Sneak Peek Pledged to the Orc Stonemaster
I was twenty-six the spring I came up the quarry road with two pots, a crate of onions, my brother’s pledge-paper, and a plan, and I want to say right off that the plan was a good one, it was a perfectly good plan, everyone I told it to on the way north said so once they’d finished telling me it was madness, and the only part of it I hadn’t planned for was standing at the gate of Greyshoulder camp when I got there, six and a half feet of it, gray as his own quarry and twice as hard to move.
The stone-master himself, though I didn’t know it yet.
I thought stone-masters would be old. This one was forty and built like the thing he sold — shoulders you could span a stream with, forearms all over old white scars from flying chips, dust in the black of his hair like the first snow on a dark hill — and he stood in the gate reading Jory’s pledge-paper for the third time while I held my breath and my onions.
“No,” he said.
Four words is a speech from Torug of Greyshoulder, I would learn.
One was nothing. I had carried those onions up nine miles of switchbacks.
I began, politely, the way my mother taught me, to explain: that the paper said the Frayne term had eighteen months to run, and the paper did not say the Frayne serving it had to be the Frayne who broke his leg under a rockfall in month six, it said a Frayne, I’d had the headman read it twice, and my brother could not swing a hammer but I could swing a pot, and Harrowfield does not leave debts standing, we’re known for it, ask anyone, ask the Kesslers’ old collectors who used to skip our village entirely on account of the disappointment—
Somewhere in the middle of all that, my crate lid slipped, and the top onion made its run for the cliff edge the way onions will, and the stone-master put out one hand without looking, without hurrying, without even fully turning, and caught it.
And went, immediately, a deep and astonishing gray-green at the ears, as if he’d been caught doing something.
He looked at the onion in his enormous hand like it had betrayed him.
He did not look at me. He had not, I realized, looked at me directly once since I’d arrived, this monument of a male who could stop a rolling onion blind, and something about that — the size of him and the shyness of him arriving in the same instant, like thunder and a stammer — interested me more than I had come north intending to be interested.
He put the onion back in my crate with the care you’d give an egg.
“Terms are hammer-work, Frayne,” he said. Four words, gray ears, eyes on the crate.
“Then it’s a poor camp that thinks an army runs on hammers.
When did your crews last eat something that wasn’t burnt at one end and raw at the other?
” I’d passed the cookhouse coming up. I’d smelled it.
A woman who has fed harvest crews since she was twelve can smell surrender from a cold chimney.
“Show me your kitchen, master, and then tell me no.”
He didn’t show me the kitchen. But he didn’t stop me finding it, which I’d come to understand was his grammar for yes.
The kitchen of Greyshoulder camp was a crime in a shed.
One pot the size of my ambition, abandoned; a hearth clogged with three seasons of other people’s failures; a cook fled south in the spring, the crews feeding themselves since on trail-bread, char, and grievance, eighty orcs of the mountain’s best stone-crews eating worse than Harrowfield’s pigs, and every last one of them too proud to say so out loud where the master could hear.
Well. I wasn’t proud. I was contracted — or my family was, same thing, we’ll come back to that — and I had onions, and by dark I had the hearth drawing, the hundredweight pot scoured to its old shine, and a barley stew with real marrow-bones going in quantities you could have bathed a calf in, and the smell went down the rows of the camp like a rumor of better government.
They came with their bowls the way cattle come to a gate, casual, sideways, pretending it was their own idea.
I fed the first twenty before anyone remembered nobody had said I could stay.
I fed the next sixty while the first twenty came back.
And at the end of the line, last, when every crew had eaten — I would learn he was always last, that he’d made a religion of last — came the stone-master, with a bowl in his hand and his eyes on the pot, and stood there in a silence with real weight in it while I filled the bowl to the civilized brim and put two extra bones on because he was carrying half a hillside of shoulders and it showed.
He looked at the stew. The whole camp watched him look at the stew, eighty spoons stopped.
“Eighteen months,” said Torug of Greyshoulder, to the stew.
And walked off to eat standing at the works-shed wall, alone, facing away, and the camp roared like a wedding, and that is how I took over my brother’s debt with a barley pot, and if the counting matters, it came to this: eighteen months, three meals a day, near enough eight hundred dinners.
I settled in the cook’s cottage and wrote to Jory that the term was in good hands, mine, and to keep his leg still or I’d come home and sit on it.
Then I blew out the lamp and lay listening to a strange camp on a strange mountain, all those enormous strangers breathing in the dark like a herd settling, and it should have frightened me at least a little, and instead, somewhere under the floor of me, low and steady, something I had no name for yet had already started humming.
The whole camp can read what the stone-master is building. Now somebody just has to say it out loud.