Friends

She found him in the guild hall the following morning, at the board, and the first thing she did was be offended.

"You thought I wasn't coming."

Alaric turned round and found Poppy at his shoulder with her arms folded and an expression of enormous injury, and had to reassemble a considerable amount of his afternoon in about a second.

"I did not know how long later was."

"Later," said Poppy, "is later. It's not a duration. You don't put it in a bucket." She was already moving past him to look at the board. "Six days. That's practically instantaneous. I had a thing."

"What thing?"

"A thing," said Poppy, with a finality that closed the subject permanently, and which he would learn over the following weeks was how she handled every question of that shape.

He let it go.

He was aware, standing at a board in a warm room, that something in him had gone quiet, and that it had been making a noise for six days that he had not identified until it stopped.

* * * *

She demanded an account of his week and then interrupted most of it.

He got as far as Ashfield before she wanted to know how much they had paid. He got as far as the shed before she wanted to know whether the reeve had been the one with the arm, and then explained at length about the reeve's arm, which was apparently a story that had reached Grennet.

He got as far as the slimes and she stopped him properly.

"How many?"

"Ten. Six on the way there. Four coming back."

"Ten slimes." She looked at him. "Deliberately?"

"The second one was deliberate. After that it was a system."

Poppy made a noise that he could not classify and would later learn to recognise as delight.

He told her about the second one. About establishing that a thing which happened once might happen twice, and about the bar, and about swinging at where the slime was going to be rather than where it was.

"You worked that out," she said. "In a ditch."

"Where else would I have worked it out?"

"Most people get told," said Poppy. "By somebody. In a room."

She looked at him for slightly longer than the remark required, and then went back to being offended about the six days, and he did not know what the look had been.

* * * *

She showed him the friend list.

"Right," she said. "This is going to take two seconds and then you are going to stop looking like a lost dog every time I go round a corner."

She got him to open his own panel, which he did, and then walked him through to a section he had been through twice and had entirely dismissed, because it had been empty and had done nothing when he pressed it.

FRIENDS.

Zero entries. A list with nothing in it, rendered neatly, taking up its own space on the pane with what he had assumed was an administrative pointlessness.

"That's not empty," said Poppy. "That's waiting."

Then she did something on her own side without asking his permission, and something arrived on his.

* * * *

His panel went from zero entries to one.

POPPY.

And beside the name, small, a set of things he had not known were things. A number, which he understood was a level. A word, which he did not recognise. And a line at the end which said, simply, GRENNET.

He looked at it.

The list had a name in it. The name belonged to somebody who was standing right there and who had put it there on purpose.

He was aware that he had stopped saying anything.

* * * *

He looked at the one entry considerably longer than she could account for.

"It's just a list," said Poppy, after a while.

"Yes."

"It tells you where people are. That's all it does. It's not a ceremony."

"No," said Alaric.

He closed the panel. Then, a moment later, he opened it again to check that the entry was still in it, and then closed it, and became aware of Poppy watching him do this with an expression he could not read at all.

She did not say anything about it.

That was the first thing she ever did for him deliberately, and he did not notice, and she never mentioned it.

What she had seen, and had decided not to remark on, was a grown man opening a list twice in ten seconds to check that his one friend was still on it.

Poppy had grown up in places where people arrived and left constantly and nobody counted. She did not have a category for somebody to whom a name on a list was an event.

She elected, in about a second and a half, to acquire one.

* * * *

"Come and meet Maren," she said. "She's in the back and she's in a mood, but she's always in a mood, it's structural."

Maren was in the back, at a table, sharpening something.

She was broad in the way load-bearing things are broad, and she did not stand up when they arrived, and she finished the stroke she was on before she looked up.

"This is Alaric," said Poppy. "He killed ten slimes on purpose and worked out kiting by himself in a ditch."

"Did he," said Maren.

She put the whetstone down and put out her hand, and Alaric took it, and she shook it once.

It was not a friendly handshake and it was not an unfriendly one. She took his hand, closed on it, held it for about a second, and let it go, and the whole thing had the quality of a woman testing a beam before she puts weight on it.

Whatever she was measuring, he had no idea whether he had passed.

"Sit down," said Maren, which he took, correctly, as the result.

* * * *

Then her eyes went to the sword.

He had it across his back, the way it sat, in the position his shoulders had chosen on the first morning and had not revised since.

