The Attendance Book

Ned arrived with the Bell House party on the morning of the eighth.

Mali saw his chair before she saw him. It stood on top of a wagon, lashed between rolled sleeping mats and a basket of empty jars. The boy walked beside the rear wheel, carrying a small bundle with both hands. Joss sat up front. His knuckles were bandaged. The woman with the weak shoulder had one arm through his, holding him steady whenever the wagon crossed a rut.

They had come by the lower road. No Reed Cut, no ambush, no weir house. Three days, Joss told her, beginning after Vale sent for the demonstration pupils. The roads had been quiet.

Mali stood beside the stage door, trying not to let her relief turn into questions too quickly.

Ned inspected her ear.

“Looks bad.”

“Thank you.”

“Better than before.”

“I'll tell the healer.”

He smiled, then looked toward the little courtyard where the preparation house clerk was sorting names. He had kept the chair, after all. Mali wondered how many times he had chosen whether to bring it before the wagon left.

“Does Vale know you're here?” she asked.

“He asked us.”

“Not that. Here with me.”

Ned's smile went. “Should he?”

It was a child's question, made small because there might be a rule behind it. Mali had to answer the rule before she could ask anything useful.

“You can speak to me if you want. You don't have to.”

He adjusted his bundle. “I'm supposed to put this in the room.”

“Then do that first.”

The instruction nearly came out as a dismissal. He watched her, waiting. She shifted aside so he could pass without brushing the sword.

The woman holding Joss had heard. Her name was Enna. She looked older than Mali remembered, the bad arm held close after the wagon journey.

“They said you'd come north.”

“Yes.”

“To stop the lessons.”

“To stop what made him strike.”

Joss looked down at his hands.

“I can remember it now,” he said.

Mali waited.

“Not why I did it. The movement. Where my palm would go. I knew it before I knew you were in the way.”

“Have you told Vale?”

“He said the table was too advanced for the class.”

“Was it?”

“I chose it.”

Enna tightened her good hand around his elbow. He did not seem to notice.

“Because of me,” she said. “I asked when the next level would come.”

Mali thought of Sel correcting the comparisons, of Deren offering his private steps, of herself carrying a carrier because she wanted a witness to believe her. The system did not need one monstrous decision if enough useful decisions could be joined without anyone keeping the whole account.

“Do you want that entered?” she asked Joss.

“Where?”

“In a record of what happened. Sori keeps it. You can read it before anyone else sees it.”

He shook his head quickly.

“No. I'm teaching tomorrow.”

“The demonstration is the day after.”

“A preparation class. With Master Vale.”

Enna looked at him. She had not known.

“I can help,” he said. “The new pupils will know me.”

Mali saw the appeal before the danger. Whatever had happened in his courtyard, Joss could still be the person others trusted to help them stand. Taking that from him would not make the months he had worked there cease to matter.

“Then tell him before you teach,” she said.

“I have.”

“Tell him you still can't explain it.”

Joss looked toward the clerk. The Bell House names were being called. He gave a small, strained nod and went with Enna into the courtyard.

Mali wanted to follow. Mae put a hand against the doorframe beside her, blocking nothing, making herself available to be noticed.

“We have the west records at noon,” she said.

“So you keep telling me.”

“Because at noon the clerk eats and someone else takes the key. I can't ask him a third time.”

Mali turned away from the wagon. “What did you promise?”

“To help carry the register back upstairs. It's heavy.”

“Does he know why we want it?”

“Yes.”

“And he's still helping?”

Mae looked at her. “Some people do.”

They had permission to inspect departure entries for the patients who had asked them. Not the whole register, not every name that might become useful. Bela had refused further use of Evin's, and his page remained closed. Leth had agreed. So had two women who could not discover where their brothers had gone after leaving the ward.

The records room had a high window and three kinds of dust. Mae seemed to know which cupboard each belonged to. She fetched the right ledger without asking twice and carried it to the table with Mali supporting the other end.

“You've done this before,” Mali said.

“I've been bringing letters since we got here. People ask where the last one went.”

“Why you?”

“Because I come back.”

There was no self-importance in the answer. That made it harder to absorb.

They found Leth's name first. Transferred from the west ward to evening instruction, then returned after a missed session. Beside the missed session stood a small red mark. No explanation.

One of the brothers had left for the road. The register gave a departure date and a permit number. They could send for the permit rather than assume disappearance. The second had been moved to the east preparation house under a recovery supervision order. That entry carried two initials, one a clerk's, the other Vale's.

Mae copied the exact words. Mali watched her leave space where the reference number was hard to read instead of guessing it.

“What do the red marks mean?” she asked the clerk.

“Missed instruction.”

“What happens after one?”

“Someone checks why.”

“After three?”

He looked at the ledger. “Review.”

“Where?”

“Preparation house, usually.”

“Can they refuse?”

The clerk leaned back. He was not an official with a seal. He had a patched sleeve, spectacles repaired at one hinge and a half-eaten lunch cooling beside the blotter. Mali could see him deciding whether helping them had been a mistake.

“I enter where they're sent,” he said. “I don't send them.”

