Chapter 8
Solveig
He came back.
I want to lead with that, because I have made a study of how badly a story can be told and the worst way is to leave a person in a lot at night for four hours.
He rode out to Sterling alone, found nothing, sat outside a closed body shop until two in the morning, and came back at four with grit in his teeth and the plan intact, because whatever else Ivar Boone is, he is not actually a man who throws himself away.
He's a man who offers to, and then does the sensible thing, and has never once gotten credit for the second half.
So Saturday night we had a night.
The whole charter was downstairs arguing about Sunday.
I could hear it through the roof — Wolf's voice low and even, Trick's fast, Nadia's cutting in with numbers, Deke asking twice whether anybody had eaten.
A war council that kept stopping to relitigate whether Ambrose Wick's truck had a working tailgate.
Crash and I were on the clubhouse roof with two blankets and a thermos, and above us the sky had decided to be absurd.
The aurora came in around ten. Green, mostly, with a bad pink edge to it, the kind that means something's happened to the sun that nobody down here is going to hear about for two days.
"Is that you people?" he said.
"No."
"You sure? Because it feels like a note."
"It's a magnetic storm."
"Sol."
"It's a magnetic storm," I said, "and yes, they use them, and yes, tonight it's a note."
"Saying what?"
"We're ready."
He nodded slowly and drank out of the thermos and passed it to me, and I drank out of it, which is a thing I have no need to do and have now done forty times.
"Say the date," he said.
I looked at the sky.
"Sol."
"Sunday," I said. "The twenty-third. On 200, at the mile marker where the state put up the third sign. Some time between six and eight in the morning."
He was quiet for a moment.
"That's about what I had," he said.
"You had it?"
"I've been running the pattern since June.
Eleven wrecks, six years, they cluster in August. Everything about you has been getting worse since the fourth of the month.
You looked at a calendar in the Perkins and put it face down.
" He shrugged under the blanket. "I'm not clever, Sol. I just count things."
And that was the moment I understood I was not going to be able to bear this.
Not the death. I have been able to bear death since before there was a word for bearing.
What I could not bear — what I still cannot, four months on, sitting where I sit now — is that he was not surprised, and he was not afraid, and he had made his arrangements quietly and told no one because he did not want anybody to have to carry it.
"Be afraid," I said. "Please."
"I've tried. It doesn't take."
"Then be angry."
"I'm angry about the wrong stuff," he said. "I'm angry there's no version where I get to be bad at this with you for thirty years. That's the whole list. That's it."
The light moved over us. It does that. It isn't like a light in a sky, it's like a thing looking for something on the floor.
"Tell me one," he said.
"One what?"
"One of them. The people you stood next to." He passed the thermos back. "You've got nine hundred thousand errands you never got to run. Run one at me."
I looked at him.
"Her name was Ingrid Sandvik," I said. "Nineteen fifty-four.
A grain auger, and it was very fast, and she was forty-one.
And she spent the last of it telling me the money for the church roof was in a coffee tin behind the flour, and that her husband didn't know, because he'd have spent it, and that she wasn't ashamed of that, she just wanted it to get there. "
"Did it?"
"I have no idea," I said. "I've never known. That's the office. I've carried a coffee tin behind a bag of flour for seventy-two years."
Crash was quiet for a while.
"Sandvik," he said. "There's Sandviks in Sterling."
"Ivar."
"I'm just saying there's Sandviks in Sterling and I've got a phone."
And I put my face against his neck and laughed until I couldn't, which is not the same as crying, and is the closest I have ever gotten.
"Come here," he said.
"I'm here."
"Sol. Come here."
So I came there.
I have attended a thousand years of last nights. I know what they look like from the outside. They are, without exception, frantic. People spend them making phone calls and lists and promises and they spend them saying the words they should have said in 1913 and 1604 and last Tuesday.
We didn't do any of that.
