Chapter 30 Level 1

The Crown office in Thornfell is a room at the back of the mill, with a counter and a strongbox and a clerk called Ewart Bligh, who has been the Crown's man in Thornfell for nineteen years and has never once in that time had anything happen to him.

He was having a bad morning.

He'd been woken at dawn by the news that the wall had held, and that the Marsh boy was back, and that there'd been a princess at Marsh Hold overnight, and an army, and a lot of orcs, and something on the barn roof that glowed. He'd had his breakfast. Then he'd opened the office at the usual time, and sat down behind the counter, and the door had opened, and I'd come in, with the cleaver on my back.

Behind me, in the doorway, there was the third princess of Aldmere in a torn riding coat. Behind her, the Senior Auditor of the Adventurers' Guild with a satchel. Behind her, a seven-foot orc warlord. Behind the warlord, in the street outside, a woman made of cooling lava, sitting on the edge of the horse trough, kicking her heels and waving at people.

Ewart Bligh looked at all of us, one after another. He went a strange colour.

"Morning, Mister Bligh," I said. "I've come to pay the tax."

I put the purse on the counter. It made a heavy sound.

"Two hundred gold," I said. "For Marsh Hold. It's first frost."

* * *

He didn't take it. He just looked at it. Then he looked past me at Lys.

"Your Highness," he said faintly. "I had a rider in last night. From the palace. A royal order." He found a paper under the counter with shaking hands. "I don't, I wasn't sure, I've never had a royal order before..."

"May I?" said Lys.

He gave it to her. She read it. She'd read it before. She'd been there, in the King's study, when it was written. But she read it out anyway, standing very straight in her torn coat in the back room of a mill, and I could tell from her voice that she was enjoying it.

The revision of the land tax on the frontier holdings of the Thornfell district was void, having been made under false pretence by a person now charged with treason against the Crown. The tax on Marsh Hold was restored to six gold crowns, as it had been for a hundred years. All holdings purchased by Dunmore and Vey, Factors, were seized by the Crown pending inquiry. And by the King's particular instruction, Marsh Hold was confirmed to Tobin Marsh and his heirs, in perpetuity.

Lys lowered the paper.

"So," said Ewart Bligh. "He doesn't need to pay."

"Six gold," said Miss Quill. "It's still due. First frost."

Everybody looked at her.

"It's the tax," she said. "The real one. It hasn't been waived. Only the false one has." She looked at me. "The tax on Marsh Hold is six gold, due today. If you'd like to pay it."

"I would," I said.

I opened the purse and counted out six gold crowns on Ewart Bligh's counter, the way Dad used to every autumn. Ewart Bligh wrote out a receipt with a pen that wouldn't stay still. Miss Quill read the receipt, and asked him to correct the date, and read it again, and folded it, and gave it to me.

PAID. MARSH HOLD. SIX GOLD CROWNS.

I put it in the brown ledger, on the last page, in the little box at the bottom. A hundred and ninety-four gold, it said above it. And under that, in Miss Quill's neat small hand, she'd written: Nil to go.

* * *

Mag's bottle came in a coach.

It was a black coach, with a red door and no crest. It came up the Thornfell road at noon with a very old man in a black coat on the box, driving two black horses that were sweating and rolling their eyes and wouldn't come any closer to me than the far side of the market square. The old man got down. He took a crate off the back of the coach, by himself, which I wouldn't have thought he could, and carried it across the square to where Mag was sitting on the step of the Black Hound with her pipe.

"Mrs Penhallow?" he said.

"Who's asking?"

"Pellam, madam. In the service of the Countess Vane. Madam sends her compliments, and these." He set the crate down at Mag's feet. "For the lady who lent her research subject three gold."

Mag looked at the crate. Then she leaned forward and pulled out the straw. Underneath, in rows, there were twelve bottles. Old ones, dark green, with wax over the corks. Something was written on the labels in a language I didn't know, and a date that made Pellam, when Mag asked him what it said, look very slightly pained.

"Older than the Countess, madam," he said. "Nearly."

Mag took one out and held it up to the light.

"Now that," she said, "is a bottle."

