Ves didn’t sleep.
She lay in the stern of the Lantern-Moth under a blanket with the wax in her left ear and the empty right one pressed into the folded sail she was using for a pillow, and the note came up through the hull and through the sailcloth and through the bones of her skull, deep and slow and enormous, and she listened to it the whole night.
She was a weaver. Listening was what she did. She’d lain awake as an apprentice listening to the hum of the sea-wall under her bunk at the Weavers’ Hall, picking it apart — labor, labor, a little grief, labor — until she could name the weight of any wall in Saltreve by laying her cheek on it.
The note wasn’t a weight.
She’d thought so, for six days. She’d thought it was a weight she didn’t have a fork for — anger, she’d called it, old and enormous and patient. But lying there in the dark listening to it with nothing else in her head, she understood that she’d been listening to it wrong. Listening to it the way you’d listen to a wall. For what was in it.
There was nothing in it.
That was what made it so loud. It wasn’t grief, or labor, or song, or anger. It was the thing her forks did. The strike. The hard bright note driven down into the Brine that told everything which wasn’t the chosen weight to get out. Except that this note didn’t choose a weight. It told everything to get out. Every weight. Every voice. Every name.
I don’t know whose name that is.
It was a fork. Somewhere down in the black, a fork the size of a tower, struck once, two hundred years ago, and still ringing.
Toward dawn she heard Abel get up and check his knots again. Then she heard him sit down on the thwart near her head and stay there.
“Ves,” he said, after a while. Through the wax. Too loud in the quiet. “You awake?”
“Yes.”
“If they can sing the struck back.” A long pause. “If there’s somebody left who can do that. Anywhere. In this thing.”
“I know,” she said.
“I’m not asking you for anything. I just. I wanted to say it out loud once.”
“I know,” she said. And then, because it was dark and he couldn’t see her face: “Me too. My mother’s in there somewhere, Abel. She walked off the eastern spit. Everything that goes into the Brine goes somewhere.”
He didn’t say anything. After a while she felt his big hand come down on her shoulder, once, heavy, and stay there a moment, and lift.
Oshe was waiting at the bridge.
On the far side. Standing at the end of it with her bare hands at her sides and the white crust on her feet, in the moving black hall, as if she had stood there all night. Perhaps she had. Ves didn’t know if memories slept.
“You came,” she said, when Ves stepped off the black salt onto the floor beside her. “Good. It will be easier to show you all at once.”
“Will it be easier to watch?”
“No,” said Oshe. “But it will be over sooner.”
She looked at Ves’s ears. Ves had the wax in the right one. Not the left. She’d thought about it on the bridge and left the left one out.
“You can put it back,” said Oshe. “I told you. You will not want to hear today.”
“I’ve heard you say what you wanted to say,” said Ves. “I want to hear what they said.”
Oshe looked at her for a long moment. Then nodded, once, and turned, and the walls of the black hall opened for her like curtains.
The woman came up the rope.
It was the same afternoon. The same long yellow light on the bright Brine. The same sixty-one wallowing salt boats, and the small sung rafts going out to them, and the Dellin singers kneeling with their hands in the sea. And the lead ship, and the rope, and Oshe’s raft beside it. And the woman coming up the rope out of the low sun, hand over hand, quick and sure, and swinging herself over onto the warm living deck.
She straightened up.
She was about forty. Tall. Spare. Sun-dark. Her hair was black and cropped short, cropped close the way you’d crop it for a long voyage with no fresh water, and there was grey coming in at the temples. Her face was long and high-boned, with a straight hard nose and a mouth held tight, the mouth of a woman who’d been holding something tight for forty days. And her eyes were dark and quick and went everywhere at once — the deck, the singers, the people, Oshe — taking everything in, weighing it.
Ves knew the face.
Not from the carving. The carving had no face. From the little cracked mirror over her own washstand, on the fourth terrace, western face. From her grandmother’s face, at the end, kneeling on the reef. From her mother’s.
The Thole jaw. The Thole nose. The Thole way of holding the mouth.
“No,” said Ves.
The woman on the raft looked at Oshe. Looked at the bowls of water going round. At a singer at the raft’s edge with her hands bare in the Brine, singing a new rib of deck out of the sea. The woman’s eyes went to the singer’s hands and stayed there. Wide. Fixed. Ves knew that look. She’d worn it on the raft yesterday.
