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

They came down the north path on the four hundred and twenty-fifth day at the middle of the morning, and there were twenty-two of them, and that was the first thing that went wrong.

Everybody had planned for a hundred. Every stopping place, every timing, every one of the four surveys had a hundred in it, because a party that assembles at a wide flat eleven days out and cuts a hundred days of firewood is a party of a hundred.

Tala had said otherwise two nights ago, off the shape of the trodden ground, and had marked it a guess the way she marks everything, and Doran had written it down, and not one plan on that terrace had moved a finger’s width.

Nobody had ignored her. That was the part Leon could not get comfortable with afterwards. They had heard her, and written her down, and had nothing to do with it.

Twenty-two walked out of the close country in a loose file with nothing in their hands, at a pace that suggested they had all morning.

Leon understood it before they reached the gate and did not enjoy understanding it.

A hundred is what you bring when you are not sure of the answer.

Twenty-two is what you bring when you have already had the answer for a season and you are coming to write it down.

Six of them were armed and not carrying it in any way that meant anything. Four were young and carried the loads. The rest were what Leon eventually settled on calling staff, for want of a Rethari word, and Doran later found a better one.

They walked into a settlement that had been rehearsed and did not look at the wall.

That was the second thing. Kharun had spent forty days on eight panels, and two hundred paces of a fresh repair sat on their left as they came in, and one of them glanced at it and none of them stopped.

The third thing was that they knew where the gate was, and which path went to the granary, and that the council ground was on the flat below it, and nobody had to be shown anything.

The older woman from the thirty-third day was with them.

Leon knew her at about eighty metres and felt his stomach go, and he had time on the way down to be honest with himself about why.

Not because she was frightening. She was not. She was a woman of about fifty-five in unremarkable hide with a walking staff she did not need, and she had come here in the autumn of last year with two others, brought nothing to trade, stayed three hours, counted households, and greeted him by a name that a scout had invented for him on a riverbank in his first week.

She had my name eleven months ago and she has had four hundred days to think about what it means.

She came up the last of the path and stopped in front of Kharun, correctly, and greeted him first and Veya second, and got both of those exactly right in a way that took Luma about four seconds to register and go slightly still about.

Then she said her name, which she had not done in the autumn.

"Anev."

They did not begin.

That was the fourth thing and it undid about half of what the rehearsal had built.

Doran had prepared four numbers and a set of rules for giving them. Vethra had stood at a gate for a morning. Everybody had agreed what a basket was.

And Anev sat down on the mat she was offered, and drank what she was given, and asked after Kharun’s arm.

Not the wall. Not the store. The arm — the shield-arm contusion he had taken in the collapse on the second day, four hundred and twenty-three days ago, which had been cleared in the spring and which nobody outside this settlement had any business knowing about at all.

Kharun said it was well.

"Good," Anev said, and asked after the man who had gone through the ice at the mineral seep, whose name she did not have, and who was Bren, and whose shoulder had been opened by an Aertal on the seventh day.

It went on like that for most of the morning and it was the worst hour Leon had experienced in a long time, because there was nothing in it to resist.

She was not threatening anybody. She was being courteous, at length, accurately, about a settlement she had visited once for three hours a year ago.

And every question she asked was a receipt.

She is telling us how much she already has. Not by saying it. By spending it.

Every name she puts on this mat is one we did not give her today, and by the time she asks her first real question we will all know that she does not need the answer.

Doran worked it out at about the same time and Leon watched him decide not to do anything about it, which was correct and cost him.

***

The first actual question came at the middle of the day, on the council ground, and it was not about anything they had rehearsed.

"How many people can write?"

The council ground went quiet in a way that Leon felt on the back of his neck.

Doran gave the number, because Doran gives numbers, and he did not hesitate, because hesitating would have been an answer.

"Four."

"Which four."

"Myself. The Varu. A man with a broken leg. And a girl of nineteen who left for Havek’s camp eleven days ago."

Anev turned that over for a moment with no expression at all.

"And the children."

"They are learning."

"How many."

"Six," Doran said. "Seven, when the small one’s brother stops pretending he is not interested."

She let that sit, and then she smiled, and it was a perfectly ordinary smile from a woman of fifty-five who has been walking for eleven days.

"You answer well," Anev said. "The last two places I asked that in did not understand the question."

It was Veya who asked the only question anybody from Retharu asked all day, and she asked it in the late afternoon, and she asked it the way she asks everything, which is never about the thing.

"Who do you count for?"

Anev put her cup down.

"You have not asked that in two visits."

"I am asking now."

And she said a name that Leon had heard three times in fourteen months and had never once had explained — on a platform in the spring of his first year, said twice by Veya and not glossed, with Oren stopping mid-movement and a storage keeper looking at the ground; again beside a folding saw going east; again on a spur with four cleaned watching positions on it.

"Rothen," Anev said.

And she said it the way you say the name of an employer, without any weight on it whatsoever, and went back to her cup, and about nine people on that council ground did not move at all.