The tutors' hill was a low green rise just north of the castle wall, with the smiths' building on one side and the town on the other. In the evening light it was full of noise.
Half a dozen boys and young men were spread across the grass in two ragged lines, with training swords, moving through the same drill. Step, cut, step back, guard. Step, cut, step back, guard. Some of them were good. Most of them were not. One of them dropped his sword on his own foot while Tam watched, and hopped about swearing.
At the top of the hill, with his hands behind his back, stood Harlan.
He looked exactly as he had the last time: short grey hair, a soldier's straight back, and two fingers missing from his left hand. He watched the lines as if he could see every boy at once and didn't think much of any of them.
"Feet!" he barked. "Feet first! Sword second! Brannoc, you're cutting like a man chopping turnips!"
And at the end of the front line, a little apart from the others, was Wren.
She was in her padded jacket and leather trousers, with her iron sword. She was doing the same drill as everyone else, the one he had watched from the bottom of the hill weeks ago, and she still made it look like water running downhill. She didn't look at anyone. She didn't look at Tam.
He knew she'd seen him anyway.
* * *
Harlan saw him coming up the hill, and his eyebrows went up a fraction.
"The drowned boy," he said. "Took your time."
Harlan looked him over: the bronze full helm, the chainbody over his shirt, the kiteshield on his back and the scimitar at his side. "And dressed for war, I see."
"I made it," said Tam. "All of it."
Harlan's eyes stayed on the chainbody a moment longer. Then he pulled a training sword out of a barrel by the path and held it out to Tam, handle first. "Fall in at the back."
Tam looked at the sword in Harlan's hand. Two weeks ago Harlan had tossed him one just like it, and it had gone straight through his hand and landed in the grass.
Harlan was lending it.
"I've got my own," said Tam.
He drew the scimitar and held it out flat on his two hands, so Harlan could see it without taking it.
Harlan looked at it for a long time. He didn't touch it.
"Bronze," he said. "Made it yourself, too?"
"Four days ago."
Harlan's eyes came up to Tam's face. Then he grunted.
"You'll not swing a live edge in my drill. Wrap it." He pointed with his chin at a pile of sacking and twine by the barrel. "That's there for anybody."
For anybody. Not handed to him, so not a gift. Tam knelt and wrapped the blade himself, around and around, in strips of old sacking, and tied it off with twine. The sacking stayed in his hands. When he stood up, the scimitar looked like a bent stick with a bandage on.
"Back line," said Harlan. "Feet first."
* * *
His feet were terrible.
He knew that within a minute. His arms had Strength 21 in them now, and the blade felt light, lighter than it had any right to. But nothing in him knew how to move. In the game you had stood still and clicked, and the fight happened. You never had to think about your feet.
Step, cut, step back, guard. He stepped with the wrong foot. He cut before he stepped. He stepped back onto the boy behind him, who said something rude. He tried to guard and found his feet crossed, and nearly fell over.
"Fallow!" Harlan's voice came across the hill like a slap. "Your feet are arguing with each other! Pick one!"
Somebody laughed. Tam didn't look to see who.
He did it again. And again. Step, cut, step back, guard. By the twentieth time, his feet had started to listen, a little. By the fiftieth, he could do it without stopping to think at each step, though not well. His legs ached. His shoulders ached from a day of hitting rocks and a day of hitting cows.
He watched the edge of his sight the whole time. Nothing rose.
Drills don't count, he thought. Naturally. In the game you got your experience from hitting things that hit you back. He kept going anyway. The numbers would come later, from cows. For now he only had to stop falling over.
* * *
Toward the end, as the light went red over the rooftops, Harlan called them into pairs.
"Sparring. Wrapped blades. Touch, don't kill. First to three." His eyes went down the lines and stopped. "Wren. Take Fallow."
Wren looked at Harlan. Harlan looked back. Wren's face did nothing at all.
She walked down the hill to where Tam stood at the back. She stopped in front of him and lifted her sword. Hers was wrapped too. Somehow that didn't make it look any less like a sword.
"Fallow," she said.
"Wren."
"Ready?"
"No," said Tam honestly.
She hit him.
He didn't see it coming. One moment she was standing in front of him with her sword up. The next, his feet were gone and he was sitting in the wet grass with the wind knocked out of him. The end of her wrapped sword rested lightly on his chest. The grass was soft.
"One," said Wren.
He got up.
She did it again. He saw this one coming, a little. He even got his sword up. It didn't help. She went around his guard as if it weren't there, and he was on his back.
"Two."
He got up.
The third time, he lasted almost a full breath. He actually landed a touch. It was clumsy and accidental, but the wrapped bronze thumped into the padding of her shoulder. She didn't even blink. She hooked his ankle with her foot and dropped him in the mud.
"Three."
Strength 21 didn't matter. Strength made a hit hurt more. It didn't help a hit land, and it didn't keep hers out. For that he needed Attack and Defence, and he had Attack 9 and Defence 1.
He looked at the edge of his sight from where he lay. He had touched her. No number rose.
Sparring gives no XP, he thought. Noted. He lay there for a moment longer, looking up at the red sky.
Then he got up.
"Again," said Tam.
Wren looked at him.
"That was three," she said. "That's the round."
"I know," said Tam. "Again."
Wren was quiet for a breath. Then she lifted her sword.
"Again," she agreed.
* * *
She put him down nine more times before Harlan called the end of the evening. He landed two more touches, both of them accidents. By the end his shirt was more mud than shirt. There was grass in his helmet, and his bare feet were black to the ankle. He ached all over.
