The Saint of Unfinished Graves: The First of The Unfinished

The tarp smelled of lampblack, axle grease, and the particular sweetness of grain sacks gone half-rot in a wet season. Iris flattened herself against the wagon bed, cheek pressed to splintered wood, and counted her breaths the way her mother had taught her for the long winter nights when the fever came through the valley. In. Hold. Out. In. Hold. Out. The count kept the panic leashed somewhere beneath her sternum where it could not reach her throat.

Dorian Ash had arranged this with the ease of a man folding a letter into an envelope. He had spoken three words to the supply sergeant at the corps depot, and the sergeant had stepped aside as if the words carried a small, invisible weight. Iris had not asked what those words were. She had learned, in the short weeks of knowing him, that some of Dorian's transactions were best left unexamined, the way one did not peel back the bandage on a wound to admire the stitching.

"Still," Dorian murmured from the driver's bench. He did not turn his head. His voice carried just enough to reach her beneath the canvas. "You have not breathed in eleven seconds."

"I am breathing now," Iris said, and proved it with a long, deliberate inhale. The tarp shifted over her face and she tasted grit.

"You are performing breathing. It is not the same. Breathe from the belly, Miss Vant. The sort of breath one takes when one means to go on living."

She obeyed, because arguing with Dorian was an exercise she had never won. The air came in cold against her teeth and carried with it the faint mineral smell of the river and the heavier, human smell of the quarry road. Ahead of her, through a slit in the canvas, the grey sky hung low over the riverlands like a lid that had not been lifted in weeks. Somewhere in the middle distance a forge bellows wheezed, and she could hear the clop of the cart horse and the occasional clatter of a loose rivet in the wagon frame.

"You will see him in the first group," Dorian said. "He has been assigned to the roadworks detail since the third week of the moon. Do not wave. Do not call his name. If you must communicate, let it be with the eyes, and only the eyes, and only for the span of a breath. There are wardens who count glances the way a miser counts coins."

"I understand."

"You say that very well, Miss Vant. Understanding and accepting are not the same animal."

She did not answer. The wagon lurched over a rut in the road and her shoulder struck the sideboard hard enough to send a small flare of pain through her collarbone. She bit the inside of her cheek and tasted copper. The road to the quarry climbed along the riverbank, switchbacking through a stand of alders whose roots had buckled the paving stones. She could hear the water below, green and cold, and the far-off percussion of men breaking stone.

Dorian had told her the cover story twice, and she had listened both times the way she had once listened to clerks reading aloud the day's docket. A visiting sanitary inspector from the capital, inspecting the labor details for outbreaks of the winter cough. The uniform was borrowed from a friend of a friend who owed Dorian a favor whose nature she had not been told. The jacket smelled of pipe tobacco and cedar, and the trousers were an inch too long at the ankle, which gave her a slightly boyish gait she had practiced in the mirror until she could do it without thinking.

"I will wait here," Dorian said, drawing the horse to a halt beneath a stand of birches at the quarry's upper gate. "The wardens expect a clerk with a notebook. You will be given one. Take notes. Ask questions about the ventilation in the lower shafts and the adequacy of the water ration. No one who asks about water is ever questioned further."

"And if someone does question me?"

"Then you will look bored in the particular way that only minor bureaucrats can look bored, and you will say the words I have written on the card in your pocket. They will allow you to pass."

He did not say what the words were. She had not looked at the card. Some knowledge, she had decided, was a debt best left unpaid.

She climbed down from the wagon bed. The ground was soft under her boots and gave slightly, as if it had been recently turned. She straightened the borrowed jacket, felt for the notebook in her breast pocket, and felt for the card. Both were there. She set her face into the expression she had practiced, the one she had worn for three years behind a clerk's desk in the capital, the expression that said, I am here about forms, and forms are the only thing I care about. It settled over her features like a mask she had grown into.

The quarry opened before her like a wound in the hillside. Men moved along its terraced ledges in a slow, deliberate procession, swinging picks at the exposed face of the stone, filling baskets, hauling them up on rope and plank. The sound of it was not the clean, percussive sound she had imagined. It was a wetter sound, a sound of stone giving way reluctantly, of metal biting into something that did not want to be bitten. A thin dust hung over the workings, catching the grey light and giving the men the appearance of figures seen through dirty glass.

