On the first day of autumn, Steward Hobb rode into the square on his bay gelding and read out a proclamation from the baron, and by that afternoon every soul in Harrowfield who could stand upright was in the fields.
"By order of His Lordship the Baron of Westmarch," Hobb read, from a paper with a red seal, in his round, damp voice. "In light of the Abyssal threat reported in the northern hills, and on the advice of the Holy Temple, the harvest of all barony lands shall be brought in forthwith. All grain to be cut, bound, and stored within the bounds of the village within ten days. Livestock to be penned within the village each night until the threat has passed." He lowered the paper. "His Lordship adds that the rents will still be due as usual."
Nobody laughed. Nobody said anything at all. They just looked at each other, and then at the barley fields, patchy and brown under a thin grey sky - three weeks from ready, at least - and then they went home and got their sickles.
❖ ❖ ❖
Ten days was not enough time. Everyone knew it. And so, for ten days, nobody in Harrowfield slept very much.
It was, Adrian thought afterward, the strangest and best ten days of his life.
The village stopped being forty houses and became one thing. The Brandts cut the Tulls' field because the Tulls had only the twins and one old uncle. The Tulls carted sheaves for the Colls. The Colls, who owned the only good wagon in the valley, drove it from field to field from dawn until the stars came out. Old Hatty closed the Plough and set up trestle tables in the square, and every woman in the village who was not binding sheaves was cooking at them, and the square smelled of bread and onion soup and wood smoke from morning to night.
Even the Grey Watch squires took off their white surcoats and cut barley. Adrian saw Rowan in the Dunns' east field on the second day, sleeves rolled up, swinging a sickle with the same heavy, steady rhythm as their father. He did not look up. But when Adrian passed with a water jug, Rowan held out his hand for it without a word, and drank, and handed it back, and bumped Adrian's shoulder with his fist, and that was enough.
The only person who did not cut barley was the High Examiner. Crane walked the fields in his white robe with Brother Odo at his side, and blessed each one as it was finished, drawing the circle of the Luminant in the air over the stubble. People bowed to him. Some of them thanked him. Brother Odo did not carry his brass bell. But Adrian noticed that he walked with one hand inside his robe, always, as if holding something there.
❖ ❖ ❖
On the third day, his father handed him the scythe.
They were in the Vale barley, the poor western strip. Tomas had been cutting since dawn, and his knee was bad - so bad that he had stopped hiding it, and was cutting with his teeth gritted and sweat running into his eyes. He finished a row, and stood leaning on the handle, breathing hard, and looked out at how much was still standing. Then he looked at Adrian.
"You've been practicing," he said. "Haven't you."
Adrian's heart jolted. "What?"
"In the south meadow. The second growth. Somebody cut a strip of it about a month ago, before the sun was up. I found it that afternoon." His father's voice was tired, not angry. "Twelve swathes. Straight as a Temple road. And the scythe was back on its pegs in the barn, and there was dew still on the blade, and a spot of blood on the handle."
Adrian did not say anything. There was nothing to say.
"Your mother knows," said Tomas. "I asked her. She told me to leave it be." He looked at his son for a long moment. "I'm leaving it be. I don't want to know what she's not telling me. I've decided." He held out the scythe. "But I've got a bad knee and twenty acres and seven days. So show me."
Adrian took the scythe. It was heavy and warm from his father's hands.
He almost didn't do it. He stood at the edge of the barley with the blade in his hands and felt, very clearly, the memory of the south meadow - the brightness running like molten silver up his arms, the black letters, the cold closing round his heart. He thought about Brother Odo walking the fields with his hand inside his robe.
Then he closed his eyes, and called up the thread.
And this time he chose.
It was harder than he had expected. The seam came to him whole, the way it always did - heel to hip to hand to steel - and the bright poured part was right there in the arms, [Steady Arm], so smooth and so easy that his whole body wanted to reach for it. It was like smelling fresh bread. It was like looking away from a fire on a cold night.
He left it.
He took only the sewn part. Heel. Hips. The fall of the blade. And where the bright line should have run through his arms, he let his own arms do it - his own thin, twelve-year-old arms, with no Trait in them and no Canon behind them, wobbling a little under the weight.
He swung.
The blade went through the barley with a sound like a long breath let out. The swathe lay down in front of him. It was not straight as a Temple road. It wavered at the end, where his arms could not quite hold the line. But it was clean, and it was even, and it was cut.
The grey window flickered at the edge of his sight.
[Replication: Scything (partial)]
[Dissonance: 0]
His father made a sound like someone had punched the air out of him.
Adrian swung again. And again. The line wavered at the end of every stroke. It wavered less by the tenth. By the twentieth his arms were burning and his shoulders ached and his hands had found, on their own, a slightly different grip than his father's - a little lower on the handle, a little wider apart, better for arms that were not as long.
