THE FIRST MORNING A bonus scene from The Broken Script of the Stars Kindred’s point of view

This scene takes place the morning after the library came home. If you have not finished the book, know that it will spoil the ending.

I had forgotten what my own weight felt like.

That was the first thing the sun taught me, and it taught me at the treeline, because I could not yet bear the open courtyard. A thousand years is a long time to be a note in a chord instead of a body in a place, and when Soren pulled me up out of the dark by a name I had not earned and could not pronounce, the world gave me back my weight all at once, and I stood at the edge of the wood like a woman who has been handed something heavy and precious and does not trust her arms.

The forger had called me Kindred. I did not know yet whether I believed it. A name a thousand years dead does not come back, and I had spent that thousand years being the absence where mine had been, the cut, the wound other souls wore at the throat. I had made a chord out of it. I had made a kingdom. And now a boy with my same brand of grief had looked at the absence and, instead of trying to fill it, had set a new thing down beside it and said this is yours if you’ll answer to it, and I had answered, and I did not know why, except that no one in a thousand years had offered me anything but the dark, and a starving woman does not interrogate bread.

The light came through the wood in pieces. I could take it in pieces. Not the whole of it, not yet, the great gold weight of a morning I had paid for and been denied, but pieces, the way you take water after a long thirst, small, so it does not kill you. A leaf. The edge of a leaf. The way the edge of a leaf held the light and let it go. I stood and watched a leaf do that for longer than I will admit, and I wept, and the weeping did not feel like the dark. It felt like a body remembering it was allowed.

They found me there one at a time, which was the right way, because two thousand years of anything cannot be met by a crowd.

The listener came first. Sarya, of the Mark, who had gone under the choir with four hands holding her rope and come back carrying two thousand of the wronged in a chest built to break under one. She did not say a kind thing. I have always distrusted kind things; they are what the god said, thanking me, at the door. She only came and stood beside me in the shade and held out her ruined arm, the branded one, the one the world had sworn made her unhearable, and she said, “You reached for me down there when you wanted me to give up. I am reaching for you up here, for the opposite. Sister to the branded. He called you that and I am making it two.”

I looked at the brand on her arm, the mark that meant do not believe her, the mark that had turned out to be the one instrument the dark could not deafen, and I understood that she and I were the same wound wearing two outcomes. The world had written us both off. She had been reached in time. I had not, for a thousand years, and had become the mistress of the unreached because of it. And now, absurdly, late past all sense, I was being reached anyway, by the very woman my own unreaching had nearly claimed.

“I do not know how to be a sister,” I told her. “I know how to be a chord. I know how to be the low note under everyone’s despair. I have a thousand years of practice at being the thing no one comes back for. I have none at all at this.”

“Nobody knows how,” she said. “You learn it one person at a time. That is the whole trick of the new name. It is not a crown you inherit from a crowd. It is a thing you get chosen into, slowly, forever, by people who could leave and stay instead.” She sat down in the shade, which meant I could sit too, and we took the morning in pieces together, and it was the first company I had kept in the light since before the Empire was a rumor.

Later, the architect came. Valeriana, who had set herself down in my chamber believing an old arithmetic, and been changed back not by force but by a woman with her hands open. She was mortal now, fully, and it showed in a way I had not expected, a softness at the edges of her, the look of a thing that can end and has decided that the ending is what makes the mornings worth the trouble. She had given three hundred years of herself to the stone to make a place where everyone could stay. She, of all of them, understood what I had done and why, better than the forger even, because she had walked to the edge of the same clean cut and been talked back.

“You and I made the same mistake,” she said, sitting on my other side, so that I was flanked now, held, the way the dangerous are held when someone has decided they are worth the risk. “You wanted to end the spending by ending everyone. I wanted to end my own by spending myself. Both of us tried to solve a wound with a subtraction. And both of us got talked out of it by people who refused to do the math our way.” She was quiet a moment. “It does not go away, you know. The old arithmetic. I still wake some mornings and the oldest part of me says it would be safer to have already gone. I imagine you will wake some mornings and the oldest part of you will say the dark was cleaner. We are not fixed, Kindred. We are only, now, accompanied. I have found that is the difference that matters.”

I turned the name over. Kindred. A thing I was chosen into, one person at a time, forever. Sister to the branded. Accompanied, not fixed.

That evening, when I could bear more of the light, they gave me a task, and it was the task that made me believe the name at last. The reformed watch walks the lower halls each dusk, the halls that used to eat people and are only halls now, and they say the names of the two thousand out loud, on a rotation, so that not one of the wronged is ever unremembered again. They asked me to walk it. Me. The one who had carried all two thousand alone in the dark for a thousand years, holding them the only way a solitary grief knows how, which is by drowning with them.

I said the names that first dusk with company for the first time, and my voice was the loudest, and when Soren asked me why, later, at the treeline, taking the last of the light, I told him the truth, which was the first wholly true thing I had said in the sun.

“Because I carried them alone for a thousand years,” I said, “and I will be damned if I let a single one of them go unsaid now that I finally have someone to say them with.”

He did not answer. He only stood beside me, hands open, empty, the way he had held them out across a thousand years of my dark, and we watched the light go down through the wood in pieces, and I found that I was not afraid of the morning that would follow it.

The god made me the first coal.

They made me the first keeper.

I like the second work better. I told him so, and it was true, and being able to say a true thing in the light, with a person beside me who had chosen to hear it, turned out to be the whole of what I had been fed to the dark for wanting, a thousand years and one impossible morning ago.

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