The road to Halvard took nine days, and on every one of them I learned something I had not known I didn't know.
I learned that dwarves sing from the moment they wake until the moment they sleep, and that none of them can carry a tune, and that this is considered a point of pride. I learned that ponies bite. I learned that a wagon wheel is not a circle but a negotiation, and that the dwarf who mends one will tell you so at length whether you ask or not. I learned that bread is the best thing in any world, and that I had forgotten it.
And I learned, on the second morning, that I could not stop counting.
It happened at breakfast. Hagen was sitting on a barrel with a slate in his lap and a stub of chalk in his fist, scowling at a column of marks the way some men scowl at a bad hand of cards.
"Forty-two crates iron," he muttered. "Nineteen crates tools, less the six the beasts took. Copper, less what the beasts took. Halvard pays four marks the crate for iron, seven for tools, and Brennick's quartermaster will try to skin us on the copper, he always does..." He wiped the slate with his sleeve and started again.
"Two hundred and seventy-five marks," I said. "Less whatever he skins you on the copper."
The whole fire went quiet.
I had not meant to say it. It had simply been there, the way the answer to a sum is there when you have spent twenty years in accounts receivable, and it had come out of my mouth before I could stop it. Hagen looked at me. Then he looked at his slate. Then he worked it, slowly, with the chalk squeaking, while every dwarf at the fire watched.
"Two hundred and seventy-five," he said at last. He set the slate down. "How'd you do that?"
I could feel Torvi's gray eyes on me from across the fire.
"I used to keep accounts," I said. "Before."
"Before the goblins," said Bolli, nodding wisely.
I let him think it.
After that, the slate came to me every morning, and the dwarves called me the Counter, and I did not mind at all. But I noticed that Torvi watched me more closely afterward. Not unkindly. The way she had looked at Clara's hip. The way a craftsman looks at a joint that should not hold, and does.
I understood then that my numbers were a thing I would have to be careful with. In this world, a smart man is a man who can count to a hundred. I could do a great deal more than that, and people would wonder why.
Torvi began my lessons on the third day.
She did not announce them. She simply dropped down beside me on the wagon bench, where I was sitting with Clara propped against my shoulder and the marionette in my lap, and set a small leather case on her knees.
"You asked me what a magical material is," she said. "So tell me first what you think it is. And don't be clever. Be wrong honestly."
I considered. "Something with magic in it."
"Good. Wrong, but good. Everything has magic in it, lad. The road has magic in it. Your beard has magic in it. It's thin as river mist, but it's there." She tapped the side of her head. "Mana. It's in the air, the water, the rock. It soaks into things slowly, the way damp soaks into a cellar wall. Most things, it soaks in and soaks out again and leaves no mark. But some things hold it." She unlatched the case. "Those are your materials."
Inside, on a bed of faded blue velvet, were six things.
She laid them out on the bench between us one at a time, and named them, and I listened the way I have only ever listened to the person who trains you on a new system at a new job, when you know your livelihood depends on it.
A small, cloudy, pinkish stone the size of a fingertip.
"Slime core. Cheapest there is. Every monster has a core where its mana pools. Most of them are buried in the guts, and you'd want a strong stomach to dig them out. A slime's just floats there, all on its own. Children collect them."
I stared at it. I had pulled one of those out of a slime with a pair of pliers, on my very first morning, and dropped it in the moss.
A gray tuft of feathers bound with thread.
"Hollow owl down. Holds silence. The Kessarians stuff their spies' boots with it."
A sliver of pale wood, no longer than my finger, silvery as birch bark and faintly cool to the touch.
"Elderheart. Wood from the inside of a tree that has stood in a mana-rich place for longer than any kingdom. It drinks for five hundred years and keeps it all." She held it up to the light. "This much would buy you a good horse."
A thread of something thinner than hair, so fine I could only see it when it caught the sun.
"Gloomweaver silk. Spider. You don't want to meet the spider."
A flake of dark metal, dull and heavy, that sat in her palm like a coin.
"Ironspine starsteel. Ore from deep in our mountains. Takes an enchantment and never lets go."
The last was a tiny chip of crystal, violet and very clear, sealed inside a little cage of lead.
