63 Days

Day 63

They give me a new world.

A small blue stone, river-veined and cloud-bright, threaded by one pale moon. The comet is already visible in the observatory mirrors, a chalk mark scrawled across the firmament. Trajectory holds. Impact in sixty-three rotations.

Routine mission: survey, catalogue, keep the ledger. I sign my name where signatures go, accept the seal, and step through the gate.

The portal opens on a river bend.

The water is winter-cold, iron-clear. The air smells of smoke from peat fires and the sharp green of frost-bitten nettles. A bell chimes, calling the village to prayer. Somewhere a woman laughs. Somewhere else, a man coughs hard enough to fold himself in half.

No one looks up. They never do. The veil is thin, but not that thin.

I make the first entry on the ledger-plate and watch. I draw the river’s course, the split where the ford stones lie, the half-drowned elm with roots like a splayed hand. I count heads at market, the number of sheep, the crop of rye, the songs the children sing when they hop across the ford.

At sundown the woman comes.

She wades to her knees, skirts hitched, a wicker basket balanced on her hip. She dips for river clay. Her hair is dark and plaited in a long braid, and her cloak is mended in three places by someone who knows their needle. She glances upstream, downstream, then up at the sky. Not at me. Past me. Through me.

I write: Potter.

I should widen the survey. I should pin the cardinal points to the stars and mark the fields, shrines, kilns. Yet I stand and listen to the river until the cold lifts from the water and the fog thins.

Day 60

“Do not favor any single point of observation,” says the handbook. “Do not become attached to any one living soul.”

We are taught this from the first day we take the seal. Our charge is the ledger, the portals, the closing of seams when worlds shatter. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Yet I watch the woman press mud to a wooden mold, thumb smoothing the seam. I watch the curve of a cup appear from river clay.

Her name is Elowen. I learn it not by asking—that would crack the first law—but because a neighbor yells it from a doorway when a goat gets loose and eats his cabbage.

I carve it into the plate beside the river’s course. A word not meant to exist in a ledger of dying worlds.

Day 55

There are other towns. I step to them and step back.

I return to the river.

Elowen builds the firing mound. Her aunt watches from a stool, each cough drawn from somewhere deep. Elowen’s thumb presses to the aunt’s wrist when she brings her broth. It quiets the cough for a time.

“You’re too narrow,” murmurs a voice beside me.

Rook. He’s older than me by a century. He leans as if a railing exists where none stands, examining my plate. “Always the river,” he says. “Always her. This makes a poor ledger.”

“I have the figures.” I tilt the plate. Rows upon rows. “You can see them.”

“I see them.” He eyes the blank space at the top where I usually add a sketch, a habit no one has beaten out of me. “You’ve forgotten your stars. And your horizon line.”

“I’ll put them in.”

He mms, not fooled, and lays two fingers against the veil. It ripples around us. You’re too close, that touch means. Step back.

“Sixty-three days,” I remind him. “It will make no difference what horizon line I draw.”

Day 50

The handbook says: Step wide, lest the circle snap you tight.

I try. I climb the hill beyond the river, tracing the stars. But I return before the bells are done tolling. Elowen is there, washing her hands. She does not see me. She never should.

Day 49

Elowen sees me.

It happens because a dog, half-starved and rag-collared, limps into the water to gnaw on a river bone and yelps as the current tugs him deeper. Elowen is wading before the cry is finished. She catches the collar, hauls, slips. The dog panics.

I do not think. I leave the shelter of the veil and step down into water that bites to the bone. My boots land with a splash. The dog turns teeth to me and snaps, and we both drag until the current releases its hold and we stagger into the reeds. The dog bolts, spraying us with a rain of river.

Elowen shoves wet hair from her cheek and looks at me.

Her eyes are hazel, rimmed dark.

“Thank you,” she says, startled and wary in equal measure. “I didn’t see you on the bank.”

“I was on the other side.” It sounds like the truth even if it isn’t.

She studies me the way you study a traveler whose dialect you can’t place. “I haven’t seen you here, is all.”

“I’m passing through.”

She nods like that makes sense and spoons water across her sleeve. “I’ve clay to settle. And a dog to avoid. Will you be here this afternoon? If I’m to thank you proper, I’ll bring bread.”

“I can’t,” I say. “I don’t linger anywhere long.”

“Then take it now, traveler.” She unties a packet at her belt and offers a heel wrapped in cloth. “Bread gives courage to foolish men and frightened dogs.”

The law warns: Do not take gifts. Yet I keep the bread. The seam of the circle tightens a notch.