She counted them as she walked. Twelve on the lowest terrace. Eight on the second. Five on the third, and those five were closer to the gate, closer to the wardens' booths. She did not look for Eli Garrick among the distant figures. She looked at the wardens first, the way Dorian had taught her. Two of them stood at the gate with the slack, watchful posture of men who had been standing all morning and expected to stand all afternoon. A third sat on a stool inside the booth, reading a folded newspaper that he kept close to his chest as though it contained something he did not wish to share.

"Morning," she said, and produced the notebook.

The nearer warden looked her over with the unhurried appraisal of a man assessing livestock. He was thick through the shoulders and neck, with a scar that pulled the corner of his mouth slightly upward into a permanent, lopsided observation. "You're the inspector."

"I am."

"We weren't told to expect an inspector."

"I was not told you were expecting one. Inspections are generally a matter of surprise." She opened the notebook. "Shall we begin with the ventilation survey?"

The warden's mouth twitched at the corner, the scar pulling with it. He stepped aside. "Suit yourself. Don't go past the third terrace. The detail boss will answer what you need."

She stepped through the gate and onto the first terrace. The dust reached her immediately, a fine powder that tasted of chalk and iron and something older, something that had no name she knew. She blinked against it and kept her face composed. Ahead of her, the first row of prisoners worked in a line, picks rising and falling in a rhythm that was not quite synchronized but had the quality of a slow, communal breathing. Their uniforms were the same shade of grey as the dust, so that the men looked, at a distance, like figures cut from the hillside itself.

She passed the first three without looking up from her notebook. She asked the detail boss about water rationing and was given a number. She asked about the ventilation in the lower shafts and was told, in a bored voice, that ventilation was adequate. She wrote the answers down in a careful, clerk's hand, and she did not let her eyes stray from the page until she had passed the fifth man in the line.

Then she looked up.

Eli Garrick was the seventh in the row. He was thinner than she remembered. The weeks in the quarry had pared him down the way winter pares a tree, leaving the bones more visible beneath the skin. His hair had been cut roughly, hacked at the nape in a way that suggested a warden with shears and little patience. His hands, when he raised the pick, showed the raw red of new blisters overlaying the older calluses of a carpenter's grip. She knew those hands. She had watched them shape a joint for a wardrobe last autumn, and she had watched them, too, rest on the table across from her with a stillness that had its own kind of language.

He did not look at her. His gaze remained fixed on the stone face in front of him, and his pick rose and fell with the regularity of a pendulum. But she saw, in the half-second between the rise and the fall, the smallest change in the set of his mouth. The corners tightened. The jaw set. It was the expression of a man who has seen something and is choosing, with great effort, not to acknowledge that he has seen it.

She walked past him as she had walked past the others, her eyes on the notebook, her pen making small marks she would not be able to read later. She did not slow. She did not speed up. She let her shoulder pass within a foot of his, close enough that she could have reached out and touched the cloth of his sleeve, close enough that she felt the heat of his labor radiating off him like the heat off a stove.

For the span of a single breath, she let her gaze rest on the side of his face. She did not speak. She did not mouth his name. She let the look carry what it could carry, which was not much, which was everything. His pick paused, mid-swing, for the smallest fraction of a second. Then it came down, and the stone split with a sound like a great, tired exhalation.

She moved on. Her hands did not tremble. Her face did not change. Behind her, the wardens watched the line, and the dust settled over everything like a quiet, grey snow.

When she reached the far end of the terrace, she turned and walked back the way she had come, her eyes on the page, her pen busy. This time, as she passed Eli, she did not look up. There would be no second glance. Dorian had been clear about that, and Dorian, she had learned, was clear about things for reasons that only became apparent later, when the cost of clarity had been paid in full.

She closed the notebook at the gate and nodded to the warden with the scarred mouth. "I shall need to file my report by the week's end. The ventilation in the lower shafts will require further assessment in the spring."

"The spring," the warden repeated, as though the word were a foreign object he was turning over in his hand. "Yes. In the spring."

She walked back up the road toward the birches. The cart horse stood where she had left it, cropping at the sparse grass along the verge. Dorian did not turn as she climbed onto the bench beside him, but she saw, in the slight shift of his shoulders, that he had been listening for her step.

"I saw him," she said.

"Yes."

"He is alive."

