The first thing I made after the boneforging was a spoon.
It was not a good spoon. I carved it from a scrap of pine, lying propped up on pillows, with Torvi's smallest knife in my right hand and the block braced against my stomach. My hand shook. The knife slipped twice and nicked my thumb. The bowl of the spoon came out lopsided, thicker on one side than the other, like something a child would make in his first week of school.
It took me three days.
When it was finished, I held it up to the light-rune and turned it over.
The Registry said nothing, of course. It does not care about spoons. A lopsided pine spoon made by a man in a bed is not a deed. It is just a spoon.
I laughed anyway, until my back hurt. Which was not long, because my back always hurt. But I laughed. It was the first thing I had made with my own hands in more than a year, and nobody had to tell me that it counted.
Torvi took the spoon from me and looked at it for a while. Then she put it in the pocket of her apron, and did not give it back, and did not explain.
I learned to sit up first.
The ossium plates in my back did not bend. My spine had been set straight and fixed there, and it would not twist the way it used to, or curl, or flex. I had to learn to move around it. To roll onto my side and push up with my arms, keeping my back as stiff as a board, the way you would lift a plank. The first time I managed it alone, I sat on the edge of the cot, sweating and shaking, with the burning line of coals along my spine flaring so hot I could barely see. Then I lay down again for the rest of the day.
The second time was easier.
Then I learned to stand. Torvi on one side, Fenna on the other, holding me up by the arms while my legs remembered what they were for. They had been still for more than a year. They were thin as sticks. They shook like a new foal's. But they held.
Then I learned to walk, which took the rest of that winter and most of the spring. Down the length of the Ticking Hall and back, past the moon clock and the brass birds, with a cane in my right hand and Torvi walking beside me, not touching me, ready to catch me if I fell. I fell a great deal. She caught me most of the time.
Ulfar stayed for the first three months. He said he wanted to see how the plates took, but I think he mostly wanted to see whether I would die. He would come in every morning, cheerful, and press his rune-lit hands along my spine, and hum, and say, "Still alive! Remarkable!" as if I were a clock that had kept running against every law of nature.
I grew rather fond of him.
In the third month, he examined me properly.
He brought the old dwarf in the black apron with him, whose name I had finally learned was Dain, and a small brass lens on a handle, set with a single tiny rune that glowed violet.
"Ether-glass," Ulfar explained, settling onto the stool beside my cot. "Shows you where it's gone. Mostly we use it on ore, to find veins. Works on people, too." He grinned. "Usually the people are dwarves, and there's nothing to see. You'll be more interesting."
I lay on my front while he moved the lens slowly over my back. Torvi stood by the door with her arms folded.
Ulfar stopped humming.
He went over my back twice, very slowly. Then he moved to my left arm, where the four pins were. Then he handed the lens to Dain without a word, and Dain looked too, and the two of them exchanged a glance over my head that I was not supposed to see.
"Well?" I said.
Ulfar sat back. For the first time since I had known him, he did not look cheerful.
"It's spreading," he said. "The ether. Not fast. But it's spreading. Out of the runes, into the bone, along the bone. I can see it. Little threads of violet, very fine, like roots." He turned the lens over in his hands. "In a dwarf, it would just sit there and do nothing. We're made to carry it. You aren't. It's eating you, lad. Slowly."
Nobody said anything. Somewhere across the hall, the moon clock ticked.
"How long?" I said.
Ulfar looked at Dain. Dain looked at the floor.
"With your vitality?" Ulfar said. "Ten years. Maybe. Give or take. It's never been done on a human. Nobody knows. But at the rate it's moving..." He shrugged, without any of his usual cheer. "Ten years."
I lay with my face on the pillow and thought about that.
"I'm level twenty-one," I said at last. "At twenty-five, a human's span goes up. To a hundred and fifty. Doesn't it?"
"So they say."
"Would that help?"
"I don't know." Ulfar rubbed his face. "Maybe it stretches your ten years to fifteen. Maybe twenty. Maybe it does nothing at all, because what's killing you isn't old age. It's the ether." He looked at me. "But I'll tell you this much, because you'd want to know. You'll not see a hundred and fifty, lad. Not with that in your bones. Not a chance."
I was quiet for a long time.
