Persil's Sorrow

Evenshade, the morning after the Night of Silent Flames (1426 DR).

The bells began wrong—jerked and uneven, as if the men on the ropes were trying to outpace their own hands.  The river crews formed a line from the mill race with buckets and hooks; the Chionthar gave what it could, late and cold.  By dawn, the eastern wing of the manor stood in ribs and charcoal, beams like the black trees of an orchard after a winter burn.  The sun came up, but only because it always did.

Behind the library hearth, metal cooled.  Persil Evenshade lay in the cramped space his mother had shown him once and named never again.  She’d taught him to hide the way a page slides into a book—straight, quiet, and leaving no bulge.  When the iron gave up its heat he pushed, and the plate tipped.  Daylight entered as plainly as a guest who has been told the door is open.

He stepped into a corridor that had been rearranged by heat and water.  Smoke stained everything at a level he would someday outgrow.  The flagstones held his father as if after a long day, boots still on.  His mother was not there.  The place where she had fallen had already begun to look like floor again.  Houses have no talent for preserving outlines.

Persil did not call out.  In Evenshade, even children knew which names, if spoken, would call back a silence too large for them.  He walked through a broken doorway into morning.  The Watch stood bareheaded, helmets under arm, faces the same color as the ash on their sleeves.  At the mill race, women dipped aprons and carried water to smother hot patches and smoke that wouldn’t admit it had nothing left to eat.

A woman with a half-moon scar on her cheek found Persil first.  She smelled of rope tar and river wind, the odor of departures that return.  She set both hands on his shoulders and said, “Come,” with the ordinary tone people use when they mean, You’re going to the kitchen now.  Later he would learn her badge and tune: Harper—one of the kind who arrive where causes have come apart and leave before gratitude can harden into debt.  She wrapped him in a damp cloak that smelled of river silt.

They walked down the hill to the orchard that enveloped the Temple-Library of Oghma.  The villagers simply called it "the library" because, being so filled with books in every single wall, it was more obviously a library than a place of worship.  The doors were wide on their hinges.  Windows stood open for smoke and people both.  At the center lectern there was no book.  On days of loss they left it empty, so there would be room for what hadn’t yet been said.

Up on the mezzanine a narrow run of bookshelves kept a gap—the Quiet Shelf.  The librarians kept stacks of blank paper there, not to threaten authors but to make space for what had been torn away.  Someone gently pushed a sheet into Persil’s hands.  It was the color of bread crumbs on a cutting board.  He held the pencil upright and honest the way his mother had held a pen-dagger when she sharpened quills.  He wrote four words without ceremony or pause: mother father brothers sister.  He slid the paper into the place left for it.  The shelf accepted the gentle weight, and partly absorbed the sheet into the smooth stone shelf, as though it were wet.

 The archivist came—an old man whose handwriting had never learned to hurry. He set another sheet, titled it in a careful hand: A Night Without Sound. Beneath it he wrote: Some losses are counted in names, titles, relationships.  The ledger can count those.  Let the margins of the book of life hold the better details to remember.

There was a second practice in Evenshade at that time, and it was for the living, not the dead.  The archivist took Persil to the ancient tower at the village edge.  Its roof was sharply pitched; the wind had the habit of climbing it the way a child takes stairs.  Persil had loved the tower over the entirety of his nine years.  Now the stones pressed back at his soles as if to keep him aware of his balance.

 At the top, on a linen cloth, lay the Loss Ledger—a blue-edged book that took confession without promising anything it couldn’t keep. A quill waited in a cup of ink that smelled faintly of iron and rain. “Write down the facts,” the archivist said, “and follow with what you think is meaningful in your grief.  Both fit.”

Persil wrote in the short lines of someone paying from his own pocket:

 What I know:

• the fire gave no warning
• the house is burned and hot and black
• mother and father and my two brothers and my sister are dead
• the hiding place worked
• I kept breathing
• my hands shake but I can write
• the watch and river men came but the house still fell

 What I want to know:

• who made the fire and where it started
• if it was pirates or the black-badge men the grown-ups whisper about
• where I will sleep tonight
• who will tell me what to do now and if I will now be Baron with my family gone
• who keeps our keys and books
• how to stop seeing the flames when I shut my eyes
• how to talk without crying and listen like mother did
• how to not be angry and still remember
• how to keep breathing tomorrow and the next day

And then Persil signed his name, carefully and thoughtfully.  The archivist—who had outlived battles and harvests and the quarrels that belong to both—nodded, as if a question from years ago had finally found a clean answer.

