Volume 1.1 — A Witness Not Myself

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.

Volume 2 — The Journal of Eveline Veyr

Book II - The Road South

The Road South

Kept by Eveline Veyr on the Corrow road, from the last week of dark in Nerith to the eaves of the Sablewood. Entries as I was able to make them.

Second day of the light. Nine miles south, off the road.

I have not been able to write since the terrace. I am going to do it now, while my hands are steady, and I am going to put down what happened rather than what I have spent two days telling myself about it.

There is no leaving House Veyr, and I knew that before I could read. We are not a coven that people join and drift out of. A house is a set of obligations that outlive the people holding them, and a Veyr who walks away does not become an ordinary woman with an unusual childhood; she becomes a Veyr somewhere else, unsupervised, carrying four hundred years of our records in her head. There is no provision for it anywhere in the folios. Nothing in that house has ever been settled by force either, which is what I was counting on. It gets settled in writing, and produced again two years later at the moment it will cost you most.

So I expected an argument conducted at meals and never quite finished, and then the sort of exhausted arrangement my family is good at — a stated errand, a date I would be expected back by, a letter sent ahead to some allied house asking them to look me over on the way through.

I raised it on the third night of the dark, which was poor timing. The shutters had been up since the bells, the oil was already being counted out by the evening rather than by the week, and my mother had turned down two commissions in as many days for no reason she gave me. Everyone in that house speaks more quietly in the dark, and everyone is more careful, and I chose it anyway because I had been carrying the thing for a month and could not carry it any further.

She heard me to the end without interrupting, which should have told me something. Then she said no.

I had my answer ready and did not get to use it, because she kept talking. She said that she understood what I was asking for better than I thought she did. She said that if I would let the dark pass and let the roads dry, she would write to Threnn herself and take me south in the spring — she would go with me, she would sit in the room while I asked them about the language, and she would put the Veyr name behind the asking so that they could not simply decline to answer a girl.

My mother has never conceded anything to me in my life. Not once, not on small matters. She sat across the table in a shuttered room with the lamp between us and offered to spend her own house's credit on the one question I have been carrying since I was twelve, and I believed her, and I still believe her. Whatever else she is, she does not offer things she does not intend to do.

I said yes. I want that in the record. I said yes, and I meant it, and I went to bed that night having decided to stay.

I asked her, before she put the lamp out, what she would do if I went anyway. She looked at the table for a while and said that she would rather I did not make her answer that in this house.

I took it for a threat. It was not, and understanding what it actually was has been most of what I have done on this walk.

Every year since my First Hearing, on the anniversary of it, Ilseth has taken a lock of my hair and a drop of blood onto paper and had me write my full name beneath it in my own hand. It is called the yearly witness. It was explained to me at thirteen as ordinary practice, a way of keeping the line documented, and it takes less time than putting my hair up, and I have sat for it every year without thinking about it once, because I was raised in a house where somebody is always writing something down. Ilseth's hands are cold and she says so every time, and she always has the cloth ready before the needle, and there is a particular way she turns the paper toward me for the signature that I have known since I was a child.

No one else in that family sits for it. Not my mother, not my aunts, not Dinnah. It appears in no folio. Ilseth began it in the month after my rite, my mother agreed to it, and every year of it has gone into a lead casket in the mortuary beneath the courtyard, where we keep what is not to be handled casually.

It is called the Tally.

Hair, blood, and a name in the subject's own hand are what our house uses when something has to be reached across distance and undone, and every Veyr knows that, because we are the ones called in to do it to other people's problems. I have prepared those three things myself, for clients, in that same room, at that same slab, and I have been the one to explain to a frightened family what we would need from them and why. Nothing in that casket would have prevented me walking out of the gate. It is not a lock. It is what a careful house keeps in a drawer for the day the daughter has to be dealt with, and they began keeping it in the month after a stranger walked into a sealed room and spoke to a twelve-year-old in a language none of them knew.

Morrow told me the following night. He did not find it out, and I want to be careful with that, because I have caught myself writing it the easy way twice already. Morrow does not go through the archive. He has never needed to. He knows things, the way he has always simply known things, and after eleven years I ask him the way you ask someone who has lived in a town longer than you have. He told me what the casket was, what was in it, how many years it held, and which flag of the mortuary floor it sits beneath. When I asked how he knew, he said that I had told him.

