52. Talon
Talon
The morning Kain didn't want to wake up to came on whether he wanted it or not.
The ribs had earned him a stretch of lying-in. The festival hadn't earned him a thing of the kind. He swung his feet down on the floor and stood up, and went to the kitchen.
Eggs in the pan, bacon in the pan after the eggs. He sat at the table and ate without much taste to any of it. Ghost rose from the hearth and padded around the table once, nosed open the back door, and went out into the morning. Kain let it go.
The day had a banner on it already, and the banner hadn't even been hung yet.
A knock came at the front door, and the door opened before he could call back, and Carol came in and stood at the kitchen doorway in the kerchief and the riding skirt she wore for a road ride.
"Your bodyguard's here."
"Bodyguard."
"I committed to it. I'm committing."
"Carol."
"Kain."
"You think you could go up and tell them I caught the flu?"
"You took a gryphon talon through the ribs for these folks. You can take a morning of being clapped on the back."
"I'd rather have the ribs again."
"I know it. The folks need this more than you don't need it. They haven't been able to celebrate without the wrong kind of weight on the celebration since the spring. You took the wrong weight off them. They mean to give the celebration back to themselves through you."
"I didn't say I wasn't going."
"I know that too."
Kain set the fork down and stood up off the chair. "Let's roll out."
Roan was at the rail with the saddle still on him from where Carol had walked him from the gate, and her mare was beside him in her tack.
The two of them swung up and rode out the lane at an easy walk, the morning coming on cool and the leaves beginning to turn at the corners of the lane, and the road into Tillamore winding past the McGraths and the Dennisons and on into the square.
The banner was the first thing Kain saw.
A wide piece of canvas strung between the awning of Sam's store and the awning of the McGrath place across the street, painted in red letters two feet tall.
GRYPHON SLAYER
Kain pulled Roan up at the edge of town. "Carol."
"I see it."
"It's nine in the morning."
"They've had it ready for a stretch. They didn't want to wait on the hour."
A crowd was coming up the street already.
A good thirty folks of the village, the McGraths and the Dennisons and Mrs. Hollifield and a string of Tillamore's farmers and their wives and a handful of the children.
Garland the smith was at the back of the crowd in a clean apron, and Sasha was at the porch of the Kettle two doors down with Matthew on her hip.
Jeremiah was in the middle of the press, holding back the worst of it.
Hands clapped Kain on the shoulder as he swung down, and Carol stayed at his side and pressed back at the edge of the crowd with her elbow when an arm came at him too quick.
Sam was on a small box at the steps of the general store with both hands on the post of the awning. "Kain. Come up here."
A second box stood beside Sam's. Kain stepped up on it, and the crowd settled in around the steps, and Sam cleared his throat.
"I know you don't care for a crowd, Kain, so I'll keep it short."
Kain nodded.
"You came up the road into Tillamore the better part of a year and a half ago.
In that time you've made yourself into a piece of the place.
Inside the first season you saw to a pack of wolves for us.
We were grateful. We weren't grateful enough at the time.
We didn't know yet what kind of man we had. "
Sam looked at the crowd a beat and at Kain a beat after that.
"When the gryphon came. You don't know what was said in this town the week it was first seen, Kain, because you live down the lane and out of earshot.
There were folks here making plans to leave.
There were folks here making plans to die where they stood.
There were folks making plans to put their children on the road and stay behind to slow the thing down.
None of those plans got carried out because you went up the ridge with your wolf and your horse and you saw to it.
You saved our lives. You saved the kind of lives we lived.
We can't put a price on it, and we wouldn't have known what to settle on the price at if we could. "
"You had me watch your horse," Jeremiah called from the middle, and the laugh went the length of the crowd.
"You had Jeremiah watch your horse," Sam said.
"That was the asking. Any other man would've come back from the ridge with a price-list. You came back with a horse to pick up.
So today, since you didn't name a price, we're going to put the price the way it lays.
The day is yours. The town is yours. The festival is yours. Thank you, Kain."
The crowd cheered.
Kain nodded and lifted a hand and stepped down off the box, and the crowd broke up. Sam stepped down off his own box and lowered his voice at Kain's shoulder.
