Chapter 17: Another One at the Door

Another One at the Door

The fire had burned down to the good part, all coals and no smoke, and Ren Calder sat on the floor of the wayhouse with the whole afternoon laid out in front of him in a line.

Six pieces. Five of them had come up off the road below Yewfell and one of them had come off a man’s shoulder at dusk, and he had laid them out in that order without deciding to, the way a man sorts coins by whichever hand they came out of.

The shovel first. A wide dished blade, worked bright at the corners, off some farmer who had wanted to be a soldier; the haft was new where an old one had split and been replaced badly. Then the matched pair of short axes, both heads stamped by the same smith, one edge nicked. Then the spear — plain, and not ashamed of it. Then the buckler with a bite out of the rim. And last in that row, the knife, which had spent most of its life cutting bread and about four seconds of it trying to cut him.

A thousand rough ley shards apiece. That was the number he had said out loud that afternoon, in the road, in front of everybody, and so far not one man had agreed to it.

The sixth piece was the hammer, and it did not belong to Coldwell Vale’s arithmetic at all. Old head, new haft, no name stamped on it anywhere, heavier than it looked — and Hob Grieve had done that sum himself, walking down out of the pines in the dark, and shouted it back up the valley so that the whole valley could hear, and so could Ren.

Five thousand. Masterwork.

Which made ten.

He counted it again, moving a finger down the line, and came out where he had come out the first time.

“It’s nine,” Elinor Rusk said, without lifting her eyes from her cup.

“You’re not even looking at it.”

“I’m counting from over here.”

She was on the bench along the wall with her boots off and her feet crossed at the ankle and the cup balanced on one knee, and she had been watching him price his own haul for the better part of an hour now. Not that she would ever have said so.

“Five men at a thousand is five,” she said. “The hammer is five. That’s ten, and it’s ten only if every man in that road was good for a thousand, and one of them brought you the knife he cuts his bread with.” She turned the cup a quarter turn on her knee. “That man has never had a thousand rough in his hand at one time in his life. You’ll get eight hundred out of him if you let him keep his boots. Nine, and change, and none of it is in this room.”

“Nine thousand, then.”

“Nine.”

Nine thousand rough was more money than he had ever had in one place. It was also never going to sit anywhere, because money did not sit where Ren was concerned; it went up the ridge, every shard of it, to the house where Master Aldric Vane lay, and it went against a bill nobody would name for him. He had asked twice, and both times he had been told that the old man was resting, which was true, and that was all anybody in that house was going to say, which was also true, and so he did the subtraction anyway, the way he did it every night before he slept, and it came up short, and it came up short by a great deal, and nine thousand was still better than yesterday.

He was still looking at the line when he sneezed.

It came on him out of nowhere and it came hard, twice, eyes shut, both fists full of other men’s iron, and when it was done he sat back on his heels with one eye streaming and his nose running, sniffed, and looked down the line again.

“Was that too much to charge, do you think?”

Elinor’s laugh got away from her before she could stop it. She had to take the cup off her knee and set it down on the bench beside her, and once she had started she kept going, well past the point where the joke needed her, which told Ren more about her afternoon than she was ever going to tell him.

“Too much,” she said, when she had the breath for it. “Five men came down that road this afternoon to tell the three of us what we were, and you took their iron off them and put a price on it, and now you want to know whether you were too hard on them.” She wiped her eye with the side of her hand. “It was not too much.”

“I could give the shovel back.”

“Touch the shovel,” Elinor said, “and I’ll break your fingers.”

“Then it stays too much.”

“It stays.”

Over by the door, Bran Coyle had a rag in his hand and was working at something that belonged to somebody else — a strap, by the look of it, off a harness that had nothing to do with the Order, and he had been at it since before the fire was banked. He had banked the fire himself an hour ago without being asked, because that was a thing Bran did when his mouth had nothing left in it; and he had walked past the line on the floor twice now, the second time slower than the first.

He came over at last and sat down on the end of the bench with the strap in his lap, and looked at the shovel and the axes and the spear and the buckler and the knife, in order, as if he were reading a page somebody had handed him.

Then Elinor set her cup down, and the room knew to listen.

“The Reach opens this year,” she said.

“I know.”

“Once. Then not again for ten years.” She nodded at the hammer, sitting in the best of the firelight like a man who had paid for the seat. “You took that off the man Coldwell Vale is counting on to carry one of their seats out of there. You took it off him in the road, in front of everybody, without moving your feet. When those doors open, you can walk in and take one off the table like a piece of bread.”

From the bench end, Bran said, “She’s right.”

“There’s nobody down there who wants to stand in front of you,” Elinor said. “You saw them today. You know it.”

“The three of us,” she went on. “One road down, one room, one set of backs. That’s all I’m saying.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Master Aldric Vane can’t get out of that bed,” Ren said. “Somebody has to be up at the house.”

Elinor looked at him for a moment, and the fire popped, and nobody moved.

“Then I’ll stay,” she said.

He looked up.

“I’ll stay with him and you go.” She said it fast, the way she said the true things, before she had time to price them. “You think I’d take a seat down there? I’ve watched those lists fill up all season. I’d walk down that road on my own two feet and come back with a bad shoulder and a longer walk home.” A breath. “You could take one of those seats with your left hand behind your back, and you know it, and you’re sitting here counting knives.”

