They were down at ten past six because Corin had decided the night before that half six meant leaving at half six rather than beginning to think about leaving at half six, and had communicated this by simply being fully packed and standing in the common room at ten past, which everybody understood immediately and resented appropriately. Hesta Bray was already up. Arthur suspected she had been up since five and had no intention of admitting it. She had bread out on the long table, eight portions, wrapped, and did not mention them, and got extremely short with Finn when he tried to thank her for it.
HES: It's bread.
FNN: It's bread you got up early to make.
HES: I get up early every day of my life. Take it and go, you've a road.
FNN: I want to say something.
HES: I'd rather you didn't.
FNN: I'm going to say it anyway. This has been the best week I've had.
HES: You're fourteen.
FNN: I'm aware of my own age, Hesta.
HES: Then you've not had many weeks yet, have you, and it's a low bar, and I'd not go putting it on a plaque.
She turned away and started on the fire, and Arthur, who had spent seven days learning to read her, watched her stay turned away for slightly longer than the fire required. Finn took the bread. Nobody made anything of it. They were out of the door by twenty past and the village was blue and mostly asleep, and the mill wheel was already turning because the mill wheel was always already turning. Odell Crane was in the yard as they passed. He did not come to the gate. He raised a hand, once, and Corin raised one back, and that was the entirety of it, and Arthur understood that this was the correct amount and that anything more would have been unkind to a man who had emptied himself out at a table the night before and had nothing further available. Roselle came to the gate. She had the ledger under her arm because she had apparently been at the ledger table since five as well, and she stopped Briar with three feet still between them, and neither of them did anything about the three feet.
ROS: You'll want to know that I did the whole of the spring quarter last night with the table.
BRR: How long did it take?
ROS: Fifty minutes.
BRR: How long did the winter quarter take you in February?
ROS: Two evenings and most of a third.
BRR: Right.
ROS: Yes.
They stood there.
ROS: I'm not going to write to you.
BRR: No.
ROS: I want to be clear about it now rather than have both of us being polite about it for six months. The post from here goes once a fortnight if the carter remembers, and I'll be at that table every night for the next six years, and you're going to be at an academy having the sort of year I can't picture properly. Letters would be four exchanges and then a gap and then a bad feeling.
BRR: That's an extremely unromantic assessment.
ROS: It's an accurate one. You can have romantic or you can have accurate. I've never had the luxury of both at once.
Briar looked at the ledger under her arm.
BRR: Can I say the thing I've been assembling since four this morning?
ROS: Is it long?
BRR: It's four sentences and I've cut it twice.
ROS: Go on, then.
BRR: You found the error in that system. Not me. You knew it was wrong for four years and you couldn't prove it because nobody had given you the instrument, and I turned up with an instrument and you had the entire thing solved inside a morning. I have been at an academy for a year being told what a clever boy I am and I have not once had a week like that one, and it was not because of me.
Roselle Crane did not say anything for a moment.
ROS: That's three sentences.
BRR: The fourth one's worse and I've decided against it.
ROS: Coward.
BRR: Comprehensively.
She shifted the ledger to her other arm.
ROS: Go on. You've got a road and I've got the spring quarter and there's nothing either of us can do about which of those is which.
She went back up the yard and did not look round, and Briar watched her the whole way, and then turned and walked, and did not say anything for about a mile and a half. Tam was at the bridge. He was there with Pip, who was in her nightdress with a coat over it and boots on the wrong feet, and their mother was standing thirty feet back at the end of the lane in the manner of a woman who had lost an argument at some point between five and six in the morning. Tam had said he might come and he might not. He had come, and he had brought his sister, and he had positioned himself in the middle of the bridge so that eight people had to go round him, which Arthur thought was probably the most nine-year-old decision available.
PIP: Are you going now?
FNN: We're going now.
PIP: When are you coming back?
FNN: I don't know.
PIP: Tomorrow?
FNN: Not tomorrow.
PIP: The day after?
Finn crouched down.
FNN: Pip. I don't know when. It might be a very long time and it might be never, and I'm not going to tell you a day, because if I tell you a day you'll wait for it.
