He woke.
First the creak of the building, the timbers contracting in the cold. Then the stirring of beasts in the stockyard, restless before feeding. A cart rattled on cobblestones below. Then distant voices. Hardown waking. Last, the light: a thin grey seam along the base of the shutters.
In the first week he had learnt the pattern. He lived by it now.
The room above Pesset’s dry goods was a cramped space, held between the merchants’ storage floor and the roof, and it hoarded whatever the season gave it, heat or cold with equal grudging stubbornness.
He had slept in worse places. He did not dwell on the better ones.
He rose, a dwarf broad through the chest and shoulders, four feet and a half in height. In Mhonad-Rac his stature had been unremarkable, a single stone in a wall of brothers. Here, it was not. His hands were large, scarred from old burns. They were a smith’s hands, capable of force or delicacy, and now seldom called upon for the latter.
The basin he found by touch, and poured into it what remained of the jug. The water was cold. He washed his face and reached for the razor. He worked a thin lather from the tallow stub, applied it to his jaw, and shaved. The razor was his own make, a straight blade forged in his first year in Hardown, kept sharp because a dull blade insulted the work. Stubble he would not suffer. The strokes were short and certain, needing no light. He cleaned the blade and dried it before setting it down. The jaw beneath his hand was bare, the skin there unexpectedly soft. The law had shorn him once; the keeping of it was his own. He could have let the beard return and passed for whole among Men. He would not give himself the lie.
He had loved the early mornings best. Before the day brought its negotiations, grievances, and the small endless politics of a working forge. Early, there had only been the work. There was a quality to that hour. The quiet, perhaps, or simply that no one was watching. He had done some of his finest work in that hour. That had seemed ordinary at the time.
He descended by the back stair, which was his by arrangement with Pesset, who preferred he not be seen using the front. This had been established in the first week and had endured unchanged since. Cragg bore no resentment of it. Pesset’s trade was with merchants and their agents, folk of a certain standing who held opinions concerning what they wished to encounter before their morning dealings. A beardless dwarf was not among those things. Khurren, he thought without heat. Wrong ground. He had always been on the wrong ground here.
The passage behind Pesset’s was an alley in all but name, too narrow for carts, wide enough for two to pass if both were willing. The city was awake, which is to say that it had never fully slept, only changed its voice in the dark hours. The smell followed hard behind: night soil, smoke, and the musk of the stockyard.
He bought bread from the baker’s boy who worked the corner of Tanner’s Row before the sun was fully up, a loaf of coarse brown, still warm. The boy kept his eyes on the bread and the coin. Most people in this part of Hardown did not look at him, which suited Cragg. Here the prevailing custom was to mind one’s own affairs. Few on this street could withstand scrutiny if it came.
There were no tanners on Tanner’s Row. The trade had moved, but the name remained. Among Men this passed without remark. He thought it slovenly. Mhonad-Rac would have had it set right in a season.
He ate as he walked, barely aware that he was doing so.
Hardown was a city that had happened because the road needed it to. Where the road came out of the west, someone had built a wayhouse and then a stable and then everything else a traveler might need before the forest or after it. The people here had found a place where no one pressed them for their history. Cragg saw it in how they moved, detached, occupied with their own business. A city of people who had stopped somewhere and decided that stopping was enough.
Cragg had stopped five years ago.
A dog followed him for half a block. It was a bony creature, moving with the cautious hope of a beast long schooled in disappointment. It observed his bread with professional attention. Cragg broke a piece from the end of the loaf and dropped it as he walked. The dog took it and fell back, and that was the end of their acquaintance.
The one virtue of Murcer’s workshop was the forge, though even that drew ill on damp mornings. Murcer himself was present when Cragg arrived. He was a broad man of low stature, the strength of his younger years gone soft in him now, spent on years of ease.
‘Cragg,’ he said by way of greeting.
Cragg entered and made his way to the bench. ‘Murcer.’
