Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The woman who answered the door was shorter than Brek and wider than the doorway.

She had a broad, blunt, striped face, white down the center and grey on either side, with a long dark nose and small black eyes that glittered behind a pair of thick round spectacles hung from a chain. Her ears were round and furred. Her hands, which were folded across the front of a flour-dusted apron, were large and clawed and surprisingly gentle, the nails trimmed square. She wore a ring of iron keys at her belt, so many that they clanked when she breathed, and her sleeves were rolled to the elbow over forearms thick with grey fur.

She was a Brockin, Fel realized. He had heard of them in Tohei: a race of burrowers and keepers, quiet and stubborn, who lived in the roots of the mountains and were said never to forget a debt.

She looked at Brek. She looked at the twins, and at Wren perched on Brannoch’s shoulders, and at the long ragged line of children behind them. She looked at the five adults. She looked at the great black beetle, which had put its head over the garden wall to see what the fuss was about.

“No,” she said.

“Mother Ashbrindle?” said Veyra.

“I said no. I have forty-one in the house. I have beds for thirty-eight. I have bread for the next four days and soup for the next two, and the roof over the east dormitory is held up by a barrel and a prayer.” The voice was deep and gravelly and not unkind. “And you have brought me fourteen more, and an armed party, and a very large insect, and I do not need to be told that all of it has a story attached. I do not want the story. Take them to the Wardens at the Sixth Terrace.”

“The Wardens will put them in the mines,” said Thara.

The Brockin turned her small black eyes on her.

“Yes,” she said. “They will.”

Nobody spoke. A cold wind blew up the Tallow Row. And then, from somewhere behind Brannoch’s knees, came a very small voice.

“Please.”

It was Wren. She had slid down from the Oakhorn’s shoulders and stood on the step with her rag doll clutched to her chest, looking up at the Brockin with her huge silver-lashed eyes. She did not cry. She was past that.

“We don’t have anyone,” she said. “He said we didn’t. He said we were just stock.”

The Brockin stood quite still. Then she took off her spectacles, and wiped them on her apron, and put them back.

“Who said that?” she said, very quietly.

“The man with the rings.”

“Hesper Dunwick,” said Veyra. “A slaver of the southern charters. He had these fourteen in a cage on the Ash Road, chained by the ankle. We took them from him.”

“Took them.”

“Yes.”

“And where is he now?”

Veyra said nothing. She did not look away.

The Brockin looked at her for a long, long moment. She looked at Brannoch’s bandaged leg, and at Fel’s sling, and at the dried black blood that no one had quite managed to scrub out of the hem of Thara’s coat. She looked at the dull brass shine on the stolen wagons, and at the way Brek had positioned himself at the front of the group, small and furious, with his shoulders squared as though he thought she might hit him.

“Come in,” said Mother Ashbrindle. “All of you. Wipe your feet.”

The Lantern House was a shambles, and it was the warmest place Fel had ever been.

Every inch of it was full. The hall was lined with pegs where forty small coats hung in ragged ranks. A staircase wound up past a landing painted with a mural of badgers in a harvest field, to a corridor of doors with children’s names carved above them in wobbly letters. The kitchen stove roared. Somewhere above, someone was practicing a flute very badly. Two little dwarf boys were wrestling on the stair, a girl of about ten sat reading aloud to a clutch of smaller ones, and a freckled, antlered child hung upside down from the banister, grinning at the newcomers as if they were the best thing that had happened all week.

It smelled of bread and woodsmoke and boiled cabbage. It smelled, Fel thought, of something he had not smelled since the Gallows: a place where the door was never quite locked.

Mother Ashbrindle led them into a cramped office at the back, a room barely larger than a closet, crammed floor to ceiling with ledgers. She sat behind a battered desk and gestured them to the chairs, of which there were three. Brannoch stood. Orrin folded himself down onto a stool, knees up near his chin. The children were taken away by a pair of cheerful older girls to be washed and fed, with Brek, at the last moment, stopping in the doorway to look back at Fel with an expression that was not quite a question.

“Go on,” said Fel gently.

The boy went.

“Now,” said the Brockin, and folded her paws on the blotter. “Tell me. All of it. If you lie, I will know, because I have been lied to by experts for sixty years, and you are not very good at it.”

They told her. Veyra did most of the talking. She told it plainly, without ornament: the cage, the chains, the number, the merchant and his rings, the last long hour behind the third wagon, the choice. She did not soften it. When she was finished, there was a silence.

