Emerson · Stonemarch Depot, Mercer State
1723
The list went up on a Tuesday after five weeks at Stonemarch. It held thirty-one names and Emerson’s was nineteenth. He stood in front of it with his hands tucked in his pockets while the wind tugged at the paper’s lower edge. He found his own name then he read the whole list again.
Up until that morning the depot had treated all three hundred of them alike. Now a sheet of paper divided them. Thirty-one was about the number he expected. Among the other names his own seemed to belong to a much smaller company than he had pictured.
“You’re on it,” Brice said behind him.
“I’m on it.”
“Congratulations. You’re a resource.”
He said it lightly, then complained that the cold was coming through his stockings. Emerson looked back at the list.
The assessment was held in a shed behind the armory. A smell of scorched brick escaped into the yard whenever the door opened and briefly drowned the cold-iron tang from next door. They waited outside for two hours. Whatever the list meant it did not earn them shelter. No officers came to inspect them. The rest of the intake was running the course past the armory. Their boots pounded the frozen ground while a sergeant shouted. Men in the queue kept glancing toward the sound as though the day’s real work were going on without them.
They sorted themselves long before the assessment did. Some had spent their childhoods being praised for their affinity while others found theirs at eleven and had hardly mentioned it since. A few minutes of talk usually showed which was which. Near the front stood a tall boy from Iron Port who had earth and apparently that made him the most interesting person in every room he ever entered. He had told them twice that his uncle’s assessment was Advanced.
“What does your uncle do?” someone asked.
“He’s a quarryman.”
“They don’t rate anyone Advanced,” the same voice said. “After Basic it’s Fifth class.”
The silence that followed forced him to change the subject. “They test you at seven in Joyce,” he said. “If you have nothing they write it in the parish book. My father’s friend told him. That way it’s on record for the rest of your life.”
“Why would anyone bother?”
“Because it’s the same families that have it. Always has been. If your grandmother had an affinity, so will you.” He glanced along the queue to see who was listening. “If she didn’t, you’re nobody and they have a book to prove it. Mercer only looks at you once, at eight, and writes yes or no. Joyce writes it down for life.”
“They test at seven in Sectar, too.” The short man near the back had not spoken until then. He kept his chin tucked into his collar.
“My mother is from Villenor. They tested her when she was young and again after her family moved. Found nothing each time. Villenor has a service for people without affinity.”
The tall boy turned. “A service for having no affinity?”
“Older than the one for having something, according to her.”
“Probably gets more use.”
Someone laughed harder than the joke deserved. After nearly two hours in the wind, Emerson understood the temptation.
“Half of Villenor has no affinity,” the short man went on. “Yet they still manage to have children. Might be worth mentioning to your father’s friend.”
“I’m only saying what I heard.”
“You seem to hear a great deal.”
The tall boy went back to talking about his uncle. Emerson stopped listening. Boasting sounded much the same regardless of how many relatives a man placed between himself and the story. The recruits went in one at a time. Each came out looking disappointed.
Emerson went in nineteenth. By then he had heard eighteen accounts of the assessment, and they contradicted one another wherever they said anything useful. The boy ahead of him had water. Outside, he used the word sphere so much that Emerson began to expect something impressive. According to the account passed back along the queue, what he actually managed was a ball no bigger than his fist. He held it up for eleven seconds. When he was ordered to fill a bucket four feet away, about half the water reached it.
“Basic,” the sergeant told him. “You’ll be useful on a march.”
Now Emerson stood on the shed’s stone floor and looked at the wet marks around the bucket. A bench ran along the far wall beneath a rack of lamps, and the air smelled of old soot and lamp oil. The woman waiting beside the bench wore her sleeves rolled to the elbow despite the cold. Her forearms caught his eye first. Burn scars covered them from wrist to elbow. Pale ridges ran across them and the skin between had healed smooth and tight.
He forced himself to look at her face. She was compact and square-shouldered. Her dark hair was cropped at the neck, and gray had reached her temples early. Three chevrons and a single bar showed above the roll of her left sleeve. A notebook hung at her belt beside a graphite pencil.
“Staff Sergeant Voss,” she said. “Show me what you can do. Then we’ll find out whether you can do anything useful with it.” She spoke at the even pace of someone reading off measurements.
She pointed to a mark on the floor. Emerson stepped onto it.
“Hand out.”
He raised his palm and let the flame come. It kindled easily and burned bright above his skin. Warmth spread into his cold fingers. He had done this alone in his room since he was five.
“Hold it.”
He held it. He had kept a flame alive for a full hour when he was fourteen. For years afterward he carried that accomplishment around. Voss watched without comment.
“Light that lamp.”