This was commonly the whole of their morning exchange. On most days it sufficed. Murcer passed him the day’s work, a list scratched in his cramped hand upon whatever scrap had been nearest: buckles for a harness-maker on the north side, hinges for a barn door being raised beyond the eastern gate, half a dozen fire-pokers of a common pattern for a merchant. The work was simple enough that he could have done most of it in his sleep and sometimes thought he nearly did. He took the scrap, went to the forge, and began.
The forge wanted coaxing at first light. He laid the fire, nursed it from the night’s embers, and waited. The draw was poor, as on all damp days. There was no purpose in forcing it. The forge would do what the forge would do, and patience cost less than striving. By the time it reached working heat, the morning was well along. Nearby, Murcer moved through his own lesser rituals: a crate shifted, a ledger opened and closed, the scrape of a stool drawn to the bench. The sounds of Murcer beginning a day he had no intention of straining himself over.
The work itself he did not resent. The fire, the metal, the negotiation between what the material was and what it was being asked to become. His craft he had learnt under a smith named Durrath, who had wrought in the deep-forges for sixty-odd years. Metal was the most honest substance in the world, he had told him. It did only what its nature and the heat and the hammer demanded, neither more nor less, and that a dwarf might live the same and fare the better. He had been twenty when Durrath spoke those words and had not understood them then. He understood them now, perhaps more fully than he wished.
Twenty buckles, a common harness pattern, made early in the week; the fire-pokers after. His hands ached at the end of each day, the ache of work beneath them.
The hinges had been the long work of the week, four in all, of the barn-door sort, heavy strap hinges with pintles. The iron Murcer kept for bulk work was of indifferent quality, foul with slag and uneven under the hammer, which made the finished pieces merely adequate. He could have made them better with better iron and knew he should not bother saying so, for the saying would change nothing.
He said it nonetheless, after the second hinge. A small rebellion, and a vain one.
‘Iron’s what it is,’ Murcer said. He stood in the doorway with a piece of salt pork in one hand, chewing slowly, his eyes on the work and his mind elsewhere, as was his custom.
Cragg made no answer. There was nothing to say that had not been said, and nothing Murcer was going to hear that he had not already chosen to ignore.
‘You ought be grateful for the work.’ This was not the first time Murcer had spoken thus. ‘It’s not as though you’ve got a queue of offers.’
Cragg gave him nothing and carried the finished buckles out into the afternoon.
He met them on the way to the harness-maker. Three of them, of the southern ranges, by their garb, broad-built, their beards long and ringed with bronze at the lower braids. They were all he was not, and they saw it at once. The first slowed. The second followed his fellow’s gaze. The third made a sound that was not quite laughter. They halted. Cragg did not.
‘Oi, khethavar.’ The dwarven tongue. He had not heard it spoken aloud in months.
Naked-face. It was not the worst thing he had been called. Far from it. A dwarf wore his beard from youth until death. A dwarf without was a dwarf unmade.
‘This one is at ease in his shame,’ said another.
He was past them now. They had mules and goods to see to. They would do nothing beyond what they had already done.
One of them spat. ‘Golvast,’ came the voice behind him.
Shame-bearer.
He walked on, and his shoulders set of themselves. Then footsteps behind him, following for a half-dozen paces before falling back.
The thought came fully formed in a wild rush. He could be on them before they understood. They were merchants, not fighters. Neither was he, but he was bigger and angrier, and that would carry him for as long as it took. He had the strength of forty years with the forge hammer. The first he could put down with a fist; he had never struck a dwarf with intent in his life, but he knew what his arm could do to soft iron, and a face was softer. The other two would not know what to do with him after that.
Then the cost. It came to him with the usual clarity of reason. A beardless dwarf seen striking three of his folk in the open street. The guard would take him before midday. The dwarves themselves would not need to come forward; their word against his was a verdict already written. He would be in a cell before sundown and dead at the end of a rope by week's end.
The logic stopped him. It always had.
His right hand had gone to a fist without his asking. He opened it, finger by finger, and walked on.
He turned the corner and passed two men in the yellow-striped sleeves of the council's guard. One muttered something to his companion. Cragg ignored them. Thurrak, he thought. Soft ones. His contempt was a reflex now, the habit of a pride that had nothing left to protect. The guards and their muttering, the dwarves and their sneers. Fools, all of them.
