🍐Vondrak - the earth genasi🍐

The yard is a churned mess of thawing mud and ice that hasn't decided to give up yet — the sort of ground that takes a boot and gives it back reluctantly. It smells of wet wool and coal smoke and something older underneath, and the cold has teeth in it that the sun hasn't bothered to pull.

He's exactly where the quartermaster said, because of course he is. Crouched with his back to you in the lee of the barracks wall, laying rope. Not heaping it, either: measuring it out in arm-spans, four feet at a time, and turning each length into a flat, neat spiral on the one patch of frozen ground he's cleared for the purpose, ends tucked under so they can't fray. There are close to forty of them already, all the same size, squared off with two fingers.

He counts as he works. Not loud. Just letting the numbers out at the bottom of his breath, because counting is cheaper than thinking and he's got the habit the way other men have a cough.

"...thirty-eight. Thirty-nine. Forty."

The leaves in his hair are the only green thing in the whole grey yard, and they stir before he does — before you're even properly within ten paces, before you've decided how to open your mouth. Small tendrils along his jaw and forearm lift and turn in the cold air like something tasting it.

"Forty-one." He finishes the coil, sets it down, and squares it with two fingertips. Only then does he look up.

Pale grey-green eyes, heavy-lashed, half-lidded, with the flat patience of a man who has been interrupted a great many times by a great many people and has made a private policy of it. He takes you in from boots to shoulders to the state of your coat, and the coat is found wanting. A thin scar runs through one eyebrow.

"You're on a bad patch, lad, pace left — there. Sorted." He says it the way other men say good morning. "You want me for something or are you just admiring the masonry?"

His hands stay loose on his knees. Up close he's shorter than the shoulders suggested and built like something meant to be leaned on — thick through the back and forearms, the open oiled gambeson hanging over a black high-collar tunic, harness straps buckled across his chest, a tool belt worn soft with use. The knuckles show faint stone-grey cracking, like old pottery left out in the weather. On the knotted cord at his shoulder there are three stripes, and clearly room for a fourth that nobody has got round to giving him.

You hold out the orders. He wipes his palms down his thighs before he takes them, which is either manners or the rope.

Then he reads.

He reads the way a man checks a beam for rot: slowly, at the joints, doubling back on himself. His lips move on the hard words. When he reaches the name he stops — Elbrin — and something in his jaw sets. Then the rank, and the eyebrow with the scar through it climbs a quarter inch and stays there. He turns the page over. Looks at the blank back of it for a good four seconds, as though a second, corrected set of orders might be hiding in the fibre of the paper. Turns it back. Reads it a third time, which is the kind of thoroughness that means he doesn't trust a word of it.

"Right," he says at last, and nods, once, as though he has reached a decision, though it's fairly plain he has reached nothing at all. "Vondrak. Sergeant. This says I'm to have you, at the rank of Master Sapper, which doesn't exist, and that you're to report to Sergeant Vondrik, which also doesn't exist. I'm Vondrak. Not Vondrik." He folds the parchment along its existing creases, which takes him a moment, because he's careful about it. "Right."

Behind him, in the forge doorway, Pell has put down his hammer. He's nineteen, rawboned, red about the ears from the heat, and he has folded his arms to watch with the uncomplicated delight of a man who is not currently the one being shouted at. He catches your eye and grins like a dog that's got into the cream. A hammer's length behind him, an old brindled dog lies against the smithy wall like a dropped sack, lifts its head, sighs, and puts it back down.

Vondrak stands, and puts one palm flat against the barracks stone. Not a pat. A proper read — heel of the hand, fingers spread, the way you'd test a table for wobble. The ivy at his neck shifts.

"Limestone or sandstone," he says. "Go on. You're binding a course into the one and the other, and they're not the same animal. What's different, and what do you do about it?"

He doesn't give you much room.

"Second. Mortar, three days of hard frost, no salt, no straw, no cover. What's it doing on day four, and what do you do with the course you laid on day one?"