For a while the Harpers kept Persil in the way they knew how—present, overlooked, fed. The woman with the half-moon scar brought bread wet with tea and a small knife wrapped at the hilt in sailcloth. “For reminding,” she said. “Sometimes a hand needs to hold a thing so it doesn’t close into a fist.” She did not ask him to be brave. In Evenshade, bravery was a seasoning added after the stew had started to cook.

Down in the council hall, the village crowded in. Baroness Sandibar was dead. Lord Ulden was dead. All but one of their children were among the dead.  Those who had loved the baroness—and argued with her honestly—agreed on the essentials: the Council would keep the accounts, pay the masons, and decline all offers of outside “protection” that required tribute or control.  In the absence of a Baron or Baroness, the Council would elect a leader each year so the office stayed a duty, not a throne.  Some of them held that the Evenshade line had snapped.  Others, looking at the same thin fiber, consisting of a single young boy, said that Persil could, and should, carry the line.  He was a sweet boy, a conscientious boy. 

 Each tenth day, Persil and the archivist climbed to the old tower to access the ledger.  Grief in Evenshade did not proceed like a road; it went in turns and pauses, the way an old man negotiates the steps on a stair.  Persil added what had grown into his mind:

• Some mornings I cannot bring Father’s voice to mind.  The day is too quiet and I don’t trust it.
• Some hours I hear all of them at once. It feels like the floor goes away and I’m holding on.
• The river helps me and scares me on the same morning. Both can be true and I am still here.
• When I hold the pencil tight, I can write things I can’t say out loud.

 Above the last line the archivist wrote: Grief is that chair that lets us rest between aching smiles. The ink dried into the page in a way that felt as if time had been made visible and left there.

The Harpers, who prefer harvests to riots, convinced the First Folk to speak of pirates instead of Zhentarim.  That wasn’t a lie, just a season’s choice.  The Watch mended boots.  Neighbors shared timber that still smelled like fresh beginnings.  The mill race took up its old errands.  The captured raiders told what they knew and what they were willing to invent; both were sorted and given to the law, which doesn’t trust how memory edits for comfort.

In the second year, when he could pass a door without checking whether it would refuse him, Persil slid a blank page into the Quiet Shelf for the manor itself.  The council had chosen to rebuild the wing, and to a greater size, connecting the manor directly to the Council House. "It is wise," they said, "to make way for a new age of prosperity and unity between the Council and the people."  They planted a ring of hawthorns and left the center to the sky.  The new page settled between spines with the dry sound truth makes when it sits down contently and intends to remain.

As he grew older, Persil practiced the arithmetic of listening, adding valuable insights and subtracting distractions. The Watch taught him how men set their arms, feet, and faces before they lie.  The merchants taught him the two kinds of we—the one that invites and the one that lassoes.  And his friends taught him the pure, non-transactional joy of being silly—where loss and hurt can sink below the laughter.  He carried those habits up the tower steps like bread he had helped bake.  When his temper gathered at his teeth, he wrote it instead.  The ledger kept what he wasn’t ready to carry and returned it later, cooled but meaningful.

One year—the ledger didn’t care which—the woman with the scar left a folded message tucked into some sailcloth.  She did it with the care someone uses to cover a sleeping child.  Persil did not open it, as It was not addressed to him, and in Evenshade, sailcloth protected messages still in transit.  He pulled the paper loose from the canvas and slid it into the Quiet Shelf, where it, too, dissolved into the smooth stone.  A faint crystalline 'ping' sounded somewhere in the ancient tower, and dazzling sunlight streamed in through the multicolored stained glass windows.

The Quiet Shelf was again bare, except for the ledger, which was suddenly a half-inch thick.  With a smile, Persil snatched the book from the shelf and held it close to his breast for a moment.  He looked down at it, pulled open the cover, and read the new title—words that attached themselves to that event forever more.

The Night of Silent Flames.