“Thirty-five knives,” said the Brockin at last.

“Thirty-four,” said Brannoch. “One ran.”

“Good for him.” She took off her spectacles again and pinched the bridge of her nose. “And you carried the children across the whole of the Ash Road and waited eight days in the Tinker’s line, with a forged bill of sale, to bring them to a house you had never heard of.”

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“We heard of it from a woman with turnips,” said Thara.

“Mm. Gorsa will have words with Marta about that.” The Brockin looked up. “Now. What do you want?”

“Nothing,” said Fel.

“Nobody wants nothing.”

“We want them safe.” He leaned forward. His shoulder twinged, and he ignored it. “We have money. Dunwick’s strongbox, and what we got for the silk. We don’t need it. We need three nights at an inn, some food, and enough to leave town if something goes wrong. The rest is theirs.”

He nodded to Veyra, and she set the chest on the desk.

It was a heavy, iron-bound thing, the size of a bread box, and it hit the wood with a thump that made the ledgers jump. Veyra opened it. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth and tied with Dunwick’s own ribbon, lay a fortune: coins of every make and metal, bars of silver, a fat roll of bank notes, a pouch of cut stones. It caught the lamplight and threw it back in a small, hard glitter.

The Brockin did not touch it.

“That is a great deal of money,” she said.

“It is.”

“A person might be tempted to ask where it came from.”

“You know where it came from.”

“Yes.” Her small black eyes moved slowly from Fel to Veyra to the chest. “I know. And I know what it will cost to feed fourteen children for three years, in a house with a barrel for a roof beam. I have the figure in my head. I have had it in my head for every child who has ever come through that door.” She named a sum. It was extremely precise. “That is what I need, to keep them whole, and fed, and schooled, and not sent to the mines at thirteen. That is what it costs.”

She reached out, at last, and counted it herself.

It took twenty minutes. She counted with her claws, on the blotter, in little stacks, muttering under her breath. Twice she paused to bite a coin. Once she held a gem up to the lantern and made a tiny noise of approval. At the end she pushed a third of the hoard back across the desk.

“That,” she said, “is yours. Keep it. You will need it for the inn, and for the road, and for when something goes wrong, and I promise you that something will.”

“That’s too much,” said Fel. “Take what you need…”

“I have.” Her voice was flat. “I have taken exactly what I need and not one brill more, and if you argue with me I will have you thrown into the street by a seven-year-old. Do not insult me by being generous.” She took a sheet from a drawer, dipped a pen, and began to write. “Three years. Fourteen children. Board, bed, lessons, and a trade at the end of it, of their own choosing. Paid in full. Signed this day by Gorsa Ashbrindle, Keeper of the Lantern House, and witnessed by…” She looked up. “Names?”

They gave them. She wrote. Her pen scratched on the paper, neat and steady.

“The date is the twenty-ninth day of the thirteenth month,” she muttered. “Year four hundred and twelve of the Delving Reckoning, and may it be the last year we need it.”

Fel went very still.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “What day?”

“The twenty-ninth.”

“Of the thirteenth month.”

“Of the thirteenth month.” The Brockin looked at him over her spectacles. “Frostmonth, to those who like names. Thirty days each, thirteen to the year. The thirtieth, tomorrow, is the Turning, when the old year dies and the new one wakes. We light the lanterns at midnight. We bring in the new year with bread and lamp-oil and a great deal of noise.” She frowned. “Did they not have the Turning where you come from?”

“They did.” He swallowed. “I just… didn’t know it was so close. I’ve lost track. I think I lost it somewhere in the forest.”

“You lost a month?”

“Several, I think.”

“Hmph.”

His mind was spinning. Thirteen months. Thirty days. The Turning. It was his calendar, the very same, nearly to the name, as if he had walked through a door and found his own house on the other side. He had not expected that. He had grown so used to being a stranger in this world that to find one small, solid piece of it that matched was almost dizzying.

The thirtieth of the thirteenth month.

Tomorrow.

“Fel?” said Veyra. “Are you well?”

“It’s nothing.” He laughed, a short, uncertain sound. “It’s just… that’s my birthday.”

Silence.

“Tomorrow?” said Thara.

