Chapter 13: Three Inches of Light

Smoke went up off the roofs of Alder Creek in thin straight lines that morning, and the mist lay low in the bottoms where the creek ran cold. Elias Hale walked the ridge of the long field with his hands behind his back.

The emberwheat stood to his knee and was green all through it. He stood over the rows a while with nothing at all on his face, the way a man looks at a thing he has already counted.

Halfway down, a man straightened up off a hoe.

“Uncle Elias. You’re out early.”

It was Rafe, his nephew — near enough that the word did the work: a big, slow, honest-looking man who could turn a sentence when he had a mind to.

“Walking,” Elias said.

“You picked a good field for it.” Rafe wiped his palm down his shirt and came up the row two steps and stopped there. “Any good news out of your house this morning?”

“There’s the wheat.”

“The wheat’s got Corwin’s wedding in it.” Rafe grinned out at the field like it was his own work. “Luck like that runs down the rows.”

“You’ve got a mouth on you, boy.”

Rafe laughed and took it the way it was meant, and stood there another minute, and went back to his hoe when Elias said nothing else to him.

It cost nothing to let a man think well of a wedding. Elias had been telling the valley for years that his house was lucky and unremarkable at the same time, and the valley had taken it. There were still men in it who looked at the new wall of his hall a while longer than a man looks at a wall.

Behind him the house stood on its rise — the hall with the true beams in it, the squared yard, the barn, and below the wall the pond they had cut out with spades and shovels, which had fish in it now. Three years of work, paid for out of the fields, and every board of it written down in the year’s paper.

Four names stood at the head of Alder Creek, and Hale was the widest of them: better than three in ten of the village carried it, and a man could walk the whole road and be uncle to both sides of it. Nobody in living memory had got the Hales to stand one way, and most of the valley counted that a mercy. Elias took none from it. He had a thing standing in the wall of his own chapel, and sixty-odd of his own blood inside a morning’s walk of it.

He had put the practice down himself, years back, and left it to the boys. His mind had begun to go, and there was no use in an old man starting a thing he could not finish. Somebody had to see to the food and the clothes and the coin that bought them, and somebody had to keep watch on the house at night. He was the one with the time.

The night before, he had folded the sheets himself and put them in with the year’s paper, and then he had slept the way he always slept. He had given the boys no instruction about any of it, and he did not mean to.

Maren would be told a part of it when she gave Corwin a child. She kept her tongue and she kept to her own side of the house, and there was no living under one roof with a shut thing in it and no questions ever asked.

Of the boys, Gareth would not hear of a wife; he had said it often enough that the house had stopped bringing it up. Duncan had come to the age where a man is asked once. Elias had Elsie Thane in his mind — Thane’s girl, steady, of an age with him.

He would walk over to the Thane gate himself, one morning soon, and say the thing plain, and take whatever he was given. An old man doing his son’s courting for him in his head; it was the only kind of work he was still good for, and he knew it, and he did it anyway.

Below him the village was at its morning — a woman calling a child back off the water, a cart in the lane, smoke, somebody chopping behind the upper houses. Five of them in his house knew what stood in the wall of the chapel: himself and the four boys. Nobody else in the valley did, and he meant to keep it that way a while longer.

He was in better humor than he had been in a month, and it showed in how long he was willing to sit. Later he came to the ridge where the old men sat of a morning, and let the talk go around him — the water coming up, the weather holding, what a thing cost — and said a word where a word was wanted.

Then he came off the ridge and down the path to the house, and by the time he got there the morning had warmed and the boys were out in the yard.

His sense went out of the stone the way it did most mornings — up through the recess, along the top of the wall, through the chapel door, and out into the yard.

Three of them were sitting in the sun with their legs crossed and their eyes shut. The paper lay folded on the ground beside Corin, the youngest, with a small stone on it to hold it against the wind. Corwin came in through the gate last, out of the fields, with his sleeves rolled and his shirt dark down the back, and sat down at the end of the bench with the rest of them.

Somebody was at the wash tub around the side of the house, and somebody was sweeping off the step, and a cart went by out on the road, where his sense did not reach.

He looked at their heads. The White Thread came up out of each of them the way it did when they sat — thin, straight out of the crown, like a hair held up to the light.

Corin’s stood eight inches. Gareth’s stood six, and Duncan’s five, and Corwin’s, at the end of the bench, three.

The White Thread was the fit: how much of a sigil a body would take, and how fast it could carry what it took. A foot of it over a man’s head was the whole of the measure — a sigil laid in the deep well under the navel of such a man would work as though he had been born with a gate in him, and at the pace of a man with a gate. Eight inches was eight parts in ten of that pace, and three was three parts. Corwin would need three days in the yard to do what a man born with a gate did in one.

Inches. He had kept a tape measure in a drawer once, for shelves and a window, and had never given the marks on it a thought. Now he thought about them a good deal.

He had put the whole of the Invitation up on the glass three times the night before, and beside each part of it the roads a breath takes through a body, so that none of them could get a letter wrong.

Four of them in the yard had it off the paper by now, or near it. The youngest had copied the whole of it out in his own hand.

Six sigils was what he had. The number had not changed since the first night, and nothing had come out of the glass yet. Not one of the six had been given to anybody.

There was one person in the house who knew nothing about any of it beyond a wedding and a run of luck — a woman at the far end of it, married in, minding her own work. The village knew about the wedding and nothing else.

Corwin’s went out first. He came up off the bench and stood a while with his hands at the back of his hips, looking at nothing in particular, and went in at the door.

The other three sat on. Their Threads held a little longer and went out one at a time as each of them came up out of it, and the yard was only a yard again — bench, water bucket, door standing open.

Then the door opened and the old man’s voice came out across the yard, and the three of them got up and went in.

He drew his sense back along the wall and into the stone, and left the six sigils where they were.