POV: john-west
Summary
John now has a name to put to Thokk's sketch — Ryan is here, two days ahead of him, and on the same road. Ealstan suggests they ask the midfather about the strange red-haired man as part of approaching him for Wyrm's release; their destination was already Wellbury. John, holding the sketch, lets a few more pieces of his old life drop into place — there had been a Jen in his life back then too, and the three of them used to go out at night, and at some point Jen had become his.
Sefawynn cuts in to say she would rather retrieve her brother *without* having to deal with Wealdsig at all — the reeve is not her favourite person. Ealstan acknowledges that the midfather's devotion to Woden can be uncomfortable. Yazad is sharper: didn't the man once nail himself to a tree? *Wait, what?* Ealstan, chagrined, explains. Before the battle of Far Strength some forty years ago, Wealdsig needed strength for the fight, and sacrificing directly of oneself to Woden is a way to tip the scales. There is an old tale of Woden nailing himself to the world tree. Wealdsig emulated him. His right hand has not been of much use since, but people respect him for it. Thokk mutters that Woden has been forgetting himself, thirsting for ever more devotion *like a drunkard calling for more wine*. Sefawynn tells her she should not say such things; Thokk tells her she'll say what she wants, because it's true. Yazad grins until Thokk warns him she is not converting to his feely-lovey god with his pillows and smiles; that god wouldn't want her anyway. *He wants everyone, no matter how lowly or incapable,* Yazad answers, sunnily; *I am proof of that.*
John drags the conversation back. Ealstan trusts Wealdsig to be unreliable — he will do what he finds amusing in the moment, which means Ulric might own him today and not tomorrow. They agree to go talk to him. Sefawynn insists they sneak in rather than ride up to the gate: if the enemy left anyone watching, *they might recognise an aelv*. There is something familiar in her eyes when she says it; she glances away. Yazad solves the entry problem: he runs apple-and-storeroom deliveries into Wellbury all the time, the hearthmen barely notice who comes with him, and it is his pleasure to repay the rescue. Ealstan and Yazad head off to count out sacks; Thokk takes over the fire from a still-dozing Leof.
John sits with his sketch. Ryan would be annoyed at him for being here at all; they used to walk into trouble together, didn't they? Something happened between them. He flexes his hand and thinks about the augments. These are not standard police kit. Where did he *get* them? And why did he freeze when the Hordaman swung that axe? Flashes of light. Shouts of anger. For the first time, he wonders whether he wants to remember. He has been clinging to *cop* because it is a clean shape; it does not explain his instincts for lying and hiding.
He digs through his system menus and tries again to enable his combat platings. This time he gets a new message. *Platings forcibly disabled by external command. You aren't getting them back, Johnny. Stop trying.* He recoils. Someone has reached into his head and locked the kit, and is mocking him by a name no one in this dimension would know. Shame floods him — an emotion he knows well — and underneath it, the same prompt to *stop digging* he keeps catching in himself. He exits the menus. Then he wonders why he saw the same look in Sefawynn a few minutes earlier.
He goes looking for her. She and Thokk have slipped out. The Preserve hums around him: women working the roof thatching, men in the orchard, someone replacing path stones. He notices the offerings bowls in front of the hut, each with a request beside it — a worn pair of shoes, reeds for a mat, a bowl of milk. Half offering, half work-order. He floats a *want to give one a try?* to the air. No reply. He finds Sefawynn out beyond the hut, sitting on a stump and staring into the dark forest. Cloak tugged in the wind. He drops into the leaned-against-a-tree slot beside her.
He calls out what he has been watching: she hid from a Preserve woman who might know her, she's worried about being recognised at the gate, she has been acting ashamed since they got here. She lets it go. *Our boasts don't do anything,* she whispers. The skops all know it — only the Hordaman skalds still make theirs land. She thinks they used to work, once. She has figured out his voice trick, more or less — like a skop she met who could throw his speech onto objects — and she has assumed he is a grifter running it. He pushes back too hard at the word, and that gives him away too. *I have no room to chide you,* she says. The skops should admit they can't do what they sell, but if they did, they'd be thrown out and starve, so they keep at it.
The Wellbury settlement she walked through a few years back, after the Bear took her parents — she was hired to perform bindings on an exposed outpost. She did her best boasts knowing the protections would not hold; she and Wyrm got paid and moved on. She nods past the great old trees. *Used to be right there.* John looks, and after a beat picks out shadows that might be old foundations under the canopy.
People are starting to figure the skops out, she tells him. Where she once loosed a bog, it returns the next night. Promises don't materialise. People die, and their kin remember who took payment. There aren't many places left where she won't be recognised, and she keeps losing track of where she's been. John recognises the shape of the life she is describing; it is uncomfortably close to his own. He tries to summon something noble — *get an honest job, kid* — and instead says, *life is awful sometimes. So you cope.* Others, she says, cope without grifting; Ealstan does it by helping people survive. *And the Hordamen do it by ripping people apart and burning villages,* he says. *On that scale, you're not doing so bad.* She stands and brushes off her dress. *Thanks for not judging.* *You think I'm a grifter too. Why would I judge?* *That,* she says, *is the first thing you've said that makes me doubt — every grifter I've ever met is a judgmental aers.*
Walking back, she warns that Wealdsig might recognise her, and probably shouldn't see her when Ealstan talks to him. John agrees, and adds that *he* may be the one to do the talking; the handbook does extol the wizard pitch as quite effective, and the Hordamen were impressed. *Your eyes should have burned out by now from all that writing,* she notes; he has a strange wyrd to him. He asks what wyrd means — *fate or luck, neither, not really* — and she asks how he can possibly not know. He tells her he's been in her country a few days; he's from Seattle; they don't have many Anglo-Saxons there, but good coffee. She rolls her eyes. He tells her to stop. She says she was checking the time of day. He says the sun is literally behind them. She says one knows by looking at the sky. He points out the shadows. She stops and squints at him to see if the shadows are dark enough to obscure his face — *nope, still visible* — and catches a smile on her lip. He stops in his tracks: *was that flirting? Were we flirting?* She rolls her eyes again and walks on. He hurries after.
At the front of the Preserve, people are staring at twenty woven mats and a mound of butter the size of a small child; the worn-out shoes have been unravelled to their component fibres and laces. Leof lifts one of the mats reverently and asks what manner of wight could do this. Sefawynn drags John away to demand whether *he* did it. He doesn't know how to weave mats. She tells him their household wight is friendly but weak — one small task at a time, days per task. *How have you bound such a powerful wight,* she presses, *and not to a place, but to a person? You make no sense.* He happily agrees. *Try being me. Zero stars, worse than diet soda with sugar dumped in.* — and then has to ask himself, mid-sentence, how he knows what that tastes like. Some things in his past it would be better to forget. Sefawynn, baffled by the word *zero*, drops it. She wants to see her brother. They go to find Yazad.