“The thirtieth. Yes.” He rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly embarrassed. “I turn seventeen. Historia gave me the date. I was too small when they found me to know my real one, so she picked the last day of the year and said I could have the whole thing to myself. I didn’t really mean anything by it.” He shrugged. “I haven’t thought about it in months. It’s not important.”

Nobody said anything. Thara’s eyes had grown very wide and very bright. Brannoch’s face did not change at all, which Fel, who had learned to read it, understood to be a bad sign for someone. Orrin was gazing at the ceiling with a look of studied innocence. And Veyra, beside him, had folded her hands in her lap and lowered her eyes, and the corner of her mouth was moving in a way he could not interpret.

“Seventeen,” she said, softly.

“Yes.”

“I am eighteen.”

“I know.” He blinked. “Why does that matter?”

“No reason.” She looked up. Her violet eyes were bright. “It is a good age.”

The Brockin cleared her throat. She blotted the page, folded it, and tied it with a ribbon. “Well. Happy early birthday, boy. You’ve picked a fine place to have it.” She stood, stiffly, and gathered the keys at her belt. “You’ll want to say goodbye.”

They said goodbye in the hall.

It was worse than Fel had expected. He had thought it would be a simple thing: a few words, a wave, and then the door. But the children had been washed and fed, and wore clean nightshirts too big for them, and stood in a ragged line in the lamplight with their hair standing up and their faces scrubbed pink. The twins held hands. The girl with feathers for hair had braided a ribbon through them. Brek stood at the end of the line with his arms crossed, glaring at the floor.

“You’ll come back?” said Wren.

“We will try.”

“You’ll try.” She narrowed her eyes. “Pim’s friend said that.”

Fel’s breath caught.

“Veyra told me,” said the little girl. “On the road. She said there was a girl named Pim who lived in a village in the clouds, and who liked spoons, and who was very brave.” Her lip wobbled. “She said she died.”

“Yes,” Fel said. His voice came out strangely. “She did.”

“Was she scared?”

He thought about it. He thought about the spoon in the ash, and the small black knife, and the girl’s fierce, crooked, defiant face.

“No,” he said. “Not of dying. She was angry. She was angry that anyone would hurt the people she loved.” He knelt, so that he was looking Wren in the eye. “She’d have liked you. She’d have taught you to throw a spoon.”

Wren’s face crumpled. Then, with a sudden dive, she wrapped both arms around his neck and buried her face in his collar, and he held her, awkwardly, with his one good arm, while the little girl’s shoulders shook.

“I’ll keep him,” she whispered, of the doll. “I’ll keep him safe until you come back.”

“I know you will.”

When he stood, the line had broken. The twins were hugging Brannoch’s knee. A boy with antlers no bigger than buds was hanging off Orrin’s arm, demanding a song. Thara, who did not cry, was hugging three children at once with her face turned determinedly to the ceiling. And Brek had come forward, finally, with his fists at his sides and his jaw set so hard that a muscle jumped under his ear.

“You didn’t have to,” said the Raskian boy.

“I know.”

“Nobody ever…” He stopped. He tried again. “I’m going to be a smith. Mother Gorsa says I can. I’m going to make something good.” His chin lifted. “And when I do, I’ll make you a sword. A real one. With my name on it.”

Fel looked at him.

“I’ll hold you to that,” he said.

Mother Ashbrindle saw them to the door, her keys jingling in the dusk.

“The Wanderer’s Rest is full, and the Gilded Cup will rob you,” she said. “You want a bed and a hot meal and no questions, and you want it cheap. Go to the southeast of the Hearthmoot, to the old smelting quarter, where the Fourth Stair meets the Cinder Walk. There’s a place called the Lopsided Anvil.” The corner of her mouth twitched. “You’ll know it. It’s the one that looks like it’s about to fall down. It won’t. It has been about to fall down for two hundred years.”

“Who runs it?”

“Tamsin Tumblewick. A gnome, and quite mad, and the kindest soul on this mountain.” She sniffed. “Tell her Gorsa sent you. She owes me a ladle.”

“A ladle?”

“It’s a long story.” She stepped back. “Go on, now. You’ve done a good thing today, all of you, and I’ll not say it twice.”

The door closed behind them with a click. The yellow paint caught the lantern light. And as they went down the steps, into the smoky dusk of the Hearthmoot, Fel realized that Veyra was walking very close beside him, her hand an inch from his, and that for some reason, she was smiling at the stones.