Oruzar's yard had a system.
Weapons on the left wall, tools on the right, the workbench in the middle where the light from the door was best. Nothing decorative. Nothing without a function and a place. Even the children's things — Sena's sketchbook, Yir's collection of smooth river stones, Pali's battered set of cards — had places they returned to, because Oruzar had explained once, without raising his voice, that things without places became things that couldn't be found when they mattered, and things that couldn't be found when they mattered had a way of deciding outcomes.
The children had absorbed this. They were young enough that Oruzar's logic had entered them before they had the resistance to question it, which was probably the point.
Engan had been coming to the yard for two years by the time he was eight. He had a place here now — the second chair at the workbench, the spot to Oruzar's left where he could watch the hands without being in the way of them. Vetrov had the third chair, pushed back slightly from the bench. Oruzar had noticed this too and said nothing. The gap in their positions was an accurate spatial representation of how they each learned — Vetrov by watching and then doing; Engan by watching, asking three questions, and then doing, which Oruzar tolerated because the questions were usually the right questions.
It was a Tuesday evening in late summer, the yard still warm from the day. Oruzar was at the workbench with a scope disassembled in front of him. Sena and Yir were doing something with Pali's cards at the far end of the yard that was going to end in an argument. Engan was reading. Vetrov was doing what Vetrov did in the evenings, which was sit on the step with whatever piece of ground was in front of him and think at it.
After a while he picked up a stick.
He cleared a patch of dirt in front of the step and drew something in it. Deliberately, with the stick held like a pen, the way someone draws something they've drawn before and are drawing carefully this time. When he was done he looked at it.
Engan looked up from the book.
It was a constellation. Thirty points connected by lines into a shape that didn't match anything Engan had seen in any of Shiro's books — not the summer patterns, not the winter ones. The shape was asymmetrical, branching at the center into two unequal arms, one longer than the other, with a cluster of seven points at the far end of the longer arm connected more tightly, like something grouped on purpose.
"What is that?" Engan said.
Vetrov looked at it for a moment. "Oruzar showed me," he said. "He said it doesn't have a name anyone uses anymore. He called it Star's Path." He paused. "Said it only comes up full on certain nights. Said if you know how to read it, it tells you where things are going."
Engan set the book down and crouched beside the drawing. Up close the lines were precise. Vetrov had taken his time.
"Where'd Oruzar learn it?"
"He didn't say." A shrug. "He never says where he learned things. He just knows them."
Engan looked at the cluster of seven at the end of the longer arm. Each point had a small number scratched beside it.
"What are the numbers for?"
Vetrov looked at him sideways. "That's the game," he said.
He handed Engan the stick and smoothed out the edge of the drawing where the ground was still unmarked.
"Each star has a number. One to thirty. You read them in a sequence — not in order, not by position. There's a specific sequence. If you recite it right, it means something." He paused. "Oruzar didn't tell me what it means. He said you have to figure that part out yourself."
"What's the sequence?"
Vetrov took the stick back. He looked at the constellation for a moment, tracing the path with his eyes before he spoke.
"Forty-seven," he said. "One oh seven. Eighty-nine. One thirty-three. Five. One eighteen. Seventy-nine. One forty. Twenty-six. One oh one. Three. Ninety-four. Fifty-seven. One forty-nine. Thirty-eight. Eleven. One twenty. Sixty-three. One forty-two. Twenty-nine. Eighty-six. Seventeen. One thirty-one. Fifty-four. Nine. Seventy-five. One twenty-three. Forty-one. One oh eight. Ninety-six."
He stopped. The sequence was done.
Engan said it back. He got twenty-six numbers right and transposed two pairs in the middle.
Vetrov corrected him without satisfaction, without impatience. Just corrected him.
Engan said it again. Better. One error.
"Again," Vetrov said.
By the time Pali came to say dinner was ready, Engan had it. All thirty numbers, in sequence, without error.
He looked at the constellation in the dirt for a long moment before they went inside. "What does it mean?" he said. "The sequence."
Vetrov looked at it too. "I don't know yet," he said. "Oruzar said we'd know when we were ready to know." A pause. "He says that about a lot of things."
"He and Shiro must have compared notes," Engan said.
Something in Vetrov's face shifted — the small movement that was his version of a laugh when he wasn't committing to one. They went inside.
Behind them in the yard, in the cooling dirt, the constellation waited in the fading light — thirty points, thirty numbers, the sequence scratched carefully beside each one in a hand that had taken its time. The evening came. The yard went dark.
The drawing remained until rain came three days later and smoothed it back into ground. Neither of them forgot the numbers.