Chapter 16: A Thousand Rough Apiece

The path down from Yewfell was cut into the mountain in switchbacks, and Coldwell Vale had put five men on it, at the place where the rock stood up on one side and the drop fell away on the other. Somebody over there had thought about the ground before they picked it. Ren gave them that much.

He saw them a hundred paces off, which was longer than they saw him, and he did not slow down and he did not speed up.

Fenn Marrow’s sword rode through his belt at the small of his back, hilt out. That was not how a man carried a sword he meant to use. That was how a man carried a sword he meant somebody to look at, and the somebody was standing on the path in front of him.

“You see them,” Elinor said. It wasn’t a question. She had stopped asking questions years ago, when she got tired of being told she was being clever.

“I see them.”

Bran Coyle looked at the five men the way he looked at weather. He had one arm, and in six years and eleven months, in Ren’s hearing, he had never once said what had happened to the other one, and a mountain path with five men on it did not look like the place he was going to start.

Ren priced them on the way down, without meaning anything by it. Two were standing with their weight already back, which meant somebody had taught them. The one with the bundle of short axes had his hands inside his coat, which meant the axes were not what he meant to open with. The young one with the shovel over his shoulder was standing like a man who had told his friends about it. And the oldest of them wore a good coat and carried a small round buckler slung down at his hip, and he was the one doing the talking. That told Ren which of them to watch and which four not to bother with.

“Calder.”

“That’s me.”

“You’re walking down this mountain with Fenn Marrow’s steel on your back.”

“I am, yeah.”

“Then hand it over here and we all go home in time for supper.” The man said it reasonably. That was the whole trick of it, and Ren had watched better men than this one run it. “Whatever you want to call what happened up there, that wasn’t a match. Nobody agreed to anything. Fenn Marrow said a few words and you took his sword off him in front of your order and mine, and that isn’t swordplay. That’s a robbery, and every man on that yard saw it.”

“He said words,” Elinor said.

She stepped past Ren, which she did every time, and Ren let her, which he did every time.

“Fenn Marrow stood in the middle of that yard and called his own match. He named the terms, he put his steel up himself, and then he lost it himself. You have spent six years telling every road on this mountain that the Swordplay is a joke. One of you finally bet something on it and lost, and if the whole bill is one sword, you got off cheap, and you know it.”

The man in the coat did not look at her. He kept looking at Ren, which was either good manners or a bad sign, and Ren had not decided which.

“I’m not talking to you,” he said. “I’m talking to the man carrying our steel.”

“Then talk to me,” Ren said.

“Give it back.”

“No.”

“Give it back and we’ll say no more about it.”

“Still no.”

One of the four behind him laughed — the young one with the shovel over his shoulder, wide through the chest, the good-humored kind of stupid that isn’t really stupid, that has just never been hit yet.

“So by that rule,” he said, “if I take him on and I win, we get our steel back. Right? That’s his rule. He said it himself.”

The man in the coat let it sit there a moment without agreeing to it.

“One match,” he said at last. “That’s the rule. Fair’s fair.”

“Sure,” Ren said. He said it the way a man agrees to cards in a house where he has already counted the money in the other fellows’ pockets. “Want to play?”

The four behind the coat did not like that, and they liked it less when the one who stepped out of them was the young one with the shovel, whose name was Marek Dolan and who had already told two people on the way up the mountain something nobody had asked him: that he was Kindling, sixth degree, and that he would take his chances with anybody standing on it.

“He’s got the Swordplay and nothing else,” Dolan said, to his own people first, because that was the part he wanted heard. “And I don’t carry a sword.”

“That’s true,” Ren said.

“So what are you going to do?” Dolan said. “Play a shovel?”

Two of them laughed. One of them laughed hard, and the man in the coat did not laugh at all, because he was old enough to know that a man who has just been handed his own joke back has already lost something.

Dolan didn’t wait. He brought the shovel out with both hands, and it was honest work — Commonwork, well kept, the kind of tool a man owns outright because it took him two years to pay off. The light came up off it and lay on the metal instead of in it. Ren read the thing the way you read a price tag through a window. Thin. Not bad, and not enough. And Dolan leaned forward when he threw, and his wrists were already moving before his shoulders knew.

The shovel left his hands and turned into a line, and the line came at Ren’s chest with the air cracking behind it.

Ren didn’t move his feet. He put two fingers out and said one word.

“Play.”

Behind Dolan, the laughing got louder. That was the joke — a shovel. No sword anywhere in it, no edge, no guard, nothing. Whatever the Swordplay was for, it was not for that, and the man who had laughed hardest was already elbowing the fellow beside him to be sure he’d caught it.

The shovel stopped in the air.

It didn’t turn and it didn’t slow. It stopped the way a dog stops at a name. It hung there trembling with all that speed still in it, a hand’s length from Ren’s chest, and then it came across the last two feet and lay in his palm and lay quiet.

