Beckwith

A mill village on a stream, four hours' walk northeast of Solmere, where eight students spent a week being useful.

The place, as ch. 321 gives it

Perhaps forty buildings. A single road with houses along it and paths branching to outlying farms. Hills rising green in every direction.

Solmere's academy alone had more people in it than this entire village.

• The mill, "sitting where the beck ran fastest, its wheel turning slowly in the afternoon light".
• The Turning Wheel, the inn, almost certainly named for the mill, which Finn declares "a second failure of imagination in a single village".
• The beck itself, which is a regional word for a stream, so the village is, by Finn's reckoning, called Stream-with.

Four hours from Solmere on foot by the eastern road. Nobody offers the students a cart and nobody thinks to ask for one.

The assignment

Instructor Whitfield delivers it in under two minutes and refuses to elaborate.

WHF: You will travel to Beckwith. You will stay one week. You will make yourselves useful. BRR: Useful how, sir? WHF: However the village requires. BRR: Is there a list? WHF: There is not a list. BRR: Is there a schedule? WHF: Mister Colton, if I gave you a schedule you would follow the schedule, and then you would come back here having learned to follow a schedule, which you already know how to do.

Corin works out what that means:

COR: There's no list and no schedule and nobody's coming to check on us, so presumably we walk out that door in the morning and find someone doing something difficult and offer to help with it. ELS: That's genuinely uncomfortable. COR: Yes. ELS: I'd rather have the list. COR: So would I. I suspect that's the point.

Who is there

Abilities are almost useless here

Ch. 322 is deliberate about it.

• Elsie can punch a hole through hardened air and cannot lift a grain sack an inch, "because compression was not lift and never had been".

• Yseult reinforces a cracked shelf bracket, which takes a couple of minutes and achieves roughly what a nail would.

  YSE: I want it noted that the nail would have been faster. ODL: I did say. YSE: You did say. I chose not to believe you.

• Mira is small enough to get behind the wheel housing, and spends three hours scraping a season of silt out of the gearing.

• Briar's foresight turns out to be the one genuinely useful ability in the village, for reasons nobody would have predicted. See his entry.

• Everybody else carries sacks. Forty pounds each, for hours.

  It was not difficult in any interesting way. That was the thing. [...] no technique to refine and no opponent to read and no clever solution available.

Who lives there

• Hesta Bray, sixties, runs the only inn. Unimpressed by academy students and says so, predicting they will spend two days getting in the way. Feeds them well and charges the academy for it (ch. 321).
• Odell Crane, fifties, the miller. Broad, quiet, grateful for the hands and embarrassed to need them. Most of the actual work happens at his mill.
• Roselle Crane, seventeen, his daughter. Works the mill and the accounts, and never had the option of an academy.
• Rufus Hale, eighties, sits by the beck and talks to whoever stops. Knows every path in the woods and every story attached to them. He is the one who points them at the caves (ch. 324).
• Tam and Pip, nine and six, who attached themselves to the students within an hour and never entirely detached.

The caves

Above the village. The first two are genuinely just holes with sheep in them (ch. 326). The third is not.

Beyond a six-minute squeeze one person wide is a cavern of cathedral scale, established by sound before sight: a footstep returning late, a dropped stone that never lands. Its walls are scoured with enormous essence crystal formations (ch. 327). See ../systems/essence.md.

Two hundred feet up there is old webbing and an arachnid fifteen to twenty feet across, grown to that size by feeding on the crystals. Mira works out that her stone never landed because it hit something on the way down.

The only exit is the squeeze, one person wide, six minutes long. That is why nobody runs.

Why it matters more than it looks

The assignment is slice of life with no plot in it, and it is the single most important thing in the volume for Arthur's power, which draws on everyone he has ever helped. A week of helping ordinary people, and nobody present thinks twice about it. See ../characters/arthur-lyerm.md.

Open questions

• How the arachnid fight resolves. In progress at ch. 327.
• Whether Tam and Pip's father, in Solmere until harvest, returns to the story.

The caves

Rufus Hale, ch. 324:

RUF: there's caves up past the high pasture. Follow the beck to where it comes out of the rock and then keep going, there's a path.

RUF: Three of them worth the walk. Two are just holes. The third one goes back a fair way and there's a chamber at the end that'll take the wind out of you.

What is actually up there

Ch. 326 and ch. 327. An hour and a half up past the high pasture, to where the beck comes out of a two-foot opening at the base of a limestone face, then a scramble up and left to a shelf with three openings.

• Two holes. Eleven feet and nine feet, ending in walls, extensively occupied by sheep at some point.
• The third, set apart and higher, tall enough to walk into upright, with cold air spilling steadily out of it.

The passage runs a hundred and forty feet, narrowing to under three feet across and shoulder height, then an eight-foot squeeze one person wide.

Beyond it is the chamber. Ceiling not found until a light is forced past a hundred and fifty feet. Walls covered in crystallised essence, thousands of years of it, in formations the size of houses. See ../systems/essence.md.

And two hundred feet up, in vast sagging sheets of ancient webbing, a spider "somewhere between fifteen and twenty feet across".

This is where the saga currently ends. Ch. 327 is the last published chapter.

COR: The gap is eight feet long and one person wide and it will take us six minutes to get through it. Nobody is running.

He drew his sword.

COR: We're doing this here.

What Elsie concludes

Ch. 323, after two days.

ELS: Everyone in this village is stronger than everyone at that academy.

ELS: Odell Crane is fifty-something years old and he carried more sacks than Corin today [...] I have a soul ability and I have been training since I was four and I currently cannot feel my legs. COR: He also does it every day. ELS: That's my point. That's exactly my point. We do difficult things twice a week in a marked circle and call ourselves competitors.

And Hesta concedes her own prediction:

HES: You arrive thinking you'll be useful, you get two days into actual work, and by the third evening the lot of you are lying about my common room like something washed up. YSE: You said we'd spend the first two days getting in the way. HES: I did. YSE: We didn't.

HES: No. You didn't.

She puts a blanket over a sleeping Finn at ten and says nothing about it.