The months after my first hunt went by the way months do when you are busy and happy. I only noticed them when I looked at my ledger.
I hunted once a month with Gudrun's party. I learned to step back before I swung, and to keep my wrist straight, to let the weight of the starsteel do the work. I learned that shriekwing bats hate silence, and that a stoneling sounds like a man clearing his throat before it moves, and that Ottil's lantern should never, under any circumstances, be held out over a hole. I bought Fenna her beer. She drank it in one long pull, wiped her beard, then said I could buy her another next month. I guess that was dwarven for friends.
Level sixteen came in the second month, off a pair of blind gnawers and a lot of patience. Level seventeen came in the fourth, after a long, ugly day in a flooded gallery that I do not like to remember. The Registry told me less experience gained every time, and I did not mind. Everyone went home.
Torvi set my gnawer's tooth into a handle of black walnut, bound with a ring of brass, and gave it back to me without a word. It was the best carving tool I have ever held. It cut linden like butter and never needed sharpening. I use it every day.
Every night, I worked on the doll.
I called her Rosamund. I never said it out loud. I did not want anyone to ask why.
She was the first thing I had ever made with everything I had. Not the scraps of a lean-to or the leftovers of a hunt. Everything. A master's bench, a master's tools, and a block of pale linden, and all the techniques I had learned in another life, in an apartment full of dolls, from books I had read so often their spines had split. I had never been able to afford to do it properly there. Here, for the first time, I could.
I carved her body in pieces, the way I had always wanted to: a torso in two halves, a pelvis, upper and lower arms, upper and lower legs, hands, feet, a head. Every joint was a ball in a cup. The shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees, ankles, and neck all turned in smooth spheres sunk into hollowed sockets, so that she could hold any pose a living girl could hold. Tilt her head. Fold her hands. Cross her ankles. Rest her chin in her palm.
Torvi watched me carve the first hip socket and did not say anything at all. Then she watched me carve the second. On the third evening, she put down her clock and came and stood behind my shoulder for a full hour without speaking.
"Where did you learn that?" she said at last.
"Books," I said. Which was true.
"Whose books?"
I did not answer. She did not ask again.
The world had no elastic, so I strung her the way I had once read that the very first makers did, with a cord of braided gut and sinew, run through the hollow of every limb and pulled taut, so that the tension held the joints together and let them move. It took me eleven tries to get the tension right. Too loose, and she sagged. Too tight, and her limbs snapped back like a trap. When I finally found it, she sat on the bench in front of me with her arms in her lap, and when I lifted one hand and set it to her cheek, it stayed.
I sat and looked at that for a long time.
Her face took two months.
I sculpted it with the gnawer's tooth, a sliver at a time, by lamplight, until my eyes ached. A gentle oval. A small, rounded chin. The faint fullness under the eyes that every real face has and every cheap doll forgets. The curve of the upper lip, which is not a curve but two, meeting in a little dip beneath the nose. I wanted the corners of her mouth turned up so slightly that you could not tell whether she was smiling, only that she had just heard good news and was too polite to laugh.
Then I covered her in gesso, and sanded it until it was smooth as the inside of an eggshell. Then I painted her.
That took another month. I did not paint her skin. I built it, in thin, translucent washes, one over another, letting each dry before the next. A blush at the cheeks. A faint warmth at the knuckles and the knees and the tip of the nose, where blood runs close beneath real skin. A shadow in the hollow of the throat. And across the bridge of her nose, a scatter of freckles so pale and so few that you could only see them when the light fell on her just right.
Torvi sent to the glassblowers on the fifth gallery for her eyes. I drew what I wanted on a sheet of paper and the glassblower, an old, cross dwarf named Brokk, looked at it and told me it probably could not be done. Then he did it that day. Two glass eyes no bigger than my thumbnail, with a painted iris of sea-green, flecked with gold near the pupil, and a clear dome of glass laid over the top, so that they caught the light like real eyes. I set them slightly upward, so that she seemed to look at whoever held her.
