The axe was Seth's.
Tam knew it was Seth's. He had seen Seth split kindling with it from the loft window that afternoon. But in the game, an axe was stuck in a log right here, outside the Groats' farmhouse, and any player without an axe could take it. If you took it, another one turned up in the log a little later.
There was only one axe here. It belonged to the man who had carried him home.
Tam stood in front of the woodpile in the starlight and thought about the coat, the sword and the coins. Nobody had handed him this.
He wrapped his hand around the handle and pulled the axe out of the log.
It stayed in his hand. No message came.
He stood there holding it. It was heavy, and the handle was smooth from years of Seth's grip. He thought about putting it away in his inventory. He didn't. It was enough to know that he could.
His stomach turned over. He pushed the axe back into the log, at the same angle, in the same split, exactly where it had been.
So I can't borrow Seth's axe, he thought. But I can steal it.
That was horrible. He filed it away anyway.
He crossed the yard to the dairy and let himself in. He climbed the ladder to the loft slowly, so the boards wouldn't creak. In the dark, his foot knocked against something under his bed. He felt for it.
Boots. A pair of good boots, old and patched, with the leather gone soft. Somebody had fetched them from the willow, where the real Tam must have kicked them off, and left them under the bed for him.
His feet were freezing from the walk. He pulled the boots on and laced them tight. Then he stood up.
His foot came out of the left one as if the boot were made of fog. The right one followed. He was standing barefoot beside a pair of empty boots.
Stands Alone is an Ironman. He stands alone.
He sat down on the bed and looked at the boots for a while.
Nobody handed me those, he thought. Somebody left them for me. It seemed that counted the same.
He lay back and stared at the beams. He lined it all up in his head.
Things that fell: Seth's coat, put around him. Jory's sword, held out to him. Tam's coins, poured into his hand. Tam's boots, left out for him.
Things that stayed: a feather nobody owned. Seth's axe, taken. A spoon and a bowl, at somebody's table. Blankets, on a bed. Seth's arm, holding him up.
Theory, he thought. If it's given to me, lent to me, or left out for me, it falls. If I find it or take it, it stays. Tables and beds don't count, maybe. People don't count. Not sure why.
Ironman rules, he thought. For real.
He fell asleep before he could worry about what else that meant.
* * *
In the morning he tried to milk a cow.
Gillie had been at it since before dawn. The cow field was grey with mist, and the cows stood in it up to their knees, steaming gently. Gillie sat on a three-legged stool beside a brown and white cow with a crooked horn, milking into a bucket with both hands. The milk hit the bucket in quick, ringing squirts.
"You should be in bed," she said, without looking up.
"I'm bored of bed. Show me which one's Daisy."
She looked up then. "This one," she said slowly. "This is Daisy."
Daisy turned her big head and looked at him too. She didn't seem pleased about it.
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Gillie got up and let him have the stool. He sat down on it and nothing fell. Chairs and stools, he thought. Same as beds? The bucket was sitting on the grass, and he didn't touch it.
He reached under Daisy, took hold, and pulled.
Nothing happened.
In the game, Gillie had a line for exactly this moment. Tee hee! You've never milked a cow before, have you? He hadn't. Not once. Not with hands.
He pulled harder. Daisy shifted her weight and made a deep, unhappy noise. He tried squeezing instead of pulling, and then pulling while squeezing. He got a thin dribble that went on his own knee.
Then Daisy lifted one back foot, very calmly, and kicked the bucket over.
Gillie put both hands over her mouth. Her shoulders shook.
"You've milked Daisy every morning for ten years, Tam," she said, when she could speak. "Daisy is not impressed."
"Daisy's a critic."
"Here. No. Your thumb goes there. Squeeze from the top down." She moved his hands. "There. Like that. Gently. She's a lady."
He tried again. A proper squirt of milk rang into the bucket.
"Ha!" said Tam.
Daisy kicked the bucket over again.
In the end Gillie milked Daisy herself. Tam held Daisy's head and talked to her, which Daisy seemed to like better. When the bucket was full, Gillie stood up and held it out to him by the handle, out of plain habit.
He knew how this would end. But she was holding it out, and he didn't know how to say no, so he reached for the handle.
The handle went through his fingers. The bucket landed upright, which was lucky, and slopped a third of the milk onto the grass, which wasn't. The old message came up in front of him, and he ignored it.