He got me under the blanket with my back against his chest and his arms crossed over me and we watched the sky for a long time and said almost nothing, and when he did start to move it was slow enough that I could have stopped it a hundred times, and I did not stop it, and the not-stopping was the whole conversation.
There's a specific thing about being touched by someone who counts.
He never once did anything twice the same way. He'd find something — the place under my jaw, the inside of my wrist, the run of my spine — and he'd catalogue it, and come back to it later like a man returning to a page he'd folded down.
Aurora light on skin is green and it is not flattering and I would trade every century I have left to see it again.
"Cold?" he said.
"I don't get cold."
"You're shaking."
"I know," I said. "It's new. Don't stop."
He didn't stop.
I have no vocabulary for what happened on that roof, and I've had four months and a thousand-year education to find one.
There was a town asleep below us with its four streetlights, and there was a clubhouse under us with fourteen men in it planning a war, and there was a sky doing something that hasn't been that bright over Havregard since 1959.
And between all of it, one man, unhurried, taking his time with a woman who had never once been anybody's destination.
He said my name against my shoulder. My whole name, the old one, the one I hadn't heard spoken aloud in six hundred years and had never told him.
I didn't ask how. I already knew. He counts things.
Neither of us pretended.
That's what I'd want anybody to know about that night, if it were the kind of thing you could tell people.
There was no we'll figure it out. No don't talk like that.
We both knew exactly what we were doing and we did it anyway, on a roof, under a magnetic storm, and it was a goodbye from the first second to the last, and it was the single most joyful hour of my life.
Afterward I put my hand flat on his chest.
His heart went under my palm, and I could hear the end of it. I have always been able to hear the end of it. That's the office; that's what I am; the whole of my existence is a woman standing in a room hearing where the music stops.
Six hours and forty minutes.
I lay on a roof with my hand on a man's heart and counted down with him breathing steady underneath me, and he put his hand over mine and held it there, and he fell asleep.
He fell asleep.
I have never in a thousand years been so angry at anyone.
At three in the morning I got up and went and stood at the parapet.
The town was four streetlights and a grain elevator and a water tower with a school district's name on it, and the aurora had gone down to a smear, and I did the arithmetic one last time.
I had two moves.
The first was on the table: a name. Renny Fauk, or Ambrose Wick, or Marrow, or any of eleven men asleep below me who had never been asked.
That one worked. I want to be honest about that.
It was clean, it would have taken four seconds, Ivar would have lived and never known, and I would have carried it, and I am more than anything else in this world a thing built to carry a page nobody reads.
The second move was a guess.
It rested entirely on the fact that in eighty years of menus and threats and small talk, the grey coat had never once used the word mortal.
That's all I had. An omission.
I have staked nothing on less. I have never in a thousand years staked anything at all.
Behind me Ivar said something in his sleep that wasn't a word, and turned over into the place where I'd been, and found it empty, and his hand went out looking.
That decided it. Not the omission.
I went back to him.
They took Renny to a gravel pit south of the highway, which was stupid, because gravel pits have one road in and Wolf has been fighting in this county since he was fifteen.
It took nine minutes.
I won't dress it up. Trick talked, Wolf came in from the west, Deke stood in the entrance with a cane and a shotgun and said something I couldn't hear that made four men sit down on the ground voluntarily.
Renny had a black eye and a broken finger and cried exactly once, in the truck, when nobody was pretending to look.
The man holding the sheet wasn't Ash Company.
That mattered later and nobody had time for it at the time.
He was a thin man in a good coat who had bought a box at a storage auction in 1987 and spent thirty-nine years reading it, and when Wolf put him against a truck and asked what he wanted, he said:
"I wanted out."
"Out of what?"
"I've been paying rent on your grandfather's paperwork since I was twenty-two," the man said. "You don't understand. It doesn't let you put it down. I tried to burn it in 1994. I tried to mail it."
"So you took a kid."
"I took a kid because taking a kid was the only thing I could think of that would make somebody come get it," he said, and started to cry, and Wolf let him go, and that is the only reason that man is still alive.
