CHAPTER 1
Eighth of Nine
The square smelled like hot wool and pork fat, and I had already worked out what Sir Charles was going to pick me for. Quickness. I’d settled it days before, while the rest of them were still deciding where to stand. A knight has a sword, a horse, and a kit of armor somebody else keeps shiny for him. What he hasn’t got is somebody at his elbow who’s already worked out the answer. I explained this to Dob three separate times, and Dob kept watching the knight instead of me, which I took as agreement.
“Size is what the rest of them are selling.” I tipped my head at the front of the line, where my brother stood with his shoulders squared like a man waiting to be weighed. “Let them sell it. If the man wants somebody who catches what the big ones walk past, he’ll work his way down to me.”
“Don’t say that where he can hear you,” Dob said.
“I’d say it louder if he could hear me. It’s a compliment.”
Nine of us stood in a loose line by the market cross, and I was eighth, because at twelve I was not, by any honest measure, a large twelve. Behind us the fleeces stacked outside the wool hall cooked in the sun and gave off a smell like a wet dog that had gotten into the butter. Somewhere past the stalls, fat spat on a griddle. My shirt stuck to my back, and the cobbles came up warm through my boot soles, and it was only late spring. There wasn’t a soul in that valley who wasn’t either watching us or selling something to the people watching us.
The knight himself was a disappointment, and I mean that as a professional observation. No banner. No spare lance. No armor bright enough to make your eyes water. He wore a gray coat that had been repaired at one elbow by somebody who wasn’t showing off about it, and he was going over his horse’s tack — saddle, bridle, straps — the way my father goes over a fence he doesn’t trust.
He still had one boot in the stirrup when I got my question out.
“How many of us are you allowed to take?” I said. “Is that written down somewhere, or do you work it out as you go?”
“Get back in the line.” My mother didn’t have to raise her voice. She never does. It finds you anyway.
“I’m in the line.”
“Not by much.”
Sir Charles got his other boot down, looked at me for about as long as it takes to check a coin, and went back to the girth strap. I couldn’t tell whether that look meant interesting or shut up, which meant it was worth keeping.
Then he walked to the middle of the square and stood there and said nothing at all, and the whole market went quieter than it had been since dawn. Somewhere past the stalls a cart wheel went on squealing until the driver worked out what the rest of us were doing and stopped it.
“I’ll save everybody a morning by being plain,” he said. “I can teach a boy to ride. I can teach him a sword. I can put meat on his arms inside a year. What nobody can teach him is how to think once the time for thinking has run out. That’s the only thing I came here to look at.”
“Understandable,” I said.
Somebody laughed. He didn’t look over.
“One riddle each. One. Answer it and you and I will have a conversation. Miss it and all you’ve lost is a morning, and I’m told the pie stall is having an excellent one.”
He started at the tall end, with Garran.
My brother is fifteen and stands half a head over everybody, and four years of holding iron steady while our father swings at it have given him the arms to prove it. Sir Charles stopped in front of him the way a man stops in front of a horse he might buy. He didn’t say anything for a good while. He just did the looking part.
“What’s your name?”
“Garran, sir. Joram’s son.”
“What has one eye and can’t see?”
I know exactly how long my brother can think before the thinking stops and the panic takes the reins, and from eighth in the row there was not one thing I could do about watching him sail straight past it.
“A one-eyed man,” Garran said.
“That man sees very well out of the one he’s got.”
The square laughed, and it was a warm laugh, the kind a town gives a boy it has known since he was a lump in a basket. Garran took it like they’d thrown fruit. The color came up his neck and kept going and didn’t stop.
Fenn came next. Fenn is my age, and my friend, and he had come up to that line with no expectation at all of being picked and more enthusiasm for the morning than the eight of us who thought we had a chance.
“What runs and never walks,” Sir Charles said, “has a mouth and never speaks, and has a bed and never sleeps?”
“My grandmother.”
That got the biggest laugh of the morning, and Fenn stood in the middle of it and lowered himself into it like a man easing into a hot bath.
“He’s not wrong about the bed,” said Fenn’s grandmother, from her stool by the cheese, without turning around.
Sir Charles waited out the noise, gave Fenn the same long look he’d given Garran, and moved on. Fenn stayed exactly where he was, thoroughly pleased with how his morning had gone, standing next to my brother, who had turned a color that doesn’t have a name yet.
After that came five boys and five riddles, and I couldn’t tell you one of them now. A river. A shadow. An echo, I think. I wasn’t listening. I was rehearsing. By the fifth boy I had good answers ready for four questions nobody had asked me.
Then he reached me, and he kept going.
He went around me. Not past me, around me, the way you step around a puddle, and he hadn’t gone around anybody else all morning. He stopped in front of the ninth boy instead, asked him what gets wetter the more it dries, got a river, and thanked him for his morning the same as all the rest.
That was nine boys in the line and eight of us asked anything.
He turned back toward his horse.
“Perrin,” my mother said. Quiet. Every boy ahead of me heard it.
Sir Charles turned around.
“You skipped me,” I said. “Nine of us stood here. You’ve talked to eight. I can count.”
“You can.”
“So why?”
“Because you cut in on me before I had both boots on the ground, and I wanted to see whether you’d manage to wait for a second turn at it.”
He waited then, until I’d stopped checking what the crowd was doing with all this. Apparently the next part was going to require my full attention.
“What belongs to you, but everyone else uses it more than you do?”
“My name.”
The noise that went up beat anything Fenn had gotten, and Fenn had actually been funny. I don’t think it was the answer that did it. I think it was how fast it came out of me. I turned my back on the knight before he could say another word. I never looked at him again and I didn’t thank a soul. I got both arms up and shouted over the whole square.
“I had that on belongs.”
Somebody whooped.
“Second word,” I added, in case the size of it had gotten past anyone. “I let him finish the rest out of politeness.”
Fenn howled. Garran kept his face down and ground one heel into the dust until the cheering quit. And past all of it, back where the stalls started, my mother stood with her hands pushed down into her apron. She wasn’t laughing. She wasn’t even watching me. She was watching Sir Charles.
Sir Charles let the noise run itself out.
“Your name.”
“Perrin.”
He said it once under his breath, the same careful way he’d checked the belly strap. “Whose boy are you?”
“Joram’s. The wheelwright’s.”
“I know Joram.” He looked at my boots, then my hands, then my face, the way a man prices a horse he isn’t sure he wants. “Be ready to leave in two days.”
Two days. I walked home saying those two words over to myself the whole length of the road, and by the time I reached the yard Garran was already back at the forge. He hadn’t waited for me.