Chương 12: She Won

It never came back. She had told it to go, and it had gone, and no pale square had sat at the edge of her sight since. She spent a long while being extremely pleased with herself about this. The days ran together after that. Snow kept piling up outside. The fire kept going. She took the beam over the flue in the mornings and the chair by the second window in the afternoons. She was, by any measure she understood, winning. Then one morning the hall filled up too early. Not the usual filling, and too quiet with it.

Bram had the long tables pulled out from the wall and wiped down before the fire had properly caught. Ren came through twice with different stacks of paper and didn't sit down for either of them. Boots outside. More than usual. She smelled them before the door opened. Oil and cold metal, the same as the men on the corners had carried, thicker now for being six of them instead of one. They came in and stood along the wall and did not sit. Snow melted off their shoulders onto Bram's clean floor.

One of them looked down at her, briefly, then away. The last man through the door was not carrying anything. He was older. Dressed heavier than anyone in the hall, fur at the collar, and he walked like the room would arrange itself around him, which it did. A conversation near the hearth stopped in the middle of a word. His smell reached her a breath before he did. Ink. Wax, the hard kind that got pressed down onto paper. Lamp oil under that, and cold stone.

Ren stopped where she stood, halfway across the hall, papers still in her hands. His face brightened, the way it hadn't for anyone else in the room. His mouth opened.

"My lord," Ren said, before anything got out of it. Loud enough for the room, and grinning while she said it. Everything he had been about to do went out of him at once. His hands, already halfway up, came back down and found nothing useful to do at his sides. His shoulders dropped. Amber had seen dogs do exactly this, sat in a doorway with their whole body asking, then told no.

"Daugh— Ahem. Miss Ren," he said. His face fell.

"That's me." She went back to her papers. Then Garr came down the stairs. The hall changed shape around it. Not the way it usually did, everyone going quiet and still. The opposite. Shoulders came down along the far wall. Somebody who had been standing very straight for a while stopped bothering. One of the young ones let out a breath he'd apparently been holding since the door opened. Garr crossed to the middle of the floor without hurrying, stopped in front of the man in the fur collar, and bowed, shallow.

"My lord."

"Oh, don't do that." A hand came up, waving it off.

"Never liked it. And you still outrank me, whatever you call yourself these days."

"Don't let me stop you," Garr said. The man in the fur collar laughed once, short, and they shook hands. The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. She yawned and settled her chin back onto her paws. The young ones came in after that, filing along the far wall in a ragged line. She knew most of them by smell if not by anything else. The three from the strap lesson.

A few more besides, older, the ones who'd been running errands and hauling packs since before the snow. They stood like a line of people who had been told to stand there and not fidget, and were fidgeting.

"You've each got five years to serve," the man in the fur collar said.

"You can finish them here. Contracts, dungeons, same as you've been training for, and nobody will think less of you for it." His voice was smooth. Practiced. The sound of somebody who had said this in several other rooms already.

"Or you take the crown's coin, and it's two." Something went through the line. Not a sound exactly. Something in how they were standing.

"Fed, housed, paid every month whether there's work or not. Land at the end, for those who serve it out." Ren stood off to the side with her arms crossed and her jaw set. Garr didn't move at all.

"Understand what you'd be signing." He said it without dressing it up.

"An adventurer picks his work. A soldier does what he's told, when he's told, and asks nothing about it. Monsters when they come over the wall, men when they come up the road, and nobody asks which you'd rather."

"That's the whole of the difference. Two years instead of five, and you do as you're told." That was the end of it. He stopped talking and the hall stayed quiet a moment longer than it needed to. His eyes went to Ren. She looked up. Amber was fairly sure she hadn't meant to, because she caught herself doing it and stopped, but by then he had her and his eyebrows had gone up and his whole face was asking her something. Ren looked back down at her papers, slowly.

Somewhere along the line a shoulder started shaking and got stopped. Somebody else made the sound a person makes swallowing a laugh with their mouth shut. The man in the fur collar turned back to the room quickly, with the other face on. Nobody let the laugh out. They stood there holding it and holding the decision they'd just been given, both at once, and the hall went quieter than it had been all morning.

"Anyone who's already decided can say so now," he said.

"The rest of you have until spring." Nobody moved. Amber could hear them not moving. An arm went up, straight over the head of the third one in from the end. It was Corin.

"Go on."

"What happens to someone who doesn't meet either standard." Corin's voice came out steadier than his arm had gone up.

"I doubt I'd hold a rifle any better than a sword, now that I can't even tell which way to point it." The hall did not make a sound. The man in the fur collar was quiet a moment. Then he paused, longer than anything else he'd said all morning, and looked to Garr. Garr gave him a short nod. Nothing more.

"There's back line work in both. Guild has clerks. We have the Information Corps." He turned back to Corin.

"I read your case. You've done your duty fully already. I could put your name forward for the Corps, or I could discharge you outright. No term owed either side." Corin was quiet a moment.

"Two years," he said.

"Same as anyone." Ren sighed before she picked up her pen and wrote something on the paper that had been separate from the others all morning. That was all the ceremony it got. Nobody clapped him on the back and nobody said anything kind about it, and Amber thought that was probably how he'd wanted it. He found a shoulder in front of him and held onto it. Whoever it belonged to did not shrug him off. She was off the chair before she'd decided to move.

She went along the wall behind the benches, past boots and pack straps and one soldier who didn't look down, and came out at the end of the line, and stopped a length short of him. Up close he looked worse. Thinner in the face. He stood like a man waiting to get bumped into, weight back on his heels, ready for it. Even his smell had changed, medicine and something stale, like he hadn't been outside in days. She waited. Nothing came. No hand reaching down, no voice finding her the way it usually did.

He didn't know she was there. He couldn't see her. Not the way anyone else in this hall ever had. She brushed against Corin's ankle. He went absolutely still. Then his hand came off the shoulder in front of him and reached down, slow, feeling for a shape he couldn't see, and found her, and stopped.

"Hey," he said. Very quietly, like he didn't want the room hearing it.

"Hey. It's you." He scratched behind her ears. His hand shook a little. He'd only managed it once before, since the eyes went, carefully, like he wasn't sure he'd get another chance.

"Tomorrow," Corin said, quiet, mostly to the top of her head.

"The soldiers are taking us out in the morning." She didn't understand tomorrow the way he meant it. She understood leaving well enough by now. His hand kept moving over her fur, slow, like he hadn't decided to stop yet. He wanted to say something else, but he stopped himself from saying anything. Corin's hand went still. He found the shoulder in front of him again and held on, and let it lead him toward the door behind the man in the fur collar.

She was still sitting there, tail curled tight around her paws, when the pale square opened in front of her again. She went very still. [SYSTEM] Territory: The Guild Hall Registered members: 210 (−1) She stared at the number a long moment. She'd chased it off before. It had gone, and stayed gone, long enough that she'd stopped watching for it. Now it was back, and something in her chest had already gone cold and small in its place.