Chương 45: The Fitting

On Tuesday he had bought a sword. It cost twenty-two marks off the scrap wall at Riddell's, where it had stood behind a roll of chain for so long that sword and chain had rusted together. It was an old guard blade, the standard pattern, gray down both sides with pitting, and the grip had been wrapped in tape by somebody who was probably dead. He owned a sword already, in a way. Croft had handed him a practice blade in November and told him to keep it, but that was a Croft blade out of the Croft house.

BRING YOUR OWN SWORD meant one that was his. Riddell took the money without one word about it. Then he stood at the end of the bench for most of an hour, serving nobody, while Abe worked the pitting out on the big wheel.

"Guard surplus," he said, when the steel started coming up bright under the stone.

"There were a thousand of those in Calder once. Your father's would have been one of these." Abe kept his eyes on the work.

"I know," he said, and neither of them said anything else about it. He gave the blade three evenings in the yard, and some hours on top of those that only he could count. He rewrapped the grip in waxed shop cord and ground the shoulders of the blade back until it stopped fighting his wrist. Then he took the edge off it on purpose, because a drill blade wants no edge, and putting one back would take him about ten minutes any time he liked. On Saturday morning the shop had its biggest day of the year without him.

He'd asked on Thursday, with the fitting letter flat on the counter, and Riddell had read it twice.

"Col will cope." They had both looked over at Col, who was wrapping a hand plane at the time with the blade of it pointed at his own stomach. Croft had the training settled before Abe could even ask where. MAREK'S. NINE O'CLOCK. PAID FOR. DON'T THANK ME, IT'S WEIRD WHEN YOU DO THAT. The evenings at Marek's were sold until Easter, every one of them, to a buyer Abe had seen through a window with his own eyes. The mornings were still Marek's to give, and Croft had taken one.

One morning, against a winter of evenings that belonged to somebody else. Abe walked up Fenner Street at ten to nine with a scrap-wall sword rolled in an old towel, past the spot on the far sidewalk where he'd stood in the dark on Friday night. Marek let them in on the hour, nodded at Croft, and went up to his office without a word. Then it was the sprung floor, forty feet of it, and the cold, and the two of them.

"Right," Croft said, dropping his bag.

"Let's see this sword I've been dreading." Abe unrolled the towel and handed it over. Croft turned it over twice. He sighted down the spine with one eye shut, hefted it at the balance, then swung it slowly, listening to it, and then he swung it again, harder, and put it down very carefully.

"This is the ugliest sword I've ever held," he said at the end of it.

"It's straight."

"It's dead straight." He sounded nearly angry about it.

"And the balance is right. Where's the balance from? These things come balanced like a shovel."

"I ground the shoulders back. There was more steel up there than it needed."

"Off the scrap wall." Croft handed it back with a certain care.

"At the shop I called a scrap shop."

"You said it to Ellis first. Then to my face."

"I stand by it." He picked up his own blade.

"Twenty-two marks. I hate this sword. If my family didn't count the swords every Christmas I'd have brought you a spare and buried this one." He pointed at the floor.

"Feet. Show me the turn while you're still warm from the stairs." Abe ran the first two steps and the turn, twice, cold, while Croft walked a slow circle around him and said nothing until he'd finished.

"They've improved," Croft said, like a judge reading out a verdict he'd checked three times.

"You'll meet the ferryman on Thursday after all. Again, with speed." For an hour it was work, wet-backed and ordinary, and better than any hour the yard had ever given him. Then, at speed, deep in the second step, the old fault came back. His back foot slid a hand's width on the turn, the same slide it had been doing since November, and Croft saw it and pulled in a breath to say the thing he always said. Abe got there first.

"When you got a step wrong," he said.

"When you were small. What did your family actually do?" Croft stood there with the correction still in his mouth.

"What?"

"Tench told me to ask you. He says the way your people teach is sitting in your bones and you don't even know you're carrying it."

"Tench said that." Croft set his blade down on the bench.

