A second sample from the AI Content Pipeline (Project One): the private journal of a Watch-elder who voted against the rescue. Same canon-lock pipeline, a different character and a different voice. Exploratory, creative canon.
Pages from the Watching-Book of Tarrin Burrow-Born
Found in the wall of an old Remnant Ward outpost during repairs in the eighth year of the present Wayfinder, wedged behind a panel of cherry wood that had been put back imperfectly. Tarrin Burrow-Born is named in council rolls as a Watch-elder of the Eastern Reach during the period of the rescue, and is recorded as having voted against the council motion to receive the refugees, one of three such votes. The book was private. It was not deposited in the Root Archives. The Wayfinder of that day read it once and ordered it preserved without copying. The present Senior Tender has permitted this single copy under her hand. The original remains where it was found, behind the panel, with the cherry wood put back properly.
Third night of the wet moon.
I am not writing this for the council. The council has its records, kept in the long room with the lamp that smokes, and copied out by hands more careful than mine, and what I set down here is not for that room. This is for me, and for whoever finds this book after I have been laid in at the roots, if anyone does.
The Tenders say something is coming up the Long Trail. They say it is not Sogue. They are sure of this in the way the Tenders are sure of things, which is to say that the Tree has shown them, and they have read what it showed, and the reading has settled in them. They say it is people. I do not know what to do with the difference between people and Sogue when the people are coming out of the country the Sogue have walked through, carrying whatever it was the Sogue did not finish carrying away.
Eskar’s old grey bitch was on my porch when I came out, which she has not been in a year or more, and I do not know whose feet she was waiting for. I gave her a piece of mutton and she went back along the path the way she had come.
I sat on the porch tonight after the Tenders came. The rain was light on the cedar shakes and the lamp in my own kitchen was the color a kitchen lamp is when your wife has trimmed the wick that morning. I watched the rain a long while before I came inside.
Fourth night.
I went to Helva’s in the afternoon, the way I have gone to Helva’s most afternoons of my life, and she was kneading. The flour was up her wrists to the second knuckle, the way it is when the order is heavy, and the small white scars on her right hand were standing out the way they do not stand out when she has not been working. I have known those scars forty years. The first she took from her brother’s pruning hook the autumn we were nine, and she did not cry then either, though her brother did. There is more to her hands than that one mark, and she has told me what she has told me, and there are pieces she has never told me and I have stopped asking. A woman’s hands are a woman’s hands.
I asked her for whom she was baking, and she said, “for whoever the Tree sends.” This is the kind of answer Helva gives. When we were children climbing the high boughs by the lake, she pretended she was not afraid of falling, and her hands shook on the bark, and she would not look down. She is afraid now in the way she was afraid then, which is to say not at all on the face of it, and entirely in the hands. There was a great deal of bread in her house. There were loaves on every flat surface, cooling under cloths, and the kitchen smelled the way her kitchen has smelled since we were children, which is the smell of a place where someone has decided that whatever is coming will at least be met with bread.
I did not stay long. I did not want her to ask me my position before I had said it to myself.
Fifth night.
I will say what I think, since I owe the page that much, and I owe my own children the clarity of a man who has known where he stood.
The Tree has spoken, and the Tenders have said the Tree has spoken, and the council will receive that as a near-decision before any of us has opened his mouth. I have sat in that council thirty winters and I tell you it is not the same room when the Tenders walk into it, and they know that, and they walk in like men who know it. The Tree shows them what it shows them, and they read it, and the reading settles in them, and the rest of us are left standing there with our two boundaries and our two children and our thirty winters of counting, and we are asked to be reasonable about a country we have spent our lives keeping.
The Sogue did not destroy the Deepwood by accident. They destroyed it because the Onslite were there, and they will follow the Onslite the way water follows the cut of the land it has already learned. Maybe not this season. Maybe not this generation. The Sogue do not forget, and a forest is a long thing, and a debt held by an unforgetting people against a country of trees is the worst kind of debt I know how to imagine. To take the Onslite in is not a kindness done in private and forgotten. It is a marker laid down against our forest, and the ones who will be asked to honor it will be the ones who were not in the room when the marker was made.
My son is seven. My daughter is four. I am writing that down because tomorrow the council will speak much of the First Charge, and “tend what grows” is a beautiful sentence, and what we plant tomorrow my children’s children will harvest, and I would like them to harvest the things their grandfather planted and not the things their grandfather looked away from. I do not want them harvesting Sogue.