He carried his anger the rest of the way to the harness-maker's. Bette had dealt with Murcer for years and handled the transaction with brisk indifference. She examined the buckles, called them adequate, and paid what Murcer asked.
He took the long way back. There was a yard off the lane behind the harness-maker's where a woman kept a few goats, penned behind a low rail. They were occupying themselves with the unhurried destruction of all things within reach, which he judged to be the chief business of goats everywhere. She sold cheese from a board set across two barrels at the yard's gate, small, round wheels of it wrapped in cloth. Cragg bought a wedge, sat on a low wall across from the pen, and ate it slowly.
The goats observed him with their yellow, oblong eyes, which lent them an air of considered judgment they had almost certainly not earned. One pressed its brow against the rail and waited. He broke a small piece from the wedge, went to the rail and held it out. The goat took it with a practiced deftness.
Cragg sat for a time after he had finished, his hands on his knees, and let his eyes follow the animals about their small kingdom. There were worse ways to spend a quarter-hour. The goats harbored no purpose beyond the immediate.
He rose and went back. The walk gave him too much quiet. He tried to keep her memory at bay, but the dwarves had stirred an old ache that the goats had not quieted, and by the time he turned onto Tanner’s Row she was already there.
Rûna. He had not meant to think of her, and now he could think of nothing else.
He had known her most of his life. The daughter of his father’s oldest friend, Draden, she was a familiar face at gatherings, no more than that to him until one evening at her father’s table. She had laughed at something he said, though he could never remember what. Cragg had turned toward her, intending only to see what had amused her, and found himself lingering. Her face. Her dark eyes. He had never truly noticed her until then. She had not looked away.
Afterward, nothing had been simple between them again.
The first months were measured in evening walks. Every evening he met her at her father’s door, and they would move through the stone halls with conversation for the destination. She was easy to talk to. She did not pretend to understand what she did not, and would never offer a false nod. If he was unclear, she pushed until the meaning was bare. In her presence, Cragg unspooled. He found himself saying things he had kept behind his teeth for years. How his hands felt like old hinges in the morning, or that he sometimes thought he was no longer young. She had laughed at that, not unkindly, and he found that he loved the sound.
Rûna’s mother had been dead some years by then, and Draden’s house was Rûna’s to keep, and she kept it. She sat with her father through the winter coughs that grew deeper and more stubborn each year. Her life was the scrape of a ladle and the pull of a needle through wool. For Rûna this was no burden. She loved her father, and the love asked these things of her, and she gave them without thought.
Draden had been a smith of the deep-forges, broad-shouldered and open-handed. He had been a childhood friend of Cragg’s father, Grenthar, and had watched the lad grow up at the margins of his awareness. The night he understood that Cragg meant something to his daughter, his idle notice sharpened to scrutiny. Cragg must have passed the test, for one day Draden told him that he was as reliable as a forge weld. By the second year, the betrothal was a mere formality; Draden was already introducing him as his own.
He walked on. Kolm, his younger brother, had spent his youth getting himself into things that needed to be undone, and Cragg had always come to his rescue. He pulled him from one of Mhonad-Rac's rivers when Kolm was six; from a fight with a smith's apprentice twice his size when he was twelve; and again at nineteen, when Kolm owed a thug of the eastern markets a gambling debt. It had not occurred to either of them that there might come a day when Cragg could not pull him clear. Draden, who saw Kolm clearly, had once told Cragg that the lad was fortunate to have an older brother who watched out for him, and that he should not relax his vigilance.
Kolm was a wastrel, affable and generous, careless in the giving, for he had never been the one to bear the cost. He found his brother’s steadiness the ground beneath him once their parents were gone, and never questioned it. Cragg had not minded. He had liked the work of being his brother. He had drawn him clear of consequences time and again, until the last time.
That was the night before he was to wed Rûna.
The three of them had been drinking at the Keg and Tongs. The contract had been signed earlier in the day, witnessed and sealed. The evening began as a small thing, and stretched. Cragg remembered laughter, warm beer, and Draden merry, his voice booming as he spun out tales of Kolm's youthful folly for the amusement of the room. It was meant in play, the rough affection of an elder, and Cragg took his brother's amusement for his own. He did not look closely enough.
