“What are you doing?”
The voice was Miss Thicket Wimple’s, as were the woolen-socked ankles beneath a heavy tartan skirt. Dalliance rolled out from beneath her cart, a guilty expression playing across his face. He didn’t even bother casting [Deflect] because this didn’t feel like something you could deflect, so instead, he tried lying.
“My brother’s been showing me some carpentry,” he said. This was true; Industry had given him the basics several times over, as it allowed him to do his chores in a more agreeable way—shaving off chips of pine and cedar, one by one with a chisel—rather than, for example, helping catch a newborn calf, which was sticky, smelly, and disagreeable, a squirming burden which he’d proven, time and again, he was likely to drop on its head. “I was looking at the joinery,” he said, and this was also true, because he had been looking at the joinery carefully, measuring it, and could tell her anything she wanted to know about it from memory. He just didn’t add, I think there’s room for a box with my sister in it.
She’d finally woken, shortly before morning. The Mallows said she’d transitioned to natural sleep at some point, and was healing. But—whatever she said, and they’d fought about it again—she needed to run away. And so, needed a ‘realistic’ escape route. And thus, this project.
While omissions, Earnest had told him, were the most boring type of lie because you don’t have to make anything up, they were also the most interesting sort of lie because if you don’t say anything definite then people will try to sift through the implications: thus, never giving anything definite risked looking even worse than the truth unless you also managed the context such that they couldn’t put two and two together to make a five that would come back to bite you.
Dalliance, it has to be admitted, had learned rather a lot from his friend on the topic. This is not necessarily a positive development.
“I thought you were going to be a [Farmer],” she said.
The simple statement boiled his blood, and he forgot everything about trying not to look like he was lying. Da wasn’t even actually trying to make him into a [Farmer]. It was a trick. He wanted him to be a [Soldier], and you can be a [Soldier] no matter what, so wasting his potential wasn’t really a cost at all. But [Farmer] . . . it was too late for [Farmer] unless he went through with his father's plan and then retired from being a [Soldier]. Then all the basics would open up again. You could be a [Pupil] again if you could make it to retiring. That didn’t sound very fun. Not everyone survives to retire.
But for her to think . . . she knew he was a [Pupil] and said that . . . it meant she expected him to fail, become a [Soldier]—because he was a Rather after all—retire, and become a [Farmer]. Of course, it wouldn’t be called [Farmer] then, he’d be a [Homesteader] or some other D-Rank advanced variant. Like his Da, the [Patriarch].
“I’m not going to fail,” he told her to her face.
She covered her mouth with her hand, a flicker of hurt in her eyes. Curious what she might say, he turned on his [Prediction]. It caught the first time: he’d been doing that a lot recently.
“I am so sorry,” the ghostly echo said. She looked remorseful, too.
“Don’t be,” he said, cutting her off before she could speak. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. That wasn’t fair of me. It’s just what everyone was saying. It’s just the plan you were told. You know how people have expectations. Sorry, Miss Wimple.” Strangely, he predicted she might contest the title. It's still Mrs., she might say. Then, Oh no. Don’t tell anyone.
And there it was. All he needed to regain control of his temper was the sobering fact that he now knew two horrible things about people, now. She’d abandoned her husband, probably, or he’d left her without the dignity of a divorce. And his mother was still sleeping with the wizard. Two things he knew he would never tell someone, two things for which he didn’t know what, if any, legitimate use there could be. Secrets, which were none of his business, and yet he knew.
“You look sad,” she said. "I didn't intend to upset you."
He felt sad. He hadn’t asked for this. He didn’t want to feel like a sword hovering over someone, ready to fall. He didn’t want to have to worry about slipping up and letting a secret out that would hurt someone.
She had been quiet for a second, and he hadn’t realized. "I think," he admitted, "that's what everyone expects. I’m sorry that I got upset about it."
"If you want to be a [Carpenter]," she began, and his brain shut off, "I think that's very sensible of you. It’s a wonderful idea."
She completely misunderstood why he was mad. It made it worse.
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"Thanks for the food," he said. "I’m gonna go inside now."
And she let him.
Emboldened by his success, Dalliance didn’t waste any time in the next phase of the plan. It seemed like a good idea, just in case Miss Thicket Wimple said anything to Industry, to muddy the waters enough that it wouldn’t be obvious he’d been lying.
“What are you making?” Industry eventually asked, watching his brother pick out a fourth board.
“A lockbox,” Dalliance said.
“Whimsy about her usual tricks?” asked Industry. She hadn’t been for a long time, but had once been somewhat infamous for stealing things like socks instead of doing the necessary work to make her own usable again, like cleaning them. At one point, she had stolen and hoarded all of Dalliance’s socks and two pairs of Probity’s before Industry had shown them how it was done. He’d gone to her room, made her stand in the corner, and removed everything, piece by piece, disassembling it as he went. The socks had been under the pallet of her mattress, all of them poked through with leaves and twigs, or wet with mud, or worse. Well-used, sometimes irreparable socks. They weren’t the most expensive garments in the world, but they weren’t free.