"He is alive, Miss Vant. That is not the same as being well, and it is not the same as being reachable. But it is, for the moment, a beginning."

He clucked to the horse, and the cart began to move, and the quarry fell away behind them, and the dust settled over the road like the closing of a book.

The morning light lay flat and grey across the upper field, the kind of light that made colours look as though they had been washed too many times. Mist clung to the hollows where the drainage ditches ran, and the air carried the mineral smell of wet stone and the sweeter rot of last year's leaves still matted in the long grass.

Eli Garrick stood at the edge of the path with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and a coil of rope over one shoulder. He had been meaning to mend the broken fence rail since the autumn, and the broken fence rail had been waiting for him with the patience of a thing that knew it would win in the end. His hands were cold. The wood was cold. The hammer at his belt felt heavier than it had any right to.

He set to work anyway.

The first nail went in straight. The second pulled sideways and bent under the grain, and he had to hook it free with the claw end and start again. Somewhere down the slope, the sound of iron on iron carried up from the village, Pev Maro working the forge at an hour when most men were still nursing their tea. The rhythm of it was steady and unhurried, the way Pev did most things, as though the world would wait for him to finish before it dared to move on.

Eli glanced toward the road.

No dust yet. No cart. He had told himself he would not watch for her, and he had told himself that twice already this morning, and both times the telling had come too late.

He drove the third nail home and reached for the next rail.

The village had been quiet since the funeral. That was the word Lenna kept using, quiet, as though the absence of Maelys from the kitchen had merely left a pause in the conversation, a gap a louder voice could fill. Eli understood the usefulness of the word. He had used it himself when he came back from the field and found Lenna at the table with Iris's notebook open between them, both of them wearing the careful expressions of women trying not to say the thing they most needed to say.

He had not asked what was in the notebook.

He had not asked what Iris had written about him.

There were some questions a man learned not to ask, not because the answers were unknown but because the answers, once given, would change the shape of every room he walked through afterward.

He fitted the rail into place and tested it with his weight. It held. He moved on to the next post.

The path from the village curved up past the old stone wall where the lichens grew in patches the size of spread hands, and beyond the wall, the land fell away toward the lower meadow and the stream that bordered the Garrick land on the east. In the summer, the meadow was loud with bees and the tramp of children coming up from the schoolhouse. In the winter, it was empty in a way that made a man think about the spaces where things ought to be.

Eli did not let himself think about the schoolhouse.

He crouched to set the next rail, and his boot slipped on the wet grass, and he caught himself on the fence post with a grunt that came out harsher than he meant. The rope slid off his shoulder and puddled at his feet. He stood there a moment, breathing, looking down the slope at the place where the path bent out of sight.

The cart came around the bend.

He saw the horse first, the patient sway of its head, the small dark shape of the driver. Then the cart itself, and on the bench beside the driver, the smaller shape in the dark coat, her notebook closed on her lap.

He picked up the rope.

He did not wave.

When the cart drew level with the gate, Iris Vant climbed down without waiting for him to come to her. Her boots sank a little in the soft ground at the verge. She looked tired in the way she always looked tired now, as though sleep had become a negotiation she kept losing.

"The fence," she said, glancing at the rail he had just set.

"Held through the winter. Mostly."

"Mostly."

She said the word the way Lenna would have said it, with the same faint emphasis on the second syllable, as though the meaning of the word depended entirely on what a person decided to leave out.

He shifted the coil of rope higher on his shoulder. "You were up at the quarry."

"Since first light."

"And?"

She did not answer at once. She looked past him, up the slope toward the birches, and the look had the quality of a woman choosing which room to enter first.

"Walk with me a piece," she said.

He walked.

They went up the path between the birches, their feet loud on the fallen twigs, the bark of the trees pale and peeling in strips that curled back like paper. The mist had not lifted. It lay between the trunks in long pale bands, and the smell of it was green and cold and faintly metallic, the way the air smelled before a true frost.

"Dorian saw him," Iris said, without preamble. "In the lower gallery. Eli was there."

Eli's step faltered. He recovered it, but not quickly enough that she did not notice.

"Alive," she said. "Sitting up. Speaking. But not, by any measure I trust, himself."

"What did he say?"

"Nothing that made sense. Dorian's word was reachable. He said the man was not yet reachable."