I expected to feel something. Fear, I suppose. Grief. Anger. I had spent a year in a bed thinking I would never walk again, and I had cried, and turned my dolls to face the wall. Now someone was telling me I had ten years, and what I mostly felt was tired. And underneath the tiredness, something stranger, something I did not have a name for. A kind of loosening. As if a knot I had not known I was carrying had come undone.
Ten years was a long time to make things.
"All right," I said.
Ulfar blinked. "All right?"
"All right." I turned my head on the pillow to look at Torvi. Her face was very hard. Her jaw was set the way it had been on the stair, the night they carried me out. "I've got ten years. That's more than I had in the tunnel. That's more than I had last winter." I tried to smile. "I'd better not waste them."
Dain cleared his throat. It was the first thing he had said all morning.
"Vitality," he said. "That's the one thing that might buy you real years, lad. Not a level. Your vitality's what's been fighting it all along. Every point more, the slower it eats you." He shrugged. "Can't promise anything. But it's the only thing I'd bet on."
I thought about that. My next stat point would come at level twenty-five. Four levels away. Four levels I could only get by going back down below the Bellows Gate, with a back that would not bend and a hand that would not open.
"Then I'll get better," I said. "I'll get strong enough to hunt again. And when the point comes, it goes into vitality."
Ulfar looked at me for a moment. Then, slowly, some of his old grin came back.
"Good plan," he said. "Best one you've got."
Torvi turned and walked out of the room.
She came back an hour later, with red eyes, and a block of linden wood, and a set of carving knives. She put them on the table beside my cot without a word.
Ragna Ironbraid came to see me in the spring, when I could walk to the end of the Ticking Hall and back without the cane.
"You're off the hunting list," she said, without preamble. "Gudrun's been told. Until you can run the length of the third gallery and back without falling over, you don't set foot below the Bellows Gate."
"I'll earn my keep."
"I know you will." She looked at the bench by my cot, where three half-carved puppets lay in a row beside the beginnings of a new doll. "I've seen what you do with your keep. Greymantle's had more orders this spring than she's had in twenty years." She paused at the door. "Make things, lad. That's your hunting, for now." Find the original chapter at novelping.com.
So I made things.
Before I picked up a single knife, I asked Torvi about the waiting list.
"It's been more than a year," I said. "I've been lying in a bed. Are they still waiting? Or have they given up on me?"
Torvi did not answer right away. She went to her bench, opened a drawer, and took out a small bundle of letters tied with string.
"The Countess of Brennan's Mill cancelled," she said. "Last winter. She found a painter in Thornvale to do her a portrait instead." She sniffed. "Her loss."
"And the others?"
"The Marchioness is still waiting. She's written three times to ask after you." Torvi untied the string and found another letter. "And the Baron. He's still waiting too. His mother's portrait is still on your shelf, where you left it." She paused. "I wrote to his agent while you were laid up. Told him the truth: the maker was hurt, and the doll would be late, maybe very late. He said the Baron would wait as long as it took." She folded the letter. "So I told him we wouldn't be charging double after all. Just the price."
I looked at her.
"I don't like him," Torvi said. "But he waited a year for a man in a bed. That's worth something."
I started with the waiting list.
The Baron Aldwick's mother had sat half-finished on the shelf for more than a year, her stern face roughed out but not refined, her lace cap still a sketch. I picked her up again and found I had forgotten nothing. My hands were slower now, and they shook more when I was tired, and the left one would not fully open. But the knowledge was still there, all of it, in the place behind my fingers where it had always lived.
I finished her face in a month. I finished her body in another. I made her lace cap from a scrap of real lace Torvi found somewhere, and her black dress from mourning velvet. When she was done, she sat on the bench and looked at me with the exact expression from the portrait: a mouth like a closed purse, cruel at the edges and tired in the middle.
Torvi looked at her for a long time.
"I'd still make her prettier," she said.
"He didn't ask for prettier."
"No," Torvi admitted. "He didn't."
The Baron came for her himself that summer.
Torvi warned me the night before. Baron Aldwick held a cold, stony stretch of the March near the passes, she said, and was known for squeezing his tenants hard, hanging poachers without a hearing, and never once in his life saying thank you. "His mother ran the place before him," she said. "Iron hand. Worse than him, folk say. He learned it all at her knee."
He arrived at noon with two guards, a thin, gray, sour-faced man in a black coat with a mouth exactly like the one I had spent two months carving. He did not look at the clocks. He did not look at me. He looked around the Ticking Hall as if it owed him money, and said, "Well? Where is it?"
