The session was in a high, narrow room lined with slates. It was already going when they slipped in — a dozen or so of the older students bent over their work, and a professor at the front, an ageless spare man with ink on his fingers and the flat unhurried manner of someone who had watched a great many young people fail to grasp a great many simple things and had stopped being surprised by any of it.
Rhosyn steered her toward the front. “New one,” she said, “late intake, sent to you,” and dropped away to a seat before she could be made part of it, leaving Lyrwen standing alone at the front of the room holding the folded paper the administrator had given her.
The professor took it without a word. He read it — briefly, the whole of it in one sweep of his eyes — and then he looked up at her, and looked back down at the paper, and set it on his desk.
“You’re illiterate,” he said.
He said it plainly. Not cruelly; there was no relish in it, no unkindness even, just the flat statement of a fact the way you’d note that a thing was broken and needed mending. But it landed on her in front of the whole quiet room, and she felt the heat climb her neck, and heard herself answer before she’d decided to.
“I can read some.”
The professor gave her a flat look. It was not an argument he intended to have. He reached to the shelf behind him without looking, pulled down a book, opened it somewhere in the middle, and turned it round on the desk to face her.
“Read that, then,” he said. “Where my finger is.”
She looked down at the page.
And it was — she’d known, the moment she saw it, that it was going to be bad. This was not the cat and the rain. This was not a child’s verse in large letters with the pictures faded and a smaller hand’s fold in the corner. This was a page of close small print, dense, the letters packed tight and running the whole width of it in words longer than any she’d ever sounded out, ordered in ways she had no grasp of. She looked at it, and the letters swam and would not resolve into anything, and the harder she looked the less they held still, and there was nothing there she could reach, not one word she could have said aloud with any confidence at all.
The professor watched her face while she looked.
He didn’t watch the page. He watched her — her eyes going over it, the small helpless movement of them trying to find a purchase and finding none, whatever her face did in the seconds she spent proving him right without saying a word. He’d done this before. He knew exactly what he was looking for and exactly how long it took to appear, and it appeared, and he saw it.
“Exactly,” he said, and drew the book back across the desk and shut it. “You will go to literacy class before you return here. There’s no use to you sitting in a room learning to write runes when you can’t yet read the words that name them. It’d be like teaching a man to shoe a horse he can’t catch.” He was already reaching for another slip of paper, already writing on it, the matter concluded. “This is not a judgment on you. It’s the order of the thing. Letters first, script after. Take this to the literacy tutor — the woman in the low room off the east court, she has the mornings — and come back to me when she says you’re ready and not before.”
He held out the slip. She took it.
“It’s a common enough road,” he said, and it was as near to kindness as he’d come, delivered in the same flat voice as everything else. “You’re not the first to come up here unable to read, and you’ll not be the last. Most of the ones who came up common can’t. It’s no shame; it’s only a thing you haven’t been given yet.” He looked at her a moment. “You’ve something they want badly, or you’d not be here at all — they don’t take late intakes from the Sink for the fun of it. So you’ll be given the letters, and you’ll get them, and then you’ll come back and learn the rest. Off you go.”
And that was it. She was turned out of her first class before she’d sat down in it, in front of the whole quiet room, holding a slip of paper that sent her somewhere else — and she felt the eyes on her back as she went, the dozen older students who could all, every one of them, read the page she couldn’t, and the heat of it climbed her face the whole way to the door.
Rhosyn caught up with her in the corridor a moment later, having slipped out after her.
“Don’t,” Rhosyn said, before Lyrwen could say anything. “Don’t do the face. I can see you doing the face.” She fell into step beside her, easy, unbothered. “Half the older lot went to literacy first. I didn’t, but only because my dreadful mother had me drilled from the cradle, and I’d trade the reading for the childhood, believe me. It’s not a mark against you. It’s just where you start.” She bumped her shoulder against Lyrwen’s, exactly the way Maren used to, and Lyrwen’s throat went tight at it. “Come on. I’ll walk you to the east court. And then, since you’ve been thrown out of script and I’ve got a free hour, I’ll show you the library properly, and you can be illiterate somewhere with good chairs.”
