Chapter 18: Much Obliged

Ren came down off the ridge in the early light, from the Order’s house up on the crest to his own place on the shelf of ground above the ferns, and he had spent most of the night up there listening to Master Aldric Vane talk about the weather.

Weather, and the north roof of the practice hall, and whether the man who was supposed to have fixed it had ever come. Ren had answered him about the roof. He had not asked the old man one of the four questions he had climbed up there to ask, and Vane had not asked him anything either.

Maisy had been fed and handed over for the morning to the woman with the goats down on the low road, and the child had watched him go with her chin up, which he had decided not to think about until later.

Then he went home.

Home was a stone house with a bad roof on the shelf above the ferns: two rooms, a shed, a yard with a fence that wanted mending, and a practice floor he had worn into the dirt out front over six years with his own two feet. Everything else about the place could fall down and he would still have the floor.

He was sweeping it — sweeping a floor that had nothing left on it to sweep — when he heard them coming up the mountain.

Voices first. It was always voices first. Then the line of them came around the switchback below the ferns and out into the open, and he stopped the broom and leaned on it.

Seven of them. He counted their hands before he counted their faces. Four walked with a hand resting on the purse at the hip and never once looked down at it. The other three carried both hands out in the open where anybody could see them, and that told him more.

Hobart Grieve came first, in the same coat he had worn yesterday, walking faster than the men behind him.

In the middle of the pack, taking the slope at everybody else’s speed and somehow not hurrying, came a fat man built like a barrel with the lid still on: bean eyes, a mouth made for talking, a beard cut by his own hand. He had the build of a man who bought other people’s salvage and sold it back to them, and he came up a mountain like it was the floor of his own shop.

His name was Crane. He was one of Coldwell Vale’s seeds for the Reach this year, and he had spent most of the night before asking careful questions about the boy in the ferns, and he had come up satisfied with the answers. The boy was not one of the Order’s seeds. He had the tricks of the place and nothing behind them, and a man who went in close and stayed inside the tricks could take them off him. Crane meant to go in close; the vale’s own armory had fitted him out for it. And then there was Hob Grieve’s opinion, which he counted for more than the armory. The whole vale knew the thing they did with Hob: a live shard in one hand, a dead rock in the other, and Hob taking the rock, every time, year after year, never once working out what the joke was, and never once getting angry about it either. A man like that could not lie about another man if you paid him for it. So when Hob said Crane was the straightest soul in Coldwell, Coldwell heard it and believed it and said it back to him, and Crane had heard it too, and gone to bed pleased with himself.

Then, on the road, forty paces short of the practice floor, Crane stopped walking, and the other six stopped with him, and he began to think out loud about what a hard thing he had come up here to do.

“Here’s what I’ve been chewing on all night,” he said, “and I’d sooner say it on this road than up there. Nobody knows what that boy is. You went off him yesterday with a flat nose and left a hammer behind, so he isn’t what he looks like. Which means if I go up there, I don’t come off it clean. I come off it stove in.”

“Then stove him in worse,” said Hob.

“I mean to. I mean to.” Crane sighed at the ferns, and sighed again. “And here’s the rest of it, Hob, and I want you to hear it straight, because you’re the one who’ll have to live with it. The Reach opens this year.”

Hob stopped moving.

“I’m in it,” Crane said. “The vale’s putting me in. And if I climb this mountain this morning and come back down with my ribs cracked and my hands half useless, then I walk into the Reach broken, and you know what that costs. A man needs to be whole when he steps through. So I’d want a healer to look at me first, a good one, and I’d want proper rations between now and then instead of what they hand out at the vale.”

“So we go home,” Hob said slowly, “and that boy keeps what he took off me, and the whole vale knows it.”

“I didn’t say we go home.” Crane spread his hands. “I’d never say that to you, Hob. I’m telling you what it costs me to go up, so that at least one man in the vale knows it, and nobody stands around afterward saying Crane did this for nothing.”

Nils Pike, who was quicker than Hob and knew it, and who had spent the whole climb keeping one eye on Crane’s face, said, “Crane. How much would it come to? To do it right.”

Crane looked at the ferns.

“Say it plain,” Nils said, encouraged. “A healer, and rations, and — I mean us. All of us. We could put in. If we all put in, what would it come to?”

Nobody ever knew what Hob Grieve was going to do next, and off the practice floor nobody ever tried to guess. He crossed the road in three strides and brought his open hand across Nils Pike’s face hard enough to turn the boy’s head, and stood over him breathing through his nose.

“Say that again,” he said. “Go on. Say it again to my face. You stood here on this road, in front of him, where he could hear you, and you offered him money.”

“I only —“

“Money for what?”

Nils Pike opened his mouth and shut it.

