has changed character since the first. At the beginning I treated refusal as an ending. If she said no, I would remain. The journey would become something I had considered and then, sensibly or otherwise, abandoned.

I am no longer certain that is what her answer would decide.

That uncertainty is the part I have had the most difficulty admitting. Wanting to travel south is one thing. Believing I have reason to go is another. Asking my mother is familiar enough that I know how to prepare myself for the conversation.

Wondering whether I am asking permission or informing her of a decision is something else entirely.

I do not know which it is.

I suspect that is why the bag has been packed in a way that allows me to pretend it is not.

Had I already decided to disobey her, I think I would know it. At least I hope I would. I am angry about many things, though not always with enough certainty to know where the anger properly belongs. I have been frustrated with my mother often enough that frustration itself proves nothing. I do not want to turn every unanswered question into evidence against her merely because I have finally grown tired of having them.

But neither do I want to spend another year accepting an answer solely because it was given by someone who expects to be obeyed.

Somewhere between those positions is the decision I am apparently about to make.

That would be easier if House Veyr were a place I simply wished to escape.

It is not.

There are mornings when I know who is moving through the corridor before the floorboard gives her away because every woman in this house has her own pace. I know which cup my mother reaches for when she has not slept enough and which chair Ilseth chooses when her knee is troubling her, though she believes nobody has noticed either habit. I know where the roof leaks in the dark and which lamps must be trimmed more often because the drafts take them first. There are books below this courtyard I have handled so often that I can recognize them by the wear along their spines before I can read the titles.

I know how this place sounds when everyone has gone to bed.

I know what it smells like after rain.

I know where I belong in every room.

That last sentence is less comforting than it once would have been.

Perhaps the problem is that I know my place here too well.

I am not going to resolve that on this page. The entries that follow contain enough of the week to show how I arrived at the question, and I would rather leave the process intact than summarize it now as though I have already understood it. There are things in those pages I did not recognize while writing them. There may be others I still do not recognize tonight.

I would like to retain the possibility of discovering them honestly.

That is the reason this note belongs at the beginning despite being written after the others. Anyone who reads what follows should know that I have not corrected the earlier entries to agree with whatever answer I receive from my mother. If I am permitted to go, the hesitation remains. If I am refused and decide that refusal settles the matter, the desire to leave remains equally true. If something else happens, it will have to enter the account when it happens rather than reach backward and make itself inevitable.

I have had enough of inevitability appearing after the fact.

The light has shifted while I have been writing. Morrow has moved twice, the second time onto the bench beside me, and has begun examining the fastening on my bag with sufficient concentration that I assume he has decided criticism by implication is more efficient than speaking.

I told him the strap is sound.

He said he had not asked.

There are advantages to companionship that does not require dignity.

The bag is ready. The pages I meant to copy are copied. There is no unfinished task in the archive important enough to justify another delay, and I have checked the contents of my writing case so many times that another inspection would constitute superstition rather than caution.

My mother is still inside.

I am frightened of what she will say. I am more frightened than I expected by the possibility that her answer may not be enough to decide me.

That is the truth of the matter as it stands now, before I have had the opportunity to become wiser about it.

The entries that follow begin six days earlier, when I still believed preparation and decision were separate things.

I am less certain now.

When I finish this page, I am going to speak to my mother.

An Absence in Good Order

First day of the light. The archive, an hour after the bells. At the small desk.

The bells rang before dawn, though Nerith had already begun waking beneath them. By the final stroke, shutters were opening across the terraces, ladders were being carried into streets never made wide enough to receive them, and every household appeared to have remembered at once whatever it had spent the dark persuading itself could wait.

The light is not gentle when it comes. For most of the year there are repairs a person can reasonably pretend not to see. Damp spreads behind plaster. Slate loosens somewhere beyond the reach of a lantern. A shutter begins admitting more wind than it used to, but only during the hours when everyone is already cold. Then the light comes and all of it is made visible at once.

Nerith responds by attempting to mend everything in seven days.

From the archive window I can see the upper part of the fourth terrace, though at present most of it has disappeared behind scaffolding. Someone across the lane has taken down an entire section of guttering and appears to have discovered, somewhat late, that removing it was considerably easier than putting it back. Farther down, two households are disputing which of them owns the wall between their roofs. They have apparently chosen to settle the matter by shouting measurements at one another from separate ladders.

There is something reassuring about the city's confidence that all of this will be finished before the dark returns. Very little evidence supports it, but Nerith has never required evidence before beginning repairs.

Our house has contributed appropriately to the disorder.

Six days remain after this one, and there are four men on our roof measuring the western slope for the third time. My mother has told them twice that they were hired to repair the eastern side. They have explained, with increasing patience, that no sensible tradesman repairs only half a roof. She has explained, with considerably less patience, that half a roof is what they were paid to repair. Neither argument has benefited from repetition.

I have been able to follow most of this from below because dust comes through the archive ceiling whenever one of them crosses above me. The first fall landed near the Ossaline correspondence. The second came down across an open witnessing from my grandmother's tenure, at which point I moved both folios farther along the table and informed the ceiling that I would not be doing so again.