And the woman’s hands —
She’d taken them off the rope. They hung at her sides. And they were white to the second knuckle.
Salt. Both of them. Rot-white, stiff at the tips, the fingers held a little curled the way Ves held hers. She had the Rot. Forty days on a sea she couldn’t touch, in boats made of salt she’d told badly in a hurry — she’d made those boats. She’d made all sixty-one of them. With her voice, or with something, and it had come up into her hands.
You are a Thole. You have her hands.
“Ysmay,” said Oshe, beside Ves. Very quietly. “That was her name. She told it to me that night, in my house. Ysmay Thole.”
Ves didn’t answer. She was looking at her own hands. The dead white right one in its sling. The left, salt to the second knuckle.
Exactly the same.
The memory went fast after that.
Not all of it at once. In pieces. In days. The way you’d flick through a journal looking for one page. Oshe stood at Ves’s shoulder and the holds moved round them — morning, noon, night, morning — and Ves watched a season go by in the time it took to draw a hundred breaths.
The sixty-one boats lashed to the edges of the holds. The settlers on the warm decks, sleeping, eating, getting their strength back. Sick ones, being sung to. Their dead, being given to the sea the Dellin way — laid on the Brine on a sung raft that slowly, gently lay back down into the sea with them, while the singers sang their names, so the sea would know who they were.
The settlers watched that from the edges, with their arms folded and their faces closed.
Ysmay Thole in Oshe’s round house at night, by the light of a fish-oil lamp, learning words. Pointing at things. Deck. Water. Sea. Sing. Learning fast. Faster than any of them. Writing the words down in a little salt-bound book with a stub of ink, in her own letters, and Oshe beside her, laughing, correcting her vowels.
Ysmay at the edge of Oshe’s raft at dawn, kneeling. With her salted hands held out over the Brine. Not touching it. Shaking.
“She was so afraid,” said Oshe. “She had made her boats by telling, and it had taken her hands, and she knew the sea was full of the dead, and she could hear them. All her people could. It was a terrible thing for them. To come out of a drowned land and find the sea full of voices. They thought the voices were their own drowned. Their land. Their families. They thought the whole sea was their grief.”
“Was it?”
“Some of it,” said Oshe. “The sea had been taking in what fell into it for a very long time. Every voice, from every land that ever went under. Theirs was only the newest.” She watched Ysmay kneeling at the raft’s edge, shaking. “I told her: it’s not grief. It’s everybody. Listen. Sing with them. And she tried. Every morning. I’ll show you.”
Ysmay put her hand in the sea.
Ves made a sound. She couldn’t stop herself. The left hand, salted to the knuckle, going down into the bright Brine to the wrist, and Ysmay’s whole body went rigid, and her mouth opened —
And Oshe was beside her. The Oshe of the memory. Kneeling. Her own hand going into the sea beside Ysmay’s, and her voice coming up, low, steady, the long looping phrase. Singing into the crowd. Singing with it. And Ysmay’s mouth, open, gasping — and a sound coming out of it. A thread. Trying to follow.
For three breaths, four, they knelt there together with their hands in the sea and sang. Ysmay’s thin cracked thread of voice under Oshe’s. And the Brine round their hands began to stir. A swirl of green. Of gold.
Then Ysmay tore her hand out of the sea and fell back on the deck and lay there curled on her side with her salted hands pressed to her face, sobbing. Not quietly. The way people sob when they don’t know anyone’s watching. Ves had never in her life heard anyone make that sound. She knew it anyway. She’d made it once, at twenty-six, on the eastern spit, with her mother’s journal in her lap.
“She heard too much,” said Oshe. “She always heard too much. She was a very good listener. Better than me. That was the trouble. She could hear every voice in the crowd, every one, separately, all at once — and she couldn’t bear not to hear them separately. She wanted to know whose each one was. She couldn’t let them be a crowd. And if you can’t let them be a crowd, you can’t sing with them. You just drown.”
“So what did she do?”
“She stopped trying,” said Oshe. “After forty mornings. And she started making something.”
There was an anchor.
Ves saw it in pieces. The lead ship’s anchor, iron, the only iron in the whole sad fleet, hauled up out of the sea on the settlers’ raft at the end of the holds where they’d made their camp. Ysmay crouched over it with a fire built on a sung clay hearth the Dellin had given them. Working. Day after day. Cutting links off the anchor-chain with a cold chisel. Heating them. Beating them out.
Into a fork. Two-tined. Heavy.
