What You Take
There were four days between the commission and the going, and Peg Hollis spent all of them being extremely normal about it.
She went to a job in Fennel Street on the Monday. She went to two jobs on the Tuesday, one of which was a drain and did not deserve her. On the Wednesday she stood in the yard for a while doing nothing in particular, and when Tal asked her what she was doing she said she was thinking about a wall, and Tal, who was eleven and had inherited more than was strictly convenient, said, “Which wall,” and Peg said, “Get in the house.”
On the Thursday she took the afternoon, which she had not done in two years.
The Hollis house held seven people and had been built, at some point in the last century, by somebody who had confidently expected it to hold four. It managed this by a system of unwritten treaties. The good chair was Peg’s, everyone knew it even if nobody said it. The step by the door was where you sat to take your boots off and also where you sat if you had had a bad day and did not want to be asked about it, and the difference between these was understood by everyone including the six-year-old.
Wren was packing on the floor of the back room, which meant that he had put everything he owned in a heap and was now looking at it.
“That’s not going to fit,” said Peg from the doorway.
“It fits.”
“It does not fit. That’s a whole coat spread out flat. When you fold that coat it becomes a different and much larger object.” She came in and crouched down, which her knees mentioned, and started sorting the heap into two piles with the ruthlessness of a woman who had spent eight years deciding what to carry to a job and what to leave in the cart. “Two shirts. Not three.”
“It’s two months.”
“It’s two months of you washing a shirt in a river like a person, instead of carrying a third one three hundred kilometers like an idiot.” She held up something woollen. “What is this?”
“Bram gave it to me.”
“Why?”
“He says it’s cold in the mountains.”
“It is cold in the mountains,” Peg allowed, “and it’s also January, and by the time you’re in the mountains it’ll be March, and this,” she said, dropping it on the leave pile, “weighs as much as a small dog. Take the grey one. The grey one’s ugly and it’s warm and nobody will steal it.”
Wren looked at the two piles. The go pile was noticeably smaller than he had planned and consisted almost entirely of things that were, on inspection, correct.
“You’ve done this before,” he said.
“I’ve done it a hundred times over. You go out with what you need and you come back with less, and everything in between you carry on your own back.” She sat back on her heels. “Compass?”
“Office issue.”
“Office’s, then. Right.” She was quiet for a second. “And the day-book?”
“Mine.”
“Good,” said Peg. “Keep it that way.”
The thing neither of them said had been in the house for two years, and had been in the house so consistently that it had developed the character of furniture. You went around it. You did not remark on it. Occasionally, at night, somebody barked a shin on it and everyone pretended not to hear.
It was this.
At seventeen Wren had been offered a place — a real one, seven years, under a master surveyor at the Capitol, the kind of place that ends with a seal and a practice and a name that means something in a room. It cost. Apprenticeships did. Seven years of fees and lodging and a boy who earns nothing, and the Hollis household at that time had contained six children, a woman two years into a trade she had started at thirty-one, and a gap where a man had been.
And Wren had said no thank you, and taken a chainman’s post at the district Office instead, which paid immediately, and had handed over most of it every month since without once making a thing of it.
Peg had never said you shouldn’t have. Because he should have. That was the unbearable part. Given the same table and the same numbers she would have made the same choice, and she had raised him to be the sort of person who would, and he had been, and it had worked, and every single month for two years she had taken his money and said thank you and gone upstairs and sat on the end of her bed for a minute.
He had traded his ceiling for her margin. He thought she hadn’t noticed.
She had watched him do it in real time and had been unable to think of a single thing to say that wouldn’t make it worse.
“They’ve got you doing this at Third grade,” she said, apropos of the shirts.
“For now.”
“For now.” She folded the second shirt properly, which he had not. “You know what a re-survey does to a record, don’t you. For the chainman.”
“It goes in as an attested return.”
“It goes in under your hand,” said Peg. “Not under Vau’s, or the Office’s. Yours. Two months of measurements with your name at the bottom of every page, and if it’s clean it sits in the Capitol’s ledgers for a hundred years being right.” She flattened the shirt with the side of her hand. “That’s not nothing. That’s a thing they can’t take off you and can’t overlook, because it’s written down.”
Wren said, carefully, “You’ve thought about this.”
“I’ve thought about very little else since Monday,” said Peg, “so if you could not make me say that out loud again, I’d be grateful.”
After the little ones were down she got the box off the shelf.
It was not a special box. It had held nails once. She put it on the table between them and pushed it over to Wren, who looked at it, and then at her, and then at it.
“That’s your plumb.” he said, almost reproachfully.