The laughing went out of the road all at once, and nobody said anything for a breath.

Then a boy’s voice, from the back of them, said one word. “Oh.”

They had all been taught it, and almost none of them had ever seen it done. Master Aldric Vane had put the two things to them short and once, the way he put everything: see the blow before the blow, and answer what is in your enemy’s hands. The word blade, he had said, was a convenience of the language. Anything a man will not put down is a blade. Ren had been seventeen and mostly thinking about dinner, and he remembered all of it now, standing in the road.

Dolan stared at his own shovel, in somebody else’s hand.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey — he’s got my—“

Four of them decided at the same moment, and all four decided the same thing, which was that there was no way to get their steel back except to take it back, and no time like the present.

Ren saw it in pieces, the way you see a room after the lamp has been knocked over. The spear came from the left, low and straight and honest. The axes came out of the right and from behind, a matched pair, both heads off the same smith. The man in the coat came in with the buckler up, stepping heavy and unhurried, the way a man steps who has done this before. And the knife, short and plain, already swinging.

He said it three times.

“Play. Play. Play.”

Every piece of steel on that road stopped belonging to any particular man. The spear came loose in the middle of its throw and hung there point-first, going nowhere. The axes came away from hands that were still swinging them — not torn, not knocked, just let go. The buckler turned over once, slow, like a coin at the end of a long spin.

Ren took a step. Not the long, showy kind. A step like a man going out a door.

Then he hit three of them, and none of it was pretty, and none of it needed to be.

The man in the coat went down first, because he was the one worth hitting cleanly, and he went onto his back and his coat came up over his head and stayed there. The axeman took the second one and sat down hard with his hands still open. The spearman threw a punch of his own, which was a mistake, and then he was on the ground too. Dolan got both his hands up and started explaining something. The one with the knife looked at the knife, hanging in the air over the road, and then at his own empty hand, and then he lay down in the road on his own, which was the only sensible thing anybody did on that path all afternoon.

Ren walked back to where he had been standing, and behind him, out of the air, the spear and the axes and the buckler and the knife came down one after another and lay in the road, and the light went out of them one at a time, politely, as if they had finished.

The road had five men on it and four of them were making noises. The man in the coat was not one of them.

Ren crouched in the middle of the path and laid the five pieces out in front of him and turned the shovel over twice, the way a man turns a thing over at a market table.

The truth of it — and nobody on that road was going to ask, and Ren had stopped explaining himself to strangers years ago — was that the Swordplay had done the smallest part of the work. What it bought him was a half step against a slow hand, and an answer to a weapon that was already loose in its owner’s grip. Dolan’s light had lain on the metal and not in it. The man in the coat stepped in heavy, which was honest and also slow. Nobody on that path had come close enough to Ren to matter in three years, and the Swordplay was going to get the credit for that, and it was welcome to it.

Farther down the path, on the rock side, a Highgate man who had come up the mountain that morning to price iron stood very still with his hands in his sleeves. Half an hour earlier he had thought about saying something clever about the Swordplay, and had decided against it out of nothing but laziness, and he was going to be pleased with that decision for a week.

Ren looked up at the man in the coat, who was sitting where he had fallen with his hair full of dust and his dignity somewhere down the mountain.

“Commonwork,” Ren said. “A thousand rough ley shards apiece. Five pieces. Who wants to start?”

Tam Ruddock, who was thick through the neck and badly wanted to be somewhere else, did the arithmetic himself, halfway, before anybody could tell him. He got the little bag off his belt and looked inside it, and looked at the shovel and the axes and the spear laid out on the path, and put the bag back on his belt, and said nothing at all. That was an answer.

“We go back up,” Ivo Senn said. He was the youngest of the five in the way that mattered. “We tell the Warden. That’s — that’s what we do. We go back up and we tell him.”

“And tell him what?” Ruddock said. “That five of us came down this path with our steel and went back up with a bill? You want to be standing in the room when he hears the number? You want your name in that room?”

Senn opened his mouth and closed it. It would have gone badly for all five of them, and they all knew exactly how badly. That was the end of that.

“Go on, then,” Ren said, and went back to stacking what the road had given him.

They went. Two of them helped Dolan up. The man in the coat walked in front the whole way down with his hair full of dust, so that everybody would be looking at his dignity instead of at his back.

By dusk they were off the mountain at the wayhouse the Order kept on the low road — a long, low building with a fire at one end, a bench along the wall, a trough outside, and a barrel of nails by the door that had been there as long as anybody could remember and had never once been used.

Elinor had her boots off and her feet up on the bench and a cup in both hands. Bran was out at the trough with his sleeve in his teeth.

Ren had the day’s take in a sack under the bench, and every so often he reached down and moved it an inch closer to his heel.

Then somebody started shouting in the road.