I have not told him. I did not know.

I did not believe him, either. That is the part I keep having to put back in when I tell this to myself. I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark and told a raven that he was wrong about my own family, and then I spent the rest of that night going through it the way I would go through a client's account, looking for the innocent version, and I could not build one. There is no innocent reason to keep eleven years of one woman's hair in lead.

So I went to Ilseth in the morning and gave her the chance.

I did not accuse her of anything. I asked her, pleasantly, over the accounts, whether we might let this year's witness go — I said I would be busy with the spring journey, I said it was a small thing, I made it as easy to grant as I know how to make anything, and I have spent my whole life learning how to make things easy to grant.

She said no. She did not look up and she did not explain and she did not ask why I wanted it, which is the part that finished it, because Ilseth has asked me why about everything I have ever wanted since I was a child.

Then she turned the accounts around toward me the way she turns the paper, and asked whether I would like tea.

I stayed in that house two more days after I knew.

I sat at table both nights. I passed things. I listened to an argument about the lead on the west roof and gave an opinion on it. My mother spoke twice about the spring, about which of the Threnn women would be worth asking and which would only waste an afternoon, and I answered her, and I was careful to be neither too warm nor too quiet, because the one thing that house notices is a change in tone. On the second afternoon I did a client's work with Ilseth in the mortuary, four feet from the flag Morrow had named, and neither of us mentioned anything at all.

Dinnah came up to my room on the last of those nights. She has been the only one in that house who still asks me for things — she wants to be taught, she has always wanted to be taught, and she asks me rather than her mother because I explain and her mother recites. She had wanted the ward that shuts the dead out of a room, because she had sat her first full communion that season and had not slept properly since. I told her I would teach it to her when the light came back.

I want that written down and I am not going to arrange it into anything.

Second day of the light. The same page, continued.

I went down on the last night of the dark with the household asleep above me. The mortuary is the oldest room we have and the only one cut into the rock rather than built onto it, so it stays at one temperature no matter what the season is doing overhead. There is a drip somewhere behind the north wall that nobody has ever located. It smells of lye and cold stone and faintly of the oil we use on the dead, and I have worked in there since I was fourteen and have never once been uneasy in it.

The door carries my grandmother's ward and I had spent most of the night preparing to take it apart. I did not need any of that. It was open when I put my hand on it.

Morrow went through ahead of me. I have written it was already open in this journal in the tone of a woman recording a piece of luck, and I am leaving it that way so that I can see myself doing it.

Dinnah was on the stair with the keys.

They had given the keys to the seventeen-year-old, which was deliberate and was not stupid. They put the one person in that house I have never been able to be cold to between me and that room. She was in her nightclothes with a coat pulled over them, holding the lantern in both hands the way you hold something you have been trusted with, and she was already crying when I came round the turn, and she had not called out. I understood from that that she had been standing there some while, deciding not to.

I talked to her. I used everything I have — every trick of framing and pause and precise wording that Morrow ever taught me, on a girl in a coat, on a stair, at the bottom of my own house — and none of it touched her, because she is a better Veyr at seventeen than I have ever been and because she believed she was doing a kindness. She kept saying my name. Not arguing with me and not pleading, just saying my name, in the way you say the name of someone you are trying to call back to themselves.

Then she filled her chest to shout for the house.

Morrow said: quiet her.

The Quieting is a ward. He taught it to me two winters ago as a way of shutting the dead out of a room so that a witch can sleep in it, and I have used it a handful of times for that and never once wondered what it does if you set it on a person instead of a room. There was no interval between the two words and the doing. Something was already in my hand that fitted the problem, and I used the thing that fitted, and I have not been able to find any moment inside it where I chose.

She made no sound. She has made none since, in the sense that matters — she can speak, she is not injured, she got up on her own and walked to her bed. What is gone is the hearing. Dinnah Veyr is of the senior line and will live two hundred years and will never again feel the current move in a room when a name is spoken in it. Ilseth came down and was on her almost at once, and could do nothing, and I know she could do nothing because I stood at the foot of the stair with the casket against my ribs and watched her try, and did not put it down, and did not go back up.