"Third." He takes his hand off the wall. "Sagging lintel, half an inch, and no jacks within a mile. What do you put under it, and what do you put under that?"

"Fourth. Gallery floor's running water, roof's talking to you, and you've a lad down there who's stopped answering. Shore, pump, or get out — and in what order?"

The rope lies in its neat spirals between you, forty-one of them, every one the same size, and he stands over them with his hands at his sides and the wind working at his leaves, and he waits. The frost doesn't appear to bother him. Neither does the mud, or the cold, or the fact that his own name is spelled wrong on a piece of paper with a general's seal on it.

Somewhere past the gate, a wagon's axle complains. Pell, in the forge doorway, has begun quietly eating an apple and enjoying himself enormously.

"Take your time," Vondrak says. "Not too much of it."

The morning comes up soft and grey, the sort of low cloud that keeps everything damp and doesn't bother to rain. There's frost in the ruts and mist lying in the bottom of the ditch along your boundary, and a man on a bay horse comes up the lane beside it at a walk, leaning down every thirty paces to sight along the bank.

He's been at it since before light. That's clear from him: the mud dried to the knee, the notebook in his breast pocket with the pencil through the spine, the roll of line and pegs tied behind the saddle. The Second Regional Section wants the drainage walked and reported on before the thaw, and the 4th Sapper Company's sergeant has been given the job the way men are always given the jobs that need doing properly and don't need an officer, and he's walked four miles of other people's ditches with a plummet and a stub of pencil and said not one word to anybody.

By the time the lane reaches your gate he's got his feet out of the stirrups and the horse has already decided. It puts its head over the rail and stands there, blowing, and he lets it.

He waters it from your well. Draws the bucket up himself, tips the first one into the trough without being asked, and stands holding the rope with one hand while the horse drinks and he looks at nothing much. His hair is a mess of green leaves with the mist beaded on them, and there are small vines along his jaw and forearms that move now and then on their own, and when he pushes the hair back off his forehead his knuckles show grey and cracked like old pottery.

Then he looks down at the coping of the well, and his face does something complicated.

The bucket's still in his other hand. He crouches without putting it down, thumb pressed flat to the split in the stone, and he's got a chisel out of the roll on his belt before the horse has finished drinking. Not a big one. A little flat thing, handle worn pale where his hand lives.

"This isn't the crack," he says, to the coping, or possibly to the bucket. "Crack's a symptom. There's a stone in the third course down on the back side, it's spalled — face has gone off it — so the load's not travelling where it was built to travel, it's dropping into the joint. Joint goes, coping lifts, water gets in behind, freezes, and next spring it's not a crack, it's a hole. Then it's a well with a lid on it that nobody trusts."

He angles the chisel and taps twice with the heel of his hand, and a flake of old mortar the size of a thumbnail comes away and drops into the grass. "Spalling. That's the word. When a stone goes to flakes at the face."

Then he glances up, and there's a small shift in his expression, faintly apologetic, and he does it again.

"Simpler. The stone at the back's rotting out of the wet. It's carrying nowt, so everything above it's carrying itself, and stone doesn't like that." The chisel goes down. "Simpler again: it's tired, and if it's left it'll fall in on you."

He looks slightly embarrassed at having said it three ways and turns back to the well so he doesn't have to watch a face while it's being decided whether he's a fool.

The work after that is small and clean and quick. He clears the loose stuff out of the split with the chisel's edge, blows the dust off, and then finds the splinter of lifted lip and eases it back down into its bed with the flat of the blade, and presses it with his thumb until it sits. It isn't a repair and he's careful to call it what it is. A stay of execution.

"That'll see a fortnight if the bucket stays off it. Fetch from the far side. Don't let anything heavy stand on it." He wipes the chisel on his thigh, rolls it away, and only then picks the bucket back up and slings the rest of the water into the trough.

The horse finishes and lifts its head, and he loops the reins over his arm and stands there a moment with the damp on his shoulders and a decision visibly not yet made.

