Letters South

She instituted the letters in the fourth week, over the objections of the barracks commander, who felt that soldiers with time to write had time to drill. One page per man per month, carried down the pass with the supply carts, paper and ink at the Gate's expense. She wrote the standing order herself and did not explain it, because the explanation was a chest of unsent letters in a life nobody else remembered.

For her own page she sat a long time over the salutation. Her sister was nineteen this year, newly married, planting the orchard's first row on land their mother had left them. In the other life, Yeon Seol's first letter home had gone out in her thirtieth year, and the reply had opened with: I had decided you were dead.

Sohwa — she wrote, this time, in the first winter — it is cold here and the work is dull, and I find I miss you in the mornings. Send me a cutting from the orchard when the thaw comes. I am told there is soil behind the south wall where a tree might take. It would do the men good to see something bloom.

She read it over twice. It was, by the standards of the Marshal of the Frost Gate, an unforgivably sentimental document. She sealed it before she could improve it.