What a Guild Is

The hall was a room over a stable.

Maren called it the hall. Poppy called it the stable, at every opportunity, with an emphasis that had clearly been worn smooth by long use and that Maren no longer responded to.

It was reached by an outside stair with a bad third step. It had one long table, four chairs of which two matched, a stove, a set of pegs on the north wall, and a smell of hay and horse coming up through the boards which nobody mentioned because there was nothing to be done about it.

Alaric stood in the middle of it on the first evening and thought it was magnificent.

He did not say so.

He had by then developed enough sense to know that saying so would produce a look, and he had a rule about looks.

* * * *

The kettle did not work.

It hung on a hook over the stove and it would not boil properly. It got to the edge of boiling and stayed there, rattling its lid, and dribbled down its own belly onto the stone, and produced tea that was hot without ever having been actually hot.

It had been doing this for some years.

Nobody fixed it. He established that within about a day, and it was one of the first genuine social facts he ever acquired: the kettle was broken, everybody knew the kettle was broken, everybody used the kettle, and any suggestion of doing something about it would have been received as an odd thing to say.

He filed it.

He would understand it eventually. Not that week.

* * * *

The rules came out over the first evening, in pieces, mostly through Poppy, with Maren supplying the corrections.

Contracts split evenly. That was the first one and Poppy delivered it as though it were obvious.

"Even how?" said Alaric.

"Even. Same. Everybody gets the same."

He turned that over. "Regardless of what they did?"

"Regardless of what they did," said Maren, from the table.

He thought about that for long enough that Poppy started explaining it again in different words, which was not necessary, because he had understood it the first time. He had been examining it rather than failing to grasp it.

He could see the argument against. It was obvious and it was strong. Somebody would do more. Somebody would do less. Somebody would carry the weight of a bad afternoon and be paid the same as somebody who had stood at the back.

And he could see, dimly, that this was the point, and could not yet articulate why.

He let it go and asked about dues.

* * * *

Dues were two bits a month.

"Nobody has ever paid on time," said Poppy, with some pride.

"I have paid on time," said Maren.

"Nobody interesting has ever paid on time."

The dues covered the room, and a share of the Charter House filing, and a small reserve that Maren kept in a box and would not discuss.

Alaric asked what the reserve was for.

"Things," said Maren.

He waited.

She did not elaborate, and he learned over the following fortnight that this was different from Poppy's version of not elaborating. Poppy's meant I do not want to talk about it. Maren's meant the answer is long and you will find out.

* * * *

The coin came on the eleventh day.

He had gone out on a contract with them, his first as a member: a clearing job at a mill three hours south, unremarkable, a morning's work and no injuries.

That evening Maren counted the payment onto the table in three stacks.

Then she pushed one of them across to him.

He looked at it.

It was the same height as the other two. He had established that at a glance, because he counted things, and the counting had told him before his understanding did.

"That is yours," said Maren.

He picked it up and held it in his hand, and it did not feel like his. It felt like something he was holding for somebody, and would shortly be asked to hand back, and he found that he was already braced for the asking.

"You did the north side," said Maren. "Poppy did the traps. I did the rest. It is the same money."

"Yes," said Alaric.

"It is yours," said Maren, a second time, in the flat unhurried way she said everything, watching him.

He put it in his purse.

He would think about that afterward, several times, including once at three in the morning: that she had said it twice, that she had not needed to say it twice, and that she had said it the second time while looking at his hands.

* * * *

Poppy explained stats that night, badly and at length.

She began with a comparison involving buckets which collapsed inside two sentences. She recovered with an analogy about a cart, which was going quite well until she attempted to make INTELLIGENCE be the horse, at which point it collapsed also.

Alaric followed all of it with total attention and understood approximately none of it.

Maren, without looking up from the strap she was oiling, said:

"They are numbers about your body. Bigger is more."

Nine words.

Alaric turned to her with an expression that Poppy would describe to people for years afterward.

* * * *

That was the thing that landed.

Numbers about his body.

He had put five points into VITALITY in a shed in Ashfield, on no basis whatsoever, because his hand had gone there. He had assumed, in an unexamined way, that the numbers were about his card. That they described the thing on the pane rather than the thing standing in the room.

He asked whether that meant he was different than he had been.

"Yes," said Maren.

"How different?"

"Depends what you put it in."

"I put five in VITALITY."

Maren stopped oiling the strap and looked at him properly for the first time that evening.

"All five."

"Yes."

"In one."

"Yes."

She did not say anything for a moment.

"That is not what most people do," she said, and went back to the strap, and Alaric could not tell whether he had been criticised or not and decided, after some thought, that he had not been.

* * * *

He tested it the following morning by standing still and letting a boar hit him.