Her hair was mohair from a frosthorn goat, dyed the color of honey, and I rooted it into her scalp one tiny bundle at a time with a needle no thicker than a hair. It took nineteen nights. On the twentieth, I brushed it out, long and soft and gently waved, and gathered it at the back of her head with a ribbon.
Then I started on her dress.
The silk came from Kessaria, by way of a trader who came up the mountain twice a year, and it cost me more than everything else put together. It was rose-pink, the soft, warm pink of the inside of a shell, and it moved like water when I held it to the light.
I am not a tailor. I want to be clear about that. But I have spent my life making clothes for dolls, and the principles are the same. A pattern drawn to scale. Darts at the waist and bust, so the cloth follows the body instead of hanging off it. Seams pressed flat. Linings, so the rough edges never show. Real fastenings, scaled down, that actually open and close.
I made her a fitted bodice with a square neckline, and edged it with ivory lace. I made puffed sleeves and gathered them at the shoulder with rose ribbon. I made a full skirt over three layers of cream petticoat, so that it rustled when she moved, then I spent six nights embroidering its hem with a border of tiny rosebuds in deep red and green thread, each one smaller than a grain of rice. Along the seams of the bodice, I stitched seed pearls, one by one, like drops of dew.
She needed a jacket. I made her a little bolero of wine-red velvet. And when I asked Torvi if she knew where I might find buttons small enough, she did not answer. Three days later there were six silver buttons on my bench, each one the size of a lentil, each one perfectly round, each one stamped with a tiny rose.
"Don't thank me," said Torvi, without looking up from her clock. "I was bored."
So I did not thank her out loud. I sewed them on.
There were stockings, a real petticoat, a pair of rose kid-leather slippers with silver buckles. There was a bonnet of cream straw, trimmed with roses I folded from scraps of the silk. There was a parasol that opened and closed. There was a velvet reticule the size of my thumbnail, with a drawstring that worked.
And there was the stand.
I had meant to make a plain one. Torvi would not let me. She took the walnut base I had cut and disappeared with it for a week, and when she brought it back there was a small brass key set into its side.
"Wind it," she said.
I wound it. The base began to play. It was a waltz, slow and sweet and a little sad, the one I had hummed under my breath for weeks while I worked without ever realizing I was doing it. A tune from my old life, I think, though I could not have told you its name. Torvi had heard it every night across the bench, and she had pinned it, note by note, onto a brass cylinder no wider than my finger.
I had to go stand in the corridor for a while.
She was finished on the hundred and fortieth night.
I set her on her stand on the bench in the Ticking Hall, in the lamplight, with her hands folded in her lap and her head tilted just slightly to one side, then I stepped back.
She was the best thing I had ever made. I knew it the way you know the answer to a sum. She was not perfect. Nothing is. There was a hair's width of difference between the two corners of her mouth that only I would ever see, and one rosebud on the hem was a little crooked. But she was the closest I had ever come to the thing I had been trying to make my whole life, in two worlds, without ever quite managing it.
She looked like a girl who had just stepped out of a garden on a summer evening, stopped, and turned, because someone had called her name.
Torvi stood beside me and looked at her for a long time. Her gears did not click once.
"Well," she said finally. Her voice was a little rough. "She'll fetch a price."
I had not thought about the price. I had not thought about selling her at all. And I realized, standing there, that that was the whole point of making her. That was the arrangement. That was how I ate. I had known it from the start.
It was still a strange feeling.
Clara sat on the shelf in the corner and regarded the new doll with her usual serenity. I did not answer for her. But I thought, privately, that she approved.
The merchants came up the mountain in the spring, when the passes cleared.
They came in carts, on mules, and in one case in a sedan chair carried by four very unhappy porters. They came to buy clocks, music boxes, runed swords and starsteel armor, and light-runes by the crate, and to sell grain, wine, honey, and Kessarian silk. For two weeks, the great hall of Khazrund was full of human voices, human smells, and humans bumping their heads on dwarven doorframes. The trading houses on the first gallery stayed open until the last bell. Torvi set up a table outside the Ticking Hall with a selection of her clocks, a few music boxes, and four of my little marionettes, then sat behind it with her arms crossed, looking extremely unwelcoming.
