Damage

The contract went wrong because of the ground.

It was a straightforward posting, and Maren had read it and had not objected, which was the closest thing the guild had to an assessment. Something was killing sheep on a holding an hour north of Grennet. The farmer wanted it stopped. The payment was reasonable and the tag on the thing, when they eventually found it, was yellow.

Yellow meant think.

They thought. They spent twenty minutes on the approach, and Maren put them where she wanted them, and none of it mattered, because it had rained for two days and the field was mud on top of clay.

Alaric found that out with his back foot at the worst possible moment.

* * * *

Something got inside his guard.

He never worked out afterward exactly how. He had the shape of it: his foot went, and he corrected, and the correction took his blade out of line for about a third of a second, and the thing came through the gap that the third of a second had made.

He was not certain it had aimed for the gap. It may have simply been coming forward.

The result was the same.

It opened him from the collarbone down across the chest to the sternum, in one motion, and he heard it happen before he felt it, which was a distinction he had not previously known existed.

* * * *

The pain was enormous.

That was the first thing and it was total. It arrived without any interval at all, filling him from the inside out, and it was not like the slime and it was not like the boar.

Both of those had been impacts. Something had struck him and the striking had hurt and then the hurting had settled into a bruise that reported for duty at intervals.

This was different in kind. This was open. There was a part of him that had been closed since he had existed and it was now not closed, and everything in his body was screaming about it at once and none of it was screaming usefully.

And it was his.

That was the part he kept afterward. Not the pain. The ownership of it.

Nothing else in his existence had been unarguably his. The name had come off a wheel. The sword had been in the grass. The map, the quests, the arrow, the counting, all of it had arrived from outside with no provenance and no explanation.

This had not come from anywhere. It was happening inside him, to him, without a pane and without a label, and no part of it was borrowed.

He went down in the mud thinking, with great clarity, this is mine.

* * * *

He stayed down.

That was the second thing and it was worse.

He tried to get up. He had got up from the boar almost at once and he tried the same motion with the same intention, and his body declined.

Not out of weakness. It simply did not do it. The instruction went out and nothing came back, the way pressing a grey word produced nothing, and he lay on his side in cold mud with his knees drawn up and understood that something had changed about what he was allowed to do.

And the wound did not close.

He was watching it. He had his hand on it, and blood was coming through his fingers at a rate he did not have a scale for, and he waited for the thing that had happened with the bruises.

The bruises had gone away. Slowly, over hours, but they had gone. Something in the world had taken them off him.

Nothing came for this.

* * * *

He was at the edge of understanding something enormous about himself when Poppy arrived.

It was assembling in him as he lay there. Not in words. In shape.

The bruises going away had been a thing the world did. The bar filling had been a thing the world did. The light coming up around him in a shed had been a thing the world did. Everything so far had been the world doing things to him, and he had been carried along by it, and the being-carried had felt, without his ever examining it, like a guarantee.

This was the world not doing anything.

And underneath that, arriving, was the real one, the one he never got to finish, which was that there might be a limit somewhere, and that he did not know where it was, and that he had been walking around for a fortnight assuming there was not one.

Then Poppy was in the mud beside him shouting, and the shouting was not at him.

* * * *

She got a potion into him.

He did not see where it came from. She had his jaw in one hand and the vial in the other and she got it in and got his chin up, and he swallowed because she made him, and she was talking the entire time in a register he had never heard from her.

Then she put both hands flat on his chest, over the wound, over her own sleeves, and leaned.

Maren finished the thing in the field. He did not see any of it. He heard it end.

* * * *

The wound shut while he watched.

That was the third thing and it was the worst of all of them.

It took perhaps four seconds. He was looking down his own chest, past Poppy's hands, at an opening in himself that went from the collarbone to the sternum and that was the largest fact in the world.

And the edges came together.

Not healed. Not knitted, not scabbed, not closed the way a thing closes over days while you are not looking. The two sides of it moved toward each other and met and there was no longer a line there, and the blood on his chest stayed where it was, on skin that had nothing under it.

Poppy took her hands away.

