The Khazrund trading house kept its accounts like a bear keeps it's pantry.
There were ledgers in crates, ledgers in barrels, ledgers stacked on the floor and wedged under the leg of a wobbly table to keep it level. There were tallies scratched on slate, tallies knotted into string, and one tally, which I came to think of fondly, carved into the doorframe of the privy. The figures went back eleven years. Three different dwarves had kept them, in three different hands, and none of them had agreed with each other.
I sat down at the wobbly table on my first morning with a cup of the bitter brown drink, a stack of fresh paper, and Clara in the chair beside me, and I was happier than I had been in a very long time.
"Gods," said the trading-house master, a fat, anxious dwarf named Oskar, watching me from the doorway. "He's smiling."
"He does that," said Torvi.
It took me four days to sort the books.
I will not describe them in detail. A person who has never reconciled eleven years of somebody else's receipts would not believe me, and a person who has would not need me to. I will say only that by the fourth evening, the trading house of Khazrund in the city of Halvard had a single ledger, in a single hand, in columns that added up, and that Oskar sat down and read it all the way through and then went outside and was quietly sick in the yard.
"Eighty-one marks," he said when he came back in, gray-faced. "He's been taking eighty-one marks a year. For eleven years!"
He meant the quartermaster, Brennick's man, who had been skinning Hagen on the copper. I had found it on the second day, in a pattern of weights that were always a little lighter on the way in than they had been on the way out. It was a very ordinary sort of theft. I had seen exactly the same thing twice at my old company. The quartermaster had simply never imagined that anyone would check.
Hagen, when he heard, went very red and very calm, and took two of the caravan dwarves and a large wooden mallet and went to see the quartermaster. I do not know what happened. The money was paid back by evening. The quartermaster did not come to work again.
After that, nobody in the trading house called me the Counter. They called me Master Kenji, and they took off their caps when I came in, and Oskar sent a boy round every morning with fresh bread and a little crock of honey, and I did not know where to put myself.
"You're wasted on puppets," Oskar told me, wringing his hands. "You should be keeping a king's purse."
"No," said Torvi, before I could answer. "He shouldn't."
She said it lightly, but I saw her look at me as she did. I thought about it for a long time afterward. I thought she might be the only person in the city who understood that I did not want to be useful in the way that other people wanted me to be useful. I wanted to make things.
In the evenings, she taught me.
We worked in a corner of the trading house's back room, at a bench under a window, with a lamp and a box of her tools. On the first night she gave me a slime core.
"Put it in something," she said. "Anything you like. Let's see what the Registry thinks."
I carved a little figure from a scrap of pine, a round-bellied man no taller than my hand, with a hollow in his chest the size of a fingertip. I set the slime core in the hollow and sealed it with a dab of pine resin, and I strung him with silver wire from the goblin hoard, which Torvi had let me keep on the grounds that she did not want to hear the story of how I came by it.
When I was done, I set him on the bench, and the Registry spoke.
Deed recorded: Crafted a puppet with a magical component.
Experience gained: 0 XP
Skill improved: puppet craft (Lv. 11)
I checked my evolution panel. It said exactly what it had said before.
Magic Puppet Maker (Level 25)
Locked. Requirement: craft a puppet from a magical material.
"With a magical component," Torvi said, leaning over my shoulder to read. "Not from one. I told you. It's fussy." She did not sound disappointed. She sounded pleased, the way a teacher sounds when an experiment goes exactly the way she predicted. "So now we know. A bead won't do. It wants the whole body. Wood, bone, metal, silk. Whatever the puppet is, it has to be the material."
"Elderheart," I said.
"Or owl bone, or starsteel, or something we haven't thought of." She tapped my little pine man on his round belly. "But there's no shortcut. You'll have to find it, or buy it, or earn it, and then you'll have to learn to carve it without killing it. That's a year's work, at least."
I looked at the little pine man. He looked back at me with an expression of mild, permanent surprise, which I seem unable to carve out of anything.
"A year?" I said.
"At least." Torvi's gears clicked.
I saw the witch on the fifth day.
I had gone out at noon to buy a pair of boots with the first wages I had ever earned in this world. Oskar had insisted. My one remaining slipper, he said, was a disgrace to the trading house. I found a cobbler near the market, paid him four silver marks for a pair of boots with real soles, and walked out into the square feeling taller than I had felt in years.
The square had filled while I was inside.