"And ether," she said. "Which you will not touch. Ever. Not until you've had a hundred years of training Or a dwarf's blood in you, and you've got neither." She closed the lead cage with a snap, and her gears clicked. "It'll rot the meat off your bones from the inside. Slowly. We work it into runes, and once it's set in a rune it's tame. Until then it's a wolf in a box."
I looked at the six things on the bench for a long time.
"So the requirement," I said. "Craft a puppet from a magical material. I could make a puppet out of elderheart."
"You could." Torvi's mouth twitched. "If you could afford it, which you can't. And if you knew how to carve it without bleeding it dry, which you don't. Cut elderheart wrong and the mana runs out of it like sap. You'd end up with a very expensive stick." This chapter is updated first at NovelPing.
"And a slime core?"
"Set a slime core into a puppet's chest, and you've made a puppet with a magical material in it. Would the Registry count it?" She shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe not. The Registry's fussy. It knows the difference between a thing made of a material and a thing with a bead of it glued on." She tapped the marionette in my lap. "Your evolution won't come cheap, lad. Nothing at twenty-five does. That's what makes it a wall."
She let me hold the elderheart that night.
I sat by the fire after the others had gone to sleep, with the little sliver of pale wood in my palm, and turned it over and over. It was a beautiful thing. The grain was so fine it was almost invisible, like the grain of good paper, and it had a faint, cool smoothness that no ordinary wood has.
"Can you feel it?" Torvi asked from across the fire. She was mending a strap and did not look up.
"Feel what?"
"The mana."
I almost said no. I had spent a stat point on Attunement once, on a cold dawn with a dead bear at my feet, and felt nothing at all. I had five points of MP that I had never been able to find, any more than I can find my own liver.
But I closed my eyes anyway, because she had asked, and because I have never been able to leave an empty column alone.
I held the elderheart. I breathed. I listened, though I did not know what for.
And there, at the very edge of nothing, so faint I could not be sure I was not imagining it, was something. Not a warmth. Not a hum. More like the feeling of standing in a quiet room and knowing, without seeing, that someone else is in it. A presence in the wood, the size of a held breath.
I opened my eyes.
"I don't know," I said. My voice came out strange. "Maybe. Maybe a little."
Torvi looked up from her strap. She studied my face for a long moment in the firelight.
"Most humans can't," she said. "Not without a magical class. Not without training." She went back to her strap. "Interesting."
I sat with the elderheart until the fire went out.
We reached Halvard on the ninth day, at noon.
I saw the walls first. They rose out of a long gray valley at the foot of the mountains, built of the same dark stone as the peaks behind them, so that the city looked like a piece of the range that had decided to sit down. Smoke rose from a hundred chimneys. Bells were ringing somewhere, and the road under the wagons turned from dirt to cobbles with a jolt that went up my spine.
At the gate, the guards read our tags.
I watched them do it. Their eyes went up, over each of our heads, quick and practiced, Dwarf, dwarf, dwarf, warrior, smith, tinker. Then they came to me.
Human Lv. 14 Puppet Maker
The younger guard frowned. He was a big, ruddy man in a dented helmet, and above his own head floated Human Lv. 11 Spearman.
"Puppet Maker," he said. "What's that, then?"
"A crafting class," said Torvi, before I could answer. "He's with me."
The guard looked at me. I must have been a sight: thin, sunburned, bearded to the collarbone, in a black hoodie with one sleeve and half a cuff missing, and a large doll in a dress strapped to my back.
"He's with you?" he said.
"He's my apprentice!" said Torvi, in a voice like a hammer coming down on cold iron. "Have you got a problem with dwarven apprentices, Gerd? Because the Jarl buys a lot of axes from people who might."
Gerd did not have a problem.
We went through the gate. And then I was standing in a street, a real street, with buildings on both sides of it, four stories of stone and timber leaning over me, and people.
There were so many people.
There were men and women carrying baskets. There were children chasing a dog. There was a woman selling hot chestnuts from a pan, and a boy with a tray of meat pies, and an old man mending a chair on his doorstep. Every one of them had a tag, and most of the tags had no class at all: Human Lv. 6. Human Lv. 4. Human Lv. 8. A few said Laborer or Merchant in pale letters, and once, a woman in a blue cloak went by with Human Lv. 23 Priestess floating over her head like a halo, and people stepped aside for her without seeming to notice they were doing it.
I stood in the middle of the street with my mouth open until a cart nearly ran me down.
