Chapter 5: The Shard Goes Quiet

Sometime in the last hour of the night, the thing under Ren Calder’s ribs stops.

He is asleep when it goes, and awake a minute later, all at once, the way you wake when a dog that has barked all evening finally shuts up. He lies on his back in the dark with his hands crossed over his stomach and waits for it to start again.

He counts to three hundred. Then he counts to three hundred again.

It does not come back. He does not sleep.

At first light he gets up off the plank bed, because lying on it has stopped being useful to anybody, including him. He hangs off the door frame by his fingers, counts twenty, shakes his arms out, and then he runs the hill.

Down past the stile, along the dry wall, in at the back of the yard where the woodpile is stacked taller than a man, and out across the apron in front of the hall.

The little ones are on the practice ground with their sticks, saying the verse while they drill, flat as a price list.

”Swordplay is a game of chess. Read the move before it comes.”

The instructor does not give them the rest. Nobody ever does. The rest of it cannot be taught, and the Order has made its peace with that. One boy on this mountain has not. He did it anyway, at ten, twice, in front of a Lord Warden and every master on the six hills.

Two of them look up, see who it is, and go back to their sticks. He runs past without slowing.

Then the gate. The steps come up from the road there, and the flags lie flat and wide in front of the hall, and he goes the long way round, as he always does, and comes out onto the stone.

Nobody is out here yet. That is not why he comes.

His steps slow, and stop, at the edge of the grass.

He does not make himself remember it. He has never needed to. Six years ago a boy stood on that grass with a stick in his fist and no name, and a man came down out of the air without using the steps, and the yard went quiet, and the man took three steps back and said a thousand years. Nobody has ever marked the spot.

His right hand is already flat on the empty air at his hip, palm down, the way a hand sits on a pommel.

He looks at it until it stops doing that. Then he turns around and runs back up.

The stone behind the hut is where he does the morning’s work.

Feet planted. Hands loose on the knees. Draw it in through the nose, all the way down, hold it under the ribs, push.

That is the whole of the first lesson of Kindling, and he had it right the first day, six years ago. It has never once done what it is supposed to do.

What it does: the breath goes down, and the iron takes it. Takes everything he brings it. Then it gives something back — finer, brighter, with a real shine on it — and the finer thing comes off the iron in one pass and goes into him, into the meat of his arms and his back and his legs, and stays there as strength and nothing else. Nothing is left over to hold. Six years of it, and he carries no more ley inside him than the rock under his feet does. What he carries instead shows up in other places, and only when he uses his hands.

This morning the iron takes nothing.

He draws and holds and pushes, and nothing comes up to meet him. Nothing swallowed. Nothing given back. He does it again. On the third he holds until his chest aches, lets it go, and gets out of it exactly what he brought.

Every other morning of his life, the work has left him warm to the wrists and hungry in a good way. Today his fingers stay cold, and rubbing them does not help.

“Six years,” he says to the rock, out loud, to nobody. “You never took a morning off. And you pick this one.”

He presses two fingers in under his ribs, where the iron has been lying quiet since midnight. Nothing. There has never been anything there for a hand to find.

Six years ago Master Vane laid him out on this same stone and put two fingers exactly there, and stood over him thinking about it for a long time — long enough for the shadow of the yew to move off the roof — and then took his hand away and said, “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

He meant it. He still means it. He found nothing his hands could hold, and nothing since has given him a reason to think he missed anything.

Ren holds his own hand up into the light and looks at it.

Two fingers under the ribs: what are you, and who put you there. The palm flat on the air at his hip: where did that come from, and off whose hand, before it was mine. And this one, held up: whose hand is this.

He was ten when he started remembering. It begins with a river, and a long time spent walking beside it, and nothing else. If somebody took the rest off him, they took it thoroughly; if nobody took it, he lost it himself; and he has never worked out which of the two is worse.

He goes down past the Master’s house and stops in the middle of the path with his hand half up and his mouth half open.

He could knock. He has the whole of it ready and rehearsed — six years, the iron, what it does in the morning, and now this. Master Vane would put down his pen and lay him out on the stone and put two fingers in the same place and find the same nothing, and then he would be decent about it. That last part is the part Ren cannot sit through twice.

He puts his hand down and goes on down the hill.

He spends the middle of the morning at the hut with Groundwork of Sigils open on the stone beside him, drawing on a slate with a stick of chalk, wiping it off, drawing it again.

There are two copies of that book on this hill: the one Master Vane wrote out in his own hand, and the one Ren made over a winter, page for page, because he was told he could look at the Master’s copy as often as he liked as long as he never carried it off the hill. So he copied it. Half of what he knows about sigils he learned from the copying itself.

A working is a drawing that either does something in the world or does nothing at all, and the difference between the two can be one line’s width. There is nobody in this Order who can lay a whole one except the Master.

