He didn't sleep. He lay under the blankets, looked at the roof beams and waited for somebody to tell him he was dreaming. Nobody did.
Late in the afternoon the ladder creaked, and Jory's head came up through the hatch.
"You're awake," said Jory. "Gillie said not to wake you. I didn't. You were already."
"I was already," Tam agreed.
Jory climbed the rest of the way up and sat on the next bed. He had changed into dry clothes that were too big for him, and his hair still stuck up. He looked at Tam's hands, then at Tam's face, then at Tam's hands again.
"Can you feel them yet? Your hands? Gillie says you're a quick healer now. Seth says it was Saradomin brought you back. Was it Saradomin? I prayed all the way to the bridge. The whole way. I didn't stop once, not even when I fell over."
"Then it was probably you," said Tam.
Jory thought about this seriously. Then he nodded, as if that settled it, and some of the stiffness went out of his shoulders.
"Do you want to check your money?" he said. "In case. I don't know. In case the river did something."
"My money."
"Your sword money." Jory's eyes went to the wooden sword on the floor by the bed, and away again. Then he was down on his knees at the end of Tam's bed. He pushed the straw aside and worked his fingers under a floorboard. It came up with a soft creak. Underneath was a little clay jar with a cloth tied over the top. "Twenty-three. I counted it once when you weren't looking. Sorry. I didn't take any. I wouldn't."
"I know you wouldn't," said Tam. He couldn't have said how he knew. Jory's face was enough.
"Two years you've been saving. You said twenty-six gets a proper bronze sword in Varrock. And now you're eighteen, Seth's going to pay you a full hand's wage, and you'd have the rest by the end of the week. Then you'd walk to Varrock and be an adventurer and send for me." Jory untied the cloth and tipped the jar. "Hold your hand out."
Tam held his hand out. He had a bad feeling about it.
Twenty-three small gold coins poured into his palm. They were thin and worn, warm from the jar, and he felt the weight of them for exactly one second.
Then they poured straight through his fingers.
Stands Alone is an Ironman. He stands alone.
The coins hit the floorboards, bounced and rolled across the loft. One wobbled to the edge of the hatch and dropped through to the dairy below. Two more found the gaps between the boards and vanished with tiny clinks.
"No, no, no." Jory scrambled after them on his hands and knees. "Hold on. Hold on, I've got them."
He gathered them up in handfuls and brought them back. Tam held his hand out again, because he couldn't think what else to do. The coins went through it again, faster this time, like water through a sieve. The old message came up again, with his old name in it.
Jory stared at the coins on the floor. His lip started to shake.
"Put them back," said Tam quickly. "In the jar. Under the board. They're safe there."
"But you can't..."
"I know. It's my hands. It'll pass." He had no idea whether it would pass. "Put them back for me, Jory. Please."
Jory went down the ladder to fetch the coin from the dairy floor. Back up in the loft, he fished the other two out from between the boards with a long piece of straw. Then he counted all twenty-three into the jar, tied the cloth on, and laid the board back over it. He pressed it flat with both hands.
Tam watched him do it.
The real Tam had saved for two years, a coin at a time, whenever he got one. He had been three coins short, and days away from his first proper wages. And now the stranger in his bed couldn't even hold them.
Coat, he thought. Sword. Coins. All three had been handed to him, and all three had fallen. It wasn't a rule yet, only a guess with a lot of evidence.
* * *
Supper was in the farmhouse kitchen, at a long table scrubbed white, in front of a fire big enough to roast a pig.
Seth sat at the head. Gillie sat on his right and Jory beside her, kicking the table leg until Gillie kicked him. Down the far end sat the other farm hands. Two big quiet brothers talked only to each other. An old man talked only to his stew. Nobody asked Tam anything, and he was grateful.
Seth said a short grace to Saradomin. Gillie put a bowl of stew in front of Tam and a wooden spoon beside it.
Tam looked at the spoon.
Everything anybody had handed him today had fallen. If he picked up this spoon and it dropped into the stew, in front of everyone, he thought he might cry.
He picked it up.
It stayed. No words came.
He dipped it in the stew and lifted it, and it stayed. He steadied the bowl with his other hand, and the bowl stayed too.
Spoon: fine. Gillie hadn't put it in his hand. She'd put it on the table, and he'd picked it up himself. Or maybe a meal at somebody's table just didn't count, like the blankets on a bed. He didn't know which. He filed both guesses away.