"Breathe, lad," said Torvi, steering me by the elbow. "It's only a town."
It was not only a town. It was a world.
The caravan unloaded at a dwarven trading house near the market, a squat, square building with an iron anvil-in-a-circle hammered over the door. Hagen went off to argue with Brennick's quartermaster about copper. I sat on a crate in the yard with Clara and watched a stable boy feed the ponies, and felt very strange.
Across the square, there was a tall stone building with a carved sign over its door: a crossed sword and quill. Men and women in leather and mail went in and out of it, laughing and arguing, and on the wall beside the door hung a great wooden board, plastered with sheets of paper. Read the latest chapters at NovelPing.
"Adventurers' Guild," said Torvi, following my eyes. "Bounties. Jobs. The kind of folk who'll take either." She pointed with her chin. "Go and look, if you want. You'll want to know what this town pays for."
I went.
The board was a mess of nailed paper. Wolves in the north pasture, 2 marks the head. Escort wanted, Halvard to Thornvale, inquire within. Lost: one gray mare, answers to Biscuit. Wanted, any information on the ash-pale fox seen near Brennan's Mill, and I felt my ears go hot, because I had eaten an ash-pale fox in my second winter and had not known it was famous.
And, near the top, in fresh black ink on a broad sheet with the anvil-in-a-circle stamped in the corner:
BY ORDER OF THE HOLD OF KHAZRUND AND THE JARL OF HALVARD
GOBLINS of the southern woods.
Three copper bits paid for each right ear, presented at the Hold's trading house.
Double for any goblin taken within a mile of the caravan road.
I read it twice. My habit.
Then I went back across the square and sat down on my crate and put my hands between my knees, and did not say anything for a while. Torvi did not ask. She sat on the crate beside me and took the marionette out of my lap and began, very gently, to tighten one of his hinges.
That night, for the first time in five hundred and fourteen days, I slept indoors in a room that was not one I had built.
Torvi paid for it. I tried to protest. She told me I could pay her back by doing the trading house's accounts for a week, and named a figure, and I did the sum in my head and realized she had overpaid by a third, on purpose, and that she knew I would notice. I did not say anything about it. I think that was the point.
The room had a bed with a straw mattress and a real wool blanket. It had a basin, and a jug of hot water, and a cake of grainy brown soap, and on the wall above the basin, a small square mirror of polished tin.
I had not seen my own face in a year and a half.
I looked for a long time. The man in the tin was gaunt in a way I had never been, with cheekbones I did not know I owned. His skin was brown from the sun and lined around the eyes. His beard was long and tangled and shot through with gray I did not remember. His hair hung to his shoulders. He looked like a hermit in a painting, or a castaway, or a saint who had gone into the desert and come back with bad news.
He looked about sixty.
"Hello," I said to him.
He did not answer, either.
I washed. I used the whole cake of soap and the whole jug of water, and the water went gray, and then brown. Then I took my dagger, and the whetstone, and I shaved, slowly, the way I had once before in the clearing, and this time I did not cut myself at all, because my hands were steadier now. Then I sat on the edge of the bed with my wet hair dripping down my neck, and looked across the room.
Clara was sitting in the room's one chair, by the window, where I had put her. The lamplight caught her glass eyes. Behind her, through the warped glass, the lights of Halvard were coming on one by one, hundreds of them, a whole city of small yellow windows climbing the dark valley.
She looked, I thought, like she was enjoying the view.
"We made it," I told her.
I did not answer for her. I have kept that rule. But I sat there with her a long time anyway, watching the lights.
Then I opened the ledger.
Day 514.
Level: 14. XP: about 8,400.
Location: Halvard. A city. Real.
Employment: accounts, Khazrund trading house, one week. Apprentice to Torvi Greymantle.
Magical materials: slime core, hollow owl down, elderheart, gloomweaver silk, starsteel, ether (do not touch).
I dropped a slime core in the moss on my first morning.
Elderheart: I think I felt it.
Goblins: three bits an ear. Double near the road.
Question: how much elderheart grows in the Forbidden Woods?
I looked at the last line for a long time, and thought of the old trees around my house, wide and patient and impossibly ancient, standing in the deepest, oldest part of a forest that kept for a thousand years.
Then I blew out the lamp and lay down on a real bed. It was too soft. I did not sleep for hours.
I was smiling the whole time.