"Sorry. Not for you. For the town."
"I know it."
"You work on that speech long."
"A stretch of nights. I'm not a man who works in words."
"It worked."
"The afternoon has another piece. We'll do a thing at noon out on the green. Between now and then, the day is yours, and your coin doesn't buy anything."
"Thanks, Sam."
Carol took his arm at the elbow, and the morning began in earnest.
The tables were under the awnings and along the porches and inside the Town Hall where the heat of the summer wouldn't spoil what had been set out.
Cakes at the McGrath table. Three kinds of jam at Mrs. Hollifield's.
Crackers and slices of fresh bread at the next table over.
A wide spread of jellies and dips and pickles and pretzels and scones and small loaves and a kind of small twisted bread Kain hadn't seen before, and a basket of strawberries someone had brought down from a patch on the cool side of their barn.
Folks called him over to try a thing and pressed a piece of it into his hand and watched his face for the verdict, and the verdict was the same every time, which was that the piece was good and the man who made it had a hand for the work.
By the time Carol got him to the door of the Kettle, Kain had eaten the better part of a small market and was leaning on her arm to keep from listing to one side.
Inside the Kettle, Gerald the brewer was at the end of the bar with three coppers on the wood in front of him.
"Sasha."
"Gerald."
"Kain doesn't pay today. I'll cover the tab. Up to one silver."
Kain lifted an eyebrow. "One silver. I couldn't spend that here on a day I was trying. On a day my stomach is what it is, I'll have a piece of one of those coppers off you before the afternoon."
"Then you'll drink to your heart's content and you won't put me out by it."
Sasha came out from the kitchen with the towel over her shoulder, and gave Kain the look she gave him when she was deciding whether to be more amused or more worried about him. "What'll you have?"
"Don't you start in too."
"It's a piece of fun. Let it be a piece of fun." She turned and pointed at the slate above the bar, which had been wiped clean and re-marked for the day in three lines of chalk.
THE DIVE. TALON SCRATCH. THE KILL.
"The Dive is mead with a shot of whiskey dropped in. The Talon Scratch is cider with cinnamon. The Kill is beer."
Kain looked at the slate a beat. "Talon Scratch."
"Talon Scratch."
"A drink named after a thing that almost killed me, that comes the color of blood out of a glass."
The towel paused at Sasha's shoulder, and Kain saw the color go out of her face. He lifted a hand off the bar before she could set the towel down.
"Messing with you. I'm messing with you. I don't drink the whiskey kind. The cider is what I came in for."
Sasha put the color back into her face one shade at a time and poured the cider into the cup and set it in front of him without saying anything about it.
Her hand stayed on the cup a beat longer than it needed to.
Kain looked at the hand. She looked at him looking.
She took the hand off the cup and turned to the stove.
The cinnamon was on the top in a small drift.
Kain took the cup up and tasted it. Apples and warmth and a thread of cinnamon.
"That's a good drink."
"It's a good drink."
Carol settled in on the stool beside him and held the line of the bar like a captain on a ship's rail, and a farmer Kain didn't know by name came up at his left shoulder.
"Kain. Walk me through how you killed the thing."
"I'll save him the long version," Carol said. "He poisoned it. Then he stabbed it in the throat. The poison didn't put it all the way down, so he used fire to throw it off the trail at the end. He came home in pieces. Anything else?"
The farmer stared at Carol a beat. "I never would have thought of doing it that way."
"You wouldn't have had to," Carol said. "You'd have asked someone else."
The farmer didn't quite know what to make of that. He nodded at Kain and shuffled off toward the cider barrel.
Kain looked at her over the rim of the cup. "Captain."
"You're welcome."
Folks came up. Carol cut the worst of the questions in half and Kain answered the ones she didn't cut. The cider sat down in him. The food on top of the cider sat down on top of the cider. The hours counted themselves toward noon.
At noon Sam came in the front door of the Kettle and held a hand up to Kain. "Out on the green."
The green was a stretch of grass at the south end of the main street where the village kept its summer ceremonies. A low platform had been laid out for the morning's work, and the crowd around it was bigger than the morning's had been. Every face in Tillamore that could come had come.
