They walked down to the mill at half past six and stood outside it for some time without any of them knocking.
FNN: Somebody should knock.
BRR: Yes.
FNN: I'm not going to knock.
BRR: Nobody is asking you to knock, Finn, you're the least qualified person here to explain why eight strangers are standing in a man's yard at dawn.
ELS: How do we even phrase it? Excuse me, we've been sent here to be useful at you?
MRA: That is approximately what we were sent to do.
ELS: I'm aware. I'm saying it sounds insane out loud.
The mill wheel turned steadily in the beck beside them. Somewhere inside, something heavy was being moved. Corin walked up to the door and knocked.
Odell Crane was a broad man in his fifties with flour in his eyebrows and the particular careful courtesy of someone who very much wanted this conversation to end.
ODL: That's kind of you. Genuinely. But I'm managing.
COR: You aren't.
ODL: Beg pardon?
COR: You aren't managing. We were told you've been shorthanded since spring, and I can see from here that the eastern loading platform is stacked three high because nobody's had time to move it, and you answered your own door at half past six in the morning, which suggests there's no one else to answer it.
Arthur watched Odell Crane's face perform several expressions in quick succession.
ODL: That's- I don't want to put anyone out.
COR: You aren't putting us out. We've been sent here by our academy and instructed to be useful, and we are not permitted to leave for a week. If you turn us away we will simply stand in your yard being useless, which serves nobody.
ODL: I can't pay eight students.
COR: We haven't asked to be paid.
ODL: That's not the point. A man doesn't take labor he can't pay for.
COR: A man also doesn't stack an eastern platform three high because he's too proud to accept an offer that costs him nothing.
The silence that followed was long enough that Elsie, standing behind Corin's shoulder, later admitted she had genuinely expected the door to close. Instead, a voice came from inside the mill.
ROS: Take them, Da.
A young woman appeared behind him, seventeen or so, sleeves rolled past the elbow, forearms dusted white, holding a ledger against her hip with the particular grip of someone who had been holding it for hours.
ROS: Take them. We're four weeks behind and I've been doing the ledgers at midnight since the thaw and I would very much like to sleep at some point this season.
ODL: Roselle-
ROS: Da. There are eight of them and they've walked here and one of them has just correctly identified our loading platform as a problem from thirty feet away, which is more attention than the last two people you hired paid it in a fortnight.
She looked at Corin.
ROS: You're the mouthy one, are you.
COR: Apparently.
ROS: Right. You can start with the platform.
The work was, Arthur discovered within about forty minutes, considerably harder than anything the academy had ever asked of him. It was not difficult in any interesting way. That was the thing. It was sacks, grain in, flour out, forty pounds each, carried from the platform to the floor and from the floor to the cart and from the cart to wherever Odell pointed, over and over, for hours, with no technique to refine and no opponent to read and no clever solution available. His shoulder, which had been objecting since the Trial, stopped objecting and started screaming. He kept carrying sacks.
FNN: This is genuinely the worst thing that has ever happened to me.
TLN: You've been doing it for an hour.
FNN: An HOUR, Talon. An entire hour. My arms have stopped being arms.
TLN: Then put the sack down.
FNN: I can't put the sack down. Roselle's watching.
She was not watching. She had not looked up from the ledger in twenty minutes.
FNN: She might look up.
Nobody's ability was any use. Elsie discovered this first and reported it with real indignation - that she could compress wind hard enough to punch a hole through hardened air and could not use it to lift a sack of grain by so much as an inch, because compression was not lift and never had been. Yseult managed slightly better, in that she could Alchemically reinforce a cracked shelf bracket in the drying loft, which took her a couple of minutes and produced roughly the same result as a nail.
YSE: I want it noted that the nail would have been faster.
ODL: I did say.
YSE: You did say. I chose not to believe you.
Mira was small and quick and turned out to be the only person who could get into the space behind the wheel housing, where a season's worth of silt had built up against the gearing, and she spent three hours in there with a scraper and came out grey to the shoulders. Corin carried sacks without complaint and without pause, which surprised nobody, and Talon carried them beside him. Arthur carried sacks.
