Morvae

FROM THE MANUSCRIPT · READING EXCERPT

Enter the story

The first time the cutting point slipped, Challen only ruined a word. The second time it opened the skin beside his thumb, and he sat watching the blood creep toward the edge of the bronze before he thought to lift his hand. Most of the lamp oil was gone. Beyond the thin partition Avara’s father slept, his breath catching at the same place in every long inhalation, and her mother had stopped moving some time ago, though Challen doubted she slept. Nobody in the little dwelling had spoken since they ate.

He pressed a scrap of cloth to the cut and read the line again. I went with her. The letters were deep enough to survive a rubbing, maybe deep enough to last after the surface had darkened, but the next word had turned into a hooked gouge. He could flatten the damage and begin again. Instead he drew a small mark beneath it and went on, because he had spent two evenings preparing the bronze and a third finding a point that would hold its edge, and if he started correcting every fault there would be no account at all.

Her name stood above the first line. AVARA. He had made those letters larger than the rest and ruled their spaces with a cord before he cut them, and the care he had taken embarrassed him now. She used to tease him about the solemn way he came at small things. When they first lived together she had caught him marking equal divisions along a shelf and asked whether the bowls had complained about crowding. He had remembered that while ruling the tablet, and he remembered it again now, with the cloth around his thumb, and for a while could not see the bronze well enough to work.

Some things he could record exactly: the year they left, the names they had used before the journey, the cold that split water vessels inside houses never built for it. He could describe her father’s hands, stiffening until he could no longer tie a fastening, and her mother putting aside part of her own food for him and insisting she had eaten. He could write that in 835 AA he and Avara had led them into passages known to the Order of the Hidden Road, that others had followed and still others had joined them on the way. He could say, without asking anyone to agree, that those people would have died if the passages had stayed secret.

What he could not do was make the beginning honest without admitting how frightened they had been, Avara too. In memory he kept turning her into someone who had never hesitated, and that was becoming another way of losing her. She had sat on the floor beside their packed possessions and asked whether the water would still be running below, whether the place he remembered was large enough, whether he understood what they would be doing to everyone who had been trusted with the roads. He had answered the first two. The last stayed between them until her father began coughing in the next room.

On the bronze Challen wrote: We knew the law. We did not believe we had found a lawful way around it. Her parents could not remain above. We chose to bring them below.

He set down the point. Something scraped outside, a basket being dragged, a muttered complaint, footsteps heading for the water channel. Until a week ago he had been able to hear someone outside without picturing the partition caving in.

Avara had gone out for supplies. There was no quarrel before she left, no warning he could pick apart afterward. She had asked him to mend a loose fastening on her mother’s wrap and he had said he would do it when he finished the bowl in his hands. He remembered being irritated that she asked twice.

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End of excerpt. This site presents a selection from the manuscript.