“Do you think I’m happy about this? Do you think I wanted it to happen?”
“No, I don’t. But you knew that it might, and then it did. I won’t help you anymore. I’m already partly responsible for this.”
“You promised,” she hissed.
“I promised to help you fix it,” I said. “And I will. We have to undo what we’ve done. We have to make amends. We have to rebuild with our own hands the thing we broke.”
“Chant, have some sense!”
I drew myself up. “Don’t call me Chant,” I said. “My name is Ylfing.343 And I’m going to tell the truth. It’s the one little thing I can do to help.”
She threw me out. She would have wrestled me into the canal, if I’d let her, but I squirmed out of her grip and ran—I’d left my boots and my oilcloak, and I lost my suede indoor slippers almost immediately, and then there was something lovely and freeing about feeling the light drizzle in my hair and the cold wet cobblestones through my socks—only rain, harmless, since the tides had begun to fall again as the moons waxed and moved out of alignment.
I came to the Rose and Ivy, where Mistress Chant was staying, because there is no better place, I suppose, to make my confessions and to think about what I’ll do.
She isn’t here; the innkeeper said he expects her back later this evening,344 so I’ve paid for a room and some paper and ink and settled in to wait for her.
Choices. Choices like telling Sterre my real name. Like Orfeo. Like writing down everything that happened to me because words on a page are real in a way that they’re not when they’re only in your head. In your head, they’re shifting formless things, twisting and gyrating through the air with no heed to reason. But on paper, you can shape them. You can put some discipline on them. You can draw conclusions from them that you can’t when they’re mere nebulous thoughts somewhere in the dark. And sure, yes, maybe at some point they get taken from you and used against you.
Or maybe you give them away and hope that someone will understand you as well as you understand yourself. Because those weeks ago, after I’d spoken to Neeltje, when I said that something as small and inconsequential and powerless as being understood, however briefly, by someone who feels your pain as their own couldn’t possibly help? I was wrong. It’s not pathetic and it’s not pointless. I thought it was nothing, but . . . One little thing like that can be everything.345
Here are the words I need to be real:
I’m Ylfing. I care about people, and I’ve been afraid because caring got me hurt, made me miss things that were right in front of me. Easier to just draw away, easier to run from it. But I care. I care and care and care, whether or not the person I care for deserves it. Everyone deserves understanding, at the very least.346
My greatest strength has always been in looking at someone and finding an inherent spark of goodness in them. This is not to redeem them. Some people are beyond redemption. But even they yearn to be understood, just as everyone does, just as I do. So I look into their hearts and find the jewel among the slop. Except the slop too has value and weight and importance. It completes a person.
People soften when they’re around me. At least, they used to when I was young and small and cute. Perhaps they still do—I’ll have to watch for it. I never did anything in particular to merit that softening, besides being soft myself, and kind, and loving. I just reached out to them with my heart and made a connection.
And maybe that’s the key to all of it. Connections.
When I was an apprentice, my master-Chant liked to tell me about how valuable stories are. We need no material to trade, he said, besides words. He bragged about the times he’d wandered through an area gripped by severe famine. He would stop to ply his trade in the town centers, and at the end, he’d find that he had earned no money, but someone would have given him a crust of bread to eat. He said that’s how you know the value of what you’re doing. Because in a famine, the food should have been the most valuable thing, but they were still willing to pay him a crust to be taken away from their suffering. So the story was, therefore, more valuable than the food, right?
Right?
Right?
But that’s not right. Not at all. Because people want to stay alive, more than anything, and if there had been any danger of someone truly starving, he wouldn’t have gotten paid, not even in crusts of bread, no matter how good his story was. It wasn’t about that. His methods were right, but his conclusions were wrong.
Telling the story connected him to them. It wove a bond between them. The food wasn’t payment; it was a gift. It was just someone looking after their own, because that’s what you do. You look after your people. You form bonds. And those connections—those are what matter most.
Those are the most valuable things in the world.347
Mistress Chant thinks that I’m a heretic for—gods, a lot of things. I don’t even know the full list of things she hates me for or thinks that I’m doing wrong.348 But I’ll write this here and now, my confession: I have sinned, this last year and a half since I sank my homeland beneath the waves. My sin was in drifting unanchored through the world, in passing by people like a ghost, in failing to reach out to them, in letting my fear get the better of me, in thinking it wasn’t important. My sin was the selfishness to think that I wasn’t important, that I couldn’t be important to the people I was passing. And that’s not the sin of a Chant. That’s a sin within the reach of any of us.
I can’t save everyone completely. But maybe I can mostly save a couple people, or save most people a tiny bit. It’s one little thing, and that’s better than nothing. That’s always better than nothing.
Sterre’s going to have to see reason, before anything else. She’s going to have to accept my help. When I reach out, tossing her a rope like she’s drowning, she’ll have to take hold of it. And then, together, we’ll toss ropes to everyone, and maybe they’ll do the same for other people, on and on until the city is a web, lashed down by a thousand ropes to weather the stormy season. That’s the only way to survive misfortune and turmoil.