There was a crowd in front of the stone steps of the city's church, a tall, narrow building of gray stone with a white lantern carved over its doors. People were pressed in close and craning their necks. A few children had climbed the lampposts. And on the steps, above them, stood a priest in white robes, a broad, red-faced man with a golden lantern on a chain around his neck.
Human Lv. 21 Priest
Beside him, on the top step, was a wooden frame.
It took me a moment to understand what it was. A pair of heavy posts, with a crossbeam between them, and a woman bound to it by the wrists. Her arms were pulled up and apart, wrapped in chains that glowed, very faintly, with lines of white light, like the veins in a leaf. Visit novelping dot com for the full chapter.
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She was not young. Thirty-five, perhaps, or forty. Plain, and thin, with brown hair cut short and ragged, as if someone had cut it with a knife. Her dress was gray and worn. She looked like any of the women in the square.
Except for the tag.
Human Witch Lv. 12 Hex-caster
I stopped walking.
"Good people of Halvard!" The priest's voice rolled out over the square, deep and practiced. "Behold what the Light has found in your midst!"
The crowd murmured. Someone threw a cabbage. It missed.
"This woman," said the priest, "has lived among you for nine years. She sold herbs in the lower market. She sat in your kitchens and tended your sick. She held your newborns in her arms." He paused, and let the crowd feel the horror of it. "And all that time, she was a blot!"
The word went through the crowd like a shiver.
"The Registry is the Creator's own ledger," the priest said. "It writes every soul. And upon some souls, it writes a stain. A heretical class. A witch's class. A class of curses and hexes, of sickness and rot and the twisting of another's will. These women are blots on the Creator's ledger, and the Light commands that they be erased!"
The crowd roared.
I stood at the edge of the square in my new boots and could not move.
"She hid her stain!" the priest went on. "For nine years, she hid it beneath a thief's veil, bought from the low streets, so that when you looked upon her, you saw only an herb-wife! But the Lantern sees all!" He raised the golden lantern on its chain, and it flared, white and hard, and the woman on the frame turned her face away from it. "An honest neighbor brought her to the Light!"
"She cursed my cow," someone shouted from the crowd. "Cow went dry the week after!"
"My boy had the fever," a woman called, "after she came to the house!"
The woman on the frame did not say anything. She just looked out over the square with flat, tired eyes, as though she had been looking at it for a very long time and knew exactly how it would end.
"Fifty silver marks!" the priest cried. "Fifty marks, by the order of His Radiance Celestin, paid to the honest neighbor who brought her forth! So shall it be paid to any of you who brings forth a blot!"
That was what got the biggest cheer of all.
"Come away, lad."
Torvi was beside me. I had not heard her come. She had a hand on my arm, broad and hard and warm, and she was not looking at the frame. She was looking at my face.
"What will they do to her?" I asked.
"Take her south," Torvi said quietly. "To Lumen. The Inquisitors will. You see the chains? Dwarf work. Runed. They hold the magic in." Her mouth went tight under her beard. "We sell them by the cartload. Fine coin."
"And in Lumen?"
She did not answer that. She did not have to.
"She sold herbs," I said. "She sat with sick children."
"Aye."
"Did she curse the cow?"
Torvi was quiet for a moment. "Maybe," she said. "Maybe not. Cows go dry. Boys get fevers. A hex-caster at twelve can give a man a bad week, a stomachache, a run of bad luck at dice. Maybe she did, once, to somebody who had it coming. Most of them do, sooner or later." She looked at the frame at last, and her face was unreadable. "Doesn't matter. The tag says what it says. Folk read it, and they're afraid, and the Church pays fifty marks for the fear."
"Is it always like this?"
"Everywhere there's a church." She tugged my arm, gently. "Come away. Nothing you can do. Nothing anybody can do."
I let her lead me out of the square. At the corner I looked back, once. The priest was still talking, his arms spread wide, his golden lantern catching the noon light. And I heard him say, quite clearly, over the crowd:
"...and do not think the Light is without mercy! For there is one witch in all the world who turned from the darkness. Who knelt before His Radiance himself, and confessed her stain, and was made clean! Lady Ibara, the Bright Witch, the Saint of the Harvest, who feeds the hungry from her own orchard! Even a blot may be washed white, if it repents! No soul is beyond the Light!"
The crowd cheered for that, too. A woman near me pressed her hands together and wept.