It stood on the bench four feet away. Emerson’s stomach tightened. Distance was always the trouble. Close to his hand, the flame answered him as easily as a finger bending. Beyond his reach, it grew thin and ragged.
His first two attempts came short of the wick. His outstretched arm had begun to tremble. Voss waited with her pencil ready. On the third try, a thin line of fire reached the wick. The small flame bent in the draft from the door and the sharp smell of burning oil drifted back to him. Relief warmed his chest.
“Basic,” Voss said. The pencil moved across the page.
“Sergeant, I can hold it longer.”
“Good reserve for your age. Your control barely reaches four feet.”
“But if I showed you how long I could keep it going…”
“A candle holds a flame, recruit.” She finished the entry. “Basic describes what you can do with yours. It’s functional. You needn’t take offense at it.”
He did not know he was offended until she said it.
Voss looked up. There was no malice in her face. “Want to see what it means?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
She turned her palm up. Fire sprang into the air above the bench. Emerson flinched as the heat hit his face. A sheet of flame two feet across hung there. Its edges were so straight and even that it might have been cut from iron plate. He stood four feet away and blinked through the water in his eyes.
Voss closed her hand. The fire vanished. The bench beneath it was not even scorched. He stared at the wood then at the scarred hand resting beside her notebook.
“Eighteen years,” Voss told him. “That’s how long it took.”
“You were Basic?”
“At seventeen. In this same shed. They wrote it beside my name just as I’ve written it beside yours.” She glanced at the bench. “It may even be the same one.”
He looked at it again.
“Your affinity tells us something about the soldier you might become,” she went on. “Whether you become any good at it is another matter.”
Emerson lowered his hand. The warmth was already gone from his palm.
Voss turned the page. “Since you have so much to spare, you can spend it after supper. The shed needs to be cleared tonight and the lamps taken back to the armory.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“Next.”
The cold stung Emerson’s wet eyes as he stepped outside. He blinked against it and still saw the fire hanging above the bench. For years, he had believed his affinity would one day explain where he belonged. Voss treated it as a tool he might learn to use. Now he was not sure it was much of a tool.
The tall boy from Iron Port sat on a barrel with his elbows on his knees. He was quiet now. “Basic,” he said as Emerson passed.
“Same.”
The boy rubbed his palms together. “My uncle was Advanced.”
“You mentioned it.”
The boy gave one short laugh, but his face did not change. Emerson had thought he might enjoy seeing him brought down. Instead, he recognized the look the boy kept giving the shed, as though the right argument might still change what was written in there. He kept walking. Anything he could offer would have sounded too much like what he wanted to hear himself.
The shed was colder after dark. The bench had been pulled into the middle of the floor and half the lamps were already down from the rack. Voss worked by the light of the last lamp and packed the rest into a crate. She did not look up when he came in. “Two at a time. Careful with the glass.”
He carried the first pair to the armory and came back for the rest. On his third trip she was sitting on the bench with the day’s list across her knee.
Her pencil stopped at his name. “South of here they’d tell you it was given.”
He set the lamps down.
Voss tapped the list. “Sectar has a whole building devoted to it. A liturgy for the ones who have nothing, which most of them do.”
“Someone outside said that, Sergeant.”
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“Farther north, they see it differently. I’m not sure they even have a word that means quite what we mean.”
“For affinity?”
“I knew a corporal from the Cainwatch rotation who’d traded up there. He said every camp had someone who did the healing.” She turned a page. “The same person read the bones to decide where the herd should graze. He asked which of those duties belonged to their religion.”
“What did they tell him?”
“They didn’t understand the question.”
Emerson thought about that. “Do you believe it, Sergeant?”
“No one’s asked me to. Mercer wants to know what you can do in the rain. Where the gift came from doesn’t concern us. This list tells me what you can do in a quiet shed on a calm afternoon. It tells me nothing about what you can do when someone is trying to kill you.”
Outside, boots went past on the frozen yard. Voss waited for them to fade. “This room mattered more eighteen years ago.”
Emerson glanced around the shed. Nothing in the lamplight suggested it had ever been grander.
“Officers used to come out from Felsberg to read the list,” she said. “Thirty-one names out of three hundred would have been worth the journey. Last year, they sent a clerk.”
“And this year?”
“The list came back with a note. Could we finish in one afternoon instead of two? They want the shed for storage.”
Her pencil rested against the page. It tapped once as she shifted her grip. “There are eight objects in the Republic of Scale that can do what you saw me do this afternoon. A man who’s never held a flame in his life can pick one up and use it.”
“Eight?”
“Eight.”
He looked at her forearms again before he could stop himself. She followed his gaze and let him look.
“What you’re born with has been mattering less for some time,” she said. “No one appears to have informed the nobility.”
