Chapter 6: Tailings

The door opens at the third bell.

It is shut every other hour of the day. It is a plain door in a plain wall, and by the time it moves there are sixteen people standing in front of it on the flags, because in this Order there are things you cannot get any other way, and everyone on this hill has learned exactly how long a shut door can stay shut.

Elle is first in line, where she has been since before the bell. Bran is against the wall out of the wind with his one hand down in his coat and his eyes on nothing at all, and Ren stands beside him, which is where Ren stands.

The door bangs back. Steward Pell comes out with the ledger tucked under one arm and the long box in both hands, sets the box on the counter, sets the ledger on the box, and looks down the line the way a man looks down a road he decided years ago not to enjoy.

“Rusk.”

Elle goes up.

Pell lifts the lid and takes out a rough ley shard — a knuckle of cloudy stone, flat-cut on two faces, with something slow and dull turning in the middle of it — and lays it on the counter.

“One rough. First of the month, first draw.”

She doesn’t take it. She doesn’t step back.

“Steward—“

“Next.”

“There’s always a leftover.”

“There’s a ledger,” Pell says. “The ledger balances. Nothing’s left over.”

“Then give it to them. Coyle and Calder. They’re the master’s, same as me.”

“You’re not owed a second one.”

“Neither is Frayne. He can’t spend what he takes.”

“He spends it,” Pell says. “That’s the whole difference.”

He puts both hands flat on the counter. He isn’t angry. Angry would be easier. He has one sentence, he has said it four hundred times, and he expects to say it four hundred more.

“You know what’s in the young ranks this year,” he says. “Frayne. Selwyn. Seventh degree Kindling, both of them, neither one of them seventeen. Put a rough in Dorian Frayne’s hand and in ten years this Order has a Bedrock out of it. Put one in Selwyn’s—“

He stops.

“Finish it,” Elle says.

“Why.”

“Because you finish it every time and I’d rather hear it out loud than guess at it.”

Pell looks at her a moment. Then he does.

“In his hand it’s a rock,” he says, and tips his chin down the flags at Ren. “The Order fed that hope for six years, Rusk. Every month, six years, on the Warden’s own word. The Warden stopped it. I keep the box. I don’t decide who stands in the line.”

“Then I’ll ask again tomorrow.”

“You’ll get the same.”

“Then I’ll ask again the day after.”

“You came up this hill a year ahead of him,” Pell says. “That year bought you a place in this line. It didn’t buy him one, and it wasn’t the year’s fault. Sign your name, take your stone, and let me get on with the line.”

Elle signs. She takes her stone. She walks back down the step with her chin up, which is how she cries.

“Calder.”

Ren comes up the step.

Pell looks past him, at the wall. “And the one with the arm.”

Bran doesn’t move off the wall.

“One arm and no novitiate,” Pell says, without looking up from the box. “The Order wouldn’t have him. The master did, and taught him anyway. He’s not in the rolls. The grit that comes to Calder comes by the Warden’s word, and this comes the same way. Take it up off the step, the two of you.”

He slides the shallow tray out of the long box and takes two handfuls out of it — grit, chips, gray thumbnails of stone, the kind of thing that falls off a real shard when it’s cut — and rolls them off his palm onto the flags at the foot of the step. One of them travels as far as the toe of the next man in the line and stops there.

“There. Take it and go.”

Ren comes down the step and crouches and picks them up. One, two, three, four, five, and a sixth that went sideways under the lip of the step. He puts them in his coat and stands.

“Six,” he says.

Pell writes nothing down. Nothing off that tray has ever gone in the book.

Elle is waiting for them at the foot of the step with her shard closed in her hand.

They are three paces from the corner of the wall when the sound of the yard changes.

Four of them come down from the practice field the long way around, the way you walk when you want the yard to watch you cross it. Practice swords through belts. Clean linen. The one in front is Dorian Frayne.

Frayne has his hands loose at his sides and a small pleasant smile on his face, and he says nothing at all.

The talking gets done for him.

Garth Mullen comes on ahead, broad and loud, with Rudy Pike half a step behind him, narrow and already laughing.

“Well,” Mullen says. “Look at this. The founder’s heir, come to draw his share.”

Pike: “Tailings for the tailings heap.”

“A matched pair, the two of you.”

There is a scatter of laughter from the four or five people still waiting at the back of the line.

Ren keeps walking.

“He had a name handed to him,” Pike says, to the others, to the yard. “Six years back. Out of the Warden’s own mouth, in front of the whole hill. Founder’s name.”

“I heard it,” Mullen says. “And six years now, and not one wisp of ley out of him. My aunt’s boy got to first degree in four months. He’s nine. His mother still wipes his nose.”

“So it’s Dim,” Pike says.

Ren keeps walking.

