Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The Lopsided Anvil did, in fact, look as though it were about to fall down.

It had been built, long ago, around the stump of a smelting stack, and then added to by every owner since, in whatever direction seemed fashionable at the time. Four stories leaned east. Two leaned west. A third-floor balcony hung out over the Cinder Walk at an angle that made Fel’s stomach turn over, and the roof was a patchwork of copper sheets, slate, and one enormous inverted cauldron that served as a cupola. Smoke rose from the old stack in a lazy, contented ribbon. Over the door, on a chain, swung a signboard shaped like an anvil that had been bent in a fire and never straightened.

The door itself was hung with a pair of bellows. When Brannoch pushed it open, they wheezed out a long, rude, thoroughly cheerful note, and every head in the common room turned.

“A customer!” cried a voice from somewhere near the ceiling. “Don’t move! Don’t touch anything! I’ll be down in a moment, there’s a ladder, it isn’t a very good ladder!”

There was a crash. There was a short silence. Then a small round gnome in a leather apron came sliding down the banister of the nearest stair, landed on her feet with a clang, and bowed so deeply that her spectacles, which were three pairs deep and fastened to her head with a belt buckle, slid off the end of her nose.

“Tamsin Tumblewick,” she said, retrieving them. “Proprietor, cook, chambermaid, and occasional bellows. Welcome to the Lopsided Anvil. Mind the floor, it slopes. Mind the walls, they lean. Mind the stew, it’s alive.” She paused. “That’s a joke. Mostly.”

She was perhaps three feet tall, with a great frizz of copper hair stuck through with pencils, skewers, and a wooden spoon, and she had the cheerful, unfocused stare of someone who was always thinking of three other things. Her apron was covered in pockets. Her fingers were stained with soot, flour, and what Fel hoped was ink.

“Gorsa sent us,” said Veyra.

“Did she?” Tamsin’s whole face lit up. “Did she say anything about a ladle?”

“She said you owe her one.”

“I do! I do, I’ve been meaning to give it back for eleven years, but it’s such a good ladle.” She flapped a hand. “Never mind. Sit! Sit anywhere! Not there, that one’s a trick. Yes, there. Oh, you’ve brought children… no? Only a beetle. Good. I have a stable for beetles. It’s the old coal cellar, he’ll love it.”

The common room was unlike anything Fel had ever seen. The tables were anvils, genuine ones, each a different size and age, bolted to the floor and topped with polished slabs of oak. The stools were upturned copper kettles. The lamps were dented cooking pots hung upside down from the rafters on chains, with candles inside them, so that the light fell through hundreds of tiny punched holes and sprinkled the whole room with moving stars. Horseshoes hung on every wall, and rivets by the thousand had been hammered into the beams in spiral patterns, so that the ceiling seemed to be turning slowly overhead. In the great hearth, an iron bellows that nobody was working breathed in and out on its own, and the coals glowed and faded in time.

“Is that magic?” said Fel.

“Oh, no, no. It’s Bartholomew.” Tamsin patted the bellows fondly. “He’s a very old forge-spirit. He retired. He likes the company.”

The bellows wheezed, in what sounded very much like agreement.

They ate until they were ashamed of themselves. There was a stew that was not alive, as it turned out, only very thick, and a flat bread baked on the hearthstones, and a dish of river fish in a sour sweet sauce that made Thara close her eyes. There were roasted turnips, which Fel thought of Marta and the wheelbarrow, and a pudding steamed in a copper pot, black with molasses, so heavy that the spoon stood upright in it. Tamsin served it herself, talking all the while about a sealed tin of nails she had inherited, the correct way to polish a kettle, and the time a Raskian had tried to buy her entire cellar with a single enormous coin. Nobody could follow her. Nobody wanted to. It was like being talked at by a warm kind wind.

Fel noticed, over the course of the meal, that something strange was going on.

Veyra kept leaning in to whisper to Tamsin. Thara kept bursting into coughing fits. Orrin, who had never once in his long life told a lie, answered the question “What are you all so happy about?” with a long and sincere statement about the beauty of the evening, and then stopped and looked at the ceiling as though he had been caught at something. And Brannoch, who generally ate in silence with the air of a man communing with his soup, glanced at Fel twice and quickly looked away.

“What?” said Fel.

“Mm,” said Brannoch.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” said Veyra, much too quickly. “You are tired. We are all tired. Go to bed.”

