Quinine's Bitter, Sugar's Sweet

Fire licking up the gear-wheel, sweeping over the crossbeams of the roof — yellow light washing everything, the smell of lamp-oil poured out just in case rising on the sharp wind, just in case the words and signs and gestures weren’t enough. Maybe that illustrates a lack of trust in his master and his teachings, but overkill never hurt anybody. Do it in the dead of night, like a bandit — they’ll see it from across the valley, but they won’t be hurrying to help put the flames out any time soon. It’s the only mill for two weeks’ haul in any direction, which pricks up hate, and the fat friendly miller has a thumb on the scales anyway — and it’s Reap Night, nobody’s looking any further than the bottom of a leathern cup.

it’s the most satisfying thing he’s seen in thirteen years of life — in many more years than that, a special pleasure.

The miller and his wife aren’t imaginative people. They’ll stumble home with uncovered hair and rub their eyes at the scene in front of them, the livestock turned loose and the empty foundation blackened like a tooth-socket — and he’ll be long gone, brother, long gone. He’d started with the baseboards first, laying down tinder, creeping up to the rafters to chalk out the signs he’d seen in his dreams — he can read and write a little already, he can reckon accounts aright and sign his own name, but his master has promised him books to read, bound in leather and written on skin, and more names than he can count. Coffin-shapes, zigzags, letters with thorns and crossbars. Things his master showed him, signs for fire.

Walter shakes the image out of his head, and runs — slipping on the damp grass where the frost has begun to melt along the bank, stumbling aways before he’s out of the crackling shell of flames and can survey his work with a little more objective appreciation. He can feel the heat licking his face even from here, scorching the baby hairs on his cheeks and pricking up a line of sweat along the drawstring of his shirt collar. The waterwheel sinks and breaks with a scream like an animal — wood shearing against wood and metal bolts shaking loose, the whole load of mass heaved down by its own weight. Like kicking over a baby’s cradle. When the wreckage hits the water, it begins to steam — horrible white billows. Terrible. Really terrible. Beyond repair. He feels like he should spit for luck or something — his hand twitches into the stiff gesture people of the town make against the evil eye and he finds himself laughing until he shakes, until his voice cracks, until tears prick in his eyes and he’s doubled over in the scrubby grass.

How he’s hated this place — this thinly drawn point of origin and everything it suggests, the mill and the farm, the river and the town. He’s hated this place as long as he’s known it — this place where he eats and sleeps, where he’s beaten, where he lugs grist for ungrateful tenants of an ungrateful baron and every time he’s looked them in their bony pop-eyed faces he’s seen bottomless ignorance, narrowness, restriction. Now he’s casting it off wholesale and the miller and his wife will have to reinvent their livelihood. He’s sick of the feeling of flour at the back of his mouth, the neutral-tasting grit that gets in and under everything, even in a good season. He wants stronger meat than this, and sweeter tastes.

No more laughter, now. He rises up gawkily on the brookbank, big black mudprints on his palms, and takes a couple more steps away from the water’s red edge before pausing. No one would have stopped him, if he’d left any other way — he put fire to the old mill because he wanted to, and because it might delay any searchers for at least a little while, raking through wet ash looking for young Wat’s bones. He’ll start on up the path and be gone before anybody even smells the smoke. It’s an auspicious start.

And because it was necessary, like a chick hammering its way out of its shell. Nothing gets born into the world without violence — Walter was born with a slimy hood over his face, that’s what the miller told him, a thick membrane too tough to be split with anything but a knife. The midwife had traded it away to a sailor for protection against drowning, before the river silted up. But Walter doesn’t believe it; Delain is a cesspit of implausible stories, and the miller’s wife says vague nice things about woven baskets and foundlings under cabbage leaves and all that happy horseshit but that doesn’t make them true. He was never born, he’ll never die, he’s merely becoming — this is his moment of becoming, coming unstuck in the universe.

There are witches and hill-folk and ghostly reaver bands that still cut through the valley on nights like these, Reap or no Reap. Things that take kids. There are haunted stragglers who pick their way along the empty steel tracks, and Walter might be one of these for a little while, turn bandit-king. He’s tall and strong for thirteen and old enough to hack it on the road, in every substantial way a man, and a good height, and handsome — he knows he’s handsome because people have said he’s handsome, because of how the girls fumble and turn away when he walks past, because of what the looks on his face do to people. It’s better than the evil eye. When he’s got all the power he can stand, he’s going to make people crawl.

He knows how to make himself go unseen, how to find true north, how to make animals lame, how to find water under the ground. The path is clear, the moon’s a sliver in the sky, he isn’t hungry. He has a blue cotton jacket and a knapsack and a stick for a stave, the last of the matches and a good fair knife and the miller’s second best boots — with the sharp toe of one boot he scratches a last sign in the freezing mud of the road, a scything arc and a round gouge for a pupil. He doesn’t know whose eye it is he’s drawn in the dirt, but he wants it to see.

Walter makes the sign again, two stiff fingers and a folded thumb, and turns his back on the fire. He’s young and strong and a greater force than luck is with him now.