way too much. I shouldn’t have talked to you while I was drunk.”
“I’m happy you did,” I said, though that was only somewhat true. My thoughts was still in too much of a boiling for me to know what I thought or felt. I think Ursala knowed that too, for she shaked her head at them words.
“But since I’ve got this far,” she said, “there’s one more thing you have to know, Koli. In case you were thinking of trying something stupid and reckless. Even if you found some tech and powered up the battery and found the switch, it would still be only fifty-fifty that it would work for you.”
“Fifty-fifty?” I felt like an idiot, breaking in all the time with these questions about the words she was using, but by now this was a thing I felt like I couldn’t just halfway understand. I had got to know it all.
“Fifty-fifty means one chance in two. It might work for you, but it’s just as likely that it wouldn’t. The reason why… well, it’s a big secret here, though in other places I’ve been it’s well known. I suspect you could get yourself into a lot of trouble, here in Mythen Rood, if you even spoke about it.”
I didn’t care, right then, about any trouble. I wanted to know. I couldn’t bear for this secret, whatever it was, to pass out of my hands when I was this close to hearing it.
My life has had any number of bends in it, where I was going one way and then suddenly found myself heading in another with no chance or thought of going back. And most of those times I only seen the bend after, when I was looking over my shoulder at it, as you might say. When it was too late to do anything but live with it.
This time, though, I seen the bend coming. I knowed in the heat and heart of me that this day, this talk, was going to be a kind of switch, and would turn something on that couldn’t never be turned off again while I lived.
And so it was, and so it did.
18
I come home after talking to Ursala, my head still full of all the things she told me – and especially that last thing. I didn’t tell you that yet, but I will soon. It will make more sense in its right place.
When I got to the mill, Jemiu was standing at the front door of our house with her hands on her hips and her face like a threatening sky. But when she seen the look I was wearing she changed at once and was afraid for me.
“What happened?” was her first words. She must of thought from my smacked-in-the-mouth stare that someone died, or else that I was took bad in a way that might not mend. And if that was what she thought then she wasn’t wrong, but I couldn’t tell her. It was hard enough knowing it my own self.
“I run the walls with Haijon,” I said, which was true, though it seemed a long time ago now. “And I think maybe I pushed myself too hard. I’m winded.”
“Well, you’re an idiot,” Jemiu said. I expected no less, and I only throwed out that bait so her worrying for me would be turned right back into being angry again. Spinner was right about me and secrets: I never could hold one safe for very long, if my life depended on it. In fact, when my life come to depend on it was when I failed most woefully of all. So I did not mind Jemiu giving me rough words as long as she didn’t press me harder on where I’d been.
“Get off to bed,” she says to me now. “And tomorrow you mind you stay home. There’s ten cord of timber to be steeped, and as much again to be cut square. You’ll help Mull and Athen.”
“Sorry, Ma,” I said. “I’ll do that.”
She gun to relent a little then. She told me I was an idiot one more time, but she said there was bread and soup waiting for me in the kitchen, and probably enough life left in the cinders to warm the soup again. “Though the pot’s dry as Midsummer from all the warmings it already had.”
I slipped away to the kitchen, and I sit there a while thinking. I didn’t have the stomach to touch that soup. My mind was in two pieces