He was tired. That was the strange thing. He was so tired that he could not think of an argument. The ring in his palm had gone quiet for the first time in days, and the long hot press of the road was settling in his bones. Tamsin showed him up four flights of crooked stairs, past a landing that was somehow also a closet, to a narrow room under the eaves with a bed built into the wall like a shelf. The ceiling was studded with rivets. A small round window looked out over the sloping roofs of the Hearthmoot, where ten thousand lanterns burned in the dark.

“Sleep well, dear,” said Tamsin. “It’s a very good bed. It only creaks when you roll over.”

“Thank you,” said Fel. And he meant it, with his whole heart.

He lay down, and the ceiling turned slowly overhead, and he slept.

He woke in the dark with his heart hammering.

He did not know why. There was no sound. There was no light, only the faint orange glow of the lanterns through the round window, and the quiet creak of the old house settling around him. He lay rigid, with the blanket twisted in his fists. His mouth was dry. His whole skin crawled, the way it had crawled in the clouds on the morning the first black smoke rose over Veilrest, before he had known what it was.

Something is wrong.

He did not know where the thought came from. It was not Gideon’s voice. It was not Silence. It was simply there, enormous and certain, like a hand pressed flat on his chest.

“We have to go,” he whispered. Then, louder, sitting up: “We have to go. Right now.”

Nobody answered.

He swung his legs out of bed. The floor was cold. He felt for the black sword, found it on its hook, and dragged the golden saber out from under the pillow. The ring burned in his palm. The silence in the house had a strange quality now, thick and held, like the silence before a spoken word.

“Veyra!” He pounded on the wall. “Brannoch! Wake up!”

Nothing.

He flung open the door. The landing was empty. He ran to the next room and hammered on it, and it swung open under his hand: the bed was made, the window open, the blanket folded back as if somebody had risen in a hurry. He tried the next. Empty. The next. Empty. Thara’s pack was gone. Orrin’s cracked staff was gone from its corner. Even Brannoch’s great bed, built for a giant, stood vacant, with its pillow still dented.

They’ve been taken.

He did not remember deciding to run. He remembered only the stairs, leaning, endless, groaning underfoot, and the swords in his hands, and the thought looping round and round in his head: not again, not again, not again. He took the last flight three steps at a time. The stair spat him out onto the floor of the common room, in the dark, in the cold, with his bare feet skidding on the flagstones and the black sword raised.

“WE HAVE TO LEAVE,” he roared, “RIGHT NOW…”

Every lamp in the room flared.

“SURPRISE!”

Fel stopped.

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The common room was full. It was full to the rafters. There were dwarves and gnomes and Raskians, a dozen travelers he had never seen before, the old tinker with the braided beard, the donkey-owning family from the bridge, with their eleven children standing on the tables. Paper lanterns hung in swags from the rivets. Someone had hung a banner of bedsheets across the hearth, painted in great wobbling letters that read HAPPY BIRTHDAY FEL, with the F backwards. A cake the size of a small anvil sat in the middle of the nearest table, with seventeen candles in it. Tamsin was standing on the table beside it, wearing a hat shaped like a kettle, with the wooden spoon raised triumphantly in one fist. Brannoch stood with his arms folded, trying not to smile. Thara was already laughing so hard she had to hold on to Orrin.

And in the middle of them all, with her green braid over her shoulder and her white bow crooked and her violet eyes bright, stood Veyra, with both hands pressed to her mouth.

“Oh,” she said, through her fingers. “Oh, no. I am so sorry. Fel, we only wanted to…”

He lowered the sword.

“It’s midnight,” said Thara, wiping her eyes. “It’s the Turning. It’s the thirtieth.” She flung out her arms. “You’re seventeen, you terrified little lunatic!”

“I thought you were dead,” Fel said.

It came out small and strange. The whole room went quiet.

“I thought…” He swallowed. “The rooms were empty. I thought somebody had…”

“Oh, Fel,” said Veyra.

She crossed the floor in four strides and put her arms around his neck, swords and all, and held on hard. He felt her heart going against his chest, as fast as his own. “We are here,” she said into his shoulder. “We are all here. Nobody is going anywhere.”

“Mm,” said Brannoch, from behind her, very gently.

He let out a long, shaky breath. Then, because the whole room was staring, and because the ridiculousness of it all was beginning to catch up with him, he began to laugh. It came out cracked and ragged, and it did not stop for a while.

“Barefoot,” said Thara. “In his nightshirt. With two swords.”

“I’m going to stop speaking to all of you.”

