Chapter 18: Overtime

Overtime

There was a tray in the furnace with one turn left on it — nourishing pills, the run she could do with her eyes shut — and nothing to do but let it turn. Her hands were free, and her attention was worth about half of what it usually was. She had the phone propped against the salt tin with the guild app open on Vermilion’s fruit.

Rare, said the listing. Two reviews. A price with a comma in it, which generally meant nobody had paid it in a while.

She read the reviews anyway. One was four words long. The other ran four hundred and was mostly about shipping.

The price wasn’t the part that mattered. Anything the fruit could do, she had dried herbs in the cupboard under the bench that did nearly as well. What it could do that nothing else could was the corner in the formula she and Wick had been circling, and the fruit would have taken that corner off clean.

“You brought two,” she said. “That’s the trade.”

At the end of the bench, in its pot, Vermilion had spent the last ten minutes working up to speaking. With Vermilion, that was a question.

“Two,” it said. And then, quickly, before she could get in front of it: “Is two too few?”

“It’s enough.”

She pulled a shallow tray out of the cupboard under the bench and set it flat in the lamplight, and counted out one pill, and set it on the bench in front of the pot.

“I’ll give you the pill now,” she said. “If it comes out uneven, come back and I’ll square it.”

Two leaves lifted off the rim of the pot and went back down. “Then I’ll bring them when they’re ready.”

“Whenever.”

Hollis filled the doorway the way he filled most doorways, all of it, without seeming to try. He had come in from outside; she could smell the hill on him, wet ground and cut stems.

“It’s confirmed,” he said. “The fire’s on the boy. Owen Penn.”

“So the rules have him.”

“They have him.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s all right.”

“Good.” She wiped her hands on her jeans. “I called Silverfall this afternoon.”

“I know.”

What Silverfall would do with it, she didn’t know yet. She meant to ask him later, once he’d stopped sparking, whether the fix left anything behind for somebody else to sweep. He took a child seriously. That had never once been the worry.

The light crossed the room and landed on the rim of the furnace and stayed there. It was Silverfall, about a foot and a half of him, all silver: the hair, the eyes with no white in them at all, two horns the length of a thumb, and a tail he kept flicking and putting back down. Sparks came off him one at a time — off each horn, off the tail, off the knuckles he had planted on his hips. His cheeks were full of air.

In its pot, Vermilion had gone down leaf by leaf until it was just a plant in a pot.

“You,” he said. “You always do this to me.”

“Rough one,” Vesper said. “How’d you handle it?”

“I had it.” He took his hands off his hips to show her, changed his mind, put them back. “I had it going wide, out past the ridge, into the empty, and then it just — left. Off my line. There’s a tree down there about to break through, and it took the strike into the wood.”

“I see.”

“Do you.” The sparks picked up. “That mistake costs me my time off. All of it, every hour I had banked. And the outsider’s confirmed as of tonight, so the rules will have something new for me by morning, and I’ll be out doing it on no sleep, and I want it on the record that the sleep part isn’t my fault.”

From the door, Hollis said, “Once the fire’s off the boy. Then you can run the strike.”

Silverfall went still. He stood on the rim of the furnace with his tail moving and the air going out of his cheeks, and when he answered, he answered the middle of the room instead of Hollis, which was an answer by itself.

“I can’t hold a strike back,” he said. “Nobody holds them back. But I can ask. I can go and ask.”

“Ask,” Hollis said.

That bought the boy tonight, and the nights after it.

Vesper took the tin off the end of the bench — Nana Iris had sent it over that morning — and pushed it along until it sat level with the furnace.

“Take one before you go,” she said.

The smell reached him before the offer did. He got both hands on a piece and bit it, and went quiet for the length of the bite, and then the sparks came slower and smaller, and his tail slowed, and hung behind him easy.

“Which tree?” she said. “I’ll have somebody go.”

“County road. East side, past the drop, where the shoulder goes to gravel.” He finished the piece and took another before she could offer it. “It’s not dying. It’s going to be loud about it, though.”

