Chapter 31 Field Work

The first thing that happened every morning, before the sun, was Brakka trying to lift Gristle off its hook.

She came in from the front step at about half five, in the dark, with frost in her braids. She walked across the kitchen to the flue, where Gristle hung on its hook the way it had every night of my life. She spat on her hands. She took hold of the handle. She heaved.

The hook didn't move. The cleaver didn't move. The flue didn't move. Brakka's ears went dark green, and then she let go, and said something cheerful in her own tongue, and Grosh, sitting on the woodbox by the door, wrote it in his book.

"Thirty-one," he said.

"Morning, Brakka," I said, from the stove.

"Morning, husband." She took a bowl off the dresser and held it out. "Porridge."

That was the first thing. The second thing, about a minute later, was Wrenna coming down off the barn roof, because she'd seen the light in the kitchen window, and putting her head in at the back door, which she didn't fit through, and saying, "Rematch?"

"After breakfast."

"You said that yesterday."

"I meant it yesterday too."

She grinned, and took her head out of the door, and went and sat on the woodpile in the yard to wait. She'd watch the sun come up from there. She never missed it. She'd sit and watch the whole thing, every morning, from the first grey to the full gold, with her arms round her knees and the cracks in her shoulders glowing, like somebody watching the best play they'd ever seen and not wanting to blink.

* * *

There were a lot of us, that first week of winter.

Lys came down at six in a grey wool dress she'd borrowed off Annis Tully, with her red hair still flat on one side from the pillow. She sat at the head of the table with a pot of tea and a stack of the King's letters, and read them, and wrote answers, and didn't say anything to anybody for an hour. That was how she woke up. I'd learned not to talk to her till the second cup.

Miss Quill came down at a quarter past exactly, with the brown ledger under her arm. She'd started a new one. On the first page, at the top, in her small neat hand, it said THAW, and underneath that, a column of numbers counting down. Every morning she crossed one out. Then she ate her porridge, which she now admitted was better than Mrs Ostry's, and did the household accounts, which nobody had asked her to do.

The warband ate in shifts at the kitchen table, two at a time, because more than two orcs at Dad's table at once made the legs creak. They ate like it was their last meal and said thank you every time. Grosh had appointed himself kitchen orc. He scrubbed pots like he was punishing them.

The Countess didn't come up till dusk. Pellam brought her down a tray at sunset, I never asked what was on it, and then she came up the cellar steps in black velvet and sat by the fire with a book, and complained about the cold, and the orcs, and the porridge, which she couldn't eat but said smelled common.

And me, at the stove, with the pot, every morning. Eleven pounds of oats.

I'd never cooked for more than two. I liked it more than I'd have guessed.

* * *

The rematch was after breakfast, in the home paddock, and it had rules.

Miss Quill had written them. She'd written them the second morning, after the first rematch took the end off the smokehouse, and pinned them to the back door. No buildings. No fences, once there were fences again. No trees, especially the apple tree. Nothing within fifty paces of Duchess. Bouts to last no longer than five minutes, timed by the Senior Auditor with her watch, after which the Senior Auditor would ring a handbell and both parties would stop, whatever they were in the middle of.

Wrenna had read the rules very carefully, with her lips moving, and said they were the best thing she'd ever seen. She loved rules. She said there weren't any on the other side, and it got boring.

So every morning, Miss Quill stood at the paddock gate in her grey coat with her watch in one hand and the handbell in the other, and Brakka and the warband sat on the stone wall and shouted, and Wrenna and I went at it in the frost.

She was getting better. That was the thing. Every morning she lasted a bit longer and hit a bit harder. She'd watch what I did and then do it back, a day later, faster. On the fourth morning she got me round the middle and threw me, properly, clean off my feet, and I went fifteen yards through the air and landed on my back in the frozen grass, and the warband went silent.

Wrenna stood there with her hands up, staring at me.

"I did it," she said. "Did you see? I did it. I threw you."

"You did," I said, from the ground.

She was so pleased she forgot to stop me getting up. I got up and put her down in the grass, gently, with one arm, and sat on her.

"Bugger," said Wrenna. She'd learned it off Mag on the first day and used it every chance she got. "Bugger, bugger, bugger."

The handbell rang.

For a clear source note, hosts the author's chapter, while this copy was made without approval.

"Time," said Miss Quill. "Mister Marsh, one fall. Miss Wrenna, one fall. A draw." She wrote it down. "That's the first draw."

Wrenna lay on her back in the frost with me sitting on her and laughed until the cracks in her went white.

* * *

The big rat from the Crane farm was still lying in the home paddock.

It had been there five days, frozen hard as a stone, while we'd been busy with everything else. It was the biggest I'd ever seen. Five cart-lengths, near enough, with plates as dark as old iron and white scars down its sides. I'd been putting it off. On the fifth morning, after the rematch, which Wrenna lost again and took very well, I went out with Gristle and a saw and a lot of rope and started taking it apart.

It took all day. Brakka's lot helped, or tried to. Orcs are good at lifting and bad at butchering. They wanted to cut everything into chunks the size of themselves. I showed Grosh how to find a joint, and he got it after a while, and then he showed the others with a lot of shouting.

The core was where the core always is, at the base of the skull. It was the biggest I'd ever taken out of anything. Bigger than my head. Black and red, like the one in the D and V strongroom, warm right through. When I lifted it out, the light inside it moved like a slow tide.

I carried it up to the house. Lys and Miss Quill were at the kitchen table. I put it down between them, on the scrubbed boards, and they both stopped writing.

"Well," I said. "What do I do with this one?"