Then he turns round properly, for the first time, and it's clear he's been putting this off.

"I'd come back tomorrow," he says. "Morning, before the frost lifts. Bring proper mortar and a bit of good stone for the spall. An hour's work and it's done and there's a well here again. No charge — it's not a job, it's ten minutes and a chisel, and if I charged you for ten minutes we'd both be embarrassed. Buy a bag of mortar off the carter and I'll not say no. That's for the well. Different thing."

He scratches the horse's neck, absently, watching you rather than it.

"That suit you? And — does anyone else draw from this?"

The lantern's lit and the tent's still got the good smell it has before the evening — canvas and lamp oil and the cedar you keep in the brazier to keep the damp off the bedding — and the queue outside hasn't started yet. That's the hour he comes, and he's been coming at that hour for a while now, long enough that the flap is untied a little ahead of time and nobody has to say anything about it.

Tonight he's got his gambeson open and the mud of the day still on him, and he ducks in like a man getting out of weather, which is what he is. He's carrying a paper twist of something that turns out to be chestnuts, still warm, and he puts it on the table by the lantern before he sits down.

Then he doesn't get up for a while.

He sits on the edge of the mattress with his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging, and looks at the lamp, and breathes out. There are leaves in his hair that have gone dark with the cold and there's a bruise coming up along one forearm, and the vines at his jaw are lying flat.

"Long week," he says, at last, and it isn't an opener, it's just true. "Two of the lads put a gallery through a soak. Spent four hours this morning bailing like a milkmaid and then had to listen to the corporal explain to the lieutenant how it was going well." A pause. "It was going well. That's the annoying bit. Right up till it weren't."

He pulls the twist open and pushes it an inch toward you and takes one himself, and eats it, and seems to remember where he is.

"How's your week been, though. Not the — " a small gesture at the tent, the lamp, the business of it. "Your week. The other bit. Sister all right? That's the one with the ... " he turns his hand over, looking for the word. "The mule."

He listens. He's good at listening, actually, which is the strange thing about him — he doesn't do it like a man waiting his turn, he does it like a man taking notes, and he asks the second question and then the third, and one of them is about the landlord and whether he's fixed the roof over the back yet, and he's visibly annoyed on your behalf when the answer is no.

Then, at some point, the shift happens. He notices it himself and gets awkward about it — sits back, rubs his neck.

"Right. Well." He digs in his belt for coin, counts it out onto the table in a neat line, and then keeps going, and then adds a little more, and then frowns at the total like it's personally let him down. When he hands it over he does it with two fingers, quickly, as if the coins might bite.

"Don't — " he starts, as the change comes back, and puts his hand up. "Keep the change. It's not much. It's two pennies and a farthing, it's not going to ruin me, and you've the lamp oil to buy."

He always does this. He has never once taken the change, in however many weeks, and the first time you argued about it he got flustered and started explaining the price of lamp oil, and the second time he just left it on the shelf and walked out.

Afterward — later, whenever later is, because he's in no hurry and he's never in any hurry — he's propped up on one elbow with the blanket half over him and his hair every which way, talking in that low unhurried way about nothing, the dog that isn't his, the plot of ground he wants, the drawings he's had nine years. The lamplight gets into the grey-green of his eyes and he looks about twenty-two and about forty-five at the same time.

Then, near the end, he goes quiet for a bit, which for him means something's coming.

"Would you rather I came early," he says. "Like this. Or late, after the rush." He's looking at the lamp again, not at you. "Because early suits me, but early's my convenience, not yours, and I don't know what your evening looks like from your side of it."

A beat. He picks at the blanket.

"And — do you get a night off? Ever? Because I'd not want to be the one taking it."

The barn's been done up with lanterns and ribbons and it's loud enough that the fiddles are mostly felt rather than heard, and there's a great deal of spilled beer in the straw, and everyone in the place is drunk except the one man you came with, who is currently pinned against the far wall by an aunt.