“I’ve got a thick head.” Hob turned around so that all of them could see him say it. “Everybody knows I’ve got a thick head. They’ve been putting a rock in my hand since I was a boy, and I take the rock, and they laugh, and I don’t know what the joke is and it has never cost me a thing. A thick head is not the same thing as a fool.” He looked back down at Nils. “And it’s not the same thing as standing in front of me and putting a price on Crane. He has never taken a shard off a living soul in that vale. Not one. Ask anybody. He is the straightest man in Coldwell, and he is standing right there listening to you.”

He rolled up his sleeve.

Nils Pike, who had known Hob Grieve his whole life and had never once seen him angry at anything, went backwards up the road with both hands raised.

“All right. All right. I take it back.”

Forty paces above them, leaning on a broom, Ren watched the whole thing.

Crane watched it too. He watched the money go — both of them knew it had gone the moment Hob opened his mouth — and took the hit of it, and put it away, and straightened his coat, because his own people had all turned around to look at him.

He was not going to be the man who came up this mountain and named a price.

“That’s enough,” he said. “Nobody is putting in anything. I’ll go up for nothing, and I’ll do it this morning, and the vale will have its name back off that mountain by dark. Hob. With me.”

They came up.

Ren had set the broom against the post by the time they reached the floor. Crane looked him over the way he looked over livestock: smallish, plain, homespun with a patch at the elbow, hands that had been doing farm work, and a pair of eyes in that face doing something else entirely — quick, steady, and not much interested in being looked at. He could not read the boy, from the road or from here.

Behind him, his own men started up.

“Wipe that off your face,” Corley said. “You won’t be grinning when he’s finished with you.”

Ren’s smile did not move. He looked at Crane, then at the man’s hands, at the black leather on them, and said, in a light, small, almost polite voice:

“You’d be Crane. You want to play?”

Crane set both feet, and his breath went out of him in one long white burst, and the morning got brighter around them, and then he came.

He came in low with the gauntlets up and his feet quick — quicker than a man that size had any business being — crossing the practice floor in four steps and throwing the first punch at Ren’s face with the whole turn of his shoulder behind it.

Ren threw at the same time. No wind-up, no ceremony, straight down the middle.

The two fists met dead center — Ren’s bare knuckles and Crane’s leather-covered ones — and the sound that came off them was flat and heavy, like a mallet coming down on a splitting block. Every man on the road stopped moving.

Ren’s feet had not moved. The dust around his boots still lay where it had been lying.

Crane went back three steps, and the third one was a stumble, and by the time he had his feet under him his right arm was shaking from the elbow down and he could not stop it. His face had gone grey under the fat, and he was breathing through his teeth.

On the road, the men had gone quiet.

“Sword tricks,” one of them said, from the back, and nobody took it up.

Ren looked at the man’s hands. Black leather, pale where the light took the high points, laid on so close he could not have found the edge of it with a thumbnail. Whatever else the fat man had spent his life on, he had spent some of it on those.

Crane got his forearms up in front of his face. It was what a man is taught to do, and it made no difference. There was no great crack to it this time. Whatever the sound was, it went through him instead of off him, and his legs let go under him, and he sat down hard in the dirt of the practice floor with both arms hanging at his sides, level with his shoes. The air went out of him and he did not get it back.

“Stop,” he said. “No. No — I’m done. I’m done.”

Ren crossed the floor, took hold of the satchel at the man’s hip, and laid his palm flat on it. Whatever had been set on the leather to keep it shut to everybody but its owner let go under his hand, and he turned the satchel upside down.

Shards came out of it, and then more of them, ringing and sliding across the packed dirt until the spill reached the edge of the floor. The men on the road stood up on their toes to see it.

Ren put them into his own satchel, without hurrying, and folded the mouth of it shut.

An apprentice of the Order drew thirty rough in a month, and was thought to be doing well for himself. There was more than a thousand of it lying in the dirt in front of Ren. He had done that sum once already this week, and doing it again did not improve it.

He took all of it.

Crane, sitting in the dirt, watched his own money go, and something in his face changed shape, and he said, in a small quick voice, “Take it. Take all of it. Only leave me the gloves. Please. Leave me the gloves.”

Ren’s eyes came up.

He considered the man’s hands a moment — the plump, well-kept fingers inside the black leather — and scratched the back of his head, and smiled at Crane, shy and pleased, as though somebody had just said something nice to him.

Then he crouched down and took the gloves off him.

On the road, the men put their hands over their faces. Crane hit himself in the mouth with the flat of his hand, twice, hard enough to make a sound.

“Stupid,” he said. “Stupid mouth. Stupid —“

Ren turned the gloves over. He turned them over twice. The plates sat flush in the leather without a stitch showing anywhere, and the lining had been done by somebody who did that and nothing else, and after six years of handling bad iron he knew the difference between that and this.

“Ten thousand rough,” he said, to nobody. “At least.”