I brought her out and set her on the bench.
The Baron looked at her.
He did not say anything for a long time. His face did not move. Then, very slowly, he reached out one gloved hand and touched the lace of her cap with the tip of a finger, as carefully as if it might crumble.
"You made her look tired," he said. His voice was flat. "She would have hated that."
"She looked tired in the portrait," I said. "Around the mouth."
He did not answer. He picked her up and held her against his chest, and turned away from us toward the wall, and stood there with his back to the room. His shoulders shook, once. Then again. He made no sound at all.
His guards looked very hard at the ceiling. Torvi became very interested in a gear.
When he turned back, his face was exactly as sour as before, and his eyes were red. He paid the price, and then, without being asked, a little more, and left without saying thank you.
I watched him go down the gallery with the doll held carefully in both arms, the way you would carry something asleep. Nobody said it, and I would never have said it to his face. But I had the feeling that the hardest man in the Ironspine March had spent his whole life trying to be the son his mother wanted, and had never once been told he was.
I did not know that for certain. I only had a feeling. But I had carved her mouth. I thought I understood it a little.
Then the Marchioness's doll. Then Corva Lisse's latest string-play, which she had been waiting for since before the collapse, and which arrived in Kessaria, I heard later, to a crowd so large the harbor watch had to be called.
And with every piece, the Registry took note.
Skill improved: puppet craft (Lv. 19)
Then 20. Then 21.
I worked as I had never worked before.
I do not think I was trying to get anywhere. Not at first. I think I was trying to fill my hands. The ether ached in my back every hour of every day, a low, burning grind like coals that never went out. It was worse in the mornings, worse in the cold, worse when I was tired. The only thing that made it quieter was work. When I was carving, or sanding, or painting a face, I could forget it for an hour at a time. Sometimes two.
So I carved. I sanded. I painted. I made dolls, and puppets, and marionettes, and little clockwork figures for Torvi's music boxes. I made a whole new cast for Corva Lisse's troupes: a pirate, a mermaid, a very fat merchant in a plum-colored coat whom I did not name but whom everyone in Kessaria would certainly recognize. I made a doll for Lady Rosalind's younger sister that looked so much like her mother that the Marchioness wrote to Torvi asking whether we had a painter hidden in the mountain.
I made more things in those two years than I had made in all the years before them.
And I used Icarus, still, every day. He handed me tools. He held small pieces steady while I carved. When my left hand would not open far enough to grip a part, Icarus held it for me. When my back hurt too much to stand, I sat, and sent Icarus across the bench to fetch what I needed. Sometimes I worked through his gray eyes instead of my own, looking at a joint from the height of a hand, seeing every flaw in the curve of it.
Torvi said I had four hands, now, and only one of them was any good.
Skill improved: puppet craft (Lv. 22)
Skill improved: puppet craft (Lv. 23)
In the second spring after the boneforging, Torvi finished the count's clock.
I had forgotten about it. I had forgotten about the lunargent, and the count's angry letters, and Torvi on her knees at the seam with her hands full of moon-silver when the ceiling came down. But she had not. When the gallery was finally cleared, a few months after the collapse, the dwarves who dug it out had found the seam still there, and most of it intact. Torvi's share had been waiting for her in the Hold's stores for more than a year.
She had cut the gears herself, at night, while I slept.
She showed me the clock the night before it went down the mountain. It stood in the corner of the Ticking Hall, tall and pale, its elderheart case polished until it glowed, and through the little glass window in its door I could see the movement inside: wheels and pinions and escapements, every one of them cut from lunargent, pale and faintly shining, turning in perfect, silent unison.
It chimed the hour while I watched. It was the clearest sound I have ever heard. It rang through the whole Ticking Hall, and every one of the hundred other clocks seemed to fall silent to listen to it.
"The count will be pleased," I said.
"The count," said Torvi, "can choke." She stood looking at the clock with her arms folded. "And he's paying double for it! I've already written to tell him!" She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, without looking at me, "I nearly didn't finish it. After. Every time I picked up a gear, I thought about The Collapse."
"I'm glad you did."
I looked at her. Then I looked at the clock, ticking in the corner, with its pale shining gears that would never wear out.
"Yes," I said. "It is."
The Registry spoke at the end of that summer.