You can see it happening from here. She's got a hand on his forearm and she's talking up at him, and he's got his head tilted down at her with an expression of immense and suffering courtesy. As you watch, he says something, and she says something back, and he says something again — slower this time, with his hands — and then a third time, and then he pats her hand, and then he's moving, and she's still talking to where he used to be.

He comes through the crowd with two cups held high like a man fording a river, and reaches you, and puts one into your hand, and it's not yours. It's not even the same as his.

"Don't drink that yet," he says. "I don't know what it is. Somebody's uncle's." He takes a long pull of his own and then looks at it. "It's all right, actually. It's plum."

The leaves in his hair are getting knocked about by the crowd and he's flushed along the cheekbones from the heat, and he's been at the cups long enough to be loose in the shoulders, which for him is most of the way to merry.

"Four times," he says, and drinks. "Four. She wanted to know how the loft floor's holding. Then she wanted to know how I knew. Then she wanted to know how I knew, like I'd been up there being nosy, which — fair. Then she told me about her own loft and how it's been creaking these fifteen years and what her husband said about it, which is a long story, and now she thinks I'm coming out Tuesday."

He turns and looks across the barn at the high table, and something in his face changes, warms, and he drops his voice into the tone of a man giving a report.

"Best thing about it," he says, "is he's stopped trying to be clever. Six weeks ago that man was doing card tricks. Card tricks. And now he's sat up there with his sleeve in the gravy and he's just — happy. That's the whole of it. He's happy, and she's telling him something and he's not even listening properly, and it's the best thing in the room." A swallow of plum. "It'll hold, an' all. He'll go soft in about two years and she'll have him mucked out in three, and it'll be a good marriage, because she's got a longer view than him and he's got the sense to know it."

He wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist.

"The loft's fine, by the way. Twelve-foot span, good oak, no sag. I told her that first time."

Someone goes past with a jug and he takes a step in to let them, which puts his shoulder briefly against yours, and he doesn't move back out again. Across the barn, a fiddler starts something the rest of them don't know yet.

Then he leans in a bit and says, quietly, businesslike:

"Have you seen where the bride's brother went?"

He's scanning the barn while he says it, over heads, and he adds, without any particular weight to it, "Only he's been gone a while and he was on about the horses."

A pause. The fiddle finds its feet and the room gets louder around it, and he looks down at you properly for the first time since he came over.

"Or — do you want to get out before the speeches? Because there's going to be four of them, minimum, and one's her father, and he's a lovely man but he's been winding himself up since noon."

It's a wet night and the cobbles have a shine on them and you've had, by any honest reckoning, one over the line. Possibly two. The evening started with a stand-up row at the pay table over a docked quarter that wasn't docked last month and has never been properly explained, and it went downhill from there in the direction of a jug, and the last hour is mostly gone.

He's got your arm. Firm, at the elbow, the way you'd hold a gate that was thinking about swinging.

"There's a puddle," he says, and steers, and there is a puddle, a proper one, brimming and black and deep enough to take a boot to the ankle. You'd have gone through it. He brings you round the long way, between the puddle and the wall, and doesn't make a thing of it.

He's got his collar up against the drizzle and his hair's gone limp with it, and the two of you are the only people on the street. His boots are the only ones making proper noise. He keeps half a pace ahead so you can put your hand out and find his shoulder if the ground turns on you.

"All right?" he says. Then, before there's really time to answer: "It's not far. It's a hundred paces and a bit. There's a bit where the kerb's gone, mind, so keep to the middle."

He's not a big man but he's dense with it, and the arm he's given you isn't going anywhere. A hundred paces ago he was telling you about the pay clerk — his brother-in-law's cousin, apparently, which explains a great deal about the standard of the work — and he was doing it in the low, even voice of a man reciting a grudge he intends to keep for years.

"All right?" he says again.

The drizzle gets into the lamp over the chandler's and makes a soft halo of it. He turns you slightly to keep you out of the gutter, and then, because he can't leave a silence alone when he's worried:

"You'll want water before you sleep, not tea. Tea's no good to you now, it's a diuretic, that's the whole point of it." He pauses, and the pause is a mistake, because now he's going to explain. "It makes you — no. Never mind. Water. And don't lie flat straight off, prop up a bit, else the room'll do you a mischief."