Maren looked at it.

She looked at it for a moment too long. Not at the shape of it, or the length, which was what people looked at when they looked at it, and two people had. She looked at where it sat on his back, and at the angle, and at the wear on the strap.

Her expression did not change in any way he could name.

Then she picked up the whetstone again and said nothing about it, and asked Poppy whether the paperwork was done.

Alaric had by then developed a fairly reliable sense for when somebody had noticed something about him, because it had happened four times in six days and every time it had come with a small pause of exactly this shape.

He waited to see whether she would ask.

She did not ask, then or for a very long time afterward, and he never established what she had seen.

* * * *

The paperwork was not done, and this turned out to be the actual reason for the evening.

They were a guild.

He had to have it explained twice, because the first explanation assumed he knew what a guild was and the second assumed he knew what a charter was, and Poppy conducted both of them at speed while Maren said corrective things at intervals.

What he assembled, eventually, was this.

There was a document. It was filed with the province. It had names on it. Having your name on it meant a set of things about contracts and coin and who was liable for what, and it meant a room, in their case a room over a stable, and it meant that when work came in through the hall you could take it as a body rather than as individuals.

They had a document. They had a room. They had two names on the document.

And a charter required three.

* * * *

"Ours is due for filing in eleven days," said Maren. "If it goes in with two names it does not go in. It comes back. And then we are not a guild, we are two people with a stable."

"There's a whole thing," said Poppy. "It's dreadful. You have to re-register, and there's a fee, and the man at the Charter House has a manner."

"We would like a third name," said Maren.

She said it plainly, looking at him, without any decoration on it at all, and he understood afterward that she had done it that way on purpose and that Poppy had been about to do it a different way.

* * * *

He said yes before he had understood the question.

He heard it come out of his mouth. He was still assembling the second half of what a charter was, and the word arrived ahead of the assembly, and then it was in the room.

Poppy made a noise.

Maren did not react at all, except that she picked the whetstone back up, which he learned much later was what she did instead of smiling.

He examined his own answer for a moment with some interest.

Two things had produced it. The first was that saying yes to Poppy was the path of least resistance, and had been since a well, and he had already noticed this about himself.

The second was larger and he only got to the edge of it.

Nobody had ever asked him for anything.

Six days of a life. Everything in it had been issued. Arrows had pointed. Panes had opened. A clerk had produced a posting. A reeve had told him where the trees were. The whole of his existence had consisted of the world handing him instructions and him following them, and not one of those transactions had contained a request.

This was a request.

Two people wanted something and it was in his power to supply it, and the supplying cost him nothing at all, and they had asked.

He would have said yes to almost anything phrased that way.

* * * *

He spent the rest of the afternoon working out what he had agreed to.

He asked questions. He asked what dues were and what a split was and what happened if a contract went wrong and whose fault it was, and got answers, and the answers raised further questions, most of which he also asked.

Maren answered the mechanical ones. Poppy answered the rest, at length, with a great deal of colour and some invention, and Maren corrected the invention about a third of the time and let the rest stand.

He learned that the room over the stable had a kettle that did not work.

He learned that Poppy had once tried to start a different guild and it had lasted nine days.

He learned that Maren had been in three guilds before this one and all of them had dissolved, and that she said this in the flat way of somebody reporting weather, and that Poppy went slightly quiet when she said it.

He learned the guild's name, which he had not thought to ask for, and which was on the document, and which Poppy pronounced with an entirely straight face and which Maren did not pronounce at all.

* * * *

It was late when they broke up, and he walked back to the Third Bell along a street with almost nobody in it.

And somewhere between the hall and the inn he registered what had happened to the evening.

He had been talking to people for four hours.

Not asking. Not testing, not running the two-question method on somebody to establish what they were. Talking. Back and forth, in a room, with three chairs and a table, where things he said produced things they said, which produced further things from him, for four hours, without any of it going anywhere in particular.

He had not once thought about whether they were the kind that responded or the kind that produced.

He stopped in the street to look at that.

Then he opened the panel, in the dark, for no operational reason whatsoever.

POPPY.
MAREN.

Two entries where six days ago there had been a neat empty list that he had dismissed as administrative pointlessness.

He looked at the two of them for a while, standing in an empty street at a stupid hour.

Then he closed it and went to bed, and in the morning he would sign a document, and be a third of something.