"And the wardens?"

"Let him walk out."

Eli stopped walking. She stopped when he stopped, and they stood facing each other on the path, the rope between them on the ground, the trees moving in a wind neither of them had felt arrive.

"Walk out where," he said.

"Back to the village. Dorian thinks he will come here first. He thinks the pull of the house is stronger than the pull of the road."

"And if it isn't."

"Then we will know that soon enough too."

He crouched and untangled a knot in the rope that did not need untangling, his hands busy with a problem he could solve while the rest of him worked at one he could not.

"Iris."

"Mr. Garrick."

"I buried my brother-in-law last month. I carried the box myself. Pev helped me with the lid because the wood was green and the screws kept catching. Lenna put her hand on the lid before we closed it and she did not let go for a long time. Maelys was standing behind us, and Maelys was holding the hem of her mother's coat, and she was not crying because she did not yet understand that the thing she was holding was the last of it."

He stood. He looked at her.

"Now you tell me the man in that box might walk back up the path before supper."

"I tell you what I have seen. I do not tell you what to do with it."

"No. You never do."

She held his gaze for a long moment. Then she opened the notebook, and the pages turned with the small dry sound of paper that had been much handled, and she held it out to him, open to a sketch of the lower gallery.

The sketch was clean and quick, the lines certain. Two figures, one seated, one standing. The seated figure had its hands on its knees. The standing figure had one hand raised, palm out, as though asking for patience or offering it.

"The wardens," she said. "They did not restrain him."

"No."

"They watched him go."

"Yes."

"And did not follow."

He looked at her. She looked back.

"Why," he said.

"Because they have been told not to. Because there are people in the village who have decided that the only way to contain a thing you cannot explain is to pretend it is not happening. Because some of those people are wardens, and some of them are not, and the ones who are not have made it very clear what the cost of asking the wrong question will be."

He closed the notebook for her. His hand on the cover was steady, and the steadiness cost him more than she would ever know.

"Will you stay," he said. "At the house. Until he comes, or until we know he is not coming."

"If Lenna will have me."

"She will have you. She has set a place at the table for you since the day you arrived, and she will not hear of your leaving until this is done. You know that."

"I know that."

He bent to pick up the rope. When he straightened, she was looking past him, down the slope, and her face had changed.

He turned.

A figure was climbing the path from the village. The mist swallowed it from the waist down, and above the mist, the figure moved with a gait that was both familiar and wrong, the way a tune is familiar when it is played in a key you have never heard before.

The man was wearing the coat Eli had laid out for the burial.

Eli set the rope down on the path. He did not pick it up again.

He walked down the slope to meet his brother-in-law.

A lantern, left burning in a window at the crest of the lane. The same pale glow as the office, the same patient, almost botanical unfolding. The widow's lamp, kept up these many weeks for a husband whose footsteps she still half expected on the threshold. Now it fell on Eli Garrick, on Iris Vant, on a man in a borrowed coat climbing through the fog with the deliberate step of someone who had not slept, and might not sleep again, and had stopped minding.

When Wen Argide reached the bottom of the lane he stood for a moment with his hands loose at his sides and his head a little bowed, the way a man stands when he is not sure whether the ground will take his weight. The mist pooled about his boots and the lantern light caught the rain on his shoulders in a fine bright dust. He did not speak.

"Lift your chin, son," Otis Vrell said, from the porch step where he had been sitting all along. "Whatever you have come back to say, it will not be easier said with your face in your collar."

Wen Argide lifted his chin.

"I remember the field," he said. "I remember them digging. I remember I had not been dead very long, because the cold had not yet reached my chest. I remember a voice that was not Father Bramwell's telling me that I had been chosen for the continuation, and that the cost of refusal was the woman I loved and the child I had not yet been permitted to see. I remember consenting, though consent is a strange word for what a man does when his refusal is a knife. I remember the wagon. I remember the dark. And I remember the taste of iron in my mouth when I was brought back across the ward, and the taste of something sweet and cloying laid on the tongue to take the iron away. I remember the man who did that to me, and I can describe him for the constable down to the smallest mole on the smallest finger of his left hand."

Iris made a small sound. Eli did not.

Wen Argide turned his head and looked at him.