And I will say one more thing while the lamp is still good. If a man stands at the eastern edge of this country thirty winters and reads the trails and counts what the forest sends him, and he says “not this,” he should not be called “cautious.” That is the word men use when they do not want to give a thing its right name. The right name for what I am is “the man who has been right about the eastern boundary for thirty winters.” If I am wrong tomorrow it will be the first time, and I will know it, and I will write that down too.
Sixth night.
Cold for the season. Wind from the east. The ink dries faster on cold paper and I am writing this down for no reason except that the page was open.
Seventh night. After the council.
The vote was as I expected it to be. Three of us said no, and the three of us were the three who walk the eastern boundary, which surprised no one, and we were called “cautious” in the carry of voices afterward, which is the word people use when they do not want to say “afraid” and do not want to say “right.” The boats were already being made ready when the count came in. I think they were being made ready before the count, and I do not begrudge that. The Tenders do not wait on us when the Tree has shown them the road.
Belwen will lead the rowing. She is good at it the way some people are good at the work they were born into, with no fuss in the hands and no waste in the stroke, and she has the further gift of going unseen on water, which I have watched her do since she was a girl on the small lake. She will not let them be seen. I walked the boundary myself before the council sat, and I will tell the page what I would not tell the council, which is that I cannot find the island anymore, even though I grew up on this lake and watched the herons land on it every spring of my boyhood. The veil is set. The Tenders have done their part, and they have done it well, and I would not undo it if I could.
I have my part now. The eastern boundary tighter than I have ever kept it, and the trails read each morning at first light, and the dog walked twice along the southern run before the sun is over the cedars. If a Sogue scout walks our country to confirm a rumor, I have to be the one who turns him back before he can carry the rumor home, and I do not know yet what turning him back will require of me, and I am writing that down because I want to remember that I did not know.
I voted against the action and I will perform my role within the action. This is what an oath is for, and I would not be a man worth keeping the oath if I did not also keep the part of it I had argued against.
I have not cried since the vote was called and I do not intend to. There is work in front of me.
Ninth night.
I should not have written what I wrote on the fifth night about the Tenders walking into the council room. Or perhaps I should have. The thing is that I do not know. I am leaving it. A man who scratches out what he wrote when he was tired is a man who would like to pretend he was never tired, and I am not going to be that.
Tenth night.
The boats came in tonight. I was on the lake’s east bank, three watches deep, where I am supposed to be, and the mist was on the water the way the Tenders had asked it to be, low and even and unhurried, and the moon was a thin moon that does not give much away.
Belwen’s stroke was steady. I would have known the stroke without seeing the boat. There is a Belwen-stroke, even and slow, with a small lift at the end that is hers and no one else’s, and I have heard it on this lake forty years. The boats came past me in the order she had set, and they made the shape against the veil that boats make before the veil takes them, and then they were gone, and the lake was the lake again. [a line here is half-erased; the next sentence continues without it]
There were Onslite in the boats. I saw them only for a moment in the parting of the mist, sitting low, with hatchlings on the backs of the older ones, the small heads tucked down against the shoulders. The hatchlings were not crying. I watched two boats pass, close enough to hear a child if a child had cried, and not one hatchling cried. I have a four-year-old who cries when her brother takes her wooden bird, and the sound she makes goes through the whole house, and I would not change it for anything.
I do not know what is done to a hatchling to teach it not to cry on a boat in the dark on water it has never seen. I am not going to write the rest of what I felt when I understood it. I would tear the page out and I would not be honest about why I tore it out, and I am tired of pretending the shape of what I am writing is the shape of what I am.
I went home after my watch was relieved. I held my children for a long time. They were sleeping, and they did not know I was holding them, and the house was quiet in the way a house is quiet when the people in it are alive and breathing and have no idea what their father has been standing in the dark watching.
Sixteenth night.
Helva sent a loaf today. The cloth was the linen with the blue thread at the hem, the linen her mother had embroidered for her in the year before her mother died, and Helva uses it for the loaves she means to be received as gifts and not as trade. There was a note tucked under it, in her hand, which has not changed since she was twelve and has always tilted to the right as if her words were leaning on a rail to look at something. The note said: “I baked the same loaf for them. I thought you should know what you turned away.”
The loaf was warm under the cloth. It was the recipe she has used forty years, the one with the long rise and the second knead, and the crumb opens the same way every time, in those small honeycombed cells that hold the butter when there is butter. I broke a piece off and the steam came up from it and smelled the way Helva’s house has smelled since we were children, and for a moment I was nine years old in her mother’s kitchen with my elbows on the board, and Helva was nine, and her brother was alive, and none of us had ever heard of a Sogue.