“What happens when someone does?”
“They’ll take it badly.”
Voss folded the list into her notebook and stood. She blew out the last lamp and put it in his hands. “Head to the barracks when you’re done.”
He had not expected the evening to be worse. The barracks smelled of wet wool and of boots drying too close to the stove. Emerson sat on the boot bench and worked at a knot while Kira drew a whetstone along her knife. They asked him about the assessment and he told them.
“Basic,” he said.
“What does that mean?” Kira asked.
“I can light a fire without a flint. No control past four feet.”
“Can you do it in the rain?”
He looked up at her. “I don’t know. Not very well, probably.”
“Still useful.” She turned the blade. “My brother had fire. Couldn’t get it going in a wind though. The rest of us used to stand around waiting on him.”
“Did he manage it?”
“Sometimes. We learned to bring a flint.” Her attention went back to the edge and the stone scraped along it again in steady strokes.
Emerson bent over his boot. He wanted more than that. The admission shamed him the moment he let himself make it. For five weeks he had watched Kira haul herself over a wall he still needed help to climb. He wanted this one thing to be something she could not wave away. He pulled at the knot and it only drew tighter under his fingers.
Brice waited until Kira left before he settled at the end of the bench. He did it with such an elaborate air of having no purpose at all that it made Emerson wary. “She wasn’t trying to be rude.”
“I know.”
“You should hear her opinion on my handwriting. Same voice, less approval.”
Emerson gave the knot another pull. Brice watched him for a moment.
“You wanted her to be interested.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No.” Brice bent to unlace his boots. “Nor did she know you wanted it. I doubt she’d guessed.”
The knot finally gave. Emerson loosened the boot without answering.
“Now. In her defense—” Brice raised one finger from his laces.
“She doesn’t need one.”
“Everyone needs one. You’ve been carrying that assessment around all afternoon. You were going to tell us whether we asked or not.”
Brice did not look up from his laces. It was a courtesy and Emerson wished he did not need it.
“Is that a fault?”
“No. I’d have told you too.” Brice worked a heel free. “But you wanted it to mean more to her. It didn’t, and now you’re pulling at that boot as if it had insulted your mother.”
Emerson let go of it.
“Are you angry with her?” Brice asked.
“No.”
“With yourself, then?”
“Neither.”
Brice set his boots under the bunk. “I don’t believe you, but I’m willing to leave it there.”
He stretched on the mattress and the ropes creaked under him. “For what it’s worth, I do find it interesting. I wouldn’t have minded seeing your affinity.”
“You could have asked.”
“Asked you to show me a flame? And then another to see whether you could make it bigger?” Brice laced his hands behind his head. “Kira and I have no affinity. It’s hard to be curious without making you feel like a man doing tricks at a fair.”
Emerson looked at him. He had imagined their admiration without once asking himself what it would look like. “You could have asked,” he said again, with less conviction.
“Perhaps.”
For a while they said nothing. At the far end of the room someone was knocking dried mud off a boot against a bedpost.
“Is that why you made the joke this morning?”
Brice turned his head. “What joke?”
“Congratulations. You’re a resource.”
“Ah.”
He thought about it without smiling while Emerson waited. “Probably,” Brice said at last. “Yes.”
No one asked Emerson about his affinity again for the rest of the course. It took him weeks to notice. There were no special exercises for the thirty-one and the assessment changed nothing about the work expected of them. He ran the course beside everyone else. His pack weighed as much as the next recruit’s regardless of how long he could hold a flame.
The Depot’s other tests came at the end of the fifth week. The clerks took over the mess hall once the breakfast bowls were cleared. Trestles stood in rows under the high windows. Each recruit carried a card from table to table and a clerk marked it at every stop.
At the first table a man with ink on his cuffs handed Emerson a written order and told him to copy it. At the second he added a column of figures from a quartermaster’s receipt. He calculated the total and it came out the same twice before he wrote it down. At the third a corporal laid a musket lock on a cloth and turned a sandglass.
Emerson had the lock apart before half the sand was gone. The springs were stiff and well oiled, like the tongs at home. He had it back together before he thought to wonder whether he ought to hurry. The corporal looked at the glass and then at Emerson. He wrote two words on the card without saying them aloud.
The last test was in the yard. A clerk gave each recruit a halter rope and pointed at a castrated horse with one white sock. The task was to lead it once around the yard and back. Brice came back with straw in his hair. The gelding had not moved.
“It doesn’t like me,” Brice said.
“It doesn’t know you,” Kira said.
“That doesn’t help.”
“Try standing where it can see you,” Emerson said.
Brice looked at him. “Now you tell me.”
