The Orc's Paper Wife

By dark, Wenna Vey had decided to marry the orc across the road to keep her forge. She had not told him yet. Orcish had no word that meant pretend.

At first light she had a horse to shoe, which was how these things generally started.

The cob was a piebald gelding with a wall like wet biscuit and an opinion about strangers, and Wenna had his near fore between her knees when Fabian Ledd came through the gate.

She knew the tread before she looked up. Nobody else in Marrowvale crossed her yard at that pace — unhurried, even, a man who had never once been made to wait in a way that mattered. She went on paring. The frog was overgrown and came away in one curled sliver under the knife, and the cob shifted his weight and thought about being a problem, and she put her shoulder into him and he thought better of it. That was the morning, in one movement. That was most mornings.

"Mistress Vey." Ledd stopped a respectful distance off, hands folded, good coat buttoned against the autumn. Grey at the temples, tidy as a ledger. He had the look of a man who had arrived exactly when he meant to.

"Factor." She did not straighten up. "You'll have to wait on the horse. He doesn't care what's written on what."

"I can see that." And he waited, which was somehow worse than if he'd pushed.

Wenna finished the trim with her jaw set. Rasp level, long strokes, the dust of the hoof pale on her apron. She could feel him watching her hands — not as men usually watched, which was the chest first and the work never, but properly, like a man pricing a job. She reached for the shoe she'd shaped at first light, still cold now from sitting on the bench, and that annoyed her more than anything he'd said, which was nothing yet. She'd sized it before the coals were properly up because she liked to have the shoe ready before the horse was. Now she would have to heat it again with the guild factor standing in her yard holding whatever he'd brought to say.

She put the shoe back in the fire anyway, and brought it out dull red on the tongs and set it to the foot, and the horn smoked and stank and told her in a breath where it bore and where it did not; and she took a heat off the heel on the anvil, tried it again, and dropped it hissing in the slack tub. Then she set the nails. Seven, clenched down and rasped smooth, the gelding's leg cupped warm against her apron front. When she let the hoof down the cob stood square and put his weight on it without a flinch, and she felt the small clean satisfaction that had carried her through a year and a half of doing this alone. Then she straightened, wiped the knife, and looked at the man in her yard.

"Well," she said.

Ledd took a folded paper from inside his coat, opened it with the care of a man who handled paper for a living, and read it out loud.

It was her father's hand at the bottom. She had known it would be before he got past the first line, but knowing it and hearing it were different animals. The note her father had signed, naming the forge-hearth, naming the sum, naming the guild factor as holder. He read it flat, like a price read off a market board, and the yard did something strange while he read — the sounds went on, the gelding's breathing, someone's cart down the road, the tick of the banked fire — and none of it seemed to be happening anywhere near her.

"You've seen it," Ledd said, folding it away.

"My father showed it me before he died." He had shown it to her as he showed her everything, half a lesson and half a confession, both of them standing in this yard pretending the cough was a cold. "It's his signature. I won't pretend it isn't."

"I did not expect you to." Ledd tucked the paper away and looked at the forge — not at her, at the forge, the stone of the hearth and the roof-timbers her great-grandfather had set. "Do you know how a forge-hearth is held, Mistress Vey? In law, not in practice."

"In practice it's held by whoever's working it." She heard her own voice come out flat and didn't care. "That's me. It's been me this last year and a half, whatever name was over the door."

"In practice, yes. In law, a forge-hearth is guild property, held in trust." He said it like a man explaining something to a bright child, which she suspected was the only register he had. "The guild owns the hearth because the valley must always have a smith. The trust passes to a household — not to a person. Do you understand the difference?"

"Tell me anyway," she said, because he was going to, and because she wanted him to say it all, plainly, so there would be no discovering more of it later.

"A person dies. A person leaves. A person takes a fever, or a bad debt, or a dislike to the work, and the hearth stands empty and the valley has no smith, and that has happened and the guild has long memories." His hands stayed folded. "A household is different. A household persists. Two backs, two names, children maybe, someone to carry the fire if the other can't. So the trust is written to households, and the note your father signed is written against the trust, and the holder of the note — which is me — may call it against a lone heir. Do you understand? A person holding a hearth alone can be called on. A household cannot."

"And I am a person holding a hearth alone."

"You are," Ledd said, without any pleasure in it that she could detect, which was its own kind of insult. "The note falls due on the autumn quarter-day. Forty days, counting this one."

The number went through her like draught through a door that had never sat true. Forty. She had thought in terms of seasons, of years, of maybe-when-I'm-grey. Forty days was the length of a foal's first rough shodding. Forty days was nothing at all.

"That's not forty days to pay," she said slowly. "No one could pay. My father couldn't pay, and he owed it for eleven years." She watched his face. "It's forty days to what?"

"Forty days for the trust to be settled as it should be," Ledd said. "The guild takes the hearth at quarter-day, and it goes to a household in good standing, and the valley keeps its smith." A pause, precisely the length of a courtesy. "There is one clause that would stay my hand. You should hear it, because you will hear it from others, and I'd rather you heard it correctly. If the hearth is held by a married householder in good standing — married, in the book, before the note falls due — the trust passes to that household, and the note rides on it. It becomes a household debt, worked off in guild service over time. The guild does not call on a married householder. It is not done."