Pip absorbed this with the total incomprehension of a six year old, decided it was not the answer she wanted, and hugged him, which she had done approximately forty times that week and which she did in exactly the same way now, and then went to hug Yseult, who had been her second favourite since the water. Tam had not moved.
TAM: I did the thing you said.
FNN: What thing?
TAM: You said I could come and I might not. I thought about not.
FNN: How long?
TAM: All night.
FNN: And?
TAM: I worked out that not coming would only be so I didn't have to feel it, and I'd feel it anyway at seven when you weren't here, and then I'd have not come as well.
Nobody said anything at all. Arthur watched Finn Jota, fourteen years old, holder of the loudest voice in the academy, look at a nine year old in a village of forty buildings and fail entirely to find a single word.
FNN: That's-
TAM: I know.
FNN: That's genuinely the most sensible thing anybody has said to me this year and I have spent the year with Briar.
BRR: I'd like that on record as a compliment to him rather than an insult to me.
TAM: Are you coming back?
FNN: I don't know.
TAM: Alright.
He stepped aside off the middle of the bridge, which was the whole of his goodbye, and Arthur thought about that for a considerable portion of the next four hours. Rufus Hale was on the flat stone with his boots off. At twenty to seven in the morning. Arthur did not know whether this meant the man had come down early or had never gone up, and decided he did not want to find out. Corin stopped. The others went on a little way and then stopped as well when it became apparent Corin was not following.
RUF: Go on, then.
COR: I was going to say something.
RUF: I know. Don't.
COR: Why not?
RUF: Because you'll spend four hours on that road wishing you'd said it better, and if you say nothing you'll spend four hours deciding what you'd have said, and the second one's considerably more use to you.
Corin stood there.
COR: That's monstrously unfair.
RUF: Aye.
He put a foot back in the water.
RUF: Off you go, lad. Mind the platform.
The road was four hours and it was quieter than it had been coming out. Some of that was the tiredness, which had accumulated across seven days into something none of them had entirely accounted for, and some of it was Arthur's arm, which he was carrying in the sling and which set the pace whether anybody acknowledged it or not, and some of it was simply that a group of people walking away from something does not talk the way a group of people walking toward something does. Yseult managed the whole distance and refused all assistance and was grey by the last hour. Mira walked next to Talon. Nobody remarked on it, which had become the arrangement.
ELS: I keep trying to work out what to call it.
ART: The week?
ELS: If somebody asks me what we did, I've got nothing. We carried sacks. That's the honest answer and it's a rubbish one.
BRR: We fought a spider.
ELS: We're not telling anyone about the spider.
BRR: No. That's rather my point. The one interesting thing is the one thing we can't say, so we're left with the sacks.
MRA: The sacks are the true answer anyway.
ELS: I know. It just doesn't sound like anything.
Solmere came up out of the country in the last half hour and Arthur was entirely unprepared for it. He had walked into the city a year ago and had been staggered by it, and had then spent ten months inside it until it had become a place with a refectory and a training yard and a bad corridor near the western stairs. Seven days in a village of forty buildings had undone every bit of that. It was enormous. It was appallingly loud. There were more people on the eastern approach road at eleven in the morning than lived in the whole of Beckwith, and none of them knew where the eight of them had been, and none of them would have cared, and Arthur found the indifference of it physically unpleasant in a way he could not have described the previous week.
FNN: It's very big.
BRR: It's the same size it was.
FNN: It is NOT the same size it was, Briar.
They came in through the eastern gate at a quarter past eleven. There was a notice on the board by the gatehouse that had not been there on the day they left, and Arthur read it in passing without stopping, the way a person reads anything on a board, and it said that the eastern coastal routes to the Serenity ports were closed to civilian traffic until further notice by order of the provincial authority and that enquiries should be directed to the harbour office. He read it. He kept walking. Yseult, four feet behind him, read it as well and did not say anything about it either, and neither of them mentioned it, and the eight of them went up the hill toward the academy talking about food.