Mullen looks at Elle and grins. “You’ve got a soft spot for the Dim one, Rusk.”

Elle says nothing.

“How long’s she been walking you home, Dim? Or does she stay the night?”

“Does she tuck you in,” Pike says, “or is she still—“

Bran’s hand is on the hatchet at his belt.

Ren puts his own hand over it, palm down, presses it flat, and shakes his head once.

Elle’s eyes go bright and red at the rims. Her mouth is set. She doesn’t say anything.

“Enough,” Frayne says.

He says it quietly. He doesn’t raise his voice. Both of them stop as if they’d been struck.

“Apologize.”

Mullen’s face does something complicated. “I only said what Master Ewan says.”

“I know what Master Ewan says,” Frayne says. “Apologize.”

Mullen looks down at the flags. “Sorry, Rusk.”

“Sorry,” Pike says, half a beat late, and doesn’t mean it.

Frayne looks at Ren a moment. Ren looks back. Neither of them says anything to the other, and Frayne smiles the same small smile and walks on, with his people falling in behind him.

“Forget it,” Ren says. “We’ve no use for it.”

He takes Elle by the arm, turns her, gets a hand on Bran’s shoulder, and walks them both out of the yard.

Elle’s hut and Bran’s face each other under the yews on the north slope. Bran’s is the one with the stove, so that is where they end up.

Elle starts before the door is shut.

“You let them.”

“I heard it.”

“You let them say it. About me. In the yard.”

“He stopped it,” Ren says.

“After.”

“After is still stopped.”

“After isn’t the same thing,” she says. “After means it’s already out there and it stays out there, and tomorrow somebody says it quieter in the line and laughs, and you stand there with your hands in your pockets again.”

She’s right. He doesn’t say so out loud.

Bran is at the stove with his back to both of them, doing something with a bowl.

“You could have said something,” Elle says.

“I said forget it.”

“That’s not saying something.”

“Them being wrong doesn’t make me right to hit them,” Ren says. “And this hill took me in. I’m not the one who breaks that.”

“I’d have hit them,” Bran says, without turning around.

“You’ve got one arm and a hatchet. They’ve got four arms and nothing else to do all day. I’d have been carrying you back up the hill by dark.”

“You wouldn’t have had to carry me.”

“I’d have carried you anyway,” Ren says. “You’re heavier than you look and it’s a long hill.”

Bran sets the bowl down on the hearthstones and lets that be his answer.

Elle sits down on the bench and rubs her face with both hands, and when she takes them away she’s got herself under control again, mostly.

“Three years,” she says. “You’ve been down that hill three days a week mending legs and setting bones and digging splinters out of people who can’t pay you anything. You have never once asked this Order for a thing you weren’t owed.”

“I’ve got the right to the rock on the step,” Ren says. “That’s a right.”

“It’s not much of one.”

“No,” he says. “It isn’t.”

Bran turns around then.

“You think it stops at names,” he says.

“I know it doesn’t.”

“No. You don’t.” Bran wipes his hand on his coat. He talks plain when it matters, and he comes off the hill country when he does it, and both those things are happening now. “You go down and you take the bad leg and the cough and the woman who wants to talk about her son, and you come back up, and you think the hill between here and there is the whole world. What’s on this hill is a yard and a door and a steward who’s tired. Past the river it’s different. Out there you’ve got men with a little ley and no patience, and to them a village is stock. Nobody asks stock a question. You take what you want and you go, and if it makes a noise, you quiet the noise.”

Elle’s shoulders pull together. She turns her face toward the stove and doesn’t say anything.

“Bran,” Ren says.

“I didn’t think it up,” Bran says. “I’ve just never been told different.”

He puts the bowl down.

“That’s what the long road costs,” he says. “Years are bought in blood, and any blood will do.”

Ren doesn’t answer.

He sits there with it for a long time. The fire ticks. Elle watches him and doesn’t touch him.

Then Elle moves. She comes off the bench and takes his face in both her hands and turns it up. She isn’t angry anymore, just tired, and it is the look she used to give him when they were small and he’d been left behind at the practice field.

“Rennie.”

“Elle.”

“You tear a hole in the sky,” she says, “I’ll stitch it.”

She says it like she’s saying she’ll bring in the washing. Then she squeezes his face hard, until it hurts, and lets go, and goes to help Bran with the bowl.

Her hut is the one across the path from Bran’s, and it has no stove in it, so she carries the lamp over and shuts the door.

She puts the shard into his hand, then sits down on the bench with her back to the door, because she asked him once what he was doing and he told her, all of it, the whole thing, and now she knows better than to watch a working while it’s being cut.

He kneels on the floor stone with the lamp beside his knee and the rough shard set in the middle of the stone, and takes the awl out of his sleeve, and starts.