Renny said, in the truck, once: "He was really nice to me, actually. He made me a sandwich."
"Renny."
"It was a bad sandwich," Renny said. "I'm not defending him."
They got him.
They got him, and it was clean, and nobody died in that pit.
And then they rode home on Highway 200 at twenty past six in the morning with the sun coming up flat across the beans.
I was already in the ditch.
I'm always already in the ditch.
Here's what I had. I want it laid out, because people will say I chose in a moment, and I didn't; I'd been choosing for eight weeks and I made the last piece of it at 6:04.
A muster roll on a table in a clubhouse. Eleven names. A twelfth line, ruled and empty for eighty years.
A rider for a rider. Like for like.
I'm not fussy about the body. I'm very fussy about the seat.
He never said a mortal. Not once. Eighty years of that thing running its mouth in diners and it never once specified.
Nadia was right. You don't win the trade.
You change what's being traded.
The deer came out of the beans at 6:41 exactly where it always comes out, and Crash went left because he always goes left, and I stood in the grass twelve feet away with the ledger open and his name on it and the date finally, finally today.
And I did the thing I have never done.
Not a rescue. I want that understood. I couldn't have saved him if I'd had a thousand more years — I have no hands for it, I've never had the hands for it, I told him that on a chapel floor and it was true.
I did the other thing.
I reached into a room four miles away where a piece of paper sat on a table under a coffee cup, and on the twelfth line, in a hand that has not written anything since the twelfth century, I wrote my own name.
Solveig Aune. Called to the Hunt.
Twelve riders. The seat was full.
And a reservation that has no rider left to seat is not a debt. It's a clerical error.
The bike went down. It went down hard, and it went down in the grass, and Ivar Boone came off it at sixty and rolled through forty feet of soybeans and stood up.
Twelfth wreck. Twelfth walk-away.
He stood there in the field with his shoulder wrong and blood on his mouth and he turned around looking for me, and he was already saying my name before he'd finished turning.
I was still there. Just.
"Sol—"
"It worked," I said.
"What did? What worked? Sol—"
I don't know what I looked like by then. He's told me since and I've asked him to stop.
"You're not on it," I said. "You're off the page. There's no reservation. There's nobody holding you, Ivar, you're just a man on a road now, you'll have to be careful—"
"What did you do?"
"I took the seat."
He came across that field faster than a man with a broken collarbone should be able to move and got his hands on me, and I was still solid enough for it, which was a kindness somebody granted and I have never found out who.
"Undo it."
"No."
"Sol. Undo it."
"It's a muster," I said. "Not a grave. That's the whole thing, that's what nobody in your club has understood for eighty years — it's an enlistment, and enlistments have terms, and I have spent a thousand years reading the fine print on other people's lives and I would like you to trust that I read mine. "
"That's not a yes."
"No," I said. "It isn't."
I put my hand on his face. The burn on his palm had healed by then, and mine hadn't started, and I remember thinking that was funny.
"You have a second half," I said. "I've seen the page. It's blank, Ivar. Do you understand what a blank page is? I've never seen one. Not once, not in a thousand years, not for anybody."
"I don't want it without—"
"I know," I said. "Do it anyway. Do it the way the smith did. Make the gate."
The light came up out of the east across four hundred miles of nothing.
He was still talking when I went. I want to be honest about that. He was mid-sentence and it was an argument and he was losing it and he'd have gone on losing it for the rest of his life if he could have.
On the ridge above the road, Halla stood with her hands at her sides.
She had watched the whole thing. She could have stopped it — she outranks me, she has since the beginning, and there is a word she could have said at 6:41 that would have unwritten my hand off that page.
She didn't say it.
She stood on a ridge in the wind and she watched her sister do the one thing our entire office exists to prevent, and when I looked up at her, at the very end, she raised her hand.
And I have thought about it every day since, in the place where I am now, which has no days.
She waved.