Summoned to Carry His Bags, She Found Thank-Yous Beat His Sword novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Spare
In the Bell Hall of Aldermarch the Reading Stone names Alric Doveland the Chosen and hands Naho Kuroda a slip the clerk reads as Handle, so the captain gives her the champion's pack, and a stable boy's heel of bread changes the ink on the slip.
The first thing the Kingdom of Aldermarch gave Naho Kuroda was a pack.
The second thing was a captain to explain why it was hers.
Before either of those, there was the Stone.
It stood in the middle of a round hall under a bell as wide as a house.
It was a grey block the size of a chest, with a slot in its side.
Naho had arrived beside it, still holding the pencil she had been using to fix line 212 of a subtitle file.
Nobody had asked whether she minded.
A herald in a yellow sash explained the custom, and he said everything twice.
Every thirty years the Bell of Calling rang by itself and brought one person from another world.
The Reading Stone named that person's gift on a paper slip.
Then the person stood beside the kingdom's champion until the grey fog in the north was gone.
Then she could go home, if she wanted to.
Naho understood every word of it, which nobody had explained, and she put that on a list for later.
The champion had been read before her.
He was a tall man in a white tabard, and he had stood through the whole reading with his chin raised toward the painted ceiling.
His slip said Clean Strike, the herald read it twice, and the champion bowed once for each reading.
Then the Stone pushed a slip out for Naho, and it was warm.
She read it before the herald could take it.
The letters were the old curly kind, and they said Handsel.
"Handle," the herald announced to the hall. "Handle."
"It says Handsel," said Naho.
"The roll says Handle," the herald told her, and held up the clerk's copy, where the word sat in fresh ink.
She had spent six years being paid by the line to notice exactly this.
"Then I have a gift," she said. "What am I the Spare of?"
"The Spare to the Chosen," said the herald. "Spare to the Chosen."
"Spare for what?" said Naho.
"To stand ready," said the herald.
"Ready for what?"
The herald looked at the ceiling, which was where the champion had looked, and said he would find someone who could answer that.
The champion found her first.
His name was Alric Doveland, and he was thirty.
He walked across the hall slowly enough to give the court time to watch him do it.
He stopped in front of Naho and drew his sword halfway, so that the lamps could find it.
"Dawnbrand," he said. "I made her myself, from my own vision, in the royal forge."
A mark was stamped in the base of the guard, small and neat, and it was not his.
"Which part was you?" she asked.
Alric smiled at the court. "The vision."
"Of what?" said Naho.
"A sword," said Alric.
"Which part of the sword?"
There was a pause that the court enjoyed, and the champion's smile stayed exactly where it was.
"The edge," Alric said. "I saw the edge."
"The edge is a good part," said Naho. "Who put it on?"
A captain stepped between them, which was the second thing.
He was forty-two and broad, with a red mustache waxed into two points.
His breastplate was hung with so many medals that they clicked when he breathed.
His name was Brant Mallow and he commanded the escort, he said, and he said it to the court and not to her.
"The Spare's duty is plain," Brant said. "She will carry the Chosen's supplies."
Two porters rolled in a pack that had been built for a mule.
It was bigger than Naho, and it leaned.
Naho knelt and read the straps.
Each one had a name stitched inside it, a saddler's, a weaver's, a smith's, and none of the names was Alric's.
"What is in it?" she asked.
"Everything the Chosen requires."
"Could you list it?"
"It will be inventoried," Brant said, "by the person who carries it."
"Then I'd be carrying something I haven't been handed or told about," Naho said. "That's not a duty. That's a delivery."
Brant told her that it was an order.
She answered that an order was not a handing.
If anyone wanted her to carry the pack, they could hand her the first item themselves and say what it was.
A boy in a stable apron pushed through the court's boots, and he was not looking at the captain.
He was holding a heel of bread in both hands, grey with flour, a little squashed.
"It's my mam's loaf," he said. "It's for the road. I didn't want you leaving hungry, miss."
Naho took it with both hands.
It was the first thing anyone in this world had given her.
"Thank you," she said, and then, because she could not leave a line unfinished, she said the rest.
"This is your mother's loaf, the end of it. You gave it so I wouldn't be hungry on the road."
The bread went warm in her palms.
The crust cracked gold along its length, and the whole hall smelled of an oven.
She bit it, and for the first time since the floor had turned to stone she was not hungry or frightened.
Across the hall the clerk looked down at his roll and made a small noise.
The word Handle was fading out of the page, and Handsel was coming up in its place, one letter at a time.
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