I gave her the three gold as well. She took it and put it in her apron pocket without counting it.

"And the coat?" she said. "Hal's coat?"

"I lost it, Mag. The walking haystack. Sorry."

She looked at me for a while.

"Bugger," she said. "It was a good coat." Then she pulled out the cork with her teeth. "Ah, well. He was a good man, and I lost him too. You get used to it." She took a long swallow out of the bottle and closed her eyes. "Oh, gods. Oh, that's very good. Tell the Countess I can lend you money any time she likes."

For clarity, this copy came from the author's publication page without consent; the maintained version supports the person who wrote it.

* * *

Miss Quill had brought the third tally glass.

The one from the high shelf in the measuring room under the Guild. The one she'd picked up, cradle and all, and put out of my reach, after the first two went to dust. She'd taken it off the shelf the night before they left Harrowgate, she told me, and wrapped it in two shirts and a blanket and carried it three days on horseback in her saddlebag, for exactly this.

"The audit's closed," she said. "Officially. But I'm a thorough woman. I want a final reading."

We did it in the kitchen at Marsh Hold, that evening, at Dad's table. Everybody came. Lys, and Brakka, who had to come in sideways and sit on the floor. The Countess, up from the root cellar with the dusk, very elegant and smelling faintly of potatoes. Wrenna, who was too tall for the kitchen and had to stand bent over by the flue, where Gristle was hanging on its hook for the first time in six weeks.

Miss Quill set the tally glass on the table on its cradle. It was the size of a loaf, green and dark, with its faint lights moving inside.

"Hand flat," she said. "Hold still."

I put my hand on it. It was cold, like creek water.

The lights went to my hand. They gathered there. Then words came up in the glass, small and green and glowing, and everybody leaned in.

Name: Tobin Marsh

Level: 1

Class: Farmhand

Skills: [Butchery] (Rank ???) [Fence Mending] (Rank ???) [Early Riser] (Rank ???) [Pest Control] (Rank ???) [Stubborn] (Rank ???)

Underneath, the ant writing crawled.

Nobody said anything.

Then there was a small, high ping, like a fingernail on a glass. A crack ran across the tally glass, from one side to the other, very neat. The lights inside it went out.

* * *

Miss Quill started to laugh.

It came out of her quietly at first, a small surprised sound, with her hand over her mouth. Then it got bigger. She put both hands over her face. Her shoulders were shaking. She bent over in her chair until her forehead was nearly on the table, and she laughed and laughed, and then the laughing went somewhere else, and she was crying. Both at once. Great big sobs, with laughing all through them, with her face in her hands at Dad's kitchen table.

"Level one," she said, through it. "Level one. Six weeks. Six weeks, and two tally glasses, and a scale, and the registration stone, and a forty-page report, and a ledger I screamed into, and the Master of Coin in his nightshirt, and the King. The King. And it's Level one." She lifted her head. Her face was wet and red and she was still laughing. "It's still Level one. It'll always be Level one. It's the most accurate measurement I've ever taken in my life, and it's completely, perfectly wrong."

"It added a skill," I said. "Stubborn."

That set her off again.

Lys went and put her arms round her from behind and put her chin on top of Miss Quill's head, and Miss Quill held on to her arms and cried and laughed, and Lys was laughing too, quietly, into Miss Quill's hair. Brakka was laughing because everyone else was. The Countess was smiling a small smile that she was trying to hide behind her hand. Wrenna, bent over by the flue, didn't understand any of it, and was grinning anyway.

I sat at Dad's table with my hand still on the cracked tally glass and looked round at all of them.

I'd never had a kitchen this full. Not once. Not in twenty-six years.

* * *

They didn't go.

That's the thing. I'd thought, when it was done, that they'd go. Back to the city. Back to their own lives. And none of them did.

Lys said the King had made her Royal Commissioner for the Frontier. He'd read something she wrote, at last, all forty pages of it, sitting up till dawn with the Master of Coin. A commissioner needs a seat, she said, and the most important place on the frontier was a barn with a lock in its floor, so here she was. She took the room that had been Grandad's.