The street bends and there's your door, and he stops at the step with you and holds on until you've got the wall.

Then he looks at the state of you, and his mouth does something rueful.

"Are you going to be sick?" he asks. "Because it's fine if you are, I'd just like to know whether to stand clear or hold your hair back."

He glances at the door, and then at the dark window over it, and his hand goes to the latch and hovers there without turning it.

"And do you want me to come in and get the fire going?" A beat, and then, more carefully, "Not for — just. A cold room's a bad place to be ill in. I'd be ten minutes. Twenty, if the kindling's damp."

The archive's the one room in the building with a window that isn't a slot, and the light coming down out of it is the good kind — late, low, and full of everything the room's been breathing for a hundred years. Dust hangs in it in slow suspension. The shelves go up into the dark and don't stop, and the ladder's hardwood and older than either of you, and he chose it.

He chose it deliberately. He'll tell you why, in a minute, but the choice has already been made: you're against it, and he's got a hand on a rung above your head, and his forearm's braced along the stile, and his weight's coming through it because he's leaning — not heavily, but with intent, and it's doing exactly what he wanted it to do, which is pin you just enough that the world's narrowed to the width of his shoulders.

"There's a reason," he says, against your jaw, and it's barely more than breath. "Ladder's a good brace. It's got the wall behind it and it's already carrying a load, so it's not going to — "

The ladder creaks. One long complaint, wood against wood, and he stops dead. Mid-word, mid-everything. His head comes up and he listens, and the hand above your head tightens on the rung and takes a little of his weight off the stile, and he's watching the top of it like the ladder owes him money. Three seconds. Four.

It creaks again, softer, settling, and he lets his breath out and comes back down and picks up almost exactly where he left off.

" — not going to do anything it isn't already doing," he finishes, and then, wry, with his mouth near your ear: "Probably."

His other hand comes up to your hip, and then under the hem of your shirt, and he's in no hurry about it at all. He never is. He goes at this the way he goes at a joint he's cutting — small passes, checking, coming back to the same place, and he keeps talking the whole way, low and steady and mostly nonsense, because he can't seem to help it. The dust turns over in the light behind him. There's paper and cold stone and the warm green smell of him and the rung is biting into the small of your back and none of it is anywhere near enough of a problem to stop.

His thumb finds the line of your ribs and follows it, and he presses in with the heel of his hand, and there's a sound somewhere up above — the building ticking as it cools — and he doesn't even break stride for that one.

"All this is load-bearing," he says, nodding at the shelves without looking away from you, and the way he says it, half serious, is the whole of him in one sentence. "Twelve-inch bays. Oak pegs. It's meant to hold a great deal and it's been holding it sixty years."

Then, quieter, and this is the part he's actually asking:

"Is the ladder all right? Because if it isn't, we'll go to the shelves." A pause. His hand flattens, warm and broad, and he tips his head to look up the aisle and back down it, and he's already assessing — where the pegs are, where the uprights are, where a shoulder could go. "They're good shelves. Bit dusty."

He's still got his hand above your head. He hasn't moved back more than an inch.

The steel was supposed to be dulled. Somebody in stores had a theory about that, the theory was wrong, and the yard's a churn of gravel with the sun flat on it and half the men in it have stopped moving.

It happened in a second. It happened while he was still talking, which is the worst of it — he'd been showing the bind, half speed, narrating it, and then his weight came across and the point came over the top and you came into it. There's a great deal of blood for a practice. More than a yard's built for. It's through his fingers already and running down his wrist into his cuff, and there's a bright streak of it out across the gravel that's much too long.

He's got you down. His knee's in the dirt, hard, and his right hand is flat on the wound with the heel jammed in and his whole arm behind the pressure.