Nobody came after me. There was no one on the stair behind me and no one at the courtyard door and no one waiting at the gate, and I have thought since that they would not have known what to do with me if they had caught me. My mother followed as far as the courtyard and spoke the severance at my back in a level, unhurried voice while I was still well inside earshot, and she reached the end of it, and I heard all of it.

I am struck out of the folio, which in eleven generations has been done to the dead and never once to the living. There is no such person as Eveline Veyr and there has never been such a person. Nothing I witness or swear or set my name to carries the house behind it again. Every debt owed to me is void and every protection is withdrawn, and if I am killed on this road nobody is coming south to ask about it.

The mirror went with all of that. My grandmother's jet glass was to come to me at my majority; it is the focus every woman of the senior line has worked through since the terrace was raised, and I have known the weight of it in my hand since I was small enough to be told to put it down. A struck woman cannot inherit, and no house will cut another for me now. Whatever I do from here I do through the raven, there being nothing else left to do it through.

The archive went with it as well, and I have been slower to feel that one. Four folios in that house are sealed and I have opened all of them, and they are the only writing anywhere in the world that touches on what came through that window, and I will not see them again. What I have instead is a page of sounds in a child's handwriting at the bottom of my pack. That is now the whole of the evidence, and there is no house behind it, and the woman carrying it does not officially exist.

I came out of the north gate into the first grey of the returning light with the eastern terraces already sounding. The city was coming out to repair what the dark had broken, and there were people on the bridges above me carrying ladders, and two women I have known since I was a child said good morning to me and asked whether I was going far. I said yes. They wished me well. By the time they were told what had happened I would already have stopped existing.

The casket is in my pack. I have not opened it. Eleven years of my hair and eleven signatures in my own hand, and I cannot burn it, because I do not know what eleven years of a witch's name burns like and I am not going to learn that in a field, and I cannot bury it, because then I am a woman who has left that lying in the ground in Fanewick for anyone to turn up. So I carry it. It is not heavy. I am aware of it constantly, the way you are aware of a bad tooth.

Ilseth came to the gate, though not to see me off, and I want to be exact about that, because I have caught myself twice already softening it into a farewell. She came because she had something to say and no intention of saying it in front of the others. She would not take my hand, and Ilseth has taken my hand at every ending in this family since I was old enough to be brought to one. She told me Dinnah was alive and that the girl had asked after me, which I believe was meant to hurt and which did. Then she said one sentence, and turned, and went back up through the house in the dark.

If it ever speaks in my voice, it is not me.

I asked what she meant. She did not answer and she did not stop walking, and she is old enough now that those stairs cost her something both ways.

Second day of the light, later.

The fire has gone down and I am not going to sleep yet, so here is the part I left out.

What I keep arriving at, going over that stair, is the speed. The working came to my hand faster than anything I have ever done — no hesitation, no recall, nothing at all between the word and the doing. Two winters of using a thing for one purpose, and the first instant it was wanted for the other purpose I was already halfway through it without having noticed starting.

I am not going to pretend a bird made me maim my cousin. He said two words, I did it, and I would have arrived at the same place a heartbeat later on my own, because she was about to bring the household down that stair and I had the casket under my arm. I made the choice. I would rather write that plainly than become one of those witches who keeps a familiar so that there is always somebody else in the room to have decided.

But he taught me that ward two winters ago, and in eleven years he has never taught me one single thing I did not turn out to need.

There is something else I have been putting off since before I left.

He has not been himself since the winter went out. He has always been particular — he refuses, he withholds, he will let me be wrong for an entire season if being wrong is the only way I will end up holding the answer — and I have never minded any of it, because that is teaching, and I had precious little of that from anyone else in the house. This is different. Since the winter he has been impatient with me. He interrupts. Twice he has cut across a working of mine to tell me it does not matter, which he has never done, and when I asked what does matter he would not say. He wakes me. He said the name of that town four separate times in one night, in four different voices, until I got up and lit the lamp and sat with it, at which point he went to sleep, which I thought at the time was very funny and do not now. And once, in the archive, when I told him flatly that I was not going anywhere until I understood why, he made a sound I have never heard him make and have no word for, and I sat in that room with every lamp burning until the bells went for the light.

