Chapter 6
Madoc
The Stonefang banner is up over the east end of the green when I come down to true the dance-floor joints, and I forget for a breath what I walked out here to do.
I know the mark before I’ve decided to. Grey field, the tusk-and-hammer worked black into the corner, the fringe along the bottom edge knotted the old way, three twists and a lock.
Somebody’s mother tied that fringe. They always do.
It’s a small thing, that fringe, the kind of thing you’d never once notice unless you grew up watching your own mother’s hands do it, winter on winter, for a banner meant to hang over a camp you’d stand under your whole life.
Right up until the day you decided you’d rather stand nowhere at all.
I haven’t stood under one in four years. I didn’t think it would land in me like a dropped beam.
The camp went up sometime in the night. Six wagons, a cook-fire already smoking, a picket line of shaggy clan ponies switching their tails at the flies.
Stonefang traders, come down out of the hills for the fair, same as any clan comes to any fair.
It means nothing. Clans trade. Half the leather on this green came off an orc’s cart.
I tell myself that, and I go on standing in the middle of the fairway with a mallet in my hand like a man who’s forgotten his own name.
A young one is stacking cured hides at the front of the nearest wagon.
Big through the shoulders, not done growing into them yet, honor-marks still fresh and shallow on his forearms. He can’t be twenty.
He wasn’t out of short breeches when I walked away.
He looks up, catches me looking, and gives me the flat once-over one clansman gives another he doesn’t place.
Reads my arms first, same as I’d read his.
My marks are old and long-healed and there’s no clan-token in my hair, nothing knotted there at all, and I watch him try to place me and give it up.
Not clanless enough to be a stranger. Not clanned enough to be kin. A gap where a name ought to sit.
He nods, careful, a nod for a man he can’t place and doesn’t want to insult. I nod back.
And then I don’t move on, which is the trouble.
My eye’s gone to the front wagon while we were nodding at each other, and it’s caught on the near wheel, and now my whole head’s there and not on the boy at all.
The felloe’s split. Hairline, dry-season split, running from the rim toward the hub along the grain, the kind that opens quiet over a hundred miles and then drops a wheel in a river ford some morning with a family’s winter stores aboard.
Nobody’s marked it. I stand there reading a stranger’s wheel like it’s mine to worry over, and my hands want the wagon jacked and the felloe drawn and a new one steamed and set before dark, and none of it is any of my business, and I want to do it so badly my jaw aches.
“Wheel’s going,” I say. To the boy. It comes out before I’ve weighed whether to say it. “Near-front. Felloe’s split along the grain. It’ll hold to the fair’s end and drop you the first hard ford after.”
The boy looks at the wheel, then at me, and I watch him decide whether to take the word of a marked man with no clan on him.
Clan-pride’s a hard thing at his age. But he was raised right, and a true word about a wheel is a true word whoever hands it to you, and after a moment he ducks his head.
“I’ll tell the wain-wright. Thank you.” A beat. “You’ve the eye for it.”
“I had the trade for it.” I don’t say which trade.
He doesn’t ask. But something’s passed between us anyway, the old thing, one Stonefang hand telling another his wheel’s going before it drops him, and it’s the closest I’ve stood to my own people in four years, and it’s over a stranger’s split felloe with a boy who doesn’t know my name.
I move on before it can be more than that. That’s what four years buys you. A boy who doesn’t know your face takes your word on a wheel and thanks you like a stranger, and you take it and go true a joint before the crowd comes.
I true the joint. West corner of the dance-floor, the same one that’s worked loose two fairs running, ground too soft under it to hold the pounding a night of dancing puts through.
I drive a fresh wedge, test it with my weight, and it holds.
Simple work. Good work. Work nobody will thank me for and nobody needs to.
I keep my back to the grey banner while I do it, and I tell myself that’s only so I can see the joint.
I’m still crouched over it when Carys finds me.
I hear her before I see her. She’s got a running argument going with somebody about the price of a comb, cheerful and merciless, and then the argument’s over and won and she’s crossing the green toward me with a heel of bread in one hand and that goose nowhere in sight for once.
