49. Uncle
Uncle
Days went slow at the farm after the back room.
Kain worked the garden through the mornings and the stone wall through the afternoons. The stones for the wall had come out of the garden plots in the spring, piled at the corner of the lot since then, waiting for a man with both shoulders working to fit them.
Both shoulders were working now. The work of bedding the stones and mortaring them and pulling the line tight was the kind of work that gave a man what he needed to give his hands while his head went where it was going to go without his asking it.
His head was on the country northeast of Tillamore.
The gryphon had been a thing a man could face with a spear and a horse and a working shoulder. The thing under the hills wasn't.
The gryphon would have come down on the village and torn a child off the road. The thing under the hills would do that to the village itself, not with claws.
Tillamore wasn't a place the rest of the country thought of. Wagons came through and travelers came through and the road went on, and the place stayed itself.
There were a thousand villages of the kind out across the country, each with its own shape of itself, and the shape was the thing the place was made of. Wreck the shape and the place was wrecked.
A dungeon's pull was the kind of thing that wrecked a shape.
Sam had said so. Will had said so. Kain hadn't needed either of them to say it.
On the third morning of stone-and-mortar work, he set the trowel down, washed his hands at the pump, and walked into town.
Sasha met him at the back door of the Kettle when she heard Roan stop at the rail. The door was open behind her. The smell of frying onion came out with her.
"Kain."
"Sasha."
"Chair."
"Chair," he said. "You mentioned it two mornings back when I came for the nails."
"I mentioned it."
He looked at her. She looked back.
She wasn't the kind of woman who pushed a thing twice. She wasn't the kind of woman who pushed a thing once, even, except where the pushing had a place to land.
"Word travels in this town," she said. "Two mornings north on the same week. Silence after the second one. A man who has been spoken to by another man who keeps the spoken-to in a small circle. The talk doesn't have a name on the thing. The talk has the shape of the thing on the country."
"There's a shape of a thing on the country."
Sasha drew a breath and let it out.
"You'll tell me."
"I'll tell you."
She stepped aside.
Kain followed her past the kitchen and into the storage room at the back of the Kettle, the same room where the dry goods had been kept while he worked on the cellar in the spring.
The broken chair stood at the wall on three good legs with the snapped one laid beside it on the floor like a piece of evidence at a trial.
Matthew was on the boards in the middle of the room, scooting toward a bowl on its side.
Kain crouched at the chair and turned it over.
"Front right leg. Snapped clean through. No fraying at the break. It went fast."
"A pair of men on a passing through. One from Higgsbuff and one from Chesterfield. They argued over which of the two cities was the better one."
"That's an old argument." Kain set the snapped piece on its end and ran his thumb along the wood-grain at the break.
"I had a contract north of those cities one autumn.
Two of them on the same job will go at each other inside of a day.
I've seen it. The one from Chesterfield came up from the south side of the fjord.
The one from Higgsbuff came down from the north.
The fjord is a wide one. The bad blood is older than the bridge. "
"The one from Chesterfield broke the chair across the head of the one from Higgsbuff.
The one from Higgsbuff took the one from Chesterfield by the collar and pitched him through the door.
They went on into the street after that.
I haven't seen either since. Neither paid for the room and neither paid for the drinks. "
"Hard luck on the chair," Kain said.
Sasha set the towel on the counter and leaned with both hands on it.
"The thing on the country."
"Two morning rides. The first morning, I sat with Jeremiah on his porch.
The second morning, I rode out past the cedar row at the back of John Marge's pasture and into the country past it.
Two miles north and east of Tillamore the ground starts going wrong.
Granite stones in limestone country. Stones come up under animal trails.
Trees split open by stone spikes that came up under them.
The ground forced up where the ground had no cause to be forced up. "
Kain took the screwdriver from the toolbag at his hip and started on the screws at the seat plate.
"There's a thing in the country that has been there since first thaw. The gryphon was drawn by it. There will be more."
Sasha didn't move. Her hand had gone to her mouth.
"A dungeon."
"A young one. A door has not opened in it yet. Sam says weeks or months. Less than a year."
The screws came up one at a time and went into a small heap on the floor beside him.
"A dungeon," she said again.
"Sam wrote to the regional Guild office that afternoon. The letter went out the next morning. Two weeks fast. Three or four more likely."
"And then."
"A survey team. A determination. The work of figuring out what to do with the country."
"And if they don't come."
"They'll come." He paused at the last screw. "Sam says they like the cut of the proceeds."
Sasha took her hand from her mouth.
"You always managed this sort of a thing. I see now why you held it back."
"I held it back to keep the town from going around the loop until there was a thing to do about it."
"You'll tell me from now on."
"No promises."
A bell rang in the main room. Sasha straightened.
"He's fine in here."
Kain glanced at Matthew. Matthew had given up on the bowl and was working his way toward the broken chair leg on the floor.
He looked up at Kain with his head cocked.
"He's fine here," Kain said.
Sasha went out toward the bar.
Kain took the snapped end of the leg off the chair with the last of the screws and set the piece beside him. The toolbag had a length of oak in it the right size for the cut.
The saw came out. The pencil came out. The line went on the wood at the right length, and the saw went into the line, and the long slow draw of the teeth through the oak was the only sound in the storage room.