Day 42

When Elowen walks to the reed beds to cut frogs from her aunt’s sealed jars—she feeds them the fat insects that strip the fever out of blood—I am there. When the priest blesses the river and children throw wreaths into the current to float luck to the sea, I stand where the current bends and count how many wreaths spin back. When Elowen hums—the tune is something old and soothing, like a winter cradle-song—I listen.

“This won’t read well,” says Rook when he finds me at the bend. He points with his chin at the plate and the hours lost to lines that aren’t wheat tallies or head counts or burial figures.

“None of it will read at all when the comet does its work,” I say. “Let me have these hours.”

“You speak like a man who believes time has corners.” Rook scratches idly at one of the veil’s seams, and it vibrates at the edge of hearing. He lowers his hand. “It is a circle, little brother. Step wide where the circle curves tight.”

I don’t argue. I can’t. I carry the comet’s chart inside my skull like a secret map. It’s coming. It will come whether I look away or not.

Day 35

Elowen puts a cup in my hand. It is simple, fired to a soft amber, with a little thumb rest where my finger falls. “For your vice,” she says. “You saved a dog. That deserves clay.”

I turn it. The glaze is thin, a little uneven. The lip is true. “It is beautiful,” I say. “But I cannot pay you.”

“You paid already,” she says. “You went into the river, and you bled. I saw where the reed cut you when your hand slipped. That’s coin enough for any cup.”

I want to tell her that I heal faster than she can fathom. Instead, I hold the cup as if the careful curve of it might grant me a little courage. “Thank you.”

“What do they call you, traveler?”

The law is clear. In the event of a breach—withdraw. Do not linger. Do not name yourself to those within the circle.

“Corven.”

Day 28

She tells me about her aunt and the cough that came the winter her mother died. She tells me about the kiln—the clay that fires best, the way wood feels different in the hands when it’s been seasoned right.

“What about a cup given by a woman to a man with no hearth?” I ask.

“That one makes him consider what a hearth might be,” she says.

I tell her about the roads I’ve walked, the way they split like choices in a man’s heart. About the coast where I once stood among rocks and watched ships with sails like ribcages tilt their way across a slate-iron sea. I do not tell her I stood there on a world that fell to ash while I watched with a ledger clasped to my chest. I do not tell her how the ash lifts when there’s nothing left to hold it, how it moves like a thought that’s been forgotten. I do not tell her that when time loosens its teeth, you can feel whole histories shake inside their bones.

“Is that why you wander?” she asks. “Because you mean to see every road there is?”

“Yes,” I say, because it is easier than admitting that I’m sent where I’m told.

“And if a road ended at a hearth worth keeping?” she said. “Would you still walk on?”

I should have stepped back. I should have swallowed her question and let the silence stand. Instead, I leaned forward, and when her mouth met mine the law splintered like glass.

Day 21

Verity is young by our measure—only two lives worn since she took the law into her hands. She steps through the gate with the air of one who has rehearsed the words she means to say. Her hair is caught up with a wire pin. She lifts her plate and looks at mine. “You have forty-one entries,” she says. “You have forty-one returns to the river bend. Your other tallies are correct. The work is good. But the pattern is… plain.”

Plain is our word for dangerous.

“The comet will show its face within the week,” she warns. “They will light their candles and beg for mercy. Step away before you forget what you are for.”

But I already have.

Day 14

The comet is a white nail hammered through the twilight. It has a name here: Saint Harrow.

“What do your saints usually keep?” I ask.

“Candles. Bones. Terrible stories with neat endings.”

“And Harrow?”

Elowen looks at the sky over the river. The white flare is bright as frost, tilted over the trees. “I think he keeps time,” she says. “And time keeps us.”

Day 12

The aunt’s cough is worse. The broth sits untouched. Elowen writes a small prayer on the back of a shard and tucks it above the doorway. She doesn’t look at me when she does it. She looks like a woman who has learned to fold herself around a grief as if her body can smother it.

Day 7

The house is still. Smoke curls from the chimney, thin as a thread.

Her aunt lies beneath a woolen shawl, hands folded, the cough finally quiet. Elowen has washed her, braided her hair, set a sprig of dried rosemary between her palms. She does not weep. She sits by the hearth with the clay cup in her lap, staring at nothing.

I watch from the veil, and my ledger shakes in my grasp. This was her last tether. When the comet comes, she will stand alone.

Day 5

The law is absolute. The law doesn’t bend. That is what we say to ourselves so we can sleep. But there are seams where gates turn, and there are angles where the circle of time feels thin a finger’s width. I go to the Archive of Forgotten Days under the mountain and lift a map where no one looks anymore. I run a hand through the chalked lines and watch the dust settle into the cracks. I sign a name that is mine and not mine in a book no one opens without a candle to hand.