It was the kind of shouting a man does when he has already told his friends, out loud, that he is going to do a thing. There was a whole speech in it. There was a name in it too, and the name was Ren’s.

“Calder! Calder, get out here — you’ve got Coldwell steel on you, and I’m taking it home tonight, you hear me? You hear me in there?”

Ren looked at Elinor. Elinor looked at the ceiling. Ren reached down and moved the sack another inch closer to his heel, and then he went out.

The man in the road was big, wide-faced, wide-bodied, standing the way a man stands when the road was built for smaller people. Hobart Grieve — Hob to everybody, including the men who owed him money — was Kindling, seventh degree, at the top of it and stuck there for two years. He was the nearest thing Coldwell Vale had to one of the ten seats in the Reach, and he knew it, and so did the Vale.

There were four men behind him. Ren knew three of them by their faces and by the way they were standing; the fourth was Tam Ruddock, who was looking at the ground.

What happened out there took about as long as a pot takes to boil.

Elinor stayed on the bench with her cup in both hands and did not get up. She had counted the men in the road before the door shut, and she could do that sum faster than the road could.

Then the door opened and Ren came back in with a hammer.

It was Masterwork; you could see it at ten paces in bad light. The head was old and the haft was new, and somebody’s grandfather had put that face on it and put it on well, and it was heavy enough that Ren carried it in both hands like a man carrying a fence post.

“That’s a hammer,” Elinor said.

“It’s a hammer.”

“You took a hammer off a man.”

“He brought it.”

Elinor laughed into her cup. She did not do that often and would not have admitted to it under torture.

A mile down the low road, in the dark, the complaining had started.

“Who told me he’d only just kindled?” Hob said. He was saying it to the four men walking down beside him, since there was nobody else left to say it to, and he was saying it loud. “Somebody told me that. Somebody in that valley told me he’d only just kindled, and I want that man’s name, and then I want his wages, and then I want something else off him besides.”

Nobody answered him, which was correct.

“I had a seat,” Hob said. “There’s a seat in the Reach in about ninety days, and there’s one man in Coldwell Vale who can take it, and that man is me, and now I’ve got a face like a dropped pie and no hammer, and the price on that hammer is five thousand rough, which the four of you together couldn’t raise if you sold the shirts off your backs and the cart besides.”

“It was five thousand?” one of them said.

“Five thousand.”

“That’s — Hob, that’s more than a year.”

“I know what it is! I did the sum on the way down! I’d have to sell my boots and my cart and then walk home on my hands!”

They went on a while like that. Then one of the young ones, the one with the split lip, said it, because somebody had to say it, and it had been sitting in all four of them since they came out of the wayhouse door.

“That man’s a bandit.”

“He’s a bandit, yes,” Hob said. “I know he’s a bandit. I’m the one he robbed. That’s not the problem. The problem is walking behind me on this road, and the problem is that four of you stood there and let a man with one arm and a girl with a cup of tea watch a stranger take my hammer off me in the time it takes to—“

He stopped, because he had run out of comparisons, and because it all hurt.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “First thing. We go and get Ferrin Tull.”

“Ferrin?” Ruddock said. “Hob, he’s got a seat already. He’s eighth degree, near the top of it. He’s not going to come down here for a—“

“He’s eighth degree and he’s my friend,” Hob said, “and I’ve done him favors he hasn’t paid me for yet, and he can take that smile off that man’s face and take my hammer back and keep the change, and he’ll do it for nothing, because that’s the kind of man he is, and because he likes hitting people.”

Back at the wayhouse, Ren had the line laid out on the floor by the fire: shovel, axes, spear, buckler, knife. Elinor came and stood in the doorway with her cup.

“They’ll come back,” she said.

“They’ll come back.”

“Are you going to ask who with?”

“No.”

Elinor waited, because she had learned to wait, and because it had taken her about two years to work out that Ren almost always finished a sentence if you gave him long enough.

“I’ll ask him when he’s standing out there,” Ren said. “Then he can tell me what he’s carrying.”

Elinor looked at him for a moment with her mouth a little open, holding the cup, and then decided not to take that one apart.

“You should hear the way they’re telling it in the valley already,” she said. “One afternoon’s work, and by tonight it’s a story.”

“What word are they using.”

“You know the word.”

“Bandit,” Ren said.

“Mm.” She drank her tea. “And worse ones behind it.”

Bran Coyle came in from the trough with his sleeve in his teeth, looked at the line on the floor, and looked at it a while longer than he needed to.

“You’ve got a system now,” he said.

“Yeah.”

From the doorway, Elinor said, “Dim. Sit down before you start counting it again.”

Somewhere down the low road, Hob Grieve’s voice came up the valley one more time, and this time there was a number in it, and the number was five thousand.

Ren moved the hammer to the front of the line, where the firelight was best, and sat down to look at it.