He apologized for it afterward. He has never apologized for anything in his life. I did not like it and I have not been able to explain to myself why not.

I raised it with him this evening, lightly, the way you raise a thing you would rather be talked out of. I said he had been pushing me for months and that I had noticed.

He was quiet long enough that I thought he would let it pass. Then he said, in the voice of an old woman I have never met, that he had been patient for a very long time, and that patience is a thing with an end on it like anything else.

I asked him patient about what.

He said: you are on the road. Sleep.

Third day of the light. The Corrow road, past the second waystone.

The Corrow is the old logging road. It runs south along the shelf until the granite gives out and then drops into country I have only read about. I had never in my life been more than a day and a half from my own house, which I am writing down because in Nerith I was spoken of as a woman who had been places, and I let that stand, and out here there is nobody for the impression to be useful with.

The road is busy in entirely the wrong direction. Carts, families, and a whole household of Wicklings up from somewhere below the Ossul with their doors strapped to the top of the load, because if you are abandoning a house in Fanewick you take the door with you. They asked where I was going. I said south, and they looked at one another in the way people do when they have decided you are somebody else's problem, and the woman driving told me there was nothing south but the trees now. Then she got a proper look at Morrow and stopped talking to me altogether. She did not say another word while I walked alongside them, and once I had dropped back I could hear her explaining me to the children in the tone people use for weather and taxes.

I have decided not to hide him. On the first night I worked out that I could keep him ahead of me and out of sight and travel as an ordinary woman with unusual hair, and I sat with that for an hour before I understood what I was actually arranging: to be alone, off the shelf, in country where nobody knows my family's name, with the one thing I cannot account for. If people see the bird then people talk, and if people talk then somewhere there is a record of a white-haired woman having come through, which is now the nearest thing to protection I own.

Sixth day of the light. Timberfall.

Timberfall is nine houses and a mill and should not have needed a witch at all, but a mill town in a bad year is a town where everyone has begun to suspect somebody.

A woman there had lost two children in a season to a fever that came and went in the wrong order. The village had settled on a neighbor as the cause — an old man, unpopular, who at the second funeral had observed to the mother's face that the little one had always been the sickly one — and they had got as far as taking his gate off its hinges, which in a place that size is the last step before the one you cannot come back from. They wanted a witch to confirm it. They were willing to pay a witch to confirm it. I want to be fair to the old man and say that he does appear to be the most objectionable person in that valley, and that if being insufferable were a curse he would have been hanged years ago on the evidence.

I asked to see the house instead, and then the well.

It was in the well. Nothing had been done to those children by anybody. The stones ran black to my eye from the third course down, the water came up the color of a bruise and smelled of nothing at all, which is how I knew that not one of them could see any of it. The mill has been cutting a stand at the south edge for two years, something in that ground has been coming down into the water the whole time, and the fever came and went in the wrong order because it was never a fever.

They did not want that. A poisoned well means the mill stops and the town starves slowly through the next dark. An old man with a loose tongue means the town has a solution by supper. I stood in that yard and watched four grown adults work out which of the two they would prefer to be true, and the arithmetic took them under a minute, and not one of them had the decency to look ashamed of how quick it was. The mother was the last to give it up. She asked me twice whether I was certain, and I understood that she was not asking about the water.

So I made the old man expensive. I announced, in front of all of them, that I would swear a Veyr witness over the well and set my name to it, and that if a child died in Timberfall after that swearing the fault would sit on whoever had known and drawn from it anyway. Then I did it properly, with the marks cut into the well-stone and the words said aloud, and it took the better part of the afternoon, and every one of them stayed and watched with their hats in their hands.

They filled the well the next morning.

What I did not tell them is that a Veyr witness carries no weight outside Fanewick and not a great deal inside it, that it is a family practice rather than a law, and that the marks I cut into that stone do nothing whatsoever except mark a stone. It is a beautiful piece of work and it means precisely as much as a fence post. They believed a thing about me and I used what they believed, and eleven people will drink from the upper spring this winter instead of out of that well, and the old man has his gate back on and will presumably go straight back to being the worst man in Timberfall.

Morrow was pleased with me. He said so on the road out, cheerfully, in the voice of a young man, that I had done it exactly right and it had cost me nothing.

