Chapter 3: Nobody Will Play With Me

Nobody Will Play With Me

The thing under his ribs goes quiet in the night, and Ren Calder lies on his back in the dark of the dormitory at Yewfell, waiting for it to start up again.

It doesn’t.

It doesn’t hurt. It never has. It is down there as far back as he can remember anything at all, and he can remember six years — a stone floor under a hard sun, and nothing on the other side of that — and in six years, asleep or awake, sick or well, it has never once stopped doing what it does. Something small and cold, at work low down on the left, steady as water going over a stone in a creek.

Now it isn’t doing anything. Not pain. Not a wound. Just a small cold nothing where the working was.

He lies still and counts to four hundred. The window over his bunk goes gray at the edges. The thing under his ribs stays as quiet as it was at the start.

Then he sits up and presses the flat of his hand against his stomach, hard.

Nothing. Not a flicker.

He has never told a living soul about it. Not one. That was the first real thing he ever worked out about the place he had landed in — before the food, before the names, before he knew which of the older boys would take your bread if you left it uncovered — that whatever this was, it was his, and the day anybody else found out about it, it would stop being his.

So he sits on the edge of the bunk in the cold and does what he does every morning. He draws the breath down, slow, past the ribs, and sets it where he always sets it, and waits.

He gets back exactly what he put in. Nothing.

Outside, the dark is still blue. Cold comes straight down off the peaks. At the cistern, two older boys are washing the night off their faces and complaining about the hour.

One of them sees him and grins, not meaning anything by it. “Calder. You look like something the dog brought in.”

Ren grins back — a wide, slow, empty grin that takes up most of his face and gives nothing away — and scratches the side of his head, and gives the question serious thought, as though there were an answer at the bottom of it. “I don’t have a dog.”

“You’re slow,” the older boy says, and shakes his head, and goes back to his face.

The other one laughs and elbows him. “Leave him.”

They go up the steps with their buckets. Neither of them says another word to him, and neither of them will remember the exchange by noon.

Ren stands there with his hand still in his hair until they are gone. Then the grin comes off him. He leans his shoulder against the cold wall, shuts his eyes, and tries again.

Nothing. Six years of something, and then nothing.

He puts two fingers on the spot under his left ribs, the way he does when nobody is watching. Then he picks up his bucket and goes down the steps to work.

Six years before that morning, when he was ten years old and had no name that anybody had bothered to write down, the Order gave him a month, a stone floor, and the sun.

The floor was stone, and the stone was green with moss, and by the last week of the month the moss had gone dry as shavings, because there had been no rain since the second day.

Dozens of children sat on it in rows, cross-legged, hands turned the way they had been shown, eyes shut. The sun came over the ridge in the middle of the morning and got into everything. Children sweated. Every so often one of them would sneak a sleeve up to his face, get caught at it, and sit up very straight.

Above the floor, on the steps, two men of the Order stood with their arms folded and watched them. The thin one had his chin up. The wide one kept looking off at the children and back again, like a man keeping an eye on somebody else’s children.

“Nobody sleeps,” the thin man said. He did not have to raise his voice; the floor heard him anyway. “There is nothing difficult about the kindling breath. You breathe, and if there is anything at all inside you, inside of a month it will kindle, and that thread is the whole of the rest of your life. Everything you ever do comes out of that thread. Today is the last day of the month. If there is still nothing in you by dark, then there is nothing in you, and you were not made for this, and nobody here is going to pretend otherwise.”

Along toward noon, a boy on the far side came up off the ground with both fists in the air.

“I’ve got it! I’ve got it, I’ve — “ He was dancing. The two children beside him had their eyes open and were grinning at him.

The wide man smiled and nodded one slow nod, the way a man agrees with rain.

The thin man did not smile. “A man who means to hold ley does not caper. Sit down. Run it one turn, and keep it.”

The boy sat down. He was shaking. He kept it.

In the third row from the back, one child had not moved all day.

He was small even for ten. He sat the way they had been told to sit, spine straight, hands right, and every so often he would open his eyes and look around the floor with a face like a swept room, and then shut them and go back to the work — all the way back, every time, as though it had never once occurred to him to stop.

The other children called him Dim. It was not meant as anything in particular. Nobody had ever told them his name, and Dim was what was left over after you looked at him and could not think of one other thing to say.

At the water break he went along the line with his wooden sword and asked the others to play, one at a time, and one at a time they laughed at him and told him to sit down and save his strength. The wide man watched the whole of it and said nothing.

Late in the afternoon the wide man nodded down at him.

