EPILOGUE: FOOTNOTES

On the morning of the second spring, Tamsin walked to work through the Well.

It was not called that any longer. The people of Highmark called it the Garden, with a capital letter that they pronounced without thinking, and the signboard at the gate, which had been painted by the children of the Ash Row school, said only The Old Cistern Gardens. Open to All. Please Touch the Plants. The Cathedral of the Founders had never been rebuilt. The Convention had argued about it for a year and had decided, by a majority of one vote, to leave the great nave roofless under the sky, and to let the ivy have it. The pillars stood now in a green forest of climbing roses. The flagstones had been prised up and replanted with thyme. And in the middle, where the altar had stood and the pit had boiled, there lay a round clear pool forty feet across, fringed with willows and bordered with stones, in which a dozen small children were at that moment wading up to their knees, shrieking, under the eye of a Rootkin grandmother who was knitting on a bench.

She stopped at the rim, as she did every morning, and looked into the water.

It was very still. She could see the bottom, a bed of white pebbles and the pale green fronds of a weed that no one had planted, and a small school of minnows hanging motionless in the shallows. She laid her palm on the warm stone of the rim. The green answered her with a faint contented stir, like a cat purring in another room, and she smiled and walked on.

…

The Adeline Marsh Academy occupied the east wing of Vandermere Hall, and its long windows were open to the April air.

She came up the steps at a quarter to nine, with her satchel on her shoulder and her sleeves rolled to the elbow, and was greeted at the door by a stout porter in a gray coat who had once been a Ward warden and who now spent his days in the happy and absorbing business of telling small boys not to slide down the banisters. There were three hundred pupils. They came from the Hollows and the Prairie and the Bayou and the Old Quarter, from the Wards that no longer existed and the great houses that were slowly learning to live without their servants, and they sat at their desks in rows, with their slates and their copybooks, in a chaos of colors that she never tired of looking at. The eyes of the Gilded had begun to fade. It was a gentle thing, and nobody grieved over it. A child born in the last year had eyes of a pale clear amber, and the next would be paler. The gold ran thin in the sons and daughters of the Founding houses, thinning toward brown, and the green of the Rootkin, freed of its burden, shone no brighter than hazel, and in the middle of the room, here and there, there sat a boy or girl whose eyes were something of both, and who looked out at the world as if they had never been told that there was anything strange in it.

"Good morning, Your Majesty," chorused thirty voices, and the whole class rose with a scrape of benches.

"Good morning to you all. Please sit down, and do not call me that." She dropped the satchel on the desk. "I have explained that I answer to Miss Reed in this room, and to Tamsin on Sundays. 'Your Majesty' is for the Assembly, and I would be very much obliged if you would save it for them."

A small boy in the front row, with a pair of fading gold eyes and a tooth missing, put up his hand.

"Please, Miss Reed, why do you always put little numbers at the bottom of the blackboard? Mr. Finch says it is because you cannot help it."

"Mr. Finch is quite right." There was a ripple of laughter. "I will tell you why, Tobias. A footnote is the place where the truth goes when it is frightened. Everything important that was ever hidden in this country was hidden there, in the small print, in the margins, where nobody would think to look. And I have found that if you wish to learn what has really happened, it is usually the quickest way to begin."

…

Lila was at the back of the class, doing something unspeakable to a tray of seedlings.

She was thirteen now, tall and thin and abrupt, with her black hair cut in a straight line at her jaw and her green eyes bright with concentration. She had taken over the herbal laboratory in the autumn, with a degree of authority that nobody had thought to question, and she moved among the benches with her sleeves pinned back and a pencil behind her ear, correcting the techniques of boys twice her age. A fine green fuzz of new shoots covered the tray before her. She gave a satisfied nod, said something under her breath to the seedlings, and the whole tray, on cue, put forth a sudden crop of tiny white flowers.

A gasp of delight went up from the front row.

"That is quite enough, Lila," said Tamsin, trying not to smile. "We have a lesson to give. The botany can wait."