The witch on the frame did not cheer. For the first time since I had seen her, her flat, tired face changed. Her mouth twisted, just slightly, at one corner, in an expression I could not read at the time. I can only describe it now as something between contempt and a laugh.
Then Torvi pulled me around the corner, and I did not see her again.
That night, I could not work.
I sat at the bench in the back room with the lamp lit and the little pine man in front of me, and I did not pick up a single tool. Torvi sat across from me, mending a clock, and let me be quiet for a long time.
"Can I ask you something?" I said finally. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
"You can ask."
"What makes someone a witch?"
Torvi did not look up from the clock. "Women only," she said. "Never a man, not that I've ever heard. Comes with the first class, at ten, or not at all. And not every girl who wants it gets it. Most don't even know it's on offer. There's something they have to do first, some deed, and nobody knows what it is. Nobody outside of them, anyway." She shrugged. "They don't come to the Hold much, and we don't go looking. Dwarves have no magic of our own. A hex slides off us like rain off a slate. A witch is a human problem, mostly."
"Do you think they're evil?"
She was quiet for a long while.
"I think," she said slowly, "that I've met two in my life. One of them was the kindest woman I ever knew, and she died in a cage in the south when I was a girl. The other one cursed a whole wagon train to rot from the inside out, for a slight I never did find out the shape of." Her gears clicked. "I think witches are people, lad. And people are what they are." She set down her screwdriver. "But don't say that where a priest can hear you. Not even a dwarf priest. Not ever."
I nodded.
"And that saint of theirs?" I said. "The Bright Witch?"
"Ah." Torvi's mouth twitched. "Lady Ibara. You'll hear about her a great deal, if you stay among humans. She's at every feast in every kingdom. She brought wheat to half of Eldmere a few years back, after their barley rotted, and they still light candles to her." She picked up the screwdriver again. "She came to Halvard once, when I was here on a caravan. Very beautiful. Very kind. Brought pastries for the whole market."
"Were they good?"
"Best I've ever eaten." Torvi bent over the clock. "Half the market had the gripes for a week after. Bad flour, they said."
She said nothing else about it.
On the seventh day, the last day of my week, Torvi and I sat in the back room with the lamp between us and the ledger finished.
"The caravan goes home to the Hold in three days," she said. "Khazrund. Two weeks into the mountains. It's cold up there, and dark, and the beer is terrible." She held my gaze. "And it has the finest workshops in the world, and more magical materials in one storeroom than you've seen in your life, and people who can teach you to carve them."
I did not say anything.
"I've spoken to the Hold-masters," she said. "By letter. They know your class. They'll take you, as my apprentice. A human, in a dwarf hold. It's been done before. Not often." She paused. "It means years, Kenji. Years before you're ready to touch elderheart. You'd be starting at the bottom. Sweeping floors. Learning to sharpen a chisel the dwarf way."
"I know how to sharpen a chisel."
"You know how to sharpen a chisel the human way," she said, with deep contempt, and I laughed out loud for the first time in two days.
I thought about it. I thought about the house by the creek, with its round table and two stools, and the dollhouse on the shelf. I thought about the black roots, and the eyes in the tree line, and a small goblin with a crooked ear calling where are you into the dark. I thought about the woman in the chains, looking out over the square as though she had always known how it would end.
I thought about the slime core in the moss.
"Yes," I said. "I'll come."
Torvi did not smile. Dwarves, I was learning, do not smile at the important things. She just nodded, once, gravely, the way you nod over a handshake, and her gears chimed.
"Good," she said. "Then go and buy yourself a coat. A real one. It's cold in the mountains."
I went up to my room that night and sat on the bed across from Clara and opened the ledger.
Day 521.
Level: 14. XP: about 8,400.
Skill: puppet craft Lv. 11.
Registry: "with a magical component" is not "from a magical material." The body must be the material.
Wages: first ever. Spent on boots.
Witches: exist. Women only. First class, at ten. Requires a deed no one knows.
The Church calls them blots. Bounty: fifty silver marks.
Exception: Lady Ibara, the Bright Witch. Repented. Gave Halvard pastries.
Decision: Khazrund. Apprentice. Years.
I looked at the page for a long time. Then I added one more line, smaller, at the bottom.
She did not look evil. She looked tired.
I closed the ledger. Outside the window, the lights of Halvard were going out one by one. Somewhere south of here, on the long road to Lumen, a cart with a wooden frame in it was rolling through the dark, and I did not know her name.
I did not sleep well. It was not the bed.