Then another. Then another.
She struck the first one at the edge of the settlers’ raft, at dusk, against an iron ring on her wrist. Alone. The note went out over the Brine, hard and bright. Ves felt it in her teeth across two hundred years. She knew it. It was the note she’d been taught at nineteen. The first note. Labor. The note every apprentice in Saltreve learned on her first day in the Weavers’ Hall.
The Brine in front of Ysmay went still.
Then thick. Then white. And a thin white bar of salt rose up out of the sea along the line of the fork’s note, a pace long, a hand high, bone-white, set hard. Pure. It didn’t hum. It didn’t move. It just stood there in the sea. And at the far end of the holds, on Oshe’s raft, every singer who was kneeling at the edge of the sea flinched at once and took their hands out of the water.
“We felt it,” said Oshe. “All of us. Every singer on the holds. Like a hand clapped over every mouth in the crowd at once. All the voices in that piece of sea that weren’t the one she’d chosen — pushed out. Shoved. Down. They went down past us into the deep screaming. We’d never heard the sea scream before.”
And Ysmay stood at the edge of the raft and looked at her white bar of salt, standing in the sea. Hard. Still. Silent.
And she smiled.
Ves had never seen anyone look so relieved in her life.
“It was quiet,” said Oshe. “That was what she wanted. That piece of the sea was quiet. Only one voice in it, and she’d chosen which. She didn’t have to hear the others anymore. She’d made a place where the crowd couldn’t get at her.”
“And her hands?”
“Her hands went a little further white,” said Oshe. “She didn’t care. Not then. She had found a way to make the sea stand still and stay still. Forever. Our decks lay back down in ten years. Hers never would.” Oshe’s voice didn’t change. “Her people came and looked at it. All night they came and looked at it, and touched it, and it didn’t move, and it didn’t sing, and it would never lie back down into the sea and leave them with nothing. And they wept.”
There was a meeting.
On Oshe’s raft, in the open, under a white sky. The singers of the holds sitting in a wide ring on the warm deck — forty of them, fifty, grey-braided most of them. And across the ring, the settlers. Twenty or so. The ones who’d become their leaders. Thin still, but standing straighter. A broad grey-bearded man with a ledger under his arm. A woman with a scar down her face. Ysmay Thole in the middle of them, with an iron fork at her belt and her salted hands folded.
They talked for a long time. Ves understood almost none of it. Half was in the Dellin speech and half in an old form of her own, thick and strange, and the ones who could speak both kept stopping to put things over. But she didn’t need the words. She’d sat in enough Tidewardens’ meetings. She knew what people looked like when they’d decided before they came in.
“They wanted to stay,” said Oshe. “In the holds’ ring. Where you are now. That was our gathering place — the place where the far holds came home every dry season, a great ring of open sea, very calm, very rich with fish. The best water on the Brine. They wanted to build a reef round it. A wall that would never lie back down. A city. Theirs.”
“And you said no.”
“We said they were welcome,” said Oshe. “To stay with us. To live in the holds, as we did. To learn to sing. We’d sing them up decks of their own. As many as they wanted. We said: the sea is big enough.” She looked across the ring at Ysmay. “But not to wall the ring. The ring wasn’t ours to give. It was where the far holds came home. And a wall that never lies down, made by pushing every voice out of the sea — we told them what that did. Where the voices went. We told them the sea was screaming.”
“What did they say?”
“The man with the ledger said that the sea was full of the dead,” said Oshe, “and that the dead didn’t need a vote.”
Across the ring, the broad grey-bearded man was standing. Speaking. Hard and short. Thumping the ledger under his arm with his fist.
“His name was Corvane Ashlar,” said Oshe.
Ves turned and looked at her.
“Ashlar,” she said.
“He kept the counts,” said Oshe. “Of everything. Food. Water. People. Boats. He wrote everything down. A careful man. He wrote it all down.” She looked at Ves. “You know the name.”
“He’s the Provost,” said Ves. Her mouth was dry. “A Provost. Ours is an Ashlar. Ansel Ashlar. Nineteen years. There’ve been Ashlars on the Tidewardens’ bench for — forever. Since the founding.” She heard herself. “Since the founding.”
Oshe said nothing.
Across the ring, Ysmay Thole stood up beside Corvane Ashlar. She didn’t speak. She stood with her salted hands at her sides, and looked across the ring at Oshe. And Ves — standing in the memory where Oshe of two hundred years ago could not see her — saw the look on Ysmay Thole’s face. And knew it.
