Chapter 14: Anybody Want to See It

No One Left Who Plays

He had forgotten what light did to a person.

The door stuck, then gave, and the afternoon came through it and hit him full in the face. He stood in the doorway with his fingers flat on the plank and took it. When his eyes cleared, two people were getting up off the low stone wall beside the path.

“There he is,” Elinor Rusk said.

She was on him before he could answer. “Three months. Three months, Dim. We had a vote about whether to knock the door down. You can thank Bran — he voted to leave you in there.”

Two fingers came up while she was still talking, cocked, and rapped him once on the forehead. It did not hurt. She did it up on the balls of her feet, her weight going forward and back, forward and back, and she never stopped smiling, and the smile took the whole scolding apart.

Bran Coyle had not moved off the wall. He looked Ren over, boots to head, and blew a long breath out through his nose.

“You’re out,” he said. “Good.”

“Three months,” Ren said.

“Three months.” Elinor rocked back on her heels, decided against it, and came forward again. “You went in the week the yews went green. We could feel you in there. That is the only reason nobody went in after you with an ax.”

Ren looked at the path, and at the wall, and at his own boots. He had carried one question in through that door with him and it was the only question he had.

“How is he?”

Something went out of her face.

“Same,” she said. Then, faster: “That’s all anybody will tell me. I’ve asked. I’ve asked twice.”

They walked. Three months had gone somewhere, and so had three months of his master, and both of those things had happened while he was sitting down.

“Have you heard, at least?” Elinor said finally, in the voice people use to get off a subject. “The Reach is opening. Coldwell Vale came up the mountain three days ago with every young one they own, and Highgate came up behind them, and the whole drill ground has been one long argument ever since.”

They got as far as the end of the hall, and then Ren heard the argument.

The drill ground below the hall was full.

Ren stopped at the top of the steps and did the thing he always did first, which was count.

Coldwell Vale had taken the west end, where the shade came early: grey coats, forty of them at least, standing in knots with their hands behind their backs. Highgate had the south wall, and the south wall was the warm one, and their sleeves were rolled. Between the two, on ground that belonged to nobody, stood Yewfell’s own — a dozen, in ones and twos, and the ones and twos standing farther apart than they needed to.

Three of them on one piece of ground, and the ground doing all the work of keeping them apart.

“—it isn’t an insult, Troke. It’s arithmetic.”

The man saying it had his arms folded and his voice pitched to carry, and it carried. Grey coat, no crest, hair cropped close enough to show scalp. Hollis Crane of Coldwell Vale, who had once explained to Ren, at length, that Ren’s boots were a disgrace to the mountain.

“You’re sending a seed to the Reach at eighth degree,” Crane said. “We’re sending ours at ninth. That is the whole conversation.”

“That’s right,” said a big man over by the Highgate wall, cheerfully, as though somebody had invited him to agree. “Ours is ninth as well. Going in at ninth.”

Hal Troke stood out on the flat with his hands open and nothing in them. He was fourth degree. On this ground, on this afternoon, that was the whole of it.

“It isn’t only the seed who goes in,” he said. “There’s two more of ours who can fight for a seat.”

“Two more,” Crane said. “At eighth.”

“Near enough.”

“There’s not many at eighth,” Rudy Pike put in from behind him. “Not in any of the three.”

Crane didn’t look at him. “Ten go in,” he said. “Two of those seats are yours by writ of passage, and nobody can take those off you. That much is law. But it takes ten at the Crucible rank, standing together, to open that gate, and they open it once in ten years. A month inside. When it shuts, whoever’s still in there stays in there. The other seats go to whoever can take them, and Coldwell Vale and Highgate will take them.”

Hal started to say something and didn’t.

“You were founded on one thing,” Crane said. “Coldwell Vale teaches a blade. Highgate teaches a blade. That’s all anybody has ever asked of a sword — swing it better than the man in front of you. Your Order is the only one on this mountain that ever taught something else. Wrote it down. Gave it a name. When the Swordplay is drawn, every blade comes home. Every child on this mountain knows the line.”

He unfolded his arms, which somehow made it worse.

“There is nobody left inside your walls who can do it. Not your seed. Not your elders. Not the men who taught your elders.”

He stopped there.

“So what is it,” he said, “that you think you’re keeping up there?”

Somebody behind him said, “Say it again, Crane. Go on. Say the line for them.”

Crane said it again, in the flat voice people use for other people’s prayers. “When the Swordplay is drawn, every blade comes home.”

Hal Troke looked at the ground. Then he looked up the slope behind the drill yard, where the yews started.

He had been the one with the most to say about Ren Calder for years. He wasn’t saying it now.

“There’s one,” he said.

Nobody moved.

Hal kept looking up the slope. “Up there. On the fell. There’s one who knows it. Only—“

He didn’t finish it, and everybody heard the only.

“Then he’d be your seed,” the big Highgate man said, reasonably, “and he’d be down here showing us. Where is he? Why isn’t he out here swinging it?”

A laugh came out of the grey end, short and mean. “Let him alone. Don’t make the man work for it.” A pause, so the ground could catch up. “I know who he means. It’s their founder.”

Two of the Highgate men sat down on the wall to laugh properly. A Coldwell girl laughed and then looked around to see who else had. Crane hadn’t laughed at all. He looked at Hal the way you look at a man who has just made your argument for you, and turned his shoulder, and went back to his own people.

Rudy Pike took Hal’s elbow and pulled him back a step.

Ren came down the last three steps.

He did not raise his voice. He didn’t have to.

“I know the Swordplay,” he said. “Anybody want to see it?”

Heads came around. Crane’s came around slowly and stopped. Up on the wall, the Highgate men stopped laughing — not all together; one of them was still going for a second after the others had quit.

Hal Troke looked at him. The smile Hal had been wearing for the crowd stayed on his face a beat longer than it had any business staying there, and then he found something interesting to look at near the wall and made a small sound through his nose.

Rudy Pike got to him first. He pushed Ren back a step.

“Don’t, Dim,” he said. “You’ll make it worse.”

Ren smiled at him. He smiled at Hal, too, and at a man he had eaten supper beside for six years, who looked at the wall. That was what the smile was for, and it did what it always did.

Then a man came out of the grey at the west end.

He came at a walk with his hands loose and his chin up, grinning at the men around him like somebody had just told him a good joke. Somebody near the front said the name, low — Fenn Marrow — and the ones closest to him began to drift back without being told, opening up the middle of the ground.

He stopped at the far edge of it and looked Ren over, boots to head, and took his time about it.

“The Swordplay,” he said. “That’s the thing you said you had.”

He looked at Ren’s empty hands, and his mouth pulled sideways.

“I came up this mountain to see it. Go on, then.”

Ren walked into the circle and stopped. He did not put his hands up. There was nothing on him to reach for.

“All right,” he said.

The talk had stopped all the way back to the wall. Fenn Marrow’s hand went to his belt.