Chương 42: Chapter 38 - My Little Sister Found the Flaw I Was Hiding

Calder Tannerson · Age about eight years He set Wrenna on the wood-stack and gave her the one job a shooter can't do himself.

"Watch where it hits," he said.

"Not the middle. Where it actually goes. Tell me after."

"Why can't you see it."

"Because I'm looking down the bolt. You're looking at the whole thing." He nocked, drew, let the breath run out, and put one low center into the straw man.

"That. Where'd it go?"

"The middle."

"Which part of the middle."

"The middle part of the middle." She swung her heels against the stack.

"This is boring. How long do you do this." He drew the next one with her voice still going and felt the shot spoil before he loosed it, the held breath jarred loose a half-beat early, and the bolt pulled wide right and stood in the butt-frame. He knew the fault the second it left the string. Not the bow. The breath, walked off its mark by a question landing in his ear at the wrong quarter-second.

"Quit it," he said.

"You're breaking my aim."

"I'm not touching you."

"You're talking. Same thing. Watch, don't talk." He reset. She lasted four bolts, which was three longer than he'd bet, and then a fairly large rat broke from the reed-edge at the fence corner, moving, low and quick along the line toward the yard. He came off the straw man before he decided to. The bow swung, the breath was already out, and there was no small voice in his ear for the half-second it took. He loosed. The bolt took the rat behind the shoulder and dropped it mid-stride, one clean stitch, no pull in it.

With nothing talking in his ear, the breath sat where it belonged and the shot went where he sent it. Wrenna came down off the wood-stack before the rat stopped kicking. She had it by the tail, holding it out at arm's length and turning it in the light, checking how the hide would take. The same look she gave a fresh strip of cord. Already hers.

"It's a big one," she said, delighted, and then she was gone, running for the house with the mostly-dead rat swinging from her fist.

"MAMA. Cal shot a BIG one, come see, it's THIS big." He lowered the bow. His kill was halfway to the house in a six-year-old's fist before he'd drawn a full breath after it. A trophy now. The clean shot already turned into something a small girl would tell at the supper table three times before the light went. Blue lifted her head from the fence-line, tracked the rat's exit and the girl's, and put it back down. Not worth a leg to chase what was already caught.

He gathered the clean bolts and left the two bent ones where they stood in the frame. Those he would read at the bench. The straw man could wait. One good shot on a moving mark proved a little, and a little was more than the straw man had given him all morning. ✦ He carried the bent heads to the bench, and his father made room without being asked. Bram worked leather at one end and let the boy have the other, the fire and the small anvil and the quench trough.

Cal set a head in the vise and found where it had failed.

"Throat's too thin," he said.

"Folded on the first hard hit."

"Mm." Bram did not look up from the leather.

"Everything you shave off one place shows up in another. Strap, seam, doesn't matter." Not at the point. At the throat, where the socket met the blade, the one seam he had made too thin chasing weight. Cut it to save an ounce and it folds on the first hard bone. You do not get to be surprised by the thing you designed in. He drew the next blank wider through the throat and left the point mean. Heated it, worked it, sank it hissing into the trough.

Pulled it and checked the seam against the light and set it aside and started the next, because one good head proved nothing and a dozen proved a method. This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Bram set down his awl. He picked one of the finished heads out of the row and turned it to the light, thumb running the wider throat once, slow, the way he checked his own seams. He set it back exact where it had been.

"That'll hold," he said.

"If it doesn't get pulled wrong." A pause, the leather forgotten under his hand.

"Where'd the cut come from, son?"

"Figured it out," Cal said. Bram nodded like that was an answer, and let it be one. That's the cost. He calls me son when he's just watched me do a thing, and every time, I can't tell him the twenty years the thing came from. He set another finished head in the row. Wider, meaner, made to hold. ✦ His mother caught him at the path, both hands still dusted with chalk from the morning's slates, and took him by the shoulder as she took hold of everything, all at once and sure of it.

