She packed her own bag in her room above the office, after the notebook, with the door shut and the shutter closed.
It was quickly done; she owned little. Two shirts, the second-best and the best. A spare pair of trousers, patched at both knees. Her other coat, the thin one, rolled tight. A comb. Her own small notebook, the one with the columns. And her socks.
She had two kinds. Work socks, which she wore every day: thick grey wool, darned at heel and toe so many times that the darns had their own darns, stiff with yard grit no matter how often she washed them. And her good socks. One pair, dark blue, soft, almost new, bought two winters ago at the market with a week’s worth of credit she had not been able to justify and had spent anyway. She wore them on tithe days and to the clinic and nowhere else.
She stood holding the two pairs, one in each hand. Then she put the work socks back in the drawer and folded the good socks and laid them on top of everything else in the bag, so they would be the first thing she reached for.
She could not have said why. She thought it might be because she had no idea when she would next be able to buy anything, or because somewhere in her there was a feeling that you did not go to a sun in socks with holes. She left it unexamined and buckled the bag.
She carried the bag downstairs and set it on the floor by the back room door, where the trunk was, and went into the kitchen for water.
When she came back Pell was standing in the doorway of the back room, looking down at the bag.
He had not been told. She had meant to tell him. She had meant to sit down with him at the table after supper and explain, carefully, in an order he could follow: the strip, the mark, the date, Lorn, the ash gate, Sera’s sister. She had been putting it off all afternoon because she had no idea how to say it so that he would not ask the thing he was going to ask.
He looked up at her.
“You packed the good socks,” he said.
She looked at the bag. The top was open. The dark blue socks lay folded on top, soft and new, impossible to mistake.
“Nobody packs good socks for the yard,” Pell said.
She set down the water cup.
“I’m following something,” she said. “A piece of our mother’s work. The courier had it. It has her mark on it. It’s dated this year.” She heard herself say it, plainly, without softening. “It points to Lorn. So I’m going to Lorn. With Sera. Tonight.”
For a moment Pell said nothing. His face did a number of things. Then it settled.
“Can I come?”
“No.”
It came out hard and final, a door closing, with no room on the other side of it. It came out in Tavin’s voice. She heard it come out in Tavin’s voice, the exact weight of it, the exact closed shape, the voice that said we agreed about her and eat your bread and not today, and she hated it. She hated it more than anything she had heard herself say in her life.
Pell heard it too. She saw it land.
Instead of arguing, he went to the crate in the back room that served as his table and picked up his notebook and opened it and took out his pencil. Then he turned to face her, notebook in hand, the way he faced the tithe clerk.
“One,” he said. “I have a bed now. At the yard. You paid for it. I’m not in the dormitory, so nobody’s going to give my bed away while I’m gone.”
“Pell—”
“Two. I keep the household accounts for the yard’s shelves. Tavin asked me to, three days ago. I count the stores and write what’s used. I’m good at it. I’d be useful on a ship.”
“Pell.”
“Three.” His voice stayed low. “You said you’d write. When I went into the dormitory, you said you’d write me every week. You wrote me twice. In three years.” He looked at her. “You haven’t written a single line since I came here. And I’m in the next room.”
She stood in the doorway with nothing to say.
He was right. All of it. She had said she would write and she had not; she had always meant to and there had always been the yard, the bins, the debt, the tithe. He had a bed now that nobody would take. He was good at counting. He would be useful on a ship.
And he was fourteen, and thin, and his ears went red in the cold, and she was going to a world under a dying sun to find a gate she could not explain on the word of a dead man. She was not taking him.
“No,” she said again, lower, in her own voice this time instead of Tavin’s. “Not because you wouldn’t be useful. Because I don’t know what’s there, and I’m not taking you somewhere I don’t know.”
Pell looked at her. He did not argue. He wrote something in his notebook, small, and closed it.
She took the first notebook out of her coat, her mother’s, I, and opened it toward the back. She had read further, after Tavin left her in the back room, before the pain stopped her again. Near the end of the book there were pages that were not about the craft at all. Household pages. Her mother’s lists: what the flat needed each week, bread and barley and lamp oil; which boots needed new soles, Mara’s and Pell’s, with their sizes; which pipe fittings in the kitchen leaked and what size of washer they took. A recipe for bread, with the amount of salt crossed out and written smaller. Notes about heat: bank the stove at the ninth bell, not the tenth, or the children wake cold.
She tore nothing out. She held the notebook open toward Pell.
“Copy these,” she said. “The household pages. All of them. For me. So there’s a copy here, if anything happens to this one.”
Pell looked at the pages. Then at her. Then he sat down on the floor by the crate, opened his own notebook to a clean page, took the ink bottle from the shelf, uncorked it, dipped his pen, and began to copy.
He counted as he went. Aloud, under his breath, the way he counted cards at the tithe gate. “Bread, one. Barley, two. Lamp oil, three.” The ink went onto his fingers almost at once; it always did. “Boots. Mara’s. Size. Boots, Pell’s.” He paused at that one, at his own name in their mother’s hand, and then went on. “Pipe fittings, kitchen, two, washer size.”
Mara sat on the floor across from him and watched him work.
“Write from the first place you stop,” Pell said, without looking up. “Even if it’s a bad one. Even if it’s only one line. Write from the first place.”
“I will.”
“Every stop?”
“Every stop. However small.” She meant it. She heard herself mean it, and wondered whether she would remember meaning it when the Tern was in the dark and the notebook was the only thing she had time for.
The door creaked. Tavin stood in it, with a lamp in his hand. He did not come in. The lamp threw his shadow long across the floorboards and up the wall behind Pell. He looked at Pell on the floor with the ink bottle and the two notebooks, and at Mara watching him, and he said nothing at all.
He came two steps into the room and set the lamp on the crate beside Pell’s paper, closer than the hanging one, so the light fell full on the page. Then he went out again.
Pell went on copying, in the better light. The ink dried on the page instead of pooling in the dark.
He finished the boots and the pipe fittings and the note about banking the stove. Then he came to the bread recipe, with its crossed-out salt. He copied it slowly, every word. When he had finished he left the page where it was. He sat with his inky thumb resting on the bread recipe in their mother’s notebook, holding the page flat, his own copy beside it, and he kept his thumb there.
Mara reached out at last and closed the notebook. Gently, around his thumb, so that he had to draw it out.
He kept his own book open in his hand, at the bread page, and looked at it for a long time. The last line was still wet, and the lamp made it shine. Then he bent his head and blew across the wet ink until the shine went off it, and closed the book on his thumb.