The instructions had taken Instructor Whitfield less than two minutes to deliver, which several of them had found alarming.
WHF: You will travel to Beckwith. You will stay one week. You will make yourselves useful.
BRR: Useful how, sir?
WHF: However the village requires.
BRR: Is there a list?
WHF: There is not a list.
BRR: Is there a schedule?
WHF: Mister Colton, if I gave you a schedule you would follow the schedule, and then you would come back here having learned to follow a schedule, which you already know how to do.
He had handed Arthur a sealed letter for the innkeeper and had gone back to his own work, and that had been the whole of it. Beckwith sat four hours northeast of Solmere by the eastern road, and they walked it, because nobody had offered them a cart and nobody had thought to ask for one.
The country changed as they went. Solmere's outer districts thinned into farmland and the farmland thinned into hill country, low green rises with hedgerows running along them, and by the third hour they had stopped talking much and had simply been walking, which Arthur found he did not mind at all.
FNN: There's a stream.
BRR: That's the beck.
FNN: Why do they call it a beck?
BRR: Because that's what it's called.
FNN: That's not an explanation, Briar.
BRR: It's a regional word for a stream. That's genuinely the whole explanation.
FNN: Then the village is called Stream-with. Beckwith. Stream-with.
MRA: Yes.
FNN: That's a terrible name.
MRA: They weren't consulting you.
FNN: Ouch.
The village came into view around the fourth hour and it was, Arthur thought, considerably smaller than he had prepared himself for. Perhaps forty buildings. A mill sitting where the beck ran fastest, its wheel turning slowly in the afternoon light. A single road through the middle with houses set along it, a few paths branching off toward outlying farms, and beyond all of it the hills rising green and unbothered in every direction. Solmere's academy alone had more people in it than this entire village.
ELS: It's smaller than home.
ART: It's about the same.
ELS: No, it's genuinely smaller. Ours had the two mills.
ART: Ours had one mill and a barn everyone called a mill.
ELS: That's revisionist.
The inn was called The Turning Wheel, which Briar pointed out was almost certainly named for the mill, and Finn declared to be a second failure of imagination in a single village. The woman behind the bar looked up as eight students came through the door and did not appear pleased about it.
HES: Academy.
ART: Yes.
HES: Eight of you.
ART: Yes.
HES: They said six.
ART: I have a letter.
HES: I don't want the letter, I want the two extra beds I now have to find. Give me the letter.
He gave her the letter. She read it without expression, folded it, and put it under the bar.
HES: Hesta Bray. I run this place, which means I feed you and I put you up and I get paid by your academy for the privilege, and I want it understood immediately that being paid does not make me glad to see you.
FNN: That's very direct.
HES: I've had four groups of you lot in eleven years. Every single one of them arrived thinking they were about to be extremely helpful, and every single one of them spent the first two days getting in the way of people who were already doing the work perfectly well without them.
BRR: That's a fair concern.
HES: It's not a concern, it's a prediction. Rooms are up the stairs, three of them, sort yourselves out. Supper's at seven and I don't hold it.
She went back to what she had been doing.
YSE: I like her.
HES: I heard that.
YSE: You were meant to.
They were sorting the rooms out - badly, with considerable argument - when the children arrived. Arthur never afterward established how they had found out. The group had been inside The Turning Wheel for perhaps forty minutes, and had spoken to precisely one person, and yet by the time they came back down two children were standing in the middle of the common room staring up the stairs with the frank, unembarrassed curiosity of the very young. The taller one was perhaps nine. The smaller one, perhaps six, was holding onto the back of the taller one's shirt.
TAM: Are you the students?
FNN: We are the students.
TAM: Are you going to do magic?
FNN: I am absolutely going to do magic.
BRR: Finn-
FNN: Not now. But at some point this week, I am going to do a considerable amount of magic, and you two are going to be present for all of it.
The smaller one made a sound of pure delight.
PIP: Do it now.
FNN: I can't do it now.
PIP: Why?
FNN: Because I've just walked four hours and I'm extremely tired and magic requires tremendous focus.
PIP: Do it now.
FNN: You're not listening to my reasoning.
PIP: Do it NOW.
Arthur watched Finn crouch down to the child's eye level with the expression of a man who had discovered a mirror.
FNN: What's your name?
PIP: Pip.
FNN: Pip, I'm Finn. We're going to get on very well and it's going to be exhausting for everyone else in this room.
By supper they had established the following. Tam and Pip were siblings and lived four houses along. Their mother worked at the mill and their father had gone to Solmere for the season and would be back at harvest. They had never met an academy student before and had a great many questions about it, most of which they directed at Finn, who answered all of them at length and with a level of accuracy that Briar found personally offensive.
BRR: You told them soul abilities come from the stars.
FNN: I told them SOME PEOPLE SAY soul abilities come from the stars.
BRR: Nobody says that. That's not a theory anyone holds.
FNN: Instructor Pratt mentioned it in the first term.
BRR: She mentioned it as an example of a discredited superstition, Finn.
FNN: She mentioned it.
Hesta brought supper out at seven exactly and did not hold it, and it was, to general surprise, extremely good. They ate at the long table in the common room with the evening coming down blue outside the windows, and the tiredness of four hours' walking settling into all of them at once, and for a while nobody said very much.
TLN: What do we actually do tomorrow?
The question sat there for a moment.
COR: We ask.
TLN: Ask who?
COR: Anyone. That appears to be the entire assignment. There's no list and no schedule and nobody's coming to check on us, so presumably we walk out that door in the morning and find someone doing something difficult and offer to help with it.
ELS: That's genuinely uncomfortable.
COR: Yes.
ELS: I'd rather have the list.
COR: So would I. I suspect that's the point.
From behind the bar, without looking up, Hesta Bray spoke.
HES: Odell Crane. The mill. He's been shorthanded since spring and he'll never once ask you for anything, so you'll have to turn up and be stubborn about it.
She wiped down a glass.
HES: That's your first day. After that you can work it out yourselves.