Levels

Two months went by and he could not afterward account for most of them.

That was itself the notable thing, and he noticed it late. His first fortnight he could have reconstructed hour by hour. He had known where he was on every day of it and what he had learned and in what order.

Then somewhere after the cafe the days began arriving in batches.

Contracts. A great many contracts. Boars in the scrub, which never stopped paying and never started paying well. Rats in a granary at a farm south of the crossing, which took a night and a half and which Poppy declared the single most undignified job in the province, incorrectly, because there had been the thing with the drains.

Two escorts, both of which required no escorting at all and consisted entirely of walking beside a cart for a day being paid to exist.

A clearing job in a wood that had gone wrong for reasons nobody established and had cost them a day's pay in potions.

And the flooded quarry.

* * * *

The quarry was bad and everybody survived it and nobody enjoyed it.

It had rained for a week. The pit had taken the water and had not given it back, and something in the bottom of it had got braver as the level rose.

They went in at dusk because the contract said dusk and came out at three in the morning, and for most of those hours they were in water to the waist on a ledge nobody could see the edge of.

Itta shot in the dark, twice, on sound, and hit both times.

Maren held a corner for twenty minutes and did not report that she had been holding it until afterward, at which point Poppy became extremely loud about it for some time.

Alaric spent most of it doing exactly what he was told.

He came out of it with a bruise across the whole of his back and a considerably better understanding of what Maren meant by nobody left behind in anything, because at one point Poppy had gone under and the finding of her had not been quick.

Nobody talked about the quarry afterward, which he understood, eventually, was how the guild handled the ones that had been close.

* * * *

He climbed from five to nine and each rung took longer than the one before.

Five to six took nine days. Six to seven took two weeks. Six came in the granary at two in the morning, among the rats, and Poppy cheered it through a mouthful of dust. Seven came at a gate at the end of the second escort, paid out with the coin, for a day of walking beside a cart, and he found he did not mind in the least.

Seven to eight took most of a month and involved a period in the middle where he became convinced the bar had stopped moving entirely and had to be talked out of it by Poppy, who explained the curve badly, and then by Maren, who explained it in one sentence.

"It costs more every time and the work pays the same."

That was all of it. He turned it over for a day and found it correct.

The thing that changed was not the arithmetic. It was what he did about it.

His instinct, early, had been to resent the slowing. He had caught himself doing the sum on the road, working out how many boars a level was now, and finding the number offensive.

Somewhere in the second month he stopped doing that sum.

He did not decide to. He noticed one evening that he had not run it in a fortnight, and that the not-running had made the work considerably easier, and that he was now simply doing the day in front of him and letting the bar do whatever the bar did.

He felt the slowing. He did not resent it.

That was a change in him and it had happened without his permission, and it was the first one of those he had welcomed.

[LEVEL 8]

It came in the end off a thing in a drain, on a wet evening, with nobody watching.

* * * *

He learned to read a room before entering it.

That was Maren, and she did not teach it so much as demonstrate it a few hundred times until he began doing it involuntarily.

She never went through a door at pace. Not once, in two months, in any building of any kind. She stopped, at a distance, and looked at it, and the looking took between two and six seconds, and then she went in and the going in was fast.

He asked her about it once.

"What are you looking at?"

"Where the second one comes from," said Maren.

He started doing it. Badly at first, and self-consciously, standing outside doorways looking at them while Poppy walked past him into the room. Then less badly. Then, at some point he did not identify, not at all consciously, and he found himself pausing at the mouth of a cellar without having decided to and being unable to say what he had just checked.

* * * *

He learned to hold a line.

That was the thing he turned out to be built for, and it took him a month to accept it.

He had assumed, early, that the point of a fight was to hit things. Everything about a sword suggested it. It had taken him an embarrassing length of time to understand that his actual job, most days, was to be somewhere and keep being somewhere while other people did things behind him.

It was not glamorous and Poppy did not narrate it.

It was, he discovered, extremely difficult.

Holding a line meant staying when everything reasonable in you wanted to give ground, and it meant taking hits you could have avoided, because the avoiding would have moved you, and moving was the one thing the job did not permit.

VITALITY, it turned out, had been an excellent guess.

* * * *

He took a hit meant for Poppy on a Thursday and she did not notice.

He did not mention it.

It was a bad one, on the upper arm, from something in a cellar that he had seen coming at her from a blind angle. He had got there and had taken it on the outside of the arm rather than let it reach her, and it had hurt considerably and had left a mark he could see for the rest of the month.

She never knew. She had been facing the other way. She finished the fight in good spirits and told a story about it afterward that had a different shape entirely.

Alaric found that he was quietly annoyed.

He examined the annoyance that evening because it was new and because he had a policy about new things, and he did not enjoy what he found.

He had wanted her to know.