I was finishing a doll for a merchant from Mirrin, a little girl in a scholar's robe with a book in her lap. I was painting her eyes. It was late. My back was burning. Icarus was holding the brush-pot steady on the bench. And as I drew the last fine line of the iris, very carefully, with my breath held, the panel opened in front of me.
Skill improved: puppet craft (Lv. 25 / 50)
EFFECT SELECTION. Choose one effect to add to this skill.
Masterwork Puppet. (Upgrades Durable Creations.) “Everything you craft becomes far more durable, and every puppet you make receives an improvement to its body at creation.”
Joint Mastery. Joints you craft move more freely and bear more weight.
Tailor's Touch. Clothing you make for dolls and puppets is finer, and fits perfectly.
I set down the brush.
I read the panel twice. Then I looked at the doll on the bench, and at Icarus beside her, with his string-tied arm that I had never quite gotten around to mending properly.
Joint Mastery was tempting. I had spent half my life fighting with joints. Tailor's Touch would save me weeks on every dress.
But Masterwork Puppet. Durable Creations had been the first choice I ever made with this skill, in a cold house by a creek, because everything I loved was fragile and I wanted it to last. Masterwork Puppet was the same wish, grown up. Not just to last, but to be better for having been made by me.
I chose it. puppet craft (Lv. 25 / 50)
Effect upgraded: Durable Creations → Masterwork Puppet.
I did not feel anything change. I never do. But I picked up Icarus and turned him over in my hands, and for the first time, I looked at the clumsy string holding his arm on and thought: I can do that better now.
I mended him that night. Properly. A new shoulder joint of elderheart, cut from the last scrap of Torvi's brick, pinned with gnawer tooth, strung with fresh silk. It took me until dawn.
When I set him down on the bench, he stood straighter than he had before. I could not have told anyone how I knew it. But he looked, somehow, more finished. Sturdier. As if the act of mending him had made him slightly more than he had been.
He looked at me with his half-closed eyes.
"Good as new," I told him. "No. Better."
In the autumn, I ran the length of the third gallery.
I did it at dawn, when nobody was about, because I did not want anyone to see me fall. It was not a fast run. It was a stiff, lurching, ungainly thing, my back held straight as a board, my bad arm tucked against my side, the coals along my spine flaring hotter with every step. But I did not fall. I reached the end of the gallery, and touched the wall, and turned, and ran back.
When I reached the start again, Gudrun Ashfist was standing there with her arms folded and her dented shield on her back.
I had not seen her come. I stood in front of her, gasping, sweating, my hands on my knees.
She looked me up and down, slowly, the way she had on my very first hunt, from my boots to my face.
"Ragna's rule," she said. "The length of the gallery and back. Without falling over."
"I didn't fall."
"No," said Gudrun. "You didn't." She looked at me a moment longer. "You look terrible."
"I know."
"Can you still swing that sword?"
I straightened up, slowly, my back burning. I put my right hand on the hilt of the starsteel sword at my hip, the one Sigrun had made for me three years ago, and drew it. It was heavier than I remembered. My wrist shook. But I held it out, straight and level, the way she had taught me. Wrist straight. Let the weight do it.
Gudrun looked at the blade. Then at me.
"First bell," she said. "Ten days from now. Bellows Gate." She turned to go. Then she stopped, and said over her shoulder, "Bring the doll."
"Puppet."
"Bring the puppet," said Gudrun, and walked away.
That night I sat on my cot in the Ticking Hall with Clara on the shelf above me and Icarus on my knee, and opened the ledger.
My handwriting was still not what it had been. It had not quite come back yet. But it was mine.
Day 2,318.
Level: 21. Four more to twenty-five. That point goes into vitality.
Skill: puppet craft Lv. 25. Masterwork Puppet.
Back: ossium. Eleven pins. Burns every day.
Arm: four pins. The left hand does not fully open.
Walked: yes. Ran: the length of the third gallery. Did not fall.
Made: the Baron's mother. The Marchioness's daughter. Corva Lisse's pirates. A scholar for Mirrin. Thirty-one other things.
Torvi's clock: finished. Lunargent gears. It's the best thing she's ever made.
Ulfar says: ten years. Give or take.
Gudrun says: first bell, ten days. Bring the puppet.
I looked at the page for a long time. Then I added one more line.
Eight years left. Give or take.
I closed the ledger, and set it on the shelf beside Clara, and lay down to sleep with my back burning and my hands, all four of them, finally still.