Chapter 15: Fair Trade

Fair Trade

Fenn Marrow’s hand stayed on his belt, which meant the other thing was still coming.

It came. Every kindled man on the mountain learned the reach early — out and back, thin as a wire drawn through water — and then used it the rest of his life, mostly to find out before supper who was worth being polite to. Ren had been on the wrong end of it since he was a boy.

He stood still and let it pass through him.

Down at the wall, the Highgate men were still up on the stones where they had settled to watch, boots braced, elbows on their knees, in the way men sit down to a show that cost them nothing.

“He’s got nothing,” Fenn Marrow said.

Nobody laughed yet. That was worse than laughing. The yard was checking first.

Fenn turned his head, slow, and said it loud enough to carry to the wall. “Not a degree of it on him. Not first degree. He hasn’t kindled.”

Then it broke.

The big Highgate man laughed until he had to put a hand down on the stone to hold himself up. The Coldwell girl who had laughed once already laughed again, and she was the only one, and when she heard her own voice she stopped. One of the Order boys made a sound and turned it into a cough. Behind Ren, Hal Troke laughed too, a short one, and Rudy Pike looked at his boots.

Ren smiled at them.

They couldn’t read him.

That had happened twice that afternoon. Elinor had put a hand on his shoulder on the steps and felt nothing. Bran had looked him over and shrugged. He’d been read across that yard a thousand times since he was a boy — everybody had; that was how you found out who to sit near at supper — and a Coldwell man had just reached into him with the same reach as every man on the mountain, and come up holding air.

Either the iron low in him was eating it, or the stone was. One answer sat under his ribs; the other somewhere behind the place his thinking happened. He had the use of neither.

Fenn Marrow was still talking, and Ren came back for the end of it. “—so if the Order wants to show me something, it can send somebody who’s actually kindled.”

“I’ll show you something,” Elinor said.

She had come around him while he wasn’t looking and put herself in front of him, which set the top of her head somewhere around his chin. She had never once noticed that she did it.

“Say it again from here,” she said.

Somebody by the wall named the price out loud for everybody. “That’s Rusk. Seventh degree.”

“And Coyle’s seventh,” another one said. “The one-armed one.”

Bran Coyle hadn’t moved. He kept the arm folded and used a flat voice that made a threat sound like weather. “I’ll play with you instead,” he said. “No rules on it. Your people can watch.”

Fenn Marrow looked at him for a moment, and then at Elinor, and then around her, at Ren.

“I didn’t come down here for the two of you,” he said. “I don’t care what the two of you are. He said he knows the Swordplay. If he doesn’t, he can say so in front of everybody and go back upstairs.”

“He’s not saying anything to you,” Elinor said.

“All right,” Ren said. “We’ll play.”

Elinor turned on him. She got a knuckle against his forehead and rapped it — one sharp knock, hard enough that the men closest to them heard it.

“Are you out of your mind? They can’t feel a thing on you. They think you’re a boy with a stick.” She rapped him again. “Say no.”

Ren stood there and took it, which was what he did with Elinor.

She looked at him for two long seconds. Then she reached back over her shoulder and pulled. The blade came out of the sheath with a sound like a note held too long, a Masterwork, the whole length of it, and the light off it stopped the laughing inside ten feet.

The old man had put that sword in her hands the day she swore her oath. She had carried it down here all afternoon anyway.

“Take it,” she said, and held it out hilt first.

Ren put one finger on the flat and pushed it back toward her.

“I’ll use his,” he said.

Elinor followed his chin across the yard to Fenn Marrow’s belt. “That one’s his,” she said. “It’s on him.”

“I know where it is.”

The laugh went off around the circle like something dropped. Fenn Marrow laughed hardest and walked it around, one arm out, making sure his own people got a piece of it.

“You hear him,” he said to them. “He’s going to take it off me. Off my belt.” He looked Ren up and down, unhurried, all the time in the world. “You’ve never been in a real one. Not once. I can smell it on you from here.”

“Show me, then,” Ren said.

He took his time with it now, turning to look at every face, from the wall around to the grey end and back.

He wanted witnesses. That was the whole of it. He hadn’t come down three steps to win anything.

“Any time,” Fenn Marrow said, “or should I come back tomorrow?”

The circle widened without anybody deciding it. Fenn Marrow’s blade came out of the sheath slow. Long and clear, and it held its own light, and ten feet off it was worth more than everything the man wearing it had ever owned at once.

His claim sat in it — the small hard knot a man works into steel when he pays for it, the thing that makes a sword answer one hand and no other.

He said one word to it and let it go.

It came for Ren’s chest fast enough that the Highgate man up on the stone quit laughing, and the Coldwell girl got her hands up, and behind Ren, the man beside Hal Troke was already saying something about how this was going to be quick.

Ren lifted one finger and said, “Play.”

The blade stopped in the air.

It hung there with the light still running along it, and it shook once — small and tight, like a dog on a short rope — and then Ren moved his hand, and it came down out of the air and lay flat across his palm, light and easy.

The yard made no sound at all.

Then the near side caught up. “How—“ a man behind him said.

“It didn’t—“ another one said.

“Did it just—“ said the Coldwell girl, and stopped, because there was no end to that sentence.