She did not put out Rosamund. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
"Not yet," she said, when I asked. "You don't put out your best piece on the first day. You let them come to you."
On the fourth day, Master Bartholomew Plumm came to us.
I heard him before I saw him. Everyone did. A voice like a brass horn came down the gallery ahead of him, complaining about the stairs, the cold, the low ceilings, the smell of the forge, and the general unreasonableness of building a city inside a mountain. Then the crowd parted, and there he was.
He was the fattest man I have ever seen. He came through the arch at the end of the gallery sideways, and even then it was close. He wore a doublet of plum-colored velvet, strained to its absolute limit across a belly that arrived in the room some time before the rest of him, and fastened with a row of gold buttons that each looked ready to fly off and blind someone. Three soft chins rested on a lace collar. His face was round, pink, and shining with sweat, and above a waxed mustache curled into two perfect loops, his small eyes were bright and quick. They missed nothing at all.
He wore rings on every finger, including both thumbs. A gold chain as wide as my hand lay across his chest. His hat was broad and plum-colored and topped with an enormous, absurd, dyed-purple plume that bobbed with every step. In one hand he carried a cane topped with a dwarven light-rune crystal the size of a fist, which was glowing brightly in the middle of a gallery full of light-runes, for no reason that I could see except that he could afford it.
Human Lv. 11 Merchant
He smelled of roses and money. He smiled when he saw Torvi's table, and a single gold tooth flashed at the front of his mouth.
"Mistress Greymantle!" he boomed. "The finest clockmaker in the mountain! I have climbed four thousand steps to see you. Four thousand! My physician will weep. Show me something to make it worthwhile."
"Master Plumm," said Torvi, without enthusiasm.
He went over her clocks quickly, the way a man who knows exactly what he is looking for goes over a menu. He picked up a music box, wound it, listened, set it down. He glanced at my marionettes and raised one eyebrow, very slightly. Then he leaned forward over the table, so far that it creaked.
"I am looking," he said, lowering his voice to a whisper that could have been heard at the bottom of the mountain, "for a gift. For a very important person. For his daughter, actually. The Marquis of the Ironspine March. Perhaps you know him? Hmm?"
"Edric Valcourt," said Torvi. "He's that human lord of yours who manages the border between your folk and ours."
"Just so! Just so! His daughter, the Lady Rosalind, has a birthday at midsummer. She will be nine. And I have it on very good authority that the Marquis is at this moment deciding which of three merchant houses will carry his grain contracts for the next ten years." He spread his ringed hands. "So you see. I need a gift for a girl of nine that will make her father remember the name Plumm for the rest of his life. A clock will not do it. A music box will not do it. I want something no other merchant on the continent can give."
Torvi looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked at me.
I went into the Ticking Hall and brought out Rosamund.
I set her down on the table in front of him, on her walnut stand, and stepped back.
Master Plumm opened his mouth.
Then he closed it.
I watched it happen. I watched his small, bright eyes go to her face, and stop there, and widen. I watched them go to her hands, folded in her lap. To the seed pearls on the seams of her bodice. To the rosebuds on her hem. To her honey-gold hair, the ribbon in it, and the little silver buttons on her jacket. To the sea-green glass eyes, set slightly upward, that seemed to look straight back at him.
The gallery was full of noise. Dwarves were shouting prices. Somebody was haggling over a crate of wine. And for the space of perhaps ten seconds, Master Bartholomew Plumm, who had complained about four thousand steps at the top of his lungs, said nothing at all.
Torvi reached over and turned the key in the stand.
The waltz began to play.
Plumm took a step back, as if someone had pushed him. He pressed one ringed hand flat against his enormous chest.
"Gods," he said quietly, in a perfectly ordinary voice. "Is she carved?"
"Carved," said Torvi.
"Her hands. Her hands move?"
