Wood for Winter

Ashfield was smaller than Grennet and had no wall at all.

He came down into it in the middle of the morning, a day later than the map had suggested, with his boots dry and his shin still faintly aching and six slimes behind him.

Twenty houses. A mill that was not working. A long open-sided shed with a roof and no walls, which he later learned was the thing the whole village was arranged around, and which was at that moment about a third full.

The reeve was a woman of about fifty with an arm in a sling and an expression of somebody doing arithmetic she did not like the answer to.

She looked at the sword. She looked at him.

"You're the one from the hall."

"Yes," said Alaric, and found that saying yes to a thing that was true about him was itself a small pleasure.

* * * *

The village wanted timber before the cold.

That was the whole of it. The shed needed to be full by the first hard frost, and the shed was a third full, and the frost was a matter of weeks. She explained it to him standing in the shed with her good hand on a stacked cord, and the explanation was complete in about forty seconds.

Nobody explained why they could not cut it themselves.

He could see reasons if he went looking. The reeve had an arm in a sling. There were perhaps nine adults in the village and four of them were doing something to the mill. Two of the houses had their shutters closed in the middle of a working morning, which he did not know how to read.

But nobody offered a reason, and it did not occur to him to ask for one.

He had been given a thing to do by a description written in plain language, and the description had said she will tell you what is needed, and she had told him.

That was, so far as he understood the world, the entire mechanism.

* * * *

He worked.

The reeve took him up the slope to the standing timber and showed him which trees, marking them with a smear of blue clay, and gave him an axe out of the shed and left him to it.

He had never held an axe.

He established that carefully, standing in the trees with the thing in his hands, because it had become important to him to know which of his abilities were his and which had been installed by somebody who was not available for questions.

He had never held an axe. There was nothing in him that said otherwise.

But his hands knew what to do with weight.

That was the finding, and it arrived in the first few swings. The axe was heavy at the head and light at the handle and wanted to travel in a particular arc, and his hands did not fight the arc. They found where the weight wanted to go and then arrived slightly ahead of it, so that the head was doing most of the work and he was mostly steering.

He had a bad third swing, where he tried to force it, and the shock came back up the handle into his elbow and taught him not to.

After that he did not force anything.

By the twentieth swing he had stopped thinking about the axe at all, which he registered somewhere around the fortieth. He had spent two days being unable to do anything without watching himself do it. Here was a task that did not require watching. His hands had it, and his hands were not going to explain, and for once he did not want them to, because the not-explaining was leaving him free to look at the trees.

* * * *

He found a rhythm inside the first hour.

It was not a decision. It assembled itself out of the work, the way the work suggested it: lift, swing, recover, set the feet, lift.

And underneath the rhythm, low, in his breath, the counting.

One count. Two count.

It fitted so exactly that he did not notice for some minutes that it had started. When he did notice, he stopped, deliberately, to see what would happen.

The work got harder.

Not physically harder. Longer. Without the count it became one enormous continuous thing, a slope of trees and an unfilled shed and an unknown number of days, and his arms began arguing with him about the total.

He started the count again and the total went away.

That was how it worked. He understood the mechanism by the middle of the first afternoon and found it entirely remarkable. The counting did not make him stronger. It cut the work into pieces the size of one swing, and a piece the size of one swing was always survivable, and if every piece was survivable then the total could look after itself.

He did not question where it came from.

He had tried that twice now and got nothing both times, and had begun, without formalising it, to treat the counting as weather.

He did notice one thing, late in the afternoon, and filed it without conclusion.

The count did not go past ten.

It went to ten and then it started again. Not because he stopped it there. It simply arrived at ten and turned over, the way a thing turns over when it has reached the end of what it is, and he had no idea whether that was significant or whether ten was just a number that a mouth gets tired at.

* * * *

He slept in the shed the first night, in the third that was full, on a bed of split lengths that smelled of resin and cold.

He woke before anybody and went back up the slope in the grey, and had a tree down before the village had properly started.

He worked all of the second day.

At some point in the afternoon a man came up the slope with water and stayed to watch for a while, which Alaric found he did not mind.

The man was perhaps sixty and had the reeve's jaw, and he watched the whole business of a tree coming down without saying anything, and then said:

"You work like somebody used to carrying."

Alaric considered that.

"Yes," he said.

He had no grounds whatsoever for agreeing. He had no evidence of ever having carried anything. He had two and a half days of continuous memory and a pack he had been given, and nothing in any of it involved a load.

