The First Person

He tried a stallholder first.

A woman selling fruit under a red awning, with her sleeves pushed up and a knife in her hand, who saw him coming and greeted him warmly and described her wares. Sweetest in the province. Picked this week. Two for a bit and three if he was buying for a household.

He asked her what the fruit was.

She greeted him warmly and described her wares.

He stood there for a moment.

Then he tried a second stall, on the other side of the street, a man with rope and tackle and a set of hooks hanging on a frame, who told him three sentences about rope.

He asked a question.

The man told him three sentences about rope, in the same order, at the same speed, with the same emphasis on the word hemp.

Alaric walked on down the street with the beginnings of a dreadful suspicion.

The guards had not been unusual.

* * * *

He tested it properly, because testing was his method now.

He walked the length of the main street asking the same question of everybody he passed, and the question was simply where can I sleep tonight, because it was short and harmless and any creature that could answer anything ought to be able to answer that.

He got it wrong four times before he thought to keep count. He had been asking in different ways, out of politeness, and had contaminated his own experiment inside two minutes.

So he started again, at the fountain, with the identical sentence.

Nine answers.

Seven of them were loops. They were delivered pleasantly, and they were delivered twice when he asked twice, and one woman gave him a warm description of her cheeses on both occasions without any indication that she had ever seen him before in her life.

Two of them were not loops.

A boy of about ten, carrying a basket, who told him to shove off.

And an old man on a step, who looked at him, decided against him, and went back to whatever he was doing without producing any sound at all.

Alaric found both of those enormously encouraging and could not immediately say why.

He worked at it while walking. It was something about the shape. The boy had chosen. The old man had chosen. Neither had produced a thing at him; both had responded, badly, in a way that took him into account.

He wanted more of that and did not know what it was called.

He also noticed, walking, that the two who had responded were the two who had been unpleasant, and that he had come away from both encounters cheerful. He turned that over and could not make it come out sensibly. A boy had told him to shove off and it had been the second best thing that had happened to him all day.

He decided not to mention this to anybody, on the grounds that it sounded like something wrong with him, and that he had a growing list of those.

* * * *

At the well, a woman answered him properly.

She was hauling a bucket up hand over hand when he asked, and she did not stop hauling, and she said the Third Bell if he had coin and the stable yard if he did not.

Then she said, "Which is it?"

And that was the thing that stopped him.

She had asked him something.

It was a small thing. She had not intended it as anything. But it was contingent, it depended entirely on what he had said and would depend on what he said next, and it could not have been produced by his presence, because his presence had already been established for several seconds and had not produced it.

He stood there with his hand out toward the bucket rope, which he had reached for without deciding to, in the way his hands did things.

Something opened somewhere.

* * * *

He asked again, a different question, to be certain.

She replied differently.

He asked a third, and she replied to that too, and then added something on the end that he had not requested, a small unsolicited remark about the Third Bell's landlord and his prices.

Three exchanges. Three distinct outputs. Each one built on the one before, none of them retrievable in advance, all of them arriving in a slightly different rhythm because she was thinking while she spoke.

His eyes stung.

He did not understand it and did not mention it and turned his head slightly until it stopped.

* * * *

Then he asked her far too many questions.

He knew he was doing it. That was the humiliating part, afterward. He could hear himself, and he could see that the questions were coming out faster than any reasonable person would ask them, and he could not stop.

What was the building with the painted board.

What was coin for.

Why did the smith have a queue when the other stalls did not.

What was north of here.

Where did the road go, the one he had come in on, if you followed it the other way.

She took it for a bit.

He watched her decide he was performing, somewhere around the fourth question, and after that she began to escalate. She answered with increasing gravity and invention. The smith's queue, she explained, was a religious observance. The road went to the sea, and past the sea, and eventually looped round and came back in through the same gate, which was why nobody used it.

She was enjoying herself thoroughly.

Alaric did not notice that she thought it was a game, because he had no framework for games.

He collected all of it. Every word. He was extremely interested in the road that came back through its own gate, and would spend a genuine ten minutes on it later that evening, drawing it in the dirt with a stick, before the geometry defeated him and he worked out that she had been lying.

He would not be angry about it. He would sit back on his heels in a stable yard with a stick in his hand and understand, all at once, that a person could say a thing that was not true, on purpose, for fun, in a way that was not intended to damage him.