"They were being obstinate, Tamsin. I only asked them nicely."

"I am sure you did."

A shadow fell across the open door.

She looked up, and her heart did the thing that it had done every day for two years, a small private stumble, like a foot missing a stair. Soren stood in the doorway, with the sun behind him. He was wearing a rumpled gray coat, unbuttoned, with an inkstain on one cuff, and his hair needed cutting, and he had the abstracted look of a man who has been four hours in a committee and has not eaten. In the crook of his left arm, with one fat fist wound into his collar, he carried a small girl.

She was a year old, or very nearly. She was a solid round creature with a thatch of dark curls and a determined chin, in a yellow pinafore with a smear of porridge on the front, and she was regarding the room with an expression of grave and critical interest. Her eyes were gray-blue. They were the color of the sky over the Silverwater on a spring morning, clear and unwavering, and as she turned her head, a thin faint line showed on the side of her neck, just below the ear: a delicate tracery of red, like a root, or a river on a map.

"We were passing," said Soren. "She insisted that she be shown the school."

"Did she really insist upon that?"

"She has been pointing at the building for twenty minutes. I believe she is under the impression that she owns it."

"Willow Aldridge Reed," said Tamsin, "is under a great many impressions." She crossed the room, took the small girl onto her hip, and kissed the dark curls, and the child grabbed a fistful of her hair and held on with perfect satisfaction. "Come in, then. You may sit at the back and be quiet, which I understand is difficult for a person of your temperament."

"She takes after you," said Soren.

"She takes after you. She frowns at everything."

…

The new map hung on the wall behind the blackboard.

She had drawn it herself, in the winter after the coronation, over a hundred nights, with a pen and a ruler and a great quantity of coffee. It had taken her three tries. It was a large sheet of heavy cream paper, mounted on linen, showing the whole of the Commonwealth from the Frost Coast in the north to the Bayou in the south, in fine clear lines, with the rivers in blue and the roads in brown. At the top, in an elegant hand, the Cartographer to the Assembly had lettered the title, The Commonwealth of the Silverwater. The Hollows were there. The Calder seams were there, and Ash Row, and the Prairie, and the thin silver thread of the river winding from its willow spring to the sea.

And at the bottom, in the lower left corner, in letters so small that one had to stand on tiptoe to read them, there was a single line of fine print, set apart by a ruled border.

She had put it there on the last night, after the Cartographer had gone home. She had thought for a long time about whether she dared. Then she had taken up her pen, and dipped it, and written.

† Marrow Creek, population 412, which was not previously mapped. The footnote that was missing.

"I never get tired of reading it," said Soren quietly, at her shoulder.

"It is a very small footnote."

"It is the best one in the book."

The child on her hip reached out one fat hand toward the map, with the intense deliberation of the very young, and laid it flat against the paper, squarely over the little dot in the corner, and gave a gurgle of satisfaction. Lila had stopped in the middle of the room with a seedling in each hand. The boy with the missing tooth was staring. Thirty children, Gilded and green and everything between, had fallen silent at their desks.

Tamsin looked at her husband.

He looked back at her. His eyes were a pale clear gold, as they had always been, but they had gone a little softer, in two years, the hard shine of them dimmed, and she thought that they were more beautiful for it. The scars on his hands were white now. His left hand, bare, lay on the shoulder of their daughter. He smiled at her slowly, the smile that she had once seen in the Archive, on the night of the storm, and that she had waited three months to see again.

She smiled back.

The sun came in at the long windows and lay across the room in broad golden bars. There was the smell of chalk and wet earth and new leaves. Out in the garden somebody was singing, a high clear child's voice, and the tune was the old one, the lullaby, half-remembered and a little out of key. It was a plain, ordinary, April morning, and the Commonwealth was not yet finished and would not be for a hundred years, and there was a great deal of work to be done.

Some crowns are worn on the head. Hers grew from the ground.