They began to leave, Draden first, Kolm just behind him. Cragg was delayed by some small thing he could no longer recall: a dropped coin, a clasp, a word at the door. A minute, perhaps two. He walked into the side passage off the drinking hall and found Kolm standing over Draden's body.
His brother turned to him with a child’s face, caught at what could not be taken back. Cragg had not asked what happened. He told him to go. Kolm went without a word, and his footsteps were gone down the passage before Cragg had drawn breath. He stood alone with the body at his feet. There was no thinking his way clear of it, though he tried. If he spoke, they would ask who. There had been three at the table and now one was dead, and the whole hall had heard Draden’s sport with Kolm that evening, and Kolm had run. The defense that would save Cragg would bury his brother. He was still standing there when he was found.
When they came and asked him, he said nothing. He did not confess, nor did he deny. He let the silence stand where the answer ought to have gone, and the silence served them well enough. A dwarf had been killed. Another dwarf had been found beside the body. The rest was not difficult reasoning, and they did not labor at it.
He had waited, through the questioning and the days that followed, for his brother to come forward. He never doubted that Kolm would; he felt it in his marrow. Kolm would confess.
He did not.
The verdict came on the second day. Guilty. Then the choice the law gave to every dwarf found guilty of killing his kind: the axe or the shearing. He chose the shearing. The craven road, they called it among his folk.
Rûna. He had not let himself look at her. Not once, through any of it. It would have undone him. But he had felt her, a ghost at his back, watching all of it. On the morning that should have made her his wife, she had stood at her father’s grave.
What followed was the law doing what the law does when a life is struck from the record. Draden had no son of his own, and the holdings he had meant for Rûna’s house had been bound to Cragg through the contract. When Cragg was convicted, his claim fell. What had been bound to him passed to his next of kin. Kolm. Draden’s home and fortune. Not from malice on his brother’s part, he told himself, nor from calculation. The law required it, and Kolm was in no position to refuse what the law delivered.
And Rûna. She too had been bound to him through the contract, and the contract had passed, and she with it. He had loved her and built his entire future on her being at his side. The law had moved her to his brother’s keeping with the same indifference it had moved everything else.
He tried to be glad for his brother. Most days.
That was a lie.
In the judgment hall, Kolm had shown nothing. No grief, no relief, no fear, none that Cragg could see. The proceeding went on in front of him. It did not seem to reach him. Silence. Nothing.
That silence had lasted twelve years.
Cragg could still not decide which cut deeper: that Kolm had said nothing, or that he had never asked.
At the time he had told himself the stillness was Kolm’s way of bearing what he could not face, his shame turned inward. He had told himself so for years, then stopped. He had come to know what the stillness was: his brother watching a thing happen that he was not going to stop.
She haunted him.
He had not come to Hardown by any straight road. Nor had he been driven from Mhonad-Rac; the shearing was its own punishment, and nothing in the law required him to leave. He had stayed long enough to know that Rûna had observed her mourning. Then the law had moved. The contract passed to Kolm, and he had taken his place. Cragg heard of it from a cousin who had not thought to spare him. Cragg left because he could no longer stand the sound of his brother’s silence.
In the months and years after leaving Mhonad-Rac he had moved like water finding the low ground, pooling where it gathered him, moving on when the pooling felt too much like settling. A mining camp in the east where they had been glad enough for his hands and asked no questions of his bare jaw. He stayed two months, until the foreman’s curiosity grew into a question Cragg would not answer and could not keep deflecting. A river-town, where a smith had fallen ill and his wife paid Cragg to keep the forge. When the man recovered, Cragg moved on the same week.
He endured it. That was what he remembered most clearly of those times: the absence of feeling about any of it, the way each place had received him, and released him, and left no impression. The wandering had been weather to him, to be passed through and not remarked upon.