I stepped forward, and lifted Rosamund's right hand, and set it to her cheek. It stayed there. Plumm made a small sound.
"Who made this?"
"Greymantle's hall," said Torvi, before I could open my mouth.
Plumm looked at her, and then, for a moment, at me. His eyes were very sharp. I do not know what he saw. I am a tall, thin, unremarkable man with a puppet maker's tag, standing behind a dwarf's table. But he looked at my hands, then at the doll's hands, and back again, and something in his face said that he had worked out exactly as much as he needed to and had decided not to say it.
"How much?" he said.
I was an accounts receivable clerk. I spent twenty years of my life being told what things cost. But I had never in my life haggled.
I stood behind Torvi and watched her do it, and it was the most frightening thing I have seen in this world, and I have seen a level fifty-six skeleton walk past my head.
"Six crowns," said Plumm, smiling with his gold tooth. "Gold. A generous price for a toy, Mistress."
Torvi looked at him. She did not say anything. She reached out and turned the key on Rosamund's stand again, very slowly, and let the waltz play all the way through to the end. Then she looked at him again.
"Seven!" said Plumm. "And my undying gratitude?"
Torvi folded her arms.
"Eight. Mistress, please, I have a family!"
"You have four families," said Torvi. "I've met two of them. I won't speak to you below twelve."
I nearly fainted. Plumm put his hand on his heart and staggered, theatrically, against the table, which groaned. He called on four different gods. He spoke of his physician, the steps, the cold, and the cost of feeding porters. He spoke of his long and loyal friendship with the Hold of Khazrund. He described in detail the poverty to which this would reduce him. Torvi listened to all of it without blinking.
"Twelve," said Plumm at last, weakly.
"Fifteen," said Torvi.
"You said twelve!"
"I said I wouldn't speak to you below twelve. Now I'm speaking." She tapped the stand. "She's the only one. There won't be another like her this year. You'll walk into that Marquis's hall at midsummer with something no merchant on this continent can match, and you know it, and I know it. Fifteen."
Plumm looked at Rosamund for a long time.
Then, slowly, he reached into his doublet and drew out a purse of plum-colored velvet, heavy enough that it clinked when he moved it, then counted out fifteen gold crowns onto the table, one at a time. Each one rang on the wood like a small bell.
"I know," said Torvi.
Plumm's porters carried Rosamund away in a padded box lined with silk, with her stand, parasol, and bonnet packed in beside her. Plumm walked ahead of them, booming at everyone to mind the corners, mind the corners, she's worth more than you are. I watched them go all the way down the gallery until the purple plume vanished around the bend.
Then I sat down on the step of the Ticking Hall, quite suddenly, because my legs had stopped working.
Torvi sat down beside me. She counted out the coins into my hand: thirteen gold crowns and ten silver marks. Her one part in ten. She did not say anything about it, and neither did I.
I looked at the coins in my palm. I had never held gold in this world. I had never seen this much gold in my old one, either, except behind glass.
And because I am who I am, I did the sum.
A gold crown is twenty silver marks. Thirteen and a half crowns is two hundred and seventy marks. Gerd, the spearman at the gate in Halvard, made perhaps forty or fifty marks a year, if he was lucky and the Jarl was generous. I was holding something close to six years of his wages, in one hand, for five months of work.
I had to put my head down between my knees for a while.
"Breathe, lad," said Torvi. "It's only money."
It was not only money. It was the first time in my life anyone had paid me what something I had made was worth.
The next morning, Torvi took me down to the vaults.
They were on the eighth gallery, below the forges, behind three iron doors and a dwarf with an axe at each one. Inside was a long, cold hall lined from floor to ceiling with small iron doors, hundreds of them, each one stamped with a number and a sigil. Some of the sigils I recognized. One was the anvil-in-a-circle of Khazrund itself. One was a white lantern. One was a sun with seven rays.
