The Job Change

It was raining on the third morning and they were eating.

That was the whole of the setting and he would remember it with unreasonable precision for the rest of his life: the room over the stable, the rain going on the roof in the steady way it went in that season, the kettle on its hook doing what it did, and four people at a long table getting through the first meal of the day without much conversation.

Poppy was complaining about the rain. Itta had come up early, which she did now, and was eating with her bow across her knees because there was nowhere else to put it. Maren had the ledger out and was doing something with numbers.

Alaric was eating bread.

The panel opened without a sound.

* * * *

[CLASS TRIAL AVAILABLE]

It sat in front of him at the table, at eye height, angled toward him.

He looked at it for a moment before he did anything else, because he had learned to notice the way a thing arrived.

This one had arrived the way the very first ones had. No chime. No small sound requesting his attention. It had simply unfolded, in the middle of breakfast, in the way that a thing unfolds when it does not consider that it is interrupting anything.

He put the bread down.

* * * *

The terms were short.

TRAVEL NORTH.
SLAUGHTER THE GOBLIN LEADER.
RETURN.

Below that, a location that was not a name, but a set of directions expressed as a distance and a bearing, which was itself unusual, because everything else he had ever been sent to had been called something.

Below that, nothing.

* * * *

He read it four times looking for the rest of it.

That was not an exaggeration and he counted. Four full readings, top to bottom, including the bearing, looking for the part he had missed.

Because there was always more. Every posting he had ever taken had come with the surrounding material: who wanted it done, why, what the payment was, what the risk was assessed at, whether a party was recommended, what he should do when he got there and who he should speak to.

The Ashfield one had told him to speak to the reeve and that she would tell him what was needed.

This told him to travel north and slaughter something and come back.

There was no rest of it.

He read it a fifth time, which he did not count, and then said, "There is a thing on my panel."

* * * *

Everybody stopped.

That was the part he had not anticipated. He had expected to have to explain it. Instead Poppy went entirely still with a spoon halfway up, and Itta stopped eating, and Maren closed the ledger.

"Say it," said Maren.

"Class trial."

Poppy made a noise.

Maren did not react at all for about two seconds, which he had learned was what she did instead of reacting, and then said, "Read it out."

He read it out.

Nobody said anything when he had finished.

Itta looked at Maren. That was the thing he noticed and could not interpret: Itta, who looked at almost nothing, looked directly at Maren for about a second and a half, and Maren did not look back.

* * * *

Then the trial issued the equipment.

It did it without asking, in the way of everything that morning. The panel folded itself down into a single line, and the line said [TRIAL EQUIPMENT ISSUED], and there was a weight on the table that had not been on the table.

All of it at once. Plate, in pieces, laid out in the order it went on.

Poppy said, "Oh," in a small voice.

* * * *

The equipment was absurd.

That was apparent before he touched any of it, and it was apparent to everybody in the room simultaneously.

It was built for something a full head taller than him. The breastplate alone was the size of a barrel end. The pauldrons had the proportions of things intended to sit on shoulders that did not exist in that room, and the greaves were long enough that he could see, without measuring, that they were going to reach places on him that greaves do not go.

It was also, he registered under the absurdity, extremely good.

He knew a little about kit by then. Four months of watching Maren maintain hers had taught him what care looked like and what its absence looked like. The plate on that table had been made by somebody who had taken it seriously, and it had been kept by somebody who had taken it seriously, and there was no rust anywhere on it at all.

"Put it on," said Poppy, already grinning. "Put it on, put it on."

* * * *

He put it on.

It took about six minutes and required assistance twice, and by the end of it the room had gone entirely quiet in a way that had nothing to do with what he expected.

The straps were at their last hole.

Every single one of them. Waist, shoulders, both vambraces. He had let them all out to the end of their travel and they were still loose, and there was nowhere further to go, and the whole assembly sat on him with about a finger of play in it in every direction.

The breastplate threw a shadow across the floorboards the size of an argument.

He looked down at himself.

He looked like a child's drawing of a hero. That was the phrase that arrived and it was accurate: the proportions were the proportions a person invents when they are not looking at a real body, all of it slightly too big for the thing inside it.

* * * *

Poppy laughed until she had to sit down on the floor.

She got a few seconds into it before her legs went, and she sat down where she had been standing, with her back against the table leg, and made a sound he had not heard her make before.

"You look," she said, and could not finish it.

She tried twice more.