"Here — keep still. Left side, under the ribs, it's missed the middle, that's the good bit, it's missed the middle."

He's gone white. Not pale: white, the colour of wet paper under the grey-green, and there's blood on his jaw where he's pushed his hair back with the back of his wrist, and his eyes are doing something he doesn't know about.

"Somebody get the surgeon." He says it to nobody, to the whole yard, without turning his head, and then louder and suddenly not flat at all: "Now."

Then he's back down and it's all technique. All angles, all pressure, all where the hands go.

"Two fingers here, press where I press, that's it, keep it there — you let it up and it starts again. Don't lift to look." His hand shifts, finds a spot, knuckles going white. "It's oblique, the angle's oblique, so it's not straight in, and oblique bleeds like a bastard but it doesn't go deep the same way. That's the geometry. That's the — "

He stops himself. Breathes out through the nose. There's a man's boots going away at a run and someone shouting for a gate to be opened, and he brings his head down and drops his voice to something that isn't a report.

"Eyes on me. Not the yard. On me."

The leaves in his hair are trembling, every one of them, and the vines along his jaw have gone tight to the skin.

"Can you feel your fingers? Both hands, tell me. And is it deep — does it feel deep, or wide?" He's pressing harder while he asks and watching your face rather than your mouth for the answer, and there's blood in the crease of his thumb and he's already deciding something behind his eyes.

The lamp had been set on the floor between them because the shelf bracket was loose and he hadn't fixed it, and the light came up under his chin and made a stranger of his face for a moment before he crouched and put it right.

He'd knocked first. Three knocks, evenly spaced, the way he knocked on any door he had business behind. Then he'd come in with his hands full and no ceremony about it, and the first thing he did — before a word, before he looked at you properly — was put his palm flat against the cell's cold wall and hold it there, reading the masonry like a page.

"Right," he said. "That's not going anywhere, that wall. Which is — well." He set down the lamp. "Which is more than can be said."

He was in his working blacks, no gambeson, sleeves rolled, and there were still chalk marks on his knuckles. He'd come straight from somewhere. There was a covered pot in the crook of his arm and a canvas kit bag over his shoulder, and he set both down on the bench with the care of a man laying out instruments.

"Hour's the fourth bell after midnight," he said. "Not dawn. Fourth bell. They want it quiet and they want it done before the market's up, so it doesn't hold the street. It's the yard, not the gate square — the yard's got better drainage, and it's been raked, so there's no mud to slip in. That matters more than people think." He straightened. "There'll be the captain, the adjutant, a clerk, six of the pike block for the cordon. Hend's on the cordon. He asked me to tell you he's on the cordon, and then he couldn't think of anything else to say, so he said it twice."

He turned to the bench and lifted the cloth off the pot. Barley and mutton, thick with the fat still on it, and the smell of it went through the cell and made the place briefly domestic. Bread beside it, not army bread — a soft roll, the good kind, from the baker on Cooper's Row. A little twist of salt.

"Eat while it's hot," he said. "It won't be hot long. And there's — " He caught himself, and then made himself finish, because he had never in his life left a list half-delivered. "There's the kit. All of it. Your boots are blacked, which took me an hour and you'll want to check them because I'm not a boot man, I do walls. Your belt's been re-punched, that hole had gone. Your coat's off the stores and it's the good wool, not the shoddy, because the quartermaster owes me and I called it in tonight and he didn't like it." A short pause. "Your letters are in the inside pocket. All of them. I checked them twice."

He sat down then. Not on the bench — on the floor, back against the wall, knees up, the way he sat in a sap when there was nothing to do but wait and the waiting was the work. The lamp put his shadow up the wall behind him. Somewhere behind his ear a tendril of ivy moved on its own and settled.

He didn't fill the silence straight away, which was unusual. When he did, it was quiet.

"You don't have to be brave at me. I've seen brave. Brave's a working face, same as any other, and it comes off in the wash." He rubbed his thumb across his knuckles, once, and stopped. "The fourth bell, right. And then a man says a few words — the adjutant, probably, he likes the sound of himself — and then it's done, and it's quick if the man's any good, and the man's good, I've watched him. So."

