The debt came due on the fourth morning.
FNN: No.
TAM: You said.
FNN: I said at some point.
TAM: It's been four days.
FNN: Four days is a point. Four days is well within the range of points I was referring to.
PIP: You SAID.
They had ambushed him outside the inn at half past seven, which suggested planning, and Pip had attached herself to his leg in a manner that made walking away a genuinely difficult proposition.
FNN: Let go of my leg.
PIP: No.
FNN: Pip. Pip, I have somewhere to be.
PIP: Where?
FNN: The mill.
TAM: The mill's not working today. Roselle said. The grain doesn't come till tomorrow.
Finn looked at the nine-year-old with the expression of a man who had been comprehensively outmanoeuvred by someone a third his age.
FNN: That's extremely good intelligence work and I want you to know I resent it.
Yseult came out ten minutes later and found the situation unchanged.
YSE: Why is there a child on you.
FNN: There's a child on me because I made a promise in a moment of weakness and I am now being held to it by two people who do not understand the concept of a reasonable timeline.
YSE: What promise?
FNN: I said I'd do magic.
YSE: You can't do magic.FNN: I CAN do magic.
YSE: Finn, your ability is a coin flip that once left you blind and unable to move in front of four hundred people.
TAM: What?
FNN: Nothing.
TAM: What happened?
FNN: Nothing happened. Nothing has ever happened. Yseult is being unhelpful.
She was already crouching down to Pip's level, which Finn registered with mild alarm.
YSE: What sort of magic did he promise?
PIP: A considerable amount.
YSE: Did he.
PIP: He SAID.
YSE: Right.
She straightened up and looked at Finn with an expression he did not care for at all.
YSE: I'll do it.
FNN: You'll-
YSE: I'll do the magic. You'll carry whatever they want carried and you'll do it without complaining, because you got yourself into this by making promises you're not equipped to keep.
FNN: That's genuinely humiliating.
YSE: Yes.
The children, as it turned out, did not want a demonstration. They wanted to show things. That became clear within about ten minutes of leaving the inn, when Tam led them off the road entirely and up a bank toward a tree that was, by his account, the best tree in Beckwith and possibly in the world.
TAM: You can get right to the top.
YSE: Can you?
TAM: I can get to there.
He pointed at a fork perhaps eight feet up.
TAM: But you can get to the top. If you're taller.
YSE: Is that a request?
TAM: It's information.
Yseult climbed the tree. She did it in a manner that suggested considerable practice, which Finn found genuinely surprising, and got substantially higher than eight feet, and reported back on the view with a level of detail that both children found entirely satisfactory.
FNN: You climb trees?
YSE: I grew up in Drennick. There was one tree in the whole district and getting to the top of it was the single most contested achievement available to anybody under twelve.
FNN: Did you get to the top?
YSE: Repeatedly. Loudly.
They saw, over the following four hours: The tree. A dog behind the third house along that was, according to Pip, extremely dangerous, and which turned out to be an elderly spaniel that rolled onto its back immediately. A place where the beck went under a stone slab and came out the other side, which both children considered miraculous and which Finn declared was simply a bridge. The bakery, where Tam had a standing arrangement involving broken pastry ends. A field they were not allowed in, which they walked to the edge of and looked at for some time with great seriousness before leaving.
PIP: We're not allowed.
YSE: Why not?
PIP: Because of the bull.
YSE: Is there a bull?
TAM: There was a bull.
YSE: When?
TAM: Before I was born.
The magic happened at the beck, in the middle of the afternoon, without any particular ceremony. Yseult knelt on the bank and put one hand in the water, and the children went completely quiet, and the surface of the beck in front of her began to rise. It came up in a thin sheet, water lifting itself out of the stream and holding, and then curled over into a slow arch that hung there for a moment against the light before the whole thing shivered and dropped back with a splash. Nobody said anything at all. Then Pip screamed.
It was not a frightened scream. It was pure, unfiltered, six-year-old delight at a volume that startled two birds out of the hedge, and she screamed for approximately four seconds without pausing to breathe and then demanded, immediately, that Yseult do it again.
YSE: Again?
PIP: AGAIN.
She did it again. She did it, in total, eleven times, and by the fourth Tam had waded into the beck to stand underneath it and by the seventh Pip had done the same and by the ninth both children were soaked to the shoulders and shrieking every time the water came down. Finn sat on the bank and watched.
FNN: I want it noted that I could have done that.
YSE: You could not have done that.
FNN: I could have done something.
YSE: You could have flipped a coin and either produced something wonderful or lost your ability to see. In front of two children. At a stream.
FNN: When you put it like that it sounds irresponsible.
YSE: It sounds like exactly what it is.
They walked the children home at six. Both were soaked and neither cared, and Pip had fallen asleep on Finn's back somewhere around the fourth house and had stayed there, and Tam walked alongside talking steadily about the water and how it had held its shape and whether it could be made to hold longer.
TAM: Could you make it stay?
YSE: For a while. Not forever.
TAM: How long?
YSE: A minute, perhaps. It gets harder the longer you hold it.
TAM: Why?
YSE: Because it isn't what water wants to do.
Tam considered that with enormous seriousness.
TAM: Our da's in Solmere.
He said it without any transition at all, the way children moved between subjects.
TAM: He's back at harvest.
YSE: That's not long now.
TAM: It's ages.
YSE: It's about two months.
TAM: That's ages.
He kicked a stone along the road.
TAM: Pip doesn't really remember him properly. She says she does.
Neither Finn nor Yseult said anything for a moment.
FNN: Two months goes faster than you'd think.
TAM: That's what everyone says.
FNN: Yes. Sorry. That was a rubbish thing to say.
TAM: It's alright.
Their mother met them at the door and took Pip off Finn's back without waking her, and thanked them both, and said something to Tam about being soaked that had no real force behind it at all. Finn and Yseult walked back up toward the inn in the failing light.
FNN: I genuinely hate that you did the magic.
YSE: I know.
FNN: It was the one thing I had.
YSE: You carried a sleeping six-year-old a quarter mile without complaining once. That's considerably harder than lifting some water and you're the only person in this village who could have done it.
FNN: That's not magic.
YSE: No, it isn't.
She kept walking.
YSE: It's better, though.