Odell Crane took one look at the sling in the yard at half past six and pointed at the bench beside the mill door.
ODL: No.
ART: I can carry with the left.
ODL: You can carry with the left for about forty minutes and then you'll compensate, and then you'll pull something on the good side, and then I'll have a boy with two bad shoulders instead of one and your academy will have words with me. Sit.
ART: I'm fine.
ODL: Every man who's said that sentence in this yard has been wrong.
So Arthur sat. He was given the gate, which meant counting carts in and carts out and marking them on a slate, and there were four carts across the entire morning. He did it properly. He marked each one. He kept the slate straight on his knee and watched seven people he cared about carry sacks past him for six hours, and understood somewhere around the third hour that he had spent his whole life being the boy who could not do the thing everyone else could do, and had assumed, without once examining it, that Solmere had ended that.
ELS: You've gone quiet.
ART: I'm counting carts.
ELS: There haven't been any carts...
She sat down on the bench for a minute she did not have, and did not say anything comforting, which he appreciated more than he could have explained.
ELS: Odell's right, you know.
ART: I know.
ELS: I know you know. I'm saying it anyway, because you're going to argue with him again at midday and I'd like it on record that I told you first.
He argued with him again at midday. He lost.
Rufus Hale was on the flat stone at two, with his boots off, and there were three children sitting on the bank in front of him instead of none. Tam and Pip and a smaller one Arthur did not know. Finn was there, because Finn went where the children went, and Corin was there, and Arthur came down because the gate did not need him and had never needed him.
RUF: You're late.
FNN: We didn't know there was a time.
RUF: There isn't. You're still late.
He waited until they had settled.
RUF: Right. I'm going to tell you the one about the deep cave, and I'm going to tell it properly, which I've not done for a considerable while.
Arthur watched Finn's face do something small and complicated.
RUF: There's three caves up past the high pasture. Two of them are holes. You can go in the two holes. There's sheep in them and there's a smell and there's nothing else, and if you want to be brave about something, be brave about the smell.
PIP: What about the third one?
RUF: I'm getting to the third one. Don't rush an old man, it's the only speed I've got left.
The beck ran. Nobody said anything.
RUF: The third one goes back into the hill. There's a narrow bit about eight feet long where you have to go on your side, and past the narrow bit there's a room. It's bigger than this village. It's bigger than the church at Solmere and I've seen that one twice. And something lives in it, and it has lived in it since before my grandmother was born, and it has never once come out.
TAM: What is it?
RUF: A spider.
TAM: How big?
RUF: Twenty feet across.
Pip made a small sound. The smaller child got up and moved four feet closer to Tam and sat down again.
RUF: Now. Here's the part that matters, so listen to it rather than to the twenty feet. It has never come out. Not in my life, not in my mother's, not in her mother's. It doesn't want you. It has everything it wants in that room and it has never once walked down this hill to look for anything else. It only becomes your problem if you go up there and make yourself its problem.
TAM: So you can't go past the narrow bit.
RUF: You can't go past the narrow bit.
TAM: Is that a rule or is it just something people say?
RUF: That's the best question anybody's asked me in forty years.
He put his hands on his knees.
RUF: It's a rule. I spent about fifty years telling it as something people say, and I was wrong to, and I'll not do it again. It's a rule.
Tam considered this with the total seriousness of a nine year old being levelled with for the first time. Then he turned round and looked at Finn.
TAM: You said Rufus Hale told you not to go in.
FNN: I did say that.
TAM: He did tell you.
FNN: ...He did, yes.
Arthur, standing behind them, watched Finn Jota discover that the only lie he had told all week had somehow arrived at the truth from the other direction, and watched him decide, visibly, not to say another word about it.
PIP: Have YOU seen it?
RUF: No.
PIP: Then how do you know it's twenty feet?
RUF: Because somebody told me, and I believed them.
He said it without looking at anyone in particular, and Corin, sitting on the grass with his arms round his knees, looked at the water for a while. The common room was full that evening, because Hesta had opened the front for the village and half of Beckwith was in it, and the eight of them had the long table and the fire and a plate of something Arthur could not identify and ate three of. It held until about nine.
Then Finn put his cup down.
FNN: I'm going to say the thing.
BRR: Don't say the thing.
FNN: I've held it for two days, Briar, which is the longest I have ever held anything in my life, and I'd like some acknowledgment of that before I say the thing.
BRR: Acknowledged. Don't say it.
FNN: Mira stopped a spider.