"The Empire's," said Torvi, following my eyes. "Their account. They keep enough gold down here to buy half the mountain. If they want a hundred runed swords? They don't drag a wagon of gold up four thousand steps. They write a letter, the vault-master takes the price out of their account, then we send the swords down with an escort." She snorted. "Saves everybody a great deal of trouble."
I did not put all of it in.
I had thought about it all night, the way I think about any budget. My hunting shares would keep coming, once a month, as long as I kept going below the Bellows Gate. So would the few marks from the books I kept for Oskar's friends, and from the little marionettes on Torvi's table. That was a living. It was more than I had ever had in this world. But I had been going down into the dark in a borrowed jerkin two sizes too wide, with a borrowed sword, and I had been thrown into walls in both of them. Torvi had told me I would buy my own blade when I had earned it.
I thought perhaps I had.
So I put six crowns and ten marks in the vault, a little under half, and kept the rest.
The vault-master was an ancient dwarf with a beard so long he wore it wrapped twice around his waist. He wrote my name in a ledger, in a beautiful, spidery hand, then he took my gold, counted it, and locked it behind a small iron door with a number on it. Then he gave me a token: a disk of black iron the size of a coin, stamped on one side with the anvil-in-a-circle and on the other with my number.
"Vault seal," said Torvi. "Show that at any dwarf hold on the continent and they'll know your account. Don't lose it. If you lose it, you'll have to prove you're you, and nobody likes doing that."
I put it on a cord around my neck.
The rest of the money was gone within a week.
Gudrun took me to her own armorer, a broad, silent dwarf woman named Halla Ringmaker on the second gallery, who measured me with a knotted cord and a look of deep personal grievance at how much of me there was. Ten days later I had a padded gambeson, a shirt of fine dwarven mail cut long enough for a human, with the rings so small and tight that it moved like heavy cloth, and a plain steel cap that sat on my head as if it had been made for it. It cost three crowns. When I put it all on, I stood a little straighter, and Bolli whistled.
"Now you look like a hunter," he said. "A tall one. A very tall, very thin one."
The sword took longer. I went to the Smith from Gudrun's party, a quiet, sooty dwarf named Sigrun who had cracked two ribs against a wall beside me in my first hunt and had not held it against me. I asked her for a starsteel short sword of my own: a little longer than Torvi's, balanced back toward the hilt, for a man who was not strong and had to let the weight do the work. She looked at Torvi's blade for a long time, turning it in the forge-light, and nodded.
"Two months," she said. "Three crowns. Half now."
I paid her half.
"And when it's done," said Torvi that evening, "you'll give me mine back."
"Yes."
"Good." She went back to her clock. "I was starting to miss it."
With what was left, I bought a secondhand pair of warded gloves and an apron from a human apprentice on the sixth gallery who was going home to Halvard, gray leather stitched with silver runes, a little stained at the fingertips. Torvi looked them over and pronounced them adequate. And I bought a good leather case for Clara, padded inside with wool, with straps for my back, so that I could carry her properly when I traveled, instead of in a sling made of boar hide.
That night, I opened my ledger.
Day 703.
Level: 17. XP: about 15,900.
Skill: puppet craft Lv. 14.
Hunts: five, with Gudrun's party. Fenna's beer paid (twice).
Rosamund: finished. One hundred and forty nights.
Sold: to Master Bartholomew Plumm, for Lady Rosalind Valcourt, daughter of the Marquis of the Ironspine March. Fifteen gold crowns. (Torvi did it. I could not have.)
My share: thirteen crowns, ten marks. About six years of a spearman's wages.
Vault: opened, Khazrund. Six crowns, ten marks inside.
Spent: dwarven mail, gambeson, and cap, from Halla Ringmaker (three crowns). A starsteel sword of my own, from Sigrun (three crowns, half paid, two months). Warded gloves and apron, secondhand, and a case for Clara (one crown).
Still coming in: hunting shares, Oskar's friends' books, the marionettes.
I looked at the page for a long time. Then I added a line at the bottom.
I hope the girl likes her.
I did not know whether she would. I would probably never know. But it seemed like the right thing to hope.
Chapter 17: The Rose Doll