"Stripped the herd," said Seth, to the brothers, to the old man, to Jory, to the porridge. "The whole herd. In his own bucket. And then he bought it off me."
"Bought what?" said one of the brothers. It was the first thing Tam had heard either of them say to anyone outside the pair of them.
"The milk."
The brothers looked at each other. Then they looked at Tam, as if he had grown a second head and they weren't sure which one to talk to.
"Why?" said the other brother.
"It's complicated," said Tam.
"It's the river," said the old man at the end of the table, to his bowl. Everybody looked at him. He didn't look up. He went on eating.
Gillie didn't say anything at all. She ate her breakfast and went out to the cows. Later, when Tam passed her in the yard with a barrow of muck, she gave him a small, polite nod, the kind you'd give a stranger.
He didn't know if that was better or worse than her laughing at him. Probably worse. When she laughed at him, at least she was laughing at Tam.
Seth wiped his beard and pointed his spoon at him. "Saw you come home with an axe yesterday."
"I made it."
"Course you did." Seth didn't even blink any more. "That old elm by the potato field. Dead three years. It'll come down on somebody's head one of these winters. Have it down today, if that thing holds."
"The logs?"
"Keep what you want for your fires. The brothers can saw the rest for the woodpile."
Keep what you want. Was that a gift? He thought about Seth's axe, which had stayed when he took it off its log himself. Wood he cut himself, with his own axe, should stay too.
"Thanks," said Tam, and tried not to look as if it was his birthday.
* * *
The dead elm stood at the edge of the potato field like an old man who had forgotten to lie down. Its bark was gone, and a woodpecker had been at it. Tam walked around it twice, picked the way it should fall, and started to chop.
He'd expected this part to be easy: woodcutting gave experience. His feet set themselves and his hips turned. The axe went in at an angle, chunk, and out, and in again, chunk, and the chips flew in a white spray. The handle wobbled. The head stayed on.
It went far faster than any real tree had a right to. In the game, an ordinary tree came down in a few seconds. Here it took a minute. Then the elm creaked and leaned and went down across the edge of the potato field with a splintering crash. Birds went up out of the hedges all along the field.
+25 Woodcutting.
One log's worth, he thought. The game's ordinary tree gave a single log and turned into a stump. You never saw it fall. The real tree lay at his feet, huge and dead, and there was a great deal more than one log in it.
He walked along the trunk to the thin end and chopped. A log came free, a neat piece as long as his arm. It vanished before it hit the ground. A log sat heavy in a square of his inventory.
+25 Woodcutting.
Logs too.
He cut ten. The third brought a Woodcutting level and the warmth down his arms. The sixth brought another. After that the axe bit a little deeper each time. Then he stopped, though the trunk had plenty more in it. The rest was for the woodpile.
He tried to put the rest of the trunk away, just to see. Nothing happened. Logs, not trees, he thought. The game had never let you carry a whole tree, any more than a whole goblin.
Seth came down the field a quarter of an hour later, with the brothers and a saw, expecting to find him still chopping. He looked at the elm lying in the potatoes. He looked at Tam.
"Well," said Seth, "it held, then."
All afternoon he mucked out and rehung a gate that had dropped on its hinges. The whole time he felt the weight of ten logs and a bucket of milk dragging at his shoulders. None of it showed. The milk never got any older. He got tired anyway.
* * *
The egg was the problem.
The Groats had eggs. They had a coop full of hens, minus the three the goblins had taken. But every egg went into the basket for the castle. The steward counted them. The Cook had said so himself. Those are for the household. The steward counts every egg.
In the game, there were eggs on the ground in a chicken coop across the river, by the windmill. You just picked one up. An egg had been there for each new player, and it came back a few seconds after you took it.
Here, Tam was fairly sure, an egg in a coop belonged to whoever owned the hens. The nearest man with hens over there, as far as he knew, was the farmer with the sheep.
