Nobody moved much on the second evening. They had gone back to the mill in the morning, and had worked, and had come back at six instead of seven because Roselle had physically stopped them, and had then discovered that a second consecutive day of forty-pound sacks produced a category of exhaustion none of them had previously encountered. The common room of The Turning Wheel had, by eight o'clock, taken on the appearance of a battlefield.
FNN: I can't lift my arms.
BRR: You said that yesterday.
FNN: I could lift them yesterday. That was hyperbole. This is a medical report.
He was lying flat on a bench with his legs hanging off the end, and had been for some time, and had turned down two separate offers of food on the grounds that eating would require sitting up.
BRR: You need to eat.
FNN: I need to be carried.
BRR: Nobody's carrying you.
FNN: Talon might.
TLN: I might not.
FNN: You'd have said no faster if you meant it.
Elsie had claimed the entire settle by the fire and had not so much sat on it as collapsed into it lengthwise, one arm draped over her eyes.
ELS: I've decided something.
ART: What?
ELS: Everyone in this village is stronger than everyone at that academy.
BRR: That's not-
ELS: Briar, Odell Crane is fifty-something years old and he carried more sacks than Corin today.
BRR: ...That's true, actually.
ELS: He carried more sacks than Corin, and then he went and did something with the wheel housing for an hour, and then he ate supper and looked completely fine. I have a soul ability and I have been training since I was four and I currently cannot feel my legs.
COR: He also does it every day.
ELS: That's my point. That's exactly my point. We do difficult things twice a week in a marked circle and call ourselves competitors.
Hesta Bray came through with a tray and looked at the general devastation of her common room with something that was not quite satisfaction and was certainly not sympathy.
HES: Two days.
ELS: Don't.
HES: I didn't say anything.
ELS: You said "two days" in a specific way.
HES: I said two days in an entirely neutral way and you're too tired to tell the difference.
She set the tray down.
HES: Every group. Every single group, eleven years running. You arrive thinking you'll be useful, you get two days into actual work, and by the third evening the lot of you are lying about my common room like something washed up.
YSE: You said we'd spend the first two days getting in the way.
HES: I did.
YSE: We didn't.
Hesta paused with her hand on the tray.
HES: No. You didn't.
She did not elaborate, and went back to the bar, and Yseult looked genuinely pleased with herself for the next several minutes. Talon had discovered that Mira had not stopped moving. She had come back from the mill grey to the elbows for the second day running, had washed, and was now sitting at the end of the long table with a small pile of the mill's older ledger pages that Roselle had let her take, working through them with a stub of pencil.
TLN: You're allowed to rest.
MRA: I am resting.
TLN: You're doing arithmetic.
MRA: I've been in a gear housing for six hours. This is the most restful thing I have done today.
TLN: That's a genuinely alarming sentence.
MRA: I'm aware of how it sounds. It remains true.
He sat down across from her anyway and did not say anything else, and after a while she pushed half the pages toward him without looking up, and he started reading them. Neither of them mentioned it.
FNN: Somebody should do something entertaining.
BRR: You do something entertaining.
FNN: I can't lift my arms, Briar, I've been extremely clear about this.
BRR: Then be entertaining verbally.
FNN: Fine.
He was quiet for a moment.
FNN: Roselle thinks Briar is very clever.
Briar's head came up.
BRR: What?
FNN: She said so. This morning. To her father. I was carrying a sack past the ledger table and she said, and I'm quoting exactly, "the quiet one's got a head on him."
BRR: That's not what you said. You said she thinks I'm very clever.
FNN: Those are the same statement.
BRR: They are meaningfully different statements.
FNN: Briar, you've gone a colour.
BRR: I have not gone a colour.
ELS: You've gone a considerable colour.
BRR: I'm warm. It's a fire. There's a fire directly there.
FNN: He's gone a colour and he's blaming the fire.
Arthur said very little all evening. His shoulder had reached a state he privately described as "settled," by which he meant it had stopped reporting individual injuries and had begun reporting a single large one, and he sat by the window with a cup of something and watched the village go dark outside. Corin came and sat down beside him at some point. They did not talk for a while.
COR: I don't know how to do this.
ART: Do what?
COR: Nothing. This. Sitting.
ART: You appear to be managing.
COR: I've been sitting here for forty minutes and I have thought about the mill for thirty-eight of them.
Arthur considered that.
ART: What are you thinking about it?
COR: That the eastern platform will fill again by autumn. That Odell Crane will be fifty-nine next year and still carrying more than I can. That his daughter has been doing four years of accounts at midnight and nobody has ever once told her the conversion table should be written down.
He turned the cup in his hands.
COR: My family owns considerably more land than this village sits on. I have never once, in my entire life, thought about who carries the sacks.
Arthur did not answer that. There was not, he thought, anything useful to say to it. Finn fell asleep on the bench at half past nine, mid-sentence, and nobody woke him. Hesta came through at ten to put out the lamps, and found eight students distributed around her common room in various states of collapse, and stood there for a moment. Then she took a blanket off the hook by the stairs and dropped it over Finn without comment, and put out the lamps, and went to bed.