The Kiln District

Sela lived where the Ash kilns reddened the evening before sunset could. Her mother glazed cups; her father burned bricks; she stitched people. The household smelled of clay, vinegar, and old smoke. When the war began, customers wanted vessels large enough to store grain against siege. Then they wanted vessels small enough to carry while running. Now they mostly wanted roof tiles for houses they hoped still existed. No council could negotiate with the wet seam above the quarry, whose widening crack threatened an island of displaced prisoners and brought four rescuers toward the same riverbank before they could agree to trust one another.

At the infirmary, wounded men demanded separate benches according to tribe. Sela removed the benches. On mats everyone lay at the same height, and anyone who wished to quarrel had to spend strength getting up. She boiled her needles in a pot borrowed from the dye yard. There were never enough clean cloths. She cut her wedding linen into strips before the wedding could happen. What the flood had broken suggested the paired crossing and raised channel, a structure whose supports could be drawn on a tollhouse floor more easily than anyone could settle who would have permission to use it.

Her intended, an Ash kiln keeper named Deren, had enlisted to defend the fuel woods. He returned with a burn along his jaw and a story about Reed thieves. While she washed the wound, he admitted their patrol had fired a granary to smoke out scouts. People had been inside. He said they had not known. Sela heard the sentence carefully, because not knowing could mean several things. For a little while, ancestry mattered less than the hauling rope across floodwater, as injuries determined the order of crossing and the rescuers counted both those who reached shore and those still missing. The rescue depended upon labor that names alone could overlook in the frayed hemp with red thread, which Pella marked after holding strangers above the flood so the next workers would know the equipment's damage.

She did not absolve him. Neither did she leave his wound dirty. After he slept, she went to the roof and watched sparks travel toward the river. Somewhere beyond that darkness people were counting losses caused by the man downstairs. Loving him did not alter the count. It only made her responsible for refusing the comfort of a simpler story. The rescued families carried their divisions into the supper beneath the leaking roof, but flour, roots, salt, and a borrowed pot made separate loyalties harder to maintain than the practical business of feeding children.