That would take him most of the night. But it started here, at a well, with a road that came back through its own gate.

* * * *

She gave her name.

"Poppy," she said, and delivered it with a small flourish, as though producing a card from a sleeve.

He gave his.

"Alaric."

It came out easily, which surprised him. He had had it for a day and a half and had said it out loud perhaps a handful of times, all of them to himself in a forest, and here it was arriving in a conversation as though it had always been there for exactly this purpose.

She repeated it back. Then she said it was a lot of syllables for a face like his.

He did not know whether that was an insult.

He turned it over while she was saying something else, and decided, on balance, that it probably was not, on the grounds that she had said it while smiling and had not moved away afterward.

* * * *

She explained the guild hall.

It was the building with the painted board, the one swinging over the door on the north side of the crossing. It had a counter. It had a board with postings on it. It had a healer, which she mentioned the way you mention that a place has a roof.

There were people there who would pay him for doing things.

"You can join a guild out of there too," she said. "Or start one, if you have nothing better to do with a month. Paperwork like you would not believe. I would not recommend it."

She used the word contract and the word quest interchangeably, sometimes in the same sentence, and appeared to feel no obligation to distinguish them.

* * * *

She used every term as though he would have it.

Quest. Healer. Contract. Guild. Party. Tier. Posting. Split.

He had none of them.

He collected them the way you collect stones on a beach, without sorting, dropping them into a pocket to be looked at later. He nodded at what he judged to be the correct intervals, and got it wrong twice, and adjusted.

He asked about none of them.

He had worked this out over the previous ten minutes and it had cost him something to learn. Asking what a common word meant produced a particular look. He had seen it twice now, a small pause and a recalibration, the face of somebody quietly revising downward.

He had decided he would rather have the words than the look.

He could work the words out later. He had a whole town to work them out in, and nobody to be embarrassed in front of, and an entire evening.

It was, he understood at some level he did not inspect, the first thing he had ever hidden.

* * * *

"You're new," she said.

It arrived in the middle of a sentence, almost as an aside, on her way to something else.

He seized it.

New.

It was the first accurate description of himself he had ever received from outside his own head, and it arrived complete, and it explained a very great deal about his afternoon.

More than that, it was a category.

She had not said you are strange or you are broken or what is wrong with you. She had produced a word that clearly had other people in it. Which meant he was not the only one, and there was a way of being new, and presumably a way of stopping.

He held onto it with both hands.

"Yes," he said.

"Obviously," said Poppy.

* * * *

Then he tried, badly, to ask what she was.

He got as far as several false starts. He began with how do you, and abandoned it. He began with what makes, and abandoned that too, because both of them were going somewhere he could not see the end of.

What he actually wanted was: why do you answer and the fruit woman does not. What is the difference between you. Which one am I.

What came out was:

"How do you work?"

It sounded, out loud, in the street, entirely insane.

* * * *

She misread it as a joke and answered with one.

Something quick about her mother, and about having been assembled out of spite and leftover parts, delivered with a grin and a shrug that dismissed the whole matter.

Then she moved straight past it into a story about the smith, who had apparently been in a dispute with the man who sold him charcoal for two years, and who conducted the dispute entirely through the medium of very slightly incorrect orders.

The moment closed over.

Alaric let it close.

Partly out of relief, because he had heard himself asking and had not enjoyed it. And partly because he did not know what the real question was, only that there was one, and that it was underneath everything he had seen today, and that he would not get at it by ambushing a stranger at a well.

He listened to the story about the charcoal instead.

It was, he thought, the best story he had ever heard, on the grounds that it was the only one.

* * * *

She stopped mid-sentence.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, no. I have to go."

She was already turning as she said it. Something urgent, she said, over her shoulder, in a voice that had gone from unhurried to moving in the space of a breath, and she did not explain what.

"I'll find you later," she called, from ten paces off. "Don't wander far."

And she was gone up the street at speed, round the corner past the smith's queue, before he could ask what later meant, or where she was going, or whether the thing that was urgent was dangerous.

Or, most importantly, whether she was coming back.

* * * *

He stood at the well.

The bucket was still where she had left it, half hauled, the rope wound round the post. The water in it was very still.

He had a great deal of vocabulary he could not use and one word that described him, and the memory of three answers in a row that had each been different from the one before.

He put his hand on the rope.

Then he took it off again, because it was not his bucket, and went to find the building with the painted board.