On the seventeenth day, Tobin knelt on the yard flags with his left palm flat on the stone. The wind came down off the hills and found the back of his neck.
Calen had chosen the flags for that reason. The board in the hall had been out of the wind. The yard was not.
“Still hand,” Calen said. “Third lesson. Count it.”
“From one?”
“From one.”
Tobin nodded once. He did not look at the hills. He looked at his own palm, the way he looked at anything he had been asked to keep.
The yard had not gone quiet all morning. Two guards argued about a cart wheel by the postern. Hoff’s boots crossed the flags twice.
Calen had decided the noise would stay, because the Mark would have noise in it too.
Calen held the tin pot above the stone. It was the smallest pot in the Keep, with a nail hole punched through the base.
The last of the ink ran through it, thinned with so much water that it was nearly clear. He held the pot between two fingers, the way he held a pen.
“The wind will push the pot,” Calen said. “It will push the thread.”
“Let it. Keep the hand still.”
“And the drop?”
“The drop lands where your palm is. Not where the wind wants it.”
Tobin’s shoulders went up, and then down. His breath went in through his nose and out through his mouth.
It was his own breath. Calen had not taught him that, and he had not asked where Tobin had learned it.
Calen loosened his fingers.
The first drop fell. The wind bent the thread to the left, so the drop landed a finger’s width from where Calen had aimed. It hit the middle of Tobin’s palm and spread into a small dark coin.
“One,” Tobin said.
“Two,” Calen said.
“Two,” Tobin said. He did not look at the coin.
The second drop came. The wind pulled harder off the hills, and it rattled the pot against Calen’s knuckles, and he kept his grip.
The drop landed in the same place as the first. Tobin’s fingers stayed open. Only his thumb twitched once, and then it was still.
“Three,” Calen said.
“Three,” Tobin said, and then, in a lower voice, as if naming the thing would hold it down: “This is the wind.”
“Yes.”
“Four. The wind is not in my hand.”
“Four,” Calen said.
“Five,” Tobin said. “I held something shut once. When I was seven.”
“Count,” Calen said.
“Six.” Tobin’s voice did not change.
“It pushed on the other side. I held the handle with both hands until the pushing stopped.”
“Seven,” Calen said.
The next drop came when the thread gusted sideways so hard that the drop struck the stone beside the palm. Tobin’s hand did not move. The wet dark patch on the flag spread out past his little finger, and he let it.
“The stone is not your hand,” Calen said.
“I know, sir.” Tobin’s voice did not change. “Eight.”
Calen kept the pot steady. His own fingers had begun to ache from the cold, and he did not let them shake.
He did not count his own breaths. He counted the drops, which was a different thing, and the only count that mattered in this yard.
By ten, Tobin’s fingertips had gone white. By twelve, the white had begun to turn blue at the nails. He did not look at them.
He did not look at Calen, either. He looked at the middle of his palm, where the drops were landing, and he kept his arm straight.
Somewhere behind them, a boot scraped on the wall walk. Calen did not turn his head. He heard the scrape again, slower, and then a voice he knew.
“The Duke does not lie on flagstones, Orrin,” Kade called down. “The Duke sits on the wall, where the view is better.”
“Then the Duke can count from there,” Calen said.
“Fifteen,” said Liss, who was sitting on the bottom step of the guardroom with her knees drawn up. She said it flatly, in Calen’s voice, without looking at anyone.
Then she said, in her own voice, “Sixteen. He is still going.”
“Seventeen,” Tobin said.
The cold had got into Calen’s shoulders now. He could feel it in the joints of his hand, which was holding the pot.
The thread of ink wobbled and straightened, wobbled and straightened, and every drop that fell on Tobin’s palm made the same small sound.
He had started to wish he could stop the wind. He could not. He could only keep the pot where it was.
Count it, he thought. Count it, and do not stop.
“Eighteen,” Tobin said. His lips were moving on the number after he had said it, as if he were checking it twice. “Nineteen.”
Dorran came out of the guardroom door with his sleeve pulled over his fingers. He stopped at the step beside Liss and looked at the flags, at the wet stone, at Tobin’s arm. His face went pale.
Dorran’s sorry was the first thing in the yard that was not about the cold.
“Sorry, sir,” Dorran said quietly. “Is he hurt?”
“No.”
“Is the wind hurting him?”
Hesper came out behind him and leaned on the door frame. “Would you like the wind to stop,” she asked, “or would you like him to stop being cold?”
“Neither,” Calen said. “He is holding still.”
“Then why is his arm shaking?”
“Because it is cold.”
“Then why does nobody move him?”
“Because he is counting,” Calen said. “Go and stand by the trough, both of you. Do not stand here.”
Dorran went, quickly and quietly. Hesper went more slowly, and she stopped to look back at Tobin before she turned the corner.
