It did not stay in the shop, because these things never do.
By the middle of the next afternoon there were two men in chapter-house grey standing on Marrow Street outside the wool merchant’s rebuilt wall, and they were not fighting about God.
“—held the line at the third gate,” one of them was saying, jabbing a finger at the cobbles as though the third gate were on them, “which is the entire—”
Rurik heard it through the glass.
He had not known you could hear the argument through the glass.
He had spent good money, in another life, making sure you could not hear the street through the glass, and here was the street arguing about his inventory loud enough to come through anyway.
He found Dain at the counter, returning volume five.
“Your people are on the street,” Rurik said.
“Arguing about the archer.”
“They are not my people.” Dain considered this.
“Two of them are my people.” He set the book down.
“The chapter house has taken the position that the one who wept is the correct match.
“They are wrong.
But they have taken it as a house.”
“As a house,” Rurik repeated.
“The Silvered Company holds that the archer is correct.
On the grounds that she held.” Dain squared the book to the counter edge.
“This is not a disagreement anymore.
It is a position each side holds.
There is a difference, and the difference is that a disagreement ends.”
Rurik looked at him for a moment.
He was aware, in a distant way, of standing at the edge of something.
He had not specifically thought about what it would look like when they loved it at each other.
It looked like two grown men in a foreign uniform pointing at cobblestones.
He did not yet see the whole shape of it — that the soldiers were defending the soldier and the clergy were defending the mercy and that neither side had noticed it was arguing about itself.
That would come later, and he would never point at it when it did, because the day you explain the joke to the people inside it is the day it stops being funny and starts being a meeting.
For now he just said, “Nobody duels.”
Dain looked at him.
“I mean it,” Rurik said.
“Whatever this turns into.
Nobody duels over the archer.
Say it back.”
“No one duels over the archer,” Dain said, in the voice of a man reading a regulation he privately intends to test.