A Succession of Bad Days (52 page)

You look really serene,
Zora says, to Chloris’ disbelief.

The last fifth of the witness are just as disbelieving as Chloris, no matter how much Blossom looks like their kid sister if they look with eyes.

Nobody believes any of the rest of it, not
even sad faces, people are appalled. Creeks, though, it’s quietly appalled.

You can see it. Lots of room between quiet and shouting.
Dove’s state of mind’s nearly back to usual, less and less likelihood there’s going to be violence.

Bubble up with Blossom and walk out,
Dove says.
Wait for people to calm down.

There’s a sense of agreement from Blossom, a sliver of attention, Blossom’s listening
very carefully to Heron, and maybe we should be, but it’s looping self-justification, same ideas in slightly different words, it’s so much easier not to be angry if I don’t really listen.

I don’t want to get angry. The folk of Morning Vale are being asked to deal calmly with Death come among them, Chloris hasn’t killed anyone, won’t kill anyone if there is any other way, but Chloris could kill
all of them on one exhale. Our presence, not just Chloris, is as simple in law as maybe shall prove hard in practice, Independents, accepted by the Shape of Peace, bother people, and we’re just apprentices, we’re not bound, not really, all we must do is come back to be judged fit or unfit. Apprentices aren’t supposed to be so capable. Arch had enough trouble with our rearranging some dirt, we’re
maybe too used to Westcreek Town and our host gean being proud of us, here we’re strange, not even strangers.

Zora’s trying not to think it, and the idea of a smile slides from Dove, Zora really can’t
not
think it.
There came a day when the Goddess of Destruction came to Morning Vale, bringing Death and Strange Mayhem along behind.
It amuses Dove, it’s a factual statement, but it doesn’t mean
what someone fearful would take it to mean.

The judges have got a little more focus from Heron. Been asked, twice, if this witness is of choice and will, it’s hard to tell if Heron’s wits are scrambled or just dysfunctional with shock, shock that will wear off, a couple of doctors have come and found ‘No organic harm’, which has them troubled. Still, that’s not a question anyone wants to have
asked the third time.

It all winds down, the judges have been an hour, a little more, talking to Heron, not counting the doctors, the Shape of Peace accepts an attestation that what Heron has said is true and complete.

Reminds-me-of-Halt hands a sheet of paper left, to the quiet judge; it goes to the third judge, there’s a few words of pen scratch, it comes back, the note, annotation, gets read,
there’s a cluster of nods. That sheet of paper goes into the record of the trial, after.

“Heron’s intent was murder,” Reminds-me-of-Halt says. “Chloris’ response is accepted as self-defence.”

Someone in the witnesses protests ‘murder’; the judges, all three of them in sequence, walk through the precedents that establish any plausibly lethal attack in a refectory or other eating-place as murder,
irrespective of the lack of stealth or how abruptly the intention was formed. ‘Hall-peace’ is a special case of the Peace as a whole, what is dire conduct at a crossroads is worse in the hall.

I’d known that, I think the protesting witness knew that. They’re not happy with the prospect of Heron being hanged.

The judges get through the precedent.

Reminds-me-of-Halt goes on.

“Chloris was not struck.
Heron may prove crippled. It is held better than hanging to forbid Heron, kin and ilk, the entirety of Heron’s forest holdings, to instruct the canal-builders as a binding judgement of law that they are to make no consideration of consequences to those forest holdings in constructing the canal the Lug-Gesith, in obedience to the unanimous decision of Parliament, has bid them make, and to oblige
Heron’s gean to pay the full current taxes of what were Heron’s forest holdings until the year after the year which would hold Heron’s eighty-fifth birthday, whenever it should prove that Heron dies.”

Has to give up the thing worth killing me to protect, gean’s paying lots of extra taxes, not going to be able to go there even if there’s enough recovery to work, gean won’t have influence for a
couple generations.
Chloris sounds calm, as still as Death.
Did I miss anything?

Going to know it removed any chance of negotiating something.
Zora sounds annoyed, but it’s clearly at the lack of negotiation, not the judgement or Chloris.

