Rejected Luna

One Hand, Two Signatures

"It is a lock with one key, and the key is mine."

"It is a lock with no key," she said, "and the key is yours." She looked at me properly then. Her eyes were tired in a way they had not been a month ago, and I knew how much of that tiredness had my name written on it, and it hurt to be the reason. "What are you carrying, Wren?"

And there it was, asked plainly, by the only person in this valley who had ever stood in a line beside me and meant it.

"Paper," I said. "Three leaves of it. Rubbings."

"Off what?"

"Off the ends of three crates," I said. "It is a sign the coast men cut into the wood. It says what came up the road and what never did."

"Then it is worth more to somebody than the salt on it."

Maeve went quiet. She dried her hands on her skirt, one and then the other, slowly, as she did when she was settling something and did not want me to watch her settle it.

"You are not going to leave that in a book and let it sit as a number," she said. "You are going to stand in front of somebody and hold it out and make them look at it."

"Yes."

"Then tell me when," she said. "Not what. When. So that somebody in this valley knows where you were standing, if it turns wrong."

"And if it does turn wrong?" I said.

"Then I am the one who knows where you were standing."

"I do not want that for you. I want to be standing next to you," she said, and it was the first time in a year that anybody had wanted to stand anywhere with me.

"No," I said. "That is the one thing I will not have."

"Then what am I for?" she said.

"You are for telling me the truth when everybody else has decided to be kind," I said. "You are for standing where you can see the gate, and remembering what time I walked through it, and saying it out loud if nobody else ever asks. That is not a small thing, and it is not nothing, and if it ever comes to a court it will be the only thing that stands up."

She studied me for a long time.

"I hate it when you are right," she said.

"So do I," I said.

She held the brush a moment longer, and then gave it up, and let me finish the last of the pots, which is how the two of us have always said the things we cannot say out loud. I had a grief for it, and took the brush anyway.

The last wagons rolled up the coast road that afternoon.

Fourteen days, the elders had said, and the weather had said it too, and the road had already become a thing people stopped and stared at, the way you stare at a door drawing shut that will not be asked to wait. They came up through the gate with the coast salt roped to the beds, and I had a right to be there now, because a count that is kept has to be kept against what is standing in the yard.

I had a name for what I was doing. This valley had never once let me have one before.

The gatekeeper was young, with his collar up, and he put his arm across the top of the wagon when he saw me come up with the book.

"No," he said.

"The count."

"The count is done by the men that carry." He looked me over and took his time about it and made a small noise in his throat. "Take your numbers from whoever writes them down for you."

"And who writes them down for me?"

"Somebody with hands for it."

"My hands have been counting this valley since I was seven," I said. "Ask Bram what he thinks of them."

He did not like that, and he had no answer for it, and a man with no answer for a thing will reach for the first answer that is not words.

I turned away from him and set the book against the wheel and looked along the load, and every board in that bed carried the same sign.

A wide V. Deep. Down past the sap.

"I said no," he said.

"I heard you."

"Then go back the way you came."

I did not go back. I put a hand on the tail of the wagon and stepped up on the axle, and the whole bed lurched, and his arm came off the rail and took my wrist. He was stronger than me. That is true of nearly everybody. My foot slipped off the axle and my boot rang on the wheel, and my wrist hurt in his hand, and I did not pull.

I did not pull free.

I went still instead, and watched his fingers on my wrist, and then up at his face, and said it low, because low is the only weapon I have ever owned that does not cost me more than it is worth.

"Take your hand off the bookkeeper."

He did not let go at once, because he was waiting for me to buy him off, with please, or with the other thing, the thing he could carry into the yard afterward and tell. I have learned never to hand a man the story he is waiting for.

Then a voice came off the steps of the hall. Flat. Not raised. Carrying the whole way to the gate anyway.

"Take your hand off her."

The gatekeeper let go so fast that I nearly went off the axle. He did not look at Caden. Nobody looks at Caden when he says a word like that. You look at the ground and find something to do with your hands.

Caden did not come down the steps. He stood at the top with his sleeves pushed back and his eyes on the wagon, on the load, on the coast sign, which he had seen a hundred times in his life and never once had cause to read.

"Finish the count," he said to the yard. And then, without turning his head toward me, so that no man in that yard could say afterward that he had handed me anything: "The low country buys on the mark. Write it down."

It was the whole thing and it was nothing. He had given me the last piece I needed in a sentence about salt, in front of twenty people, and not one of them could ever say he had stood for me. I wanted to say something to him and did not know what a person says.

That is his way. He does not reach for you. He moves the ground.

I stood on the axle and wrote the sign down.

The gatekeeper watched me the whole time, and when I had finished he leaned in, low, so that the steps could not hear him.

"You will want to be careful, bookkeeper. A key is a thing that can be taken back."

"That is true," I said, without looking up. "So is a road."

Wide V. Deep. Slow. The coast hand, exactly as Bram had described it, cut by a man with his back to the road because he did not want to be watched while he put his name to something that had to outlast him.

Then I stepped down off the wheel, and gave the gatekeeper the part of the day that was already written for him, and walked back across the yard with the book against my chest, where the three pages were still folded inside my shirt.

One hand. The same slant, let in with a blade where no blade had any business, in a room I now had a key to, in a book whose back page is only ever opened by people with a reason to open it.

I did not know his name. I did not need it. The valley is small, the hands in it are few, and there is one man in it who rides down the coast road every year with the salt, and no wolf takes that road without the pack's leave.

He had signed his work in two places. Once in ink, on the back leaf of a book, in a hand he had spent three winters teaching me to notice without ever once letting me see the face that made it.

And once in wood, where he thought the sign would stand on its own and mean nothing to anyone but a buyer.

He had counted on my reading the page.

He had not counted on the wood, and I was glad of that, and afraid of it.