He had learnt in those years that a dwarf alone upon the road drew eyes, and held them. The beardlessness compounded it. Among Men he was already a curiosity; but a dwarf without a beard begged a question they could not quite resist. Whatever he offered by way of answer only bred further inquiry, and so he had learnt to offer nothing. He cultivated, from necessity, a talent for being unremarkable. Keeping his hood raised. Speaking little. Doing the work and not lingering for questions.
After some years of this, he had imagined going north. Not to Mhonad-Rac, never there, but to some other settlement where his skill might find real work and his golvast might be unknown. He held that thought for a time, then let it go. It required a kind of hope he no longer had.
The ring of the farrier’s hammer two doors down brought him back to the street. He did not know how long he had walked so, his feet finding the way without him.
Osta was speaking with Murcer when he returned, there for the fire-pokers she had ordered. She was a hard haggler, every order. In the early years, she had asked Murcer, within Cragg’s hearing, whether he was certain about the dwarf. He had said his work was sound and the price was right. She had not asked again.
She had the pokers set upon the bench and was turning them one at a time, examining the shaft, testing the weight against her palm, setting those aside that did not satisfy her without explanation. Cragg stopped where he stood. His mother had handled things that way. The same flat certainty. Throna, turning a pot in her hands in the market, or running a thumb along the edge of a blade to know if it was worth the asking price. A tough customer.
Cragg moved past them to the forge.
He returned to the hinges. The fourth and last was in his hand, the iron brought up to the first heat and taken to the anvil. He drew the strap and began working the taper.
His mother. He had not thought of her in some time. She had been older already when he was young, though he had not known it then, and he had taken the grey in her hair for the ordinary furniture of motherhood. She had kept their house with a discipline that left no corner unexamined, and he had learnt from her a portion of what he was. The habit of order. The dogged belief that a thing done well was its own argument, however few were listening.
Under the memory, unbidden, his body had gone wary and warm in the same breath: an old readiness to step light around someone and be glad of them at once. He recognized the feeling. He had carried it always. So he went down after its root, to the one it was for.
There was no one there.
He thought again. The feeling remained, the care and the warmth of it complete, and below it, where the one who had earned it should have stood, there was a seamless nothing. He tried to furnish the place with a face at the head of the table, a voice and the pitch it took when it rose, and found not a shadow, not a fragment at its edge. He knew only that the wariness had been tied to love, and that a lifetime had gone into the making of it, and that he could not find the one it was made for.
He had not moved. He did not know for how long. The iron was on the anvil and the heat was bleeding out of it, the color already past its window. He saw it, and knew it, and the knowing did not reach his hands in time. He brought the hammer down late and wrong, and the stroke caught the edge of the anvil face and rang across the shop, sharp and bright and carrying. The hinge leapt from the face and struck the stone floor.
In the silence after, he heard Osta’s voice stop mid-word. He did not turn. He stood with the hammer in his hand and looked at the anvil.
‘What was that?’ Murcer said from the doorway. Osta stood behind him, the accepted pokers gathered under one arm.
Cragg set down the hammer. He crossed to where the hinge had fallen and picked it up. The iron had cooled past working. The taper he had drawn was set crooked and the strap had taken a twist where the stroke had caught it wrong. He would need to bring it back to heat and begin the shaping again. An hour’s work, and a length of iron if the twist had soured the grain.
‘The iron slipped,’ he said, because he was not going to say what had taken him, and the lie sat in his mouth like slag. Murcer looked from him to the hinge and back. Osta said nothing, which served the same purpose.
‘You’re getting strange,’ Murcer said. ‘Stranger.’
Osta settled her account and left without further comment. Cragg heard the door, and then the workshop was quiet, and he was alone with the ruined hinge and the question that had ruined it.
His mother had been alone. The thought had no force at first. His mother had kept the house, had raised him and Kolm, had done what was needed and asked no help of anyone. Alone, as a widow was alone. He had never examined it.
But she had not been a widow. Had she?
He scoured his memory for who should have stood beside her. A father. The word sat in his mind like an empty room.
Had his mother ever spoken of a father? He turned through what he could recall of their conversations, her family stories. The things she had said to him as a child, the things she had not. She had spoken of Draden, of neighbors, and the price of lamp-oil. She had never, in all the years he could call to mind, spoken of a husband.
