Chapter 8
Madoc
Icut the first ward-mark by lamplight, and my hand knows the shape before my head gives it leave.
It rises up out of a place I’d shut and forgotten.
My grandmother’s thumb steering mine over a soft pine offcut, winter on winter, a mark I was too small to understand and too fond of her to refuse.
Three strokes and a turned hook, cut fresh into the doorsill each high summer so the house stayed the house and the green stayed the green and the two never changed places.
I called it a game. She let me call it that.
She was setting it down in my hands against a day she wouldn’t be alive to help me through, and she did it the only honest way a thing like that gets kept. Half a joke. Taught anyway.
I finish the mark. I drive a cold nail through the meat of the sill beside it, deep, iron to hold what the cut declares. Then the next doorframe. Then the window frames, all four. Then the frame of the loft stair, where a woman sleeps who a furious green thing wants first.
I work till the lamp gutters low, and it’s the most use I’ve had out of a chisel in five years.
Carys finds me at it near dawn, come down for water, her hair a lost cause and her feet bare on my cold floor.
“You didn’t sleep,” she says.
“No.”
She looks at the fresh mark on the door I’m crouched over, and the bright nail-head beside it, and she doesn’t ask what it is.
She’s quicker than that. She crouches down next to me, close, and puts one finger to the cut without touching the iron.
“That’s the old woman’s tale,” she says.
“The one your grandmother told you. You’re cutting it into your own house. ”
“For what it’s worth. Which might be nothing.
” I sit back on my heels. My knees make their case against it.
“I don’t know if a mark my grandmother half-believed does a thing against what’s in those trees.
But cold iron went cold in my pouch three times now with no fire near it, and a mark that won’t take is a mark trying to do a job it can’t.
So there’s a job. And if there’s a job, there’s a way to do it right.
I don’t have a better place to start than the one my own hands were taught. ”
She’s quiet a moment, still crouched beside me, close enough that the cold’s coming off her bare feet and I have to fight the plain animal want to pull them into my own warmth and be done with it.
“You keep doing that,” she says. “Making the enormous strange thing into a job you know how to hold. The god yells at me and I go to pieces, and you go get your good iron.”
“It’s what I’ve got.” I don’t look at her when I say the next of it, because it’s easier said to a doorframe.
“You want to know the truth of me, it’s not a comforting one.
I spent a war learning exactly how a thing fails.
Bridges. Walls. Gates. The men behind them.
I was the one they sent to look at a fortification and say how long, not whether.
Whether was never the question. Everything falls if you know where to lean on it.
My gift was telling them how many days.”
I true the edge of the mark with my thumb. It gives me somewhere to put my eyes.
“I got good at it. Good enough that I stopped being able to look at anything without seeing where it would break. A cradle. A church. A woman’s face across a fire.
I’d see the fault in it before I saw the whole of it, every time, and I couldn’t stop, and one morning I set down my tools in the middle of a siege I was winning for them and I walked north till nobody knew my name.
I thought if I only ever built things that held, I might unlearn the seeing.
” I shake my head once. “I never did. I still see where everything breaks. I just point it at hives now instead of gates.”
She doesn’t say she’s sorry. I brace for it and it doesn’t come. That’s a mercy I didn’t know to want until she hands it to me.
“So you’ve been looking at me for three weeks,” she says instead, slow, working it out, “seeing exactly where I’ll break.”
“Aye.”
“And?”
I look at her then. Bare feet on my cold floor, hair wrecked, a smear of yesterday’s blood she missed at the corner of her jaw, a furious old god that knows her name, and under all of it that unkillable brightness she keeps over the whole of it on purpose, choosing it, every single morning I’ve watched her wake into a strange yard and decide to be glad anyway.
“You don’t,” I say. “It’s the one thing about you I can’t work out.
Everything I’ve ever looked at, I found the fault in it.
I’ve been looking at you a week, hard, the same look I gave a wall I meant to bring down.
And I can’t find the place you’d break. There isn’t one.
You just bend, and hold, and bend the other way, and come up sunny, and I don’t understand how a thing built like that stands up, but it does.