The stew was mutton, barley and onions. It was the best thing he had eaten. That might have been the dying.
"Since when," said Gillie, "do you eat with your left hand?"
Tam froze with the spoon halfway to his mouth.
Owen had been left-handed. Apparently Tam hadn't.
"Since the river," he said, and moved the spoon to his right hand. It felt like writing with his foot.
Gillie looked at him across the table. She didn't giggle this time. Then Seth asked her about a cow with a sore hoof, and she looked away.
* * *
The farm hands went to bed when it got dark. Within ten minutes, the loft was full of snoring. The old man snored like a saw. The brothers snored in turns, as if they had agreed it.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Tam lay still until he was sure. Then he crept down the ladder in his bare feet and went out into the yard.
There was no moon, but the stars over the river were bright enough to see by. The farm was grey and black, and quiet. Somewhere a cow shifted in her sleep.
He stood in the middle of the yard and took a breath.
New account, he thought. You know what you do with a new account.
You checked everything. Every panel and every setting, before you took a single step. He had done it on stream with a dozen fresh characters, while chat yelled at him to hurry up.
Chat, we are so back.
Chat didn't answer. Chat was a world away, and he was standing barefoot in a farmyard at midnight. He started anyway.
The inventory first. He thought of it, and a grid of squares appeared in front of him. It was four across and seven down, just like the one in the corner of his old screen. Twenty-eight squares, all empty.
He bent down and picked up a feather from the yard. It was white and soft, one of the hens'. Nobody had given it to him. It was just a feather.
He thought about putting it away.
The feather wasn't in his hand any more. It was in the first square of the grid, a tiny white picture of a feather.
He thought about taking it out, and it was back in his hand, light and real.
He put it in and took it out. He put it in again. He did it eleven more times, grinning like an idiot. Then he let the feather go, and it drifted back down into the yard, where it belonged.
Worn equipment next. In the game, this showed the outline of a body with a slot for each thing you wore, from hat to boots.
He was wearing a shirt and trousers. Every slot was empty.
Clothes don't count, maybe, he thought. Huh. Plain starting clothes hadn't counted in the game either. It made him feel a little more naked.
Combat options. He had no weapon, so it showed the three ways to fight with his hands: punch, kick and block. In the game, punching trained Attack, kicking trained Strength and blocking trained Defence. If that's true here, he thought. Something to find out. Hopefully not tonight.
Prayer. A page of little symbols, every one of them grey except the first. Thick Skin. In the game, it gave a tiny bit more Defence for as long as your prayer points lasted. A small counter beside it said he had one prayer point.
He tried it.
The symbol lit up. Something cool spread over his skin. He held up his arm and looked at it in the starlight. It looked like an arm. It felt slightly tougher, as if there were a thin layer of leather over it.
A little over half a minute later, the symbol went dark by itself. When he checked, his prayer points said 0.
You get those back at an altar, he thought. There's a church in Lumbridge. Churches have altars. He added it to the list.
The quest list. On his old screen, it had been a long list of every quest there was, red until you started them. He knew all of them by heart and had finished every one.
Here it was empty: a heading at the top, and nothing under it. He didn't know what that meant, and he didn't like not knowing.
Settings. He ignored the usual switches, for sound and brightness. Halfway down was the one he was looking for.
It said Accept Aid. In the game, other players could cast helpful spells on you if this was switched on. Ironmen could never switch it on.
He tapped it.
Iron Men do not accept aid.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "I'm getting that."
And the one at the bottom. He had been putting it off without admitting it to himself. At the bottom of the panel, on his old screen, there had always been a little door. You clicked the door, and a panel opened with one red button. You clicked that, and you were back in your chair with your cold coffee.
He looked for the door.
It wasn't there. There was no button for it, not even a greyed-out one. There was just a gap where it had always been.
He stood in the yard for a long time under the stars, looking at the gap.
Okay, he thought eventually. Okay. That's fine. I didn't want to—
He didn't finish it. He didn't say anything else for a while.
* * *
The spellbook. He had left it until he could think straight again. It was a long page of spells. Nearly all of them needed runes, the little stones with magic in them. He had no runes, so every spell that needed them was grey.
Two of them weren't.
The first was called Minigame Teleport. It opened a list of places. In the game, these were the minigames, the arenas where players went to fight or compete. Under the list was a note: no runes, a long cast, twenty minutes before it would work again.
Most of the names were grey. A few were bright.