The third attempt got as far as "like a spoon," which was not obviously funny and which set her off worse than either of the first two, and she put her head on her knees and stayed there for some time.

Itta was smiling. That was rare enough that Alaric noticed it through his own embarrassment.

He bore it. He had discovered months ago that being laughed at by Poppy cost him nothing at all, and it had been true then and it was true now, and he stood in the middle of a floor in a stranger's plate and let it happen.

* * * *

Maren did not laugh.

He noticed it at about the point Poppy's legs gave out, and he noticed it because everything else in the room was making noise.

She was standing at the end of the table with her hand still on the closed ledger.

She was looking at him.

Not at the absurdity. He could tell the difference by then, because he had been looked at with amusement by three people that week and this was not the shape of it. She was looking at the plate, and specifically at where it sat, and her eyes were going over the joints in a particular order.

Shoulders. Waist. The set of the breastplate against his ribs.

Then she came over.

* * * *

She worked the buckles without being asked.

She did not say anything about doing it. She simply arrived in front of him and started at the waist, and her hands went where hands go, from six thousand repetitions, without looking at what they were doing.

He had watched her do this to Poppy perhaps forty times. He had watched her do it to Itta twice. He had had it done to himself once, at a breakfast table, when she had reached over and squared the hang of his baldric mid-sentence without pausing what she was saying.

She was not saying anything now.

She drew the waist strap up a hole. It had been at the last one; she found half a hole's worth of leather that he had not known was there, and worked the tongue into it, and the whole assembly settled downward about an inch and stopped being loose at the middle.

Then she did the left shoulder.

Then the right.

Then she stepped back.

* * * *

"It is a finger loose in the shoulder," she said.

That was all of it.

He looked down. She was correct. Everything else on him had come in. The waist had come in, and the vambraces had come in, and the greaves were long but the greaves were always long on everybody.

The shoulders were a finger loose.

That was the entire remaining discrepancy between a suit of plate built for a man a full head taller and the body of a Level 12 with four months of contracts on him, and Maren had found it and closed everything else and had stated the remainder out loud in eight words.

Poppy, from the floor, said, "That's not right."

"No," said Maren.

* * * *

Then she said nothing else at all.

He waited. He was expecting something further, because there was obviously something further, and because no was not a sentence and she had left it standing there on its own.

She did not add to it.

Something went across her face while he was watching. He was looking directly at her and he saw it happen and he could not name it, and he would try to name it several times over the following four days and would fail every time.

It was not amusement, which was what Poppy's face was doing.

It was not concern, which was a thing he had seen on her twice and knew the shape of.

Whatever it was, it arrived and stayed for about a second and then was put away, and the putting away was deliberate and he saw that too.

She turned away.

* * * *

She hung the whetstone up early.

That was the detail he took north with him.

The sharpening had a time. It was the last thing in the evening and it went on for as long as it went on and was never abbreviated because somebody was waiting, and he had spent four months in a room where the whetstone had been the clock.

She had barely started that morning. He had heard perhaps six strokes over the course of breakfast.

She crossed the room, and put the stone on its peg, and put the blade in the rack.

Then she said something about the roof needing looking at before winter and went down the outside stair into the rain, and did not come back up for two hours.

* * * *

Poppy got up off the floor eventually and made him turn round twice.

She was still delighted. She wanted to know whether he could raise his arms above his head, and he could, and this produced a fresh collapse. She wanted to know whether it made a noise when he walked, and it did, and that was worse.

Itta said, "It suits you well," which was four words and was the only compliment he received that day, and which he suspected was not entirely a joke.

He took the plate off, which took less time than putting it on, and laid it out on the table in the order it had come off.

He looked at it lying there.

It was very good kit. It had been made for somebody and kept for somebody and issued to him by a panel that had not explained itself, and there was no rust on it anywhere.

He did not know where it had come from.

He would think about that on the road, at some length, and would arrive at no answer at all, and would put it in the collection with everything else.

* * * *

He went down to the yard in the evening and found Maren looking at the roof.

She was not looking at the roof.

She was standing in the rain with her arms folded, facing the stable, at an angle from which the roof was not visible, and she had been there for a while.

He stopped at the bottom of the stair.

"Four days north," he said, because it was the only thing he had.

"Four days," she agreed.

Neither of them said anything for a while.

Then Maren said, "Take the potions."

"I always take the potions."

"Take them anyway."

He said he would.

She nodded, and went past him up the stair, and put her hand briefly on the doorframe on the way in, which was Itta's gesture and not hers, and which he had never once seen her do.