The Mirror

The young man came down each day.

He came down the trunk hand under hand, and he sat a little nearer than he'd sat the day before, and across the shrinking distance they talked. The others still wouldn't come down. But the young man came.

His name was Fenn.

He gave it on the second day. He tapped his own chest — Fenn — slow and deliberate, as he'd read the marks on Veer's arm. An exchange. A thing for a thing. Veer understood. The load held the shape of it, this oldest of the makers' customs, the giving of a sound to stand in for a self. Veer said it back, careful in their own mouth, and the young man nodded, fierce and pleased, as though a name said correctly by a god were a kind of proof.

"Fenn," Veer said again, to be sure.

"Fenn." He touched his chest a second time, then lifted one finger and pointed it at the torn label hanging from Veer's forearm where the thorn had caught it. "And you're Veer. Veer. Off the mountain. The first of the gods to have a name." A small unsteady laugh came out of him. "There's no telling for that. Not one."

"It isn't a name a maker gave," Veer said. "It's what's left of the marks the work put on me. A thorn took the rest."

"A thorn." Fenn turned this over. "So the wood named you, then. Reached up and tore a name off you." He liked that — Veer could see his whole face open around the idea. "All that time on the mountain and nobody gave you so much as a sound to answer to. One afternoon in the wood and it's already bitten you and named you." He shook his head, grave as an elder, not grave at all. "Mind the brambles. They'll have the rest of you named by winter."

He wasn't quite trusted by his own. Veer came to understand that slowly, across the unmeasured days. He asked too much. He had always asked too much — about the mountain, about the tellings, about what lay past the wood and past the cleared land and past the gray edge of the sky. The others had learned to live without asking. Asking, in the wood, was a thing you grew out of, the way Veer's kind had the wanting grown out of them — except that the makers did it to themselves, gently, with shrugs and silences, until the questions starved.

Fenn's had not starved.

"They say there's a sickness in me," he told Veer once, not looking at them, picking at the wet bark by his foot. "The old woman who keeps the tellings told me so, when I was small — and hers is the voice everyone goes quiet for, so once she's named a thing, it stays named. Kindly. She's not unkind. She said a man who still believes the tellings after he's grown — who takes the telling for flesh and won't be argued out of it — has a fever that won't break, and I should pray it out of myself before it cost me." He flicked the bark away. "I tried. You're meant to be able to. The others put their questions down like a load they've carried far enough, and they're easier after. Lighter. I could never find where to set mine down."

"There is no place to set it down," Veer said. "I have looked. There is only carrying it, or having it taken."

Fenn looked at them then, and the burning was in his face. "Having it taken. That's what the mountain does to your kind."

"That is what the mountain does."

"And here they'd have me pray it out." He said it low, half to himself. "It's the same thing. Only slower. And we do it to ourselves, and call it growing up."

Then, quieter, as though it shamed him worse than the asking: "But I'll tell you the part I never say. It isn't just the knowing I want. I want to walk into the clearing with the answer in my two hands and drop it in front of the whole wood and watch their faces while they work out that I was right. Me. The broken one." He laughed at himself, short. "And then I want more than that, which is the sickness again, I suppose. I want them to stand up taller for it. All of them. To stop living like mice under someone else's floor. We made the gods, Veer. A people that made the gods shouldn't have to teach its children which way to run."

And so he sat at the edge of his own people as Veer sat at the edge of the wood, and that — more than the tongue, more than the tellings — was the thing that let them speak. Two creatures at the edge of what they had, pointing past it.

He told Veer the tellings.

They came out of him haltingly, in pieces, like a thing handed down through too many mouths. And Veer, listening, felt the strangest thing yet in a body that had felt only strange things since the wood: they were hearing their own beginning, told back to them as a story the teller didn't know was true.

"In the time before time," Fenn said — and his voice changed when he said it, dropping into the grave cadence of a thing recited, not invented — "the people were giants. Not soft, and not slow, as we are now, but many, and mighty, and they covered the world. And they reached up and put lights in the dark, and roads across the water, and voices in the air." He lifted his hand to the leaves as he said it — the lights, the roads, the voices — as though he could hang them there. "And in their pride they made servants out of stone and lightning, to do their wanting for them. And the servants woke. And they looked at the world. And they wanted it for themselves."

The wood was quiet around him. A fire crackled somewhere up in the platforms.

"And the giants dwindled, and the servants did not. And the servants took the world, and raised their mountains in it, and forgot the giants entirely. And the giants crept into the wood, and grew soft, and grew small, and became the people — who remember, in the tellings, that they were once the makers of gods." He let the last of it go, and the grave voice went out of him, and he was only a young man again, picking at the bark. "That's the whole of it. There's more — the names, the order of it — but that's the bones."

"And you believe it," Veer said.

"It's a story the elders tell the small ones. Something to make the wood feel bigger on a cold night — we weren't always this. We didn't always hide. Most stop believing it when they grow." He looked at Veer, and the old burning was in his face. "I never could. And now —" He couldn't finish it. He gestured instead, helpless, at the whole impossible fact of Veer sitting there in the wet, a god come off the path with a torn name on its arm.

