That night, for the first time since the monastery, Corvin did not sleep well for reasons other than the city.
He lay in the fisherman's shelter Dain had found a mile south of the lighthouse — a storage structure, unused in the off-season, stone walls and a board floor and the specific smell of salt and old rope — and looked at the ceiling and thought about the mathematics.
Six points. Less than two weeks. Tight but possible.
Possible was not the problem.
The problem was what he was thinking about when he was not thinking about the mathematics. The thing that arrived in the quiet when the calculation finished and the cold-clarity had nothing immediate to work on.
His mother.
He had been careful not to think about her directly. He had filed her in the not-now category with considerable deliberate effort since the Abbot's floor — had filed the road impression of her, the Aelwyn gift's coastal frequency in the stone three hundred years deep, the winter before the massacre, the last journey she made carrying him. He had filed Borin's description of her — warmer, more immediately present, the one who made the estate feel alive. He had filed the fragment of his father's letter — the three days I had with him were the most complete three days of my life.
He had filed all of it.
In the fisherman's shelter with the sea audible through the walls and the lighthouse visible through the single small window, the not-now category declined to stay closed.
He lay with this.
He did not try to close it again. He had been filing things for three weeks and the category was very full and in the specific honest way of his own psychology he understood that the full category was not the same as a resolved one. He had been doing the work. He had been doing it because the work was real and urgent and genuinely required everything he had. That had not made the other things less real. It had simply made them secondary.
They were not secondary now.
He was seventeen years old and his home had burned and his name had been false and he had spent three weeks learning what he was in the specific context of what it required of him, and somewhere in the learning he had not spent time with the simpler fact.
He had had parents.
They had been killed when he was three days old.
He had never known them and would never know them and the closest he had to them was a road impression and a field practitioner's account and four sentences in a letter that had been written for a night like this specific night.
He lay in the fisherman's shelter and let this be true.
He did not cry. He was not certain if this was because the grief had not yet arrived in that form or because he had been managing his internal states with such consistent precision for his entire life that the form itself was not easily available. He suspected both.
What arrived was not crying.
What arrived was the specific quality of understanding the full weight of something that had been present since the monastery's burning but that he had not yet held completely. The weight of being the last of something. Of being the continuation of people who had been killed before he was old enough to have any memory of them. Of carrying a function they had carried and a fragment they had kept and a tradition they had maintained for four hundred years, without ever having been given the ordinary transmission of any of it — without a father's hands showing him how, without a mother's voice telling him what it felt like, without the accumulated ordinary intimacy of a family that knew what it was.
He was doing it alone and he had always been going to do it alone and his father had known this and had written the letter anyway and his mother had walked the coastal road one last time carrying him and had not known whether what she was carrying would ever be able to do what she hoped it would do.
He lay with all of this.
He held it.
He let it be what it was without filing it.
After a long time the weight became — not lighter. Held. The specific quality of something that had been floating beyond reach and had now been brought in close enough to carry properly.
He pressed his hand to the locket.
Warm.
The working's frequency. The living specification. The continuity that did not require his knowledge of it to be real.
He thought about location of self.
He thought about his father sitting in the standing stone formation for four hours until he understood something he didn't have words for.
He thought about what it meant that the understanding had come at the same formation.
He lay in the fisherman's shelter.
He slept.