It was the look Ves had worn in the Tidewardens’ Hall a week ago, when the Provost offered her the fire-salts and she said yes.
It was the look of a woman who has decided that whatever it costs, she will not kneel.
The memory went quiet.
Night. The holds asleep, rafts rising and falling on the slow swell, the Brine glowing under them, the voices in it murmuring like a far crowd. Lamps out. Here and there a singer awake, sitting at a raft’s edge, humming to the sea.
And at the far end, on the settlers’ rafts, a light.
Ves saw them. Forty of them. Fifty. Kneeling round the clay hearth in a ring, and Ysmay in the middle, and an iron fork in every hand. Forty days of anchor-chain. Ysmay had been teaching. Every night. While the Dellin slept. Teaching her people to strike.
They were practicing. Very quietly. Striking forks against the iron rings on their wrists with the tines muffled in their fists, so the note went only into the hand. Feeling for it. Over and over.
Labor. The first note.
“We didn’t know,” said Oshe. “We should have. A singer should know when the sea goes quiet in a place. We felt the little quiets out there at the end of the holds, night after night, and we thought she was still practicing on her own. Making her little white bars. We were sorry for her. We thought she would grow out of it.” Her voice didn’t change. Ves had begun to understand that Oshe’s voice didn’t change for anything. That there was nothing left in her to change it with. “I sang her a lullaby once, through the deck, so she would hear it in her sleep. I thought it might help.”
It was dawn.
Ves knew it before it began. She knew it from the light. She knew the exact colour of it — long, pale, cold gold along the bottom of the sky, the Brine bands green and violet under it — because she’d seen it carved every day of her life. Every coin in Saltreve had this dawn on it. The Striking. The First Weaver at the bow, the fork raised high in both hands, the sea empty before her.
The sea wasn’t empty.
The holds were all round. The far holds had come home in the night — Ves could see them, out to the north and the west, more rafts, dozens more, low round shapes on the morning Brine sliding in to join the great crescent in the ring of calm water. Their singers at the edges, singing the homecoming. The call. The two notes. Held and falling. Answered and answered and answered from raft to raft across the whole ring, a hundred voices, until the sea was ringing with it.
And at the end of the holds, the settlers stood up.
All of them. Fifty forgers, in a long line, along the edge of their rafts. Forks in their hands. And at the head of the line, at the bow of the lead ship, which they had unlashed in the night and poled round so that it faced into the ring, Ysmay Thole. With her fork. Raised high in both hands.
The most beautiful shape in the world.
“Oshe,” said Ves. “Oshe, I can’t —”
“I know,” said Oshe. “I couldn’t either. Watch anyway. Somebody has to, who isn’t her.”
Ysmay struck.
It wasn’t one note.
That was the first thing. Fifty forks, struck in the same breath against fifty iron rings, all tuned to labor. And under them, from Ysmay’s fork at the bow, something else. Not labor. Lower. Much lower. A note Ves had never heard taught in any Weavers’ Hall. A note that didn’t choose any weight at all.
It told everything to get out.
The Brine in the ring went still. All of it. The whole calm ring of the gathering-water, a league across, with the holds floating on it — went still in one breath, the color bands stopping dead, the swell stopping, the hundred voices singing the homecoming call stopping. Because the sea under them had stopped carrying them. Because the sea under them had been told.
And then the reef came up.
Ves had seen it carved. She’d seen it on coins. She’d seen it yesterday, cracked open in the black wall of the corridor. She hadn’t seen it from the deck.
It came up under them. White. Along the line of Ysmay’s note, in a great curve, the curve of the first reef of Saltreve, the line that every apprentice drew from memory — and the holds were on it. The rafts were on it. Not near it. On it. The white came up out of the sea underneath the living dark decks and went into them like frost into a leaf, and the decks stopped humming. Ves heard them stop. Raft after raft, all along the curve. A hundred hums going silent as the white went into them, and the voices in them pushed out, shoved down into the deep, screaming.
And the decks went white, and hard, and set, and rose with the reef.
Lifting the people on them up out of the sea.
They knew. That was the thing she’d remember. The Dellin knew what was happening the moment it began. Every singer on every raft knew. She saw them go to the edges. All along the white curve of the rising reef, she saw them go to the edges of their rafts and kneel and put their hands out, palms down, toward the sea. Bare. And open their mouths.