And him. With chalk, on a slate, with nothing else to spend.

Just past the middle of the day he packs the satchel and goes down: a roll of clean linen, a knife, a jar of salve, and a book.

The book is a country healer’s — which root you chew for what — and he traded two hares for it at the mill market in the spring. It is wrong about a third of the time. He has learned which third and copied the good of it out in his own hand, twice.

The mill town is forty roofs and a wheel where the road crosses the water. Forty minutes down. An hour back up.

On the green, a girl of about seven is sitting with her leg stuck out straight in front of her, and her mother has been arguing with the cut on that shin for three days and losing. Ren kneels down beside her and looks at it. The girl watches him the whole time without blinking.

He washes the cut, wraps it, ties it off — and she bites him on the wrist.

Her mother smacks her shoulder, not hard, and starts in on the apology. Ren sits back on his heels and looks at the little wet tooth marks and laughs. Then he tells the mother what to put on the leg and what to leave off it, and takes the scolding she owes him for not coming down yesterday.

She puts three eggs and half a loaf into his satchel before he can stand up. Refusing them would cost her more than the eggs, so he carries them.

At the wheel, a man has a chest full of something that rattles when he breathes. Ren listens to it, does not like it, and says he will come back Thursday.

An old woman wants to talk about her son, who is not coming home. He lets her.

On his way back through the mill yard he comes on a cart with a wheel off it and the carter underneath, both feet braced and one shoulder into the bed of it, getting nowhere, and two men from the yard standing off to one side watching him not do it.

Ren sets his shoulder under the bed of the cart, lifts, and holds it up while the carter fits the wheel back on and drives the pin through.

The carter stares at him from the ground.

Ah, hell, Ren thinks, and scratches the back of his head, and grins. “Good footing in this yard,” he says. “That’s all it is.”

Halfway up he stops in the middle of the path where nobody is going to see him, and does the morning’s work over again: feet planted, hands loose on the knees, all the way down through the nose, hold it under the ribs, push.

Nothing takes it.

He stands there a second. Then he goes on up.

The shard-house stands at the top of the yard with its door shut. The step in front of it is worn hollow in the middle, and it is where the Order keeps its ley.

Elle is sitting on the step with her chin in her hands. Bran is flat against the wall out of the wind, his one hand down inside his coat and the empty sleeve hanging by his ribs, his eyes on the road.

She sees him first. She always does.

“Rennie.”

“Elle.”

“You’re late.”

“I know.”

“I’ve been on this step since the noon bell.”

“I’ve been down at the mill. A girl with a bad leg bit me for my trouble.”

“Good,” she says. “She’s got better sense than I have.”

He comes up the last few yards and looks at the door. It is always shut at this hour, and everyone on this hill waits in front of it anyway. The man who keeps the key has not once in six years hurried for anybody.

“You were on the flags this morning,” she says.

“Was I.”

“In the half-dark, standing on them by yourself, like a scarecrow somebody put up wrong. I saw you from the wall.”

“I was counting the stones.”

“You were counting the stones.”

“There are four hundred and eleven of them. I got to two hundred and lost the count and had to start over.”

She has two small pointed teeth at the corners of her mouth, and they have been giving her away since she was ten, and they are giving her away now.

She lets it go. Either she believes him or she has decided not to make him prove it, and he has never been able to tell the two apart with her, and she has never made it easy.

She reaches out and takes his hand and holds it a second, and her hand is warm and his is not.

“You’re cold,” she says.

“It’s a long walk.”

“It’s not cold out.”

“I’ve been up since before the bells.”

She looks at him a moment longer, and lets that go too.

“Say something nice to me,” she says.

“What?”

“I’ve been sitting on this step all afternoon, I’ve got the water duty tonight, and Bran hasn’t said a word in an hour. So say something nice to me.”

“You’re graceful,” he says. “You’re composed. You are the most elegant person on this hill.”

“Go on.”

“You’re patient with children and kind to animals.”

“Go on.”

“And the most special thing about you—“

“Yes?”

“—is that you’re a little bit vain.”

“I’ll kill you,” she says, and raps him on the forehead with a knuckle, twice.

Bran turns the split of wood over in his hand, end for end, and says nothing, which is how Bran laughs.

Elle pulls her skirt out from under her so there is room on the step. Ren presses his thumb in under his ribs, through the cloth, one more time, and gets the same answer he got at midnight, which is none. Then he puts the grin on and sits down between the two of them.

“Water duty,” Elle says. “Buckets up the east path. In the dark.”

Bran turns the split of wood over again.

The door stays shut.

He has the whole speech ready, the door is right there, and he turns around anyway. That’s the choice I keep replaying. Do you knock, or do you walk on?

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