At the third draw, Matthew abandoned the chair leg and crawled to the second chair against the wall, the old one that had been in the storage room since before Kain came to Tillamore.
His small fist set on the chair leg. The wobble of standing came on the boy and settled in him.
Kain put the saw aside and rested his elbow on his knee.
Matthew bounce-squatted at the chair leg, then bounce-squatted again. His one fist held the chair.
The other hand let go and came up to chest-height. He held the position a long beat.
"Easy, now," Kain said.
Kain reached out his hand into the open floor between them, palm up.
Matthew looked at the hand.
Matthew let go of the chair.
The first step was a pitch forward as much as a step, the body following the foot. The second step was the catch, the other foot coming under the body just before the body would have gone down.
The third step was a step. The fourth and the fifth and the sixth were three steps a man couldn't have called anything but walking, even on a small unsteady body that hadn't walked before that minute.
Matthew's hand caught Kain's fingers.
Matthew's eyes went wide.
"You didn't mean to do that," Kain said. He set his free hand on top of the boy's head. "Your legs did a thing."
Matthew grinned the whole-mouth grin of a boy who had just found out a thing about himself the world hadn't told him yet. Matthew turned and looked at the chair leg he had come from.
The small hand let go of Kain's fingers. Three steps back the way he had come put the small body on its backside on the boards.
A scowl. Back to the chair on hands and knees. Up on his feet again.
Kain picked up the saw and went back to the cut.
The cut went through. The new piece fit the seat plate the way the saw had said it would. The nails came out of the bag in a small handful.
Kain set the first nail and tapped it home, then drove it the rest of the way.
Matthew came across the floor again.
Three steps and fall. Crawl to the chair. Pull up. Three steps and fall. Crawl to the chair. Pull up.
Three steps and four steps.
By the fourth attempt he had the rhythm of standing up and had stopped using both hands to bring himself up at the chair leg. By the fifth he was making it past Kain to the wall behind him.
The boy took after a stubborn man.
On the sixth try, Matthew came up off the chair and stood and looked across the room at Kain, and he tilted his small chin up.
The chin set itself in a line Kain had seen before, in the dark of a wagon on a road south of Greyhaven, on a face arguing for a route Kain hadn't agreed with.
Kain laid the hammer down.
"He gets it from his uncle, too," Sasha said from the doorway.
Kain looked up. Sasha was leaning on the frame with the towel back over her shoulder.
She wasn't looking at Matthew. She was looking at Kain.
The look on her face was a look that said the thing she had just said had been a thing she had been waiting on the right moment to say, and the moment had come.
Kain took the hammer back up.
"Aren't you supposed to be cooking," he said.
"I am."
"Then."
"It sounded like he was being cute."
She didn't move from the doorframe. She opened her mouth. She closed it. The towel on her shoulder shifted with the breath she took and let out without speaking.
Then she backed out of the doorway. A voice from the bar called something easy at her about not worrying over the boy, and Sasha called back something easy in return, and Kain set the next nail and drove it home.
The last nail went in tight. Kain set the hammer aside and turned the chair right-side up on its four legs on the boards.
He rocked it back and forth. The leg held. He sat on the chair.
The chair took his weight without a creak. He stood up on the seat.
Matthew was at the broken-piece-of-leg again on the floor. He tipped his face up to Kain on the chair and babbled at him in a string of sounds that didn't have any words in them.
"You want to come over," Kain said.
Matthew looked at the distance between his chair and Kain's chair, and at the open floor, and nodded.
He came across the floor at the wobble. Eight steps put him at the leg of Kain's chair. He looked up.
Kain crouched down off the chair and lifted the boy onto his hip.
"Look at you," he said.
"Kain."
He turned to the doorway. Sasha was back. The towel had come off her shoulder and was twisted in both her hands.
"I'm testing the chair."
"Why are you holding Matthew while you're testing the chair."
"If it goes I'll catch him."
"If it goes you'll catch him with the leg on the boards in three pieces and him on the boards on top of it."
"It won't go."
"Then why are you testing it."
Sasha had him there.
Kain set Matthew on the boards. Matthew stuck a thumb in his mouth and pouted at the floor. Kain held out two fingers.
The thumb came out and the small hand wrapped around the two fingers, and Kain walked across the storage room at the pace a man walks when he's walking a small boy along the floor.
They went the length of the room. They went back. They went across one more time.
Sasha had her hand over her mouth at the doorway.
Kain crouched at the wall and let go of the fingers.
"Walk to your mama."
Matthew looked at Sasha. Matthew held his hands out the way he had held them out at the chair, balance-hands, tightrope-hands.
He set one foot in front of the other. The other foot followed. The other foot followed that.
He went three steps and four and five. At the seventh his foot caught his other foot and the small body pitched forward, and Sasha was there before he hit the boards.
She came up off the floor with the boy on her hip and pressed her forehead to his hair.
Sasha set him back on the floor a beat later.
Matthew looked at his mother and at Kain across the room and at the open floor between. He set off back the way he had come, the small arms back out for the balance.
His small face carried that same line, the line of a man Kain had known.
Kain stretched out his hand.
The boy came.