Chapter 87: A Reasonable Request

Theo stood in the middle of the hall and read the panels going past his eyes, and did the arithmetic on the third one.

’Four hundred thousand.’

’That’s... what is that in real money. I should do the calculations later.’

’And a staff of nineteen. Nineteen people. What am I supposed to do with nineteen people, I do my own laundry.’

He bowed, because it was the only thing he had that was certainly correct.

"Thank you. It’s very generous and I don’t think I’ve earned most of it."

King Ordwin shook his head.

"No, Lord Sky, you do not understand what you have done. The trials are the only way to save the floors, and our kingdom was doomed until you came. Because of you, Alderkeep will survive the wrath of that thing."

’That thing?’ Theo noted.

He straightened and said:

"Except this is performative, I want to believe that many Climbers have come to Alderkeep and passed Alderkeep. Why am I the one that saved you people, or is this a practised dialogue?"

The King heaved a heavy sigh.

"For each there is a calling, and for the calling there is a fulfillment, if that fulfillment is unsatisfied, the structure will collapse, there is not one path to destruction. All paths lead to destruction. One thing we do know is that you walked one of the most gruesome paths of our destruction. One unsolved for eleven years and you solved it. Only you. So Lord Sky, you did a lot."

Theo stayed silent.

’Why does he keep shortening my name. I hope it doesn’t become a thing.’

"One more thing," the King said, "and then I will let you go and sleep for a week."

He put his hand out without looking at it and somebody put a cup in it before the fingers had finished opening, and he did not drink from it.

"It is customary, when the Keep is in debt, to ask the creditor to name the debt himself. So." Ordwin looked down at him. "Name it. Anything within the gift of this floor. Weapons out of the vault. A ship. A commission. My Guard has four hundred and I will give you sixty of them and they will follow you up the Tower. Whatever it is."

A hundred nobles leaned in about an inch. Nobody’s feet moved. It was all done in the shoulders.

Theo thought about it seriously, the way he thought about a bill.

’Sixty soldiers. Sixty soldiers is genuinely useful and I would have to feed them.’

’Weapons out of a vault... that will really go a long way too... since I don’t have the best weapon right now...’

All of it was worth having. None of it was the thing sitting behind his back teeth since the gate had opened. He had nowhere to go and look for the ingredients, and he could not stand in a room like this one and outright ask a king to help him cure Mana Heart cancer, because a question like that comes with people following you home afterwards.

"Actually, Your Majesty," Theo said, "there is something."

"Name it."

"I’ve got some recipes."

The hall did not react, because the hall had not understood him yet.

The King’s eyebrows came down half an inch.

"...Recipes."

"Two of them properly, and a few odds and ends."

Theo had already got the panel up and was reading off it, in the tone of a man at a market stall.

"There’s a Herbal Tea one. And there’s a Bone Strengthening Broth, and that one I’ve had for weeks and I’ve never been able to make it, because I can get about half of what I need from where I come from and the other half doesn’t exist out there at all."

Somewhere down the left-hand side of the hall, a woman in green said "What?" out loud and was immediately embarrassed about it.

"So what I’d like," Theo went on, entirely undisturbed, "is to know where the ingredients grow. Not the ingredients. The ground. Because if somebody just gives me a crate of it I’ll have a crate of it once, and then I’ll be back here in four months asking again like an idiot, and I’d rather know the field."

The Chancellor had stopped writing. The nib sat where it had stopped and a bead of ink spread out of it into the paper.

"You are being given a county," he said carefully.

"Yes, thank you, that’s very kind."

"And sixty men."

"I’d rather have the field, sir."

It broke properly then.

It was certainly not laughter and was worse than laughter. About ninety of the most powerful people on the first floor of the Tower all deciding at the same moment that they had misheard, and turning to the person next to them to check, and the noise of it went up the hall like wind through wheat.

"Is he simple?"

"He asked for soup—"

"The King offered him the vault. The vault. My grandfather died asking for a look at that vault—"

Captain Hessa Dunn, at the foot of the dais, was staring at Theo with an expression that had nothing polite in it at all any more. She had not turned to check with anybody.

Theo waited for the King’s answer. Either he had not heard the hall at all, or he had been laughed at by better people than these for long enough to have stopped noticing it. He kept his eyes on the dais and his hands loose at his sides, and he waited.

Every other thing on that list was something he had the money to buy when he needed it. The ground was not.

King Ordwin of Alderkeep had not laughed.

He had not moved at all, in fact, and after a moment the hall noticed that its King was not participating, and the noise came down the way noise does, in patches, until there was none of it left.

"Say the second one again," the King said.

Theo blinked.

"The Bone Strengthening Broth?"

"The ingredients. Say them."

So Theo said them, all nine of them, off the panel, in order, in the flat voice of a man reading out a shopping list, and in that quiet his voice carried all the way to the back wall.

The Queen put her cup down on the arm of her chair.

The Chancellor’s board came up flat against his chest.

And Captain Dunn’s hand went, without any part of her deciding it, to the place on her hip where a sword would have been if she had been permitted to wear one in that room.

King Ordwin came down the last step. The hem of his robe dragged over the stone behind him and nobody moved to lift it.

"Young man," he said quietly. "Who gave you that recipe?"