“It’s a plumb.”
“That’s your plumb. Corven gave you that when you qualified.”
“Corven,” said Peg, “gave me that because the Guild makes them give the journeyman something and it was the cheapest thing on the shelf that wasn’t a hat.”
This was a lie, both of them knew it was a lie, but it was told in the specific tone that means that’s that.
Wren opened the box. It was smaller than he had remembered, he’d last seen it when she first brought it home, he had been ten and scarcely tall enough to meet her shoulders, and extremely curious at how something could look like stone but feel like metal.
On a plaited cord lay a bob about the length of his thumb — dull grey, taking no shine at all, tapering down to a point the eye could not quite find the end of. Under the cord, wound on a peg of black wood, was a length of fine line for when you wanted drop.
He put a finger on it and took the finger off again. It was cold. Not cellar-cold, and not the cold metal goes in July — cold in the particular way that would have you believe it had never heard of warmth before, and wouldn’t understand if you explained it.
Deadmetal. He had seen a knight’s gorget once, at a distance, at a parade, and had been told what it was by a man who was almost certainly wrong about everything else that day. He had never seen a piece of it small enough for a person to own.
“You wear it,” said Peg. “Under the shirt. It’s no good to anybody in a box.”
“What’s it for?”
“Nothing. That’s the whole of it.” She turned her cup a half-turn on the table and left it there. “Everything else has got somebody in it. That hasn’t. So when you’re stood somewhere and the ground’s saying one thing and that’s saying another, it isn’t that one doing the lying.”
“I can’t take this.”
“You can’t take anything of the Office’s,” said Peg, “because it’s the Office’s and Vau’d have your ears. You can take this, because it’s mine, and I’m giving it, and if you say the next thing you’re about to say I will put you out the back door.”
Wren shut his mouth.
“I had it seen to this week. Mattock knew a man who’s worked it before – he’s the only one in the town who’ll touch the stuff, on account of you can’t get it hot, so it’s all cold work and files.” She said it as though it were nothing much. “Point was going. It’s true now.”
“Right.”
“Cord’ll want replacing before winter. The line’s fine though.”
“Right.”
“And don’t lend it.”
“I won’t.”
“People ask. They ask nicely, that’s the trouble with it.” She stopped. Started again. “The line’s fine, though.”
“You said.”
“I did say.”
Neither of them said anything for a moment. Above them somebody small turned over and complained in their sleep.
“Nine years that door-frame’s been up,” said Peg, to nobody in particular. “Not a crack in it.”
“I know.”
“I know you know,” she said, and stayed where she was.
He went at first light, because parties go at first light, for reasons which are entirely to do with daylight and not at all to do with the fact that first light was a merciful hour at which to leave a house.
The whole street knew, because two of the little ones cried. One because Wren was going and one because the other one was crying, which is a well-documented mechanism. Tal, with a very determined expression, presented him with a stone she had found and considered lucky. He received it, examined it with exagerrated care, agreed that it was a very good one, and put it in his coat with enormous seriousness — and though he thought it might not come back with him, and he was fairly sure she would have found a better stone by then anyway, he wasn’t going to refuse her determination.
Peg walked him to the end of Fennel Street and stopped, because past Fennel Street was the Astar road, and she was not going to stand at the top of the Astar road waving.
“Right, this as far as I go. I’ve got a job here anyway,” she said. “You’ll write.”
“I’ll write.”
“You won’t,” said Peg, “because nobody writes, and there’s no post out of the drove country, and I’ve made my peace with that, so don’t spend the whole two months feeling guilty about a letter, because I’d rather you spent it doing the job properly.”
“That’s a very strange sort of permission.”
“It’s the only sort I’ve got.”
He was taller than her by a head, which had happened at some point without anybody signing off on it. She reached up and straightened his collar, which did not need straightening, and which was the only thing she could think of to do with her hands.
“Wren.”
“Yes.”
There were about nine things she could have said. She had been assembling them for four days, in the yard, on the way back from a drain, at the end of her bed. I know what you gave up. Or I’d have done it too and I hate that. Or it’s not a debt, it was never a debt, and if you spend the next forty years paying it I’ll have failed at the only thing I actually cared about.
She looked at him standing at the top of Fennel Street with his mother’s plumb under his shirt and three hundred kilometers in front of him, nineteen years old, entirely certain the whole thing was going to be fine.
“The line’s fine,” she said.
“You said.”
“Go on, then.”
And he went, and she stood there rather longer than she had intended to, and then she went to work, because there was a wall in Fennel Street that had been leaning since March.