He agreed anyway, because the sentence had gone into him and settled somewhere and the settling had felt like recognition, and because saying yes to it was easier than the alternative, which would have been explaining.

The man nodded and took the empty water pail and went back down the slope.

Alaric stood in the trees for a moment afterward.

Used to carrying.

He turned it over. Then he put it in the place where he was putting things now, which was a growing collection of statements about himself made by other people, none of which he could verify and all of which appeared to be true.

Then he picked up the axe, because the shed was two thirds full and the light was going.

* * * *

The bar filled on the second evening.

He was not watching it. That was the thing he would tell Poppy about later, badly, and she would not understand why it mattered.

He had stopped watching it after the fourth slime, because watching it had turned out to be like watching a candle burn down: technically it was happening and there was nothing to see. He had checked it that morning and it had been perhaps a third along and he had closed the card and gone to work.

He was stacking. Last load of the day, arms full, walking the split lengths from the sledge to the pile at the shed's east end.

He put the load down.

And the bar filled and turned over.

* * * *

The light came up around him.

It came from underneath, or from nowhere, or from him, and it was warm and it was entire and it went through the whole of him at once like a thing being confirmed.

He stood in an open-sided shed in a village of twenty houses with sawdust on his forearms and his hands still curled in the shape of the load he had just set down, and the light held for about two seconds and then went.

[LEVEL 2]

* * * *

He grinned at a woodpile like a simpleton.

There was no other description available. He stood there with his face doing something entirely outside his control, at a stack of split lengths, in the dark of an open shed, and he did not care in the slightest who saw it.

Two people did see it.

The reeve, from the door of her house across the way, who had come out to see what the light had been. And the man with the reeve's jaw, who was closing a shutter and who paused with his hand on it.

Neither of them said anything.

Alaric would think about that later and conclude, correctly, that they had seen it before.

Not from him. From others. Whatever the light was, it happened in this village occasionally, to people who came through it doing work, and the village had a settled and unexcited relationship with it.

He found that he minded slightly, and could not defend minding, and let it go.

* * * *

Then a second prompt.

[STAT POINTS AVAILABLE: 5]

Below it, four names. STRENGTH. AGILITY. VITALITY. INTELLIGENCE.

Each with a number beside it and a small mark he could press to make the number go up.

He stood in the shed and looked at it for a considerable time.

He could not rank them.

That was the difficulty, and it was total. He knew what the words meant in the ordinary sense. He did not know what any of them would do to him. He had no way to find out. Nothing on the pane explained the relationship between a number going up and a man being different, and nothing in his experience gave him a basis for preferring one kind of different to another.

He tried to reason about it and got as far as noticing that he had been hit on the shin by a slime and had not enjoyed it, which was one data point and pointed vaguely at two of the four.

He looked at the list again.

STRENGTH was at the top. He had five points. There were four names.

He noticed himself about to distribute them, one here and two there, in a way that would have been entirely arbitrary and would have produced four numbers that were all slightly bigger, and he stopped.

Arbitrary in four places was worse than arbitrary in one. If he was going to guess, he should guess once and guess large, so that whatever happened would be big enough to notice.

That was actual reasoning and he was rather pleased with it.

So he looked at the list to pick the top one, and his hand went to VITALITY.

* * * *

He noticed afterward that VITALITY was not at the top.

STRENGTH was at the top. He had gone past it, and past AGILITY, and landed on the third one, and had pressed it five times before any of this occurred to him.

He examined that for a moment, standing in the shed with the prompt closing itself away.

He could not produce a reason. He had not been thinking about the shin. He had not been thinking about anything; his hand had gone where his hand went, the way it went to a sword grip and an axe handle and a bucket rope at a well.

It was possible that the hand knew something.

It was equally possible that he had simply misread a list in bad light.

He decided, quietly and without any grounds at all, that he was pleased with it.

There was, he thought, a difference between a choice made badly and a choice made by something in you that has better information than you do. He had no way to tell which this was.

But he had five points and had put them somewhere, and the somewhere was decided, and undeciding it was not on the pane.

[STRENGTH 5 | AGILITY 5 | VITALITY 10 | INTELLIGENCE 5]

He closed the card and went to find somewhere to sleep, and the shed was two thirds full, and there were three days of trees left on the slope.

He was up before the reeve in the morning.

His arms hurt in a way that was entirely new and that he found, on inspection, he did not mind at all.