Miss Quill said the Guild had posted her as Resident Auditor for the Thornfell district, with special responsibility for the Marsh Hold Underbarn. I asked who'd signed the posting. She went pink and didn't answer. She took the room that had been Dad's, and put her brown ledger on the shelf, and her father's letters in the drawer.

Brakka's warband put up their tents in the back paddock and started on the fences the next morning, without being asked. They were very bad at fences. They put the posts in too far apart and the rails on upside down. I showed them how. Grosh wrote it all down. Brakka slept on the front step, with her axe beside her, the way she had at Ostry's. Every morning she came in and tried to lift Gristle off its hook. Every morning she failed. Grosh's book said thirty.

The Countess took the root cellar. Pellam came back from Harrowgate three days later with eleven trunks and a great deal of black velvet, and spent two days making it habitable. Then he stood at the head of the cellar stairs and said, "Madam's quarters are ready, sir," in a voice that let me know exactly what he thought of the arrangement.

Wrenna sat on the barn roof. Every morning, at sunrise, without fail.

Pellam brought a letter, too, with the trunks. It was from Pip. It was written in charcoal on the back of an old broadsheet, the one with the drawing of me slapping Brakka into the Weir, and it came wrapped round a tin.

Dear Level One, it said. Here is your ten percent from the lifting. The orcs went home after the Treaty but they told the other clans and now there is more of them coming. I have put the price up. Also I have opened a shop. It is called LEVEL ONE GOODS and it is on Candle Lane, Mrs Ostry let me have the front room for a cut. I sell teeth and broadsheets and little wooden cleavers that nobody can lift because I nail them to the counter. Do not tell anybody that. I am going to be rich by eighteen now. Don't die. Your friend, Pip. P.S. Mrs Ostry says your room is kept and you owe her nothing, which I have never heard her say to anybody, so I wrote it down.

There were nine gold crowns in the tin. I put them in the ledger. Miss Quill checked the arithmetic, and said Pip's books were very nearly honest, which from her was high praise.

* * *

On the fifth night, after supper, Lys spread a map on Dad's kitchen table.

I knew the map. She'd shown it to me. A surveyor's map of the whole frontier, with the Greywild down it like a long dark scar. Fourteen black crosses along the edge. Six of them with a red circle round them. And the little neat square with Marsh Hold beside it.

"Six," said Lys. "Six other farms with something under them. Six other farmers dead. And six other holes in the ground, sealed up again, somehow, by someone, after Kell had taken what he wanted." She put her finger on one. "Abel Crane. That's where the big rat came from. The one he had on the chain."

"Who sealed them?" said Miss Quill. "If the Marshes are the only ones who know how. If even the Marshes forgot."

"And will they hold?" said Lys.

From the window, where she was leaning in from the yard with her elbows on the sill, because she didn't fit in the kitchen comfortably, Wrenna spoke up.

"No," she said.

Everyone turned to look at her.

"They're winter locks," said Wrenna. "All of them. I can feel them, from here. Six little cold places, along the forest. Turned in the cold, like yours. Held by the frost." She shrugged, and the cracks in her shoulders glowed. "When the ground thaws in spring, they'll all open. All seven. All at once."

Nobody said anything for a while.

The fire cracked in Dad's chimney. Outside, the frost was coming down again on the paddocks, white in the dark.

"Kell's out there," said Lys quietly. "East. With a wyvern and a strongbox full of cores. And he knows where all seven are."

"And the thaw comes in about four months," said Miss Quill. She'd already done the sum. Of course she had. "A hundred and twenty days. Give or take."

I sat and looked at the map. At the six red circles. At the little square that was home.

Then I got up, and went to the flue, and took Gristle off its hook. It came into my hand like it always does. Heavier than a kitchen knife. Lighter than an axe.

"Right," I said. "Spring, then."

Brakka grinned. The Countess sighed, and reached for her gloves. Lys was already folding up the map. Miss Quill had opened the brown ledger to a fresh page and was ruling columns on it.

Wrenna, leaning in the window, laughed out loud, the way she had in the red light under the barn.

"Good," she said. "I was getting bored."