"Huh." He frowned at nothing for a bit.

"Nobody shouts," he said, like that was the answer.

"That's it?"

"My father shouts at everything. Dogs. Referees. The phone." He was still frowning.

"Never at sword. I don't think I ever heard anybody shout at sword."

"So what do they do?" Croft came over and put his hand flat on Abe's chest.

"This. The second it goes wrong, this, and everything stops. You don't finish the step." He took the hand back and looked at it like it had done something without him.

"If you finish it, it counts. The fault goes in with the rest." He stopped.

"Huh. I thought everyone knew that." Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"I didn't."

"No," Croft said, slower.

"Apparently not."

"And then?"

"Then you get walked." He made a small turning motion with one finger.

"Turn around."

"What?"

"Turn around, I'm not explaining it, it's easier to just do it." And then Miles Croft put both hands on Abe's shoulders from behind and steered him through the second step so slowly it hardly counted as moving, and somewhere in the middle of it he stopped talking. Five times at that speed. Five at Abe's own slow. Then half pace, then real. When the foot slid again the flat hand came the same instant, and nobody shouted. When they reset he never let Abe start at the broken step.

"Two back. Where it's still good." Being steered through a sword form slower than walking, by Miles Croft, in socks, in a cold hall, was one of the stranger experiences of Abe's life. It worked so fast it was nearly insulting. The tenth time through at speed, the back foot held. The eleventh. On the twelfth, mid-step, a small window opened in the middle of him, and he stopped dead with the blade still out. DRILL HAND · Apprentice Lv 3 (12 / 1, 800) Croft knew that stillness by now.

Half the school knew that stillness.

"Level?"

"Level."

"Of course it is." He did not even try not to look pleased.

"It leveled me twice. Again, before your legs forget it." It was the best lesson of his life, and he knew it while it was still happening, which made the clock worse. He'd promised himself he'd watch the clock, and he did, and hated it. At quarter to twelve he made himself say it out loud.

"I have to go."

"You've got..." Croft looked at the light in the windows and worked it out, and his face came back down.

"The kit thing."

"Train's at twenty after." Croft stood in the middle of the floor with his blade hanging.

"Six weeks I've been saying back foot," he said.

"Back foot, back foot, like a parrot. Today it went in." He was not really talking to Abe by the end of it.

"First morning it goes in, and you're off to Prescot to get measured for clothes."

"I know."

"Pants, Abe."

"I know."

"Go on, then." He turned back to the floor.

"Thursday. Two o'clock. Don't be early." The last thing Abe saw from the door was Croft alone on forty feet of bought floor, walking himself through the third step at half pace, with his own hand flat on his own chest. The address in Prescot was up a stair beside a shoe shop, and the woman who opened the door was the one who had run the evaluation floor off a clipboard. She still had the clipboard.

"Dolan," she said, finding him on it.

"One forty. We're running early, don't tell anybody. I'm Coates. In you come." The room was long and warm and smelled of new cloth and tea. A tall girl stood on a low box at the far end with her arms straight out, being measured and bored. And in the near chair, with his boots off and one sock half on, sat the boy from up the coast, the one who'd spent the evaluation with his thumb strapped to a board.

"It's YOU," the boy said, delighted.

"The pad boy. You crossed in the room, I was in the doorway. I heard the assessor say prodigy with my own ears." He stuck his hand out.

"Hutton. My mom's watched your clip about forty times. She does the voice."

"There's a voice?"

"No, man, no, look at it, look at it," said Hutton, doing the voice.

"That one. She does it at Christmas dinner now." He wiggled his thumb.

"Good thumb these days, look. Straight." The fitter was a small gray man named Leeming with a measuring tape hanging around his neck, and the tape stayed there the entire appointment. He looked at you, wrote a number, looked again, wrote another, and nobody in that room behaved as if this was unusual.

"Long in the arm," Leeming said, past Abe's shoulder, to Coates.