⁂
The east court was quieter than the rest of the building, and the low room off it was quieter still — a warm, cluttered, comfortable sort of room, nothing like the high narrow one they’d thrown her out of. Cushions and chairs sat on the floor, with slates and chalk within easy reach, and light came in low and gold through a window facing the little court, and it had the settled, patient feel of a place where things went slowly on purpose.
The tutor was seated on a low chair in the middle of it with a few students gathered close around her — younger than Lyrwen, most of them, and one who wasn’t, a broad grown man with a scarred hand who was frowning over a slate with the fierce concentration of someone doing a thing that did not come easily and refusing to be beaten by it. The tutor was working with them not the way the script professor had worked, from the front, above, but from among them, leaning in, her voice low and even, and there was no shame in the room at all. That was the thing Lyrwen felt as she stood in the doorway. Nobody in there was embarrassed to be there. It had been made not to be a place you were embarrassed to be.
The tutor looked up, saw her hovering, and finished her sentence with the man before she came.
“You’ll be the new one,” she said, rising — an older woman, soft-faced, with the same unhurried patience the room had. “Come in, you’re letting the warm out. What’ve they sent me?”
Lyrwen held out the slip.
The tutor took it and read it, and unlike the professor, there was nothing flat in her face as she did — she read it and nodded, unsurprised, the way you’d nod at a thing you saw most weeks. “Ah. Script sent you back. Yes. They always do; it’s the right of it, whatever it feels like walking out of that room.” She glanced up, and caught, plainly, whatever was still on Lyrwen’s face from the high narrow room. “He’ll have said it plain, won’t he? He always does. You’re illiterate.” She said it in a fair imitation of the professor’s flat delivery, and then, gently, in her own voice: “He’s not wrong, and he’s not unkind, whatever it feels like. He hasn’t the room in him for softening things. That’s what this room’s for. We do the softening in here.”
Something in Lyrwen’s chest loosened by a fraction it hadn’t expected to.
“Sit,” the tutor said, nodding at the cushions, at the loose warm circle of them. “Anywhere. We’re not particular. That’s Bewell there with the slate; he came up off a farm in Yuven three winters back and couldn’t read his own name, and now he’s near enough through the second primer and only swears at it twice a session, which is progress.” The man with the scarred hand snorted without looking up, but there was no rancor in it. “The little ones are from the children’s side, sent up for the extra hour. Nobody in this room could read much when they came to it. That’s the whole of what this room is. You’re among your own.”
Lyrwen sat, slowly, on a cushion at the edge of the circle.
“Now.” The tutor lowered herself back into her low chair and considered Lyrwen with a frank, kind, assessing look — not the head-to-foot sweep of the others, but something narrower and warmer, a woman sizing up a task she meant to see done. “Tell me true, and don’t dress it up; there’s no one in here to dress it up for. How much have you got? The professor’ll have shown you his worst page and watched you drown in it — that’s his one trick, and it tells him nothing but whether to send you to me, which he already knew. I want the real of it. Do you know your letters at all? Can you sound a small word? Where are you, honestly?”
And Lyrwen, who had spent her whole life dressing up exactly this, making the enough look like more than enough, hiding the thin places so no one could see how close to the bottom she ran; Lyrwen looked at the warm cluttered room full of people who couldn’t read either, and the soft-faced woman waiting without any judgment at all, and told her the truth.
“I know my letters,” she said. “Most of them. I can sound out a small word if I go slow, and a child’s rhyme if I go very slow and put my finger under the line. I’ve a book I’ve been working at. But that page he showed me—” she shook her head “—there was nothing in it I could reach. Long words. Packed close. I didn’t have any of it.”
“Good,” said the tutor.
Lyrwen blinked. “Good?”
“You know your letters, and you can sound a small word, and you’ve been teaching yourself off a book with your own finger under the line, with no one to help you and no reason to bother but that you wanted it.” The tutor smiled, and it was a real one, warm and pleased. “That’s not nothing, girl. That’s a great deal. That’s someone who’ll learn fast, because you’ve done the hard first part alone — the wanting. Most of what I do is drag the wanting into people. You’ve brought your own.” She reached over and pulled a fresh slate off the stack and set it in front of Lyrwen, and a stub of chalk beside it. “We’ll have you reading that professor’s dreadful page before the Freeze is out. Now. Show me the letters you’re sure of, and we’ll find the edges of what you’ve got, and start there.”
