Kit asked her but Rasali never walked out with him. “I see enough from the river,” she said.
Kit was Nearside, in his room in The Fish. He had lived in this room for five years and it looked it. Plans and timetables overlapped one another, pinned to the walls in the order he had needed them. The chair by the fire was heaped with clothes, books, a length of red silk he had seen at a fair and could not resist. It had been years since he sat there. The plans in his folio and on the oversized table had been replaced with waybills and receipts for materials, payrolls, and copies of correspondence between Kit and his sponsors in the government. The window was open and Kit sat on the cupboard bed, watching a bee feel its way through the sun-filled air. He’d left half a pear on the table. He was waiting to see if the bee would find it, and thinking about the little hexagonal cells of a beehive, whether they were stronger than squares and how he might test this.
Feet ran along the corridor. His door flew open. Rasali stood there blinking in the light, which was so golden that Kit didn’t at first notice how pale she was, or the tears on her face. “What—” he said as he swung off his bed.
“Valo,” she said. “Pearlfinder.”
He held her. The bee left, then the sun, and still he held her as she rocked silently on the bed. Only when the square of sky in the window faded to purple and the little moon’s crescent eased across it, did she speak. “Ah,” she said, a sigh like a gasp. “I am so tired.” She fell asleep as quickly as that, with tears still wet on her face. Kit slipped from the room.
The taproom was crowded, filled with ash-gray clothes, with soft voices and occasional sobs. Kit wondered for a moment if everyone had a set of mourning clothes always at hand and what this meant about them.
Brana Keep saw Kit in the doorway and came from behind the bar to speak with him. “How is she?” she said.
“I think she’s asleep right now,” Kit said. “Can you give me some food for her, something to drink?”
Brana nodded, spoke to her daughter Lixa as she passed into the back, then returned. “How are you doing, Kit? You saw a fair amount of Valo yourself.”
“Yes,” Kit said. Valo chasing the children through the field of stones, Valo laughing at the top of a tower, Valo serious-eyed with a handbook of the calculus in the shade of a half-built fishing boat. “What happened? She hasn’t said anything yet.”
Brana spread her hands out. “What can be said? Signal flags said he was going to cross just after midday but he never came. When we signaled over they said he left when they signaled.”
“Could he be alive?” Kit asked, remembering the night that he and Rasali had lost the big scull, the extra hours it had taken for the crossing. “He might have broken the scull, landed somewhere downriver.”
“No,” Brana said. She was crying, too. “I know, that’s what we wanted to hope. But Asa, one of the strangers, the high-workers; she was working overhead and heard the boat capsize, heard him cry out. She couldn’t see anything and didn’t know what she had heard until we figured it out.”
“Three more months,” Kit said mostly to himself. He saw Brana looking at him so he clarified: “Three more months. The bridge would have been done. This wouldn’t have happened.”
“This was today,” Brana said, “not three months from now. People die when they die. We grieve and move on, Kit. You’ve been with us long enough to understand how we see these things. Here’s the tray.”
When Kit returned, Rasali was asleep. He watched her in the dark room, unwilling to light more than the single lamp he’d carried up with him. People die when they die. But he could not stop thinking about the bridge, the nearly finished deck. Another three months. Another month.
When she awakened, there was a moment when she smiled at him, her face weary but calm. Then she remembered and her face tightened and she started crying again. After a while Kit got her to eat some bread and fish and cheese and drink some watered wine. She did so obediently, like a child. When she was finished she lay back against him. Her matted hair pushed up into his mouth.
“How can he be gone?”
“I’m so sorry,” Kit said. “The bridge was so close to finished. Three more months, and this wouldn’t have—”
She pulled away. “What? Wouldn’t have happened? Wouldn’t have had to happen?” She stood and faced him. “His death would have been unnecessary?”
“I—” Kit began but she interrupted him, new tears streaking her face.
“He died, Kit. It wasn’t necessary, it wasn’t irrelevant, it wasn’t anything except the way things are. But he’s gone and I’m not and now what do I do, Kit? I lost my father and my aunt and my sister and my brother and my brother’s son, and now I lose the mist when the bridge is done and then what? What am I then? Who are the Ferry people then?”
Kit knew the answer. However she changed, she would still be Rasali. Her people would still be strong and clever and beautiful. The mist would still be there, and the Big Ones. But she wouldn’t be able to hear these words, not yet, not for months maybe. So he held her and let his own tears slip down his face and tried not to think.
Five years after the Oncalion bridge was completed, Kit was two years into building an aqueduct planned across the Bakyar valley. There were problems. The first stones could not sustain both the weight of the aqueduct and the water it was meant to carry. His predecessor on the project had been either incompetent or corrupt, and Kit was still sorting through the mess she had left behind. They were a season behind schedule, but when he heard about Davell Meinem’s death, he left immediately for Atyar. Some time would be required to put his father’s affairs in order but mostly he did not wish to miss Twentieth-day, when Davell would be remembered. Kit had known that Davell’s death would leave a hole in him, but he had known his father was dying for years. He hadn’t expected this to hurt as much as it did.
The Grayfield was a little amphitheatre Davell had designed when he was young, matured now to a warm half-circle of white stone and grass, fringed with cherry trees. It was a warm day, brilliantly sunny. The air smelled of honey-cakes and the last of the cherry blossoms. Kit was Davell’s only child, so he stood alone at the red-tasseled archway to greet those who came. He was not surprised at how many came to honor his father, more and more until the amphitheatre overflowed, the honey-cakes were all eaten, and the silver bowls were filled with flowers, one from each mourner. Davell Meinem had built seven bridges, three aqueducts, a forum, two provincial complexes, and innumerable smaller projects, and he had maintained contacts with old friends from each of them; many more people had liked him for his humor and his kindness.
What surprised Kit was all the people who had come for his sake: fellow students, tutors, old lovers and companions, even the man who ran the wine shop he frequented whenever he was in the city. Many of them had never even met his father. He had not known that he was part of their patterns.
Five months later, when he was back in the Bakyar valley, a letter arrived wrapped in dirty oiled paper and clearly from far away. It was from the miners of Oncalion. “We heard about your father from a trader when we were asking about you,” the letter said. “We are sorry for your loss.”
The fairs to celebrate the opening of the bridge started days before the official date of Midsummer. Representatives of Empire, from Atyar and Triple, from the regional governors and anyone else who could contrive an excuse all polished their speeches and waited impatiently in suites of tents erected on hurriedly cleaned-up fields near (but not too near) Nearside. The town had bled northward until it surrounded the west pillar of the bridge. The land that had once been sheep-pasture—Sheepfield, it was now—at the foot of the pillar was crowded with fair tents and temporary booths, cheek by jowl with more permanent shops of wood and stone that sold food and the sorts of products a traveler might find herself needing.