My sisters, Athen and Mull, took turns to hug me and wish me luck. Athen said it was nothing and would be over soon, which of course it had been for her, but at the back of everyone’s mind was: what if I was a Rampart, not a Woodsmith, and never come home at all? And I’m shamed to say that thought excited me. I seen myself in my mind’s eye with old tech in my hand, standing on the outside fence with shunned men lying dead around my feet. And I seen Spinner watching me, her eyes all bright with love she was too shy to speak. She was the furnishing of a lot of my thoughts back then. I was a boy of fifteen after all.
So I said goodbye, with something of sadness and something of hunger, and walked to the Waiting House. It was no more than five hundred steps but it felt like I was going into another world. In a way I was, for younger children never got to set foot inside the house. It was a thing forbid.
I hadn’t never seen anything like the inside of the Waiting House. I had been in Rampart Hold for public meetings – in the Count and Seal, I mean, not in the residence – and the Waiting House was not so big as that. But then we was only two boys, not a whole village, and for two boys to have such a space all to themselves was a new and wonderful thing. It must of been strange even for Haijon, who lived in Rampart Hold. For me, it was like a dream that stayed with me even when I was awake.
We was spared from all share-works, and our food – the same meals as was served to the Ramparts – was brung to us at sunrise and lock-tide. We didn’t have nothing to do but play games, make up songs and stories and run mad through the place. Mostly we played the stone game, of course, but sometimes also we would do make-believe stuff. We pretended the house was a wilderness we was exploring, or we played forest-wake, where all the chairs and tables was trees and if we touched them they would wake and whelm us. It was a good time, and I remember it with wonder now. It’s hard to credit how little I thought about things back then. About the test I was going to face, and what it might mean. About Haijon, and who he was besides being my friend. About the Ramparts, and what their expectations might be for their son. Must be, I should say.
And though I said we was alone, there wasn’t no rule forbidding family visits – except for little ones, who wasn’t allowed to set foot in the Waiting House until they went Waiting themselves. My mother was mostly too busy with her work, but she come once or twice a week and she brung me news of the village. She brung me presents too: raspberry curd that she laid down the year before and only just opened, and a whistle that she carved out of cherry wood. Athen and Mull come too, as often as they could, but they never stayed for long. I think the Waiting House brung back too many memories for them.
Then Spinner went Waiting, and we didn’t have the house to ourselves no more. For as soon as there was boys and girls together, of course there had got to be someone set to watch us. So on the day Spinner walked in through the door, Shirew Makewell come to live in what was called the turn-key room, just inside the door of the Waiting House. She trusted us though, and besides she was oftentimes busy with work that mattered more than making us behave, so we was still left alone together a lot of the time. Nor our pastimes didn’t change much, Spinner being as much for games and songs and stories as either of us. More, maybe.
She had a knack for music too, and she showed me how to play the whistle my mother give to me. How to hold it, and coax the notes from it, and how to cut or strike the sound with a little shift of my fingers. When I had picked it up before, I only just blowed on it and set it down again, but Spinner teached me to draw tunes out of it, which was an amazing thing to me.
I think that time, when she was teaching me, was when I first come to love her. What she done with Lari after she lost her finger had made me admire her something keen, and besides that the shape of her face and her body’s gracefulness had made their way long before from my eye to my inside longings. But that’s not love, though it’s sometimes mistaken for it. Living with Spinner so close, for so long, I got to see who she was, and I liked what I seen more than I could ever tell you.
Most of all I liked to hear her tell stories. These weren’t stories like Rampart Remember told in the Count and Seal, but things she made in her own head, all crazy and without a shape. They had monsters in them, and places and things from the old times, and her and me and Haijon as the heroes of them. Oftentimes they started with us getting out of the village somehow to rescue a child as had gone missing or it might be to explore or to find something that was lost. One time she told about how we went to Half-Ax and found my brother Jud living there. Another time it was her father, Molo, as had been pinned by a choker tree and couldn’t get home. Then there was one where we went and crossed the Fathom and the Curtain, and got took by the wizard Stannabanna, the lord of all shunned men and faceless, that lived under the ground of Skullfield and only come up to waylay travellers and eat their eyes and tongues. The odds was always fearful and we come close to losing every time, but at the last moment we would always make it good by some trick or other.
And sometimes she told tales of London, and of London’s heroes, that was the Parley Men. They was the guards that was set on the treasure house of London, the Palace Westernmost, where the riches of the king was piled high. Them riches included a great store of tech, and they was never broke into because the Parley Men was the fiercest fighters you ever seen. Their ghosts guard the treasure still, and they’ll kill any that come to take it.
When Spinner was telling, Haijon and me would listen without a word. Sometimes Shirew Makewell would walk by the door and hear her, and linger to see how the tale come out. When the story was done, the two of us boys would whoop and slap the floor to show we liked it. Shirew didn’t go in for that kind of display, but oftentimes she nodded and once she said bravo. That means a good story in a language of the old times.
I think Spinner liked me too. Well, I knowed she did, but I was far from knowing if it was as much as I liked her. Certainly I didn’t dream of telling her I loved her. I thought of telling Haijon, since I told him everything else that went through my head, but whenever I was close to saying it, I held back somehow. It was a secret thing that I folded down into my heart and kept a watch on. And like the secret about the door in Rampart Hold, it had a big bearing on how my life went.
Anyway, the time went by fast and soon it was time for our testing. It’s not likely you’ll remember what that was, or what it meant, so I will say it straight.
It meant your name and your fate, for the rest of your life.
6
We had an abundance of old tech in Mythen Rood, but most of it wouldn’t wake or work for us. The few things that did work we took good care of, seeing they made such a difference to whether we lived or died.
There was the firethrower. This was a thing like a musical instrument that you held in both your hands, only instead of making music it made a kind of long rope of fire that crawled through the air like a snake. The fire-snake burned whatever it touched, and clung to it so it would keep on burning for the longest time. You couldn’t even put the flames out with water, though you could smother them with earth if you had enough of it to hand. The heat of the flames was so great you could feel it from a hundred paces off.
Whoever held the firethrower was Rampart Fire.