Eleven villages, one road, most of a summer.

2.5.863 · Before setting out

I've spent four years writing about practitioners for an audience that has, in the main, never met one.

It took me far too long to notice this, and since that failure is the reason this journal exists, it goes at the top.

Everything I've written assumes the reader already accepts that practitioners matter. I've never checked whether the countryside agrees, or whether the word means to a farmer what it means to a tender. So I'm going to walk the lower road from the eastern stands to the ford and ask.

Four questions, the same four, everywhere.

Have you met a practitioner. What can they do. How would you know one. What would you do if your child showed signs.

I expect to be told a great deal of nonsense and I'm going to write all of it down, because what a place believes wrongly is usually more informative than what it knows.

4.5.863 · The arithmetic, done properly before I embarrass myself

I did the sum on the first night out, and I'm writing it down in the order I worked it.

Signs appear in something like one child in a thousand. Of those, by the best figure anyone in the trade will give, about one in forty completes. That's one in forty thousand.

The dominion has never been counted, and I'm suspicious of anybody who quotes you a population. Working from tithe rolls, garrison ration returns and two market censuses that were taken for entirely unrelated reasons, I get somewhere between three and four million people.

That gives fewer than a hundred practitioners in the whole Heartlands who arrived at it unaided.

That can't be right, because the five Houses plainly have more practitioners than that between them. The answer came about three weeks later, from a tender at a crossroads inn.

House children complete at a far higher rate. Every House flatly denies that House blood is different, and the tenders find the suggestion faintly insulting. The difference is placement. Somebody puts scaffolding into a child while the aperture is opening, and it finishes.

That's what the Houses are for, and why they can exist at all. None of them has ever put it to me in those words.

So practitioners are concentrated, almost entirely, inside five institutions that produce them, and the countryside yields a trickle which the Houses go out and collect.

Which means that in the Borderlands a practitioner is a visitor, and most of what follows in this journal comes back to that.

11.5.863 · Kettleford. Have you met one

Most people haven't. That was the finding in the first village and it stayed true all summer.

Of everyone I asked across the summer, a little under one in five claimed to have met a practitioner. Pressed, about half of those meant a House official who had passed through on business, whom they hadn't spoken to and couldn't describe beyond the horse.

Genuine sustained contact, the sort where a person could tell me what the practitioner was actually like: perhaps one in fifteen. Almost always a Saltmarch courier, because couriers go everywhere, stop overnight, eat in the common room, and are the only House members most of this dominion will ever share a roof with.

The commonest single answer, given cheerfully and with no sense whatever of having missed out, was some version of no, but my cousin did.

People in my line of work get this badly wrong, I think. I'd half expected wistfulness and there's none. To the Borderlands a practitioner is something that happens elsewhere, like a coronation.

19.5.863 · Compiled from four villages. What they believe

I'd assumed the countryside would credit practitioners with moving mountains, and that my job would be deflating it.

The errors run the other way. They're domestic and oddly specific, and far more interesting than exaggeration would have been.

That they cannot be burned. Seven villages of eleven. Total confidence, never a source, and twice I was told it in the tone one uses for something so obvious it is embarrassing to state.

That they need less food. Five villages. This one may have a real root, since a practitioner drawing hard eats enormously afterwards and a practitioner doing nothing eats normally, and a village that sees one for two days will see whichever it sees.

That they can tell when you are lying. Four villages. In one, a man told me his sister had confessed to a theft when a Saltmarch courier walked into the room, and that she had confessed to the wrong theft, which the courier had no interest in and which the village has never let her forget.

That they cannot lie themselves. Two villages, both within a day of a Saltmarch waystation, which I think fully explains it. The Code binds Saltmarch couriers. It has become, in the surrounding countryside, a property of practitioners as a class.

That they always know one another on sight. Universal, and as far as I can establish entirely true, which makes it the only piece of common belief that survived checking. I haven't found anyone who can explain how it works, practitioners included.

Almost nobody mentioned the Sources. Fire, water, earth and the rest are House vocabulary, and House vocabulary doesn't travel far from the roads. When I explained the six to a table in the fourth village, three separate people told me that was a nice way of putting it, in exactly the tone one uses about somebody else's religion.

26.5.863 · How would you know one

Everybody had an answer, though nobody had a good one.

The commonest was that you would simply know, which is unhelpful and is also, at the upper tiers, precisely correct.

The second was clothes. A practitioner is somebody who arrives in good boots and doesn't look at the price of things before ordering.

The third came up in five villages and is the best piece of fieldcraft anybody has given me, including the Houses. A practitioner is somebody who isn't afraid on the road.

A woman in the eastern Borderlands: "You don't get told. You watch somebody walk out of an inn at dusk on their own and not think about it. You draw your own conclusions."

I've been walking out of inns at dusk for four years and thinking about it every single time. I didn't tell her that.

3.6.863 · Ashcombe. The ones who do not count

The seventh village is where I understood that I'd been asking the wrong question in the wrong words since Kettleford.

Every one of these villages has somebody in it who can do something.

A brewhouse woman with something she does to the mash. A man who finds water. A girl who can tell whether a ewe is carrying. A thatcher two valleys over who never falls, and everyone knows he never falls, and nobody has spent more than one sentence on it in thirty years.

None of these people are practitioners, locally. The category, the way the village uses the word, simply doesn't apply to them.