It has so far respected the warning.

The archive is otherwise removed from whatever Nerith is doing above it. That is intentional. Whoever chose this room understood that records survive longer when they are kept away from damp, changing temperatures, casual visitors, and family members who suddenly remember that an old account contains something they would prefer to inspect privately.

The first two are matters of preservation. The others are why the door locks.

The key has been mine for eleven years.

I was twelve when it was given to me. At the time I understood the key as a mark of trust, and I was proud enough of it that I think it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise now. The archive contained more of House Veyr than any room I had been allowed into before then, and being made responsible for it seemed important. It was important. I am only less certain, eleven years later, that importance was the only reason it became mine.

Most of what reaches this room is already over by the time it reaches my desk. An oath has been sworn and subsequently disputed. Someone has died, leaving the living to disagree over what was meant or promised while there was still a person present to mean or promise it. A witnessing has concluded, and the people involved have gone home with enough time ahead of them to make their memories more comfortable.

My work begins with what they leave behind. I compare one account against another, separate what can be established from what is merely agreed upon, and arrange the matter so that someone coming to it years later can understand not only what was concluded, but why. This is more difficult than copying down what people say. People are very precise when certainty favors them and unexpectedly philosophical when it does not.

The long table is where those accounts are entered. This smaller desk has never had so definite a purpose. Correspondence waits here for replies. Notes accumulate beneath the inkstand until I remember why I made them. Unfinished statements remain in the lower drawer while somebody decides whether the matter is worth pursuing, or whether everyone involved would prefer that it quietly cease becoming official.

That is why I chose it for this.

I intend to ask my mother for permission to travel south, and I do not expect her to grant it. I have not yet asked, which means there is presently no conclusion to arrange and very little evidence from which to predict one beyond knowing my mother.

I am aware that this is not how a Veyr account is ordinarily begun.

That is part of the reason I am doing it.

If I mean to apply the habits of this house to my own account, then I should record what those habits are while I still know which of them I follow deliberately and which I obey because nobody ever taught me there was a difference.

House Veyr holds that a witch should never stand as the only witness to her own work. The rule is old enough that I cannot tell whether the wording we use now resembles the first version of it, but the reasoning remains sound. A person inside a ritual is occupied with performing it and is therefore poorly placed to observe everything the ritual does in return. There are workings that disturb memory directly. There are also grief, fear, pride, embarrassment, and the ordinary human talent for remembering an event in whatever shape permits life to continue afterward.

None of this requires dishonesty.

That distinction matters to our practice. A false account and a lie are not the same thing, although the damage caused by either may be identical.

Our answer has always been to write things down.

Other houses consider the extent of it excessive. They are less offended by the practice when one of our ledgers contains the wording of an oath they suddenly need remembered exactly. I have never thought it worth pointing out the inconsistency. If a record is useful only after everyone has forgotten why it was made, it is useful nonetheless.

Five generations of House Veyr occupy the shelves around me. There are funeral accounts detailed enough to establish whether rain had begun before or after the body was carried from a house, even in cases where nobody later discovered a reason to care. Agreements are copied in full rather than summarized because a summary requires the writer to decide which words will matter later, and people are remarkably inventive when given several years to discover significance in a word previously ignored.

My great-grandmother once devoted half a page to a client's dog.

The animal would not enter the courtyard. Nothing unusual occurred afterward, so far as any surviving account establishes, and the matter appears never to have been mentioned again. She recorded it anyway. Its name was Pellen. It belonged to the client's eldest son and had apparently crossed our courtyard many times before that morning without objection.

When I was younger, I thought half a page was an absurd amount of ink to spend on a frightened dog.

I no longer do.

The trouble with deciding what does not matter is that the decision must usually be made before anyone knows enough to make it well. An archive is useful precisely because it allows a detail to survive the period during which everyone agrees it is useless.

This is why the absence bothers me.

Every daughter of House Veyr undergoes her First Hearing in her twelfth year. Anyone outside the houses who eventually reads this will reasonably expect an explanation of what that means. I will give one when I reach the night itself. There are portions of the rite I was taught never to write outside the books intended for its practice, and I have not yet decided how much authority that instruction should retain simply because I was young when it was given to me.

For now, it is enough to know that the rite is ordinary among us. It is expected. It is witnessed.

And it is recorded.

There is no record of mine.

For years I assumed there had been some ordinary mistake. Misfiling was the obvious explanation, and obvious explanations should be exhausted before more interesting ones are permitted to waste everyone's time. I correct misplaced records most seasons. Someone returns a folio to the shelf beside the one from which she took it. A loose account finds its way inside a larger volume. A page copied for reference is mistaken for the original and the original is subsequently put somewhere extremely safe by a woman who dies before telling anyone where that is.

Archives produce mysteries without assistance.

Mine was not one of them.

I began with the First Hearing ledgers because that is where the account belonged. When it was not there, I checked the family records against the date in case it had been entered under household business instead. Years later, once the archive was mine without supervision, I went through the sealed folios and then the boxes reserved for matters the house prefers not to leave in ordinary circulation. Some of what I found there was considerably more private than my rite and considerably less interesting.

