Brandon Ashveil's Arc

Chapter 13 of 18

They reached Dayna's longhall by late afternoon. The dark timber walls looked smaller than Brandon remembered. The sod roof sagged where a beam had shifted. Dayna's red dog met them at the door, tail high, tawny coat bright against the mud. It pressed its nose into her hand and did not bark. She rubbed its ears once and pushed inside. The books were stacked in a chest under the window. Dayna knelt and lifted them out one by one. Brandon sat on the bench by the hearth. The thread in his chest still pulled north, steady as a held breath. Thornweave was still alive. Still coming. "Here," she said. She set a thin leather book on the table. "Bond-speaking. Grandmother copied it out." Brandon opened it. The pages were dense with looping marks that were not letters he knew. He turned three pages. Every page was the same. He looked up. "I can't read this." "I know." Dayna sat across from him. "She wrote her workings in old script. She said plain words wore out." "Then read it to me." "I can't either." She flattened her hand on the page. "She died before she taught me. I know the shapes. I don't know the sounds." Brandon shut the book. "Then we're finished." "No." She pulled the book back toward her. "I've been staring at these pages since I was ten. I know which marks repeat. I know which ones sit at the start of a working and which sit at the end. Give me the night." He watched her. Her hands were shaking. The dog put its head on her knee. "One night," he said. She lit a tallow candle and started at the first page. Brandon fed the fire. He brought her water. He did not speak. She wrote on a scrap of birch bark, crossed lines out, wrote again. The dog slept against her foot. Twice she put her forehead on the table and did not move for a long minute. Twice she picked the quill back up. Near dawn she pushed the bark across to him. "It's not a translation," she said. "It's the shape of one. The working needs a name spoken into a bound thing. Something the other person touched. Something warm from him." Brandon's stomach dropped. "I don't have anything of his." "You do." She looked at his chest. "You have his blood in you. Every wound he took, you wore. That counts." "You're sure." "I'm sure enough to try." He set his hand flat on the birch bark. The thread pulled north. For the first time it felt like a line he could speak down, not only bleed down. "Tonight," he said. Dayna nodded. She closed the book. The candle guttered out on its own. Outside, the dog lifted its head and looked north, and did not lie back down.