Against The World

Chapter 72: The First Sheaves

The first ripe barley arrived in the council room tied with string.

Fenna put it on top of a customs proposal.

I preferred the barley immediately.

“From the south slope,” she said.

The stalks were dry and golden. A few loose grains rolled onto the table.

I picked one up.

“Ready?”

“Some of it.”

“When do you start?”

“Tomorrow, if the weather holds.”

Evelyn leaned forward to examine the bundle.

It had been months since we stood in mud placing wooden signs in empty ground.

For a moment, neither of us said anything.

Then Beatrice reached for the harvest estimate.

That restored the ordinary order of council.

The first numbers were encouraging.

They were also full of qualifications.

One field had ripened early. Another needed more time. The replanting near Bellcross would come later still. There were losses from wet ground, birds, and a patch of barley Fenna described in terms unfit for a formal report.

But there would be a harvest.

A real one.

Enough to change the coming winter, even if it would not feed the entire kingdom.

“We still need the purchases from Stoneford,” Beatrice said.

“Yes,” Evelyn replied.

“And the reserve deliveries from Valewood.”

“Yes.”

“And somewhere dry to put all of it,” Eleanor added.

Aldren unfolded the storage plan.

The repaired granary could take the first deliveries. Another storehouse needed its floor finished before the main crop came in.

Joren offered cooperage workers for two days to help fit the raised boards.

Mara said her workshop could repair sacks if the stores sent them over before they were needed.

By the end of the meeting, the barley had acquired a schedule, a workforce, and several destinations.

Fenna gathered her papers.

I looked at the bundle.

“May I keep that?”

She shrugged.

“You can’t eat the string.”

Evelyn waited until she had left.

“You look very pleased.”

“I have been given agricultural permission.”

“A rare honor.”

I placed the barley on the windowsill, where it caught the light.

We went to the fields the following morning.

I carried gloves.

Nobody had to remind me.

Alistair noticed, which was gratifying until he said, “Good. Now you can learn what they’re for.”

Fenna assigned me to gathering cut stalks.

The experienced workers handled the blades. Behind them, others bound the sheaves and stood them together.

I had imagined an orderly procession across a golden field.

It was orderly.

It was also hot, dusty, and full of people telling one another where the spare binding cord had gone.

Melody worked two rows over.

Her ears rose above the grain until she crouched.

Then she vanished.

It was unsettling.

“You could wear a bell,” I suggested when she reappeared.

“You could work faster.”

I returned to my sheaf.

After an hour, my back had developed an opinion.

After two, I understood why nobody had welcomed my arrival as a miraculous solution to the harvest.

I could move a great deal of material.

These people knew which material to move, when to move it, and how to leave it ready for the next pair of hands.

I learned.

Slowly.

Evelyn arrived nearer midday with water, bread, and Helena.

Her mother carried a basket.

My wife carried the expression of someone prepared to defend her right to walk across a field.

I saved us both the conversation and met her at the path.

“Good morning.”

She looked me over.

“You have straw in your hair.”

“I’m contributing.”

“So I see.”

She removed a stalk and held it up.

Behind her, Helena began distributing cups.

Evelyn stayed beneath the shade awning with several of the workers during their break. By the time I joined them, she had learned that the temporary grain scales stood too far from the unloading point, one of the water barrels leaked, and a young man named Bren had proposed marriage to someone who had told him to ask again after harvest.

“Why after harvest?” I asked.

The woman beside him grinned.

“I’d like to see whether he finishes something.”

Bren accepted this with the weary dignity of someone who had heard it before.

We ate together.

Dust stuck to my wrists.

Evelyn took my hand and turned it over.

“No blisters.”

“I wore the gloves.”

“I noticed.”

The praise should not have pleased me as much as it did.

Oren Pell’s account began producing results that week.

The first was a dismissal order bearing a date three days before the inspection he had supposedly signed.

The second was a transport ledger.

Six cartloads of dressed stone had left the supplier for Bellcross.

Two had arrived.

The other four had been redirected to a private house belonging to the district works superintendent.