And sing.
Not the homecoming. Something else. Low. Long. The deepest sound Ves had ever heard a human throat make. A hundred voices, then two hundred, then every voice in the holds, singing into the sea. Singing to the crowd. Asking. Asking the sea to lie back down. To be soft. To carry them.
And the sea tried.
She felt it. Through the white under her boots, through the memory, through two hundred years. The sea heard them and turned toward them the way the deck had turned toward her hand, and under the white crust of the rising reef the Brine heaved — once — like a great animal trying to stand.
And Ysmay Thole at the bow of the lead ship raised her fork and struck again.
And fifty forks behind her struck again.
And the sea was told. Again. And the white came up.
Up the reef. Into the rafts. Into the singers kneeling at their edges with their hands held out. Up their hands, up their arms, into their knees where they knelt, into their bodies. Fast. So fast. Not the slow creep of the Rot up a weaver’s fingers over twenty years. A breath. Two. Like frost racing up a window.
And they didn’t stop singing.
That was what the Hull had been screaming, for six days, in the gaps of the choir. That was what Ves had been hearing. They didn’t stop. They knelt with their hands out and the white going up through them and they sang, and sang, and as the white reached their chests the songs thinned, and as it reached their throats they went to a thread, and the threads went out one by one by one, all along the white curve of the reef, like lamps.
And there they knelt. White. Hard. Still. Forever. With their hands held out, palms down, toward the sea, and their heads bowed. All along the first reef of Saltreve.
The Kneeling Row.
Not all of them were on the reef.
Some of the rafts had been outside the curve. The far holds, at the north and west edges, still coming in. Some of the singers had been in the sea already, swimming between rafts, or out on the small quick sung skiffs. When the reef rose, they were left in the water on its outer side, in the Brine, which had gone still and thick and strange and wouldn’t carry them.
The settlers had boats. And hooks. Fish-gaffs, from the lead ship, long-handled, iron-tipped.
Ves watched them go out.
She wanted to look away. Oshe had told her to watch, and she’d said yes, and she watched. She watched three of the settlers’ salt boats pull along the outer face of the new white reef where a dozen Dellin were in the water, trying to climb its sheer side, and she watched the men in the boats lean over with the gaffs. She watched one man in the water take a gaff under the arm and get dragged in to the boat’s side and get his head held under, and come up, and get held under again, until he stopped coming up, and the Brine round him went dark with blood that didn’t spread, that just hung there in the thick still sea in a red cloud round his body. She watched a woman get a gaff in the face. She watched a woman swimming out toward the far holds, toward open sea, toward the west, and a boat go after her, and the woman dive, and not come up, and the boat wait, and wait, and the man in the bow lean out and look, and turn back.
She didn’t know if that one had lived. She’d never know.
The far holds were fleeing. She saw that too. Out on the north and west edges of the ring, the rafts that had been coming home were turning. Their singers kneeling at the edges, singing, not the homecoming now, something fast and hard, and the sea out there, beyond the reach of the forks, carrying them — away. Out of the ring. West. Into the open Brine. Faster than the settlers’ boats could row.
“Some of them got out,” said Oshe. “I don’t know how many. I sang to them. I’ll show you.”
Oshe’s raft was at the very tip of the crescent. Facing open sea. The last raft on the curve.
The white hadn’t reached it yet.
Ves saw her. The other Oshe. The one from before. Standing in the middle of her dark old raft with the shell door of her house clicking behind her in the dawn wind and the long strips of kelp-paper fluttering on their lines all round her, and the white coming toward her along the reef from raft to raft — a line of frost, crossing the dark woven deck.
She wasn’t kneeling. She was standing. Tall. Very straight. Her face turned not toward the ship but out. Toward open sea. Toward the far holds, fleeing west.
And she was singing the call.
The two notes. Held and falling. The call that brought the far holds home. The call on the song-sheet in her house, that she’d written on kelp-paper so the new singers could learn it.
Except she was singing it backward.
Ves heard it. Falling, then held. The same two notes, reversed. Over and over. Out over the sea, in that carrying voice she’d been so proud of, that could reach every boat in a fleet. To every raft still on the water.
Don’t come home. Don’t come home. Don’t come home.
The white reached her raft.
It came across the dark old deck toward her, frost crossing a leaf. It went into the edges, and the lines of kelp-paper hung from the poles went white and stiff and stopped fluttering. It went into the door of her round house, and the shells stopped clicking. It came across the deck toward her feet.
