Kit took her cold hand. “It’s all right, Loreh. It’s all right.” It was a lie and in any case she could not hear him, but the others would. “Get Hall,” one of the workers said and Kit nodded: Hall was a surgeon. And then, “And get Obal, someone. Get her husband.” Footsteps ran down the stairs and were lost into the hiss of rain just beginning and someone’s crying and Loreh’s wet breathing.
Kit glanced up. His chest heaving, Valo stood staring. Kit said to him, “Help find Hall,” and when the boy did not move he repeated it, his voice sharper. Valo said nothing, did not stop looking at Loreh until he spun and ran down the stairs. Kit heard shouting far below as the first messenger ran toward the town.
Loreh took a last shuddering breath and died.
Kit looked at the others around Loreh’s body. The man holding Loreh’s other hand pressed his face against it crying helplessly. The two other workers left here knelt at her feet, a man and a woman, huddled close though they were not a couple. “Tell me,” he said.
“I tried to stop it from hitting her,” the woman said. She cradled one arm: obviously broken though she did not seem to have noticed. “But it just kept falling.”
“She was tired. She must have gotten careless,” the man said, and the broken-armed woman said, “I don’t want to think about that sound.”
Words fell from them like blood from a cut. This was what they needed right now, to speak and to be heard. So he listened, and when the others came, Loreh’s husband Obal, white-lipped and angry-eyed, the surgeon Hall, and six other workers, Kit listened to them as well, and gradually moved them down through the pillar and back toward the warm lights and comfort of Farside.
Kit had lost people before and it was always like this. There would be tears tonight, and anger at him and at his bridge, anger at fate for permitting this. There would be sadness and nightmares. And there would be lovemaking and the holding close of children and friends and dogs—affirmations of life in the cold wet night.
His tutor at University had said, during one of her frequent digressions from materials and the principles of architecture, “Things will go wrong.”
It was winter, but in spite of the falling snow they walked slowly to the coffee house, as Skossa looked for purchase for her cane. She continued, “On long projects, you’ll forget that you’re not one of them. But if there’s an accident? You’re slapped in the face with it. Whatever you’re feeling? Doesn’t matter. Guilty, grieving, alone, worried about the schedule. None of it. What matters is their feelings. So listen to them. Respect what they’re going through.”
She paused then, tapped her cane against the ground thoughtfully. “No, I lie. It does matter but you will have to find your own strength, your own resources elsewhere.”
“Friends?” Kit said doubtfully. He knew already that he wanted a career like his father’s. He would not be in the same place for more than a few years at a time.
“Yes, friends.” Snow collected on Skossa’s hair but she didn’t seem to notice. “Kit, I worry about you. You’re good with people, I’ve seen it. You like them. But there’s a limit for you.” He opened his mouth to protest but she held up her hand to silence him. “I know. You do care. But inside the framework of a project. Right now it’s your studies. Later it’ll be roads and bridges. But people around you—their lives go on outside the framework. They’re not just tools to your hand, even likable tools. Your life should go on, too. You should have more than roads to live for. Because if something does go wrong, you’ll need what you’re feeling to matter, to someone somewhere, anyway.”
Kit walked through Farside toward The Bitch. Most people were home or in one of the taverns by now, a village turned inward; but he heard footsteps running behind him. He turned quickly. It was not unknown for people reeling from a loss to strike at whatever they blamed, and sometimes it was a person.
It was Valo. Though his fists were balled, Kit could tell immediately that he was angry but that he was not looking for a fight. For a moment Kit wished he didn’t need to listen, that he could just go back to his rooms and sleep for a thousand hours, but there was a stricken look in Valo’s eyes: Valo, who looked so much like Rasali. He hoped that Rasali and Loreh hadn’t been close.
Kit said gently, “Why aren’t you inside? It’s cold.” As he said it, he realized suddenly that it was cold. The rain had settled into a steady cold flood.
“I will. I was, I mean, but I came out because I thought maybe I could find you, because—” The boy was shivering.
“Where are your friends? Let’s get you inside. It’ll be better there.”
“No,” he said. “I have to know first. It’s like this always? If I do this, build things, it’ll happen for me? Someone will die?”
“It might. It probably will, eventually.”
Valo said an unexpected thing: “I see. It’s just that she had just gotten married.”
The blood on Loreh’s lips, the wet sound of her crushed chest as she took her last breaths— “Yes,” Kit said. “She had.”
“I just… I had to know if I need to ready for this. I guess I’ll find out.”
“I hope you don’t have to.” The rain was getting heavier. “You should be inside, Valo.”
Valo nodded. “Rasali—I wish she were here. She could help maybe. You should go in too. You’re shivering.”
Kit watched him go. Valo had not invited him to accompany him back into the light and the warmth. He knew better than to expect that, but for a moment he had permitted himself to hope otherwise.
Kit slipped through the stables and through the back door at The Bitch. Wisdon Innkeep, hands full of mugs for the taproom, saw him and nodded, face unsmiling but not hostile. That was good, Kit thought, as good as it would get tonight.
He entered his room and shut the door, leaned his back to it as if to hold the world out. Someone had already been in his room. A lamp had been lit against the darkness, a fire laid, and bread and cheese and a tankard of ale set by the window to stay cool. He began to cry.
The news went across the river by signal flags. No one worked on the bridge the next day or the day after that. Kit did all the right things, letting his grief and guilt overwhelm him only when he was alone, huddled in front of the fire in his room.
The third day, Rasali arrived from Nearside with a boat filled with crates of northland herbs on their way east. Kit was sitting in The Bitch’s taproom, listening. People were coping, starting to look forward again. They should be able to get back to it soon, the next clear day. He would offer them something that would be an immediate, visible accomplishment, something different, perhaps guidelining the ramp.
He didn’t see Rasali come into the taproom, only felt her hand on his shoulder and heard her voice in his ear. “Come with me,” she murmured.
He looked up puzzled, as though she were a stranger. “Rasali Ferry, why are you here?”
She said only, “Come for a walk, Kit.”
It was raining but he accompanied her anyway, pulling a scarf over his head when the first cold drops hit his face.
She said nothing as they splashed through Farside. She was leading him someplace but he didn’t care where, grateful not to have to be the decisive one, the strong one. After a time she opened a door and led him through it into a small room filled with light and warmth.
“My house,” she said. “And Valo’s. He’s still at the boatyard. Sit.”
She pointed and Kit dropped onto the settle beside the fire. Rasali swiveled a pot hanging from a bracket out of the fire and ladled something into a mug. She handed it to him and sat. “So. Drink.”