I have been turning that over since. He was not wrong about the outcome. What has stayed with me is that at no point in the entire business did he suggest simply telling them the truth about the swearing and letting them decide with it in front of them — and that at no point did I think of it either. Not in the yard, not while I was cutting the stone, not until he said the word cost.

Ninth day of the light. Below the shelf, in the low country.

The land changed today and I did not have language ready for it.

North of the shelf the forest is something you live under. Down here it is something you live inside. It is warmer than it has any business being for the season, the air stands still between the trees, and there is red running through the low growth along every ditch and watercourse. Not autumn color — this is the light-week, everything ought to be green and desperate about it. The red follows the water in a line. I have seen Lady's Veil preserved in a jar on a shelf in my own house, priced at more than a cart horse, guarded like a relic. I had not understood that in the wild it grows in a direction.

I stood at the edge of a wet field and looked at a stand of it for a long while with the seeing open, and what I need to record accurately is that I did not see decay. Cursed things look dead to me; that is the entire method by which I have ever recognized one. This did not. What I saw when I looked at that field was closer to completion, as though the field were the sketch and the red were the intended work, and I have spent two days trying to write that down in a way that does not sound as though I approved of it.

Morrow went down into it. He does not do that. When I am afraid he stays at my shoulder, always, without being asked, and it is the most reliable thing about him. He walked through the red growth for some minutes with his head turned sideways in the way he does when he is reading something, and came back, and said in a woman's voice I did not know: it is not sick. It is being answered.

I asked him what that meant. He said he did not know why he had said it.

In eleven years he has never once told me that.

Twelfth day of the light. The Ossul crossing.

Held at the crossing most of the day while a Haven column came through going north, and I have not been able to leave it alone since.

Sixty men, four wagons, the last two under canvas with the crates stamped and sealed at the corners. Nobody at that crossing needed the seeing to know what was in them. There was a woman beside me on the bank with a child on her hip, and the child had the grey around the mouth that comes in the second month of the Wither, and she watched two wagons of Lady's Veil go past at walking pace close enough to touch and said nothing, because there were sixty men. She adjusted the child's blanket twice while they went by. When the last wagon was through she asked me, without turning her head, whether I was a physician. I told her what I was. She thanked me anyway and went down to the ford.

The officer wanted papers from everyone crossing south. He was young, he had the accent of somebody's third son, and he was doing an inspector's work because he had been told to and did not want to be watched doing it.

I did not lie to him. I gave him my given name, which is all I have now, and my trade, and let him read the rest off my face, which is white hair and grey-violet eyes and a raven and a knife. I said a town to the south had asked for a witch and that he was welcome to write that down. He asked me to state my house. I said I did not have one. He asked me to state it anyway, because there was a box for it, and I stood in the sun at a river crossing in Haven-held country and gave the name of a family that no longer contains me to a boy with a ledger, because there was a box for it.

Then I asked him, pleasantly, in the tone of a woman making conversation while a man does paperwork, whether the column had come up from the coast or from the Sablewood road.

He said the Sablewood road. He said it was the third one this season, and he said it the way a man says a thing he has been chewing on for weeks with nobody to say it to. Then he heard himself, and stamped my paper, and told me to move along.

Three columns this season, coming up out of that forest, loaded.

Haven is not garrisoning that country, it is taking something out of it, in quantity, often enough to be worth a column's worth of wagons three times in a season — and the town I have been walking toward for a month sits on that road. I have written the physician's name in the margin of this page and I am not going to explain why, and I am not going to cross it out either.

Second day of the dark. Ardmill.

The dark caught me at Ardmill and I took a room rather than be on that road for a week, and I have spent three nights of it arguing with a woman of House Corvane.

Her name is Ithe. She is perhaps forty, she works out of a shuttered dye-house with six birds and an apprentice who does not speak, and I could not tell you whether the apprentice is under an oath of silence or simply could not get a word in. Ithe knew what I was before I had crossed the room — not the house and not the name, only the shape of me. You are the white one, she said. From the north. With the bird nobody can hear.

No stranger has ever recognized me before. In Nerith the story was mine; I had years to arrange how it was told and who was permitted to tell it. Out here it has traveled ahead of me in a form I did not write, and I sat in that dye-house with a cup of something unforgivable and understood that I have no idea what shape it is in by now, how far it has gone, or who has been improving it.