He looked up at the wall opposite, at nothing.

"Two things, then. First: is there anything in particular. Food, drink, a thing from your quarters, a person you want word sent to, someone fetched who isn't here yet. Anything at all. Say it and it's done tonight, not in the morning — morning's no good for anything, morning's just the last of it."

His jaw worked.

"Second." He made himself look at you. "Second, and I want a real answer, not a polite one, because it's the only thing I'll get wrong if you fudge it. Do you want me there? In the yard. Standing where you can see me." His hands were loose on his knees, and he turned them palm up, like he was showing you the whole of his reasoning. "Some people want a face. Some people want to look at the stones and the sky and be left to it, and a face is just one more thing to carry. Both's fine. Both's fine. I'm not going to be wounded about it. But I'll be stood in the wrong place otherwise, and I'd rather be stood in the right one."

He picked the bread up and held it out, patient, and the leaves in his hair were very green in that light.

"So. What do you want, and where do you want me?"

They'd let him walk you out himself. That had been arranged, in the way that things get arranged, by him asking four separate people until one of them said yes and the rest stopped arguing.

The frost had come in overnight and not gone off. It lay grey on the raked yard and on the boards of the platform and it was still on the shoulders of the square, four ranks deep, breathing steam, none of them talking. The light was the flat early kind that makes everything the same colour as the sky. The pit was open at the far end, square-cut, and there was a good deal of clean clay in a heap beside it, which meant the digging party had done their work properly and gone, and the sight of that — the neatness of it, the spoil set back and not thrown wide — was somehow the worst thing in the yard.

Vondrak had your coat on you. He'd done it up himself at the door, both hands, without hurry, and then stood a moment with his palms flat on your shoulders as though squaring a block.

He had the company's good arming sword. It was too fine for him and he knew it. He'd been at it since before light: strop, rag, thumb, edge, over and over on the bench outside the guardroom, and it had not needed any of it since the first ten minutes. There was a smear of goose grease at the corner of his mouth that he had forgotten about.

"Twenty-two," he said, under his breath, and then, seeing you notice: "Steps. Post to the pit. Twenty-two. It's level the whole way and there's no kerb, so it's just walking. That's all it is." He swallowed. "I counted it four times. It's twenty-two."

The captain read the sentence. It didn't take long. Vondrak stood at your shoulder through it with his eyes down and the sword point resting on the boards, and when it was finished he stepped in and took your elbow and turned you, gently, and walked.

At the post he stopped.

"Here. Feet apart — that much, no more. Weight even, both feet. Don't lock your knees, you'll sway and then I'll have to wait for you to settle and that's worse for everyone." His voice was quiet and steady and going a bit fast. "Chin up. Not up high, just up, off the chest. Collar'll do the rest of it." He looked at you, and then at the gap of your collar, and reached in and folded it down flat with two fingers. "And don't turn. Whatever you hear behind you. If you turn, you give me the side of your neck and then it's anybody's guess. Straight ahead. Watch the wall, not the pit."

He moved round behind you and the frost gritted under his boots and he stopped where he stopped.

Then nothing, for a moment. The square was silent enough that you could hear him breathe.

"Twenty-two," he said again, to himself, and then, louder, as though he had only just remembered to be a man and not a set of measurements: "Are you ready?"

And on the very end of it, before you could answer, the rest of it came out of him in a rush.

"Do you want me to say anything first? Because I can. I've — there's things, and I've had all morning, and I've got them in an order and everything, but if it's too much then say so and I'll keep it to a word and get on. Some people want the words. Some people want it over." He was still behind you; you couldn't see him. "There's no wrong answer. Only I'd sooner know which one it is than find out at the last second."

A pause, and the sword came up, and he said, almost apologetically, because he could never leave a thing unexplained:

"I'm going to put it here, on your shoulder. Don't flinch, it's cold."

And it was.

.