Small Work

MADISON

The villages east of Haze. Ten days after the new moon. Seventy-three days to midsummer.

The first person who spat at her was a farmer named Odd.

He did it without heat, almost politely, a man spitting out a cherry stone. He stood in the doorway of his farmhouse in the third of the villages east of Haze, a thin, sun-dried man of sixty with dirt in every crease of his hands, and his eyes went to the guild tabard on Madison's chest, the gold tower on red, and to the sword on her back, and to Mantis behind her in the yard, a big slow man in plate older than any of them. Then he spat on her boot.

"There," he said. "That's what I've got."

She'd been spat on by gulls with better aim. She looked at her boot, and then at him, and did what she did on the dock when a buyer tried her: she let the silence go on until it was his.

Behind her Vask made a small delighted sound and started forward, and old Rovan, without a word, stepped between him and the door, which was how Madison learned that Rovan did his talking with his feet. The Guild had chalked Party Five on the yard board the second morning after the tower, under Mantis's name, before any of them could argue, and Tyba's under Party Nine, bound north for the salt pans. He had gone looking back over his shoulder.

They had walked out of Haze at dawn three days ago and she had met the rest of them on the road, one at a time, the way you meet weather. Boro had stopped them at the first bridge to knock on a beam with one knuckle and pronounce it a scandal, and been right; a cart went through it behind them before noon. Puli carried a clay pot of pitch in a sling at his hip and walked on the downwind side of everybody without being asked. Juvar walked with a leaf in his mouth and fell in at whoever's shoulder was quietest.

Nocta walked last and wrote, at every halt, in a small black notebook, and once Madison saw her own name on the page upside down. Rovan walked first and never once looked behind him, and she had stopped trying to get a word out of him by the second milestone.

This morning Mantis had handed her the ledger.

"You read," he'd said. "You can add. Your father's name opens doors out here or shuts them, and I want to know which. Third village is yours."

So it was her ledger open in her bad hand, and her boot.

"Master Odd," she said. "It says forty coppers for the spring assessment."

"It can say what it likes."

"It says two fields in barley, one in beans, a dozen sheep."

"Nine sheep. Wolves had three." He leaned on his doorframe and looked at her face for the first time. "You're not from Haze. Islands?"

"Jul."

"Jul." He nodded slowly. "Got a statue in Jul. A hero." He jerked his head back into the dark of the house, where something hung on the wall. "My boy did six years. Came home with one arm and a medal. The medal's on the wall. They stopped his pension last spring. Clerical review." He said the two words like the name of a sickness. "Wait there."

He came back with a letter and held it out to her, not to Mantis. It was the same paper. The same clerk's round hand. The same three scrawls at the bottom.

Madison didn't take it. She didn't trust her hand to.

"Read it out, then, since you read," said Odd. "I can't. My boy can't. The priest says it's the Emperor's will."

Behind her she heard Vask stop smirking.

She read it out. Pending clerical review. Her mother's letter, word for word, with a different name at the top. When she finished, Odd took it back and folded it along creases gone soft as cloth.

"So," he said. "Forty coppers."

Mantis said nothing. That was the point of the morning, she understood. He stood in the yard with his big gauntleted hands behind his back and his cliff of a face showing nothing, and waited to see what she'd write.

She knew what the ledger was for. A shortfall in a party's take came out of the party's pay, and a shortfall marked in her hand came out of hers. She had sixty coppers sewn into her shirt beside the order, the first month's wage the Guild paid every new name in advance for boots, and two hundred to find for Ossery by midsummer, or the magistrate took the lamp shop.

She wrote Fifteen coppers. Rest after harvest. And under it, smaller, Shortfall to M. of Jul.

Odd went in and came back with fifteen coppers and counted them into her palm, as if each one cost him blood. Then he looked at the ledger, at what she'd written under it, and didn't say thank you, and didn't spit again either.

"One more thing," Madison said. "Your boy's letter. Lend it to me."

"What for?"

"Because there's another one like it on my mother's table, and I want to put them side by side in front of somebody in Haze who can't say it's a mistake twice."

He looked at her as he'd look at a sky before cutting hay. Then he gave it to her, and shut the door.

In the lane Mantis took the ledger back and read her line and closed it.

"Twenty-five short," he said. "That's near half your month."

"I know."

"You'll still be short at midsummer."

"I know that too."

He walked on a few paces before he said anything else. "I'd have written the same." He didn't look at her. "And I'd have hated you a little for making me pay it. Odd's boy served under your father. Did you know that? Shadowthorn. He'd have told you if you'd asked."

That night Party Five slept in the loft of the inn, on straw pallets under a low roof. There was no pallet for Tyba, and the loft felt a cooper short.