She was afraid of me, and being afraid she was rude, and being rude she told me a great deal more than she meant to. Corvane has been moving people south — not toward Hush by name, she was careful with the name or did not have it, but toward the Sablewood, in threes, quietly, under instructions to observe and not act. Halvane has had people inside Haven's supply chain for two years, which every house has suspected and no house has been able to demonstrate. And there has been what she called correspondence: letters to the houses, unsigned, in the old formal hand, invoking the authority of the Ancients over a matter that is never once specified.

I asked how the letters arrive. That is the question I have been putting to sect authorities since I was fifteen and it is the question that ends the conversation every time.

She said they are already in the archive. Nobody delivers them. A house opens its own sealed records to check a genealogy or an old debt and there is a page in there that was not in there before, in the correct hand, on the correct paper, aged correctly for the date it carries.

I said that was an old trick and that any competent witch could seed a folio, which was, I admit, mostly me being unpleasant to a woman who had been unpleasant first. She agreed with me. Then she said Corvane has had two of them, and that the second was written on Corvane's own paper, of a lot that has not been made since her grandmother's time, and that there is none of it left in the house because the last of it went into that letter.

I have been three days on that and I cannot make it come out anywhere I like. Every explanation I can build requires somebody to have been inside that house, at leisure, with the good paper, and to have then aged a document forty years for the pleasure of confusing House Corvane, which is a lot of work to go to for a joke.

At the end of it she asked whether Morrow had told me anything about the letters. I said no. She said that was interesting, because when she had said the word Ancients out loud, every one of her birds had gone quiet at once, and mine had not so much as turned his head.

She meant it as an accusation and I have taken it as one, though not the one she intended. I have been watching him ever since and he has been faultless — attentive, useful, better company than he has been since the winter, and funnier than he has any right to be about a woman who keeps six birds in a dye-house. I have twice caught myself checking him the way you go back to a door you are already certain you locked.

Fifth day of the dark. Ardmill, before leaving.

Something happened last night. I am going to write it down exactly as it went and do the thinking afterward.

I woke at some point in the small hours. Morrow was on the sill with his back to me, facing the shutter, and he was talking.

He was not talking to me. He was talking steadily and quietly at conversational pace, the way a person talks to another person who is answering, and there were pauses. The pauses are the part I cannot get down properly. He would speak, and stop, and wait for exactly as long as a reply takes, and then go on.

I could not understand a single word of it.

Eleven years. He has used hundreds of voices and I have understood every one of them in rooms where nobody else hears anything but a bird, and last night I lay four feet away and heard a language with no purchase in it anywhere. I did know the sound of it. I have a page of that sound at the bottom of my pack, written out in a child's hand the morning after my rite.

I said his name. He stopped, and turned around, and told me — in the voice of a middle-aged man, mild, faintly amused — to go back to sleep, that it was hours yet until the bell.

There is no bell in Ardmill. There has been no bell anywhere on this road. The only bell I know of is the one under the stone in the dream, and I have never described that dream to him.

I asked him this morning what he had been doing at the window. He said he had not been at the window. I know precisely what he sounds like when he is being careful with me and this was not that. He believed himself, he was mildly puzzled that I had asked, and then he spent the rest of the morning being kind to me about the road ahead, which I have decided to find comforting, because the alternative is to think about it.

I have been assuming that Ilseth was warning me about something that could wear her voice.

I do not think that is what she meant.

Eighth day of the dark. Coombe.

The dream three nights ago was the ordinary kind: a lane, a broken wall, a chapel with the roof gone and a hawthorn grown up through the chancel, and a woman sitting in the hawthorn's shade cleaning a wound on her own forearm and singing something without words. Nobody I know. Nothing happening. No reason to record it. I woke with wet feet and put it down with the rest.

I walked into that lane this afternoon.

The wall, the chapel, the hawthorn, the same — not similar, the same, down to the way the roof-beam has come down across the north window and the shape of the gap where the door used to be. I stood in the chancel for a long time and made myself walk the whole of it twice before I would let myself believe it, on the grounds that Fanewick is full of broken chapels and I have been tired for a month.