Garland the smith was at the side of the platform with a small box in his hands. Carol took her place at the side of the platform. Kain stepped up to the boards, and Sam stepped up beside him.
"Folks of Tillamore. Thank you all for coming to the celebration of the killing of the gryphon by Kain Asheld."
The crowd let out a sound that was half a cheer and half a long breath out of the chest of a village that had been holding it for a stretch.
"This afternoon we'll have the games on the green. The Talon Toss. The Pin the Beak on the Gryphon. The Gryphon Tag for the children. Before any of that, the village has a thing it wants to put in the hands of the man who held the village in his hands when it needed holding."
Sam turned and gestured to Garland. The smith came up on the boards and held out the box. Kain took it from him.
"Open it on the count of Kain," Sam said.
Kain set the box on the rail and worked the small clasp at the front, and the lid came up. Inside, on a piece of dark cloth, lay a worked arrowhead the length of a man's hand.
It was the dense matte black of a thing that had come out of a gryphon. Garland had ground the talon and worked the base into a tang and set a cross-edge along the spine and a fine point at the head.
Kain lifted the arrowhead out of the box and held it up for the green to see.
A sound came up out of the crowd, and it was a different sound from the one before.
"Garland took the talon off the foot of the bird," Sam said. "The smith worked it down to what you're holding. The talon will go through dragon hide if the talon ever has to. The village hopes it never has to. The village will have it if the village does."
Kain set the arrowhead back in the box, closed the lid, and lifted the box.
"Garland."
Garland nodded once at the boards.
"I'll take it grateful," Kain said. "I'll hold it the way the village asks me to. Thank you." The bow at the end of the line was the bow a man gave when the bow was the only thing he had to give back for a thing he hadn't asked for and couldn't refuse.
The crowd clapped. Sam set a hand on Kain's shoulder a beat and let it drop.
Children ran the Talon Toss in the grass at the south end of the green, throwing wooden talons painted black at a row of wood-cut gryphons. The Pin the Beak on the Gryphon went the way the game went. A small girl won it twice and cried when her brother won it the third time.
By the time the sun was halfway down the western side of the sky, Kain had been at the work of being thanked for the better part of a day. He looked at Carol. Carol looked at him.
"Kettle."
"Kettle."
Inside the Kettle the light was lower and the noise was lower and Sasha was at one of the tables in the corner with a plate of cake in front of her and Matthew on her knee.
The boy had cake on both fists and cake on his chin and a piece of cake worked into the corner of his eye where his small hand had gone the wrong way at his face.
He saw Kain and lifted one cake-fist in the air and waved at him.
Kain lifted a hand and waved back.
He came and sat across from Sasha at the small table and set the basket on the floor at his foot, and Carol took the chair next to Sasha.
The four of them sat there a beat in the low light of the Kettle while the boy worked cake into his mouth a fist at a time, and the sound of the festival came in muted off the street.
The boy held out his cake-fist toward Kain.
"You're not getting any of that," Kain said.
Matthew grinned cake-grinned.
Sasha had a piece of cake clean of fist-handling on a side plate. She slid the plate across the table to Kain. "You eat that. You've been at it all day."
Kain ate the cake.
Sam went past the front window of the Kettle on his way home with his hat in his hand and his coat over the other arm, and looked in through the glass.
Kain looked at Sam through the window. Sam looked back at Kain through the window.
Neither of the two men said any of the thing the look was the thing for, because they had said the saying of it in the back room a stretch before, and the days since the back room had moved both of them along the road they were on, and neither of them had moved off it.
Sam touched the brim of his hat and went on past the glass.
Kain looked at his cake-plate.
The festival had been the festival the village had needed.
The next time the village would set the tables out and string a banner up and put a slate of three drinks on the wall of the Kettle, the village would be looking at a different country, and the road in wouldn't be the road it had been, and the faces in the crowd wouldn't all be faces the crowd had seen before.
The day had been the village's day. The day hadn't been one Kain would put on the list of his favorite days, but the day had been one a man took when a village asked him to take it.
He finished the piece of cake on the plate. Matthew lifted the cake-fist again and waved, and Kain waved back.