A life can be carried through a gate. A life can be shielded if you cut the arc right, if you open the door in the breath between impact and light and the wave. You put her behind you and you take the brunt and you hope the brunt does not grind you to powder.

It is a sin with a ledger and a weight.

I take the cup Elowen gave me and hold it to the light. “Dawn,” I whisper to the clay. “At the bend. When the frost is silver on the reeds.

Day 2

I tell her the truth, or a part of it.

She walks to the doorway and looks at the river with her arms crossed. “What does a traveller do when the road ends?” she asks. “Where does he go?”

“You go on.”

“And those who cannot walk?”

“Sometimes a traveler carries a friend,” I say. “If he is allowed.”

“And if he is not?”

“Then he may carry them anyway.”

She turns to look at me. I force myself to hold her gaze.

“What will it cost you?” she asks.

“Everything.” There is no point in shaving truth once you begin to give it.

Elowen steps closer, until the smell of clay knows me. She looks at my hands, takes them, and holds them as if I have earned the right to have my hands held. “I will come.”

“Dawn,” I say, and my voice breaks around the word. “At the bend. On the last day.”

Her fingers leave mine. I feel the echo of them long after. The cup sits on the sill catching the last light. I mean to take it, but my hands are shaking, and when the gate closes I know, too late, that I have left it behind.

Day 1 — Night

Rook comes to my chamber.

“You can’t go,” he says.

“I’m going.”

“You can’t carry her through. Even if you cut the seam and angle the door, even if your bones hold—what then? Where do you hide her?”

“There are other worlds.”

“Brother, listen.” Rook says. “This is not a sermon. This is not the law talking. It’s me. If you carry her through, they’ll hunt you until the seam gives her up. And when they drag her back, they’ll set her in her rightful hour, in the breath she was meant to die. You’ll watch her burn twice. And you—you will be erased. Cast adrift, never whole, slipping through time until nothing of you remains. That is the price, brother. Not only to lose her, but to lose yourself, and be remembered by no one.”

He taps a code on the wall. I hear the lock on my gate shift, then engage. The watch-light quickens. “Rook...No.”

He doesn’t meet my eyes. “I have to.”

I beat the lock with the heel of my hand until the skin splits.

Finally, I sit on the floor and put my head against the bars, counting the seconds between watch-light pulses.

Day 0, Dawn

The lock opens.

I run.

Frost silvers the banks. Elowen sits on a flat stone at the water’s edge. The cup she gave me rests beside her, catching the white smear of the comet in its rim.

I take a step.

The veil slams down, a guillotine of light, bright and blinding.

On the other side, Elowen stands as if she’s been struck. She looks where I was and sees empty river. Her face is calm. That is the worst of it. She does not panic. She does not cry out. She looks at the sky where Saint Harrow draws his tail across the dark like a sword. I hit the gate with both palms. It throws me back.

The sky lifts.

You can hear it when a world is about to end if you are made for hearing. The light tilts. The air hums as if a thousand kettles sit at the boil. A long, low sound moves through the ground, up through the bones. Birds break out of the reeds all at once and stitch themselves into the grey like a cloak flung high.

The dog leans against Elowen’s knee. She rests a hand on his head.

The first piece of the comet kisses air .

The river lifts in a wall clear as glass and runs backwards uphill. The frost burns away in a breath. Light pours over the reeds.

Elowen closes her eyes.

I do not.

I watch the light take the river. I watch it take the bank and the flat stone and the long braid and the cup’s thin lip.

The veil is so bright it is black.

Then it is snow.

It lays itself down where the living were. The watch-light pulses.

After

Rook doesn’t come to me. He sends a message: I am sorry.

I go to the place where we keep the things the dead leave in the folds of our gates. It is not a reverent place. We do not, as a rule, believe in relics. A cup sits there on a shelf. Amber glaze, thin in places, true at the lip.

It is the one Elowen gave me, or it is not. That is the manner of gates. They return a thing with a different weight and tell you to hold it anyway.

I take it. I carry it to the river bend where no river bends anymore. A band of light still spins there, slow as a halo fallen and rolling on its edge. I stand where Elowen waited and I set the cup down and I turn the lip to the current that is gone.

“It was dawn,” I say out loud. “I was late.”

In the ledgers, the comet is a mark, a date, a neat notation. In my chest, it is a door that never opened. I keep the key anyway, the cup in my hands, the rim under my thumb where hers told me to rest.