"Go on, then," said Seth.
Tam stopped with his spade in the air. He had been mucking out for an hour. For most of that hour he had been working up the nerve to ask for the morning off.
"Go on what?"
"The mill. The flour. The Duke's cake." Seth leaned on the cow shed door. "You've got the milk, and you've been looking at the road to Draynor all morning like a dog looking at a gate. Go. I'll want you back for the evening milking."
"I'll make up the time," said Tam.
"You'll muck out tomorrow twice as hard," said Seth. "That's how you'll make it up." He paused. "This farm sells to that kitchen, lad. If the Duke's cake goes wrong on his birthday, somebody up there will remember who brought the milk. Go and get your flour."
Tam leaned his spade against the wall. Then he picked it up again and let his inventory take it.
He was halfway to the bridge before he remembered that he'd need shears too. He'd buy them on the way.
* * *
The general store was quieter this morning. The bald shopkeeper looked up as Tam came in, saw who it was, and sighed.
"What is it today? Milk churn? A cow?"
"Shears," said Tam.
"Shears." The shopkeeper took a pair down from a hook. They were the same kind as Fred's: two grey iron blades crossed on a pivot, with brown wooden handles. "One coin. You're shearing now as well, are you?"
"For Fred the Farmer."
"Fred the Farmer has shears."
"I know," said Tam. "Everybody keeps telling me."
He put a coin on the counter and picked the shears up himself.
"And a bow," he said. "Unstrung, a plain shortbow, no string. What would you give me for one?"
The shopkeeper's eyebrows went up. "You're making bows now?"
"Tonight."
"Nine coins," said the shopkeeper, "for a good one. Less for the next. Folk around here don't shoot much."
Nine. It was the game's price, near enough. Tam walked out with twenty-seven coins, a pair of shears, and nearly twelve hundred arrow shafts in one square, worth nothing at all. He did the sums all the way to the bridge.
* * *
The lane to the windmill ran north-west from the castle, past Fred's farm, along the road to Draynor. Tam went past Fred's gate at a fast walk with his head down, in case Fred was there and wanted to talk about gates. He wasn't. The sheep watched Tam go by with their little black faces. He felt they knew he was coming back for them.
Then the lane bent, and there was the mill.
It was bigger than the game's. It was a tall, eight-sided tower of white plaster and brown beams, three floors high, with a thatched roof. It had four great lattice sails, each one as long as a barn. The sails turned slowly in the wind with a deep, steady creak and swish that he could feel in his chest. A cart stood by the door with sacks on it. A man was carrying the sacks inside, one at a time, bent double under each.
Beside the mill was the wheat field.
Tam stopped and stared at it.
In the game, the wheat field by the mill had always been gold. Tall and ripe, waiting for you to pick a handful and carry it up the stairs. Millie even told you so: help yourself, there always seemed to be plenty. He had picked that wheat a thousand times. He had been counting on it all morning.
The field was green.
Rows and rows of short green shoots, about as high as his ankle, poking up out of brown earth. A crow walked along one of the rows, picking at something. It was a thoroughly un-ready field.
Oh, he thought. Oh, no. It's spring.
In the game, there had been no seasons. The wheat was always ripe and the river never froze. In all his years of playing, he had never thought about it.
Here, it was the first warm week of spring. If wheat here was anything like wheat at home, it had gone in last autumn and wouldn't be ready until the end of the summer. And the Duke's birthday was this week.
He stood there, at the edge of the field, and laughed out loud. The man with the sacks gave him a look and went inside a little faster.
Obviously it has seasons, he thought. It's a real place. The wheat grows when wheat grows. I'm going to have to learn when every single thing in this world is ripe.
Then he looked at the cart and the man carrying the sacks inside, and he stopped laughing and started thinking.
Last year's wheat. Somebody had grown it, and cut it, and kept it all winter in sacks. And now they were bringing it here to be ground, a cartload at a time.
* * *
The inside of the mill was all noise and dust.
The ground floor was one eight-sided room with a floor of beaten earth. Flour hung in the air like mist and settled on everything: the walls, the sacks, the barrels, the cobwebs in the corners. Above, a deep grinding rumble never stopped. A wooden chute came down through the ceiling into a big wooden bin, and flour poured out of it in a soft white stream.
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A woman stood by the bin with a scoop, filling a sack. She was small and quick, perhaps forty, with strong bare arms, brown hair tied up in two bunches, and a white apron over a dark red dress. Flour had settled in her eyebrows and on her eyelashes. She looked at Tam as if he were a cat that had walked into her kitchen.
"We're full," she said. "Booked to the end of the month. If you've got grain, take it to another mill."
"I don't have grain," said Tam. "Not yet. I'm..."
"Then what do you want?"
"Are you Millie Miller?"
She drew herself up, all five feet of her. "I am Miss Millicent Miller," she said, "the miller of Mill Lane Mill."
She said it like a prayer. Tam's mouth was already moving along with her before he could stop it. In the game, that had been her examine text. He'd read it a hundred times. Miss Millicent Miller, the miller of Mill Lane Mill.
Millie narrowed her eyes. "Were you saying that with me?"
"No," said Tam.
"You were. Your lips were moving."
"It's a good name. It's very... catchy."
"It was my grandmother's name," said Millie, "and my mother's, and my aunt's, and it'll be my daughter's, if I ever find a man who can stand the dust. What do you want?"
So he told her. The Cook, the Duke's birthday, the cake, a bucket of milk and an egg already, and a pot of flour to go. He left out the twelve cows and the egg through the bottom of the pot. He thought it would sound better without them.
Millie listened with her scoop in her hand. When he finished, she shook her head.