Technically, the compensation undervalues you,
Dove says, Dove’s been doing sums in our head,
but they don’t have, no one gean has, what I think you’re supposed
to pay in cost of loss for the capability to weed two hundred hectares with utmost thoroughness in a day.

Chloris blinks, inside. Chloris did a hundred hectares, roughly, of the Weed Stream valley in half a day. Could certainly have kept going, and the weeding part of that was all Chloris. It’s ‘capability’ in law because one person doing that should be laughable. Halt, sure, Halt or Wake or Blossom
could
sterilize
that much, much more than that much ground, a Line battalion could sterilize square kilometres, but Chloris left living soil, living animals, behind.

“I take no harm from the judgement,” Chloris says to the judges. “I do so attest by the Peace and my name within it.”

‘Justice adds no harm to the wronged,’ about a third of Commonweal law all by itself. Why Chloris has to accept
the judgement.

There’s a tiny flicker of relief from the quiet judge, the relief from some of the witnesses isn’t quiet, as soon as Heron’s acts were adjudged murderous and Chloris’ self-defence, Chloris could have insisted Heron hang. If you’ve tried to murder someone, if it hasn’t worked, in a Commonweal court the wronged can insist you can’t possibly try again. Chloris doesn’t want Heron dead.

Perfect still voice of Death isn’t how people you’ve never met before are going to reach that conclusion.

The quiet judge asks the jury, the jury foreman’s a refectory baker, I think, from apron and flour and forearms, if the jury holds the law fairly applied. The dark jar travels around them with the steady clinking, comes back with nine black marbles, which the foreman counts out one by one,
the jury stands one by one and attests the trial fair.

All three judges look, very narrowly, I don’t think I’d see it with my eyes, but they look that little bit relieved.

“Let the order be made, that the judgement of the court upon Heron, holdings, and gean, is made, and binding, and binding upon all, that the Peace be maintained.”

You can feel the Shape of Peace taking notice.

“As a point of
information,” the Township Clerk says, “what might be known about Heron’s present condition?” ‘Do I need to put Heron down for crippled?’ hangs in the air, unspoken but not unheard, lots of people looking very uncomfortable. Not working because you didn’t die from the bad weeds or the cruncher or the time the tow-rope broke, no matter how good the reason is, not working still feels like failure.
People do everything they can to find something to do. Not working because you’re the idiot who tried to brain a necromancer with a water-pitcher, well.

“So far as I am aware,” Blossom says, Chloris has no, none of us have, any idea how to answer that, “the number of people able to perform the wreaking applied to Heron is small, certainly less than five, possibly one.” Chloris tries not to, but
can’t manage it, looks, perfect still face of Death and all, utterly appalled.

“A definitive answer would be better had by consulting Wake and Halt and the records of the Galdor-gesith, but for my knowledge, no other such wreaking is known to us.”

Chloris stops looking appalled, this is beyond appalling, Zora has to try hard not to smile, and Chloris has to try hard not to wail.

You found a way
not to kill, even if you had to invent something no one else had,
Dove says.
Lots of ways to do worse.

Blossom takes four quick steps, squats down, picks up the water pitcher handle, stands. All the pitcher pieces rise, reassemble, there’s a narrow surge through the Power, it looks like the bitter taste of zinc, and the pitcher is whole. Blossom hands it to the refectory person holding a mop,
who is so startled that they nearly drop it again.

“Fix what you can,” Blossom says, and everybody nods. Comfort in proverbs.

Dinner’s cold, but I’m not going to waste it.

It winds up, next morning, early, with us, Arch’s survey team, all three judges, and six witnesses from Heron’s gean, up on the ridge, rise, where the stream cuts through.

Heron hasn’t died in the night, isn’t as unfocused, there’s a general agreement that Heron’s not like people remember, Heron’s memory’s fine, remembers everything, but something changed.