“I don’t know where Master Vane picked that one up,” he said. “He works harder than half of them. He’s just — “

“Slow,” said the thin man. He said it without heat, which was worse than heat. “Kindling, Bedrock, Crucible, Ascendant. The road is a ladder, and the first rung asks for one spark. A month is four times what the first rung asks for. When this Order stood at its height we took children who kindled the same day they came in through the gate. Now we take anyone whose family asks nicely.” He shrugged. “If the boy cannot manage it, that is not cruelty. It is the kindest thing anybody in this yard could do for him. A man with no ley in him lives a long quiet life and dies in his own bed.”

“Master Vane brought him up from somewhere,” the wide man said.

“Then Master Vane can carry him back down. There is no place for him up here.”

At the bottom of the day the thin man put his hand up.

“That is enough for this floor. Take up your sticks. Say the verse, all of you, and say it loud.”

The children pulled their wooden swords out of the grass and came up onto their feet, glad to be done, and it came out of them as noise:

“Swordplay is a game of chess.
Read the move before it comes.
No form, no self —
the man plays the sword,
the sword plays the foe.”

None of them knew what any of it meant. It had not meant anything to anyone in the Order for a long time. And in the third row the small boy with the swept face shouted it louder than anybody, having no idea what he had in his mouth.

The thin man looked down at the noise until it stopped. Then he waved his hand, and the floor emptied.

He was turning to go up when somebody took hold of his sleeve.

The small boy was standing there with the wooden sword in his fist, and his face had changed. Something had come up into it. Something that wanted something.

“Play swords,” he said. “Let’s play swords.”

Then he let go, stepped back, and went at the air with the stick.

It was nothing. It was worse than nothing. He stabbed left and right and overhead and at nothing in particular, feet wrong, shoulders wrong, no more order to it than a man fighting bees. It looked exactly like what it was, which was a child playing.

The thin man pulled his sleeve out of the boy’s hand and went up the steps without a word.

The wide man stayed where he was a moment longer.

“Half a month of this,” he said. “And not one of us can tell you what got into him.” Then he went up too.

The sun dropped behind the ridge. Out past the broken run of wall at the top of the floor, the Order’s boundary stone stood in the long grass, a long way inside the line the Order used to hold.

The heat went out of the stone, and the moss went cold under his feet. He stood out in the middle of the floor hitting the air, and after a while he was the only thing left out there, and the shadow he threw was small.

In the morning they were lined up on the flags in front of the gate.

One at a time the children of the year went up and put their hands out and did the work for the instructors, and one at a time a thread came up in them, thin as spider silk, and they were passed and sent to stand on the other side of the flags.

Then it was the small boy’s turn.

He went up. He put his hands out. He did the whole of it, everything he had been shown for a month.

Nothing came up. Nothing at all.

The instructor held his hands a moment longer than he had to. Then he let them go and looked over the boy’s head at the next child, and the boy understood that he was supposed to walk, and that there was only one way to go, which was off to the side.

Past the gate, on the flagged ground where the Order did its business, stood the masters of the peaks.

There were six of them, in the Order’s gray, swords at their backs, none of them young. Behind each of them stood his own people. Behind one of them there was one girl.

Master Aldric Vane was the youngest of the six, and in that company it was not a compliment. The Order kept its sigils in his care — the wards on the granaries, the marks that hold a boundary stone in its socket, all the patient work that goes unthanked — and paid him for it with the leanest of the six peaks, the thinnest ley, and the fewest people.

The girl behind him was about ten, small, her hair coming out of its knot, her hands behind her back. She grinned at nothing in particular, and when she grinned you got both of her eyeteeth.

Vane came down off the step and walked over to the two instructors.

“Tell me about that one,” he said.

The wide man rubbed his hands together. “He tries, Master Vane. He is the last one off the floor most nights. He’s just — “

“Slow,” the thin man said. “Diligent and slow. And slow is the one of the three you cannot teach.” He put a hand out, palm up, reasonable. “Master, the road asks for diligence, sense, and luck. A man can be given the first two. The third is not given to anyone.” He nodded down the line of children. “And it is not only the ley. Our own verse is rote. It means nothing. A normal child has the whole of it by supper. That one took fifteen days to get the shape of it. Fifteen.”

“Ah,” Vane said, and nothing else.

The thin man nodded and went back to his place. Then he turned to the children and put his voice out over them.

“Say the verse. All of you. Louder than that.”

And they said it, and the small boy in the third row shouted it with them, loudest of all.

Then the children of the year were brought up one at a time. Each of them walked to a master, and the master put a hand on his head, and then the child went and stood behind him among his people.

