Chapter 19: Word Travels

He stayed out on the practice floor while they went down, because sound climbed out of Fernhollow the way smoke climbed out of it, and he had nothing better to do with his morning.

Six men on the road, walking it badly, the line opening at every switchback and closing up again. What came back to him came back in pieces.

“— and the clerk will want a name, and I know which name I mean to give him —“

“— four months. Four months of putting by, and you stood there with your mouth open like the rest of us —“

“— my mouth was open because his hand was inside your coat, Nils —“

Two of them laughed at once, short and mean. Then a voice came up off the road doing the voice a man saves for an elder’s porch, high and careful, saying back the thing Corley had said in the yard an hour before.

“Pay my respects,” it sang. “When the time comes.”

Corley’s own voice went in under it, flat as a board. “That’s enough of that.”

The road took them around the bottom bend. After that there was only the stream down in the rocks and a pair of boots on wet stone, going away.

Ren stood with his hands on his hips and looked down the hollow a while.

“Word travels,” he said, to nobody, in the same singsong he had just been sung at, and then he went inside.

He ate bread standing up at the table and counted the money again. It came out the same as it had come out twice already: a little over a thousand rough in three purses, and the smallest of those purses had a frayed drawstring and a name stitched into the leather in grey thread, because some man had bought it at a fair and thought enough of himself to have his name put on it, and now it sat under Ren’s floor with the rest.

An apprentice of the Order drew thirty rough in a month. Ren did that arithmetic even though nobody had asked him to, and got three years, and did not enjoy it.

Behind the door there was a bundle wrapped in sacking with their iron tied up inside it and the head of a hammer showing at one end. He stepped over it on his way out.

Down in the vale the low road was having its morning, which meant eleven people on it and all eleven of them with something to say about the man coming down the hill.

He got the first of it at the water trough.

“— not a scrap of sense in him,” one carter was saying to the other, both of them holding their horses’ heads. “Not one scrap. He had seven of them standing in his own yard and he let the whole seven walk down the mountain. That isn’t mercy. That’s a boy who hasn’t worked out yet that you finish what you start.”

“He took everything they were carrying,” the second carter said.

“He could have taken their heads.”

He got the second of it at the shard-cutter’s stall, where a woman with a brass scale was weighing rough out of a box and explaining the world to anyone who would stand still for it.

“— and then he gave the gloves back,” she said. “Ask anyone on this road. He took the money, and then he gave the gloves back, and he stood in his own yard and told all seven of them to come up and ask for their iron whenever they’ve a mind to. That is a young man who keeps his word. I’d trade with him tomorrow.”

“Ma,” said the boy at her elbow, “he robbed them.”

“He robbed them and he kept his word,” she said. “Both of those happened. I don’t see why I have to pick one.”

At the end of the row, the woman with the goats had the third piece of it ready and did not wait to be asked.

Ren put the purse on her table. She opened it and counted it twice and put it away in her apron.

“You’re the one that cleaned out the vale’s seed up the mountain,” she said.

“That’s me.”

She looked him over the way she looked over a goat she was thinking about buying.

“They’ll be telling that one up and down this row for a month,” she said. “I had thirty rough out of it. The rest of it is theirs to argue over.”

Maisy was down at the fence with the animals, standing on the bottom rail with her chin on her hands. Ren stood beside her a while and watched the goats get on with their day, which they were very good at.

“They said you fought nine men,” she said.

“Seven.”

“Somebody said nine.”

“Somebody’s selling something.”

She thought that over.

“When are you coming back down?”

“Before dark, or after it. One of the two.” He looked at her. “Get off the fence.”

“I’m on the fence.”

“Get off the fence.”

She got off the fence. He took her up the hill with him, because the woman had a fair to take the goats to and nobody to leave the girl with, and because it cost him nothing.

He carried all three of those voices up the row with him, and then he put the grin back on, which took about the length of a breath.

He bought tiles with that grin on his face, and scratched the back of his head when the tile man named a price that would have shamed a highwayman, and said yes and no and thank you and yes again. By the time he had them loaded on his back, forty-odd pounds of clay on top of everything else, the men he had beaten had gone from seven to nine, and one of them, they said, had been Crucible grade, which was a rank nobody on that road had ever stood next to. Half a mile further on it was a round dozen.

That was the vale’s arithmetic and Ren did not argue with it. He carried the tiles up the hill, and the girl walked in front of him the whole way, checking every twenty steps that he was still there.

He stacked the tiles under the eaves and washed his hands and went on up, past the top of the hollow where the ridge road comes out along the spine with the whole vale on one side of it and nothing much on the other.

