44. Local Herb
Local Herb
More days had gone past since the ride out to the carcass, and the body had gone on mending.
Jeremiah had stopped coming evenings. Kain had argued him into it, slowly.
The leg held weight now. The shoulder lifted what it had to lift. The ribs were still the ribs, and the ribs would be the ribs for a while yet.
The wolf had taken to going out at dusk and coming back at dawn. One night it had come back with a rabbit in its mouth and laid it on the kitchen step. It had taken the wolf a stretch to be up to the hunt.
Kain had skinned the rabbit slow with the one good hand and the bad hand bracing the knife for the cuts that didn't ask much pull. The wolf had watched him do it. He had set the meat in the cellar. The wolf had eaten its share at the back step and slept by the hearth.
Carol still came every few days. She wasn't coming today, and that was that.
He knelt at the edge of the herb bed with his right hand and his teeth doing the work two hands had done before.
Oregano. Rosemary. Lavender.
Half a dozen others, the names Mark had written down in the margins of the almanac and Kain had memorized one season at a time.
The plants had come up well. The tender leaves were ready.
He stripped them off, careful to leave enough stem that the plant would set more, and dropped them into the small jars he carried at his belt.
These could dry in the sun. He could use them in the cooking, or sell them on if he didn't see himself using them.
Spices were a thing he'd never quite figured out the use of. Darien would have. Mark had been getting there.
Kain would either find a use for them or move them along, and either way the plants had done their work.
When the herbs were jarred he rose and went out to the tomatoes.
「Skill Gained: Herbalism F」
「Detail: Identification and harvest of common kitchen and medicinal herbs」
The fruit had set. First picking of the year.
He brought a basket out and set it down on the path beside the rows.
Tomatoes had to be taken just above the fruit. Pinch the stem tight, break it in one smooth motion.
Pulling on the fruit bruised the flesh, and could topple the whole plant if a man wasn't careful with the cage. He worked along the rows with the basket beside him on the dirt, and he could carry one tomato at a time, which meant walking it back to the basket after each one.
The work ran longer than it should have. He gave the better part of the morning to it.
The basket went heavier as he went, and by the end of the rows he had close to sixty in it, red and heavy and warm from the sun.
He set the basket on a stool by the kitchen door and rested against the post a long beat. The shoulder was telling him to be done.
The basket went around to the road in two trips, the tomatoes into the collection box one by one. He closed the lid on the full box.
It wouldn't net him a great deal. It would net him a small honest piece of silver, the kind a farm did in midsummer, and that was the right shape of it.
He stood back from the box and looked down at his hands.
The system hadn't been on the slope with him. The system hadn't smelled the wing-fan of the fire driving up at him. The system hadn't had the dust of the cave back in its nose at the second fall.
The system had a title and a number for it. He had the rest.
There was more work to be done. The pumpkin vines were running into three plots now.
The potatoes needed hilling. He didn't have the body for that today.
He went into the barn. Roan looked up and shifted in the stall, the way Roan did when he expected to be saddled.
"Sorry, boy. Not today."
Roan snorted.
"I'd ride if I could. Riding hurts more than walking, right now. You don't go smooth enough for what my leg is telling me."
Roan took it. Kain gave the gelding the wedge.
Ghost was already standing at the barn door, watching the path.
"You and me, then. Town and back."
Ghost fell in on his good side as he went out the gate. Down the road they went.
He hadn't been up to the village in some count of days, and he wasn't in a great hurry to be up there now, but he needed seed for the late tomato planting and there was no one else to ride for it.
People passed on the road and tipped their hats and looked sideways at the wolf. Ghost didn't bristle.
It moved at his heel with its one good eye forward and the folk on the road did the math of it without comment. The wolf was Kain's. The wolf was here, on the road.
That was where the conversation had settled.
Tillamore was as Tillamore had been, and not as it had been.
The streets were the same. The shops were the same. The folk in them weren't.
He passed the smithy and Garland looked up from a piece he was working and nodded once. Garland didn't break to say anything.
That was the nod of a man treating Kain the same as he had treated him three months back, and Kain set that one down where it could be remembered.
Past the smithy it was different.
Farmers he had only ever exchanged grunts with stepped sideways out of his path. Two of them tipped their hats.
A woman on the steps of her own front door called her child back from the road as he passed, with a hand on the boy's shoulder and a soft word in his ear that was meant to be respectful and only managed to be aware.
A pair of younger women on the porch of the seamstress's looked at him longer than they ever had before, the kind of look that suggested they'd been talking about him in their kitchens.
Kain set his jaw.
He'd come to Tillamore to plant potatoes. He hadn't come to be looked at.
He'd found a kind of community here. He liked the version of it where a man could walk down a road and not be the center of it.
This was a different version. He hoped it would pass.
He pushed through Sam's door.
"Shouldn't you be resting," Sam said from behind the counter.
"Shouldn't you be selling something to anyone who walks in."
Sam grinned. He'd been waiting for that one.
The talons were mounted in the front window, polished and set on a velvet cloth a man might've bought in Greyhaven. Each one ran a foot and a half end to end.
The whole foot, looked at as a piece, was nearly as big as Kain's own head. There was a small painted sign in the window beside them.
"LOCAL KILL."
"You want to buy them." Sam tipped his head at the window. "Not for sale. But I'll part with them for a hundred gold."
"In your dreams."
"Split between myself and the man who slew them. Which goes the way you set it up to go."
Kain looked at him. Sam looked back, even.