“There you are,” she says. “I’ve been looking.
You’re a hard man to lose in a crowd and somehow I managed it anyway.
” She stops. Looks at me, then past me at the grey banner, then back.
Something in her face shifts, the bright thing dimming a shade, careful now.
She reads faster than I give most people credit for. “Ah,” she says, quieter. “Those yours?”
“No.”
“Madoc.”
“They’re Stonefang.” I stand up off the joint. My knees make their usual complaint. “So was I. That’s all the kinship there’s left. It’s not a reunion.”
She doesn’t push it, which surprises me. She’s got a mouth on her that goes where it likes, and I braced for it to go here. Instead she just stands next to me a moment, chewing her bread, looking at the camp with me like it’s weather we’re both watching come in.
“You want to leave,” she says. Not a question.
“I’ve work.”
“You’ve always got work. That’s not the same as wanting to be here.
” She tears the bread in half and holds a piece out to me without looking, no ceremony to it, an offer made small on purpose.
“You’ve got the exact face my horse makes when she’s decided the barn’s too far to bother walking to.
Set and miserable and pretending it’s a choice. ”
I take the bread. I don’t know why. “I don’t make faces.”
“You make one face. It just has a great many small settings, and I’ve been learning them.
” She grins around her own half. “That one’s the barn face.
There’s also the goose face, and the this-wood-is-lying-to-me face, and the one you made this morning when I asked if cheese counts as a meal, which I’ve decided to call the do-not-encourage-her face. ”
It gets me before I’ve braced for it. A short breath of a laugh, out before I can catch it and put it back.
Not much. More air than sound. But it moves through me and loosens something the banner had wound tight, and she hears it, and her whole face lights like she’s won a wager nobody knew she’d made.
“There it is,” she says, delighted and quiet both at once. “I was starting to think you kept that one locked up special.”
“I do.”
“Well. Now I know where the key is.”
And the thing of it is, I let her. That’s the part I turn over, standing in a fairway with bread in my hand and a grey banner at my back and four years of nobody knowing my name.
She walked up into the worst hour I’ve had since I put the war down, and made me laugh in it, and I let her do it.
I didn’t want you out of my yard is a lie I told myself for about a day. I’ve stopped bothering to tell it.
We walk the fair a while after that. She’s got jars to check and I’ve got joints to true, and somehow the two errands keep landing us in the same places, which is how we both end up at Ordun’s stall in the middle of the afternoon.
The old orc’s got the good corner two down from hers, a plank counter set on two casks and a wall of mead behind him, and he’s holding court over it like he holds court over everything, which is loudly and to strangers.
He lost two fingers off his left hand somewhere in the war he won’t say which side of, and he pours with the two he’s got left like it’s a thing he’s proud of, a little flourish on it, daring you to look.
His tusks are worn flat as an old dog’s teeth.
He sees Carys coming and his whole weathered face cracks open.
“There’s my menace,” he says. “Come to rob me again. She talked me out of a full crock of the linden yesterday,” he tells me, delighted, “for a jar of her clover and a promise she’d tell me a story, and the story was about a goose, and it was a lie, and I’d do the whole trade again tomorrow.
Sit. Both of you. You.” A blunt two-fingered hand jabs at me.
“Woodwright. You look like a man who drinks standing up and hates it.”
“I don’t drink much.”
“That’s not a no.” He’s already pouring.
He slides a cup at me across the plank and I take it because it’s easier than the argument, and he watches me like one old soldier watches another, quick and total, reading how I hold the cup and the old healed marks on my arms and the set of my shoulders, and whatever he reads he doesn’t say.
He just gives me a short nod, the nod that means I know what you were and I’ll not make you say it, and pours himself one, and leaves it there.
It’s more than the boy at the camp could give me and it comes easier, from a man who chose peacetime the same way I did, off the same kind of war.
Then he reaches for the second cask to top Carys off, and his hand stops.
“Huh,” he says.