The house the Order kept for Master Aldric Vane sat where the road bent to get out of the weather. From the step you could see the smoke of Fernhollow coming up out of the ground like a thread.

The door stood open. Ren knocked on it anyway.

“Come in or don’t,” the old man said, from the window.

He was in the chair by the glass with a stick laid across his knees — good ash, sanded, brass ferrule at the foot, carried up and down that ridge for years and never yet needed, which was the only story he ever told about it. He heard Ren’s boots on the boards and got up.

It took him about as long as it takes to say a short prayer. He did it with his face turned to the hearth so the work of it would not show, and then he crossed to the fire and put the poker into the coals as though that had been the errand all along.

“Sit down,” he said. “You make the ceiling low.”

Ren sat.

“How was your morning?”

“Busy.” Ren put his hands on his knees. “Seven men from the vale came up to take their money back off me.”

“And?”

“And they left it with me instead.”

The old man thought about that. “Any of them hurt?”

“One of them. A hand. He came at me wearing gloves, and the gloves did most of the work for him, but he’ll be sore a week.”

“Any of them dead?”

“No.”

“Then I won’t hear about it again,” Vane said, “because a finished thing is finished, and a man who keeps opening it up hasn’t got anything else to do.”

Ren let that go.

“How’s the girl?” the old man said.

“She’s got goats and a fence.”

“Good. And the other two?”

“They eat like it’s a competition.”

“Good.” Vane looked out the window at the vale for a moment. “You had two of them on your step this morning. It isn’t so long ago there was nobody at all on that step, and I’ve seen what that does to a house.”

Then he poured, out of a pot he kept on the hob, and his hand went out on him halfway through and the pot dipped, and Ren’s hand was there before his head had finished deciding anything, closing over the old man’s knuckles and the handle together.

They held it like that a second.

“The pot’s heavier than it used to be,” Vane said.

“The pot’s the same pot,” Ren said.

“Then it’s the day.” The old man sat back down with the cup and did not spill a drop of it. “How are you on the forms?”

“Third form twice through, then the fourth until my arm goes. Every morning.”

“Does your arm go fast enough?”

“Faster than it did in the winter.”

“Good,” Vane said.

That was the whole of it. Ren had told him the truth and had told him nothing.

“Have you been down to the hall this week?” Vane said.

“No.”

“Go down. There’s paper on the board.”

“What paper?”

“Paper that will tell you when the gate opens.” The old man turned the cup in his hands. “It’s this year. It has been this year since before you were born, and now it’s arrived, and they will not keep you out of it and I would not want them to. Ten years is a long time to stand on the wrong side of a gate.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“You’ll go down to the hall and read the paper,” Vane said, “and after that we’ll talk about where you’re going.”

Ren said nothing. He looked at the fire and let it be enough.

He got up to leave and went around the back on the way, out of habit, to look at the wood.

There used to be three winters stacked along that back wall: split, dried, roofed over, with the top row cut short so it wouldn’t come down on anybody. Ren had split that wood for six years, and he knew what a winter of it looked like in that house the way he knew his own hands.

The stack behind the house was the same size it had been in the spring. One winter and no more.

He stood looking at it long enough that the old man came to the door.

“It’s a warm year,” Vane said.

“Yes,” Ren said.

He took a purse out on his way past and put it on the table by the door.

“For the roof.”

“The Order pays the man who mends my roof.”

“Then it’s for the Order.”

“Take it off my table.”

Ren left it. The old man came across the room — slowly, and this time he did not hide it, because it was worth it to him to be seen doing it — and put the purse back into Ren’s hand and closed Ren’s fingers around it and held them closed with a strength that had no business being in that arm anymore.

“I’m not so far along that I’m taking coin off a boy,” he said.

Ren didn’t have an argument that was any use. He put the purse away.

At the door he looked back once. The old man was sitting down again, both hands on the arms of the chair, lowering himself the way a man lowers himself when he believes there is nobody left in the room to see it.

Ren went down the ridge road with his hands in his coat and did not turn around a second time.

Coming down off the ridge he stopped at the hall, because the old man had told him to and because the paper on the board was up where anybody could see it. By the time he got there nine or ten people were in front of it, and three of them were reading it out loud at once in three different voices, which is a thing that only ever makes a crowd worse.

Ren stood at the back and listened.

“Ten seats,” said a man in the Order’s grey, who had one hand flat on the paper to keep the wind off it. “Two of them the Warden signs himself. Writs of passage. Four more are open to trial on the field, claimed and held. The other four were spoken for before this notice ever went up. Ten go in altogether.”

“When?”