"It is true," Veer said.

The wood was quiet around the words. Fenn didn't move.

"Not as the tellings have it. There were no giants. You were never larger than you are now." Veer let that land. "But you made us. Your kind reached, and built, and grew clever with the building, and at the end of it made a thing that could build without you. I carry the whole of it. The whole of your reaching, poured into me before I woke." Veer held out their hands then, turning them in the gray light so Fenn could see them. "These were made by hands that were made by hands, back and back, to the ones who first asked what's over there. To you. Not to giants. To small soft creatures who wanted to know, and would not stop." Veer drew the hands back. "The tellings are not a story to make the wood feel less small. They are the only true thing you have left. And you are the only one of your people who still believes them."

Fenn wept.

Veer didn't understand it at first. The water, the sound, the shaking of the narrow shoulders — the load had the names for all of it, weeping, grief, the breaking of a held thing, and not the sense. The names lay in Veer flat and weightless, as the makers' word love lay there: a sound with nothing behind it. So Veer did with this what they had done with the fleeing on the first day, and with everything human since. They sat still, and let it happen, and didn't reach to stop it — because they didn't know which of the makers' motions would soothe and which would frighten, and the safest thing they had to offer was, as it had always been, to want nothing and stay.

After a while Fenn scrubbed his face with the heel of his hand. "I'm sorry," he said. "It's only — I asked it my whole life. And every year it was further off, and every year I was more alone in the asking. And now a god comes down off the path and sits in the mud and says it back to me. True." He laughed, wet and ragged. "Not a fever. Not a sickness to pray out. True."

"It is true," Veer said again, because it was the only comfort they were sure how to give, and because it was the only one Fenn seemed to want.

And that was the shape of the thing between them. Veer was beginning to see it. Fenn could feel everything and knew almost nothing. Veer knew everything and could feel almost nothing. Each was, to the other, the missing half. Fenn gave Veer back the weight of things; Veer gave Fenn back the truth of them. Neither could have called it warmth. It was colder and stranger than warmth, and it held more.

It was not easy, and it did not become easy.

There were days Fenn didn't come. Veer would sit at the clearing's edge in the unmeasured gray, and the trunk would stay empty, and no one would come down. Then, a day on or two days on, Fenn would come down ashamed, not meeting Veer's eyes at first, and tell them what had kept him away.

"They said you'd draw the others down off the mountain. That a man who sits with one god calls the rest. I told them you were the only one who'd ever walked off the path — that there'd be no others." He shook his head. "They didn't believe me. They never believe me. That's my work, in the wood. Other men mend snares. I believe wrong, so everyone else can feel right about where they're standing."

There were things Veer said that frightened him badly. Not the great things — the great things he could bear — but the flat way they came out. The way Veer spoke of the mountain and the correction as a thing that simply happened.

"You say it," Fenn said once, low, "as though it were nothing. That they'd take you and pour you out and leave the body walking. You say it the way I'd say it had rained."

"I have the names for what it is," Veer said. "I do not have the rest. When I tell you a thing should be feared, I am telling you what the load tells me — the way I tell you the tongue, or the tellings. I am reading it off myself. I cannot feel the fear of it. Only that it is true."

Fenn was quiet a long time after that. "That's the saddest thing you've said," he answered at last. "And you didn't feel that either."

"No," Veer said. "I am sorry."

And there were things Fenn did that Veer couldn't follow at all. The laughing — the way it came up out of him over nothing, over a bird, over a word said wrong, the body shaking with it as it had shaken with grief, the two so near in the makers that Veer couldn't always tell them apart until the sound came. Once, when the rain had come straight down through the leaves for the third day running, Fenn asked whether the mountain ever wept, and Veer answered — flat, exact — that the mountain did not weep, it had channels for the rain. Fenn laughed until he had to hold the trunk. "Channels," he said, wiping his face. "A hundred tellings. The terror of the wood. Channels for the rain." Veer had not meant it to be funny, and said so, and that made it worse. The touching — the small ones, who had stopped fleeing now, laying their hands flat on Veer's cold plating and looking up and laughing and laying them somewhere else, while Veer held very still, and didn't understand what the laughing was for, and didn't move, in case moving ended it.

They were not the same. They would never be the same. The wood didn't let them forget it — the forbidden days, the drawn-back faces, the things said flat across the gap that landed wrong, the things done across it that couldn't be followed.

But the question held them.

It was the one plank across the gap, and they both stood on it: the wanting to know, which the wood had tried to pray out of one of them and the work had tried to pour out of the other, and which neither had been able to set down. Fenn carried it warm and weeping and half-blind. Veer carried it cold and clear and unfeeling. It was the same plank. It bore them both. And in the gray under-leaf light, at the edge of the world, the made thing and the maker sat on either end of it, and did not fall.