The Girl Who Sold the Wind · novelette
4The Third Bargain
You will want to know how I thought I was going to catch a wind on foot.
I have wondered it myself, since, and the honest answer is the answer of every fool in every tale I have ever told: I did not think it. I stood up so fast I went into the fire, and Rafiq pulled me out, and from that moment I was simply going, the way water goes downhill, with no more plan than water has. A city was going to sit down in its own streets and never get up, and I had sold the weather that would do it, and a girl with that on her cannot sit still by a fire and reason. She can only walk west. So I walked west, before the sun was up, out of the ring of the camels and into the open Waste, and it was Rafiq who caught me by the arm at the edge of the light and turned me round.
“Not that way,” he said. “That’s the long way. You’ll be a month, and she’ll be there in nine days.”
“Then what’s the short way?”
And Rafiq, who never told me anything he had not thought all the way through, said, “Ask the woman who knows too much,” and pointed back at the fire, where Mother Sufra sat on her heels with her shawl down off her mouth, watching us both, and waiting, the way the old wait for the young to finish being stupid and come back and ask.
“There is a wind that will carry you to Halvashir in three days,” said Mother Sufra, when I had come and sat, humbled, at her feet. “It runs the high air over the Bright Waste, west and west, and it is fast, and it is proud, and it is for sale, because everything on the Salt Road is for sale, and you, of all the fools I have carried, ought to know that.”
“I’ll buy it,” I said. “How much?”
She looked at me with her old unbothered eyes. “With what?”
And there it was, and I felt the whole of the last three days come round in a circle and bite its own tail. I had no coin. I had spent my three coins of wind-metal one at a time on the story I needed, and my fortune had gone with them — no stall, no shelves, no striped cloth, no ticket, nothing between me and the hungry orphan but my own two hands, which is precisely how much a wind-seller who sells the wrong wind deserves to have.
“I have nothing,” I said, and it was the truest thing I had said in a fortnight, and it tasted, I will not lie to you, like ashes.
“Good,” said Mother Sufra. “Now we can begin. Because a wind does not take coin, child. You knew that on the ninth night; you have simply not let it walk from your head down into your feet, where knowing does its work. A wind is paid in wind-metal — in a thing minted out of what it lost. That is the only money a wind owns, and it is the only money a wind will spend, and it is the only money a wind will take.” She leaned close. “So. To buy a fast wind to Halvashir, you must pay it in a coin minted out of what you lost. Or — for you have lost little yet, being young and lucky and a thief — out of what you want most in all the world, and would keep, and would never, ever put upon the shelf. You must mint it, girl. Out of yourself. And you must spend it. And spent is spent.”
“I’ll pay,” I said, at once, the way I had said it the night before, because I was still, God forgive me, the best wind-seller at the Ninth Waystation and I thought I knew the price of everything. “My stall. My coin. My whole trade when I have it back. Mint that. I’ll spend it gladly.”
And Mother Sufra shook her head, slow, almost tender.
“You would spend that gladly,” she said, “and that is exactly why it is worth nothing. Wind-metal is minted out of the thing you would not spend. A coin you give gladly is a coin the wind cannot use — there is no losing in it, and a wind knows loss the way you know your own name. Try it. Go on. Mint me the stall. Hold it up and let me see.”
I closed my hand, the empty one, the one she had touched, and I tried to mint the stall.
I thought of it hard — the striped cloth, the good pitch at the Ninth Waystation, the shelves of stoppered winds, the little brass scale, all of it — and I tried to press it down small and hard and round the way the wind’s own grief had been pressed into those three warm coins, and I felt it go soft in my hand like wet salt and run out between my fingers, worth nothing, weighing nothing, because Mother Sufra was right, curse her, curse all women who know too much: I would have handed over the stall for this and thanked her. There was no losing in it. It was only money, and I have never in my life truly loved money, whatever I have told you, whatever I told myself for fourteen years.
I loved what money was a wall against.
And that was where the coin was. I felt it the moment I stopped reaching for the thing and started reaching for the reason, and I will tell you it was like putting my hand into my own chest and closing my fingers on something that did not want to be held. Because under the stall, and under the coin, and under every clever trade I had ever made at that hot white hour, there was one thing, one only, that I had wanted since I was small enough to be hungry and had had no name for it then and have a name for it now:
I never wanted to be the hungry orphan again.
That was it. That was the whole of me, pressed down small and hard and round. Not the stall — the stall was only its shape. Not the coin — the coin was only its weight. What I wanted, what I would not spend, what I had built my whole cheating soul around keeping, was enough — the wall, the store, the full jar, the certainty that I would never again stand at the edge of a fire I did not own and watch other people eat. That is why I had taken three coins off a veiled stranger without asking one question. That is why I had sat by the fire and counted while a city hung in the scale. Not because I was greedy. Because I was frightened, and had been frightened so long I had mistaken the fear for who I was.
I held it up. It was the ugliest, dearest coin I have ever minted, and it was worth more than the whole of Halvashir’s white stone, because it was the one thing on the Salt Road I would truly grieve to lose.
“Ah,” said Mother Sufra, very softly, looking at it in my open hand. “There she is.”
I did not spend the whole of it. I want to be exact, because this is the part where the fable turns, and if I let you think I paid it all at once and cheaply, I steal from the girl I was the one hard thing she ever earned.
I broke a corner off it.
You can do that, with a coin of your own minting; a wind’s metal, once lost, is lost whole, but a coin you carry in your own chest you may pay in pieces, and each piece costs the whole of itself even so. I broke off a corner — one day’s fear, one jar’s worth of enough — and I gave it to the high proud wind that Mother Sufra called down out of the west air with a word I did not catch, and I felt it go: a small lightness where a small wall had been, and it did not feel like freedom. It felt like standing in a doorway with the door open and the cold coming in, which is a thing I had spent my life bolting shut. And the wind took it, and turned, and lay down for me the way no wind had ever lain down for the best wind-seller at the Ninth Waystation, because I had never once paid a wind in anything that hurt.
“Three days,” said Mother Sufra, and she did not come with us; the old know when a tale is no longer theirs. “You will reach the gate before her, but only just, and only because you have started paying. Hear me, girl, for this is the hook and I will say it once. What you broke a corner from tonight, you will be asked for whole, at the gate, in front of her — all of it, the wall and the store and the full jar and the never-again — and there will be no Mother Sufra there to make you do it, and no Rafiq to pull you out, and the wind cannot spend it for you. Only the hand that minted it can put it on the shelf.” She pulled her shawl back up over her mouth. “You will want, at the gate, to be clever. Do not be clever. You have been clever your whole life and it has brought you here. At the gate, be poor. It is the only coin she will take.”
Then the wind got up under us — under me, and under Rafiq, who had climbed on beside me without a word and without being asked, the way he did everything, the boy I had cheated of a bonded place and could not for the life of me shake — and it took us up off the cold sand and out over the Bright Waste, west and west, three days and three nights, until on the evening of the third day, at the turn of the day, at the hour a whole city had once named its daughters for, the white stone of Halvashir came up out of the haze ahead of us with the sea behind it going gold.
And between us and the gate, a little lower on the wind, in her grey and with her veil streaming, going home at last with my dearest bottle held against her like a child, was the stranger.