Liss did not move at all until Calen looked at her, and then she got up and went after them, copying nothing.
Nell had come out to the trough with her bandaged arm held against her chest. She stood with her good hand on the rim, and her lips were moving. She was counting her own breaths.
Then she looked at Tobin and her lips moved on a different number.
“Sir,” Nell said. “He is at nineteen.”
“I know.”
“I counted his breaths too. He breathes out through his mouth on every drop.” She paused. “May I stay by the trough?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you, Sir.” She went back to counting her own breaths.
“Twenty,” said Tobin.
Calen did not let go of the pot. He waited for the next drop, and it did not come, because the last of the thin ink had run out of the nail hole.
The pot dripped once more, slowly, and then the thread was gone.
Tobin did not lift his hand. His lips were still moving.
“Twenty,” Calen said. “Lift.”
Tobin lifted his palm off the flag. There was a small dark coin on it, and a second one beside it, and the wet had gone pink where the cold had made his skin tight. He turned his hand over and looked at it.
“Twenty counts,” Tobin said. “I held it.”
“Yes.”
“That is the most I have held.”
“It is the first full one,” Calen said. “Give me the hand.”
He took Tobin’s fingers in both of his, the way he had done in the hall, and rubbed the blue out of the nails. It took a long time.
Tobin did not flinch. He watched the top of Calen’s head as if he were counting the strokes.
For a while neither of them spoke. By the postern, the two guards finished their argument about the cart wheel and went back to their posts.
“Stand up slowly,” Calen said. “Blood first, then the arm.”
“Blood first,” Tobin said. “You said that in the hall.”
“Then it is still true.”
“Is that the Mark?” Tobin asked.
“No. This is the third lesson.”
“When is the Mark?”
“In two days.” Calen let go of his fingers. “Three clean runs.”
“The first with noise in the yard, the second with someone shouting at you, the third with a blade drawn in front of your face. Clean means you do not move. Three times, in a row.”
Tobin was silent for a moment. He flexed his hand, slowly, and watched the pink come back into the skin.
“A blade drawn,” he said. “Who will be cut?”
“That is Hoff’s drill to decide.”
“Hoff does not ask me.”
“No.”
“Then I will ask Hoff who.”
“Do not.”
Tobin looked up. It was not an argument. It was a question, and it wanted a reason it could hold.
“Why, sir?”
“Because he will tell you,” Calen said. “And then you will hold still with that in your head, and the Mark will not be clean.”
“Hold still with the wind, and the noise, and the blade. Not with a name.”
Tobin thought about that. He put his hand back on his knee, palm up, and he did not put it on the flag again.
“I am still now,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Then I will be still later too.”
Calen looked at the boy’s palm, pink and creased where the cold had marked it. Men who held still often locked their knees and stopped breathing.
Tobin did not lock anything. He breathed through his mouth and kept his hand where it was.
That was the difference, and it was the one that would matter in two days.
---
Hoff came out of the guardroom with a canvas roll under one arm. He laid it on the long table by the trough and unrolled it with two flat slaps, as if he were laying out a meal.
Six blades lay in the canvas. Each one was clean and dull at the tip, with new wrapping on the grip in brown twine.
Calen had seen the blades before. He had seen them on the sixth day, before anyone had mended them. He had not seen them like this.
Hoff had not looked at Tobin once while he laid the blades out. He had looked at the empty pot in Calen’s hand, and at the wet coin on the flags, as if he were weighing them.
Hoff picked one up and tested the weight in his fist. He swung it once, low, toward the wall, and the air made a short, sharp sound.
The grip turned a little in his hand. Hoff frowned at it, then lifted it to his eye and looked at the place where the tang went into the wood.
“It holds,” Hoff said, to nobody.
Calen looked at the third blade in the row. The twine on its grip was wound in a hurry, two turns too few at the top.
He did not say so. He had no reason yet to say anything about a blade that was holding.
Calen did the sum without meaning to. Six blades. Seven students. Three pairs, and one left over.
The one left over would stand at the trough with nothing in his hands, and he would watch.
Hoff set the one he had tested back in the canvas, and he stood with his hands on the table.
“The Duke will take the first blade,” Kade called down from the wall.
“The Duke will take what he is given,” Hoff said, without looking up.
“Who draws the blade on Tobin?” Calen asked.
Hoff did not look at him. “The drill draws it. I decide the drill.”
“The Mark is in two days.”
“Then you have two days to be patient, Orrin.”
“Tomorrow the blades come out,” Hoff said. “All six of them. Pairs by the trough, as on the list.”
Tobin’s head came up at the word six. “Six,” he said, very quietly, the way he had said it at the morning drill.
“Every one of them is sharp,” Hoff said. He looked across the yard at Calen, at the empty pot in Calen’s hand, and at the wet pink coin still drying on the flags. “Somebody will be holding one.”