An unwed mother. The thought went through him cold. Among his people a dam who bore a child outside of marriage was not merely shamed. She was diminished, set apart. The stain touched the child. He had known such children in Mhonad-Rac. He had seen how they moved through the world, the way a stone moves when the wall has been built around it wrong.
He put the thought down. It was wrong, and he knew it was wrong. There had been a father. The wariness told him so, and the warmth under it, and neither would have grown in him without someone to grow them around. There had been a father, and no shame in it. He held it with every proof of it gone, but he held it.
He reheated the iron. The forge took its time.
The truth was he could not find him. He stood at the forge, warmed by a fondness he could not spend and braced for a temper that belonged to no one, and grieved, and did not know for whom.
The iron came up. He worked the twist out of the strap, drew the taper clean and set the pintle. It took him the rest of the afternoon. The light through the high window had begun its slow retreat by the time he set it beside the others. Adequate.
By the time Cragg gathered himself to go, Murcer had taken himself into the back, engaged in something that involved crates and muttering. The week’s wage lay on the bench, counted out, as always, to the exact amount and not a quarter-penny beyond it. Cragg took it without checking and went.
On the street, the last of the day’s light had begun to fade, familiar things gone muddled in the dimness. He turned away from Pesset’s. The silence waited there, and he had no stomach for it tonight.
The Tinglenog occupied a corner position on the better end of the street it called home. Marginally less grim than its neighbors, it served good food, better drink, and stopped short of welcoming outright violence. Scarred tables, uneven benches, but the noise was the ordinary sort: commerce, argument, laughter, complaint. No one in it had ever, in Cragg’s experience, made his face the subject of extended commentary.
He took his accustomed seat against the wall near the lesser hearth, where the lamplight was thin enough that he could see without being easily seen from the door. He had sat thus for five years, since shortly after he came to Hardown. He set his hands on the table and looked at them. The forge-grime was still on them.
A cup appeared at his elbow he had not called for. Sprink, then.
‘You look like Hardown smells,’ said Sprink, with good cheer. He was already moving toward the next table, a plate in each hand, his gait the barely governed forward motion of one running on the fuel of his own tireless interest in whatever was presently happening.
Cragg glanced down at himself. The day’s sweat and charcoal-smell were on his shirt in equal measure, a smear of ash along his forearm he had not noticed until now. He had not gone back to wash. He always went back to wash. That he had come here instead, without thinking, without basin or clean shirt, pricked at him with a brief and unreasonable embarrassment. He raised the cup and drank.
Sprink returned in a moment, having set the plates down with a speed and sureness that came from years of navigating crowds. He leant against the post at the end of the table with his familiar ease. ‘You hear about the elf?’ he said.
The lad was among the few folk in Hardown whose company Cragg did not actively wish elsewhere. He said nothing, which Sprink had long since learnt to interpret as permission to continue.
The Tinglenog filled around them, table by table, until the room had achieved its fullness of noise and warmth. A company of laborers held the long table near the door, Men still bearing the dust of hewn timber on their clothes. Two merchants sat beside the main hearth with the careful distance of Men not yet certain whether they were rivals or allies, using the meal to decide. A woman alone near the windows with a cup, sitting turned from the room.
‘Came in from the east this very evening,’ Sprink said, leaning forward slightly, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial register. ‘Tall. Riding a dark horse. Mail like the scales of a fish, silver. And a sword –’ He paused, savoring the moment. ‘with a ruby in the pommel.’ A small measure of spittle attended the final word, which Sprink did not mark.
He was cut short by a shout from the kitchen, his father’s voice. Sprink straightened, cast a look of theatrical suffering at him, and was gone, threading between tables.
Cragg’s food arrived in his absence, brought by Sprink’s younger sister, Tilli. She set the bowl down with the solemnity of someone taking her work seriously and departed smiling. It was a mutton stew, the evening’s common fare, thick with root vegetables and served with a heel of brown bread for soaking. It was hot and it was honest and it was the same stew the Tinglenog had been serving since he had arrived in Hardown. He had no complaints about it that he had ever seen fit to voice. He ate steadily, his eye on the room.