Not to be thanked. He had turned that over and it was not that. He had wanted her to know, which was smaller and worse, and he sat with it for a while and eventually decided that wanting it did not oblige him to arrange it.

He said nothing.

He would take three more over the following weeks and say nothing about any of them, and one of those she would see, and would be extremely loud about, and he would find the loudness embarrassing and would enjoy it enormously.

* * * *

Itta taught him spacing by standing in the right place a hundred times.

She never said one word about it.

He worked it out in the third week: that she was always at a particular distance, and that the distance changed, and that the changing was not random. Too close and she could not draw. Too far and she could not reach the back of the room. And there was a third factor he took another fortnight to identify, which was that she also stood where she could see Maren's feet.

He asked her about it, once, in the direct way that had become permissible between them.

"You watch Maren's feet."

Itta considered this.

"Shoulders lie," she said.

That was the entire lesson and it took him a week to unpack, and when he had unpacked it he found it was worth more than most of what he had been told in sentences.

* * * *

Maren taught him patience by never once hurrying.

Not in a fight, where hurrying would have been obvious. In everything.

She did not hurry to a contract. She did not hurry through a meal, or a road, or a conversation, or the sharpening, which took as long as it took and was never abbreviated because somebody was waiting.

He had been in a mild hurry since the morning he woke under a tree. There had always been an arrow, and the arrow had pointed, and behind everything he did was a low continuous sense of a thing not yet done.

He watched a woman spend forty minutes on a strap that would have been serviceable in ten and understood, slowly, over weeks, that she was not being slow.

She was refusing to be moved by anything that had not earned it.

He started doing it with his own kit, and then with his own days, and the low continuous sense of a thing not yet done did not go away but it stopped being in charge.

* * * *

Somewhere in it he stopped being new.

He could not identify the day. He looked for it afterward, with some effort, because he liked knowing when things happened.

There was no day.

He knew he had been new at the fountain, on the first morning, in the guild hall with thirty people talking a dialect. He knew he was not new in the eleventh week, standing in a hall listening to two men argue about a split and finding that he had an opinion about the split and that the opinion was correct.

Between those two points there was no boundary he could find.

The best he ever managed was an evening in the ninth week when somebody he did not know asked him a question about the board, and he answered it, and the answering had been automatic and accurate and had not cost him anything.

He had noticed afterward. Only afterward.

* * * *

Maren began putting him where she needed a wall.

It happened without discussion, which was the whole of it.

The first time, she said his name and pointed at a gap in a corridor, and he went and stood in it and held it for the length of a bad fight, and she did not check on him once during any of it.

That was the compliment. He understood that immediately.

She had not looked. In eleven weeks he had watched her check on Poppy in every single engagement, sometimes four or five times, quickly, an eye going sideways and coming back. He had watched her check on Itta less and on strangers constantly.

She put him in a gap and then spent the fight facing the other way.

He stood in a corridor in the dark with something coming at him and understood that he had been given the largest thing available in that guild, and that it had cost her one word and a pointed finger, and that neither of them would ever refer to it.

* * * *

He was happy.

He arrived at the word late and sideways, on a road in the eleventh week, walking behind the other three with a pack and a sword and a bruise, and it came at him whole and he had to stop and look at it.

He had no baseline for the condition.

He could not compare it to anything, because there was nothing before this. He could not say it was better than his old life. He had no old life. He had a forest, and a fortnight of extreme confusion, and then this.

He decided, on the road, not to examine it.

That was a genuine decision and he made it deliberately, which was unusual for him, because his method for two months had been to examine everything. He looked at the happiness and thought, quite clearly, if I take this apart I may find out what it is made of.

He let it alone.

He walked the rest of the way to Grennet behind two people arguing about a bird.

* * * *

And the counting had become so ordinary that nobody remarked on it any more.

Including him.

It had been remarked on twice. Poppy, in the first month, had asked what he was muttering and he had said he did not know and she had let it go with less difficulty than he expected. Itta had never mentioned it. Maren had mentioned it once, in the fifth week, in the form of a statement rather than a question.

"You count."

"Yes."

"Under load."

"Yes."

She had nodded and said nothing else about it then or afterward.

It ran under the work now, continuously, the way his breathing ran. He counted up hills and through fights and while stacking things and while waiting. He counted to ten and it turned over and started again, and the turning over at ten was so completely part of it that he had stopped noticing there was a number involved at all.

Two months earlier he had reached for its origin twice and found no place in him where the answer was kept.

He had not reached for it since.

It was simply a thing he did, the way he checked the potions on his belt without looking, and the way his shoulders knew where the sword sat, and the way his feet arrived at the left flank before the left flank collapsed.

He had a small collection of things like that.

He had stopped adding to the collection deliberately, and had stopped looking at it, and on the whole the days went better that way.