“You want it,” Ren said.

“That’s not the point.”

“It’s half the point.”

“It isn’t.” She held his eyes a beat longer than she needed to, and then gave it up. “He’d tell you to go. You know he would. He’d throw his cup at your head.”

“He can’t stand up to throw it,” Ren said.

Elinor opened her mouth to say the next thing, and did not say it, because there was no next thing. She had learned a long time ago that the way to get a sentence out of Ren was to wait for him, and that the way to lose an argument with him was to keep being right at him. He would wait, and then he would say one thing, and then he would go back to what he was doing.

He looked at the two of them for a while.

Then he reached out and took Elinor’s hand, and then Bran’s, one in each, and squeezed once, hard, hard enough that they felt it in the knuckles.

“I’ve got him,” he said, low. “All you two have to do is come back alive.”

Nobody said anything to that.

Elinor looked at the fire for a while, longer than the fire needed. Bran looked at the door, which had nothing on it worth looking at. Then Ren let go of them both and sat back down on the floor beside the line of iron, and Elinor picked her cup back up, and Bran set the strap aside and got up and put the bar partway across the door without latching it.

He was on his third pass through the count when he heard them on the road.

Feet, coming down off the mountain — two sets, going fast, and not in step. Ren listened to them the whole way in without getting up. Coldwell’s men had gone down the valley road with their shoulders around their ears, and Coldwell’s men walked like men who were owed something. Whoever these were, they were losing their footing on the gravel, and neither of them was stopping to fix it.

The door came open before anybody knocked. Doyle Prine got in first and Milo Quill came in on top of him, and somewhere in the middle of that Milo caught the old nail bucket with his knee — the one that had stood by that door since before either of them was born, and had not held a nail in years — and it went over and rang on the boards like a dropped bell.

“They didn’t go home,” Doyle said. He was bent over with his hands on his knees, talking at the floor. “Ren. They didn’t go home.”

Milo got the door shut behind him with his heel. “Coldwell’s people. The ones from this afternoon. They didn’t go home and cry about it. They went and got somebody.”

“Who,” Elinor said.

“We don’t know. One of the seeds. One of the ones already promised a seat.” Milo’s voice went up at the end of it, like a boy’s. “They’re saying he’s coming down here for you. Tonight, maybe. Tomorrow. They’re saying he’ll do it for the practice.”

Doyle straightened and started, “You should go up, you should get up on the ridge and sit behind the Warden, or—“ and then ran out of the sentence, because he did not know, and had never known, and it was to his credit that he stopped there instead of filling it.

Milo opened his mouth again, because there was more, and the more was a name.

Ren did not ask him for it.

Elinor had not moved off the bench. She set the cup down now, and looked at the two of them the way she looked at a man on the far side of a practice floor.

“Tell me why you came.”

Milo blinked at her. “What?”

“Nobody comes down that mountain in the dark out of the goodness of his heart.” She let it sit. “Six years, and neither one of you has ever walked into a room of ours carrying anything but a joke. So what is it? What do you want?”

“We’re — Elinor, it’s the same order, we came up under the same—“

“Say the thing you came to say.”

Doyle’s face had gone the color of the firelight. He rubbed his hands together and stopped, and looked at the floor by the bench where the iron was laid out, and could not seem to get his eyes off it.

“We said things about him,” he said. “Before. I know what we said. Everybody said them.” He swallowed. “But this afternoon I stood in that road and watched one man put five of them on their backs, and I have been in that vale a long time, and I have never seen that. And on the walk down here I got to thinking about who he’s likely to remember when this is over. And I’d rather he remembered that we came.”

It was true as far as it went. They had not come up that mountain for him. They had come because six years of small jokes had stood up in that road that afternoon and gone over backwards, and the two of them had spent the whole walk down doing arithmetic about which side of that they were standing on.

Bran said nothing at all from the bench end, which was its own opinion.

Ren looked at the two of them a moment longer. Then he reached back and scratched his head, slow, the way a man does when he is working something out in a language he has almost got the hang of, and let the smile come over his face — the one that had carried him through six years of that valley without ever costing him anything.

“Another one at the door,” he said, to the fire, to the line on the floor, to nobody.

Then he looked at the hammer, and said, “I hope he brings his purse.”

From the bench end, low, with his eyes somewhere off toward the firewood and his voice pitched so that the two men at the door could just barely hear it:

“You don’t have to do the sums out loud.”

Doyle Prine looked at the smile. Then he looked at the line on the floor — five men’s iron with a price on it, and a hammer sitting up front where the light was best — and then back at the man squatting beside it by a stranger’s fire at the bottom of the mountain, doing cheerful arithmetic about somebody he had never laid eyes on and would not, unless that man came up the mountain and stood in that door.

He did the sums one more time, and did not like where they came out.

His hand went back and found the doorframe. Milo was already through it, and neither of them said good night.

Elinor rolled her eyes at the door, at the two of them, at the whole evening, and picked her cup back up.

Ren turned back to the line and started the count again from the knife, and got as far as the hammer, and was happy, and started over.