Auren Walks East

Two weeks after the morning of the second bucket, Auren rose at the small dark hour she had been rising at all her life.

She did not, on rising, light the lamp. She did not, on rising, wake her mother. She had, in the past two weeks, not told her mother what had happened at the well. She had carried the morning, the way she had been raised to carry the small things of the household, into the next morning.

In two weeks the flame had not returned to the well.

In two weeks the hearth had banked, every night, on its own.

In two weeks Auren had, by the small careful reading of a girl who had been raised by women raised by women, known herself.

She had decided.

She would go east.

She rose. She did not light the lamp.

She went, in the small careful steps of a girl who had been raised in a small house, to the kitchen. She knelt at the hearth. The hearth had banked, in the night, in the small steady way it had banked every night for two weeks. She put her hand into the banked coal. She did not lift it. She rested her palm, briefly, on the small steady warmth of the night-coal.

The warmth was the warmth of any hearth.

She did not, on the warmth, ask anything.

She rose. She took, from the wooden chest by the door, her travelling shoes and her travelling cloak. She put on the shoes. She put on the cloak. She took, from the small clay jar on the kitchen shelf, the three pieces of dried bread her mother kept for unexpected visitors. She took, from the small brass jar at the top of the kitchen shelf, three of the four coins her mother had kept against the year's accounts.

She went, last, to the kitchen table. She set, on the table, a small sheet of paper she had taken from the school-tutor's house in the previous week. She wrote, on the paper, in the small careful hand her mother had taught her, three sentences.

I have been called east. I do not know yet by whom. I will write you at the first town that will carry the letter.

She did not, on the paper, write her name.

She did not need to. Her mother would know her hand.

She left the paper on the table, weighted at the corner with the small clay cup the kitchen kept for vinegar.

She went to the door.

She stood at the door for a small private count.

A voice came, from the bed in the back of the kitchen, in the small low careful tone of a woman who had been awake longer than her daughter had thought.

"Auren."

She did not turn. She had, in the careful long reading of a girl in her sixteenth year, expected this. She had, on each of the past three mornings, expected it. She had, on the third morning, decided that if it came on the fourth she would answer it standing at the door, without turning, in the small careful tone the answer required.

There was a long count from the bed.

She did not, in the answering, turn. She did not, in the answering, weep. She had been raised in a village whose long careful instrument for the leaving of houses was not to make of the leaving more than the leaving was.

She opened the door.

She stepped out.

She closed the door behind her in the small careful way a daughter closed a door whose weight she had measured every day of her life.

She walked across the square. The square was empty. The well was at the centre of the square. She did not, in walking past the well, pause at it.

She walked the short walk to the eastern lane.

The eastern lane led, in two leagues, to the small dirt road that joined the larger road to the next village. The larger road led, in eight leagues, to the road that joined the kingdom's eastern highway. The eastern highway led, in some number of leagues she had not been told, to a city. The city had a cathedral. The cathedral had, on a night a year before her birth, been answered.

She walked.

The dawn rose, in the slow careful way the spring's dawn rose on the kingdom's eastern downs, behind her. She did not, in the rising, turn to it. She walked east.

She walked all that day. She walked through the next village without entering it. She slept, that night, in a small barn whose owner was kind enough not to ask her name. She walked the next day. She walked the next day after that.

By the end of the first week she had reached the kingdom's eastern highway.

By the end of the second she had reached, on the southern fork of the highway, the long pale arc of the burned circle on the eastern downs.

She did not, on reaching the burned arc, stop.

She walked along the burned edge for a quarter of a league. She did not, in the walking, feel afraid. The burning was, by every small careful reading her two weeks at the well had given her, a country she had been called into. She did not, on the reading, claim the country. She had been raised by women who had taught her never to claim a country one had only walked through.

At the centre of the burned circle, by the small careful reading of a girl who had been measuring countries for the past two weeks, was a stone.

She did not, on the reading, walk to the stone.

She spoke once, into the cupped left hand where the flame had been since the morning of the second bucket.

"Not for me. Not yet."

The flame in her hand did not, on the saying, change. It sat in her cupped hand the size of a small apple, the colour of an ember after the wind has gone.

She walked east.

The chronicle, the chronicler will record, had been waiting since the cathedral grounds, fifteen seasons before, for a mortal who could carry a sign. The sign had been kept, all that long count, in a feather under cloth and on a small altar; the sign had been added to, in the autumn before this season, by a second feather laid beside it; the sign had been registered, all winter, by a tower in the north; and the sign had been answered, on the morning of a second bucket at a small cold well, by a girl who had not yet been told her own name's full reading.

The girl was sixteen.

She walked east, on the morning the chronicle had been waiting for, in the small ordinary way a sixteen-year-old in her aunt's shoes walked the east-bound lane out of a village whose name no kingdom-map had ever bothered to record.

The chronicle, that morning, had been answered.

It would be some time before the chronicle, in its small careful instrument, registered the answer.

The cathedral, on the morning Auren walked the eastern lane out of Lowwell, did not yet know her name.

She did not, in walking, ask it to.