“Oh that’s right, I haven’t told you about the ice house yet! I mean, yes, I do need to work to get food, but I have plenty now and most of it won’t keep. The junk in the villagewillthough. I don’t have to keep a specific schedule—”
A marvel.
What is it like, to have the freedom to decide what you do with your day? With all your days?
I shy away from the prospect; the responsibility of it.
But part of me also yearns for it.
“—And it’s not like anyone is going to miss me,” Tasa explains.
I can’t believe that. Or rather: I can believe her. And I have seen humans at their lowest. Intellectually, I understand what she’s saying.
But in my gut, the place where my power comes from, I can’t believe it.
I debate what I want to say, because it may change things. I am a deliberate person. Idon’tsay things I don’t mean, and I think she’s beginning to believe me.
But ultimately, I simply can’t let this stand.
“I would,” I tell her softly.
Her eyes brighten, and that’s enough.
It’s worthwhile, becausesheis worthwhile.
It’s a start.
Chapter 5
Kovan
Themorningisprecious;precarious.
After storing Tasa’s latest haul in the workshop—which, when I open the door, gives her a glimpse of the disaster I’ve made of it and she falls over laughing at me, which is a new and unexpectedly charming experience—I remind Tasa she wanted to tell me about the ice house, and she shows me: a small stone building near the temple.
She’s lucky, she says, that it wasn’t simply attached to Celestial Sanctuary, or she wouldn’t be able to access it. And it has huge stores of food from the expected upkeep of dozens of priests.
Dozens of priests, dead instantly at a sage’s hand.
Is that the kind of grand work I want to do?
On the other hand, is it enough to water a single plant?
The spells on the ice house are broken, but it will work anyway for much of the year; the real problem is that there’s no way to replenish the ice, because the system to bring ice from the top of the mountain down requires multiple people, and she—and now I—aren’t enough to make it work.
Some works require more people.
I know this, intellectually, but between Tasa’s unending knowledge and my being accustomed to solving problems singlehandedly, it feels like a blow.
But there’s no sage power in the world—determination or wrath or joy or ingenuity—that can substitute for the simple need for more hands working on a problem.
A humbling reminder.
I bring out the massive book to note down whatisin the ice house, since Tasa can’t remember, and then we retreat back to the coziness of her cottage. As we sit next to each other on her couch—very carefully not touching, though the warmth of her, at my side, is impossible to put out of my mind—she tells me how long each food will last and from that she takes me through working out a plan for what to cook based on what needs to be eaten first, and what will need supplementing.
It’s a fascinating puzzle, and one I have a very limited understanding of. The priests take care of all my food, but more than that, they can use spells to preserve food, spells that apparently most people can’t afford. So food that I’ve been able to eat year-round simply isn’t accessible to Tasa.
More thanthat, though, is the more visceral understanding of how the labor of other people to see to my base needs is what truly enabled me to grow into my power; to have the space to.
