A Conspiracy of Truths

by Alexandra Rowland

  Which was almost true, as it turned out. It carried her all but the last step.

  Ylfing and Ivo came the next day as promised, and I immediately sent Ylfing back out for monk’s-puffs, wheedling and sighing until he went. Ivo and I were left alone. I cleared my throat. “Hello, Ivo,” I said. “I hear Ylfing has been teaching you some Hrefni.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “I know my letters.”

  “Runes,” I corrected. “How nice. I thought I could help teach you. Did you bring paper? We’ll have to write most of it down.”

  “No paper,” Ivo said, “but I have a slate and chalk.”

  “Even better,” I said, trying to sound as jolly and unsuspicious as I could. “We can wipe it all away when we’re done. Pass it through the slot, lad.”

  I clutched it to my chest when I had it in my grasp, and I prayed to any god that was listening. I even prayed a little to Shuggwa, old Shuggwa, though I doubted his Eye would be turned towards this wretched corner of the world, and I didn’t particularly expect any kind of special treatment just for being a Chant.

  I set the chalk to the cool, blue-gray surface, and I transliterated Nuryeven sounds into Hrefni runes. “I’ll say it aloud to help with the pronunciation, and then you can copy it down again for practice: Ēow maga ic áhilpe. Ic ēow áhelpan ályste.”

  I saw Ivo’s fingers as he picked up the slate and read what I’d written: I can help you. I want to help you. A moment later, I heard Ivo’s chalk scratching on the slate, and he pushed it back through. Why?

  We made all sorts of little scraps of conversation as we passed messages back and forth, but they were so inane and irrelevant that I’ll leave them out, so as not to bore you to death. Here are the important things we said, all written in scraps on the slate:

  You told me about how bad things are. I have an idea.

  We’ve thought of everything.

  Not this, I wrote. And even if you had, you wouldn’t have had the resources to make it happen. It was a pretty small slate. We couldn’t fit much on it.

  Go ahead, he replied.

  “By the way,” I said aloud. “Vihra Kylliat came to speak to me recently and she said something—you’re from the west, aren’t you, Ivo?”

  “Yes,” he said. “By the mountains.”

  “Mm. She told me about the Umakha raiders, how they come over the mountains in the spring.”

  “Yes,” Ivo said. His voice was as flat as the door in front of my face.

  “I was just wondering if you’d ever seen one of the raids,” I said, chalk poised above the slate. “They sound fearsome.”

  “Yes,” he said again, solemnly. “I have. I’m lucky to be alive.”

  You’re lying, I wrote, grinning from ear to ear. Because if you’ve really seen them, then you know.

  Yes, I am, he wrote back. What of it?

  You know they don’t care about killing people who aren’t offering a fight; they want money. And some livestock just for the fun of it.

  Yes, I know.

  If you like, I can open the door for them, I can invite them in. And I can ensure they succeed.

  How?

  Chants have their ways.

  Why haven’t you done this already?

  Because the price of inviting them to rid you of your corruption is that the country will be theirs. They come in, they take over, they stay.

  “Can you explain that one again?” Ivo said, handing the slate back almost immediately.

  “Yes, of course.” This is how they have done it before, in Mwit and Bhoshnu and so on. They install an overseer and collect taxes and tribute, but for the rest, they leave you to your business.

  Footsteps hurried down the hall. “I’m back,” Ylfing announced breathlessly. “I hope they haven’t gone too cold.” They had, but it wasn’t his fault—the temperatures had plummeted and would have whisked away their warmth in a minute no matter where he’d carried them from.

  “I suppose I’ve given you a lot to think about,” I said to Ivo. “Perhaps we could finish the lesson another time.” I hadn’t, at that time, decided not to tell Ylfing; it’s just that you can’t untell something, and I didn’t know if I’d need him to be innocent, as blank as a slate wiped clean.

