It was spiced porter and the warmth eased the tightness in his chest. “Thank you.”
“Talk.”
“This is such a loss for you all, I know,” he said. “Did you know Loreh well?”
She shook her head. “This is not for me, this is for you. Tell me.”
“I’m fine,” he said, and when she didn’t say anything, he repeated with a flicker of anger: “I’m fine, Rasali. I can handle this.”
“Probably you can,” Rasali said. “But you’re not fine. She died and it was your bridge she died for. You don’t feel responsible? I don’t believe it.”
“Of course I feel responsible,” he snapped.
The fire cast gold light across her broad cheekbones when she turned her face to him, but she said nothing, only looked at him and waited.
“She’s not the first,” Kit said, surprising himself. “The first project I had sole charge of, a toll gate. Such a little project, such a silly little project to lose someone on. The wood frame for the passageway collapsed before we got the keystone in. The whole arch came down. Someone got killed.” It had been a very young man, slim and tall with a limp. He was raising his little sister. She hadn’t been more than ten. Running loose in the fields around the site, she had missed the collapse, the boy’s death. Dafuen? Naus? He couldn’t remember his name. And the girl—what had her name been? I should remember. I owe that much to them.
“Every time I lose someone,” he said at last, “I remember the others. There’ve been twelve in seventeen years. Not so many, considering. Building’s dangerous. My record’s better than most.”
“But it doesn’t matter, does it?” she said. “You still feel you killed each one of them, as surely as if you’d thrown them off a bridge yourself.”
“It’s my responsibility. The first one, Duar—” that had been his name; there it was. The name loosened something in Kit. His face warmed: tears, hot tears running down his face.
“It’s all right,” she said. She held him until he stopped crying.
“How did you know?” he said finally.
“I am the eldest surviving member of the Ferry family,” she said. “My father died. My mother. My aunt died seven years ago. And then I watched my brother leave to cross the mist, three years ago now. It was a perfect day, calm and sunny, but he never made it. He went instead of me because the river felt wrong to me that day. It could have been me. It should have, maybe. So I understand.”
She stretched a little. “Not that most people don’t. If Petro Housewright sends his daughter to select timber in the mountains and she doesn’t come back—eaten by wolves, struck by lightning, I don’t know—is Petro to blame? It’s probably the wolves or the lightning. Maybe it’s the daughter, if she did something stupid. And it is Petro, a little; she wouldn’t have been there at all if he hadn’t sent her. And it’s her mother for being fearless and teaching that to her daughter, and Thom Green for wanting a new room to his house. Everyone except maybe the wolves feels responsible. This path leads nowhere. Loreh would have died sooner or later.” Rasali added softly, “We all do.”
“Can you accept death so readily?” he asked. “Yours even?”
She leaned back, her face suddenly weary. “What else can I do, Kit? Someone must ferry and I am better suited than most—and by more than my blood. I love the mist, its currents and the smell of it and the power in my body as I push us all through. Petro’s daughter Cilar—she did not want to die when the wolves came, I’m sure, but she loved selecting timber.”
“If it comes for you?” he said. “Would you be so sanguine then?”
She laughed and the pensiveness was gone. “No indeed. I will curse the stars and go down fighting. But it will still have been a wonderful thing, to cross the mist.”
At University, Kit’s relationships had all been casual. There were lectures that everyone attended, and he lived near streets and pubs crowded with students; but the physical students had a tradition of keeping to themselves that was rooted in the personal preferences of their predecessors and in their own. The only people who worked harder than the engineers were the ale-makers, the University joke went. Kit and the other physical students talked and drank and roomed and slept together.
In his third year, he met Domhu Canna at the arcade where he bought vellums and paper: a small woman with a heart-shaped face and hair in black clouds that she kept somewhat confined by gray ribbons. She was a philosophical student from a city two thousand miles to the east, on the coast.
He was fascinated. Her mind was abrupt and fish-quick and made connections he didn’t understand. To her, everything was a metaphor, a symbol for something else. People, she said, could be better understood by comparing their lives to animals, to the seasons, to the structure of certain lyrical poems, to a gambling game.
This was another form of pattern-making, he saw. Perhaps people were like teamed oxen to be led, or like metals to be smelted and shaped to one’s purpose, or like the stones for a dry-laid wall, which had to be carefully selected for shape and strength, sorted, and placed. This last suited him best. What held them together was not external mortar but their own weight and the planning and patience of the drystone builder. But it was an inadequate metaphor. People were this, but they were all the other things as well.
He never understood what Domhu found attractive in him. They never talked about regularizing their relationship. When her studies were done halfway through his final year, she returned to her city to help found a new university, and in any case her people did not enter into term marriages. They separated amicably and with a sense of loss on his part at least, but it did not occur to him until years later that things might have been different.
The winter was rainy but there were days they could work and they did. By spring, there had been other deaths unrelated to the bridge on both banks: a woman who died in childbirth, a child who had never breathed properly in his short life, two fishers lost when they capsized, several who died for the various reasons that old or sick people died.
Over the spring and summer they finished the anchorages, featureless masses of blocks and mortar anchored to the bedrock. They were buried so that only a few courses of stone showed above the ground. The anchoring bolts were each tall as a man, hidden behind the portals through which the chains would pass.
The Farside pillar was finished by midwinter of the third year, well before the Nearside tower. Jenner and Teniant Planner had perfected a signal system that allowed detailed technical information to pass between the banks, and Kit took full advantage of it. Documents traveled each time a ferry crossed. Rasali made thirty-eight trips. Though he spent much of his time with Kit, Valo made nineteen. Kit did not cross the mist at all unless the flags told him he must.
It was early spring and Kit was in Farside when the signals went up: Message. Imperial seal. He went to Rasali at once.
“I can’t go,” she said. “I just got here yesterday. The Big Ones—”
“I have to get across and Valo’s at Nearside. There’s news from the capital.”
“News has always waited before.”
“No it hasn’t. News waited restlessly, pacing along the levee until we could pick it up.”
“Use the flags,” she said impatiently.
“The seals can’t be broken by anyone but me or Jenner. He’s over here. I’m sorry,” he said, thinking of her brother, dead four years before.
“If you die no one can read it,” she said, but they left just after dusk anyway. “If we must go, better then than earlier or later.”