[Scything (Adrian Vale) - 2%]
Adrian nearly stopped mid-swing.
It was a new line. Not [Scything (Tomas Vale)]. Not his father's seam. His own name, in brackets, in the flat grey letters, with its own small number beside it.
Mine, he thought. That one's mine.
[Yes.]
[No one wrote it.]
[You are writing it.]
❖ ❖ ❖
They cut the Vale barley in two days.
It should have taken four. Tomas cut until his knee would not hold him, and then Adrian cut while his father bound sheaves, and then they switched again. By the evening of the second day Adrian's hands were a mass of blisters and his arms shook like a newborn lamb's, and the grey window said [Scything (Adrian Vale) - 9%], and his father was looking at him the way he had looked at him in the south meadow after the knee - with something Adrian could not read, which was not quite pride and not quite fear.
On the third day they went to help the Brandts.
Word had got round. Adrian saw it happen: Goodman Brandt came to the edge of his field to watch the Vale boy swing a blade, and folded his big arms, and after a while he unfolded them and scratched his head. By noon the Tulls had come over too. By the afternoon, Jory Keel was standing at the edge of the Brandts' barley, silent, with his colorless eyes on Adrian's feet.
Adrian's mother had told him not to let the village see him walk like a hunter. Nobody had said anything about scything. And a boy who could cut barley was not the same as a boy who could walk silently. A boy who could cut barley was useful.
"Null," said Goodman Brandt at supper that night, shaking his head, and it didn't sound like the same word it had been in the chapel. "Twelve years old and Null, and swings like Tomas did at twenty. Must be all that staring at things."
Hollis, beside him, kicked Adrian under the table and grinned with his mouth full.
❖ ❖ ❖
Hollis and Mira were in his field on the fifth day, and the sixth, and by the seventh, it was as if they'd always been.
Hollis bound sheaves. Hollis could bind sheaves faster than any grown man in the village, because [Sturdy Back] meant he could stoop and lift and stoop and lift for hours without tiring. He also talked the whole time, about everything - about a two-headed calf a peddler had once told him about, about how he was going to be a caravan guard in Veyrholt one day, about how Oswin Tull's [Keen Nose] meant Oswin could now smell every time his twin brother broke wind and it was ruining both their lives.
Mira did not bind sheaves. Mira stood at the end of each row with a wooden tally stick and a knife, and counted. How many sheaves per row. How many rows per field. How many sheaves per cart. She had worked out by the second day that the Colls' wagon was wasting an hour every afternoon going round by the chapel road instead of the mill track, and had told her father, and he had stared at her and then changed the route.
And at noon, the three of them sat together under the big alder at the end of the Brandts' field, and ate bread and cheese and onion from Hatty's tables, and for an hour it was easy.
"Four days," Mira said on the seventh noon, looking at her bread. "I leave in four days."
Hollis stopped chewing.
"The Temple carriage is coming from Veyrholt on the first day after the harvest's in." Mira pulled a piece off her bread and didn't eat it. "Brother Odo says the harvest supper will be my farewell. He says it's an honor. The whole village giving thanks, and me going off to serve the Luminant." She rolled the piece of bread into a ball. "He says it like it's a wedding."
"Veyrholt's not that far," Hollis said. "Four days on a cart. My uncle goes there for the wool market."
"Four years," said Mira. "Before I can come back. Four years."
Hollis didn't have an answer to that. He looked at Adrian, the way he had looked at him on the fence, a boy who had never had to think about what words could do.
"You'll write," Adrian said.
"Wards' letters are read. Everyone knows that." Mira threw the ball of bread to a sparrow. "They're read by the Sisters. Anything that isn't praising the Luminant gets cut out with a knife. My cousin Hanna had a friend who was a ward, and her letters came home with holes in them."
"So write it so they can't see it," Adrian said.
Mira looked at him.
"When we were eight," Adrian said. "The code. The one we made up. With the first letters." He could barely remember it himself. It had been a game, one wet winter in the chapel loft, the three of them and Brother Fennick's old slate: a message hidden in the first letter of every line. They'd written each other terrible secrets in it. Hollis stole a honey cake. Mira hates turnips. Adrian likes Bettany Marsh, which had been a lie, and which Hollis had spent an entire spring not letting him forget.
"That was a baby game," Mira said. But there was a strange light coming into her eyes.
"It worked on Brother Fennick."
"Brother Fennick's deaf."
"You're the cleverest person in this valley," said Adrian. "You'll make it work."
Mira stared at him. Then she looked away, very quickly, and wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, and said in a thick voice, "You're only saying that because it's true," and Hollis laughed so hard he fell over backward into the stubble.
"And if you find out anything," Adrian said, lower, when Hollis had gone to get more water. "About wards. About what happens to them. About where they send the - the ones who don't go to schools."