He read them, and his mouth went dry. Castle Wars, far in the west, past the end of everything he could see from here. The games room at Burthorpe, up in the mountains. The Fight Pit inside the TzHaar city, in the heart of a volcano. The Isle of Souls, out in the western sea, where the cows and chickens ran wild. The Ferox Enclave, a walled town inside the Wilderness, where people fought each other in arenas for sport.
And Bounty Hunter, which was in the Wilderness itself, the lawless north where anybody could kill anybody.
If it worked, he could go to any of them. Right now, tonight. With ten hitpoints, no shoes and no food.
Absolutely not, he thought.
But he couldn't stop looking at the list. In the game, you could walk from one end of the world to the other in an evening. Here, if the town across the river was anything to go by, it might take weeks. If this list worked, he could be on the far side of all of it in less than a minute.
The other bright spell was the one he'd been hoping for.
It was called Lumbridge Home Teleport. No runes. A slow cast. Thirty minutes before you could use it again. In the game, it took you straight back to Lumbridge from nearly anywhere in the world. Players used it all the time.
The hair stood up on his arms. One spell could take him far away. The other could bring him back to Lumbridge. He could go to the far side of the world and be back before breakfast.
If it worked. If any of it worked here.
There was one way to find out. Lumbridge was a short walk away, down the bank and across the bridge. He'd walked past the end of it this morning. If the spell went wrong, he wouldn't be far from his bed.
He took another breath and cast it.
His body knew how before he did. He bent down and drew a circle in the dirt of the yard with one finger, all the way around himself. Then his legs folded, and he sat down in the middle of it, cross-legged, like a boy in school. His mouth said some words. He hadn't chosen them, and they weren't in any language he knew. In the game, his little figure had done something like this every time he cast it. He had never paid attention to what it did.
It was slow. Light gathered in the circle around him, pale blue and then brighter. It climbed up his body. His skin tingled, then buzzed. The farm went thin around the edges, as if somebody were washing it off.
Then there was a lurch, and the yard was gone.
* * *
He was standing on flagstones, though he'd sat down to go.
There were two stone fountains, one on each side of him, splashing quietly in the dark. Between them stood two tall statues, black against the stars. In front of him, three wide steps went up to a pair of huge closed doors.
He was in the courtyard of Lumbridge Castle. He had stood on this very spot a thousand times, as a little cartoon figure with a bronze sword.
This time it was the middle of the night. The gates behind him were shut and barred. And a man with a lantern and a spear was walking straight toward him.
"Oi," said the man. "Oi! You!"
He was a big, sleepy castle guard in a bad mood, with a dented helmet and a padded coat. He held the lantern up to Tam's face. Then he lowered it to Tam's bare feet. Then he raised it again.
"How," said the guard, "did you get in here?"
Tam's mouth opened. Many answers came to mind. None of them were good.
"I'm sleepwalking," he said.
"You're what?"
"Sleepwalking. It's a whole thing. I walk in my sleep. Terrible problem. Runs in the family."
"The gates are barred."
"I'm a very good sleepwalker."
The guard looked at him. Then he leaned in and sniffed near Tam's face, clearly checking for drink, and looked disappointed not to find any.
"Out," he said.
He took Tam by the back of the shirt and marched him across the courtyard to a small door set in the big gate. He unbarred it and shoved Tam through, then slammed it shut. Through the wood, Tam heard the guard say to nobody, "Sleepwalking. Sleepwalking."
Tam stood outside the castle gate in the starlight.
Then he laughed. He laughed so hard he had to sit down on the cold cobbles with his back against the castle wall, until his stomach hurt.
It works, he thought. It actually works.
Home Teleport worked. So the list of faraway places probably worked too, but he'd have to find out, and not tonight. Not with ten hitpoints and no shoes.
He tried casting Home Teleport again, just to see. Nothing happened. Instead, a line of text told him how many minutes he had left to wait. Twenty-nine.
So that's real too, he thought. Thirty minutes. Same as the game.
He got up and started walking. He went through the dark streets of the sleeping town and over the bridge. Then he walked up the east bank, with the sound of the river on his left. The spell had taken him from the farm to the castle in less than a minute. Walking back took the best part of half an hour.
He didn't mind. He walked the whole way grinning, making a list in his head.
The farm gate was ahead, dark and quiet. Beside the farmhouse door was the woodpile. And stuck in a log on top of the woodpile, catching the starlight, was an axe.