You’re the first thing in my life I couldn’t find the fault in, and it’s undoing me, and I’d thank you to stop while I’ve still got some sense left. ”
The shop’s very quiet. The lamp’s near out. She’s looking at me with her whole face open, no chatter loaded behind it for once, and I’ve said a great deal more than I meant to say to a woman before sunup, and there’s no taking any of it back now that it’s out on the cold floor between us.
“That,” she says, unsteady, “is the second thing you’ve said to me that’s made me want to cry, and both of them have been about carpentry, and I’d like you to know that’s a genuinely deranged way to court a person and it’s working anyway.”
“I’m not courting you.”
“You built iron into your whole house at midnight so a god couldn’t get up the stairs to me.” She stands, and her knees crack too, and she huffs a wet little laugh at the both of us. “Call it whatever lets you sleep, Madoc. Which, I’d point out, you’re not doing.”
The day I make stranger still.
I load a barrow with every spare scrap of cold iron in the shop, nails and brackets and the cut ends of good bar, and I take my mallet and my sharpest chisel down onto the green in broad daylight, and I go stall to stall cutting my grandmother’s mark into the threshold-boards of a fair that has no notion what I’m about.
I get looks. A joiner on his knees at the foot of a candle-seller’s stall, cutting three strokes and a hook into her door-board and driving a nail beside it, is not a thing this town has seen and doesn’t rightly know what to do with.
A few laugh. One old farmer tells me flat I’ve gone soft in the head and he’ll not have me carving up his good boards for a superstition.
I don’t argue him. I cut the mark into the stalls on either side of his and leave his bare, and I tell him plain that when the strange comes for the sweet on his boards and steps over his neighbors’, he can come find me and I’ll cut his then, no charge and no told-you-so in it. He grumbles. He lets me be.
Because the strange keeps coming. All morning the sweet keeps turning.
A honey-cake seller’s whole tray goes grey between one customer and the next.
A little sugar-twist crumbles to dust in a child’s fist and she cries, and her mother goes white and looks at the trees, and everyone on that end of the green looks at the trees with her, and nobody says the word sitting in all their mouths.
I cut marks. It’s the only sermon I’ve got, three strokes and a hook and a cold nail, said over and over down the length of a frightened fair.
Ordun sees what I’m at before anyone and hauls his own barrow of cask-iron over to work the far end toward me, an old soldier’s habit neither of us has to name.
He reaches me at the middle of the row and we work a stall from either side without a word for a while, falling into step like you do with a man you’ve never soldiered with but recognize anyhow.
He drives iron rougher than I’d like and faster than I can, hammering brackets flat to the door-boards where I’d cut a clean mark, and it’s ugly work and it’ll hold, and holding is all he’s after.
“You know what you’re doing,” he says. Not quite a question.
“No. I know what my grandmother did. It’s the nearest thing I’ve got.”
“Good enough. A wall you’re sure of falls the same as one you’re guessing at.
” He spits, sets another bracket. “I dug a ditch once on a captain’s guess.
Whole company thought he’d lost his mind.
Held the line three days when the sure thing two valleys over got overrun in a morning.
” He looks at me sidelong, quick, the old assessing look.
“You were a sapper. Don’t answer. It’s in how you kneel to a thing.
Engineers kneel to a wall like they’re apologizing to it. ”
I don’t answer. He doesn’t need me to. We keep on toward the west end, toward the trees.
And at the west end the trees push back.
I feel it before I’ve set the chisel, feel it like you feel a floor go soft the step before it gives.
The last three stalls sit closest to the tree-shadow, and the air over their thresholds is wrong, heavy, a pressure leaning down with the same weight as the meadow.
I set my mark into the first of them and drive the nail, and the cold comes on so hard and so fast my hand goes numb around the mallet.
Not the pouch-cold of the last three nights.
A living cold, aimed, pressing on the fresh iron from the far side of the line like a shoulder set to a door, and my whole trade wakes up under it and reads the strain plain as print: something on the other side of my grandmother’s three strokes, testing the joint, looking for the give.