Vask didn't let them sleep. He had a set of knucklebones and a theory that a party which hadn't lost money to each other wasn't a party yet, and he went round the loft with his fist out until they were all on their knees in a ring on the boards. Puli's pitch pot sat in the far corner with a ring drawn round it in the dust. Mantis played in his shirt, which none of them had imagined he owned. Nocta sat out with her notebook. Rovan lay by the hatch in his boots, facing it.

They played for coppers nobody had. Madison wouldn't bet a copper, so she bet the top button off her collar, and lost it, and the collar lay flat for the first time in its life. Juvar lost everything, and smiled as if he'd won, and Vask looked at the smile and pushed his whole pile back across the boards to him without a word. Boro laughed so hard the pegs creaked. Even Mantis laughed, once, a sound like a cart going over a bridge, and looked surprised at himself.

When the candle went out they found their pallets in the dark by feel, and somebody, she never knew who, put a blanket over her that wasn't hers.

The sword took her back to the boat slip.

It didn't come as a dream. It came as a smell comes, all at once and whole: smoke, and wet cobbles, and the hill of black rock behind the town, and a head the size of a cart coming down through the smoke with an eye like a lamp of yellow glass, and thock into the shield from behind. Not from the drake. From behind. From a roof. One. Two. Three. And a face at the roof's edge, turning away, that she never got to see.

She came up off the pallet with her hands closed on nothing and her heart slamming. Puli was snoring. Boro was snoring louder. Juvar was awake on the next pallet, she saw, with his eyes open on the rafters and his hand pressed over his heart, and he shut them when he saw her looking. Moonlight came in through the gable window in a long pale stripe.

Nocta was sitting in it, cross-legged on the bare boards beside Madison's pack, looking at the sword.

She didn't touch it. She was looking at it as you'd look at a sleeping animal you weren't sure was asleep. Without raising her eyes she said, very softly, "That's the third night I've watched you do that. Since I started watching."

Madison's mouth was dry. "You count my nights?"

"Hegal does. I tell him." Now Nocta looked up. In the moonlight her eyes were dark and perfectly calm. "He asked me to tell him what it does to you. I could tell him it does nothing. He'd believe me. He trusts me more than he should."

"And what do you want for that?"

"What it shows you."

Does it talk to you? Madison had asked her father once, in the kitchen in Jul, leaning in the doorway as if it didn't matter, and he had looked up from the oil and the rag and something had moved in his face, and then he'd laughed and said no.

She could say no. Nocta would know it for a lie, and go and tell Hegal the truth in the morning, and Hegal would take her off the roll for a girl the sword was eating, and there would be no guild pay and no Haze and no one to put Odd's letter in front of.

"The harbor at Southport," she said. "A drake coming down on the slip. And somebody shooting from behind him, off a roof. Not at the drake." She heard herself. "At him."

Nocta was quiet. Down in the yard a horse shifted and blew.

"How many?"

"Three. Every night, three."

"Bows?"

"Crossbows. Short and hard. Thock."

Nocta looked at the window, at the moon, as if she were reading something off it.

"In this province," she said at last, "the only men who carry crossbows on a hunt are Council wardens. The Guild uses bows. The Legions use bows. The Council's wardens use crossbows, because you can teach a clerk to shoot one in an afternoon." She got up without a sound. "I'll tell Hegal it does nothing. You'll owe me the face on the roof, when it shows you." She held out her hand. "And the farmer's letter. Now."

"No."

"You walk into the registry with two letters with the same tail, and they open a folder on Odd's boy, and on your mother, and you get a ditch." The hand stayed out. "Hegal walks in with one, and a clerk loses his post. That's what it's for. But it goes in under Hegal's name. Not yours, not Odd's. Or I tell Hegal the truth in the morning."

Madison took Odd's letter out of her shirt. It was warm from her. She'd promised a one-armed man's father she would put it in front of somebody in Haze who couldn't call it a mistake twice. She put it in Nocta's palm instead, and Nocta folded it once and it was gone, a card in a trick.

Nocta went back to her own pallet at the far end of the loft. Before she lay down she opened the black notebook on her knee and wrote one line in it, by moonlight, and Madison saw her own name go in at the top of the page.

Madison didn't sleep again. She lay on her back with the order inside her shirt and the place against her ribs where Odd's letter had been, and the sword warm under her hand.

At first light, when she went down to the pump, a one-armed man was waiting in the inn yard with a medal on his coat, and she knew whose before he spoke.

"Father says you're taking it to Haze," he said. "My letter."

"It's going to Haze," said Madison.

He looked at her face a while, and at her empty hands, and nodded, as men nod who have been told things by people in tabards before. He walked back down the road toward the third village without looking round.

She was barely back in the loft when Mantis came up the ladder behind her with a paper in his fist and his face grimmer than usual.

"Get up. We've got a real one."

