The way down took two hours and ten minutes over ground they had covered in ninety on the way up, and Arthur spent most of it discovering the number of perfectly ordinary things a person does with the arm he is not currently able to use. They went slowly because there was no other way to go. Corin and Talon took Yseult in turns, one on each side for the steep sections and one carrying her outright across the loose scree above the high pasture, and she permitted this with a total absence of comment that alarmed Arthur considerably more than complaining would have. Mira walked. She had insisted on walking. She did it with Talon's hand closed around her upper arm the whole way and did not once suggest he let go. Finn carried everything. He had the packs, all of them, and both waterskins, and Corin's sword belt, and he did it for two hours and ten minutes and did not say a single word about it, which was, Briar observed afterward, the most unsettling thing that had happened all day.
YSE: Finn.
FNN: Don't.
YSE: I haven't said anything.
FNN: You were going to say the thing you said at the beck.
YSE: I was.
FNN: I'd rather you didn't, because I'm currently carrying eleven stone of other people's luggage and I'm about four minutes from crying about something and I'd like to choose what.
She let it go. Arthur, walking behind them with his arm strapped across his chest and Elsie's belt digging into his neck, thought that letting it go was probably the kindest thing Yseult Marchant had done all week. Rufus Hale was where he always was, on the flat stone above the village with his boots off, and he watched them come down out of the hills for a long time before he said anything at all. He counted them first. Arthur saw him do it.
RUF: Eight.
COR: Eight.
RUF: You went in the third one.
COR: We did.
Rufus looked at Yseult, who was sitting on the grass because she had run out of alternatives, and at Arthur's arm, and at the fact that nobody had answered him properly.
RUF: What's up there.
Corin told him. He did it the way he did everything, in order and without decoration, the size of the chamber and the crystal on the walls and the webbing two hundred feet up and the thing that came down out of it, and Rufus Hale listened to all of it with his feet still in the water and his face doing nothing whatsoever.
RUF: Aye.
COR: Aye?
RUF: There's a story about that.
Corin went very still.
COR: There's a story?
RUF: There is.
COR: You sent us up there.
RUF: I did.
He did not say it defensively. That was the part Arthur found hardest to watch. He said it the way a man reads a figure off a page.
RUF: My grandmother's story, and her mother's before that. Something in the deep one. Nobody ever said what. You didn't go past the narrow bit, that was the whole of the rule, and every child in this village had it off by heart and none of us knew why. I went in myself at nineteen with a lamp and a great deal of confidence and I got about forty feet and I came out again, and I've told that story at this stream for fifty years as a thing they used to say.
He took his feet out of the water.
RUF: As a thing they used to say. Do you hear it? That's how I've been telling it. Fifty years of nothing coming down off that hill and I stopped believing a thing that was simply true and had the manners to stay where it was.
COR: That's not-
RUF: Don't. You're about to tell me it's not my fault and I'd rather you didn't, because I sent eight children up that hill today and there's a girl sitting in the grass who can't stand up.
COR: We chose to go in.
RUF: You did.
COR: You told us it was as safe as we were sensible. We weren't sensible. We were in there twice as long as I said we'd be and I'm the one who said it.
RUF: Aye. And you're fifteen years old, and I'm eighty-three, and one of us had the whole of the story and it wasn't you.
He said that flatly, without any particular kindness in it.
RUF: Take your share. You'll carry it better than most. Just don't take mine as well, I've not got the years left to hand it round.
The beck ran. Somewhere down in the village a door shut.
MRA: It won't come down.
RUF: You know that, do you.
MRA: Yes.
RUF: How?
MRA: Because it never has. You just told me so yourself. It's been up there longer than your grandmother and it has never once come down this hill, and that isn't luck, that's a creature that has everything it wants and no reason at all to walk further than it has to.
She said it quietly and without any particular force, and Rufus Hale looked at her for a considerable length of time.
RUF: What's your name, lass.
MRA: Mira.
RUF: Mira. That's the first sensible thing anyone's said about that hill in eighty years.
ELS: It doesn't have to come down.
Everyone looked at her.
ELS: That's not the problem. The problem is Tam.
Nobody said anything for a moment, and Arthur watched the whole shape of it arrive on seven faces at slightly different speeds. A nine year old who knew every path in these hills. A six year old who followed him. Eight students who would be on the eastern road at the end of the week, and one of them, the only one of them who could walk into that chamber and come out the other side, going with them.
FNN: We put something across it.
BRR: Across what? It's a hillside, Finn, there isn't a door.
FNN: Then a sign.