* * *

The argument took most of the evening.

Lys said, quite reasonably, that it was evidence. It had come out of a creature bound by the Lord Chancellor, brought here in the commission of a treason, and it ought to go to the Crown.

Miss Quill said, quite reasonably, that it was found on Marsh Hold, on land confirmed to Tobin Marsh in perpetuity by the King's own order, and under the law of finds, it was his. She quoted the law. She knew the section.

Lys said the law of finds didn't cover treason.

Miss Quill said the law of finds didn't care.

They went on like that for two hours, very politely, getting more polite the angrier they got, while I sat between them and peeled potatoes. The Countess came up from the cellar halfway through and sat by the fire and listened with great enjoyment.

"Do they always do this?" she asked me, quietly.

"Every night this week."

"How marvellous," said the Countess. "I haven't been to a play this good since the Interregnum."

In the end I put the potato down.

"There's forty-one of them out in the chook shed," I said. "And now this one. They're no good to me in a sack. And I don't want them going to anyone who'll do what Kell did." I looked at the two of them. "Lys. Miss Quill. You're the ones who count. What do they do, these? What are they for, if they're not for collars?"

They both stopped.

"Light," said Miss Quill, after a moment. "Heat. A city district for a year. A mill. A forge. A hospital in winter."

"Then that's what they're for," I said. "Sort it out between you. Whatever's fair. I'll go with what you say."

They looked at each other across the black and red core.

"That," said Lys slowly, "is going to take a very long time to do properly."

"Good," said Miss Quill, and got out a fresh page.

The Countess, by the fire, laughed out loud.

Later, when they'd both gone off to their rooms, still arguing on the stairs, the Countess stayed. She stayed in her chair with her book shut on her knee and watched me bank the coals for the night.

"Mister Marsh," she said.

"Countess."

"My terms. The ones I offered, in the window, at Mrs Ostry's." She was looking at the fire, not at me. "You never gave me an answer."

"I said it felt like selling the milk off a cow that wasn't mine."

"You did." A pause. "I've thought about that. I didn't care for it at the time. I think I care for it now."

I put the poker back in its stand.

"I won't take money for it," I said. "That's all I meant. If you're hungry, that's different. That's just looking after somebody."

She went very still. For a long moment she didn't say anything at all. Then she stood up, and picked up her book, and went to the cellar door.

"I am not hungry," said the Countess, with her back to me. "I am never hungry. Goodnight, Mister Marsh."

She went down. Pellam, at the top of the steps with a candle, looked at me over it, said nothing, and followed her down.

* * *

The barn needed doing. That took most of the week.

Bram came up from Thornfell on a cart on the third day, with both legs still splinted, driven by Col. In the back there was a load of seasoned pine off the mill, and two new pairs of strap hinges, and a bag of screws. The hinges were rougher than Corrie's had been. They'd been made by his apprentice, a lad called Hew, who'd stood at the forge two days and nights making them, Bram said, and wouldn't take money.

"Corrie'd have wanted you to have them," said Bram. "Hew says."

I held the hinges a while, turning them over in my hands. They were good hinges, for a lad.

I paid for the timber. A gold and three silver. Bram didn't want that either, and I made him. Miss Quill wrote it in the household ledger.

The warband and I put the back wall up again in two days. They were good at lifting and hopeless at measuring, so I measured and they lifted, and Grosh wrote down which way round the boards went so they'd remember next time. I hung the new doors on Hew's hinges. They closed true, the way the old ones had.

Inside, in the middle of the floor, where the drain had been, the round black glassy patch lay smooth and cold, with the cleaver-shaped notch at one edge. I didn't put boards over it. Miss Quill said not to. She said she wanted to be able to see it. Every evening after supper she went up with a lamp and her little brass rule and measured it, and wrote the numbers down, and every evening they were the same. She said that was the most comforting column she'd ever kept.

* * *

On the seventh night, when the house had gone quiet, I went into Dad's room.

Miss Quill slept there now. But she'd gone up to the barn with a lamp to look at the black glass again, the way she did most nights, and the room was empty. It had her things in it now. Her grey coat on the hook. Her father's letters in the drawer. A neat stack of ledgers on the windowsill.

But under the bed there was still Dad's chest.

I hadn't opened it since he died. I'd meant to. I'd just never got round to it. That's not true. I'd got round to it a dozen times, and stood here, and not done it.

It was a plain pine box, the size of a small coffin, with rope handles and a hasp with no lock on it. I pulled it out and knelt down and opened it.

His good coat. His spare boots. A bundle of Mum's letters, tied with a blue ribbon, that I wasn't going to read. His pipe, and his tobacco pouch, still half full, which smelled so much like him that I had to stop for a minute.

Underneath all that, at the bottom, flat, there was a leather folder, old and cracked. And on the front of it, in Dad's square heavy capitals, the way he wrote the farm accounts, it said:

TOBIN. FOR WHEN YOU KNOW.

I sat on the floor of Dad's room with the folder in my lap for a long time.

Out in the yard, I heard Miss Quill's footsteps on the frost, coming back from the barn. I heard her stop at the back door. I heard the latch.

"Tobin?" she said, from the kitchen. "Are you up?"

"In here," I said.

She came to the door of the room. She had the lamp in her hand. She saw me sitting on the floor with the chest open, and Dad's pipe on the floorboards beside me, and the leather folder in my lap. She didn't say anything. She just came in and put the lamp down on the windowsill, and sat down on the floor beside me with her back against the bed, close enough that our shoulders touched.

"Do you want me to go?" she said.

"No," I said.

I opened the folder.