The laborers by the door grew louder as the evening wore on, though not unpleasantly. Their dispute concerned some matter of structure, a beam-reckoning from what Cragg could gather, upon which two of them held strong and opposing views. The merchants at the hearth had apparently resolved their assessment of each other and were deep in talk that involved papers drawn from coat-pockets and examined with a show of ease. The woman by the window had been joined, reluctantly by the look of it, by a man who had either missed the set of her shoulders or not heeded it. She was handling it with a weary competence.
Cragg had turned away, but the woman laughed at something the young man said. A real laugh, sudden and unguarded, her head tipping back and her hand going to her mouth after, as though she had not meant to be so loud.
Cragg picked up his cup.
Rûna’s laugh had been lower, and she had never covered it.
By the window, the young man was reaching for the woman’s hand. Clumsy about it. She laughed again.
Cragg drank and tried to forget.
Sprink reappeared some while later, faintly hurried, with the look of someone freshly removed from scrutiny. He filled Cragg’s cup without being asked and resumed leaning against the post.
‘Where was I?’ he said.
‘Ruby in the pommel,’ Cragg replied.
Sprink pointed at him with satisfaction. ‘Ruby in the pommel!’ He reached across, tore bread from Cragg’s remaining loaf, and ate it. ‘I saw him come through myself. Stopped in the street for a gape, I won’t pretend otherwise.’ He paused and repeated, ‘Ruby in the pommel,’ with a kind of reverence. ‘You don’t see his sort every day. Every year, really. Convinced him to lodge here, I did. He’s upstairs.’ He jerked his chin at the ceiling. ‘Right above us. Asked for a private room, stabled the horse, paid without discussion, which tells you something, wouldn’t you say? I carried the saddlebags up. Wouldn’t let me touch the sword though. Never left his hip.’
He leaned closer, lowering his voice.
‘And the stone, I called it a ruby, but I’m not certain it was. At first look, aye. Red, deep red. But there was something in it. A light. Like a flame, turning slow.’ He frowned. ‘I’ve seen rubies. My father has one in the strongbox, the one he thinks none of us knows about. This wasn’t that. This was something else. I don’t know what.’
Cragg set down the cup. ‘Elvish make,’ he said.
Sprink blinked, and grinned, wide and a little lopsided, the way his face went when things were moving in a direction he liked. Then he looked harder at Cragg, and the grin fell away, and in its place came a look Cragg had seen on the lad before, though never turned upon himself: the look he kept for what moved him.
‘You’re curious,’ he said. ‘You’re never curious.’
Cragg said nothing. Sprink waited. When no answer came, he grinned again, pushed off from the post, and returned to his work.
Curious was something Cragg had not been in some time.
He left the Tinglenog when the room had mostly cleared and given place to its later crowd, the committed drinkers, the ones with nowhere particular to be, the ones for whom the noise of other people was preferable to the quiet of wherever they slept. He nodded to Sprink on his way out. The lad was already deep in talk with a traveler, leaning so far across the counter that the traveler had drawn back a little.
The street held the day's warmth still, as it did this time of year. He walked on, the way quieter now but not yet silent. A pair of council guards ambled along the far side. A cat regarded him from a window-ledge with the detached superiority of its kind and looked away first, which Cragg did not take personally.
The lane narrowed as he turned toward home, and in the quiet between the lamps the feeling rose again of its own accord, the warmth and the wariness both, and found nothing to settle on. He had hoped, all evening, that the memory would come to him. Some forgotten mention, some trace he had overlooked.
It did not. And Cragg was beginning to understand that it would not. He carried a love up the dark street with no one at the far end of it.
He climbed the back stairs by feel, which was the same way he had descended them that morning. The room was as it had been, small, low-ceilinged, the walls close enough to touch if he stretched his arms. He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled off his boots, and after them his breeches and shirt.
He lay down. Somewhere outside, the stockyard beasts stirred in their pens. The sounds of Hardown changed registers in the dark hours. He knew the pattern. He closed his eyes.
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