Chương 5: CHAPTER FIVE: COPPERMILL

They rode north the next day — Marcus and Perrin and two garrison soldiers whose names Marcus had by now learned along with their service history, their family situations, and their opinions on the garrison's training schedule, all of which he'd gathered through the natural conversation of people riding together through cold autumn air. Coppermill announced itself before it appeared: the sound of hammering, rhythmic and purposeful, carrying through the trees on the north wind. The smithy.

Marcus had been told it was good work, and the quality of the sound suggested it — even tempo, confident strikes, the specific music of someone who knew what they were doing with iron. The village itself was perhaps two hundred souls, arranged around the mill that gave it its name and the forge that had made it prosperous in a modest way. Neat houses by the standards of the period, gardens well-tended before the frost, a small square with a well and a trader's board where notices could be posted.

Marcus did what he'd come to do: spoke to the headman, listened to the winter concerns (a dispute over water rights upstream, a question about the road maintenance between Coppermill and Greyhold that had been promised and not delivered), made reasonable and honest responses. The headman was satisfied. The village visibly relaxed when it became apparent the castellan was not there to collect anything or impose anything but simply to listen. Marcus noted that reaction carefully.

It said something about the previous administration's character. He found Danny Reyes in the smithy. He wasn't looking for him specifically — he was looking for the boot prints' owner, which meant he was looking for anyone whose behavior had the specific texture of a modern mind in a pre-modern body.

He had a list of indicators: vocabulary slightly out of period, organizational instincts that exceeded what the person's ostensible background would explain, the specific quality of someone adapting back to training rather than learning forward from scratch. He found what he was looking for in the corner of the smithy, watching the forge.

A boy of perhaps nine years old, sitting on an upturned crate in the far corner where the firelight reached but the heat didn't quite, with a piece of charred wood in his hand and a section of the stone floor in front of him that had been turned into a calculating surface. The calculations were long division. The method was chunking — breaking the divisor into convenient component parts, solving piece by piece, assembling the result. A perfectly correct modern method. Not a medieval method.

Not a method that anyone in Coppermill should know. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site. Marcus watched him for sixty seconds. The boy didn't look up. He was absorbed in the problem the way people were absorbed in problems when they were genuinely interested in solutions rather than performing the appearance of interest. He was quick. Very quick. The calculation he was working through would have given Marcus pause, and Marcus had always been comfortable with numbers.

"Good arithmetic," Marcus said, in English, very quietly. The boy went absolutely still. Not the stillness of a child who has been startled. The stillness of a person who has heard a word they had given up expecting to hear. He looked up slowly. His face was a child's face — round, open, in the process of the transition from baby features to the sharper lines of later childhood. But the eyes were not a child's eyes.

The eyes were looking at Marcus with an assessment that no nine-year-old should be capable of and that Marcus recognized, with a jolt that ran from his sternum down to his feet, as the assessment of a soldier recognizing a superior.

"What's your name?" Marcus asked, in the local language, with a calm he was carefully maintaining. The boy blinked. Shifted. Became, briefly, a nine-year-old again.

"Danny," he said. And then, very quietly, looking past Marcus to make sure the smith was occupied and the other soldiers were outside, he said — in English, in the voice of a nine-year-old that nonetheless carried the inflection of someone considerably older: "Sir." Marcus looked at him for a long moment. Everything he wanted to say — everything that needed to be said, all the questions and the relief and the impossible complexity of this situation — he set aside. Not now. Not here.

"How old are you, Danny?" he said, in the local language, loudly enough for anyone nearby to hear.

"Nine, my lord," Danny said, matching the register perfectly.

"I turned nine in the summer."

"And you're good with numbers."

"My da says I'm too clever for my own good," Danny said, with the practiced ease of a kid who had given this answer enough times to make it natural. Brennan the smith was approaching, drawn by the sound of the lordly voice in his workplace, and Marcus turned to meet him with the easy authority of a man conducting a legitimate inspection. He spent ten minutes talking to Brennan about iron quality and the possibility of a garrison contract. Good iron. Reliable work.

The man was proud of his craft in the way of craftspeople who had good reason to be proud. When Marcus left the smithy, he carried with him: a preliminary agreement for a metalwork contract, a reason to invite Brennan to Greyhold to discuss specifications, and the knowledge that PFC Danny Reyes was alive, functional, nine years old, and living in a blacksmith's family that apparently cared for him.

He mounted his horse and rode toward the next village and did not allow his face to show any of what he was feeling, because Perrin was watching and Perrin was perceptive, and there would be time for feeling things later. Right now he had two more villages to inspect and a winter to prepare for.