RUF: A sign lasts four winters and there's not a soul in Beckwith reads one twice.
FNN: Then WHAT.
Rufus put his boots on. He took his time about it.
RUF: I'll tell it right.
COR: Tell what right?
RUF: The story. I've been telling it wrong for fifty years, as a thing they used to say, and I'll tell it right instead, which is as a thing that is. I'll tell it to Tam and I'll tell it to Pip and I'll tell it to every child in this village until I'm dead, and they'll tell it to theirs, and it'll hold for sixty years and it won't need painting.
He stood, and found the standing harder than he had a few years ago, and did not comment on that either.
RUF: That's the only fence that's ever worked up here. It worked for four generations. It stopped working the year an old man decided he was too clever for it.
Hesta Bray was in the doorway of The Turning Wheel before they had reached the bridge, which meant she had been watching the path, which meant somebody had told her something. She looked at the eight of them for about two seconds.
HES: Roselle. Go and get your father.
That was all she said about it. She did not ask where they had been, or what had happened, or whether they had done something stupid, and Arthur understood somewhere around the second stair that this was not incuriosity, it was triage, and that Hesta Bray had spent eleven years deciding very quickly what mattered in a room. Odell Crane came in ten minutes later with flour still on his forearms, looked at Arthur's shoulder, and put a hand on it without asking permission.
ODL: Sit down.
ART: It's alright.
ODL: It's out. Sit down.
ART: How do you know?
ODL: Lad, I've had it out twice and I've put it back in for four other men, and one of them was my father, and none of them sat down when I asked either.
He put it back in. It took about four seconds and Arthur made a sound he was not proud of, and Odell Crane, a miller of fifty-eight who had never once said thank you properly, held onto his arm for a moment afterward and said nothing at all until Arthur's breathing came back.
ODL: There.
ART: Thank you.
ODL: Aye.
The common room went quiet early. Yseult was asleep by half past eight in the chair nearest the fire and nobody suggested moving her. Mira had eaten something and gone up. Talon had gone up ten minutes after her and had been extremely casual about the interval, which fooled nobody and was not, Arthur thought, entirely meant to. Briar stayed. He sat at the long table with the crystal in front of him, turning it over under the lamp, blue going into amber at one end, and Arthur and Corin sat with him because neither of them had worked out how to go to bed yet.
BRR: I could write this up.
COR: I know.
BRR: I don't think you do. There is no recorded deposit anywhere in Maeris of that scale. Not one. I've read everything the academy holds on crystallisation and the largest confirmed find is a seam in the Iron Reach the length of this room. That chamber is a hundred and forty feet in and I could not see the far side of it.
He set the crystal down.
BRR: I could write four pages and put my name on it and be the person who found it. At fifteen.
COR: What happens to Beckwith.
BRR: I know what happens to Beckwith.
COR: Say it anyway.
BRR: A survey crew inside a month. A road inside a year, because you can't take that out on a footpath. Forty buildings and one mill and a beck that turns a wheel, and every single person who arrives to work that hill has to eat and sleep somewhere.
He said it flatly, in the voice he used for the ledgers.
BRR: Odell doesn't sell the mill. Odell gets bought out by somebody who needs the water.
Nobody said anything.
BRR: I'm keeping the piece. I'm not writing it up. I'd like it noted that I'm entirely aware of exactly what I'm choosing not to do, because in about four years I'm going to be sitting in some archive somewhere and it's going to occur to me all over again, and I'd rather have witnesses.
COR: Noted.
ART: Noted.
Briar put the crystal in his pocket and went to bed, and did not look especially pleased with himself, which Arthur suspected was the correct response and had no idea how to say so.
Tam and Pip came at eight the next morning, the way they had come every morning, and found the common room considerably quieter than usual and Arthur with his arm in a proper sling.
TAM: Did you find the caves?
FNN: We did.
TAM: What was in them?
FNN: Two of them are just holes. Genuinely. Sheep, and a smell, and a considerable amount of nothing.
TAM: What about the third one?
Finn Jota, who had never in his life let a story go past him unimproved, who had spent four days telling two children about the academy at a level of accuracy Briar found personally offensive, looked at a nine year old across a breakfast table.
FNN: We didn't go in the third one.
TAM: Why not?
FNN: Because Rufus Hale told us not to.
Tam accepted this immediately and completely, and asked whether they were going back to the mill today, and Pip asked whether there was going to be more magic, and the morning went on.
Arthur watched it happen and understood that he had just seen Finn tell the only lie he had told all week, and that it had been believed instantly, and that this was because Finn had never once been worth believing about anything until the moment it mattered.