The account was nowhere among them.

I checked the volume itself after that, not for the entry but for evidence that one had once existed. The numbering continues correctly through the relevant pages. The binding shows no missing leaf. There is no change of ink where a damaged section might have been recopied, and no later hand has attempted to repair an interruption because there is no interruption to repair. The entries continue through that week in good order.The archive looks complete.

It was several years before I understood why that disturbed me more than a torn page would have.

A missing page admits that something is missing.

This does not.

There were six women in this house capable of making the record that night. Any one of them could have entered the account before the ash in the chamber had cooled, or the following morning if exhaustion made accuracy doubtful. Illness does not explain the omission. Neither does absence. They knew the rite had taken place.

No account was made.

As keeper of the archive, that is as far as I can go. My First Hearing occurred during the last day of that dark. House Veyr did not record it. I have found no comparable omission in five generations of family records.

I cannot establish why.

I have theories, obviously. Eleven years is an unreasonable length of time to coexist with an absence without attempting to explain it, particularly when one has been trained from childhood to dislike unanswered questions. But an explanation that fits the evidence is not necessarily an explanation supported by it, and there is a point at which inference becomes invention no matter how satisfying the result.

I was taught to know that point.

The men have come down from the roof for their meal. I can hear them in the courtyard through the floor above, along with my mother, who appears to have resumed the argument from this morning without allowing food to interrupt it. I cannot distinguish her words, but one of the men has just given an answer of such extraordinary length that I assume he has decided to explain the roof to her again.

I have reconsidered my earlier position and no longer feel sorry for him.

The quiet above has at least left the archive quieter, and in it I have reached the part of this entry I have been avoiding.

The missing record troubles me for reasons beyond the omission itself. Had the night been written down, I would have something against which to test the account I have carried for eleven years. It would not necessarily be true. I know better than to grant paper that kind of authority. But it would be another hand, another set of eyes, something made close enough to the event that time had not yet done much work upon it.

Instead, I have only my own memory.

I have begun to distrust the condition of it.

This is not a sudden discovery. I have heard the changes for years without giving them that name. I tell the story of that night less often now than I did when I was younger, but when I do, the account comes too easily. Places where I once hesitated no longer require hesitation. Events that I remember as separate have drawn closer together. Things I learned afterward sometimes sit beside things I witnessed, and I have to stop and ask myself whether I knew them in the chamber or merely know them now.

I know what that means because I have spent eleven years listening for it in other people.

A person gives an account soon after an event and leaves gaps because memory has gaps. Asked again months later, she is often more certain, not less. The missing portions have acquired explanations. Words she once remembered approximately return with greater precision. None of this need be deliberate. Repetition has its own method of revision, and the mind is uncomfortable with a story that refuses to become complete.

I have watched grieving people do this across my table. They were not lying; by the time they spoke to me, the account they gave was the one they genuinely remembered. The difficulty is that sincerity does nothing to make a memory accurate.

I appear to have believed that recognizing the process in others would make me less susceptible to it myself. I can find no professional justification for that assumption.

Half my life now stands between me and the chamber. During most of those years, the only account available to me has been the one I carried away from it. I asked questions at first. Some were answered, though rarely twice in the same way. Others produced the sort of silence that makes asking again feel less like persistence and more like a failure to understand what has already been communicated.

Eventually I stopped asking aloud.

I did not stop going over the night.

Every return to it has therefore depended upon the return before. There is no original account waiting somewhere untouched for me to consult, no second witness willing to sit across from me and say that a detail happened differently. I have memory checking itself against memory and eleven years of information gathered afterward by whatever means remained available to me.

I do not know what that has done to the girl I remember sitting inside that circle.

It is difficult to write that sentence without correcting it.

So I will leave it.

This journal cannot give me back the first version. Paper does not become truthful merely because I trust it more than memory, and an error written carefully is still an error. Whatever I have already lost will remain lost. If I have filled some part of the absence myself, the ink will not expose it for me.

What the page can do is prevent me from continuing to alter the account without evidence that I have done so.

That is enough reason to begin.

Some of what I remember from that night belongs unquestionably to the twelve-year-old who was there. Some of it may have arrived later from conversations that ended when I entered the room, answers given with enough care to make me wonder what an unguarded answer would have sounded like, or things I learned because nobody realized I had learned them.

There are parts I do not know how to classify. For a Veyr, that is an uncomfortable admission.

For me, perhaps it is overdue.

I will write what I remember when I reach it. Where I am uncertain, I will say so. Where I know something only because another person told me later, I will try not to lend it the authority of something I saw myself. I cannot promise that I will always know the difference, which is precisely why I am setting this down before another year has the opportunity to make the distinction easier than it deserves to be.

The men are back on the roof now. I can hear slate being lifted above me and my mother has gone quiet, which suggests either that an agreement has finally been reached or that she has decided continued argument would constitute encouragement.

They have begun repairing the western side.