She kept singing. Don’t come home.
It reached her feet. Went up over them, white, a crust like frost on a rope. Reached her ankles.
And Oshe of the Dellin, still singing, turned and took one long step off the edge of her raft into the open sea.
Out of the white. Into the Brine. Beyond the reef’s curve, beyond the line of the fork’s note, into the bright moving water that was still carrying, still soft. She went in to the waist, to the chest. Singing. Her braids spreading out round her on the surface of the sea. Her face turned up. The call going out over the water, reversed, to the far holds. Don’t come home.
And the Brine took her the way the Brine takes everyone. Not quickly. Gently. As if it knew her. She went down singing, and the last thing Ves saw of her was her mouth, open, on the falling note, and then the sea closed over it, and the sea was bright and moving and full of voices, and one of them was hers.
On the raft, two white footprints. A crust of salt, the shape of two bare feet, stopping in a clean line a finger above the ankle bone.
Beside Ves, the Oshe of the Hull stood with the white crust on her feet and watched herself go into the sea, and her face didn’t change at all.
“There,” she said. “That is all of it. That is the Clean Founding.”
It went on a little longer. Oshe let it. Ves supposed she had to.
The forgers coming along the white reef afterward. Walking on it. Testing it with their boots. It held. Corvane Ashlar with his ledger, walking the reef, counting. Counting the shapes along it. Kneeling, white, with their hands held out. Writing. Ves saw him stop at one, and look at it, and write, and go on. Careful man. He wrote everything down.
Ysmay Thole came last. Alone. She walked out along the new white reef from the bow of her ship to the very end, to the tip of the crescent, to Oshe’s raft. Over the white decks. Past the kneeling shapes. Not looking at them. Her salted hands at her sides.
She went into Oshe’s round white house. She came out with an armful of kelp-paper. Song-sheets. All of them, every one. The whole house. She carried them back along the reef in her arms and didn’t drop one.
At the end of the reef, near the ship, she stopped. Beside the first of the kneeling shapes. The first Dellin singer who’d gone white. A big woman, kneeling, with her hands held out.
Ysmay looked at her a long time.
Then she knelt down beside her. In the same shape. Hands out. Palms down. Head bowed. Kneeling beside the white shape on the white reef in the cold gold dawn with her arms full of song-sheets.
Not salt. Just kneeling.
She stayed there until the sun was well up. Then she got up and went back to her ship.
“She came back to that place every evening for the rest of her life,” said Oshe. “To kneel. In the same shape. And when she was old, and the Rot had reached her heart, she asked that when she died her people put her there, beside the first one. And every weaver of yours since has knelt there too, when it was her time. Beside us. In our shape. Because it was the shape the founder chose.” She was quiet. “Two hundred years. You put flowers on us.”
“She didn’t kneel there,” said Ves. It came out of her flat and hoarse. “The First Weaver. She isn’t in the Row. Everyone knows that. She walked into the sea. Off the —”
She stopped.
“Off the eastern spit,” said Oshe. “Yes. When she was very old. She asked for the Row, and then at the end, she couldn’t. She walked into the sea instead. Where I went.” She looked at Ves. “Your mother went off the same spit. I heard her go in. She was singing too. Badly. My song. She’d learned it from the bird.”
The memory let go.
Ves was on her knees on the black floor of the corridor.
She didn’t remember kneeling. She was on her knees with her left hand flat on the floor and her dead right hand in its sling against her chest, and the black floor under her palm was singing in Oshe’s voice, and her stomach turned over and she was sick. On the floor. Everything. Hard, and then again, and then nothing but bile, and then nothing at all, and her body going on trying anyway, heaving, her eyes streaming, her whole frame shaking.
The black floor took it. She watched it go. It sank into the moving black like ink into wet paper and was gone.
Somebody had her shoulders. Nella. Holding her up. Saying something through the wax, too loud. Ves couldn’t make it out.
And on her shoulder, Hush began to read.
You are Ves Thole, it said. In her own voice. The catch on the r. The first page of her journal, the page she’d written at nineteen, the page that brought her home every time the Wind took her. You are Ves Thole. You are a Salt-Weaver of Saltreve. You live on the fourth terrace, western face —
“Stop,” said Ves.
— Your grandmother is in the Kneeling Row, fourth from the eastern stair. Your mother —
“Stop it. Hush. Stop.”