Mary set the copied entries beside one another.

“The house still stands.”

I read the destination.

“And the superintendent?”

“Dead seven years.”

That stopped me.

Evelyn rested a hand on the table.

“Who owns it now?”

“His eldest daughter. We’ve asked for the estate papers. She says she knew nothing about the source of the stone.”

“Do we believe her?”

“We haven’t established otherwise.”

I looked at the neat columns.

After all the hidden papers and frightened testimony, some part of me had expected a man we could bring into a room and require to answer.

Instead, we had a house.

A dead official.

And a daughter who might be learning something ugly about her father.

“What happens next?” I asked.

“The examiner determines what can be proved and what claim the Crown has against the estate,” Mary said. “The surviving payment clerk has also been summoned.”

Evelyn nodded.

“And Pell?”

“He wants his name corrected.”

Mary slid another document toward us.

That part was ready.

The dismissal date, his surviving handwriting, and the original district register established that the inspection had been falsely attributed to him.

I signed the correction.

It would not return eleven years.

It would mean the next person opening the record found the truth beside the lie.

Pell came to receive the corrected copy the following afternoon.

His daughter read it first.

She reached the end, went back to the beginning, and read it again.

Then she handed it to him.

He held the paper carefully.

“I can take this home?”

“It’s yours,” Mary said.

He looked at the seal.

For a moment, his mouth moved without sound.

Then he nodded.

His daughter put a hand on his back.

I expected them to leave.

Instead, Pell turned toward me.

“The southern stair at Bellcross chapel,” he said. “The second step used to work loose.”

I waited.

“I reported it before I left. They may have fixed it.”

“We can ask.”

He nodded again.

“I wouldn’t want someone to fall.”

After they had gone, Mary sat down.

“He remembers the stair,” I said.

“Yes.”

“All these years.”

She looked at the closed door.

“He was good at his work.”

The first grain carts reached Greykeep under a sky turning grey at the edges.

I went to the granary with Eleanor.

Inside, workers spread grain for checking and drying before storage. The room smelled of dust and fresh timber.

It was one of the buildings I had helped restore when the city still seemed too large for the people living in it.

Now every corner had a purpose.

Near the door, a clerk argued with a carter over the weight of an empty sack.

Farther in, Beatrice stood beside the first delivery, examining a handful of barley.

“Well?” I asked.

She let the grain run through her fingers.

“Good.”

“Just good?”

She looked at me.

“Would you like me to invent a problem?”

“No.”

“Then good.”

I smiled.

Rain began tapping the roof before we left.

The grain was inside.

The roof held.

For several minutes, I stood under the doorway and listened to the weather fail to become our emergency.

That evening, Evelyn did not want supper in the dining room.

She wanted it upstairs.

“With you,” she added, before I could begin rearranging half the household.

“That sounds manageable.”

“And without papers.”

I looked at the folder beneath my arm.

She raised an eyebrow.

I put it on the hall table.

We ate beside the open windows while the rain softened the courtyard below.

She had loosened her hair and changed into a gown that sat comfortably around her growing stomach. One foot rested on a low stool.

I watched her butter a piece of bread.

“What?” she asked.

“I like this.”

“The bread?”

“This.”

She followed my glance around the room.

Then smiled.

“So do I.”

For a while, we talked about nothing that required a decision.

Melody had taught one of the younger guards a card game and then objected when he won.

Garrick had sent another small carving.

Helena had discovered it in his pocket and accused him of spoiling children who had not yet arrived.

He had apparently asked whether there was a rule against it.

I laughed.

Evelyn watched me over her cup.

“What were you like as a little boy?”

The question caught me by surprise.

“Loud, I think.”

“I could have guessed.”

“I followed Caroline everywhere.”

“Did she mind?”

“Yes. Until I stopped.”

Evelyn smiled.

“That sounds familiar.”

I told her about hiding beneath a table during a thunderstorm.

About Caroline joining me with a blanket and pretending the table was a ship.

About how, by the end, I had been disappointed when the storm passed.

Evelyn put down her cup.