This ridge is where the lake
flowed over, when Old Lake was deeper this was all under water, so there’s no canyon, not to look at, there’s one down there, in the rock, there was a bigger river, a narrow spot in the flow of water, I think even when Old Lake was as big as it got. All the rock’s buried, the canyon filled with mud and marsh when the lake fell, so there’s this notch, there’s deep channels through mud and sand, the
current stream’s got maybe fifty metres of the two hundred available for width. It’s steep, but steep dirt banks; no jumbled-rock rapids, no waterfall, just cut layers of sediment. The top, anywhere stable or flat, is grass and bushes. The ridge top itself has nothing but grass, I think kept that way. If I lived in Morning Vale, I wouldn’t want trees up here, the soil is shallow and sandy with clay
lenses. Some strong rainstorm and there would be tree boles in houses.

The forest, you can see why Heron was upset. Varied, the leaf colours aren’t the same, and it’s huge, it goes back and back on both stream banks. The ridge-tops are mostly bare, rain or old waves or they were just sand when the lake dropped and nothing grew that could hold it down, none of it looks steep enough or sharp enough
to shed soil. Meadow up high, too, above the forest, thinner soil before the bare crowns of the hills. Highlands around the other side of the hilltops, the forest is in what’s surely an erosional feature, lower, sheltered. The distant highlands to the north are meadow, a few stands of pine. Not high enough to be cooler, but closer to the Northern Hills, and those are high enough for year-round
snow. Up in the chill wind from the mountains likely counts for what will grow.

“Blossom, could you put a visible contour where the lake is supposed to be?” Zora sounds distant, abstract, Zora’s mind sliding in a strange direction, only slightly attending to the substantial world.

The intended lake borders blaze up ice-white, and tall, taller than the trees, or we’d never see it. Can’t see all
of it, some of it’s behind hills, it’s ripply land, the lake-to-be goes back a long way. One of Arch’s surveyors mutters something Dove translates as
Must be nice
.

Zora nods, thinks
Thanks,
and reaches back in the link. We reach forward; a beat or two later, Blossom does, too.

Zora talks to the forest.

All of you have names.

They all do, all the trees, every individual tree, the kinds of tree,
the kinds of bird and pangolin and spider, deer and wolf and shy wild cattle, every crawling thing in the earth, so many beetles, soil fungus, bacteria past counting, down into everything that distinguishes soil from dirt, the names of the energy flows, a vast tangled thing like melted gears that’s the actual nitrogen cycle, the one going on in the forest, not the idea of it, all of it has names.

RISE,
Zora says.

Everybody just standing there hears the word with their ears. In the Power, it echoes.

We’re all together behind Zora’s will and pushing, reaching out over five thousand hectares.

The forest walks.

All of it, not just the trees, from the dirt up, clear down to bedrock, the forest walks. In places it’s moving a couple kilometres, to get clear, well clear, of the lake contour, the
meadows above it move, covering the bare and rounding ridges, rearranging, making room for where the water will rise.

When I open my body’s eyes the lake bed is there, bare to bedrock, steep-banked, stretching back twelve kilometres, one- and two- and four- kilometres wide as the land rises and falls in hills and valleys, a wedge of stream-bed trailing through it, still raised up on the dirt that
was below.

Zora says “Whee!” and falls over.

It’s afternoon. That took awhile.

Arch’s survey team have the bad shakes. Arch, they’re not precisely indifferent, but some kind of functional. There was a lot of rumble through the ground when the forest got up and walked. Didn’t notice, Dove didn’t notice.

Zora’s not functioning, or not much; not conscious, there in the link but
only
there, no thoughts,
no sense of intention, breathing’s good, deep, steady, nothing wrong there, Blossom’s nodding, nothing wrong with Zora’s circulation of the Power, mind’s in there, brain’s not cooked, Chloris is producing bed and blankets from good intentions and tiny aluminium marker tags, we get Zora bundled into it, we’ve all, probably Blossom, too, got Grue’s voice in our heads about over-extending yourself
and the risk of shock. Chloris looks up, puts a canopy over the bed that looks like green glass and iron roses.