In the afternoon Harwin wrote the numbers one to ten down the mess wall. Beside each he wrote a word or two in square capitals. “This is the army,” he said. “You’ve been in five weeks and half of you couldn’t find the 2ndRegiment on a map.”
Beside the 4th he wrote STEEL PORT and somebody at the back groaned. Beside the 10th he wrote EMBERHELM. Beside the 1st he wrote FELSBERG and Emerson was sitting up straighter. Beside the 9th he wrote nothing.
“What’s the 9th, Sergeant?” someone asked.
“Light infantry.” Harwin dusted the chalk off his fingers. “They go in wherever somebody needs men in a hurry. Nobody stays there long enough to learn the cook’s name.”
The slips came back two days later. The clerk handed out their results from the test. Each man got a strip of paper with his marks down one side and three regiments at the bottom. Below them a line had been left empty.
“You write down the location you want to get stationed at,” the clerk said. “Nobody promises you’ll get it.”
Emerson’s first line read 10th, Emberhelm. Ordnance.
He read it twice. The thought of the forge at home came back to him all at once. The heat on his face and the reek of hot iron in the quench trough. He had not stood on the wall above the muster field at eight years old just to become a smith.
He wrote 1st, Felsberg on the empty line. He pressed hard enough to dent the paper. Kira had already finished hers. He read it upside down.
9th.
“The Light Infantry?”
“They get sent out first.” She folded the slip in half. “Felsberg’s been there our whole lives, Em. It’ll still be there when we leave.”
Brice sat at the end of the bench with his slip flat under both hands. Emerson leaned over to see it.
1st, Felsberg. Clerk.
Beside the column of figures somebody had written a single word. Quick.
“That’s the 1st,” Emerson said.
“It’s a desk in the 1st.”
“It’s Felsberg.”
“It’s a desk in Felsberg.” Brice dipped the pen and wrote 9th on the empty line in small neat letters. “You two are going to need somebody who can write it all down.”
“Brice—"
“Don’t.”
Emerson folded his own slip with the 1st on the inside and put it away. He had never seen Brice come first at anything. Brice had folded it away before anyone else could look.
In the seventh week Harwin marched them out below the eastern slopes. The bank was old earth gone hard and black, and a row of white boards stood with a ring painted on each. Harwin counted ten cartridges into each man’s hand and wrote the number beside each name in his book. “Ten,” he said. “Every one of them was bought. You’ll fire them all, and you’ll see where every one goes.”
They had loaded these muskets a thousand times with nothing in them. Emerson bit the paper and tasted salt and something bitter that stuck to his tongue. He primed and shut the pan, then sent the rest down the barrel with the ramrod. His hands remembered the movement. None of it had ever weighed anything before.
“Present!”
He laid his cheek to the stock. The board swam at the end of the barrel.
“Fire!”
The lock snapped and the pan flashed a hand’s width from his eye. Then the musket kicked into his shoulder hard enough to turn him half around. The noise came from everywhere at once. Along the line the other muskets went off a fraction apart. White smoke rolled out over the ground and hid the boards. It stank of rotten eggs and scorched hair. When it thinned his ears were ringing, and the board in front of him was whole.
“Forger,” Harwin said. “You closed your eyes.”
He did not know it until Harwin said so.
“That one cost the State as much as your supper, and you never saw it go. Again!”
He fired nine more. By the fifth he kept his eyes open through the flash, and by the eighth he had stopped flinching before the kick. Two of his balls went into the board. The rest went into the bank.
At the end of the line the tall boy from Iron Port lowered his musket. His face was black with powder to the eyebrows, and he was grinning. “There you are, Forger,” he said. “Now everybody’s got fire.”
The line laughed. Emerson cleaned the barrel with his ears still ringing and the taste of the powder at the back of his throat. A few minutes in a shed behind the armory was all the interest the army took in his affinity. At first that reassured him.
When the barracks had gone quiet Emerson thought about his mother’s affinity and his grandmother’s, which had been stronger. Before he understood affinities as ranks on a military sheet, he thought of his fire affinity as something simple because it was theirs. His mother called it into her hands at the forge as readily as she picked up her hammer. His grandmother had possessed enough power that people still remembered it after she was gone. Emerson had grown up with the quiet certainty that he belonged to that line. He had never thought of himself as proud because of it.
His face went hot in the dark. Part of him wanted people to notice. Something in the fire was supposed to prove that he had inherited more than a name and a few stories told over a forge. Instead, the army had reduced it to something useful and ordinary. That should have been enough.
He lay awake with his hands under the blanket.
The army treated him just as he had hoped it would, and he could not understand why that ached. Nobody at Stonemarch had any use for his flame. The army would only ever rank it. He would make men notice it by what he did with it.