Four Names And Nothing Else

Kindling · page 73 withdrawn

Page seventy three, my dear readers. I will tell you what is on it and then you will know as much as I do, which has not been true of a page in this case for some time now and is, I am starting to suspect, going to be true less and less as we go.

It is four names. That is the whole page. No world above them, no sentence under them, not even the little scratched-out first attempt at a sentence I usually leave in by accident. Just four names, in my own hand, close together, like I wrote them fast and did not trust myself to come back and finish the thought.

Two of them I can still do something with.

Sarn taught me Threnn's numeral system backward, on purpose, because forward was how every outsider tried to learn it and every outsider got it backward as a result, and she thought that was funny in a way she never once smiled about while saying it. Öyla ran a supply skiff off Kaunis and lied to a customs officer twice, on two separate mornings, so I would not miss a ship I had no real claim on missing. I do not know why she did that either time. I asked once. She changed the subject so cleanly I did not notice for an hour that she had done it.

That is a line each, and I could give you three more lines on either of them if the fire would wait. It will not, so there they are, and there they go.

The other two names are Ræl and Tuvid, and I have been sitting with this page for longer than I have sat with any page tonight, and I cannot tell you a single thing about either of them. Not a world. Not a face, if I ever had a face for them, which I may not have, given everything I have told you about faces in this case. Not a reason my own hand would have put them next to Sarn and Öyla, who I do remember, on a page with no other writing on it at all.

I have tried the obvious things. I have said the names out loud, twice each, on the theory that a name said out loud sometimes drags the rest of the room in behind it. It did not. I have gone through the case looking for another page that might mention either of them and found nothing, which tells me nothing, since I have burned some of what I would have been looking through. I have sat here doing the thing where you stare just past a word and hope it comes at you sideways. It did not do that either.

I do not know if this is the case doing it or if I am simply getting older in a room with no way to check. I would like it to be the second one. I have no way to make it the second one just by wanting it, and I am aware that wanting it is doing exactly nothing.

So. Sarn and Öyla, who I will keep for as long as I am keeping anything. And Ræl and Tuvid, who go into the fire the way the rest of the page does, four names together, two of them already gone from everywhere except the one place that is about to stop existing.

Page seventy three withdrawn.