So after the evening delivery he didn't walk home. He came out of the kitchen yard, went around the castle wall, and turned north-west, up a lane between fields he'd never walked down.
The west bank was different from the east. There were no goblins on this side of the river, or not many, and the farms looked it. The hedges were neat. The gates were shut. Sheep stood in a big pen on the right, pale smudges in the dusk. Somewhere ahead, against the last of the sky, he could see the sails of a windmill turning slowly.
Mill Lane Mill, he thought. Tomorrow's problem.
The farmhouse sat just south of it, on the west side of the sheep pen. It was a long, low house of logs under a dark roof, with a stone-walled yard in front and rows of onions in the garden. In the yard, five or six chickens were going to bed in a hutch. That was all. It was a small farm, much smaller than the Groats'.
A man was leaning on the garden gate with his arms folded.
He was round. Not fat, exactly. Well fed, in a way that suggested he took his meals seriously. He had a broad red face and small suspicious eyes under a battered straw hat. He wore blue dungarees over bare, thick arms, and muddy green boots. A pitchfork leaned on the gate beside him. He watched Tam come up the lane.
Fred the Farmer, thought Tam. A well fed looking farmer, the game had said, if you examined him. In the game, Fred had wanted his sheep sheared, and he was always in a bad mood about something. Later, in a longer quest, he had sent you across the river to Seth Groats for chickens, because Seth had more. And somewhere in his pen there had been one sheep that wasn't a sheep at all, but two penguins in a sheep suit, spying.
Tam glanced at the pen. Every sheep in it looked like a sheep. He wasn't sure if that was a relief.
"What are you doing on my land?" said Fred.
"Good evening," said Tam.
"Are you the one who keeps leaving my gates open? Letting all my sheep out?"
"No."
"Somebody is."
"It isn't me. Not that I remember." Tam held up both hands. "I'm Tam. Tam Fallow. From the Groats' farm, across the river."
Fred looked him up and down. He took his time over the bare feet. "The drowned one."
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"That's me."
Fred unfolded his arms and folded them again the other way, which seemed to mean he was thinking about it. "What do you want, then, Tam Fallow from across the river?"
"An egg," said Tam. "Just one. For the castle cook. I'll pay."
He had been ready for an argument. He hadn't been ready for Fred to laugh.
It was a short, rough laugh, like a cough that had decided to be friendly. "Pay! For an egg! Lad, I've got more eggs than sense." He turned to the chicken run, put his hand into the hutch, and came out with a brown egg. "Here. Catch."
He tossed it.
Tam had about one second. It was enough. He had worried about this all the way up the lane. Kind people handed you things, or threw them. But maybe the slipping was only his hands. A pot might catch what his hands couldn't. So he had taken the dented goblin's pot out of his inventory before he reached the gate, and carried it under his arm. Now he held it out in both hands and caught the egg in it, neat as anything.
The egg went through the bottom of the pot.
The pot had no hole. Tam had checked it all over, scrubbing goblin out of it in the river. The egg went through the bottom of it anyway. It dropped and burst on Fred's left boot.
Stands Alone is an Ironman. He stands alone.
Tam looked at the words, then at the yolk sliding slowly off Fred's boot into the grass.
So it isn't my hands, he thought. It's me. It's anything of mine. I could hold out a bucket the size of a house and it would go straight through the bottom.
Fred looked down at his boot.
"Are you feeling all right?" he said.
"Not really," said Tam honestly. "It's been a long week."
"You caught it. I saw you catch it."
"I know."
"In a pot."
"It's not really a pot," said Tam. "It's a goblin's helmet. I'm using it as a pot. That's not the problem. The problem is..." He stopped. There was no way to explain the problem that didn't make him sound like a madman. "Things fall through me," he said. "If people give them to me. Since the river. I'm sorry about your boot."
Fred was quiet for a while. A chicken in the hutch made a sleepy, complaining noise.