"There you are, and muddy to the knee again, which means you were out before light and I'm not going to ask where, because a baby came in the night, over at Nessa's, a whole new mouth in that loom-house, and you are going to come and be introduced before the light goes and the day gets away from all of us." She turned him toward the path without letting go.

"New ones don't wait to be met."

"You were out where the traps are." Not a question. She had started it as one and let it go, and Cal heard the endearment she left off the end of it, the one that always came, missing now on purpose.

"Set those down, love. Dead things keep." She almost asks, every time, and every time she chooses me over the answer. He set the bolts down.

"Okay," Cal said. ✦ Nessa's house smelled of wet wool and lanolin and the loom going, and the baby was small and furious and entirely ordinary. His aunt put the cousin into his arms without ceremony, as she did everything.

"Can't keep a thing dry this season," she said over the loom.

"Thread swells, wood warps, and I could stand over it with a fire all night and lose it anyway."

"You could bank the fire low and leave it," Cal said.

"Dry heat all night. It's the wet air that swells the thread, not the cold." His aunt looked at him a moment, then laughed and said that was more sense than his uncle had given her all week. She went back to the loom warmer than before, because a thing said back to her was a thing tended. Cal held the small weight and felt the read run without being asked for, loom-tension and damp beams and the set of his aunt's shoulders, all of it, none of it needing him.

Running the engine over a room that asked nothing back was its own quiet tax, one he had not thought to price until it was spent. Nessa watched him hold the baby and stopped the loom.

"You've gone still," she said.

"You do that. Same as your mother when she's carrying too much and won't set it down." She started the shuttle again before he had to answer.

"Hold him. That's the whole job right now." ✦ Mateo walked them to where his world stopped, on the side road, the light going long and gold across the reeds and Blue ranging easy ahead. The boy had his words back. He had been getting them back the whole walk, the fear bleeding off into commentary.

"A marsh-rat can't plan, that's the thing, they don't, except that one clearly did, so either they can and nobody told the marsh-rats or that one's been keeping secrets, and I don't know which is worse." Then he stopped on his own, which the lord-boy almost never did, and looked at Cal a beat too long.

"You stop pretending when things get dangerous," Mateo said.

"You noticed that."

"I notice everything. It's the thing I'm for." He said it without the reaching that usually rode under his words, without the apology.

"You do the dangerous part. I watch the part you can't. That's the whole arrangement, and it's a good one." Not a question anywhere in it. The boy had spent the day inside the work and arrived at the thing under it, and instead of digging for what Cal was, he had handed over what he'd found and left it there. Something turned over warm in Cal's chest and came up faster than he could route down.

He knew the feeling from another life, the word for it caught below the sound and held, and holding it cost him, a wall gone thin where he spent the strength to keep the word off his face. He gave the boy the flat hand, low, the sign for hold. Mateo returned it, grinning, because for once he had been handed a thing instead of having to dig it out of the mud. The walk home he turned over the one thing that would not sit quiet.

The clever rat, coming last, on the one line his push had left open, at the angle a thing chooses when it has learned. He had reclaimed something today, control he had been without since the flood, a tool of his own making that put the killing back in his hands. But the control was provisional, and he knew the shape of provisional from a hundred structures that had held right up until they did not. The mana-touched one had not wandered into the chokepoint.

It had come last, on a line that read the ground he had shaped. Whether it found that line. Or whether something sent it to find where my line was. He had no proof of the second. He kept it anyway, unproven, where a thing he might need later lived. He carried the heads home at his back, a row of them wider and meaner and made to be found. He had chased a faster hand for three mornings and lost every time. He was done chasing. First light, he would lay the room.

Not another trap on the line for the clever thing to unwind. A shape in the ground it could read all it liked and still have to walk into, one open lane that looked like a gift, baited with the thing it wanted. Let it come reading. This time the board was his, and the boy had the eyes to watch it work.