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

Leon did not make him.

He spent four days working out how to and then took it to Doran instead, which was the second-best available choice and which he suspects was also the cowardly one, and Doran took about nine seconds to find the thing Leon had walked past.

"His first reason."

"They have not asked."

"Ei." Doran had the hide out already, because he had been waiting for somebody to come to him about it and had not been prepared to go first. "Ask me the next question."

Leon did not have the next question.

"Has anybody made it possible for them to ask?"

***

That is the whole of the chapter and it took the settlement about an hour to be ashamed of itself.

Retharu publishes a count. Six camps, five carriers, one morning, every year, whether it is more or less.

Retharu will read anybody's copy against the master, free, without notice, in a bad year, and turn nobody away.

Retharu has terms written down for people who arrive with nothing, and four days of food at the end of them written first so that nobody has to ask.

None of it has ever been sent to Toran.

Not out of anything. Toran is three reaches up. The carriers go where the carriers have always gone, and that list was made in one afternoon two years ago by four tired people and has never been looked at since.

"We wrote a rule that says anybody may come," Doran said, at the fire. "And then we told six camps about it. There are perhaps eleven camps on this river and I could not name four of the others."

***

Kharun's four reasons were read back and three of them survived and one did not.

That was Doran's method and it is the reason nobody could accuse him of doing anything to Kharun.

They know their own ground: stands.

Retharu has two hundred and nine baskets and a hundred and seventy-six mouths: stands, and nobody is proposing to send food.

Nobody here can see into the ground: stands as far as it goes, and Leon said so himself, and said the other half of it out loud this time in front of everybody, which he should have done in the first place.

They have not asked: does not stand. Not because it is untrue. Because it is a fact about Retharu.

Kharun heard all of that in public, from a man he made keeper, in front of a hundred and forty people.

He did not defend himself and he did not agree either, which Leon watched carefully and thought about afterwards.

"Say what you want to do," he said.

"Send them the count."

***

It is a very small thing and it took two evenings, because Doran would not let it be smaller.

Not a message. Not an offer. Not a survey and not a man asking questions about a spring.

The count, the same one that went to six camps in the spring, unaltered, with the last line on it — and with it, on a separate page, in plain words, four things Retharu does that Toran has no way of knowing about.

Anybody may bring a page here and have it read against ours, free.

Anybody who arrives may work on written terms, and the terms are these, and here they are in full.

We publish this number every year whether it is more or less, and you may have it every year if you want it, and you owe nothing for it.

And there are eleven camps on this river and we have only ever sent this to six, and that was our fault and not yours.

The fourth one was Kiri's. She wrote it on the practice page and left it where Doran would see it, which is how she says everything.

There was a fifth line and it did not go on.

Vethra proposed it, on the second evening, in about eleven words, and she is the only person there who has ever been on the receiving end of an offer from a richer place.

We have a man who may be able to tell you why your spring is going.

Doran refused it and gave two reasons and Leon agreed with both of them at the time and has copied them into the register so that he cannot pretend later that he did not.

The first is that Leon has not stood on that ground. He has three or four ideas about a failing spring and no way of choosing between them from three reaches away, and a page that goes out of this settlement does not carry a guess — which has been the rule since the germination test went downriver and came back counted at three days.

The second is worse and Doran said it plainly.

"A camp of two hundred and forty on ground older than the cord does not want to be told, by a place that did not exist when its grandmother was born, that we have a man who knows about their water." He rolled the hide. "That is not an offer. That is a verdict with a courtesy on the front of it."

Leon said he agreed.

He wrote that he agreed. In his own hand, on the page, with the day on it, because that is the arrangement and he asked for it.

***

The argument was about who carried it and it went on for a whole evening and was the ugliest thing that settlement had done in a year.

Half the ground wanted Kharun to go.

Their reasons were warm and stupid. He is from there. His father is alive. Thirty years. It would mean something.

Nayra killed it in about four sentences and did not enjoy it.

"If he walks up that reach, everything on those two pages stops being what it says and becomes a man coming home with something." She did not look at Kharun. "And when Tor reads it he will not be reading a count. He will be reading his son. And whatever it says, that is not what he will hear."

Kharun said one thing all evening.

"She is right and I would like it written that she said it and not me."

***

They sent Tala.

Not because she is the scout. Because she is the only person there who can go three reaches up, hand over two pages, answer truthfully whatever she is asked, refuse to be drawn on anything else, and come back — and because she has never in her life wanted anything from anybody.

She took eleven days each way and one carrier and no gift of any kind, which Doran insisted on and which about nine people found rude.

"A gift is an offer," he said. "An offer is a thing they have to answer. Two pages is a thing they can put down."

***

She came back on the thirteen hundred and sixty-second day and gave it in four sentences at the fire, the way she gives everything.

They took the pages. A man read them out, badly, in front of about sixty people, which means somebody at Toran can read, which nobody at Retharu had known and which is now the single most interesting fact anybody has learned this year.

They asked three questions. All three were about the terms.

Nobody asked about the water.

And an old man sat at the back of the ground the whole time and did not say anything and did not come up afterwards, and Tala, who was told nothing and had asked for nothing, said one more sentence and then would not be drawn.

"He watched me the whole way out to the path."