Chloris takes a look at Arch’s survey team, notes that there’s active gibbering going on, and makes more blankets. The three judges, the Clerk, the court clerks, it’s not hitting them as hard. Less sense of the mass involved, maybe. They get benches anyway, same as the survey team, nice
deep ones with seat-curve and tall backs under sunshade canopies.

Chloris sort of nods,
Done,
quietly, it’s a thought leaking out, the list of things that need doing when. The Clerk would like to express approval; I think it might hurt, not to, but an office is an office, and they’re surely not out of it.

The witnesses are mostly gone, two of them still there, one of them is crumpled and crying,
another one doing their best to stand upright.

“Zora’s a life-tweaker,” Blossom says, calmly. “Still, that was a surprise.”

Various people start laughing with troubling overtones. Dove grins, Chloris snickers, stops. It sounds sinister when Chloris snickers. It shouldn’t, but it does.

Blossom produces several silver flasks, distributes them being visibly careful which flask is handed to whom,
hangs on to one, and waits.

Dove and I and Chloris split the stream banks back to the incipient lakeshore and wedge them up with the dirt that was under the stream, just to have something to do that isn’t waiting for Zora to wake up. It’ll keep the reeds and the turtles damp enough for awhile, the stream splitting at what will be the lake inflow to flow down each lake-bank. Can’t see the stream
entrance, not with eyes, and all of it isn’t splitting, some of it’s flowing down, it’s not the sort of thing that’s going to last, we’ve just re-arranged some dirt, but it will do for a décade or so. Better than letting the stream-support collapse on its own, it might rain tonight. There’s a lot of seep from the edges, the excavation’s below the water table, there are subsidiary streams flowing
in, Zora gave them all little marshy deltas, we need to get the dam up soon, and then find some more water.

Moving the stream bed takes about an hour, and then there’s some waiting, only about ten minutes but it feels much longer, before Zora starts making muzzy noises. Blossom sits Zora up and gets sips, lots of emphasis on
sip
, from the flask cup, whatever was in that flask Blossom held back,
into Zora. Zora’s making faces, entirely normal Zora disapproval faces. There’s a collective noise of relief in the link, Zora says
Fine, really, just tired,
goes right on sipping.

The surveyors had hauled out some sketch paper and have been figuring out the lake volume ever since. Optimistic floor is half a cubic kilometre; Arch figures it’s really about point six. “Half the clear water volume
of the Old Lake,” Arch says, in a voice that’s lost between twitching horror and admiring.

The standing witness takes several deep breaths, turns, takes a step toward Zora, and stops, having received Blossom’s full attention.

Hair’s not on fire,
Dove says.

Chloris says,
I can smell ozone.

“Was the student chiefly responsible for moving the forest hurt?” The witness says this as carefully as possible,
purely as a question of information.

Zora’s trying to say “I’m fine,” but stops at Blossom’s
shush
gesture.

“Zora’s physical brain had motor and cognitive damage from bleeding and oxygen starvation. Zora was blind, had some bone-marrow damage, and the brain bleeds were ongoing. No survival expectation without prompt first-order sorcerous intervention, which Zora provided by reflexively shape-shifting
into good physical condition while transitioning awareness down from the metaphysical self at the completion of the working.”

One of the judges says “Shapeshifting?” and Dove says “Into ourselves. Our rested, unhurt selves.”

There are nods, and Zora says “It hardly even hurt!” in aggrieved tones.

“No pain receptors in your brain,” Blossom says, teacher-Blossom for just a moment, before saying
“I do so attest by my name and the Peace,” as whatever it means to be a Keeper of the Shape of Peace. Everything hears, you can feel the faint ringing echo up from the rocks.

A different judge, the one I think would get on really well with Halt, asks Zora, “Did you do so much because you wanted to embarrass Heron?”

Zora sorts of sighs, and looks down, and looks up, handing the flask cup to Blossom
with a quiet “Thanks.”

“I was angry with Heron; I
am
angry with Heron. I didn’t think I was taking a significant risk, I wanted to save the trees, and if Heron had to live with it,” Zora shrugs.

“Angry?” the judge says.