The boys drifted off down the hill in twos and threes, talking and laughing. Tam sat on the grass and unwrapped his scimitar with stiff fingers. He put it back at his side.
Wren sat down a little way off, cleaning the wet grass off her blade with a rag. After a while, without looking at him, she said:
"You got up."
"You kept knocking me down."
"Most people stop getting up. Around the fourth time." She ran the rag down the blade. "They decide it's not their day, and they go home, and they don't come back."
"I'll come back," said Tam.
"I know." She said it flatly. Then, still not looking at him: "Your feet are a disgrace, Fallow."
"Harlan said."
"Harlan was being kind." She stood up and slid her sword into its sheath. Then she looked down at him, and the corner of her mouth moved. It was almost a smile. "Nice bucket."
"It's a helmet."
"It's a bucket," said Wren, and walked off down the hill toward the river.
Tam sat on the grass in the dusk. He realised, after a while, that he was grinning.
Harlan had stayed. He stood at the top of the hill with his hands behind his back, watching the last of the light go. He looked down at Tam.
"Feet first," said Harlan. "Sword second."
"Yes, sir."
"Rest day tomorrow. The day after, then."
"The day after," said Tam.
Harlan nodded and turned away. As he went, Tam heard him say to nobody, or to himself, "Two weeks. Two weeks ago he couldn't hold a training sword." He shook his head, and went down the far side of the hill toward the castle.
* * *
That night Seth paid him at the long table, as he did on the last evening of each week: thirty-two coins for four days' work, and nothing for the two days Tam had taken off. The coins stayed.
The next day was rest day.
The Groats walked to church in the morning. Gillie and Jory went ahead, arguing about something. Seth walked with Tam. Halfway there Tam said, "I'm going to fight some cows this afternoon."
"Nobody's," said Seth, before Tam could. That was all either of them said. In church, Father Aereck tangled himself in the bell rope once and went bright red. The Duke's adviser sat on his cushioned bench at the front, neat and still, and didn't sing. Hobart sat three rows behind him, in his big coat, and didn't sing either.
After the service, in the crowd outside the church door, Hobart came over to Seth. He said something low. Seth listened with his arms folded and his face closed.
Tam was too far away to hear. He didn't need to.
There's a meeting, Hobart had said, at the farm gate. Next rest day. Just a few of us. Farmers who've lost stock.
Seth stood still. Then he turned to Gillie.
"Take Jory home," he said. "I'll be back this afternoon."
"Dad, where are you..."
"Just a drink," said Seth. "With Hobart. Go on."
He walked off up the street with Hobart beside him, toward the Sheared Ram. Hobart was talking. Seth was listening.
Tam stood in the crowd outside the church with his hands at his sides and watched them go.
He could have run after them. He could have said: Don't. I know who's buying the drinks. I know what's in the chest upstairs in the castle, and I know where the people in those robes are taking this. Seth would have given him a long, flat look. And then he'd have gone anyway, because Tam was an orphan farm boy who had drowned and come back strange. Seth was a man who had lost eight hens in a fortnight.
So Tam stood there. He did nothing, and he hated it.
* * *
That afternoon, he didn't sit in the farmhouse kitchen listening for Seth's boots. He went up to the loft, put the hatch down, and cast the Minigame Teleport.
The island was grey and blowing. The cows were on their slope. He had a plan for the afternoon, and he did it in order.
Attack first. He set the scimitar to chop and fought cows until the words came.
Congratulations, you just advanced an Attack level. Your Attack level is now 10.
Then he set the scimitar to block, for Defence. He still swung at every cow, as hard as before. The setting only meant he fought with his shield first and his sword second, and every blow he landed taught his Defence instead. His Defence crept up from 1.
Congratulations, you just advanced a Defence level. Your Defence level is now 10.
Then back to slash, for Strength, to start the round again.
When the sun had moved most of the way down the sky, he did one more thing. He stopped leaving the hides.
He skinned the next cow and let the inventory take the hide. And the next. Twenty-one cows, twenty-one hides, until every free square had one. The weight pulled at his shoulders like a wet sack of washing. In the game, a tanner called Ellis in Al Kharid, a desert town east of Lumbridge, turned hides into leather for a coin each. The town gate cost ten coins to pass.
* * *
He came back by Home Teleport in the late afternoon. In the courtyard the fountains splashed, and the pigeons walked about the steps. And there, walking his laps at the same steady pace, close to the wall, was Hans.
Hans came around the far fountain. As he passed Tam, he didn't slow down.
"Twenty days, nine hours and two minutes," said Hans.
Then he was past, and going around again.
Twenty days. Three weeks, near enough, since the river.
Tam sat down on the edge of the fountain, in his bronze, and opened his panels one after another.
Attack 10. Strength 23. Defence 10. Hitpoints 19.
Combat level 19. Quest points 2.
Coins: one thousand, one hundred and seventy.
He looked at that one for a while. In the game, a thousand coins bought you a house: a garden and one empty room, folded away somewhere outside the world, with its front door a portal in a town called Rimmington. He had thought saving that much would take him all summer.
Then the inventory: twenty-eight squares, every one of them full, twenty-one of them cowhides. And his feet still bare.
Leather, he thought. Boots. Real boots, that are mine.
Twenty days ago he had been a drowned farm boy with an empty inventory and nothing in his hands. He grinned at the panels.
Then he thought about Seth, in the Sheared Ram, listening. The grin went away.