Not one of them walked to Vane.

The other five had better ley under them, and more important men standing on them, and every child on those flags had known which road went up since before he could read the word.

So there was one child left standing out front at the end of it, with a wooden sword in his hand, and he was the smallest one.

Vane looked at him for a while.

Then he came down off the flags, and he did not look at anybody else on the way, and he stopped a few feet short of the boy and put his hand out, palm up, and waited.

“Come here,” he said. “Stand with me.”

The boy came. He came slowly, looking at his feet the whole way, and when he got there he took hold of the master’s sleeve and said, quietly, “Master. I can play swords.”

Then he let go, stepped back, took the wooden sword in both hands, and went to work on the air.

Behind him the other children laughed.

“He’s off again.”

“Look at him. All he’s got is the stick.”

“Somebody must have dropped him on his head.”

The two instructors of the year did not laugh. The wide one looked at his feet. The thin one looked at Vane.

“What is this,” Vane said. It was not a question.

“Boy,” the wide instructor said, and his voice had gone up a notch. “Come and be chosen. Come on. This is your chance.”

“He has been this way the better part of a month,” the thin man said. “It is not our doing.” Then he walked forward, because walking forward was easier than standing there, and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder to move him along. “Stop playing the fool. Go and be chosen — “

The boy was still stabbing at the air, at nothing, in no direction in particular, and the point of the wooden sword came up and went into the meat of the man’s palm.

He got his hand back and stood holding it out in front of him, staring at it. There was a hole through the middle of the palm, and it was already running red.

For one full second the whole yard held still — the year of children, the six masters, the morning.

Then the wide instructor put both hands over his face. The thin man’s face went from surprise to red to something past red. A grown man, a teacher of the Order, and a hole in his hand, made by a ten-year-old with a stick.

“You little — “ he said. “You stabbed me. You stabbed me?”

The boy had stopped. He looked at the man’s hand, and then at his own sword, and he could make no story out of any of it, and it was all over his face, and he took a step back.

“Play swords,” he said. Then, smaller: “With me?”

The thin man crossed the ground between them in two steps and hit him.

The boy went down on the flags and sat there with one hand on his face, which was coming up red and high on one side. His eyes filled and did not spill. He took the hand away, picked the sword up where it had fallen, and looked up at the man and said it the way you would explain a rule to somebody who had it wrong.

“I only know how to play swords,” he said. “And nobody will play with me.”

Vane was moving before the boy finished.

He came off the flags straight at the thin man with his arm already up, and there was nothing held back in it.

“Master Vane!” The wide instructor got between them and took Vane’s wrist in both hands, and he was not a small man, and he had to use everything he had. “Master. Not in front of the year. Whatever they see today they will tell at home, and it will be told again.” He was sweating now. “He meant it for the boy’s own good — ask him. Rough is how he has always been with the slow ones.” He pulled at the wrist. “Let the boy go down to the river villages. There is good land down there, and families who would take a strong boy. The month is over, Master. Let it be over.”

Vane’s arm did not come down.

“You have all decided there is no place for him here,” he said. “Who gave any of you that?”

And then, loud enough for the gate, and the steps, and the boundary stone out in the grass:

“He has one. He has mine.”

The boy watched.

He understood about half of it, which was as much as he generally understood of anything grown-ups said. But he understood the arm, and the hand that had stopped it, and the fact that the master had not stepped back. Nobody had ever stood in front of him like that.

So he got up off the flags. He went to Vane and took hold of his sleeve again.

“Play swords,” he said. “Come on. Let’s play swords.”

Then he stepped back and went after the air with the stick.

Vane looked down at him. Whatever had been in the master’s face did not last. After a while he let the breath out of him, and his arm came down, and he stood there in front of the whole Order and watched a boy with no ley in him stab at nothing at all.

Behind him the other five masters looked at one another. One of them sighed. One of them, further back, was doing a poor job of not laughing.

He kept at it. He put the stick out to the left, and to the right, and over his head, and out again, and the air took all of it. And after a while he noticed that no one had answered him. In the whole yard, not one child had picked up a stick.

His eyes went red.

He turned around on the flags and shouted it at the yard, at the gate, at the mountain.

“I can play swords! Who’ll play swords with me?”

And then, out of the morning — from high up past the top of the gate, somewhere off where the peaks went pale, and also, somehow, from about a foot behind his own ear — a voice.

“What is all this noise?”

Every master on the flags turned. Every child on the flags turned around, to see what the masters had turned to look at.

The light on the stones changed. Something had come between them and the sun.

The boy didn’t look up. He wasn’t finished.