Ren turned the blade over, and ran two fingers down the flat of it from guard to point. Fenn Marrow’s claim came off under them like wet ink off glass.

“That’s mine,” Fenn Marrow said. His voice had gone up. “You can’t — that’s mine.”

“It let go of you,” Ren said.

He gave the sword a testing swing, off to the side, and made a face. “This is the cheap kind. You’ve got a better one? Bring it out, and we’ll play with that instead.”

Up at the wall, two of the Highgate men had put their hands back in their pockets, and had stopped laughing.

Fenn Marrow’s face went dark red.

“Three years,” he said. “Three years I ate nothing for that. Commonwork. That’s the best steel anybody in my family has ever laid a hand on, you understand me? That’s the best I’m ever going to get, and you—“ He had his hands up and he couldn’t finish it. “Give it back. Give it here.”

Ren didn’t.

Fenn Marrow’s hands moved. Light came up out of him in a sheet and folded itself into a hand — the plainest trick there was, the one they taught first, a hand the size of a cartwheel, coming down over Ren’s head with the weight of a real thing behind it.

Ren made the same one back, with exactly what he’d been given and no more, and when it came out the far side of the iron low in him it was pale blue against the yellow coming the other way.

The two hands met over the middle of the circle.

Fenn Marrow’s broke apart first. It went into pieces in the air and let go of its light all at once, and Ren’s kept enough shape to keep going, and it caught Fenn Marrow square in the chest.

Fenn Marrow went back four steps, and the fifth one wasn’t a step, and then he was on his back in the dust with his mouth full of blood.

The Coldwell girl was two paces further back than she had been. Up on the stone, the big Highgate man kept his elbows on his knees and did not laugh.

Then Elinor was up on her toes with her knuckle against Ren’s forehead, rapping it a third time, delighted, while the yard was still trying to be quiet.

“You kindled!” she said. “You kindled and you didn’t say a word. You little—“

“It came in the last month,” Ren said. “I was going to say.”

“When?”

“Tonight. After supper.”

Bran had his arm folded and his eyes on the man in the dust. “He’s getting up,” he said.

Fenn Marrow got up. It took him a while and he did it badly, hauling on one knee, and when he was standing he was favoring one side and hadn’t got his breath back. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at the blood on it like it belonged to somebody else.

Then he looked at the sword in Ren’s hand.

“Give it back,” he said. “That’s my sword.” He got his breath. “This isn’t over, either. Not today, not any day. You don’t know who I’ve got behind me. You’ll see me again, and when you do—“

Ren’s arm came out with the hilt toward him.

He took a knock from his own and never counted it, and he’d been doing that for six years. Fenn Marrow wasn’t his own.

The arm came back in, and the sword came back with it.

“Now hold on,” Hal Troke said. He and Rudy Pike had both come up at once, which was the only useful thing either of them had done all afternoon. “Come on, Ren. Let’s not make this into something. Give the man his steel and we’ll all go eat.”

“That’s right,” Rudy said. “Nobody wants a blood feud over a sword.”

Hal Troke had spent six years being funny about Ren Calder in that yard. He was not being funny now, and Ren looked at him a while before he answered, and when he answered he was pleasant about it.

“You two,” he said. “You’re fine. Go eat.”

Then he turned back to Fenn Marrow and smiled at him. It was the same smile he’d been using all afternoon — plain, friendly, a little slow — and he let it sit there while he thought about it, openly, like a man at a market table.

“You can have it,” he said.

Fenn Marrow’s shoulders came down half an inch. “That’s better.”

“For a thousand rough ley shards,” Ren said. “Then it’s yours and everybody’s happy.”

The yard did the arithmetic.

Nobody did it out loud. The Coldwell man closest to the middle put a hand up and started counting on his fingers — one, two, three, a long way in — and then simply stopped and put the hand back down. A woman behind him said the number back to herself once.

Fenn Marrow stared at him. “A thousand.”

“A thousand.”

“A thousand — do you know what I draw? Do you know what I take home in a—“ He heard his own voice saying it in front of two orders and shut his mouth.

“It’s my sword,” he said instead, which came out smaller. “Damn it, I bought it. My own coin, every shard of it. It’s mine.”

“It was,” Ren said. “Now it’s mine.”

Elinor put a hand over her mouth and laughed through it anyway. “Dim,” she said, “the face he’s making—“

“We’re all reasonable people here,” Ren said, to Fenn, kindly. “You want the sword. I don’t give away swords. Shards for steel is a fair trade. Nobody’s cheating anybody.”

“He — it’s — I —“

Fenn Marrow’s face went from dark red to a color the yard had never seen on a man before. His mouth opened twice. Then he went over backward, straight down, and lay in the dust with his arms out, his mouth still working, white foam at the corners of it.

For a count of three, the yard didn’t move.

Then one of the men at the near edge of the circle said it, low, into the dirt, and he said it about Ren.

“Bandit.”

A couple of others agreed with it, half a second late, and quietly. The big Highgate man stayed up on his stone and didn’t join in, and looked at the sky instead. Two of the Coldwell men caught each other’s eye and said nothing.

Down in the dust, Fenn Marrow’s people came and got him up between them and carried him toward the west gate, and the circle closed behind them.

Ren slid the sword through his belt at the small of his back, and kept it.