Lyrwen glanced over her shoulder.
Rhosyn was still in the doorway where she'd hung back, one shoulder against the frame, watching — and when Lyrwen's eyes found her, she smiled. Not a teasing one, for once; a real one, warm and plain, and she gave a small nod, the kind that said go on, this is the right room, you're all right here. Then she pushed off the doorframe and stepped out, back toward the corridor and the library and her free hour, leaving Lyrwen to it.
Lyrwen looked after her a moment — this girl she'd known for the length of a morning who kept turning up beside her exactly when the ground went uncertain, who'd lit at the Sink and gone soft at the bag and walked her to a warm room and stood in the doorway to see her settled before she went — and felt the small warmth of it settle in her chest alongside all the rest.
Then she turned back to the tutor, and the slate, and the stub of chalk waiting in front of her.
"All right," she said. "Show me where to start."
And she bent her head over the slate, in the warm cluttered room full of people who couldn't read either, and began.
⁂
Rhosyn was waiting for her when the session let out, propped against the wall of the east court with the patience of a girl who had decided to wait and would have waited an hour.
"There she is." She pushed off the wall. "Survived it? Course you did; it's the gentlest room in the building—half the older lot go there just to be talked to kindly; it's the only place anyone will. Come on. Library. I promised you the library, and I'm a woman of my word, which my mother says is the one virtue I have and I choose to believe she means it as a compliment."
She led her back through the warren, up a broad stair worn hollow in the middle, and talked the whole way — the whole building narrated as they went, who taught what and which of them to fear and which were soft, which corridors flooded in the Rains, where the mess put out bread in the evenings if you missed the meal, all of it in an easy running stream that asked nothing of Lyrwen but that she keep up. And Lyrwen kept up, and let it wash over her, and found she was learning the place faster off Rhosyn's gossip than she'd have learned it off a month of maps.
Then Rhosyn pushed open a heavy door, and Lyrwen stopped in it.
She had never seen so many books.
She had, in truth, barely seen books at all — she'd seen the keeper's, the one, soft-cornered and loved; she'd seen the professor's dreadful dense page; she'd seen the primers stacked in the warm room. She had thought, in some dim way, that she knew what a lot of books might look like. She had not known this. The library went up — shelves on shelves on shelves, higher than the tavern was tall, running back into the cool dim of the room farther than she could see, ladders leaning against them, galleries above with more shelves still, and every single span of it full. Full of books. Full of words. There were more words in this one room, she understood, standing frozen in the doorway, than existed in the whole of the Sink — than she had heard spoken aloud in her entire life, probably, than all the talk of all the taverns end to end.
And an hour ago she had not been able to read a single page.
"It gets everyone," Rhosyn said, beside her, watching her face with something soft in her own. "First time. You should've seen me — I stood here like a stunned fish. And I'd grown up with books; we've a whole room of them at home my mother won't let anyone touch. This is different. This is everything." She said it with real reverence, under the chatter, a girl who loved this room. "Come on. Quiet, though — the woman who runs it, that's her, the one who looks like she's been carved out of the same wood as the shelves — she's kind if you're kind and she'll find you anything under the sun, but dog-ear a page and she'll know, I swear she can feel it happen from across the building."
They went in, quiet, into the cool dim of it.
And Lyrwen walked among the shelves with her head tipped back, and something happened to her that she hadn't braced for — a wanting so sharp and so sudden it startled her. She ran her eyes along the spines, the ones low enough to see, and she couldn't read them. Most of them. Here and there a short word would resolve — she'd catch a the, an of, a name she knew — and then the rest of it would swim away into shapes she had no purchase on. It was worse, somehow, than the professor's page had been, because the professor's page had been one page and this was thousands, a whole vast room of things she could not have, standing open all around her, and she could not read one shelf of it.