“Who does?”

“The instructor certifies. The ward supervisor accepts. I enter.”

She wrote those distinctions down. They were not absolution. They were the places an inquiry would have to ask separate people separate questions.

Mae found a loose sheet folded inside the cover. Not a secret, only a list of medicines dispensed during transport. One column described a night draught; another, a needle treatment restricted to named teachers. Vale's initials appeared beside four withdrawals.

“May I copy this?” she asked.

The clerk looked. His expression changed.

“Not without the supervisor's leave.”

“Then can you enter that we asked?”

He did. Mali kept her hands off the paper. She had never found obedience to a reasonable boundary so difficult. The thing was there. She could read it, could memorise enough to carry away. Nobody could stop her knowing what she had seen.

That did not mean she could make every name on it theirs.

They returned the heavy book to its shelf. Mae wrote the request number in Sori's notebook, then went to find the two sisters who had asked about their brothers. One had a road permit to follow. The other had a new closed door. Mae told them both without making the first answer stand in for the second.

Mali waited in the lane. The preparation house windows were too high to see through from the ground.

Vale came out as she was preparing to leave.

He held Ned's chair.

For a moment the sight was so strange that she had no idea what to say. Then he set it on the paving and nodded toward a loose rung.

“He'll sit only if it doesn't move,” he said. “The wagon loosened it.”

“Give it to a carpenter.”

“I used to repair furniture.”

“Before Bell House?”

“Before the starfall.”

He crouched and tested the knot. His hand was shaking. Not much, but there was no performance to hide it now. Mali stood close enough to see the work required to put his thumb where he intended.

“How did you get it back?” she asked.

He did not pretend to misunderstand.

“The first weeks after the Convergence, I couldn't hold a cup. I could think about holding it perfectly. Knew the weight. Knew the movement. Then it would be on the floor.”

“Who taught you?”

“A woman in a recovery house. Before we had a name. She counted while I lifted. Sometimes it worked.”

“And the Codex?”

“Made the sequence repeatable.” He pulled the knot too hard and had to loosen it. “I stopped spending all day trying to eat. I could help someone else.”

Mali looked at his fingers. There was an injury beneath the tremor, some old learned damage the relief had not erased. He had built a life around the return of an ordinary hand and now feared that life falling to the paving with another cup.

“Then tell people that.”

“They know.”

“Tell them it comes back when you stop.”

Vale's head lifted.

A door closed at the end of the lane. Two children ran past, chasing a hoop. He waited until they had gone.

“It doesn't always.”

“Does it for you?”

“Yes.”

There it was, without room for an argument. He looked down at the chair as if ashamed of having surrendered a fact that could be used against the whole house.

“I watched you under the bell,” Mali said. “The night I stayed.”

His hand stopped moving.

“Were you afraid of me then?”

“Yes.”

He gave a small, bitter nod.

“Not because you were shaking.”

“No?”

“Because the jar warmed when you stopped.”

For the first time, he looked at the locked service doors rather than her face. The movement was too quick to call deliberate. Mali saw it anyway.

“Do you still have the sheet?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Bring it back.”

“No.”

“Joss needs it.”

“Joss needs to be able to ask why he struck.”

Vale stood. The chair remained between them.

“He has asked. I've answered.”

“Then answer again where Enna can hear.”

“You don't get to decide how we treat—”

He stopped. Mali waited. His hands shook against his robe.

“What do you give the people who refuse?” she asked.

“Care.”

“And the needles?”

“Sometimes their bodies need sleep before they can think about choosing anything.”

“Who chooses the needle?”

He looked at her injured arm. “The same sort of person who chooses to break fingers before a frightened man cuts his face.”

She had known the comparison would come. Hearing it did not make it easier.

“Teren can tell anyone what I did,” she said. “He can say I was wrong. He doesn't have to keep coming to me for his hand to work.”

“He may never use it properly again.”

“No.”

The word left a small, bare space between them. She would not make him fill it for her.

Vale picked up the chair.

“You'll take away something you don't know how to replace.”

“Yes,” Mali said. “If it's holding people who want to leave.”

He went inside. The door closed without a slam. That absence of violence frightened her more than anger would have. He had listened. He understood what she was asking him to relinquish. He was still carrying the chair somewhere a boy would be glad to receive it.

Mae found her standing in the lane.

“Did he tell you anything?”

“Enough that I need to write it before I decide which parts to hate.”

They returned by the rehearsal rooms. Rin sat on the floor with the cue equipment open. Sena had taken two lamps into the ward. Sori was arguing with an attendant about permission for Bela to see her sleeping son. Hesh had gone back to the stable to earn the promised shoe repair. Gorrath remained below with Tovan, and had sent word that she had eaten enough and did not wish to be fetched.

Mali sat beside the open cue case and wrote Vale's words. She left out the parts she had only seen in his face. Then she wrote the name of the restricted dispensing sheet and the request number beneath it.

The record did not release a patient. It did not stop tomorrow's preparation class. It was still more than she had known that morning.

She asked Rin where to put it.

“With the things we can lose only once,” Rin said.

Sori's contract folder was getting too full to close.