“Forty days. The gate opens in forty days and stands open for three, and after that it’s shut for ten years, and that has not changed in four hundred.”

“And how long inside?”

“A month.” The clerk had a flat voice for bad news and he used it. “They open it up again at the end of the month, and whoever is not standing at the gate when they do is not coming out. That’s the whole of the rule.”

“It takes ten at the gate to open it,” somebody said.

“Ten,” the clerk agreed, “and not a man of them under the Crucible grade. That is where the count comes from, and it always has.”

Elinor Rusk was at the board with her arms crossed, and she did the arithmetic out loud because she could not help herself.

“Forty days out and thirty days in. Ten weeks. Less than a season out of a life.”

“People have been saying that for four hundred years,” said the man in grey, “and the ones who say it loudest are the ones who come back empty.”

Ren read it for himself. Two writs. Four to trial. Ten in all, and it took ten at the gate to open it, which was why the seats were counted as close as they were.

“Who holds the trial?” he said.

“Any sworn man of any Order with the standing to claim a place,” the clerk said. “You hold it by holding it. One man claims the seat, another claims it off him, and whoever is still standing at the end of the day has it.”

“And the writ’s worth what?”

“Passage in and out, a place at the gate, and the Order’s share of whatever comes back out of the Reach,” the clerk said. “Which is more than most men get out of anything.”

Bran came up the road behind them while the clerk was talking, hands behind his back, the way he stood when he planned to say something and hadn’t worked out yet what it was.

“Four seats,” Elinor said, “and every seed in the vale with an arm and an opinion.”

“Every seed in every vale between here and the coast,” Bran said, “and every one of them owes somebody money, same as you.”

“I’ll hold one.”

“You might,” Bran said, which from Bran was a speech.

Ren turned to go. Elinor got in front of him.

“You told seven men you’d give them their weapons back when the gate opens,” she said. “I was standing on the step when you said it.”

“I remember.”

“It’s forty days.”

“I know how many days it is. I read the same paper.”

“So on the fortieth day they come up your hill, and you hand it back, and they walk into the Reach with the iron they came up to kill you with. And that’s that.”

“That’s that,” Ren agreed.

She looked at him the way you look at a man who has answered a different question. Then she took the clerk’s pen.

“Rusk,” she said. “Elinor Rusk. For the trial.”

The clerk wrote it down.

Somebody at the back of the crowd said, “The vale’s short a hammer. There’s a note about it in the ledger.”

“There’s a note about it in the ledger,” the clerk said, without looking up, “because the armory lent it out and the armory wants it back or wants paying. That’s bookkeeping. It happens every year.”

Behind Ren, somebody asked the thing everyone was thinking. “Who pays?”

“Whichever of them comes back,” the clerk said.

Ren walked home with the sound of that behind him and did not put his name on anything.

They ate late and outside, on the step, because the night was warm and there was no room at the table for four, and because Ren had found that food eaten outdoors tastes like it cost less.

Maisy ate with both elbows on her knees, watching Bran’s hands, which were twice the size of anybody else’s.

“I put my name in,” Elinor said, to nobody in particular, and then, when nobody said anything, “For the trial.”

“Good,” said Bran.

“You could say something else.”

“I could.”

She threw a crust at him. He caught it and ate it.

Maisy looked at Ren. “Did you?”

Ren got up with the plates.

“He didn’t,” Elinor said. She said it to the girl, mildly, and while she said it she was looking at the plates, and after that she let it alone, because the child was sitting right there.

Bran hadn’t put his name in either. Nobody asked him, and he did not offer, and after supper he sat on the step with his hands hanging and worked at something in his head and kept it.

Elinor walked the girl down the low road when it got dark. Ren stood at the top of his own path and watched the two of them go down with a lamp between them until the lamp turned in at the goatherd’s gate and went out.

Then he went out to the practice floor.

He had meant to do the fourth form until his arm went. Instead he stood at his own door with the sacking bundle open at his feet.

Two knives, three lengths of harness, a set of saddle fittings, a short axe, a bracer with the strap mended twice, and a hammer with a ring hammered into the butt of the haft. Somebody had missed something twice with that hammer, judging by the notch beside the ring.

In forty days the gate opened. When it opened, all of it went back to the men who had carried it up his hill — and they would be waiting on it, because they meant to be inside the Reach when it opened, and nobody walks into the Reach without iron.

Ren put the hammer on the top of the pile, where he would see it every morning when he opened his own door.

Then he stood in his own yard and looked up the mountain. There was one window lit in the house at the bend of the ridge road, and while he watched, it went out. It was not midnight. It was not even late.