Heyrland knows about floods. They know about throwing ropes to the drowning. If I were anywhere else in the world, I don’t think that this would work. But here . . . maybe. Maybe.
Here, there’s a chance. Because they know what they need to do to keep the waters back.
Mistress Chant returned. I don’t have the strength to write about that now349—every time we speak I stagger away only wanting to sleep for a year, rolled up in a blanket in the attic of the inn where it’s quiet.
* * *
339. Yes! At last! All right, now the interesting parts, right? Now the parts where you tell Sterre to go to hell.
340. Yes! Yes! Yes, yes!
341. What a ridiculous notion. There are more places in the world than a Chant could ever hope to visit in their lifetime. You could make a project of getting yourself blacklisted from as many of them as possible, and still there would be places and people in the world left willing to listen to you.
342. Good.
343. I’ll let this one slide—if you felt like you had to be . . . that . . . in order to tell the truth, then fine. Fine.
344. “There’s some raggedy half-drowned young mann what says he’s here to see you. He’s got no shoes, but he had enough coin to buy a room. Weird priorities. Do you know him?”
345. Hm. I see. I don’t agree, but . . . I do see.
346. This, this I agree with.
347. Oh . . . Oh, you’re right. My master-Chant used to tell me that little fable too. I don’t know if it was ever true, but I can see how many Chants might have had similar experiences. But you’re right—it was never really because the stories were that good. That’s vanity. It was never about the stories. It was just . . . people. Of course.
348. “Hates” is an awfully strong word. I can be angry at you without hating you.
349. Motherfucker! Fine!
FORTY-NINE ½
Some of Us Have Discipline, You K
now
Except it has to be written, Brother-Chant, whether you feel like it or not—hell, even whether I do. The story has to be complete, and the talk we had that day was important, and it informed the things we talked about later. I still don’t like this writing-things-down affair, but . . . the story has to be complete. It would be a greater sin to let it remain fractured.
So:
“There’s some raggedy half-drowned young mann what says he’s here to see you,” said Mevriend Otte, the innkeeper, upon my return. “He’s got no shoes, but he had enough coin to buy a room. Weird priorities. Do you know him?”
It was the weird priorities that made me think it might be my brother-Chant. I sent Arenza and Lanh Chau to occupy themselves in the common room, and I followed Otte’s directions up to Chant’s room—the door stood open, and Chant himself sat at a small desk, scribbling what I thought at the time was a very long letter.
“And to what do I owe the pleasure today?” I said. He looked up—Otte’s description hadn’t been far off. His hair was half-dried, but his clothes were still sodden and dripping, and all he had on his feet was a pair of muddy socks. “Shouldn’t you be at de Waeyer’s offices?”
“We had a fight and she threw me out.” He slid all his papers into a stack and put a blank sheet over the top to cover his writing—all I glimpsed was a few lines of Xerecci, written in a fair, clean hand.
“Glad to know you pick fights with more than just me,” I said, making myself comfortable in the other chair.
“I was in the right. I told her . . . Well, you probably don’t want to hear about all that.” He fiddled nervously with the papers. “Could I tell you a story?”
“Of course.”
“A very long time ago and half the world away,” he began, a little rushed. (See, Brother-Chant? I can take your butterflies and pin them to paper too. How’s it feel?) “My master-Chant and I returned to my homeland in Hrefnesholt. He was old, you see, too old to be traveling that much anymore, and he longed to rest his feet. He knew I wasn’t quite ready to go off by myself, but he couldn’t lead me anymore, and I didn’t want to settle. I wanted to go; I wanted to keep having adventures and meeting new people and discovering beautiful things. I wanted to see the Palazzo della Colombe in Pezia, and the dragons hatching in Xereccio, and the festival of lights in Tash. I was prepared to take the oaths. I had been prepared for years. I’d carried a rock around with me ever since I left home, but my Chant told me I needn’t have.
“We went home, back to my own little village with the mountains hard at its back and the pebbly beach of the fjord at its toes, with the forests thick around, and the little plots of farmland. We went home, and I discovered it wasn’t really home anymore. My parents were still alive, but we were nearly strangers to each other—we’d always been strangers on some level. That’s part of why I left in the first place, because something in me had known I didn’t belong there, that I didn’t fit. I’d always been looking off over the horizon—before I met Chant, my biggest dream was of being taken to this competition between all the villages, called the Jarlsmoot. That was the greatest adventure I could conceive of.
“When we returned, I only found that I fit even less. The boy I’d been in love with was as grown as I, and he was taller and stronger and handsomer than when I’d left, and he’d taken up making-home with another boy we’d known as children. It was all just the same as it had always been, and I was nothing like the boy who had left. I’d seen more things and done more things than any of them could dream of. They welcomed me home with warmth, but when we sat down at the fireside and they asked me about my travels, they gawked at every word I said, and they swore it must be impossible, that the world could not be as big as I described.
“I had changed too much. I had already lost my homeland, painlessly and gradually, in bits and pieces, with every step away, and even with every step back to them.
“So early the next morning, when the sun had not yet burned away the mist veiling the surface of the water, I led my Chant a little ways out of the village, down along the narrow, rocky beach to a secret place I knew where a brook tumbled out of the pine forest into the fjord. It was quiet but for the birds, and we were well enough distant from the village that we might have been the only two people in all the world.