"My granny had a cousin," Fred said slowly, "who couldn't cross running water after he fell in a millpond. Had to go the long way around everything for forty years. Carried him over the Lum in a barrel when he died." He looked at the pot. "It takes folk funny, water."
"It does," said Tam, with great relief.
"So you can't take an egg."
"I can buy one," said Tam. "I think. If I pay for it, it's not a present. And if you put it down somewhere, and I pick it up myself."
Fred stared at him. Then he shook his head slowly and went back into the hutch. He came out with another egg and set it down carefully on top of the gatepost, between the two of them, as if it might explode.
"One coin," he said.
Tam turned away for a second, took a coin out of his inventory and put it on the gatepost beside the egg. Fred picked up the coin. Tam picked up the egg.
It sat in his palm, smooth and brown, still a little warm from the hen. He let out a breath.
"Two down," he said.
"Two what?"
"Never mind."
He put the egg in his inventory, carefully, which meant tucking it into his shirt first so that Fred wouldn't see it vanish. Then he wiped the bottom of the pot on the grass, for no reason at all, and tucked it back under his arm.
* * *
Fred didn't go back inside. He leaned on the gate again and looked out over his sheep in the dusk. Tam realised, after a moment, that he was being kept for a conversation.
"You're a farm hand," said Fred.
"Yes."
"Seth Groats's farm hand."
"Yes."
"Seth Groats has got more hands than he knows what to do with." Fred jerked his chin at the sheep pen. "Look at that."
Tam looked. The sheep were huge. They were the shape of clouds, round and lumpy, grey with old fleece. Little black faces peered out of the middle of all that wool as if they were lost in it.
"Should've been shorn a month ago," said Fred. "The man who used to do it for me went off to Varrock to be a guard. The lad I took on after him let half of them out on the Draynor road and I spent three days getting them back. My back's gone. And I've got a buyer wanting twenty balls of wool by the end of the month and not a single one spun."
He said all this to the sheep, not to Tam. Then he turned his head and looked at Tam, sideways, suspicious.
"You've got hands," he said. Then he looked at the pot, and corrected himself. "Well. You've got hands. Sort of. Could you shear my sheep? Shear them, and spin the wool, and bring me twenty balls of it? There's sixty coins in it."
At the edge of his sight, his quest list stirred.
He opened it. Under Cook's Assistant, there was a second line now, as if it had been written there while Fred was talking.
Sheep Shearer.
Somebody asks, he thought. That's how it fills. The Cook, and now Fred. It wasn't a guess any more.
"Well?" said Fred. "You've gone quiet. Is that the river as well?"
"Yes," said Tam. "I mean, yes, I'll do it. Sixty coins. Twenty balls of wool."
"Spun," said Fred. "Not fleece. Balls. Spun."
"Spun. Where do I spin it?"
"There's a wheel up at the castle. In the old spinning room. Cadmus lets folk use it." Fred sniffed. "If you can get past the guards. I can't, and I've been trying for twenty years."
Naturally the spinning wheel is in the castle, thought Tam. In the game, there had been no guards.
"I'll manage," he said.
"Wait there," said Fred, and went off around the side of the house. He came back with a pair of shears: two grey iron blades crossed on a pivot, with brown wooden handles. "You'll want these. I'll want them back."
He held them out, handles first.
"Don't," said Tam. "Please. Just... put them on the post."
Too late. Fred had already let go. Tam's hand had already closed on them out of plain politeness. The shears went through his fingers. They dropped point first into the soft earth by the gate and stuck there, quivering.
The old message came up again. Tam didn't bother reading it.
Fred looked from the shears to Tam.
"That," said Fred, "is twice."
"I know. I'm sorry. Lending's the same as giving. I'll bring my own shears. They're a coin at the general store."
"You're going to buy shears," said Fred, "to shear my sheep. For me."
"Yes."
"When I've got shears. Right there."
"Yes."
Fred pulled his shears out of the ground and wiped them on his dungarees. He looked at Tam with his small suspicious eyes.