  “I’ll see what my schedule is like.” He scratched something on the slate and pushed it through the door and got to his feet. “Sorry to leave, Ylfing, but I’m supposed to meet someone for lunch.”

  “Oh,” he said, sounding a little sad.

  “I’ll see you at home later? I might be late.”

  “All right. Yes.”

  I was busy reading the slate: I need to think about it. Which was exactly what I expected. “Well,” I said, when Ivo had left. “Shall we get to work?”

  “I suppose so,” he sighed. The brown paper wrapping around the monk’s-puffs rustled, and he pushed the parcel halfway through the slot so we could both reach them.

  I told Ylfing about the visits from Vihra Kylliat to distract him from wisting about Ivo, and he said that he’d heard that there was some tension growing between her and Zorya Miroslavat. I nodded, and belatedly realized that there was still a solid door between us. “Some people think they might have a falling-out,” Ylfing said around a mouthful of pastry. “Ivo doesn’t know, but I think he isn’t really all that interested in politics.” He switched to Hrefni. “Not these politics, anyway. He just wants things to be different, and he thinks all this is useless and tiresome.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “I don’t think it’s tiresome, if that’s what you mean. Politics are people fighting about things they believe in—I think it’s a good way to find out about the Way People Are. It’s just them telling stories to one another.”

  I took another monk’s-puff from where he’d laid it out right in front of the door’s flap. “An unusual stroke of insight, apprentice,” I said.

  “I don’t think it’s that insightful. It seems obvious to me. It’s just something that makes sense.”

  “Well, you’ve had some training in seeing the stories in things, and most people haven’t. Tell me more about the tension.”

  “Ivo told me about it after he went back to work last week—finally. There’s so many things piled up from the courts being frozen that he’s been at the scribes’ offices for ten or eleven hours a day, and he comes home almost too tired to eat, but I’ve been making him. He’s being paid again now. I’m still paying him back what he lent me, of course.” I felt a little bad then about making him buy monk’s-puffs for me, but what’s done was done. “Ivo heard that Zorya Miroslavat and Vihra Kylliat have been having screaming arguments in the Justice offices, and he said he’s never heard of that happening before, and I’m going to ask Consanza what she thinks about it when I see her tomorrow, and then I’ll come back the day after, probably. Unless she wants to come see you tomorrow. I don’t know if she will. And, um . . . I thought we should talk about what happens if you . . . you know. If they kill you. Because everyone thinks Vihra Kylliat should have scheduled your execution ages ago.”

  I grunted. “What happens is up to you, isn’t it? I won’t be around to care about it.”

  “I know,” he said, his voice a little unsteady, “but I thought you might have something that you wanted done? Or messages carried? Like . . . Well, when you found out Xing Fe Hua had been killed here, it was surprising, wasn’t it? Isn’t there anyone you want me to tell, if you die?”

  I thought about it. I’ve walked back and forth all across this wide world, and there are friends in every corner of it, but few so great that they would have particularly mourned for me. Pashafi would have poured some water on the sand somewhere in the Sea of Sun, maybe. I suppose Azar and Heba would have lit candles for me, and Aimenta. And Ciossa in Elanriarissi, if she still lived. And you, of course. But I didn’t want Ylfing to spend half his life tracking down people who might themselves have already died. I didn’t want to bring unnecessary grief to people for whom it would do no good
. Ylfing was young, and he had better things to do than the errands of a dead old man. “No,” I said. “But if you think someone in particular should know, you may go to them if you choose.”

  “You don’t want anyone to know?” he asked.

  “You will know. Will you go home?”

  He paused. “I haven’t decided,” he said softly. “I think I might, at least for a little while. Two or three years, maybe. I miss my family sometimes.” This he said as if he was dragging it out of himself, as if he was ashamed to admit it. “I dreamed about the little boat that Finne and I used to row out on the lake in the spring before dawn, when there was just a little shimmering veil of fog across the water, and it seemed like the pines on the opposite shore were rising out of nothing. I dreamed we were fishing, and he said I should come back, and he took my hand, and it was so warm that it startled me and I woke up. I don’t miss them always,” he hastened to assure me. “And I hadn’t even thought of Finne in . . . years.”