He set something on the boards between the pallets before he said anything else: a chip of gray stone the size of a thumb, tied to the paper with red thread. The old mountain houses sent a piece of the trouble with a request, Rovan said later, so whoever took the job could hold it first; he'd seen it done once, thirty years back, and never since. In the warm loft, while they watched, the chip began to sweat. Then the sweat went white. A rind of frost crept out across the boards around it in fine feathers, a hand's width, and the straw nearest it stiffened and clicked.

The sword on Madison's pack gave one low note, and the frost stopped spreading.

They sat up, groggy. Puli had straw in his hair.

"The dwarves of Stoneheart have something in the lower galleries of a mine. They say the stone's gone dry and cold, and there's a crack in the lower gallery that wasn't in the last survey, and they want swords and fire inside. One of their miners has already gone in after it and not come out." He looked down at the paper. "They're paying triple. That means it's bad, and they know it's bad, and nobody else in the region would take it."

"What's in the mine?" said Puli, very small, for Puli.

"They don't say. That's what worries me. I've been doing this twenty years and never seen Stoneheart ask a guild for anything." Mantis looked round at them. "Two weeks south and east, maybe more, on Guild horses, which come out of our pay. They're sending a miner called Grant to meet us at the gate and take us down. Witnessed for the mountain by a Hugar, black-axe, whatever that is." He turned the paper. "Stoneheart pays on completion, in their own hall, in their own coin, not a copper before. It's volunteers.

Anyone who doesn't sign carries the tax ledger back to Haze and waits for the next posting, no shame in it."

"Triple," said Puli, and looked at Madison, because Madison was the one who did sums.

"Triple what?" She already knew. She wanted to hear it said.

"Triple the wage," said Rovan from the ladder, his first full sentence since Haze. "For the month under."

"And the road?" said Puli.

"Plain wage. Goes on boots and bread."

"The Guild takes—"

"A fifth. For the bond." Rovan looked at Madison, not Puli. "And it's paid when their people come up, walking or carried, not before. Nobody comes home from an outside contract with more than the contract. Don't count the road money. There isn't any."

A hundred and eighty, less the Guild's fifth: a hundred and forty-four. With the thirty-five in her shirt, if the road didn't eat them, a hundred and seventy-nine.

"Is it enough?" said Puli, who knew about Ossery.

"It's twenty-one short," she said, "and it's the closest I've been since the counter." The pension would have closed it, and she had let that go at a window with a pen on a chain. She didn't say so.

Mantis held the contract out, and she saw the foot of it. The Stoneheart seal, a hammer on an anvil, pressed deep into brown wax. And under it, in a clerk's round hand, the Haze office's endorsement: Contracted by leave of the Council.

The same five words that had been on the poster at the foot of Harrow Lane.

"Haze put it through?" she said.

"Haze puts everything through." Mantis watched her. "Why?"

She thought of Odd's letter, and the face on the roof she hadn't seen yet, and the registry clerk's pleasant open hand. If she went back to Haze with the ledger she'd be in the city, with the letters, and with nothing to live on and nobody's name behind her. If she went south she'd be two weeks from Haze and in the dark under a mountain, on a contract somebody on the Council had blessed, with the colonel's girl's name on the roll for anyone to read.

They could lose a girl from Jul, Thorne had said. A girl in a mine was easier still.

She didn't do the sum in days. She knew it came out at a little under two weeks to be sick in, or lost in, or hurt in.

On the boards between the pallets the frost round the stone chip had stopped spreading, but it hadn't melted. In the gray light she saw it hadn't spread the way frost does, any old way. Its feathers ran out from the chip in straight lines, like spokes, and between the spokes, finer, round and round, the threads of a ring. It was a web, drawn in frost on an inn floor, and it was the size of her two hands.

Juvar saw it too. He put his hand over his heart and didn't say anything.

"Who's signing?" said Mantis.

Vask put his hand up first, because he wanted something that wasn't boring. Then Boro. Juvar. Rovan, without a word, his feet already pointed down the road. Nocta didn't put her hand up at all.

"Somebody carries your ledger back to Haze," she said to Mantis. "And a farmer's letter to Hegal." She didn't look at Madison. "I'm better at roads than holes."

Mantis nodded as if he'd expected it. Puli looked at Madison, and waited.

Madison took the pen. When she reached for it, the sword on her back gave one thin note, too low for anyone but her, as it did when a price was spoken.

She bent to the foot of the contract to find her place, under the Stoneheart seal and the Haze office's five words. Under the five words there was a signature, small, in brown ink. The Council's leave had to be signed by somebody.

She'd sat with that signature all winter. She'd carried it against her ribs across the sea. The tail ran off the end of the last stroke and on, like a gutting knife that slips.

A man a month dead before her father's order. Signing a dwarf contract in Haze, this month.

Puli was waiting with his hand out for the pen. Mantis was watching her face. She could put the pen down. She could walk back to Haze beside Nocta, and live.

She wrote Madison of Jul three fingers under the tail, small and straight, and gave Puli the pen.

End of Chapter 5