“They — ” Zora’s chin swipe means me and Dove and Chloris — “aren’t my siblings in function, they’re not anything I know a word for.” Zora looks embarrassed. “They’re why I’m
not going to die of being who I am. We’re all why we’re not going to die, it’s new and no one knows what we’re doing and it won’t
work
without all of us, we already lost Kynefrid, it matters, trying to brain Chloris with a water pitcher isn’t functionally any different from trying to kill me, except…lingering.”

“This is not something the Law considers.” The third judge, sounding almost too thoughtful
to talk.

“This — ” Blossom doesn’t need to do any chin-pointing, everyone knows who Blossom means, what Blossom means, just try to avoid knowing — “lacks precedent.”

All three judges are nodding.

Reminds-me-of-Halt reaches up, takes their judge’s hat off, hands it to a colleague, turns to the standing witness. “I remind you that suicide voids a will. Heron’s wishes in the disposition of the forest
holdings have no meaning should Heron neglect to live.”

The witness nods. I think “Yes, Auntie,” is pure reflex.

The judge accepts their hat back, puts it on.

“Zora, did you intend to harm or diminish Heron?”

Zora’s head shakes, once, and stops with wincing. “No. I knew moving the forest, if it worked, it would cost Heron standing. I considered that a benefit, but the goal was to get the job done
at the least cost.”

“Cost?” Reminds-me-of-Halt, has to be extra persnickitty about this if Heron’s a relative.

“All those trees. Everything that lives in all those trees. If you, everybody, don’t have to lose half the forest, you shouldn’t, we shouldn’t, building, it’s not, what’s the word for things you can’t just throw away? It’s a worse canal if it takes away half the forest when it didn’t
need to, and it didn’t, doesn’t, need to do that. Everybody seems to have just assumed the forest had to go, I wasn’t trying to flout the judgement, the judgement said
forest holdings
, not
forest
, the forest is more than that, this — ” Zora waves at the lake bed — “is the right way to build the canal, the most gain for the least cost.”

Blossom’s looking worried; Zora’s getting vehement.

The quiet
judge says “We did not expect creatures of legend.”

Zora and Chloris wrinkle their noses, nearly identical expressions despite their different faces. Dove’s thoughts fill from memory with a host of demons, nervous and obedient to bring before an indifferent Halt the heads of Halt’s enemies.
Ways to go,
Dove says, tone so dry I have to work at it not to laugh.

“I have no more questions,” the quiet
judge says. “Colleagues?”

“No,” and a head-shake, twice.

Zora says “I do so attest by the Peace and my name within it,” and the Shape of Peace doesn’t protest Zora’s veracity an iota.

The third judge says “Independent, why did you permit your student to take such a risk?”

Blossom says, with a sort of conversational calm, “It was not a predictable risk. None of the students have stable scope or
capability, and by the time the risk was apparent, abruptly stopping the working would have been certainly destructive.”

Two out of three, four out of five if you count the Clerk and the standing witness, look confused. The seated witness, I think someone should be concerned about them.

Blossom visibly discards things that could be said, one and two and three. “They’re getting better in fits and
starts. The land area was well inside demonstrated capability, they were weeding over more area in the spring. The Power use, not nearly so much as parts of the canal, and they’ve done more than any working used for the canal. Didn’t expect the thoroughness of names. That made it much harder.”

“Like the first time you let the kid steer.” Arch is saying that more to the sky than Blossom, but Blossom
nods.

“You built a whole canal by letting the kid steer.” I don’t think Arch, Archimedes the Surveyor, is going to be the same after this. Not anything, emotionally, not right now.

“Half a canal,” Dove says, dimpling. It’s cute, somehow.

Blossom says “Learn by doing,” and everyone looks at the kilometres and kilometres of dry, damp, muddy in a lot of places, lake bed and drops the line of inquiry.

Reminds-me-of-Halt looks at the Clerk and says “No malice is found. The judgement of Heron stands entire,” and the judicial colleagues nod, very formally, you can really tell with a judge’s hat, might be why. And that’s that. Over. The witnesses look at the Clerk, get a nod, head away, the seated one helped to their feet by the standing.