He didn't understand, at first, what Victoria had meant by it. Build something for himself — as though he were a project to be finished, a trench to be dug and sealed before the frost came. He turned the thought over for three days without settling on anything, distracted by the ordinary business of a town that had gone on needing him regardless of what number sat unseen in his tunic, and it was only on the fourth night, lying awake beside her while she slept, that he understood what she'd actually been asking of him.
She hadn't meant a monument. She'd meant a letter.
He rose quietly, careful not to wake her, and carried a single candle down to the undercroft, where the Codex's newest quire sat waiting on the bench exactly where Aldith had left it that afternoon, three pages still blank at its end. He sat a long while before he wrote anything, the candle burning low, turning over the strange, vertiginous problem of trying to address a page to people who might never need to read it at all — or might need to read it far sooner than any of them were prepared for.
He thought of his mother first, which surprised him. Not Victoria, not the valley, not even Joan's quiet grave above the flume-race, but a woman three hundred years and one entire impossible world away, who had spent three years writing him letters about a leaking garage roof and a neighbor's badly behaved dog, never once knowing that every evening's small, ordinary comfort might be the last thing her son ever heard from home. He had never told her the truth of where he'd gone. He had let her believe, through some unspoken mercy neither of them had ever examined too closely, that the distance between them was simply distance, and not the specific, impossible, one-way kind that no letter of his own could ever cross back over.
He wrote to her first, though he knew the words would never reach her by any road the phone or the world could carry them. I don't know if you'll ever read this, he began, and then sat a long while with the candle guttering, uncertain how a man was supposed to summarize an entire second life to a mother who still believed, as far as he knew, that he had simply moved somewhere far away and grown quiet about visiting.
He wrote of Victoria — not the ledgers, not the ratifications and negotiations that filled most of what the valley knew of her, but the particular way she held her quill when she was working through a problem she hadn't yet solved, the small, unguarded softness in her voice on the rare evenings she let her guard down entirely. He wrote of Joan's tart, and Wat's grudging respect, and Hamo's slow unlearning of a certainty that had once nearly killed him. He wrote, finally, of the fear itself — not to frighten anyone who might one day read it, but because he understood, setting the words down, that a fear left unwritten had a way of curdling into something worse than the fear itself, while a fear written plainly, in his own hand, in ink that would outlast him regardless of what became of the glass in his tunic, felt, somehow, considerably easier to carry.
I don't know what happens when the number reaches zero, he wrote, near the end, his hand steadier than he expected it to be. I don't know if I go home, or simply stop, or become something in between that none of us have a word for yet. I know that I have spent three years building a life here that I did not expect to want as badly as I have come to want it, and that if this is the last thing I ever write, I would rather it be an account of what I loved than an accounting of what I feared losing.
He found Victoria awake when he finally climbed back up from the undercroft, sitting by the cold hearth with a shawl around her shoulders, waiting for him without any pretense of having simply happened to be there.
"You went and did it without me again."
"I needed to do this part alone. I promise the next part isn't." He sat beside her, the candle still in his hand, and found, for the first time since Oakhaven, that the weight in his chest had shifted into something he could actually hold rather than something that simply sat on him, crushing. "I wrote to my mother. And to you. I don't know if either of you will ever read it. I think I needed to write it regardless."
Victoria didn't ask to see it, not that night, only reached for his free hand and held it the way she had every difficult night since he'd first shown her the falling number, steady and unhurried, as though the mere fact of her continued presence were itself a kind of answer to every fear he hadn't yet found words plain enough to fully voice.
"Then let's build the next part together," she said. "Whatever it turns out to be."