I Won the Lottery and Went Back in Time!?!

The students’ season ended on the three hundred and ninety-second day and three of them started packing.

Nara went first, because Nara did everything first. She had a bundle, a posting at Havek’s camp, forty-one letters and a hand that Luma described as legible on a good day, and she spent two days telling everybody she was leaving in a way that suggested she was not entirely sure she wanted to.

Selora packed without saying anything, which by then surprised nobody.

Tevi packed twice, unpacked once, and asked Nayra a question at the end of it that he had plainly been holding for a season, which was whether the fourth camp could send somebody again next year.

Nayra said yes before he had finished the sentence.

Vethra did not pack.

She did not announce it either. She simply went on being at the ward in the morning, and on the third morning Nayra stopped in the doorway and looked at her for a while.

"You have a camp."

"Ei."

"Low Reed sent you against your will and your season is finished and you are still here."

Vethra was mending a splint binding, which she did when she wanted her hands busy, and she did not stop.

"Low Reed has two people who can set a bone and one who cannot but thinks she can, which is three more than most places, and my daughter has been running it since the wet without me and has not sent for me once."

She pulled the binding tight.

"And you have a hundred people coming down a road in five weeks, eight bad panels of wall, and a woman who counts as the only one on this terrace who has ever been in a camp on the day it was priced."

Nayra did not say anything.

"So I am not going home yet," Vethra said. "You may write that down however you like."

***

The eight panels became four when Sevik’s timber came up, and four was still more than Oren had days for.

He came in off the timber ground on the three hundred and ninety-fourth day with the count and gave it flatly, the way he gives everything.

Six panels done. Four to go. Thirty-one days.

Two men and a boy, at the rate they had been going, get through eleven in forty. Four in thirty-one is arithmetic that works on paper and does not work on a man of fifty-seven who has been up a ladder for six weeks.

"I am slower than I was in the second week," Oren said, and it cost him something to say it in front of people, and he said it anyway because a number given late is worse than a number given badly.

Kharun took it without a word.

Then Vethra, from the back of the platform, said the useful thing.

"Put the students on it."

Nara had gone. Selora and Tevi had not, because the boat downstream went every fourth day and they had missed one.

Vethra pointed that out, and then pointed out the rest of it, and she did it in the voice she used when a student had got the right answer badly.

"They have spent a season learning to hold a body’s weight without dropping it. That is what a panel is. They are nineteen and sixteen and they will not be as good as Oren and they will be better than nobody, and nobody is what you currently have."

Oren said the objection before Kharun could, and it was the correct objection.

"They are not builders. I will spend a day teaching them and lose a day."

"Ei. And then you will have three days a week you did not have."

Doran did the arithmetic out loud in about forty seconds and it came out at four panels in twenty-six days instead of thirty-one, with a margin of five days for the thing that always happens.

Nobody argued with it, which Leon noticed and thought about, because a season ago somebody would have.

Selora and Tevi were asked and both said yes, and Tevi said it fast enough that Leon understood he had been looking for a reason not to get on the boat.

They lost the day teaching them, exactly as Oren had said.

They got it back on the third day, exactly as Vethra had said.

And on the fifth day Selora, who had said almost nothing for a season and had listened to everything, asked Oren why the new posts were being charred to the same depth as the old ones when the old ones had rotted at the ground line and not below it.

Oren stopped what he was doing.

Then he put the adze down, which he did not do, and went and got the strip of bark with the seventy-four numbers on it, and sat down on the ground with a girl of about nineteen who had been in this settlement for a season and had never once volunteered an opinion, and went through it with her.

They came up with the same answer Leon would have and got there without him, and it took them about an hour.

You char below the line because it costs nothing and it works down there. You cannot char the line itself, because the line is where the post has to be sound and charring makes it brittle. So the line gets the best wood you have and the tightest packing, and you accept that it is the part that goes first, and you build the panel so that one post can come out without the two beside it coming out with it.

Oren changed four panels’ worth of joint design on the strength of a question from a healer’s student.

He did not make a speech about it. He wrote it on the bark, and the bark went back to Kel that evening, and Kel copied it into the register in the letters Leon had taught him, and Leon read it the next morning and had no corrections at all.

***

Nayra told Vethra that night that she could stay, formally, in front of Veya, because Vethra had made her say it out loud.

"For how long."

"Until you go."

"That is not a thing." Vethra put the splint down at last. "Say it as a thing or do not say it."

So Nayra said it as a thing, and it took her a moment to find the shape of it, because nobody on this river had ever needed the shape before.

Retharu has a second healer. She came from Low Reed and Low Reed did not lose her, because she goes back for two months of every dry season and takes whichever student is ready. The ward is Nayra’s. The teaching is both.

Veya asked one question.

"And when the two of you disagree?"

"Then there are two of us disagreeing in front of the patient," Vethra said, "instead of one of us being certain in front of the patient. I have watched certain kill people. I have never once watched an argument do it."