Dalliance had carried that grudge for a while, until, with Industry’s prodding, he had taken all of her petticoats and hung them in a tree higher than she was comfortable climbing. Of course, it’s much more obvious when you go out and about without your petticoats. She had to admit she didn’t know where they were, and Da had noted their new location. Dalliance had had to climb up and get them back, the world righted again, except for the trouble he got in afterwards.
“Well, a strongbox is a really simple beginner project,” his brother said cheerfully. “What’s the carpenter’s maxim?”
“Measure twice, mark clearly, clean up after yourself?”
“Measure twice, cut once,” his brother corrected. “Though the rest is important.”
“Miss Wimple says I’m going to be a [Farmer],” Dalliance blurted out.
His brother’s take on it wasn’t what he expected. “Grown-ups talk to each other,” he said. “Sometimes they lie to each other. Do you think Da wants to announce to everyone that his son is defiant and he’s having trouble controlling him?”
Dalliance hadn’t considered that.
“And it’s not like you’re going around telling them the same thing, because then Da would lose face. That would be something he would see the need to repair.” Dalliance, of course, knew exactly the form of reparations that would involve. “So your brother knows, I know, but you aren’t going to tell everyone. Do you see the game?” he asked. “You know how it’s played? If he has carte blanche to say whatever he wants, he’ll say whatever makes him look good. Honestly, what did you expect?”
When he put it that way, Dalliance wasn’t sure. The true answer was that he expected honesty, but he didn’t have a particular reason to point to as to why. Certainly Da wasn't averse to falsehoods, used strategically. Himself.
“Why does it matter so much to him?” Dalliance asked.
“I don’t think it does, not as such. If you waste your life doing something that’s truly bad for you, I don’t think it matters to him. But if you turn him down when he’s trying to give you good advice . . . if you turn down his freely offered good advice that he gave trying to help you, then you’ve insulted him and wasted his time. He’s lost face.”
Dalliance scribbled unhappily on the wood with a pencil, darkening his outline marks.
“It’s always going to be about social standing, because he still remembers when he had it all. He was one of the Rather brothers. The three of them on the Wall, clearing everything before them like a whirlwind of sharpened steel. Implacable. Invulnerable. They were our monsters, right? And then he retires. He doesn’t have fame as such. He’s just ‘one of the Rather brothers,’ not ‘Cadence Rather, renowned warrior.’ He ends up a [Patriarch], which his father was. He didn’t surpass his father, and I think that’s a disappointment.
Dalliance rolled his eyes.
“You think you’re smart, Dalliance, and you’re not dumb. But I know you know what Father is doing, and if I know you know, then he knows you know by now. It’s a twisted sort of nonverbal communication you two have just succeeded in—maybe the first in your life that wasn’t a beating, but I don’t think he’s going to accept failure now, any more than I think you’re going to go quietly and become the good little soldier.”
"That's stupid."
“He can see his dreams living on through you. Maybe you get knighted and come back marching in a Triumph like Vigilance Worth did. Oh, Da was envious."
Dalliance felt his face go slack. What?
You didn’t know that?” Dalliance shook his head. “Oh, he raged. I think that’s why he took a freehold despite it being harder, rather than taking his place as seneschal for Sir Worth.”
“I didn’t know he had the option.”
“He did,” Industry confirmed. “He did. So now he’s a humble farmer, unless one of us surpasses him, and then we all become nobles beside him. So your job is to go out there and get knighted so Da can be more important than his dad was.”
“That’s stupid.”
“It’s just a theory,” said Industry. “Anyway, I thought that was what was going on. I’ve always liked working with my hands, so I took the wise path. I took something that was directly in line with everything he said that would lock me out of being a soldier, because we needed so many carpenters at the time. I told your brother everything . . . I should’ve told you sooner. Sorry about that. But Probity invested every point he was told and Tiered up as exactly what Father told him to be: a modest Grit farmer. And Da was so disappointed, but he couldn’t do anything about it, you see, because that’s directly what he said to do.”
Industry sighed. “I will be disappointed if you become a [Carpenter], but I will understand. But if you get the opportunity to be a [Knight] . . . make sure you turn it down.”
In the end, Dalliance measured twice, cut once, and got it wrong on five of the seven boards required for the base. Industry took over, using the excuse that he was showing him what to do, but Dalliance was pretty certain it was so he wouldn’t have to keep watching.
His brother presented him with the dark wood box, stained to resemble Miss Thicket Wimple’s cart as closely as possible. It was a tolerable fit. It would be a little short, but then, Whimsy was a little short.
It would work. It had to work. He wasn’t going to be able to live with himself if it didn’t. Now came the hard part: he had to talk Whimsy into getting into it.
White-wash vibes?