3. The Mark
The Mark
Kain drove the last nail of the board flush, set the hammer down, and pushed himself up out of the crouch. He worked the kink out of his back and crossed the loft to the high door set into the gable end of the barn.
The door was meant for hauling hay up off a wagon, hay he didn't grow yet, but it gave him a clean look out over the whole of the land.
His eye moved out across the property, over the bare trees, over Roan frisking in the pen, over Ghost asleep in the yard, and settled on the northeast corner where Mark's flask was buried. He stood at the door for a count.
He'd buried the flask before the ground froze, and there'd been no time then to set a proper marker over it. The corner had gone the whole winter bare, and he'd let it.
"Sorry, brother. I'll get to it."
He went back down through the barn, took the narrow stairs two at a time, and came out into the yard. Ghost lifted its head as Kain crossed toward the road but stayed where it lay.
He crossed the road and went in under the snow-laden branches on the far side, where a line of trees ran along a creek that cut down through the loam. It was a small thing, more creek than river, but the water ran fresh year-round and it had served him well over his first year here.
His boots crunched through the snow and over the trails the rabbits and deer had pressed into the undergrowth.
He came down to the water where it ran broad and shallow over a bed of rounded stones. He wanted the right stone for this, not some soft scrap of limestone that would crumble in a season.
Granite would have held best of all, but the odds of finding granite in a creek like this one ran thin, so he worked along the bank and read the rocks under the moving water as he went.
Ice had built up along both banks, but it gave out before it reached the moving center of the creek. He stepped down off the bank and into the water.
The cold came through his boots and drove up into his shins, and he set his jaw and waded on. He'd known cold his whole working life, and he talked himself through this one the way he'd talked recruits through worse.
"Go all the way under in water like this and it has you in a few minutes. Just your feet, you've got a good while longer." He bent to the rocks. "Long enough."
He worked his hand over the stones on the bottom, the cold biting hard into his fingers, and tried to lever up a big brown one that looked about right. It was set fast in the bed and wouldn't come, so he left it and went looking again.
Most of what he turned up was too small to mean anything or too big to carry.
Then he found one tucked in among the others, near two feet long and a foot across, flat-faced and square enough to take a mark. He waded over, got both hands under it, and it came free of the bed easy.
He hefted it up into the light to look it over.
"This one." He tucked it under one arm and made his way back across the creek and up the bank.
He came back out of the trees with the stone under his arm and his boots full of creek water. A farmer was rolling past on the road with a wagon stacked high with grain sacks, and the man's eyebrow went up at the sight of him.
Kain knew what he looked like, soaked to the shin and muddy and carrying a rock out of the woods, and it still wasn't the strangest sight the town had gotten out of him.
He carried the stone into the house, where the hearth fire had burned down low, and built it back up with a few fresh logs. He pulled off his soaked boots and his wet cloak and set the stone on the kitchen table beside the stove to dry while the warmth came back into his hands.
Then he went out to the barn for the chisel and hammer.
The chisel had gone dull over a winter of odd jobs, and the hammer's handle was worn smooth where his grip fell on it. He brought them in, pulled a chair up to the table, and sat down with the stone in front of him and the fire low in the stove.
What to put on the stone was the thing he had to settle first. Mark's name didn't sit right, and the dates sat no better, because a name and a span of years was what you cut into a stone for strangers to read, and this stone was never going to be read by strangers.
The Silver Hands had carried a mark, a closed fist gripping a cluster of arrows. He'd carved it into trees along contract routes and scratched it into the dirt outside a hundred camps, and he could lay it down with his eyes shut.
He set the chisel against the stone and swung the hammer.
The chisel skipped out from under the hammer and clattered across the table, his fingers still half-numb from the creek. He caught it before it went off the edge, brought it back, and set it again.
Stone was harder than wood and far less forgiving, and the first line he cut ran crooked and too deep at one end. He changed the angle, eased off the pressure, and tried it again.
The second line came straighter, deep enough to read and shallow enough to look like he'd meant it. He worked down the outline of the fist one strike at a time, turning the stone when he needed a new angle and blowing the dust clear after every few marks.
The arrows took longer, the lines thinner and set close together, and his hand cramped twice before the cluster was done. Both times he laid the tools down, worked his fingers until the cramp let go, and picked them back up.
The light through the window went low and orange while he worked, and he didn't mark it passing. The work took most of the afternoon and the last of his patience.
When he lowered the chisel and held the stone up to what light was left, the fist and the arrows looked back at him out of the surface, rough and uneven and plain enough that any man who'd served with the Hands would know it on sight. The lines weren't clean.
He took the stone out into the yard with the sun already low. Ghost lifted its head from where it lay at the barn door and watched him cross, but the wolf stayed put.
Kain fetched the shovel from the barn and went to the northeast corner where the snow lay unbroken over the buried flask.
He knelt and scraped the snow and the crust of ice off the ground, down to bare frozen dirt with no grass grown over it yet. He set the stone beside the cleared patch, judged how deep the bed would need to be for it to sit flush, and dug.
He didn't need to go down to where the flask lay, only deep enough to seat the stone level with the ground. The shovel chipped and skidded off the frozen soil. He drove the blade in hard, breaking the ground up an inch at a time and clearing it out by the handful.
The sun went down fully before he was through, and he had to fetch a lantern from the house to finish by. He worked the shallow bed flat, set the stone down into it, and packed the broken soil back in around the edges until it held.
The fist and the arrows faced up at the sky.
There were no names cut into it and no dates. Nobody else who came to the farm would know what it meant, and they had no need to. Kain knew what it was, and that was the whole of what the stone was for.
He leaned on the shovel and looked it over in the lantern light. He stayed at the corner for a count.
Ghost had come up while he was digging and stood now against his leg. Kain didn't look down at it.
He hadn't asked the wolf to come, and the wolf had come anyway, and the two of them stood at the corner in the lantern light with the cold coming down hard.
"That'll do."
He turned and walked back toward the house with the shovel over his shoulder. Ghost followed him as far as the porch and lay down at the corner of it. Kain went inside with the corner finally squared away and the thaw still out ahead of him somewhere.