You are Ves Thole, said Hush. Patient. Steady. The way it had read her home on the skiff, line by line, three hours of her life given back. You are Ves Thole. You are a Thole of Saltreve —
“I said STOP.”
She put her hand over its bill.
Her left hand. Salted to the knuckle. Over the bird’s long hooked bill, on her own shoulder, holding it shut. She’d never done that. Not once in twelve years. Not once in nineteen years of it reading to her mother before that.
Hush went still under her hand.
It didn’t struggle. It sat on her shoulder with its bill held shut under her palm and its blind white eyes open, and the black floor sang under her knees, and the note came up from below, enormous and empty, telling everything to get out.
“I know who I am,” said Ves. Into the black. Into the bird. Into the floor. “I know who I am. I don’t want to hear it. Not in my voice. Not right now. Not — I know whose name it is.”
She took her hand away.
Hush didn’t read anything. It turned its head and pressed the top of it against her cheek, the way it had pressed it into Oshe’s palm, and stayed there.
When she could stand, she stood.
Oshe was where she’d been. A few paces down the corridor. Watching her. Patient.
Abel was against the wall with his eyes shut and the lamp on the floor at his feet. Nella had let go of Ves and was standing with her arms wrapped round herself.
“Why,” said Ves.
Her voice was wrecked. She didn’t care.
“Why show me. Why me. You’ve been under the city for two hundred years, you said. You’ve heard every word it ever said. You could have shown anyone. Any of the forty thousand. Any of them who walked into the sea this week, you could have — why the Thole? Why do you want the one with her face to see it?”
Oshe was quiet a long moment.
“Because you sang,” she said.
Ves stared at her.
“Yesterday. On my raft. With your hand on the deck. Badly.” Something moved at the corner of Oshe’s mouth. “Very badly. But you sang, and it grew, and there was no cold. And that is the first time in two hundred years anybody who came out of that ship has asked the sea for anything.” She looked at Ves’s left hand. “She couldn’t. She tried for forty mornings, and she couldn’t let the crowd be a crowd. You did it the first time I asked.”
“I had your bird on my shoulder singing your song for twelve years. I’ve been hearing it in my sleep.”
“Your mother had it for a year, and she couldn’t. She tried too. She sang it all the way into the sea.” Oshe looked at her steadily. “You are the first of her line who could. That is why it is you.”
Ves said nothing.
Somewhere down in the black, deep, far ahead where the corridor sloped down into the dark, the note went on. Struck once, two hundred years ago. Still ringing.
“What’s down there,” Ves said. “The note. It’s a fork. I lay awake all night listening to it. It doesn’t choose a weight. It tells everything to get out. It’s her note. The one she struck at the end. The one she taught nobody.” She looked at Oshe. “What’s down there?”
“Tomorrow,” said Oshe.
“There isn’t a tomorrow. You’re a league from Saltreve every day. There are two days left. What is down there?”
Oshe looked down the corridor into the dark for a long time.
“What she pushed out,” she said at last. “And what all of you pushed out after her, every time you struck. Two hundred years of everything your iron told to get out of the salt. It had to go somewhere. It went down.” She turned back to Ves. “Into the deep place, east of your city. Where you pour your dregs.”
Nella made a sound.
“And at the bottom of it,” said Oshe, “is the one who struck first. Still striking. She went into the sea, and she went down with everything else, and she never stopped. She can’t. She never learned how.”
WRIST · V. THOLE (LEFT HAND)
THE HULL, DAY 7
THE FIRST WEAVER: YSMAY THOLE. MY FACE. HER HANDS SALT TO THE KNUCKLE.
SHE COULDN’T SING. SHE MADE IRON FROM THE ANCHOR-CHAIN.
CORVANE ASHLAR KEPT THE COUNTS.
THE STRIKING: THE REEF ROSE UNDER THE HOLDS. THEY KNELT AND SANG TO THE SEA AND WENT TO SALT. THE GAFFS.
OSHE SANG “DON’T COME HOME” AND WALKED INTO THE SEA.
YSMAY TOOK THE SONG-SHEETS. KNELT BESIDE THE FIRST ONE. EVERY WEAVER SINCE HAS KNELT IN THEIR SHAPE.
I WAS SICK. I MADE HUSH STOP.
THE NOTE IS HER. AT THE BOTTOM OF THE DREGS.