Chương 46: CHAPTER FORTY-SIX: HARGROVE SEES GREYHOLD

Hargrove had been in Greyhold for a week before he said what he thought. He said it to Marcus in the study on the last evening before his return, sitting across the desk with a cup of the grain infusion that he had accepted without comment on his first morning and had been drinking every day since without apparent enthusiasm or objection.

"The school," he said.

"Yes," Marcus said.

"Danny runs the Thursday sessions."

"He does."

"He's twelve years old."

"In that body, yes."

"I watched the Thursday session," Hargrove said.

"I sat in the back. He doesn't know I was there."

"He probably knows," Marcus said.

"He notices most things." Hargrove considered this.

"He's going to be someone," he said, with the flat economy of someone making an assessment rather than a compliment.

"He already is someone," Marcus said.

"He's going to be someone important," Hargrove said, clarifying.

"The kind of important that affects things beyond this territory."

"I know," Marcus said. Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"You've been building toward that." It was not quite a question but Marcus answered it.

"I've been building toward him having what he needs to become whatever he's going to become," he said.

"The building toward is his." Hargrove turned the cup in his hands.

"The clinic," he said.

"The mortality numbers Okafor showed me."

"Yes."

"The baseline versus the current figures." He paused.

"That's not administration. That's not governance. That's something else."

"It's medicine," Marcus said.

"Applied systematically in a context that had never had it applied that way before."

"It's lives," Hargrove said.

"Specific people alive who should statistically be dead." He paused again.

"I've been thinking about that since she showed me."

"It's the point," Marcus said.

"All of this—" he gestured vaguely, encompassing the castle and the town and the forge and the school "—is toward that. People alive who should be dead. People doing things they couldn't do before. People with rights and protections that didn't exist. That's the point." Hargrove looked at him steadily.

"You're twenty-five years old," he said.

"Twenty-six now," Marcus said.

"The anniversary was last month."

"Twenty-six," Hargrove said.

"And you've been building this for eighteen months." He paused.

"When I was twenty-six I was a second lieutenant who thought he understood command and didn't."

"I don't understand it either," Marcus said.

"I'm doing the best I can with what I have."

"That's what command is," Hargrove said.

"I didn't understand that at twenty-six. I learned it around forty." He looked at the cup again.

"I'll send you ten soldiers," he said.

"My best ten. They'll integrate with Hollis's garrison." He paused.

"And I'll come to the next council session."

"Thank you," Marcus said.

"Don't thank me," Hargrove said.

"I'm not doing it for you. I'm doing it because you're right and I'm tired of building alone." He stood, with the economy of motion of a man who was done with the conversation and had said what he came to say.

"I'll be back in three months." Marcus walked him to the courtyard. They shook hands in the morning that was not quite morning yet, the summer dark just beginning to grey at the edges.

"Sir," Marcus said.

"Cole," Hargrove said, and rode south. Marcus stood in the courtyard for a moment, listening to the hoofbeats fade, and then went back inside to the work.