"I can't, lad. I'd like to. I like a cake as much as anybody. But that's Tolley's wheat on the cart, from up the road. His flour's promised first, then the next farmer's, then the castle's. I'm not stopping my stones for one pot."
"I don't need you to stop them," said Tam. "I just need a handful of grain, and one grinding slipped in between Tolley's sacks and the next ones. I can do it myself. You won't even have to leave the bin."
Millie laughed. "Do it yourself! Nobody touches my mill, lad. It's taken me twenty years to learn her."
"There's a hopper on the top floor," said Tam. "A big wooden funnel. You pour the grain in the top. The lever lets it down to the millstones on the floor below. The stones grind it. The flour comes down the chute into the bin here, and you scoop it out with a pot." He pointed. "That chute."
Millie stopped laughing.
She looked at the chute and the ceiling, where the rumble of the stones came from. Then she looked at him, at his farm hand's shoulders and his face. She seemed to be wondering where a miller was hiding in there.
"Who told you that?"
A game, thought Tam. A game told me. I've done it a thousand times, from the hopper to the bin, and I've never seen a real one.
"I've seen it done," he said.
"Where?"
"Somewhere a long way from here."
Millie went on looking at him. Then she put down her scoop and wiped her hands on her apron, which only moved the flour around.
"Well," she said. "Now I want to see if you're right."
* * *
The grain was the next problem. She made him find his own.
"Floor's yours," she said, and pointed at the sweepings by the door. It was the grain that spilled from the sacks as they came in, swept into a heap against the wall. "I give it to the hens. Help yourself. Take what you need."
Tam looked at the heap of spilled grain. He thought about Seth's leftovers, and the six coins he had paid for them, and the egg going through the bottom of the pot.
Help yourself. Was that a gift?
He crouched down, scooped up a good double handful of grain, and waited.
It stayed.
It sat in his cupped hands, dusty and pale gold, and it didn't so much as twitch. It was last year's wheat, hen feed swept off the floor. Nobody had set it out for him. Millie had only said he could take it, and he had picked it up himself.
So permission isn't a gift, he thought. If someone says I can take it, and I take it myself, it's mine.
Which meant the leftover milk in Seth's cows had been his for the taking all along.
Which meant he'd paid Seth six coins for nothing.
He crouched there with the grain in his hands and started to laugh again. He tipped it into the front of his shirt before he dropped it. Millie looked down at him with her floury eyebrows raised.
"Are you all right?"
"I owe myself six coins," said Tam.
"What?"
"Nothing. Never mind. Which way are the stairs?"
* * *
The stairs were a ladder, more or less, steep and narrow, going up through a square hole in the ceiling. The first floor was all millstones. Two great round stones lay one on top of the other. The top one turned and turned, with a deep, slow grinding noise that made his teeth buzz. A wooden shaft came down through the middle from the sails above. The whole floor shook.
The second ladder went up to the top floor, under the cap. It was dim up here, and full of creaks and the swish of the sails going past outside the little window. Beside the great wooden shaft stood the hopper: a big wooden funnel, square at the top and narrow at the bottom. Two levers sat on a wooden block beside it.
There you are, thought Tam. He had never been so pleased to see a funnel.
Millie had come up behind him, puffing. "Go on, then," she said. "Show me."
He poured his grain from his shirt into the hopper.
He did it badly. Half of it went in. The other half went over the side of the funnel and pattered onto the floor, because he poured too fast and missed. His hands had no idea what they were doing.
Yep, he thought. No help with this one either.
He knelt down and picked up the grain he'd spilled, a few grains at a time, and dropped it in properly. Millie watched him with her arms folded and didn't say a word.
Then he put his hand on the lever. He knew this part. In the game, you pulled the lever and the grain went down. He pulled.
Nothing happened.
He pulled harder. The lever didn't move.
"You push it," said Millie. "Away from you. Gently. She's old."
He pushed it, gently. There was a clunk and a rattle. The grain hissed out of the bottom of the hopper and away down a wooden spout into the floor. Below them, the grinding of the stones changed its note for a moment, deeper, and then went on as before.
"Well," said Millie. "You weren't wrong about the hopper."
They climbed back down the two ladders, through the dust and the rumble. At the bottom, the chute was still pouring Tolley's flour into the bin. Then, for a moment, it went thin.
"That's yours coming," said Millie, and stepped back from the bin. "Have you got a pot?"
Tam turned his back for a second and took out the goblin's dented pot.
Millie eyed it.
"That's a goblin's helmet," she said.
"It's a pot now."
"Is it clean?"
"I scrubbed it in the river."
"With what?"
"Hope," said Tam.
Millie snorted. A new little stream came down the chute, a slightly different colour, finer. Tam held the pot under it himself. It filled nearly to the brim with fine white flour, still faintly warm from the stones.
Tam looked into it. Milk, egg, flour.
Three down, he thought.
He hadn't expected a number to rise, and for once he didn't mind.
* * *
Millie walked him to the door. Outside, the man with the sacks had finished unloading and was sitting on the empty cart, eating an onion like an apple. The sails went around, creaking.
"You'll come back," said Millie. It wasn't a question. "When you've got proper grain. I'll want to know where you saw a mill like mine."
"I'll come back," said Tam.
"And you'll pay, next time. I don't run a charity."
"I'd rather pay," said Tam truthfully. "You have no idea how much I'd rather pay."
He walked back down the lane past Fred's sheep with the pot of flour in his inventory, next to the egg and the milk. Tonight they would be the Cook's, and the Cook would have his cake.
The green field rustled in the wind as he passed. He looked at it properly this time. Short green shoots, as far as the hedge.
End of summer, he thought. I'll come back and see you gold.