The table went quiet in the way a table does when everyone has been avoiding the same subject and one person walks into it.
FNN: She walked out onto open rock in front of a thing four times her height and she said look at me and it LAY DOWN, and nobody has said a single word about it since, and I have been going quietly insane.
Mira was sitting at the end of the table with both hands round a cup. She did not look up.
MRA: I wondered how long you'd last.
FNN: Two days.
MRA: I said four hours. Briar said a day and a half.
BRR: I want it noted I was closest.
FNN: You BET on me?
MRA: We didn't bet. Betting would have been unkind.
She turned the cup round once on the table. Arthur watched her do the thing the first week had shown him, the small internal audit, the weighing of exactly how much she was about to hand over.
MRA: Ask, then. You've all been very careful for two days and I'd rather have the questions than the careful.
There was a pause in which nobody wanted to go first.
ELS: What is it?
MRA: It doesn't have a name. Not one I've been given, anyway. It works on animals and it only works on animals, and what it does is not what people assume when I describe it, so I'd like to describe it properly rather than have it be more impressive than it is.
She set the cup down.
MRA: I can't command anything. I can't make a creature do a thing it doesn't want. What I can do is hand it my own disposition toward whoever's standing in front of it. It will be as friendly to a stranger as I am. That's the whole of it. I didn't tell that spider to lie down. I made the room stop being something it had to defend.
BRR: That's-
MRA: It's small, Briar.
BRR: I was going to say that's the most efficient use of an ability I've ever heard described and I'd like to write it down, but if you'd rather I said it's small I'm happy to.
Something crossed her face.
COR: Why has nobody seen it before?
MRA: Because I've only ever done it with birds.
She said that flatly, and it landed harder than the spider had.
MRA: Birds, mostly. A fox. A dog that would not stop barking at my mother's gate for a summer. I have never in my life used it on anything that could kill me, and I'd like everyone here to understand that I did not know it would work and I walked out there anyway, because Elsie said it was hurt and I said those aren't the same thing, and I was the only person in that room who could tell the difference.
YSE: You could have died.
MRA: Yes.
YSE: You did it anyway.
MRA: Yes.
YSE: I'm not criticizing. I'm establishing the facts so I can be properly impressed by them.
Mira looked at her for a moment.
MRA: There's a second part. It's the part I'd normally not say, and I'm going to say it, and I'd appreciate it if nobody was kind about it immediately afterward.
She put both hands flat on the table.
MRA: My mother is monsterkind. Eskandar coastal lineage. My father is ordinary human stock from inland, and I am the thing in between, which is why you've all been very politely not asking about my eyes since the first week.
Nobody said anything at all. Arthur was aware of the fire and of somebody laughing at the bar and of the fact that he had noticed her eyes on the first morning and had decided, without any deliberation, not to look twice.
FNN: I wasn't not asking politely. I genuinely just thought they were nice.
Mira laughed. It came out wrong and startled, and she put a hand over her mouth immediately, and Briar started laughing too, and then most of the table did, and Arthur watched the whole thing come apart in the most ordinary way possible.
MRA: That is the single most useful thing you have ever said.
FNN: I say useful things constantly. Nobody records them.
It was Elsie who noticed, a minute later, and she said it without any particular emphasis, which is how she said everything.
ELS: Talon didn't ask.
Everyone looked at Talon. Talon looked back with the unbothered composure of a person who had been waiting some time for exactly this.
TLN: No.
ELS: You knew.
TLN: Yes.
ELS: How long?
TLN: A while.
He did not elaborate, and it became apparent, over the next several seconds and with no assistance from him whatsoever, that he was not going to.
BRR: How long is a while, Talon.
TLN: A while, Briar.
Mira was looking at the table. Arthur, watching her rather than Talon, saw something in her face that he did not have a word for and thought, privately, that it was probably the closest thing to being safe that a person like her ever got: seven people finding out at once that somebody had known for months and had simply never once mentioned it to any of them.
MRA: He's been deliberately not asking things since before the harvest market.
TLN: I've been deliberately not asking things my entire life. You're the first person who's noticed.
Hesta Bray came through at ten to put out the lamps and found eight students still at the long table, none of them making any move toward the stairs, and stood there a moment with the taper in her hand.
HES: Bed.
FNN: Five minutes.
HES: Bed.
FNN: Ten minutes.
She put out three of the four lamps and left the fourth, and went to bed without another word, which Arthur had learned by now was how Hesta Bray said yes.