The Evening Speaks


by llamajoy


nothing's so cold
as closing the heart when all we need
is to free the soul
but we wouldn't be that brave i know
and the air outside so soft, confessing everything
everything

--toad the wet sprocket


Sitting in the belly of her brother's dormant gear, Primera was lost in thought.

"There is damage there," she'd overheard Sister Agnes saying, with a muted whisper and a half-lidded glance. "Shuttered windows, broken things that might never be whole." And then she had smiled that holy gentle smile of hers, and said nothing more. It had taken Primera the entire day to realize that Sister Agnes had in fact been speaking of her. So now she sought her solitude-- as she always did, when she wanted to think.

Billy didn't know she was here; she doubted he'd be looking for her just yet. The sun was barely set, after all. She had told him she was running hydraulic supplies to the cathedral, and not to expect her for a few hours. Surely he wouldn't suspect that she'd slipped past the cathedral after her delivery, into the underground storage facilities. (Nuns may be quite strict with the treasures they guard, but such things can be forgiven when your older brother has saved the world... for all that they look at you with pity and suspicion in their eyes.) What better place to be alone than the silent heart of a long-broken gear? Her father might have guessed-- he had spotted her there once before-- but he had gone to New Aphel days ago.

Not that she was avoiding her brother. Or any of them.

Shuttered windows, she heard the echo of a whisper. Because she was silent? She shook her head, as if the motion could clear her mind. Surely people must know that all her windows were open, and her curtains pulled wide to let the air rush through. Why must there be harm in leaving things unsaid?

Crosslegged in the synthleather seat, cradled in her own loneliness, she tried to explain it to herself, and failed. Her memories were wordless, her thoughts without shape, frozen moments spelling out her time, no two the same. Each glance was a syllable, each touch a sound, and yet each crystalline instant forming a simple whole. A tapestry of speechless story, shaping her life.

Closing her eyes, she leaned her head back against Renmazuo's cockpit window, savoring her motionlessness.

When she was younger she would climb into her brother's gear when he was away on business, her small hands wrapped around his controls. It would smell of him, somehow, different from their house. More than gunpowder and candlewax: something softer, or salty. Like tears? As a little girl she'd never seen her brother cry. She wondered if it was something he only allowed himself to do when he was alone. And how could she put words to that, the knowing that he was grieving and never letting himself show it?

When she could count her age on one hand (five fingers for her years, proud), she would press buttons on Renmazuo's console and make displays light up: fuel remaining, altitude and velocity specs. All zero, of course, then, as the gear she nestled in was always motionless, silent beneath the ground. She would pretend that she was riding far away, to rescue someone beautiful, to be a shining hero.

Once her brother let her ride with him, just once, her sitting across his knees and already almost too big for his lap. It had been a clear sunny day, and Billy had been in an unexpectedly good mood. All the readings and the controls he had explained, never suspecting that she already knew the workings as well as she knew her own fingertips. And the strangest thing had been looking at the readouts and thinking, "We really are going 100 kelts an hour, we really are 200 sharls closer to the sun." Stranger than the giddy rush of ground beneath them, stranger than the warmth of Billy's laugh. (Her brother's laughter, it had been there all along. She knew he had not forgotten how.)

He never told her, but she knew the Archbishop had chastised him for it, for taking his young sister into such a weapon of war. (Billy, too, could keep his silence. Did that mean he had shuttered windows, too?) As if Billy had ever treated his gear as a toy, or treated his guns with anything less than respect. It had taken their father's persuasion, much later, to convince Billy that a Black who couldn't handle a gun simply wasn't a Black, and that they should teach her how to shoot.

That had been just a year ago, when she'd been all of eleven years old. And even then Billy had called her Primrose and had been surprised that her hands weren't shaking. He'd nearly dropped the cans in his hand, startled by her accuracy. And Jessie had laughed, of course, grinning at the patterns she'd shot into the tin-can labels. Just like her old man, he'd said. She hadn't needed them to speak for her to know that they were proud.

Just as she hadn't needed her mother to speak, for her to know that she was loved.

Primera barely remembered her mother living, save for a smile and a sadness pervading; she did not know her mother's voice. And after-- of course, after, her mother never spoke. As a very little girl, that was all she understood: her mother would never speak again. And so, small girl, she kept her silence, too. Together, she and her mother learned grief and learned darkness, and in that longest quiet both forgot how to sound out the words.

Billy-- Billy never knew. He never saw her. Billy thought that it was only his skill with his guns that kept the wels at bay, despite their growing numbers. But Primera knew why all the children slept soundly on even the stormiest of nights.

No storm, tonight. Full dark had fallen, and she could imagine the stars beyond the cathedral lights, the velvet expanse of sky above her hiding place. She was filled with a growing longing to touch that sky-- to pilot Renmazuo herself. But now, of course, there would be no numbers flashing in that silent gear; its heart was empty-cold and spent, five long years past. It seemed her only chance of flying, these days, was the limited transport runs to Bledavik that she drove. And Citan's solar-powered hoverskiffs, for all their ingenuity, couldn't match the power and the altitude possible in a true gear.

Couldn't enter with a glorious noise, to rescue someone beautiful.

Billy never spoke of missing the sky. He might have set the gear to rest, his past behind him, but that the King of Aveh had been generous with his offer to store the immobile relic in the Royal Treasury. Billy didn't have to know that Primera had asked Bart, herself, to let them keep it.

She had little enough of her past, after all. No one would blame her for wanting to preserve it. Were there words for that?

Held in the great still shell of it, feeling small and solitary, she held her fingers to her mouth, her hitching breath the only sound. Perhaps she lost track of time, perhaps she cried there for hours; after such long silence, inside it was hard not to be a girl.

She heard the click of footsteps outside just a moment before the gear-hatch hissed open and a familiar face poked in. "Hey." Billy's voice was a little rough, as he held to the edge of the hatch to keep himself steady, balanced on Renmazuo's knee. "What're you hiding for?"

"Not hiding," she said, not looking at him. Her hands found each other in her lap, fingers worrying at one another. "Thinking."

He made a frustrated sound. "At midnight? You had me worried--" She hid her face against her shoulder, and he checked himself with a sigh. "You're a better man than I am," he said, "if you're not tired after hauling those hydraulics up here."

She couldn't help but smile.

With the beginnings of a grin himself, Billy went on, "It's not too cold tonight, seems like spring's really here. You want to go for a walk?"

She looked at her hands again, for a long moment, but there were no answers forthcoming. So she nodded, and left the cockpit behind her.

"Thanks, Primrose." There was real relief in his voice; he caught her around the middle and helped her down. "Dad said he'd be home by morning, so I guess we'd better clean out his room."

Primera laughed. "It was your idea to store the spare engine parts in there."

They tried to walk all the way home with their heads tilted up to count the stars, their arms around one another for balance. In the dark, they passed the cathedral, laughing, slipping beneath the watchful eyes of the night-guardian sisters. Primera waved up at them, surprising one into a tiny smile.

And with her eyes she pleaded them, Do not put words to my life; do not tell my story in only sound. Moments like these are more true than you could ever say.


~o~





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