“That’s fine.”

She wiped her fingers on her jeans and called Ochre.

It rang twice and clicked over to speaker, and under it there was the small glass sound of a bottle being set down.

“Vesper. Am I your warden now?” Ochre said. “Because I don’t remember agreeing to that.”

“New ones,” Vesper said. “Four.”

“Six.”

“Done.”

There was a pause on the line.

“County road, east side, past the drop,” Vesper said. “It’s young, something hit it that wasn’t meant for it, and it’s going to want an explanation from somebody with a title.”

“I’ll go.” The glass sound again. “Six.”

“Six.”

She put the phone down.

What she didn’t say — and had not said since Hollis came through the door — was: not on the boy. Not the strike, not the rules, not one dark minute of it.

She slid the tray back under the bench and shut the cupboard door.

The tree was still cooling when Ochre got there. She could hear it from the shoulder: small ticks down in the wood, where the sap had boiled and was going hard.

She came down the shoulder with her hands held out flat in front of her, fingers spread, both still wet. She’d done them an hour ago. The first coat had gone on clean.

“What did I do?” the tree said.

Its voice came out of the burnt side, so there was a crackle stuck on the ends of the words, thin, and working hard at being civil.

“Tell me what I did,” it said, “and I’ll stop doing it.”

Ochre put her hand flat on the trunk, on the side that was still warm. Trees liked being touched. It cost her nothing.

“You got hit,” she said.

“I know I got hit. I want the reason.”

“Here’s what I did,” the tree said. “I went down to the store. There’s a screen over by the ice, and nobody has ever once told me to move along, and there’s a show on it I’ve been following. I watched that. Then I came back here and stood in my own spot and went to sleep. You tell me which part of that was worth a strike.”

“There’s something in the district that shouldn’t be here,” Ochre said. “The rules are working on it. Tonight’s strike was meant for that, and on the way out it came off its line, and it went to the biggest thing standing in the dark. That was you. That’s all of it.”

“On its way out.” The tree said it flat, testing whether it would hold. “So it was aiming at somebody else, and then there’s me. Out of every tree on this road.”

“That’s right.”

“Happened.” It got the word out in pieces. “I’ve stood in this exact spot for years and nothing has ever happened to me. Now the sky misses, and I’m what it hits, and you want to call that a reason.”

“Here’s the rest of it,” Ochre said. “I’ll report it tonight, to the one who ran the strike. He’ll want it on paper anyway. And you’re close to crossing, so when you do, you get a count, same as anybody, and I’ll have one struck off yours.”

“One.”

“One.”

“One isn’t going to feel like much, with the sky over my head.”

“There’s more.” She took two pills out of her jacket pocket and set them in the notch where the trunk split. “Two Comeback pills. Somebody put them up.”

The burnt side of the tree went quiet.

“Comeback pills,” it said, to make sure. “Two.”

“Two.”

“Who.”

“Somebody.”

It didn’t answer for a moment. Then it straightened as much as a tree can, which is not much, and the shape of it changed anyway.

“All right,” it said. “All right. Well. That’s different.”

Ochre took her hand off the trunk.

“Listen,” the tree said. “Next time there’s one of these, you can send it through me on purpose. I’ve been working on a hold-still and it’s coming along, and I’m thick.”

The bark did look thick.

“Go to sleep,” she said.

It was out in about four seconds, which trees are good at.

She walked back up the shoulder with her hands fanned out in front of her, the way a woman walks carrying two full cups. The nails were not going to dry even. She’d have to do the thumb over.

An hour ago she’d been sitting at her own kitchen table with a towel under her hands and the polish open, and the night had been mapped out: two coats, the thumb, then nothing.

Vesper’s husband had wardens of his own, more of them than he could keep track of, and one call in that direction would have made tonight somebody else’s. Instead it was Ochre on a county road with her hands out, being paid in pastry.

Somebody owed her an evening. Six pastries were not an evening, and one of these nights she was going to say so out loud, the next time the phone rang after dark.