"I am not what I was," he said. "I do not yet know what I am. I know that I left a child behind and a woman who had every right to refuse my door and did not. I know that I have come back to the town I tried to leave and the house I tried to leave with. I do not know what will be required of me in the morning. But I will be required, and I will not run from it."

Eli stepped down off the porch.

He walked across the wet boards and down the three steps and across the lane and stopped an arm's length from the man in the borrowed coat. He looked at him. Wen Argide let him look.

In the porch light the new stillness of the face was harder to read than Eli had expected. The lines were the same. The bones were the same. The set of the jaw was the same stubborn Garrick set that had exasperated him since they were children and that he had learned, over the slow patient years, to love in his own ungracious way. But the weight behind the eyes was different. The weight behind the eyes of the man who stood before him was the weight of a thing that had been taken to the edge of itself and had been allowed, at the last, to turn around. The eyes of the man he had buried had been the eyes of a man going forward into a dark he could not imagine. The eyes that looked at him now were the eyes of a man who had imagined the dark and had come back from it.

Eli lifted his hand.

He did not know, until he had done it, what he meant to do with the hand. He had not planned a blow. He had not planned an embrace. He had planned nothing. The hand rose of its own accord, and the fingers uncurled, and the palm met the lapel of the borrowed coat and rested there, and the cloth was warm from the climb, and the man beneath the cloth was warm, and the warmth was the unmistakable, inarguable warmth of a body that was living its life.

The breath came out of Eli in a long slow shudder that he could not have arrested if his life had depended on it.

"Maelys is asleep," he said. "Lenna is by the fire. She has set a place at the table for you since the day you were taken, and she will not hear of your leaving until you have eaten. You know that."

"I know that," Wen Argide said.

"Then come in."

They climbed the steps together, Iris a half pace behind, and at the door Wen Argide stopped and turned and looked back down the lane as if to make sure that what he had climbed up was still there. The mist had thinned. The ward marker was visible as a pale upright at the road's edge. Beyond it, the village.

"Come in," Otis Vrell said, from his step. "Whatever is out there is not yours to wrestle tonight."

Wen Argide turned from the door.

They went in.

Lenna Garrick stood by the table. She had heard the boots on the boards and she had heard the voice and she had understood what she had heard and she had not moved from the place where she stood, because her legs would not carry her. Her hand was on the back of Maelys's empty chair. The fire in the hearth threw a steady amber across the cloth and the plates she had set, and the amber made a small bright kingdom of the table that did not reach to the walls.

Wen Argide stopped just inside the door.

He looked at her.

She looked at him.

The child slept on the landing above, breathing the slow breath of the spared, and the fire breathed with her, and the kettle breathed on the hob, and the house breathed around them all, and the two people who had not known whether they would stand in this doorway again stood in it, and the distance between them was the width of a kitchen and a year and a half of the hardest grief either of them had ever been required to carry.

Wen Argide took one step forward.

Lenna took one step forward.

They met at the hearth.

He did not speak. He did not need to. He lifted her hands from where they had come to rest against his chest and he turned them over in his own and he looked at the calluses on the palms, the calluses from the needle, the calluses from the long evenings at the mending, and the calluses from the rail of Maelys's crib, and he folded the hands together and held them so, the way a man holds a thing he intends to keep.

She wept. She did not make a sound. The weeping was in the shoulders and the throat and the back of the hands, and she let it happen, and he let it happen, and the fire made a sound in the grate that was almost the same as the weeping and was not the same.

Iris Vant sat down on the bench by the wall and put her face in her hands. The bench was the bench the boy had sat on to put on his boots. The bench smelled faintly of wet wool and faintly of the herbs Lenna kept in a basket by the door for the headaches of children and the headaches of men.

Eli sat down beside her.

They did not speak.

After a while, Lenna drew her hands back from her brother's grip and looked at her nephew over the top of Maelys's chair.

"Sit," she said. "Sit, Wen. There is broth."

There was broth.

He sat.

She went to the hearth and she ladled the broth into a bowl and she set the bowl before him and she set a spoon beside the bowl and she drew the chair in close behind him so that he could not fall out of it if the weariness took him at the last, and she stood behind him with her hand on his shoulder while he lifted the spoon.

He lifted the spoon.

He put the broth in his mouth.

He swallowed.

He set the spoon down.

"She puts sage in it," he said. "She has always put sage in it."

"Yes," Lenna said, from above him.