They both looked at the puddle.
"It's my hands," he said. "Since the river."
"It's not your hands." Gillie said it quietly. "You picked up your spoon fine last night."
He didn't have an answer to that, so he didn't give one. Gillie picked up the bucket and carried it to the dairy herself. She didn't look back at him.
* * *
Father Aereck walked out from Lumbridge in the middle of the morning, all the way across the bridge and up the east bank, just to see him.
Aereck was Lumbridge's priest of Saradomin, a thin, balding man with white tufts of hair over his ears. He wore long dark robes trimmed with blue, with a blue star on the chest, and there was mud on the hem from the walk. He had a long, kind, tired face and ink on his fingers. In the game he had sent you to deal with a ghost in his graveyard, and that was nearly all Tam knew about him. That, and one thing the hermit priest in the swamp said in the game: Aereck used to get stuck up the bell ropes when they were both young.
Aereck held Tam's face in both hands and looked at him as if Tam were a small miracle.
"Saradomin's mercy," he said. "That's what this is, Tam. Nothing less."
"Thanks," said Tam. "I mean. Thanks to Saradomin. Obviously."
Aereck smiled. They sat on the bench outside the dairy in the thin spring sun. The priest yawned twice behind his hand and apologised both times.
"Bad night," he said. "There's been some kind of... noise in my graveyard. At night. I'm sure it's nothing. The wind."
In the game, it wasn't the wind, Tam thought. It was a ghost who'd lost his skull. He didn't know if that was true here. He said nothing.
"I buried your mother and father, you know," said Aereck. "Col and Annis. The winter of the fever. You were eight. You held on to my sleeve the whole time and you didn't cry once." He looked out over the cow field. "I'd have hated to put you in the ground beside them. I'd have hated it very much."
Col and Annis Fallow. The real Tam's parents. He heard their names for the first time, and they hurt more than he expected. He hadn't thought about the boy having parents. But the boy had had a whole life, and he had spent the end of it pushing a little boy up onto the willow roots.
"Thank you," said Tam. "For burying them."
Aereck patted his knee. "Come to church on rest day, if you're well. Let people see you. They've been praying."
"I will," said Tam, and found he meant it.
* * *
At midday, Seth came and stood in the doorway of the dairy with his arms folded.
"Gillie says you spilled the milk."
"Some of the milk."
"And you can't keep hold of a bucket."
"Not if somebody hands it to me."
Seth frowned. Tam waited for him to shout. Instead Seth nodded slowly.
"Rest," he said. "Till the end of the week. That's an order. Then we'll see about those hands."
"I can work. Honestly. I'll muck out, I'll carry things..."
"You'll rest," said Seth, "or I'll sit on you." He turned to go, and stopped. "The kitchen fire's there for anyone in this house, lad. You know that. If you get hungry, help yourself."
Then he was gone, and Tam sat in the cool of the dairy with the milk churns and thought.
He had no money. He had no tools. He couldn't borrow anything or be given anything, as far as he could tell. He could take things, but he wasn't going to take them from the people who had raised the real Tam. He didn't even have shoes.
In the game, a new player started with a whole kit: an axe, a pickaxe, a net, a sword, a tinderbox and food. Twenty-five coins waited in the bank. Tam had a shirt and a pair of trousers.
But he remembered the game.
Down in Lumbridge Swamp, a fishing tutor stood by the water, and two small fishing nets lay by him for anyone who wanted to learn. If they were here, they weren't anybody's. They might stay in his hand.
And there was a bank at the top of Lumbridge Castle.
He sat up a little straighter. Jory had said Tam was eighteen now. That sounded like a grown man to him. In the game, you could use a bank from your very first minute. Here, he had no idea who could have an account. But coins he earned himself might stay in his hand. And surely a bank would take a grown man's coins.
A bank would change a lot. It was somewhere safe to leave things, so he didn't have to carry everything he owned in his inventory's twenty-eight squares.
If they'll have a farm boy, he thought. Find out.
The faraway places on the Minigame Teleport list could wait. Later. With shoes.
He couldn't keep the real Tam's money, or the real Tam's boots, or the wooden sword Jory had carved. But he could still walk to Varrock one day and become the adventurer Tam had wanted to be.