Reaven's Arc

Chapter 3 of 8

Six beams stood now, and six plates hung empty. Reaven had names for two of them. She needed names for the rest. Empty brass told any passing assessor the truth: these were not memorials at all. A blank beam was a beam the barons could seize. She had no list of the drowned. The barons kept no record they would ever show. She could not carve what she could not name. She climbed the ladder and set the mechanical cat on the highest beam. Its green glass eyes ticked across the empty lot. Its gears clicked in the wind. She looked at the bare plates and felt the trap close. By morning some collector would count the blanks and call for a seizure crew. The men had gone home. One stayed. He crouched by the fence under a willow that leaned over the mud, its long branches dragging the ground. He was the oldest of the six, slow to lift and slow to speak. He had not looked at her all night. Now he did. "You're carving strangers," he said. "You don't know their names. You're guessing." Reaven said nothing. He had seen it. "My brother went into the flood works in the spring," the man said. "They said he ran off. He didn't run." He stood and brushed mud from his knees. "I know eleven men who went the same way. Their mothers know more. Their widows know the dates." Reaven came down the ladder. "You'd give me the names." "The barons burned the ledgers." He tapped his own chest. "But they can't burn us. Every family down here buried someone the water took. Nobody wrote it down because nobody thought it mattered." He looked up at the empty beams. "You made it matter." He pulled a stub of chalk from his coat and knelt on a flat stone. He wrote his brother's name. Then another. Then a third. His hand shook but he kept writing. Eleven names, then a woman's name, then a boy's. Reaven knelt beside him and read each one in the lantern glow. "Bring the widows here," she said. "Bring the mothers. Let them carve their own." The man nodded. He tucked the chalk away. "I'll come back tomorrow. I'll bring who I can." He touched the nearest empty plate. "Fill these. All of them." He left through the fence. Reaven looked at the stone covered in chalk. She had a list now. Not one name, but fourteen, and more coming. The empty beams would fill. But a list of the barons' drowned was a written accusation. Written down, it could be found. Fourteen names would soon be forty, and every widow who carved one became a witness the barons would want silenced. She had solved the empty beams. She had just made herself a keeper of the one record the barons had killed to erase.