She'd spent her life walking past things that weren't for her. Windows she couldn't buy from, tables she carried food to and didn't sit at, a whole district up a hill she'd never once looked toward. She knew that ache; she'd made her peace with that ache a long time ago, filed it down to nothing. This was different. This she wanted with a rawness she didn't have a callus for, because it was the first thing she'd ever walked past that she might actually, someday, be able to reach — if she learned. If she sat in the warm room with her finger under the line long enough. The books weren't up a hill behind a wall. They were right here, and the only thing between her and them was the letters, and the letters could be got.
"I'm going to read all of these," she said. It came out of her low, half to herself, before she'd decided to say it.
Rhosyn glanced at her, and didn't laugh.
"Not all of them," she said. "Nobody reads all of them, there's things up there in scripts even the professors can't manage. But a great many of them. Yes." She said it simply, as a fact, not a kindness. "You will. You've got the look of someone who does the thing she says she'll do. It's a frightening look, honestly. I'd not want to be a thing you'd decided to get through."
They found a corner with good chairs — Rhosyn had clearly found it before, and clearly claimed it — near a tall window where the light came in. Rhosyn folded herself into one with the ease of long habit and pulled her knees up and looked at Lyrwen with the frank open curiosity that had been building all morning. Lyrwen understood that the walking-about was over and the asking was about to start.
"Right," Rhosyn said. "We're somewhere quiet, there's no one to overhear, and I've been very patient, which I'll have you know is not my nature." She tilted her head. "So. You sang. You told the woman at the desk you sang, and you told me you sang, and I have watched you all morning be thrown out of script and sent to the babies' reading room, and none of that is a girl anyone brings up late from the Sink for." Her grey eyes were bright and steady. "New ones come at the start of the year, in a crowd, and get slotted in, and nobody walks them anywhere or registers them special. You came mid-term, alone, and they gave you to me to mind, and the woman at the desk had a note about you that made her sit up straighter. So. I'll ask you the once, and then I'll leave it if you want it left." She leaned in. "What did you actually do? Who did you sing for?"
Lyrwen looked at her — this girl who'd lit up at the Sink and gone soft at the bag, who'd walked her to the warm room and waited outside script and stood in a doorway to nod her on, who kept turning up beside her and asking questions like the answers mattered. And she found, sitting in a good chair in a vast quiet room full of everything she couldn't yet read, that she wanted to tell someone. That she'd been carrying it alone since the gold hall — the whole enormous impossible thing — and here was someone her own age, in a quiet corner, asking.
"You'll not believe me," she said.
"I absolutely will. I believe everything, it's a terrible flaw. Try me."
Lyrwen took a breath.
"I sang for the General," she said. "And three of the commanders. And three captains. In a hall at Vaelhold, yesterday morning." She watched Rhosyn's face as she said it, the way the professor had watched hers. "The General himself. Hethyr. They stood in a room, and I sang and — " she didn't know how to say the rest of it, the weeping, the going-undone, so she didn't. "That's what I did. That's why I'm here."
Rhosyn had gone very still.
"You're not joking," she said, faintly.
"No."
"The General." She sat up out of her slouch entirely. "You sang for — Lyrwen. Do you know how many people at this Institute have been in a room with the General? Ever? Once? None. I've been here three years, and I've seen the top of Commander Eluvar's head across a courtyard exactly one time, and I dined out on it for a month." She stared. "And you — a Sink girl, up mid-term, who can't read — sang for the whole of the high command in a hall at Vaelhold, and then went to breakfast, and then got thrown out of script." A slow, delighted, incredulous grin was spreading across her face. "That's the best thing I've ever heard. That's the single best thing I have ever heard. You have to tell me all of it. Every word. Start at the beginning — no, start before the beginning, start at the Sink, I want the whole of it."
And Lyrwen, for the first time since she'd walked out of a tavern up a hill and into all of this, told someone her own age the story — some of it, the safe parts, the parts that were hers to tell — in a quiet corner of a library full of books she couldn't read yet but meant to.
She left Rhevan out of it. She didn't decide to, exactly. She just found, when she came to him, that she didn't have the words yet for what he was. So she left the shape of him out of the telling, and told the rest, and Rhosyn listened with her chin on her knees and her grey eyes wide, and it was, Lyrwen thought, the closest thing to sitting in the tavern with Maren that she'd felt since the day she left it.
