The Lesson He Does Not Reread

Kindling · page 16 withdrawn

Greetings again, my dear readers. Sixteen came up tonight.

I want to tell you, before I do anything else, that I am not going to read it. I am going to take it out of the case and hold it and put it into the fire without opening it past the line I can already see from here, and I owe you the real reason for that rather than a reason that would sound better, because a reason that sounds better is exactly the kind of thing I would once have reached for, and I am trying to stop doing that.

Some of you already know this one. This is Ilmarrow. This is Hallovar, who told a room of his own named students the exact hour he would stop, three hundred clicks out, and then spent every one of those clicks teaching them how to do his job instead of ever once asking anybody to do anything about the stopping itself.

They built something afterward, out of what he taught them: a gimballed thing of stone and bronze the Rethi call the Standing Wheel, worked in shifts, doing by counterweight and very tired arithmetic most of what Hallovar did by simply existing. Most. Not all. There is a drift it does not quite catch, small, at the edges, and they have a word for it that is not spoken as a complaint, the Stutter, and they have made their peace with it the way you make peace with anything handed to you slightly unfinished by someone who ran out of time and not out of care.

This is the syllabus. Three hundred and forty lessons he had time to teach in full, to the standard he held for himself, without shortchanging an earlier one to buy room for a later one. And this is Lesson three hundred and forty one, which he did not have time for, which is a title and nothing under it, and which four thousand clicks of the Rethi's own best attempts have never once been allowed to finish, because finishing it would mean somebody other than Hallovar gets to be the one who authorises the last word of Hallovar's own syllabus, and nobody on that world has ever wanted to be that person.

(I did not want to be that person either, for the record, on the two occasions since my visit that it has occurred to me I could just write something and send it to them. I want to be extremely clear that I did not do that. I am telling you so you know I thought about it, not so you think well of me for resisting.)

Here is the true reason I am not opening it tonight. I have read this page more times than any other page in the case. On the nights when the count is bad, or the fire will not catch, or I cannot for the life of me remember why any of this is worth doing, this is the one I take down and read again, because a person who ran out of time for exactly one thing, having taught everything before it completely, is the closest thing I have found in ninety pages to company. If I open it now it will not be for the record and it will not be for you. It will be because I want the company one more time before I no longer have it, and that is a selfish reason to read a page, and it is the honest one, so I am not doing it.

I can tell you it from here anyway. I have held the actual syllabus, in Ilvra's stone room, the one her family has kept for six generations, and I can tell you a thing that nobody who has not held it in their own hands knows, which is that you can date any single lesson in it just by looking at the hand it is written in. Lesson twelve is drawn out like a man who believes he has all the time he thinks he has. By the two hundreds the hand is hurrying. By the three hundred and thirty something it is a hand that has done the arithmetic on exactly how many clicks are left and has decided to spend them on the lesson rather than on the handwriting. Ilvra showed me that, page by page, with her finger and not her hands, because her two hands were needed to hold the syllabus out, and both of mine were needed to take it.

That is what is going in tonight. Not a story I need to check by reading it again. A thing I already know is right, because I stood in that room, and because she let me hold it the way you hand someone something you expect back.

It goes in easily, for what that is worth. It is never the ones you expect.

And here is a small thing, my dear readers, which I am only going to say once and then go on, because the season is long and there are pages left and I do not intend to make a habit of stopping the whole account for every strange thing that happens at this table. I wanted to tell you the exact lesson number where the hand changes, the one Ilvra actually pointed to. I remember her finger on the page. I remember thinking I would never need to write the number down, because how does a person forget a thing like that. I have just reached for it, with the page still smoking in the grate, and it is not there, and it did not come back on a second try, and I am going to stop reaching before I make this table about me instead of about him.

Twenty three next.