He said it the way you'd tell a man standing on thin ice exactly where the thick ice was, forty miles off.

Wenna looked at him for a moment. The yard was very quiet. Somewhere behind her the gelding sighed and dropped his head to the post ring, a horse who had found the whole business too dull to fear.

"You don't think I can use it," she said.

"I think," Ledd said, "that I have served this guild for twenty-two years, and I know this valley the way you know a hoof, and I do not believe there is a householder in it who will stand beside the Vey forge in forty days." He said it without heat, and that was when she understood that he meant it as a fact, like the weather, like a price. "I am not doing this to be cruel, Mistress Vey. I want you to understand that. Your father owed money he was never going to see the back of, and the guild let it stand, because the valley liked him. It stood eleven years because a likeable man held the hearth. I waited. I am owed more than money at this point. I am owed the thing being done properly." He buttoned his coat, though it had not come unbuttoned. "Forty days. The quarter-day, in the square. The clerk has the filing."

He gave her a nod — a correct nod, exactly as deep as her standing warranted and no deeper — and walked out of her yard at the pace he had come in at, and did not hurry at the gate, and was gone.

Wenna stood in the yard until the piebald gelding got bored and began, delicately, to untie his own lead with his teeth, at which point she called him a name her mother had brought up the Corran road and took him back to his owner's boy, who had been waiting at the end of the lane the whole time, and who had clearly heard some of it, and who paid her with his eyes on his boots.

Then she worked.

She worked because work was the thing that did not change shape when you looked at it. She reset the fire and shod the carter's two bays that had been waiting since yesterday, and she was good at it, and the bays stood quiet for her, as they always did, and nobody watching would have seen anything but a farrier having an ordinary day. Her hands shook twice. Once during the second bay, when she dropped a nail and stood looking at it in the straw as if it had done something to her; and once at the bellows, when she realised she had been counting strokes and had got to forty without noticing.

Forty days. The gelding's shoe. Forty. She set her palm flat on the anvil's waist and breathed until the shaking went somewhere she could ignore it, and finished the bay, and took her coin, and was civil.

In the evening she barred the yard gate, banked the fire, and sat at her father's table with the stub of pencil he had kept behind his ear all his working life, which still smelled of his hair oil, and which she had not been able to throw away, and did the sums.

The sum on the note was a joke. She did it twice because the first time her pencil kept stopping. Even if every shoe in Marrowvale came to her, even if she shod the whole valley and half the steadings up the side, forty days of farrier's work at farrier's prices came to something under a sixth of it. Her father had owed it and paid the interest in ale and goodwill and the guild's forbearance, and the forbearance had died before he had, by about the length of time it took Fabian Ledd to walk from the guild hall to her yard.

She could not pay. She had known she could not pay before the pencil came out. The pencil was just making it official.

What she could not stop looking at was the other number, the one that was not a number. A married householder in good standing. Heard correctly, from the man himself, because Ledd was the sort who made certain you had heard the door he did not believe you could walk through. It was the last thing a man like that did before he shut you out: he handed you the key, smiling internally, sure the lock was beyond your reach.

Married. In the book. Before the quarter-day.

Wenna sat with the pencil in her hand and the cold coming up off the flags and thought about the men of Marrowvale, the whole available field of them, and laughed once, shortly, like a hammer hitting a cold shoe. Half of them had looked straight past her at market until she was twenty-five. The other half had watched her hold up a tonne of horse between her knees and decided that whatever they wanted in a wife, it was elsewhere. She had made her peace with it years ago. She had made a virtue of it, because that was what you did. Beyond criticism was better than liked, and she had been beyond criticism for a decade.

The valley would not give her a husband in forty days. That was a fact, and she was good at facts.

But the clause did not say the valley had to give her one. It said in the book. It said a signature. A marriage line was a piece of paper witnessed by a clerk, and she had spent her whole working life dealing in things that held or did not hold, and she knew — as she knew a hoof-wall, as she knew iron — the difference between a thing that was sound and a thing that merely looked sound from the road.

She looked across the table at the dark window and the dark yard beyond it, and past the yard to the road, and past the road to the yard opposite, where a thread of forge-light still showed under Ozrek's door, late as hers, as it so often was. Two years he had been across that road. They traded steel when one of them was short, and silence when both of them were busy, and he had once held her bellows pole for an hour when her spring went, without being asked and without making it a thing.

She put the pencil down.

It was a terrible idea. It was the sort of idea her father would have had in his last year, the grand arrangement that fixed everything at a stroke and owed money to nobody. She could hear the ostler and the whole valley saying so.

She picked the pencil up again, turned the paper over, and began, in her square farrier's hand, to write down what such a thing would have to look like to be sound — forty days, a signature, separate beds, undone quietly after — and her hands had stopped shaking, which she did not examine.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

Get the e-book