Mira was quiet for a moment.
"Lise," she said.
"Lise."
"I'll find out," said Mira Coll. "I swear. I'll find out, and I'll tell you in the first letters." She looked at him with her clever, frightened eyes. "And you'll tell me what you saw in the chapel. One day. You'll tell me."
Adrian thought about it for a long time.
"One day," he said.
❖ ❖ ❖
The harvest was in on the tenth evening, just as the first cold rain began to fall.
The last cart rolled into the square at dusk with Hollis riding on top of the sheaves, whooping, and the whole village cheered. The barns were full - fuller than anyone had dared to hope, because a village that cuts together cuts faster, and the barley that was three weeks from ready had turned out to be not so bad, once it was all in one place. Not a good harvest. But not the fourth bad one either. And that was enough, tonight, to be a feast.
Hatty's trestle tables were moved into the chapel, out of the rain. Brother Fennick lit every candle he owned. There was onion soup and barley bread and a whole roast sheep that Goodman Dunn had given, because, he said, he'd rather eat it himself than let a wolf have it. There was Hatty's watered ale, and cider from the Colls' orchard, and a fiddle, and Oren Tull on a drum.
Adrian's father danced with his mother. His father, with his bad knee, danced one slow, stiff, careful circle with Mara in the candlelight, and his mother laughed - really laughed, with her head back - and Elsie climbed on the bench and shouted "Again!" and the whole chapel cheered.
Rowan sat with the squires at the end of the hall, in his white surcoat, and drank one cup of cider and no more, and watched Adrian across the room with a strange, soft look on his face.
High Examiner Crane blessed the bread.
He stood at the altar - where the Sounding Mirror had stood - and raised a round loaf, and spoke the old words of thanks in his soft, clear voice. Then he blessed Mira. He called her up in front of the whole village and put his hand on her head and spoke of the honor of serving the Luminant, and the good work her [Kindled Palm] would do, and everyone clapped. Mira stood very straight and did not cry. Her mother did.
Then Crane sat down at the end of the Vales' table, as if by accident, and asked Tomas how the harvest had gone.
"Well enough," said Tomas stiffly. "Better than feared."
"I heard your son cut most of it." Crane smiled at Adrian across the table. "The whole valley's talking. A scything prodigy. Goodman Brandt says you swing like a man of twenty."
"He's been practicing," said Tomas.
"Practicing," said Crane thoughtfully. "Yes. That's the wonderful thing about it, isn't it? No Trait at all. Just practice." He turned his cup of cider in his long fingers. "Most people with Traits never practice anything. They don't need to. They simply receive, and stop. I've always thought that was a kind of poverty."
Adrian looked at his bread.
At the edge of his sight, very faintly, the grey window flickered - once - and went dark.
"Where is Brother Odo tonight?" Mara asked lightly. "I'd have thought he'd enjoy a feast."
"Brother Odo has a head cold," said Crane. "I left him in bed with a posset."
Adrian found that he could not swallow the bread in his mouth. He made himself chew. He made himself think about onions and fiddles and the color of the candle flames.
Brother Odo was not at the harvest supper. Brother Odo was not carrying his brass bell up and down the lane, or through the fields, with his hand inside his robe. And the High Examiner, who did not need a bell, was sitting three places away from Adrian, drinking cider, watching him not swallow.
"Excuse me," said Adrian. "I need some air."
He stood up. He walked out through the side door of the chapel into the cold, wet dark, and he stood under the eaves with the rain dripping in front of him, and breathed.
The square was empty. Rain hissed on the cobbles. Every house in Harrowfield was dark, because everyone in Harrowfield was in the chapel behind him, laughing and singing and stamping their feet to Oren Tull's drum. Beyond the square, the sheep that had been penned in the village for the night were a dark, shifting mass inside a hurdle fence by the mill.
They were very quiet. Sheep were never quiet.
Then, from somewhere to the north - from the hills, from beyond Ashwood, from the black rocks past the edge of the moor - came a sound.
It was not loud. It was very far away. It was a long, low, rising note, like wind in a chimney, or someone blowing across the neck of a bottle, and it went on for much longer than any breath should last.
Every dog in Harrowfield began to bark at once.
The fiddle in the chapel behind Adrian stopped mid-note. The drum stopped. In the sudden silence, the howl rose again - closer now, much closer, and not from the north. From the west. From the end of the valley where the rented fields were poorest.
The door behind Adrian banged open. Jory Keel stood in it, with the candlelight behind him, and his colorless eyes were fixed on the dark hills.
"That's not hunting," the old hunter said softly. "That's calling."
And from the west, from the direction of the Vale farm, where the Vales' eleven sheep had not been brought into the village pen because Tomas Vale had not had time, came the high, terrible, screaming bleat of an animal that knew exactly what was coming for it.