Alaric lay in cold mud in a wet field and looked at his own unbroken chest with blood all over it, and the pain went out of him at the same rate the edges had come together, and by the fourth second there was nothing wrong with him at all.

* * * *

He could not make the two facts sit in the same head.

Fact one: something had gone into him and opened him, and it had been the most real thing that had ever happened to him, and it had been unarguably and entirely his.

Fact two: it had been undone in four seconds by a small bottle.

He lay there working at it while Poppy was still checking him over and swearing at him.

If the wound could be undone, then the wound had not been what he thought it was. It had been a state. Something that could be entered and left. A condition of his body that had been changed and had then been changed back, the way a number on a card could go up.

And if that was true of the wound, then it had been true of the pain, and the pain was the only thing he had ever been certain belonged to him.

He got up eventually.

There was nothing to stop him. He was entirely well. He stood in a wet field, filthy and bloody and undamaged, and did not feel like a man who had been saved.

He felt like a man who had been corrected.

Maren came back across the field wiping her blade on a handful of grass, and looked at the blood, and then at the skin under it, and said nothing at all. He would learn later that this was what she said when a thing had been worse than it looked.

* * * *

They put him on the cart because Maren said to.

He did not argue. He sat on the boards with his back against the rail and looked at the road going away behind them and did not say anything for about a mile.

Then Maren, from the front, without turning round, said:

"Why did you not drink one of your own?"

Alaric opened his mouth.

Nothing came out.

* * * *

He had no answer.

He went looking for one, because a question deserved a real answer and because he had been asked, and the looking took him somewhere unpleasant.

It was not that he had forgotten. Forgetting would have been ordinary and he could have said so.

It was not that he had none. He had two, in his pack, bought a week ago on Poppy's insistence, on the grounds that everybody carried them and it was stupid not to. He knew exactly where they were.

It was that at no point, in the entire sequence, from the foot going out to the mud to the four seconds of watching himself close, had the thought presented itself.

He had lain on the ground bleeding and had thought about the world's guarantee and about whether there was a limit and about the ownership of pain, and had not once thought there is a bottle in my pack.

The potions had been a thing you carried.

They had not been a thing that applied to him.

He could not explain the shape of that. He turned it over on the cart for the rest of the hour and could not get underneath it. It was not a belief. He did not believe he was exempt. If anybody had asked him directly whether a potion would work on him, he would have said yes without hesitation.

Something further down had simply never filed him under the same heading as the rules.

"I do not know," he said, eventually, to Maren's back.

"Mm," said Maren.

* * * *

He bought three potions the next morning.

He did it before breakfast, at the stall by the fountain, and he bought three rather than two because two was what he had already failed to use and three felt like a different number.

Then he sat on the fountain edge and did the other thing, which was the part that mattered.

He worked out where they would go.

Not in the pack. The pack came off, and had come off in that field, and he had watched it lying six feet away while he was on the ground. A thing in the pack was a thing he had to get to.

He fixed a place on his belt. Left side, forward of the hip, where his hand went without travelling. He put them in it and he took them out and he put them back, and he did it eleven times sitting on the edge of a fountain in the early morning, until the hand went there on its own without being sent.

Poppy came past halfway through and asked what he was doing.

"Learning where they are," said Alaric.

She looked at him for a moment.

"That's not a bad idea, actually," she said, and went to get bread, and did not do it herself, and never would.

* * * *

He carried them everywhere after that.

Every day. Every contract. On the road, in the hall, asleep in a rented room with the belt over the back of a chair where he could reach it.

He checked them without looking, in the way his hand had learned that morning, so often that it stopped being a check and became something his fingers did while he was thinking about other things.

He did not use them.

Not that month, or the month after. Not on the days when he took a bad hit and worked through it, or the evening he came back off a contract with his shoulder wrong and let Poppy make a fuss and did not reach for his belt while she was doing it.

He would tell himself, when he thought about it at all, that he was keeping them for when it was actually bad.

That was true, and it was not the reason.

The reason was that somewhere underneath everything, in a place he had reached for twice and found nothing in, he had not yet been persuaded that he was the kind of thing they worked on.