“No, you aren’t!” Tamsin whooped from the table. “Somebody get that boy a cider! Bartholomew, the music!”

The bellows heaved. The fiddlers on the stairs struck up. And the Lopsided Anvil began, at last, to live up to its name.

Fel was handed a mug, and he held it, and he did not drink much of it.

It was warm honey cider, spiced with clove and orange peel, and it smelled lovely. He took a sip to be polite, and another to be braver, and then held the mug in both hands for the rest of the night, where it grew cold and slowly became a prop. He had never liked the stuff. He had tried it once in the hold of a cart on the road to Sorticia and decided that it tasted like pennies and regret. Nobody pressed him. When Thara tried, Veyra simply took the mug out of his hand, sniffed it, handed him her own cup of plain water instead, and gave Thara a look until she sat down.

“Games!” Tamsin was shouting. “Games, games! We can’t have a birthday without a game! Who knows the Long Count?”

Half the room knew the Long Count. It was an old smithy game, apparently, played by apprentices in the dead hours of the night shift to keep one another awake. The rules were simple, and the rules were cruel. Everyone sat in a ring. The first player said “one.” The next said “two.” And so on around the circle, except that any number divisible by three had to be replaced with the word “moon,” and any number divisible by five with the word “anvil,” and any number divisible by both with a clap, a stamp, and a shout of “HAMMER!” Whoever stumbled took a drink.

“What do I drink?” said Fel.

“You count,” said Tamsin firmly. “You’re the guest of honor. You also may point at whoever you like and they drink for you.”

He sat down in the ring, between Veyra and a lanky Raskian boy who smelled strongly of coal, and they began.

It started slowly. “One.” “Two.” “Moon.” “Four.” “Anvil.” The ring tightened and the pace grew. By twelve the old tinker had forgotten to stamp and drained his cup in disgrace. By twenty-one, Orrin, who had sung ten thousand songs in a hundred different tonal systems, had lost the thread of counting entirely, and said “moon” with great solemn dignity at the number twenty-two. “I am not a mathematician,” he said, and drank, and looked embarrassed, and was cheered. Brannoch never missed a single count. He said his numbers in a low, level rumble that rolled like a boulder down a hill, and when the ring reached thirty he stood, stamped, clapped, and said “HAMMER” in a voice that shook the dust from the rafters.

“I hate him,” said Thara, with admiration.

She went out at thirty-three. Fel survived until forty-five, which he later learned was a record for a first-timer, and was beaten at last by a single foolish and perfectly sincere “forty-five,” when the word was “HAMMER.” Veyra, who had been counting under her breath the entire time, caught him out with a look of pure delight.

“Drink!” cried the ring.

Fel pointed at Thara.

“I was already OUT!”

“That doesn’t mean you don’t drink,” said Fel, and the whole room roared.

They played a dozen rounds. They played until the fiddlers could no longer keep the beat and the candle in the cupola had melted into a puddle. And somewhere in the middle of it, as Fel was catching his breath on a kettle-stool with his sides aching, a shadow fell across the anvil, and a voice like a barrel rolling downhill said:

“So you’re the birthday boy.”

He looked up.

The man was perhaps twenty, and he was big. Not Brannoch big, but big in the ordinary human sense: wide in the shoulders, broad in the chest, with forearms like the legs of a table and a face scarred with a hundred small burns. He wore a smith’s leather apron over a bare torso. His hair was cropped close. He had a mug in one hand and a very friendly, very dangerous grin.

“Kettil,” said Tamsin, appearing at his elbow. “Third-year apprentice at Garnet’s forge. Arm wrestling champion of the Hearthmoot, four years running.”

“Five,” said Kettil.

“Five, then.” Tamsin beamed. “He heard there was a boy with a sword. He’s been dying to try you.”

Fel looked at the mug. He looked at the arm. He looked, very slowly, at Veyra, who had her face in her hands and her shoulders shaking.

“You don’t have to,” she said.

“I know.”

“He will crush you.”

“Probably,” said Fel. He stood up. His good arm, which ached from a long road and a short night, was half a head slimmer than his opponent’s. But there was a heat in his chest that had not been there a minute ago, a stubborn, dangerous little spark, the same spark that had once made him lift a sword he could barely carry. “Where do I sit?”

The room cleared an anvil. Money began to change hands, in great quantities and loud voices. Thara had already taken three bets, all of them against Fel, on the grounds that she knew him best. Kettil rolled up his sleeve with ceremony. Fel set his elbow on the cold iron, locked his hand into the smith’s enormous callused one, and felt, immediately, the sheer enormity of what he had agreed to.