“Thief!” Crane bellowed. He got his feet under him and stayed low, and let it out at the top of his lungs, again and again, hollering it up the mountainside so the ferns and the birds and the whole of Yewfell could hear. “Thief! Robbers! Somebody — is nobody going to do anything? Somebody do something!”

The door of the house opened.

Bran Coyle came out first, and Elinor Rusk came out behind him with a cup in her hand, and the two of them stood on the step and took in the scene: the man bawling in the dirt of the practice floor, the gloves in Ren’s hands, the money going into Ren’s satchel.

Then both of them rolled their eyes, and looked hard at the middle distance, and did not appear ever to have met any of the men in that yard.

“It’s a pair of gloves,” Ren said. He crouched down low enough that the man could see his face. “Is it worth all that?”

“You don’t know anything.” Crane’s voice came out wet. “You don’t know what it costs to get Masterwork when you’re still Kindling. Do you know how many of us ever get our hands inside one? I have been paying the vale for those since I was seventeen years old. I’m going into the Reach this year — the vale’s putting me in — and the Reach doesn’t care whether a man walks in whole. You go in with what you can carry, and that’s what you’ve got, and I have got nothing between my hands and what’s in there. You have taken my life. You have taken my life off me.”

“That bad,” Ren said.

He squatted there in the dirt with the gloves in his lap and thought about it a while.

“Then I’ll give them back,” he said.

“You will?” Crane was up off the ground before the sentence had finished, dust coming off him in a cloud, and there was no more wet in his face than there had been the day he was born. His eyes had gone small and bright in the fat. “On your word? On your word, boy —“

“For money,” Ren said.

Crane’s face stopped where it was.

“My money is in your satchel. You took my money —“

“Theirs isn’t,” Ren said, and nodded down at the road.

The men on the road looked at one another.

Somebody said, “Crane —“ and somebody else said, “Go,” and all of them turned at once and started down the mountain, and Crane was faster than any of them. He was across the road and in among them in a moment, his hands in and out at their waists, and before they had finished turning back around to shout at him he had three satchels and was walking back up to the floor with them.

Somebody shouted after him. He did not bother to turn his head.

“I’ll say one thing and then it’s finished.” He emptied the first satchel onto the dirt as he talked, and the second, and the shards rang down into the quiet. “We all know what this year comes to. If I don’t come out of the Reach, the vale loses everything it has put into me, and every one of you loses with it. If I do come out, then I owe each of you, and I do not forget what I owe. That’s the whole of it. It isn’t a favor to me, brothers. It’s the sensible play.”

He said it the way a man reads numbers off a page. None of it was funny. Nobody laughed.

Ren counted what came out of the three satchels, and it was not much. He took it anyway, all of it, and then threw the gloves back across the floor, and Crane caught them out of the air with both hands and was grinning before he landed.

He put them on. He flexed them. He said something over his shoulder that nobody down the slope could hear, and then he was walking — down the track, away through the ferns, past his own people without a word to any of them, one hand up and busy with the leather of his own glove, pleased, all the way down the hollow and out of sight.

On the road, the six of them watched him go.

“Half a year of putting by,” Corley said at last, flat, out loud. “And now I get to sit in front of the clerk who keeps the vale’s books and explain that it went up a mountain. I’d like to hear how that sounds.”

“He didn’t even look back,” said Rudd, and the curse he put after it was long and careful and aimed down the hill, at the man walking away, and not at anybody standing near him.

“He took my money to buy back his own gloves,” Corley said. “My money. For his gloves.”

Nils Pike, with a red handprint still coming up on his cheek, said nothing at all. He stood with his arms folded and watched the track.

Hob Grieve said nothing either. Hob stood at the back of it with his hands open at his sides and looked down the hollow at nothing in particular, and worked, slowly, at something; and whatever it was, he kept it.

Ren came down off the step and stood at the edge of his own practice floor.

“All of you,” he said. “I’m sorry for the morning.”

One of them laughed — short, and surprised, and not nice about it.

“When the Reach opens,” Ren said, “come up here and ask me for your iron. Every piece of it that came off you these two days, all of it, exactly as it was. Not before.”

“Truly?” one of them said.

“On my word. And you’ve got witnesses.” He tipped his head back at the house, at the step, at the two people standing on it. “So have I.”

Elinor rolled her eyes at him hard enough that it was nearly a courtesy.

Corley straightened his coat. He had come up this mountain for a fight, and he had been robbed on it, and he looked at the man in the yard and did the arithmetic on both sides of it and arrived at an answer.

He took his cap off, which he only did for elders, and gave Ren a small, exact nod.

“Then we’re much obliged to you,” he said. “And I’ll come up and pay my respects, when the time comes.”

Ren put a hand up and waved them down the mountain. He went red about it, all the way to the ears, the way he did, and stood there in his own yard with his hand still up, and said it to the road, and to the ferns, and to nobody in particular:

“You’re welcome.”