The Sin System: My Wife is Envy

Chapter 53: Beautiful Journey

The estate disappeared behind us before anyone spoke.

Tessira started talking about a market town she had passed through once, a vendor who sold three completely unrelated things from the same cart: dried fish, small carved figures, and boots, and who had argued with complete conviction that all three were unified by a coherent business logic he was willing to explain at length to anyone who asked, and who had in fact explained it to Tessira for the better part of half an hour.

"The fish and the boots, he said, were both about preservation," she said. "Keeping things in usable condition against the damage of time. And the carved figures were about the same thing, except for people you bought one to remember something you wanted to keep."

She told it well. The vendor’s logic was absurd and internally consistent in equal measure.

Anastasia listened completely, her eyes moving occasionally to the window and back.

"What did the fish preserve," Anastasia said.

"Itself. That was his point. The fish had already done the work. He was just facilitating the transfer."

"And the boots."

"Feet. From the ground."

Anastasia thought about this.

"And the figures," she said.

"Memories. Or moments. He said people bought them when they had something they were afraid of forgetting."

"Did you buy one."

Tessira looked at her.

"No," she said.

"Why."

"I was not sure what I would have been buying it for yet." She looked at the window. "At the time."

Then Anastasia looked at me.

"What is snow like," she said.

Tessira stopped, a detail about the vendor’s boots half-formed.

"Cold," I said. "Heavier than it looks when you hold it. It makes everything quiet."

"Quiet how."

"It absorbs sound. A street that is loud in autumn is different in winter after a heavy snow. You can hear things that were always there."

She thought about this.

"I could hear the pipes in the walls," she said. "When it rained. The water moving through the stone. Snow would stop that."

"The water would still move. You just would not hear it the same way."

She nodded slowly.

Outside the window the road was doing what roads did in early morning: grey, straight, the frost on the verge catching the weak light.

Tessira was looking at me.

I looked at her.

She looked at Anastasia.

Anastasia was looking at the glass again.

"You were saying," I said to Tessira. "About the boots."

"The left ones," she said. "He made the left ones better. He said people leaned left when they were tired, so the left boot took more weight over time, so it needed to last longer."

"Did the theory hold," I said.

"I had no way to verify it. I only had the one conversation."

Anastasia looked at her.

"You would have bought the figure," Anastasia said.

Tessira looked at her.

"What."

"You said you were not sure what you would have been buying it for yet. At the time." Anastasia’s eyes moved briefly to the window and back. "But you knew what the answer was going to be. You were waiting for it to arrive."

Tessira was quiet for a moment.

"That is a strange thing to say about a conversation you were not in," she said.

"You described it very precisely. The fish and the boots and the figures, and his logic for all three, and the fact that you had not bought one, and the specific qualifier. At the time. People use qualifiers like that when they know the situation has changed."

Tessira looked at her hands.

"Maybe," she said.

The carriage went quiet. After a while Tessira looked up.

She looked at Anastasia directly. Something still making up its mind. Anastasia looked back with the steady attention she gave everything. Two beats of that. Then Tessira looked away.

***

Halfway through the morning Tessira asked Anastasia whether she had ever been to a market before.

Anastasia looked at me first.

Tessira noticed. She let a beat pass and then said, "You do not have to look at him."

Anastasia looked at her.

"I know."

"Then why do you."

"He explains things in a way I can follow," Anastasia said. "I have been without a reference point for a long time. He became one. It is a habit I did not notice forming."

Tessira absorbed this.

"You can ask me things," she said. "I know things too."

"I know you do," Anastasia said. "I was listening to you explain the vendor."

"You were."

"You are good at explaining. You assume the person knows less than they do and adjust when they do not. That is a useful approach."

Tessira blinked. She took the compliment and said thank you and she meant it. The compliment was genuine and she knew it was genuine. But she had wanted to be seen as a person and she had been seen as an approach, and after she said thank you she looked at the window and something in the set of her shoulders was slightly different from before.

She finished the vendor story.

She finished it the same way she had started it, well, precisely, with the right details in the right order. But she was doing the work of it now. Anastasia asked a question at the end. Then another. Tessira answered both fully.

I watched from across the carriage and did not say anything.

***

The trees came back on both sides as the road bent north of the farmland. The light through the window had gone from grey to pale gold.

Anastasia had stopped looking at the glass.

She was looking out of it now — at the trees, at the road, at a hawk sitting very still on a fencepost that passed and was gone before she could ask about it.

"What was that," she said.

"Hawk," I said.

"It did not move."

"It was watching the verge. Looking for something in the grass."

"Did it find it."

"We passed too quickly to see."

She looked at the space where the fencepost had been.

"I could hear them sometimes," she said. "Hawks. They made a different sound from the other birds. Higher. More specific." She looked at the trees. "I did not know they sat still like that."

Tessira was listening.

"They wait," she said. "They are very patient. They will sit on the same post for an hour if they have to."

Anastasia looked at her.

"An hour," she said.

"Sometimes more."

"That I understand," she said.

Tessira looked at me.

I looked at the road.

***

An hour in, Sebastian’s voice came through the partition.

"Young Master."

"Yes."

"The young lady in the red dress."

"Yes."

"She is not enrolled."

"No."

"She will be staying in your rooms."

"Yes."

A pause considerably longer than the previous ones.

"I will need to adjust the dormitory request," he said.

"You will."

"And if the academy asks about her."

"She is a companion. It is not unusual."

"It is somewhat unusual, Young Master, given that she appeared at the gate without luggage, prior notice, or any documentation of existence."

"She has luggage."

"She has two books in your trunk."

"That is luggage."

Sebastian said nothing for a moment.

"Understood," he said.

***

The afternoon came in through the right-side window. The farmland was back, flatter than the northern stretch, the fields larger, the villages visible from further away.

Nobody had spoken for a while.

Tessira was watching the road ahead through the partition gap. Anastasia had her shoulder against the window glass, watching the villages go past. I was going through the intake sequence in my head: registration, dormitory, orientation.

Then Anastasia said, without looking away from the window:

"The carving."

Tessira looked at her.

"The figure," Anastasia said. "From the vendor. What would you buy it for now."

Tessira was quiet.

The road went over a long uneven stretch and the carriage rocked and steadied.

"I do not know yet," Tessira said finally. "I think I am still in the middle of finding out."

Anastasia looked at her then.

"Yes," she said. "I think I am also still in the middle of finding out."

Two beats of that. Then Tessira looked out the front and Anastasia looked back at the window and the carriage kept going.

The afternoon light was good on the farmland.

***

The city appeared at the edge of the afternoon, first a smudge, then shapes, then towers and walls and the silhouette of a place built by people who expected to stay.

Anastasia pressed her hand flat against the glass.

The carriage slowed as the road widened to accommodate the traffic coming in from other directions. Merchants, travelers, two military formations moving in good order along the left side. A woman on horseback moving faster than everyone else and not apologizing for it.

Anastasia watched all of this.

Tessira was explaining the gate checkpoint system — standard for fifty years, the particular arrangement of the northern gates versus the southern — and Anastasia was listening with the focus she brought to things she was genuinely learning, and Tessira was adjusting her pace when Anastasia asked something.

The gate came up.

Sebastian said the correct words through the partition and the carriage moved through.

The city closed around them.

Anastasia took her hand off the glass.