“Ready?” said Tamsin, holding a wooden spoon over their fists. “Set? Hammer!”

She struck the anvil.

Fel’s arm nearly went flat in the first second.

It was like pushing against a wall. Kettil’s grip was iron, his shoulder was a mountain, and the whole bulk of his body leaned into the push with a patient, grinding weight. Fel’s elbow skidded. The back of his hand brushed the anvil’s edge, an inch from the table, and the room howled. His teeth ground. The veins stood out in his forearm. He felt the muscles in his shoulder tear and burn and scream.

Don’t let go.

It was a thought he had had before. In the hold of a cart. In a burning house. On the end of a rope in the dark. It was the only thought he had ever been good at.

“Come on!” Veyra was shouting, on her feet. “Fel! Come on!”

He breathed in. He breathed out. He set his feet. And very slowly, with the sweat pouring down his face, he began to bring his arm back.

An inch. Another. The smith’s grin flickered. Kettil’s eyes widened, then narrowed, and the whole of his massive arm began to shake with effort. The two fists hung in the middle for a long, shuddering minute, locked, trembling, unmoving, while the room held its breath and the bellows in the hearth held its own.

“Who is this boy?” someone whispered.

“Hammer,” said Fel, between his teeth. And he pushed.

Kettil’s wrist bent. His knuckles hit the anvil with a sound like a dropped plank, and the Lopsided Anvil exploded.

It was a roar of the kind that rattles windows. Fel fell back off his stool, laughing and gasping, with his arm limp and trembling and his hand aching to the elbow. Hands pulled him up. Thara was cursing, loudly, magnificently, and counting out coins. Kettil sat stunned for a moment, staring at his own fist as though it had betrayed him. Then he threw back his head and laughed, a big warm bark of a laugh, and clapped Fel on the back so hard it nearly knocked him down again.

“Best of three?” said the smith.

“Absolutely not,” said Fel.

“Fair.” Kettil rubbed his wrist. “That’s the hardest I’ve lost in my life. Where did you learn to hold like that?”

“Climbing.”

“Climbing what?”

“Clouds,” said Fel. “Mostly.”

Kettil stared at him. Then he laughed again.

“I like him,” he told the room. “Somebody give him a cake!”

They sang to him.

It began with Orrin, who stood, gravely, on a kettle, and cleared his throat. Then Tamsin joined in, off the beat and wildly out of tune, and then the fiddlers, and then the whole of the room. It was not a good song. It had been written, by the sound of it, in the last ten minutes, by a roomful of people who had been drinking since sundown. It rhymed “Fel” with “well,” and with “bell,” and with “hell,” and then, at some length, with “Tumblewick.” It described a boy who fell from a cloud, was caught by a giant, and had since defeated a wicked merchant with a stolen pot. By the third verse, it had developed a chorus, and everyone knew it:

Oh, he came from the sky with a sword on his hip, And a hole in his boot and a crack in his lip, But he beat the big smith and he won’t touch his ale, So we’ll drink to the lad with the long, long tale!

They sang it four times. Brannoch sang it in a bass so low that the cake candles flickered. Thara sang it wrong on purpose. Kettil sang it with his arm around Fel’s neck, weeping a little from the cider. And Veyra, standing at the edge of the crowd with her braid over her shoulder, did not sing at all. She only watched him, with her chin on her hand and a soft, strange, steady light in her eyes.

“Make a wish,” said Tamsin, and Fel looked at seventeen small flames.

He did not know what to wish for. There were too many things. He thought of Pim, with her small black knife. He thought of Osha and the elders and the long sky. He thought of the king, and the forge, and the road ahead, long as a line drawn across the world. And then, for no reason he could name, he thought of a green braid and a crooked white bow, and he drew in his breath and blew.

The candles went out. The room cheered until the beams shook.

He had never in his life been given a cake. He ate three slices. It was dense, dark, and full of spice, and the icing had been piped in the shape of a sword, slightly crooked, with a ruby of red sugar at the hilt.

He was licking his thumb when a hand touched his sleeve.

“Come with me,” said Veyra, very quietly. “Just for a little while.”

Her cheeks were flushed. He could not tell whether it was the firelight.

He looked at the cheering room, and the dwarves and the gnomes, and Thara dancing on a table with the tinker’s donkey, and Tamsin pushing a fourth cake into Orrin’s hands. Then he looked back at her.

“All right,” he said.