“We’ll need a good table.”

I looked at her.

Then laughed softly.

“Yes,” I said. “We will.”

The next morning, the Castellan requested an audience.

He did so while I was shaving.

This gave the request a strange formality.

“Can it wait until I’m less likely to cut myself?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

I finished.

Evelyn sat near the window with the names page on her lap.

Both columns had acquired suggestions.

Most were crossed out.

“All right,” I said. “What is it?”

The golden eye brightened.

“Your successful reconstruction of Willowbrook’s receiving assembly has met the practical requirement for access to the Crown artificers’ instructional archive.”

I lowered the towel.

“There’s an instructional archive?”

“Yes.”

Evelyn looked up.

“Was the practical requirement necessary before he could read the instructions?”

“The introductory instruction was supplied during the repair. The archive contains procedures that would have been unsafe to attempt without demonstrated control.”

I considered my glowing practice disk.

Then the time it had nearly burned my fingers.

“Fair.”

A pattern appeared above the desk.

Not a map of chambers.

A list.

Stored heat controls. Structural sensing. Water-level warnings. Light assemblies. Gate maintenance.

Farther down, several entries remained dim.

I stepped closer.

“Could other people learn this?”

“Individuals with suitable aptitude may learn portions of the work. Crown authorization does not require Crown execution for every procedure.”

That mattered more than anything else on the list.

Tilda could cast the parts.

Aldren could measure them.

I could teach someone what I had learned.

Perhaps, eventually, a broken gate would not have to wait for the king.

Evelyn was studying the list too.

“Start with the water warnings,” she said.

“Bellcross?”

“And every granary we’ve just filled.”

I nodded.

The Castellan expanded the first lesson.

It began with a plain sentence.

No warning device replaces inspection.

I smiled.

“Eleanor will like this.”

We took the archive proposal to council two days later.

By then, I had read enough to know that the work would take months.

I said so first.

Nobody looked disappointed.

Tilda wanted copies of the component patterns.

Aldren wanted to test a water warning in a bucket.

Eleanor wanted to know how it failed.

Mary wanted apprentices chosen by aptitude rather than family connections.

Evelyn asked who would keep the lessons once we began adding things the old instructions did not know.

There was a pause.

Then Mary reached for a fresh page.

We chose a room beside the foundry.

Two benches.

Locked storage for unfinished pieces.

A slate board.

Enough space for people to make mistakes without setting the curtains on fire.

The city was getting a workshop where the thing being built would sometimes be knowledge.

I found that almost embarrassingly exciting.

Melody noticed.

“Will there be examinations?”

“Probably.”

“Good. I want to see someone mark your work.”

“Tilda already does.”

“And?”

I thought of the practice disk.

“She has high standards.”

The rain cleared before sunset.

Evelyn and I walked to the granary yard, where the first carts stood empty beneath the eaves.

The air smelled clean.

Beyond the roofs, the western sky had opened into a pale band of gold.

I carried the little bundle of barley Fenna had given us.

Evelyn glanced at it.

“You’ve brought that everywhere.”

“Only twice.”

“Three times.”

“I’m finding it difficult to put down.”

She slipped her hand through my arm.

We stopped beside the granary door.

Inside, workers were finishing the last checks before closing.

I remembered the empty fields.

The stakes.

A sign that said carrots with considerable determination.

Evelyn rested her free hand against her stomach and became still.

I turned.

“One of them?”

She nodded.

Then took my hand.

We waited together.

A small movement pressed beneath my palm.

Behind us, someone slid the granary bar into place.

Evelyn smiled.

“What are you thinking?”

I looked at the barley.

Then at our joined hands.

“That I want to be here when they’re old enough to help.”

“With harvest?”

“With anything.”

She leaned against me.

“They may be terrible at tying sheaves.”

“They’ll have company.”

Her laugh carried across the quiet yard.

We walked home slowly.

When we reached the nursery, I placed the barley on the high shelf, well away from the cradles.

Evelyn watched me arrange it.

“For them?”

“For us,” I said.

She took my hand again.

Then we went to find supper.

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