Briar ended up with the accounts. It happened without discussion. He had wandered past the ledger table on his way to the loading floor, had stopped, had looked over Roselle's shoulder for perhaps eight seconds, and had said something.
BRR: Your carry-forward's wrong.
ROS: I'm sorry?
BRR: Third column. You've carried the spring total forward twice, once on the summary page and once in the running figure, so everything after the thaw is overstated by about eleven percent.
Roselle stared at the page. Then she stared at Briar.
ROS: Sit down.
BRR: I'm meant to be on the loading floor.
ROS: You are meant to be sitting down. Sit down.
He sat down. The ledgers ran across four separate books, which was the actual problem. Roselle had inherited the system from her mother and her mother had inherited it from someone else, and it required cross-referencing intake weights against outgoing volumes against the standing accounts against a fourth book that appeared to exist purely to record disagreements, and every single figure had to be found in one book, held in the head, and carried into another. She had been doing it four pages at a time for four years.
BRR: Read me the intake column.
ROS: You'll need the second book for the-
BRR: I know. Read me the intake column.
She read it. Briar wrote without looking at her, and then, before she had finished the next line, wrote the corresponding figure from the second book beneath it. Roselle stopped.
ROS: That's the outgoing figure.
BRR: Yes.
ROS: You haven't opened the second book.
BRR: No.
ROS: Then how-
BRR: I'm cheating. Slightly. Do you want me to stop?
ROS: Absolutely not. Explain it while you keep going.
He kept going.
BRR: My ability's foresight. It's not useful for anything, before you get excited. Two minutes at the absolute maximum and only a few seconds at a time, once an hour or so before it starts costing me.
ROS: That sounds enormously useful.
BRR: It sounds enormously useful. It's mostly good for avoiding puddles.
He turned a page without appearing to check which page it was.
BRR: But if I look about one second ahead, I can see what I'm about to be looking at. Which means I don't have to shuffle between four books, because I've already read the figure in the version of me that's about to open the right one.
ROS: That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.
BRR: It's genuinely ridiculous. It's also saving us about forty minutes an hour.
It cost him. Roselle noticed it around the second hour, the way his writing hand slowed and the way he paused occasionally with his eyes shut, and she said nothing for a while and then put a cup of water down beside him without comment.
BRR: I'm fine.
ROS: I didn't ask.
BRR: You put water there.
ROS: I put water there because there's water and you're a person. Keep going or don't, I'm not your instructor.
He drank the water. He kept going. They were still there four hours later. Arthur passed the ledger table once around midday, carrying a sack, and caught a fragment.
ROS: ...because the mill's paid by weight and the bakers pay by volume, and nobody has ever once written down the conversion, it's simply in my father's head, and when I ask him he says "you know it" and walks off.
BRR: You need a conversion table.
ROS: I need a great many things.
BRR: No, you need an actual table. Written down. On paper. Once. And then you never have to ask him again and neither does anyone who comes after you.
There was a pause.
ROS: ...I've been doing this for four years.
BRR: I know.
ROS: Four years, and nobody has ever said that sentence to me.
They finished at seven. Odell Crane stood in the yard looking at an eastern loading platform that was empty for the first time since spring, and did not appear to know what to do with his hands.
ODL: That's... well.
COR: Yes.
ODL: That's a considerable amount of work.
COR: It was.
ODL: I'll feed you. Tomorrow. I won't hear otherwise, so don't start.
COR: I wasn't going to.
They walked back up to The Turning Wheel in the blue evening, filthy and aching and moving considerably slower than they had that morning. Finn's arms had, by his own account, ceased to exist. Mira was grey from the shoulders down and had refused all offers of assistance. Arthur's shoulder had gone somewhere past pain into a kind of hot numbness he suspected he would regret in the morning. Hesta Bray looked up as eight students came through the door. She took in the flour, the silt, the exhaustion, and the eastern platform's absence from the general shape of the day, and she said nothing at all for a moment.
HES: Supper's at seven.
ELS: It's ten past.
HES: I held it.
She went back to the bar.