"I had forgotten the sage."

"You will not forget it again."

He lifted the spoon a second time, and ate, and the kitchen was quiet, and the fire burned, and the mist outside pressed its cold face against the window and found the glass in good order, and the man from the graves sat at his sister's table and was fed, and the night turned on its hinge toward the small unkind hours, and the ward held, and the village held, and the house held, and somewhere in the house, on the landing above, the child of the continuation slept on in her crib with one sock off and one sock on, breathing the steady breath of the living, of the continued, of the child whose mother and whose uncle and whose father and whose great-uncle by marriage had all in their different ways gone down to the edge of the dark on her behalf and had all in their different ways come back.

The bowl was emptied.

The spoon was laid down.

Lenna lifted the bowl and the spoon and set them by the sink.

"Sleep," she said. "Upstairs. The small room at the back. Eli has kept it aired."

"I would like to see Maelys first."

"You will see her in the morning. She wakes early and she will not be reasoned with before the bread is cut. You will be the second thing she sees, and she will forgive you for being the second thing only if you are sitting in the kitchen with the bread in your hand."

"Very well."

He stood.

He looked once around the kitchen, at the table and the bench and the hearth and the door and the faces of the people who had kept his place for him. He looked a long time. Then he went out and up the stairs, and his tread on the treads was the tread of a man who knew where the third step creaked and stepped over it without thinking, and the door of the small room at the back of the landing opened and shut, and the house was quiet.

Iris lifted her face from her hands.

The lines of weeping were drying on her cheeks. She looked at Eli. He looked at her. The look that passed between them was the look of two people who had done the hardest thing they had ever been asked to do and who had done it together and who were now sitting on a bench by a wall in a kitchen where the fire was dying and the kettle was empty and the morning was a long way off and would not wait for them.

"The physician," she said. "Dorian Ash. He will come for him."

"Yes."

"We are not ready."

"No."

"The wardens are not ready."

"No."

"The chapter is not over."

"No."

He put his hand over hers on the bench. The hand was rough from the plane and the chisel and the long hours of holding the wood steady. The hand was warm.

"Go to bed," he said. "Lenna will make up the pallet in the front room. I will sit with Otis."

"You will not sleep."

"No."

"Neither will he."

"No."

She stood. She did not let go of his hand until the last, and then she let go, and she crossed the kitchen and went out into the hall and up the stairs, and her tread was the tread of a woman who was very tired and who was not going to give in to the tiredness and whose door at the top of the stairs opened and shut, and the house was quiet again, and the fire in the hearth settled to a low blue whisper that had nothing more to say.

Eli went to the porch.

Otis Vrell was still on the step.

They sat.

The mist was lifting. The ward marker was clear. The village below was a scatter of small lit windows in the dark, and the dark was a dark that the morning would take apart with a steady and impartial hand. Somewhere in the village a rooster that had no reason to be awake at this hour announced that the morning was its own affair and would not be argued with, and the announcement was followed by a silence that was more eloquent than the crow.

"It is the hour," Otis said.

"It is the hour."

"Are you afraid."

"Yes."

"Good. The man who is not afraid at this hour is the man who has not understood what has been asked of him."

Eli sat with his hands on his knees. His sister-in-law's lamp was burning in the window at the crest of the lane. His brother's lamp was burning in the small room at the back of the landing. Iris's candle was burning behind a curtain at the front of the house. The three small flames leaned in three different directions in the still air of the porch, and none of them went out.

"We will need the priest in the morning," Eli said. "Father Bramwell. We will need the constable."

"Yes."

"We will need the wardens."

"Yes."

"We will need the man."

"Yes."

"And we will need to be ready to lose all of it again."

"Yes."

The rooster had nothing further to say. The mist drew itself up off the lane like a sheet drawn off a bed. The ward stood. The village stood. The house stood.

In the small room at the back of the landing, Wen Argide lay on his back with his hands on his chest, and he did not sleep, and the not-sleeping was not the not-sleeping of the field, and the ceiling above him was a ceiling, and the weight on his chest was the weight of his own hands and the air that moved in and out of him, and the air was the air of the house, and the house was the house of his sister, and the sister had set a place at the table for him, and the table was set, and the morning was coming, and the morning would not wait.

He closed his eyes.

He opened them.

He closed them again.

He slept.