The trust was a thing the two of them weren't naming out loud in a store where anyone could be coming in.
"My tomatoes have set. I need seed for the late planting. Nothing fancy."
"You've got a box at the road?"
"I've got a box."
"I'll send Oren before sundown." Sam waved at the rack along the back wall. "You know where the seeds live. Take your pick."
Kain was looking through the rack when the bell over the door went.
Two men came in.
Walking sticks. Satchels. Hats and boots showing the dust of three or four roads.
They were the kind of pair who had been traveling because traveling was what they did, not because they had a place to be.
"Afternoon," Sam said. "Look like you're not from here."
"We are not," the older one said. He had the accent of the western coast, the open soft vowel and the long final consonant.
"We came down the road from Greyhaven yesterday.
Bellpass before that. The talk's been the same in both places, and we couldn't believe the talk, so we came down to look for ourselves. "
"What's the talk."
"A B-rank merc soloed a gryphon in a village called Tillamore."
"That's not the talk," the younger one said. "That's the version Greyhaven was telling. Bellpass said a B-rank merc with a wolf at his heel."
"The talons are right there in the window," Sam said. "You're welcome to look at them. The carcass is still up on the ridge, if you want the ride out. Not much of it left, but enough."
"We'll pass on the carcass." The younger one stepped to the window and went down on a knee to look at the talons. "We're not adventurers ourselves. We sell wool. We listen."
"Then this is for you," the older one said.
He was talking to Sam, but his eyes had set on Kain over Sam's shoulder.
"Bellpass had an A-rank adventurer in the common room of the inn the night we passed through.
We bought her a drink and asked her what she would've done if the gryphon had come to her.
She said she'd have wanted three Bs along, four if she could've got them, and even with the team she'd have wanted poison and high ground for it.
We pushed her. We asked about an A alone.
She said it was possible. The kind of work a man took.
We pushed her again. We asked about a B alone. "
The older man let it sit a moment.
"She laughed, and she said a B alone went and farmed something."
Sam looked at Kain.
Kain went on looking through the seed packets.
"That's your man," Sam said, and he tipped his head at Kain.
The older one straightened. The younger one stood out of the crouch he'd been in over the talons.
They held on Kain a long beat without speaking. Then a glance between them, and back to the talons in the window. They had the kind of conversation a long-walking pair had with their eyes after the road had given them something they hadn't expected.
"He's a farmer," Sam said. "He happens to have been a B-rank merc on the circuit. Now leave him be. He's mending."
Kain pulled a packet of late-tomato seed off the rack and went on looking.
He let them be.
Three versions in the room.
The villagers had the small one. A man had killed a monster.
He could walk past it and it wouldn't follow him home.
The travelers had the harder one. They had the rank math.
A team of Bs. An A alone if she liked the cold. A B alone went and farmed something.
They had come a long way down a road to look at the man the math said couldn't be standing where he was.
His own version was the third. The kill was a thing a B-rank could try if he had a year of his dead friends' work in his hands and a snare cable wound out of a spice-box and a ranging shot lucky enough to be called luck.
The kill was the smaller of the two things that had happened on the ridge. The other thing, the one the math had no rank for and neither side of the room had a frame for, was that he had walked back out of the wood under his own seat in the saddle.
He let it stay his.
He pulled a packet of squash seed off the rack and set it under his arm with the others.
"Tell us about the wolf," the younger man said.
"It'll cost you," Sam said.
"It'll cost us what."
"A copper. Apiece. I'm a merchant, gentlemen, not a bard."
Kain heard the coppers go down on the counter. He carried the three packets up to the side counter, set them down, laid a copper of his own on top of the seed, and went around the back of the travelers while Sam settled in to tell the version of the story he'd been refining for a few weeks.
He went out by the door and let the bell finish behind him.
Ghost fell in beside him on the boards.
The Kettle was three doors down. He took the alley.
Sasha was at the back of the kitchen when he came in by the rear door. She glanced up, took him in with the look she had, and lifted the coffee pot off the stove without saying anything about it.
"My thanks."
"Long walk."
"Longer than I'd reckoned on."
She set the cup down on the small table by the door. She put a plate next to it. Bread, butter, a soft cheese, two cold sausage links from the night before.
She didn't stand and watch him eat. She went back to the stew at the back stove and left him in the front of the kitchen with the food and the coffee.
He sat in the chair at the corner table where he could see the door, the way he had sat in chairs that could see the door for fifteen years.
A small fist came up around the edge of the bassinet at her side, and Matthew made the rising sound that meant he was about to have a problem with the world.
"Hush, boy," Sasha said, into her stew, without turning.
Matthew hushed.
Kain ate. He drank the coffee. He sat in the kind of quiet he hadn't had in town since the night Sam took him off Roan.
The farm didn't care what the system had filed him as. The farm didn't care what the travelers had ridden down from Bellpass to look at.
The farm cared whether the potatoes got hilled and the late tomatoes got in the ground and the herbs got dried while the sun was high.
He had something to drink. He had something to eat. He had a body that was mending. The work was still his. The work he could do.
He set the empty cup down. He stood up slow.
Sasha looked over her shoulder.
"Tell Oren the box is ready."
"He'll come down before sundown."
"My thanks to you."
"That's me, Kain."
"Then thanks."
She made a small sound through her nose that wasn't quite a laugh, and went back to the stew. He went out by the back door.
Ghost was on the step.
They went home the long way, by the river road, which wasn't so much longer than the high road but had fewer hats to tip on it. Ghost set the pace.
He kept it.