I ate it standing at the table. I did not sit down. I cried. I have been wanting smoked trout for a week, the way my father used to do it with the green wood, and I cannot get it out of my head, and I do not know why I am writing that down except that it is true and I have been writing only the true things in this book.
I still think I voted right. I think the loaf was very good. I think the Onslite are alive, and the Sogue are still coming, eventually, on a road I cannot see the end of, and I cannot rank these against each other in any way that resolves them, and I do not believe a man is required to resolve everything he is required to carry.
Nineteenth night.
Quiet on the boundary. I was going to write something about the way the cedar smelled this evening after the rain, the way it does in the third week of the wet moon when the bark loosens and lets the underwood up, but I have come back to the page twice and the sentence will not
Forty-first night.
Quiet boundary. Walked the eastern run twice and the southern once. Dog walked the southern a third time on her own, the way she does when the wind is up. No sign on the trails. Mist holds.
Found a print in soft mud at the third bend that I could not place. Not Sogue. Not Onslite. Small, with the toe-spread wrong for either. Sat with it a while. Could not decide. In the end I covered it with a handful of moss and walked on. Some prints are not for me to read. I do not have to know everything that walks under the Tree.
Need to mend the south gate hinge before the next rain. The lower pin is loose and the gate is dragging.
One hundred and twelfth night.
My son asked tonight what I was writing, leaning over the back of my chair the way he does, with his chin on his hands and his hair smelling of the lake because he has been swimming again when he was supposed to be helping his mother. I told him I was writing about my work. He said, “is your work boring,” and I said, “yes,” and he was satisfied with that, and went back to the small carved animals he has lined up on the hearth and the long quiet game he plays with them, in which the wooden bear is always the one who decides.
I have decided I am not going to tell him about any of this. Not when he is seven, and not when he is seventeen, and probably not at all. The thing about an oath you took before your child was born is that it belongs to you and not to him, and what you are sworn to protect includes him, and he does not have to carry the weight of his own protection. He is allowed to grow up thinking the lake has always been quiet, and that the men who walk the boundary do so because they like the walk, and that bread comes out of Helva’s oven because Helva likes bread. Helva will tell him something one day. She tells the children things, gently and slantwise, the way she always has, and whatever she tells him will be enough.
Two hundred and ninth night.
Walked the eastern run. There is a kind of evening light here in the late wet-moon weeks, when the lake is more still than the sky above it and the cedars lay down a longer shadow than they ought to be able to lay, and I have stood in that light enough seasons now to be unwilling to write of it without acknowledging that the standing is itself the thing, and not what I have come there to see. The water tells what it tells. The man who has stood at it long enough is part of the telling.
I do not know what the herons see when they fold themselves down where the island used to be. I do not know what is there. I have decided that the wanting to know is a kind of prayer that does not require an answer to be the prayer.
Three hundred and eighteenth night.
Helva died yesterday morning, in her kitchen, with the dough on the board and the cloth laid over it and the oven warm, and someone else, a younger woman whose name I did not catch, finished the loaves for her in the afternoon, because that is what is done in a baker’s house when the baker has gone, and the loaves were good, I am told, though I have not had the heart to taste one.
I sat with her an hour in the kitchen before they came for the body. The light was the kitchen’s late-morning light, the slow yellow that falls through the small east window onto the board where she had worked since she was a girl, and the bread under the cloth was still warm when I laid my hand on it without meaning to, and I left my hand there a long while before I took it away. Her hands were folded the way bakers’ hands fold when they are laid out, with the thumbs tucked under, and I did not say anything to her, and the not-saying was the closest I have ever come to a prayer in that kitchen.
I did not eat any of the bread. I had eaten the loaf she sent me on the sixteenth night, and I have been eating that loaf ever since, in a way, and I think I will be eating it the rest of my life. I think I will stop writing soon. I have written what I came to write.
Three hundred and nineteenth night.
One more night, and then I will leave the book where it belongs.
If you find this book, do not read it as a complaint. Three of us voted no, and the boats came in, and the forest is alive, and my children are alive, and my friend who fed them is dead, and was buried with flour still under her fingernails because no one thought to wash the hands of a baker, and I am glad now that no one thought to. Some of what we are is in the work, and the work leaves marks, and the marks are not stains to be lifted off before we go into the ground. They are part of what we carried. They go with us.
Put the cherry panel back the way I left it. I will know if you don’t.
Tarrin Burrow-Born Watch-elder, Eastern Reach