First the ring, one hair’s width from the shard, never touching it. Then four arms out of the ring, one to each quarter, all four the same length to the width of a fingernail, because if one runs long the ley gathers there and burns the cut and you’ve got a drawing on a floor instead of a working. Then around each arm a small ring. Then inside each small ring a shape he has cut so many times that his hand cuts it and his eyes check it after, and the checking is what takes the time.

One breath’s worth of a mistake and none of it works.

He learned it out of his master’s book, and then out of his own hands. There are two copies of the Groundwork of Sigils on this hill. One is the master’s, written out in his own hand, and it never leaves his house. The other is Ren’s, copied page by page over one winter, and it lives under his bed with the medical book he traded a pair of live hares for at the spring fair, a book with about a third of it wrong.

The book won’t do this part. Nothing in the book does this part. The ground at the foot of his own bed is where he worked it out.

Three years ago the Order stopped his draw. There is no arguing with that, and he didn’t try. What he did instead, over a few bad weeks, was work out that a rough shard is too much stone for one ley-trap and a tailings is too little — and then that five small ley-traps laid in a ring, each one with a tailings at its eye, chained so the ley passes from one to the next instead of gathering, will hold the same as one proper working holds.

Five lumps of gravel doing the work of a stone nobody would sell him.

He has never told anybody that. Bran knows he does something with the floor. Elle knows he does something with the floor. Neither of them has ever counted the cuts.

He closes the last ring and sits back on his heels. The lamp above the stone dips for a moment, and the rough shard at the center goes from cloudy to clean at the edges.

Then it settles, and the lines go quiet, and it’s done. Whatever she draws off it now, she’ll draw at ten times the rate, and she won’t know why.

He wipes his thumb along the ring to check for grit. There isn’t any.

“Bran wants you,” Elle says.

Ren looks up.

Bran is in the doorway. He has the hatchet in his belt.

“Arm,” Bran says.

Ren shows him his arm.

Bran takes the hatchet out of his belt and raises it in one hand. Elle is halfway off the bench, saying Bran’s name, when it comes down.

It isn’t a tap. Bran has been felling wood with one arm for six years, and he swings like a man taking down a stump.

The sound is wrong for what it should be. It is flat, the noise you get when a hand comes down on a table.

There is a white line across Ren’s forearm, the width of the edge, and it doesn’t break the skin. By the time Elle has hold of his wrist the line is going, and by the time she has turned his arm toward the lamp for a better look there’s nothing to see but the ordinary skin. Nothing has ever cut it.

Bran looks at the place where the line was for a while.

“Waste of a swing,” he says, and puts the hatchet back in his belt, and goes out.

Elle is holding Ren’s arm in both hands.

“Is he — did he —“

“He’s been wanting to know for a while,” Ren says.

“You could have told me first.”

“You’d have stopped him.”

“Yes,” she says. “I’d have stopped him.”

She runs her thumb up his arm and down it, both sides, twice, looking for something to find.

“Rennie,” she says. “What are you?”

He grins at her. He scratches the back of his head.

“Tired,” he says, and picks up the lamp, and goes out.

The roof of his own hut is the best place on this hill to be nobody’s problem, so he goes up the back of it and lies down along the ridge with his hands behind his head.

Above him the yews move. Below him the yard goes dark one lamp at a time, and the last of the line comes back up from the practice field, talking, and they don’t know how far voices carry up here.

He lies there and lets the yews do what they do.

After a while Bran’s voice comes back to him.

Years are bought in blood, and any blood will do.

He says it twice in his head, and then out loud once, quietly, up at the sky, to hear it in his own voice and find out whether it fits anywhere in him.

It doesn’t. It sits in him like a boot on the wrong foot.

“So which one is it,” he says to nobody. “The long road. Or the killing road.”

The stars are out. They have nothing to say about it.

The masters on this hill say the road is climbed. Bran says it’s bought. Elle won’t say anything about it at all, and none of the three will fit inside the other two.

“Maybe it isn’t mine,” he says. “Maybe it’s theirs. Let them walk it.”

The door of the shard-house opens at the third bell. It will open again tomorrow, and on the first of next month he’ll be on the flags with Bran, and the man on the step will hand him the same spoonful of gravel.

He puts his palm flat under his ribs where the iron sits, and holds it there.

Nothing answers. It hasn’t answered since the middle of the night, and he has mostly stopped waiting for it. He hasn’t stopped asking.

His hand gets warm. Above the roof the yews keep up the same six or seven sounds they have been making all night, none of them for him.

He stays up there until the last lamp in the yard goes out.

He takes the gravel they roll at his feet and counts every piece, even the one that slid under the step. I keep thinking about that tally. Would you have gone back for the sixth one?

Read it here first — then, if you want the chapters ahead of this one, they’re already posted on my Patreon: https://patreon.com/zuochuang