"You're a strange lad," he said finally. "But you're not the one who leaves my gates open. I'll give you that."
"Thank you," said Tam. "I'll take it."
Out of habit, he waited for Fred's praise to fall through his fingers. It didn't. On the walk home, he was pleased with it.
* * *
He walked back over the bridge in the dark, with a bucket of milk, an egg and ten logs in his inventory. On the bridge a carter going the other way said, "Evening, Fallow," without slowing down. Tam had no idea who he was. The whole town knew him: the drowned boy, the one things fell through.
The farm was dark except for the lamp in the kitchen window. He didn't go up to the loft.
He went down to the stony bank below the cow field instead, where nothing could catch. He laid one log on the stones and struck the tinderbox.
The spark went where it needed to, into the dry elm, and the flame caught and climbed.
+40 Firemaking.
He grinned at it. And then his feet moved.
He didn't move them. They just went. His left foot stepped sideways and his right foot followed. He took one neat, brisk step to the west, away from the fire, as if somebody had called his name.
Oh, no, he thought. It's the step.
In the game, every time you lit a fire, your character stepped one square to the west, out of the way of the flames, so that you could light a long line of fires, one after another. He had done it ten thousand times. He had never wondered what it would feel like to have his legs do it for him.
He tried again, braced, with his legs tensed to stay where he was. One brisk step to the west. He nearly fell over.
"Ha!" said somebody behind him.
It was Jory, in his nightshirt, with a blanket around his shoulders and his hammer in his fist.
"You're meant to be asleep," said Tam.
"So are you. Do it again."
"I'm not a performing dog."
"Please."
So he built the next one against the big boulder on the bank, with the boulder to the west, where his feet would want to go. His feet thought about it, and went east instead. Halfway through the step, warmth ran down his arms.
Congratulations, you just advanced a Firemaking level. Your Firemaking level is now 2.
"Ha!" said Jory, who could see only the step.
The next fire, with the boulder to the west and the steep bank to the east, sent him south.
Tam sent Jory back to bed. Then he burned the rest of his logs, one after another, west, west, west, in a line of little fires along the stones. When the logs were gone, he took the lantern from the cow shed and walked up past the east fields into the woods.
* * *
As far as he knew, nobody owned the woods past the farm. He picked an ordinary tree, felled it, and cut logs from it until the trunk was gone. Then he did the next.
He didn't burn all of them. He sat on a stump between trees and took out his knife and a log. He thought about arrow shafts. The knife went down the log in long curls. Fifteen thin straight shafts lay across his knees. Then they were gone into a single square of his inventory, all fifteen in one. Arrow shafts stacked. Same as the game.
+5 Fletching.
Five, for fifteen shafts. A shaft sold for nothing at all. But every log he cut gave Woodcutting experience, and every log he whittled gave Fletching experience. In the game, Fletching led on to bows.
So he cut and whittled, and burned a few logs when his hands got tired of the knife. Once he forgot to whittle. The axe bit and the chips flew and nothing came free. He checked. Twenty-eight squares, all full, and a full inventory meant no more logs, here as in the game. He whittled himself some room and went on.
The levels came so fast he stopped reading them. Woodcutting went past ten, and then past fifteen. Firemaking reached ten. He knew he should go to bed. He also knew exactly how this felt, from a thousand nights in front of a screen: one more log.
It was Jory who found him, in the end, long after midnight, sent up the hill by Gillie with a candle in a jar.
Jory stopped at the edge of the lantern light and stared.
There was a clearing in the woods that hadn't been there at supper. Stumps stood all around it, pale and new. A line of little fires burned down to embers along the edge, every one a pace from the last.
"Gillie says," said Jory slowly, "you're to come to bed."
"In a minute," said Tam. He had a log on his knee and a knife in his hand. "One more."
Fletching came up on that last log, as if it had been waiting for him to say so.
Congratulations, you just advanced a Fletching level. Your Fletching level is now 5.