  “It’s not a bad thing,” I said. “It doesn’t make you a poor Chant, to miss the ones you love. It makes you human, and you can’t be a Chant without being decidedly, stubbornly, gloriously human. It’s the only way to really have the slightest hope of even beginning to comprehend the things we’re trying to understand.”

  He drew a shaking breath. “I thought it must be very bad to miss them like that,” he said. “Because the Chants have to sink their homeland beneath the waves. Give them up forever, isn’t that the point?”

  “Sort of?” I waved my hands—maybe gesturing could be heard in the voice even if it wasn’t seen. “It’s an oath, not a literal thing. A ritual, symbolic. Once we got to that point, where we were thinking of you taking that step, we would have gone back to Hrefnesholt and seen your family and—”

  “Oh,” Ylfing said, and began to cry. I sat frozen and silent. If watching him cry through the bars had been awkward, this was twice as bad.

  “What are you doing? Why?”

  “You told me before we left that—you told me about sinking my homeland beneath the waves,” he gasped out between sobs, “and at first I thought you meant the whole thing, but then you explained that it was saying some words and throwing a rock or something into a lake or a river, so I . . .” His voice got very small. “I brought a rock from home with me because I thought we were never going back ever.”

  Something shattered in my chest, and I leaned my head against the door. He’s a very stupid boy sometimes. “Sorry.” I cleared my throat and tried again. “Sorry, I suppose I didn’t explain it very well. You brought a rock with you? You still have it? It’s been years.”

  “Yes,” he said in an even smaller voice. “I thought I’d lost it once, remember? When we were in Ondor-Urt and I tripped and dropped my bag over the rail of Pashafi’s house, and it spilled open across the sand, and I almost jumped down to get it because the huts weren’t even walking that fast, and—”

  “And you would have been eaten in seconds if your feet had touched the ground, yes, I remember. I wondered why you cared so much about a spare set of clothes.”

  “It was the rock, is why. I thought . . . if you asked me to sink my homeland beneath the waves, I thought I was supposed to be ready to do it at any second. I thought if I didn’t have it, you’d send me home and I’d never get another chance. And sometimes I thought about how maybe if you asked me to, I could just pretend that I’d lost it, because . . . because once in a while, I thought maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to be sent home. I’ve seen more of the world than anyone I know. Or knew.” His voice was still thick and sniffly, but the tears already seemed to be easing up—Ylfing’s tears are ever as brief as summer rain showers.

  “You were prepared to sink your homeland beneath the waves at any second?”

  “Yes. I thought I was supposed to be. I thought the whole apprenticeship was a test.”

  I wanted to laugh at him, I really did. “You already know you’re not my first apprentice. I don’t talk much about the others, but I’ve had fifteen or sixteen of them, Ylfing. It’s not . . . Well, it is sort of a test, but it’s a test that you’re giving yourself, and you get to figure out whether you passed it or not. It’s not me that tells you if you did. Of the sixteen or so, I took seven of them back home to sink it beneath the waves, and . . . Hell, Ylfing, when we got there, only three of them came away with me again. They came with me as journeymen for a little while—journeywomen, actually, all three of them were women—but then the time came for us to part, and I don’t know what happened to them after that. Don’t know if any of them ever kept on as Chants in their own right. It’s been years. I don’t go back to their homes, because I don’t want to know if they gave up, and because if they didn’t give up, then there might still be someone who carries a grudge against me for taking them away.”

  “Only three of them?”