"And he'll thicken by spring. Leave room in the shoulders." Abe stood on the box and got discussed in the third person, like a doorframe somebody was thinking of replacing. They measured each of his feet twice, which was two more measurements than any shoe he'd ever owned had involved. Coates wrote down two pairs, mat boots and weather boots, the good kind, the kind that keep the water out. He thought about a pair of boots by the wall bars, and a chin pointed at them, and signed the next form.

Then Coates dealt paper like cards. Sign here, initial there, this one's medical, this one's the train money. One form wanted a name under WHO DO WE CALL, and he wrote Peg's name, and it looked very small in the box they gave it. Then she put a folder in his hands with his name printed on the cover, like a school report.

"Your spring," she said. Two meets, one in March at a place called Millbrook and one in May with the town not decided yet. Three afternoons marked LISTING, with towns and times against them, whatever listing was. And in the middle of the page, in the same print as everything else, one line for March: the re-read, the day the instruments came back out and the line either kept climbing or didn't.

"Kit comes in the mail before the first meet," Coates said.

"Lose nothing, it's all invoiced. And merry Christmas, Dolan. You're the easiest one forty I've had this week."

"Is that the whole year?" Abe said.

"That's your year." Hutton had his head halfway into a sweater by the door.

"That's his sponsored year. It isn't all the fighting there is." Coates gave him a look that did not slow him down at all.

"What? He can read a poster." Hutton got his head through.

"Open competitions, Dolan. Not meets. Meets are what Gault's bought you into, and there's two of them, and they're in the spring. The open ones run all winter and every town with a hall has one. Two halves to a night. The open half is anybody at all who walks in and wants a bout, and if you win the whole open half they give you fifty marks and a cup with somebody else's name still on it."

"What's the other one worth?"

"The other half is four bouts at the end of the night, and the hall stops dead for them, and that is where all the money is." He was enjoying himself now.

"Prescot's the big one after Christmas. Seventeenth of January, and it's a qualifier. Win your bout there and you're in the final in February. Ten thousand marks." Abe was still up on the box with his arms out. Ten thousand marks. It came apart in his head without being asked: June's doses, every month, for the better part of four years.

"Can I be on that?"

"You can enter the open half. Anybody can." Coates put her pen away without looking up.

"The other half you don't enter. You get put on it, and the person who would put you on it is Miss Gault, and she'll say no."

"Why?"

"Because you've got an assessment in March and she isn't risking you in a competition in January." She snapped the case shut.

"Ask her anyway, though. She picks up on Sundays."

"MILLBROOK," said Hutton, with his bag on his shoulder, by way of goodbye.

"The food's unbelievable. There's a whole tent." He got home after seven with the folder in his bag and the morning still in his legs, and Peg had kept supper back. The folder went on the table between the salt and the electric bill. That was the second folder to land on that table since October. June had read the first one standing under the hall light, turning every page over, and found the line in it that let Gault stop paying in March. Peg read the kit list all the way through with one eyebrow working.

"Two pairs of boots," she said.

"Three of everything else. They do know there's one of you?"

"There's a tent at the meets. Food."

"A tent. In March. On this coast." She handed the list back like she'd won something, and went for the pans. June took the spring calendar. She read it twice, straight through, with a pencil in her hand that she didn't use. Her own count was up on the wall by the door in her own writing, sixteen days to the January board. The calendar on the table ran to May, and nobody in this house had written it. Abe watched her read it and went down the same page in his own head, out of habit, looking for the surface.

The place where fifty free hours could get a grip. There wasn't one. He could not even get quiet in this kitchen with the two of them sitting in it, and it would not have helped if he could. Everything he had beaten since October had a door in it somewhere, or a tide, or a bar to fill. He had signed everything they put in front of him that afternoon, and not one of those forms had a date on it that could move. June turned the calendar over to see if there was anything on the back.

"Two meets," June said.

"Three listing days. And that one." Her finger had stopped on the March line, and she left it there.

"Then we get you ready for that one." June said it to the calendar and not to him. Then she looked up.

"What happens if we're not?"