“She’s gone lame on the near fore, and I’m two villages behind where I ought to be,” Eoin Forbes said, already working loose the strap of a mule’s bridle before Walter had properly crossed the yard.
“Mistress Una said ye’d a hand with beasts as well as bairns.
That true, or was she having her fun with a tired man?”
“Depends on the beast.” Walter crouched at the mule’s near fore, one hand flat against the fetlock, feeling for heat before he’d decided to look for it.
“Let’s find out.”
The tinker was a broad, sun-cured man with a cart of pots and pans lashed high enough to sway when the wheels found a rut, and he had the particular restlessness of someone doing arithmetic against a clock only he could see.
“I’m away within the hour, mind.
Next village’s expecting me by dusk and I’ll not make it walking a lame mule the whole road.”
“Give me ten minutes before you decide that.”
Walter’s attention settled on the swollen joint, and the world doubled the way it had learned to double these past weeks the mule’s leg as mule’s leg, warm and tender under his palm, and beneath that, arriving whole and certain, the second understanding: strain along the suspensory ligament, not a fracture, not an abscess, the kind of injury that healed with rest and made itself permanent without it.
Interesting, said the voice behind his sternum, and there was something in the single word that hadn’t been there in earlier weeks not warmth exactly, but the specific attention of someone leaning forward to watch a result land.
You’ve never turned the Hand toward an animal before.
It answers all the same.
Note the sensation this is new ground for you.
“Strained tendon,” Walter said aloud, to Eoin, running his thumb along the swelling to confirm what he already knew.
“Not broken.
But she’ll go properly lame within the week if you push her on it now.”
Something rose alongside the diagnosis, unbidden, a pressure behind his ribs that hadn’t been part of any previous reading a climbing, cumulative sensation, like a kettle building toward its whistle without ever quite reaching it.
Eighteen percent, Margaret said, crisp, the way a nurse reads a chart aloud without editorializing.
You’re feeling the Tide-Charge for the first time the calendar building toward Solstice.
It will keep climbing whether you use it or not.
Two days from now it peaks.
He filed the sensation the only way he knew how by continuing to work, because a half-formed theory was worth exactly nothing set against a mule that needed tending now.
“Comfrey poultice, three days’ full rest, no cart-work,” Walter said, straightening.
“She’ll take the road again after that, sound as she started.”
Eoin’s face did the complicated thing faces did when a man received good news wrapped in inconvenient timing.
“Three days puts me a week behind altogether.”
“A week behind’s better than a mule you have to put down in a month for pushing her lame leg into worse.” Walter kept his voice level, the way Una’s voice went level with a customer who wanted an answer different from the true one.
“Your choice, of course.
I’m only telling you what I see.”
The comfrey came from Una’s stock, cut and bruised fresh at the back bench while the pressure in Walter’s chest kept its slow, patient climb not painful, not even unpleasant, just present, the way a held breath is present before you let it go.
Twenty-one percent, Margaret noted, somewhere in the middle of the poultice-making, entirely unprompted, and Walter found himself almost smiling at the precision of it a woman dead eighty-some years, reading him a percentage like a laboratory instrument reporting exactly what it was built to report.
“You’re keeping count,” he said, low, mindful of Eoin loading his cart twenty feet off.
Someone ought to.
You’d only estimate, and estimation is how operators die believing they had more margin than they did.
He packed the poultice into a cloth wrap and walked it out to where Eoin stood already halfway convinced, judging by the set of his shoulders, that three days lost now beat a dead mule later.
“Twice a day, fresh each time,” Walter said, handing it over along with instructions plain enough to survive a tired man’s memory.
“Keep her off that leg entirely.
Eoin turned the wrapped poultice over in his hands, weighing it the way a man weighs anything he’s paying for without being entirely sure yet whether it’s worth the coin.
“And what’s your fee, Master Bryce, for a beast’s leg and three days of my custom lost?”
“A copper, if that sits fair.
I’d not call myself the expert on mules I am on men.”
That earned him something close to a laugh dry, surprised out of a face that had looked, twenty minutes earlier, like it had forgotten the shape a laugh made.
“Fairer than fair.
I’ve paid horse-leeches twice that for advice that cost my beast a leg entirely.” Eoin pressed the copper into his palm and swung up onto the cart’s bench with the loose-shouldered relief of bracing for worse and meeting only a manageable inconvenience.
“I’ll mind your name on the road, apothecary.
A man who tells ye the true cost before ye pay for the lie is worth remembering.”
The cart creaked off toward the north track, mule limping gamely along behind it on a lead, and Walter stood in the yard a moment with the copper warm in his palm and the pressure in his chest still climbing, slower now, settling toward whatever ceiling it was building toward.
Twenty-four percent, Margaret said, once the cart had cleared the yard’s edge.
And rising still, though slower now that the diagnostic moment’s passed.
It will keep climbing on its own schedule until the day itself.
You need do nothing further to feed it.
“And at the peak, it does what, exactly.” He kept his voice to a murmur, back turned to the shop’s open door where Una was visible sorting stock, half-attentive.
At true peak, every function you carry runs at two and a half times its ordinary rate, and its cost drops to a fraction of what you’re used to paying.
It is the single richest day the Charter offers you, and it comes seven times a year, and it does not wait for you to be ready.
Walter turned the copper over once between his fingers Eoin Forbes’s fair payment for an honest diagnosis, the first coin he’d earned off a function nobody in this village would ever have a name for and looked north along the track where the cart had already shrunk to a shape and a sound.
Two days.
He had exactly no idea yet what a two-and-a-half-times version of anything he could currently do actually felt like from the inside, and there was, he found, no way to answer that question except to be standing in the shop when the day itself arrived and let it answer him instead.