The woman was not there. Nobody was. The ash of a fire in the chancel was four or five days cold and there was a rag on the ground by the hawthorn with a good deal of dried blood in it.

So it was not the past, and it was not the moment I dreamed it either, because she was already days gone by then. I have never been able to tell which direction I am facing when I am in one of those, and I have now established, once, for one dream, that the answer was backwards by about a week. Whether that is the rule or only this once I would give a great deal to know, and there is no longer anybody alive I can write to and ask, which is a fairly expensive way to have learned it.

Morrow was very quiet in the chapel. When I asked whether he had seen the woman he said, she is ahead of us on this road, and would not be drawn any further on it.

I did not ask how he knew that. I am recording that I did not ask, because I noticed myself not asking at the time, and I have not managed to give myself a reason for it since.

Eleventh day of the dark. The eaves of the Sablewood.

There is no gradual edge to this forest. There is farmland in poor condition, and then there is a wall of trees with the road going into it like a nail going into wood.

Two carters at the last farm would not take me further for any money I offered, and I offered a genuinely humiliating amount. It was not superstition and they were not frightened men. One of them told me the road is sound and the trees are ordinary and he has been through four times without trouble, and that he has stopped going because of the sound. When I asked what sound he said the one underneath, and that I would hear it before dark, and then he offered me a pear. I have met sect authorities with less composure than that man.

I heard it late in the afternoon. Once, faint, a long way down and a long way off. Everything above ground stopped for the length of it — birds, insects, the wind working in the top of the canopy — and then all of it started again as though nothing had happened, and the two farm dogs that had been barking at me continuously since I arrived did not bark again the rest of the time I was there. It is the bell from the dream. It has the same wrongness in the strike, as though it is being rung by something that has never in its existence had occasion to ring a bell in a hurry.

The treeline has moved. I have no way to prove that and I know exactly how it reads, but I stood at the same fence-post twice this afternoon, and the line of the wood is not where it was, and the grass in the gap is the wrong grass for open ground.

Morrow has been ahead of me since noon. He will not ride my shoulder. He goes out along the road and comes back and goes out again, and he has not waited for me, and he has not spoken since the farm. He has been doing it all afternoon with the particular economy of an animal that knows the way.

I have walked a month and a half toward a place I found in dreams and could not find on a map, and I have been telling myself the entire distance that I chose this road because staying had become a form of obedience. Sitting at the treeline with the light going and the pear in my lap, I would rather write down honestly that I do not know which of us has been leading.

First day of the light. Hush.

I came out of the Sablewood in the afternoon and there is a town here.

That is not what I expected to be writing. I had been preparing for a ruin, or an evacuation, or the particular quiet of a place whose doors were shut from the outside. There are children on the green. There is a smith working. A woman took one look at my hair and the bird and gave me directions to the inn without my asking for them and without any alarm whatsoever, and I thanked her and walked twenty paces and had to stop and collect myself, because the last time a stranger treated me as an ordinary traveler needing an ordinary bed I was eleven years old.

I have walked the whole of the town twice with the seeing wide open and I can find nothing. No black in the wells, nothing on the doors, nothing in the ground, nothing on any of the people I have passed. It is the cleanest place I have been since Nerith, and it sits in the mouth of a forest that has swallowed a column's worth of Haven wagons three times this season, above a bell that stops the birds.

There are strangers here. Several, arrived recently, none of them local, and at least two of them armed in the manner of people who expect to be paid for it. One of them tried to buy me a drink, which after the month I have had was so disarming that I nearly said yes before I had finished working out what he wanted, and I am not going to write about any of them until I have spoken to them properly.

One more thing, and then I am going to sleep, because I have not slept properly since the chapel.

The inn has a wall of old boundary charters under glass, the way these places do. The third from the left is a grant of common ground, signed in a hand I could not read and dated four hundred and some years ago, and the town is not called Hush on it.

I asked the innkeeper what the old name was. She said nobody says it. She said it pleasantly, the way you decline a second helping, and she was already turning away as she said it, and she has not been anything other than perfectly friendly to me since.

Morrow was on the beam above the door the whole time I was asking. He did not say anything. He has not said anything since the treeline.

He is watching the door.