He wants it on record that there was reasoning behind this.

The reasoning was: he had a claim, delivered by a reliable source, that a number on a pane was a fact about his body. He had no way to verify a claim about his body except by putting his body somewhere. And VITALITY, so far as he could reconstruct from Poppy's collapsed cart, had something to do with not being badly hurt.

The three of them were on a low contract in the scrub east of Grennet, thinning boars, which were yellow-tagged and which Maren said were beneath them and which paid.

He picked one at the edge of the group.

He walked into its line, set his feet, put his arms down, and waited.

It hit him.

* * * *

It was, everybody agreed afterward, extremely stupid.

Poppy agreed at length and at volume. Maren agreed once, briefly, at the point where Alaric was still on the ground getting his breathing back.

He had gone about six feet.

He got up.

That was the finding, and he got it while he was still doing it. He got up. Not immediately, and not gracefully, and his ribs told him about it for the rest of the week.

But he had been hit by a thing the size of a table, at speed, deliberately, and he had got up under his own power inside a few breaths, and something in him had absorbed the whole of it and passed the bill along in instalments rather than all at once.

He stood in the scrub with his hand on his side, doing arithmetic.

Five points. One number. A claim on a pane.

The claim was true.

* * * *

"Do not do that again," said Maren.

"No," said Alaric, who had no intention of doing it again, having got what he came for.

"Why did you do it once?"

He told her. All of it: the shed, the prompt, the four names he could not rank, the reasoning about guessing once and guessing large, the hand going to the third name for no reason he could produce.

She listened to the whole thing without interrupting, which Poppy did not manage.

At the end of it she said: "You could have asked."

And he opened his mouth to answer and found that he did not have one.

He had not thought of it. That was the whole of it. He had been alive for a fortnight and every problem he had ever had, he had solved by walking into it, because there had been nobody to ask, and the habit had outlived the circumstances by the better part of a week.

"Yes," he said. "I could have asked."

* * * *

He levelled twice in the fortnight.

[LEVEL 3]

The first came in a hedge, with a boar still kicking at the end of his sword, and he read it standing in the ditch with his boots full of water.

[LEVEL 4]

The second came at the long table, over soup, a full hour after the work that had earned it. Poppy said that was normal. Maren said it was not worth discussing, and passed the bread.

Contracts, mostly. Boars, a nest of something in a cellar, an escort that turned out to require no escorting. Small work, steady, unglamorous.

The first time the prompt came up he took it to Maren.

"Five points," he said. "Where?"

She thought about it for a moment, which he appreciated, because she could have answered instantly and instead she looked at how he stood and what he carried.

"Three vitality. Two strength."

"Why?"

She told him.

It took about a minute. It involved the fact that he stood in the front without being asked to, that he had reach and did not use it, that a body which is going to be hit ought to be able to be hit, and that strength moved slowly at low numbers and was not worth loading yet.

He did it.

The second time, a week later, he asked again, and got a different answer with different reasons, and did that too.

* * * *

He found that reasons were better than the top of a list.

That was the finding of the fortnight and it did not arrive as a revelation. It assembled quietly, over two prompts, and he noticed it on the stairs one evening.

A reason could be wrong. That was the part that interested him. Maren's answer might be a bad answer. He had no way to check it, and she might be mistaken, and it was still enormously better than his own method, which had been to look at a list in bad light and press whatever his hand landed on.

A guess produced a number.

A reason produced a number and an argument, and an argument could be examined later, and improved, and thrown away if it turned out to be wrong.

He had made four decisions in his life with any thought in them at all. He noted, on the bad third step, that all four had been better than the ones he had made without.

* * * *

Maren gave him the doctrine on the last evening of the fortnight, while sharpening.

He had asked what the guild was actually for. He had asked it badly, and had meant it in the sense of what are we, and Poppy had answered with a joke and gone downstairs.

Maren finished a stroke.

"We take small work," she said. "It pays less and it does not kill anybody. There is a great deal of it and nobody wants it, so it is always there."

Another stroke.

"We split even. That is because if the money follows the fighting then everybody fights, and the person who should have been watching the road is instead fighting, and then somebody dies on a job that paid four bits."

He had been about to ask that exact question a fortnight ago and had let it go. He sat with the answer arriving a fortnight late and fitting perfectly.

"And?" he said, because there was clearly an and.

Maren set the whetstone down.

"Nobody gets left behind in anything," she said. "Not a fight. Not a dungeon. Not a road at night. Anything."

She picked the whetstone back up.

"That one is not a policy. If you cannot do that one, you can have your two bits back and go."

Alaric sat at a long table in a room over a stable with a kettle rattling on a hook behind him.

"I can do that one," he said.

He did not know yet that he would need this.