  “Only three. For some people, a few years of apprenticeship is enough to scratch their itching feet. Some people don’t have the knack for it, and they figure that out on their own. And sometimes they think it’s what they want to do until they go home, and then . . .” I shrugged. “There’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes you forget what home is like, and what it’s like to be around so many people who know you and love you. Sometimes they’ve changed for the better; sometimes you have. That might still happen to you, and there’s nothing wrong with it. If I get out of here and we go back to Hrefnesholt one day, and you decide to stay in your village instead of leaving again as a journeyman, that’s fine. You won’t have disappointed me. It’s your choice, do you understand? Every day with me is your choice.”

  He sniffled. I don’t know if he nodded or shook his head in addition to that, but he didn’t answer.

  “We might go back, and you might decide to stay. Or you might find that they’ve changed, and you’ve changed—because you will find that you’ve changed, that you’re not the same person who left—and that you can’t go home, not really, because home doesn’t exist anymore in the way that it used to be. The houses will still be there, some or most of the people will still be there. . . . The fjord and the pine trees and the mist on the water in the morning, those will all be there. But home might not be. So you might leave. Or you might stay, and it’ll be a different home one day, even though it’s in the same place.” I paused. “Were you in love with Finne?”

  “Sort of,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes a little. Of course he was—like I said before, he’ll fall in love three times a week if he’s given the opportunity. “So you might go back and find that the two of you still have feelings for each other, and that he missed you and waited for you. Don’t get your hopes up about this,” I added. “I’m just saying that is one of a hundred thousand possibilities. There are more possible endings where you go home than possible endings where you become a master-Chant. That’s only one ending in thousands. And it’s important to consider the idea that others might arise instead. As we have established already with Taishineya Tarmos, neither of us can tell the future unless we’re faking it. But if we consider several threads of fate rather than just one, we can be more prepared when the path twists away under our feet and takes us somewhere other than where we first thought we were going.”

  “I love traveling with you,” he said. “I don’t want to stop.”

  Poor kid. “Do you love traveling with me,” I asked as gently as I could, “or do you love traveling? Because execution or not, I won’t be in this world forever.”

  I sat back and looked down at the opening in the bottom of the door. He was toying with one of the monk’s-puffs, tearing it to tiny pieces. “Well, I’ve never traveled without you,” he said, “so I don’t know. Other than going to the Jarlsmoot when I was a kid. I loved that, too, but . . .”

  “But it was the Jarlsmoot, and you were a kid. It was exciting in and of itself, and every child would have loved to go.”

  “Yes.”

  “Your life is your own, Ylfing. You have taken no
vows, you have made no promises. Not even to me, you understand? I told you when we first started out that you could stay as long as you liked, unless you proved to be more annoying than you were worth, because I get to stay with you as long as I like too.”

  “Do you like it? Having me with you?” he whispered.

  I spent a moment rearranging my cloak.

  “It’s just that I sometimes think you don’t like it,” he said. The monk’s-puff he was shredding was looking more like a powder.

  “It’s fine,” I muttered. “As apprentices go, you’re not the worst I’ve ever had.” I didn’t realize until after it had come out of my mouth how that would sound to a Hrefni. I hadn’t meant it as a compliment, not really, but that’s what it was to him. They have this odd thing about wanting to know where they are on a spectrum of worst to best. Not-worst would be a wonderful place for Ylfing to stand, in his own estimation.

  I heard him take a deep breath. “Oh,” he said. “Thank you.”

  Ivo came back, very, very late that night—I don’t know if it was some privilege of being a court scribe, or if he simply knew which palms to grease. “Are you awake?” he said, tapping on the door. “I forgot my slate here. I came to collect it.”

  I rolled off my bench and tottered over to the door. The only light was what little came from the torches in the hallway, shining through the slot in the bottom of the door. “Yes, sorry, let me find it for you. Did you have a nice day?” I was casting around, trying to find a way to ask him what he thought of my offer without revealing anything to the guards.

  “Yes. I’m in a rush, though, I can’t stay to chat.”

  “Oh . . .” I was disappointed. Perhaps the slate was all he’d come for after all.

  “Next time, you’ll have to tell me another story. The one earlier, I liked that one. I had to think about it, but I liked it.”