“ ‘Last chance, my boy,’ said Chant. ‘Don’t do it unless you mean it. There’s time yet to think about it.’
“But I was ready, and though my heart ached for the homeland I’d lost, it was no worse than the homesickness I’d felt on the road a hundred times. I scraped up a handful of dirt and pebbles, and I said the oaths, and I wept for Hrefnesholt and for Arthwend, and then I waded out knee-deep into the cold water, and lowered my hands under the surface. I sank my homeland the way it had been lost, slowly and gently, first soaked to mud and then worn away in trickles between my fingers by the currents of the water, until all that was left was a little bit clinging to my skin and under my nails. And I washed that away too, and then I went back to the shore, and hugged my Chant, so small and old and frail, and wept while he clucked his tongue and scolded me in that way he had, and chafed my hands to warm them, and told me I was very stupid, which had always meant that he loved me and worried about me.
“We spent all day there, him giving me advice and chastising me about minding my manners out there in the world, and sometimes he said nothing, and we just sat together in silence, in the dancing, dappled sunlight that came through the pines. And when I’d stopped weeping, we told each other stories of all our best memories of those years we’d traveled together, and we laughed, and I cried again, and he told me I was an idiot.
“The next morning, I left. And Chant stood at the threshold of my mother’s cottage and watched me go along the shore road, waving whenever I looked back over my shoulder, all the way until the forest blocked him from my sight.
“And that was how I became a Chant,” he said.
I nodded.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“Does it matter what I think? It’s your story, and it’s a story for you. It doesn’t matter what I think of it.” He looked sort of upset, so I sighed. “It was a good story, Chant.”
After a long pause, he said slowly, “You could call me by my real name.”
“No. Absolutely not. You told a good story; don’t ruin it with some . . . dreadful whimsy.”
“It’s not a whimsy. I’ve been thinking of it for a long time. Of using my name again, I mean. Don’t you want to know what it is, at least? It’s—”
“Hush!” I said sharply. “I won’t use it. I don’t even want to know it.”
“It’s my choice to use it. You could respect that. It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
“You made an oath, and you would break it so easily? Pig trough or fjord, both ways you made the oath. I don’t agree to be your accomplice in this. I don’t agree to witness whatever damn fool thing you think you’re doing, whatever adolescent tantrum you’re having about it. Now, are you here only to tell me that story, or was there something else you wanted?”
“I want to know how to undo a story.”
“Don’t ask me questions you already know the answer to. You tell me how.”
“Tell another, and hope that the first one is weaker, I guess,” he said bitterly. “You were right, you know. About the flowers, about my part in it.”
“Of course I was.” And then, because I was feeling vindictive, I said, “You’re a smart lad.” I wouldn’t speak his master’s language. If I called him an idiot, he might think I approved of him.
“Would it really be so bad if I broke my oaths?” he said. “If I decided to . . . give it all up?”
“I don’t know,” I said flatly. “Would it? Could you live with yourself if you did?”
“You’d like it, me giving up Chanting. At least part of you would. But you’d be upset with it too. You want me to be better than that.”
“Once again, it doesn’t have
anything to do with me. It’s none of my concern. It’s between you and your ability to sleep at night.”
“Have you ever thought of it? Settling down? Finding one place to stay?”
“Of course I have. I plan ahead. How you imagine spending your twilight years, what with that ridiculous and unnecessary devotion to asceticism that you got from your master, I’m sure I don’t know. Me, I’ll have a house and food, because I’ve planned for it.”
“Where will you go, when you’re ready?” He glanced at me. “Inacha, I suppose. To be with the one you love.”
“And that’s none of your concern.”
“I’ve been thinking lately that it might be nice,” he said, fidgeting anxiously with the edges of the papers once more. “If I were married. If I belonged somewhere.”
“You won’t do it,” I said. “You’re talking about it, but you won’t.”
“How would you know?”
I snorted. “Have you found some all-consuming love, then? Something right out of legend? Some lover who, in giving you his heart, will eclipse everything else that came before? You wouldn’t settle for anything less. A Chant never does.”
“Is that His Majesty of Inacha for you, then?”
I spread my hands. “You see me sitting here before you in Heyrland, don’t you? Chants don’t settle down like that. We’re too full of stories to find a human relationship stable or sustainable. No living man could ever live up to the myths you’d tell yourself about him. You’d make him into a concept, or an avatar, or you’d set him on a little pedestal and build a shrine around him. You’d expect him to move mountains for you or part the seas, or something else ridiculous like Tyrran’s twelve tasks—you’d expect him to be a mythic hero. And he won’t be; he’ll just be a person, crushed to dust under the weight of your expectations.” I leaned forward. “You might walk away from Chanting, but Chanting won’t ever walk away from you.”
“You don’t know all that,” he said softly. “Not for certain. You’re guessing. What if my story had been that I went home with my Chant, and Finne wasn’t making-home with anyone? What if he’d waited for me? What if I’d decided to stay?”
A Choir of Lies Page 33