I asked the water-finder's neighbour outright whether he was a practitioner. She thought I was making a joke. Then she realised I wasn't, and was genuinely thrown, and had to think about it.

She said he was Tam. He finds water. Practitioners are from the Houses.

So the Borderlands runs two completely separate concepts under one word, without difficulty and without confusion. There is the local who can do a thing, filed alongside the man who is good with horses and the woman who can set a bone. And there is the practitioner, who comes from somewhere else in good boots and constitutes an event.

Everybody involved has all the facts. Awe needs distance, and Tam has been down the lane for forty years.

I've thought about this a great deal. If I'm right, most practitioners in the Heartlands are socially invisible because their neighbours have known them since they were nine.

14.6.863 · On the road above Ashcombe. A drover

The first of four unaffiliated practitioners I met this summer, and the one who has stayed with me.

He moves cattle. Forty-odd, weathered, unbothered by me, and he let me walk two days with him on the grounds that I could carry a pack and he was bored.

Air-connected. Awakening. He didn't volunteer it and I didn't spot it, for all my four years of claiming to be observant. He told me on the second evening, apropos of nothing, in the way people tell a stranger a thing they cannot tell a neighbour.

Does anyone know?

"My wife. Her brother, because she told him and I've forgiven her." He was rolling a cigarette and did not look up. "Nobody in the village."

Why not?

"What would it get me?" He meant it as a question, and waited to see whether I had an answer. "I'd be the one they come to for everything. Somebody's roof, somebody's dispute. Their boy that's gone off. And I'd have to do all of it or be the man who wouldn't."

And the House?

"Would take me. I'm forty-three." He lit it. "I've got a wife, three cattle of my own and an arrangement with a man in Kettleford that took eleven years to build. What am I doing in the Groves?"

He uses it for weather, and that's all. He knows a day and a half ahead whether he can move stock, which over twenty years has added up to a man who has never once lost an animal to a storm and has a quiet reputation as the luckiest drover on the lower road.

I asked whether that reputation troubled him.

"Luck's fine," he said. "Luck they'll let you have."

21.6.863 · Hallow Bridge. What a visit actually does

I came into this village three days after a Vaulin tender had left it, and I got the aftermath rather than the event, which turned out to be better.

She had been passing. She had stayed one night. In that night she'd looked at a child with a bad chest and told the family what it was and what to do about it. The doing of it was ordinary and cheap, and it hadn't occurred to anyone.

The child is fine. Everybody agrees the child is fine.

What I found three days later was a village mildly at war with itself, and it took me an evening to understand why.

The mother of the child is being congratulated, which she finds unbearable, because she did nothing and knows it. The village midwife, who had been treating the child for a fortnight and had it wrong, hasn't been blamed by anyone and has stopped coming to the common room. Two other families have decided their own children have the same thing. And a man whose wife died four winters back has said out loud, twice, that nobody came through that year.

Nothing bad happened here. A tired woman on her way somewhere else did an obviously good thing at no cost to herself and rode on, and probably hasn't thought about it since.

And the village has a wound in it now that it didn't have on Tuesday.

I don't think there's a lesson in this, and I'm suspicious of the part of me that wants one. But I've spent four years asking practitioners what their power costs them, and never once asked what it costs the room they used it in.

29.6.863 · The same. On being unable to pay

Related, and it came up in six villages once I started asking.

A practitioner can't be paid properly, and this is a genuine social problem that nobody has solved.

If a courier fixes your gate, you can't give them coin, because the sum that would be fair to them is absurd to you and the sum you can afford is an insult. Labour and goods are no use either, because they're leaving in the morning and travelling light.

So you give them hospitality, which opens an account rather than settling one.

Three villages described some version of the same discomfort. A House member gets fed and housed and given the good bed. They take none of it as a debt, because to them it's normal courtesy and they're gone by noon. The village sees it differently. It's been given something it hasn't paid for and has no way to pay, which sits badly in a place where every other obligation on earth is settled within a season.

An innkeeper in the eighth village has solved it privately by refusing to house practitioners at all and sending them to her sister, who charges them, and who is not in the village.

She was slightly ashamed of telling me this. I thought it was the most sophisticated thing I heard all summer.

6.7.863 · Near the ford. A hedge-healer

The second wanderer, and the opposite case to the drover in every respect.

She is Water-connected, at Intent, unaffiliated, and has lived in the same district for nineteen years doing openly what Vaulin does inside a Grove. Everybody for two days' walk knows exactly what she is. She's never concealed it and wouldn't know how.

She's beloved. Three households fed me on the strength of my having said her name.

She's also, by her own account, trapped.

"I can do about four a day," she said. "Properly, I mean. Where I'm actually any use. After that I'm tired and I'm worse than the midwife and I should stop."

Do you stop?

"No." She laughed at herself. "You try stopping. Somebody's walked six hours."

What happens when you're wrong?

She thought about that for a long time, and when she answered she had gone quite flat.

"They forgive me, every time." She looked at me. "It's the worst part of it. If they'd shout I could argue. You can't argue with people deciding it was meant."

She has no apprentice. She has tried twice. Both left, because what she does can't be taught to someone without a connection, and she can't bring herself to explain that to a hopeful nineteen-year-old, so both times she let them believe they had failed.

I asked if she would go to a House now.

"They came. Twice, years back. Perfectly nice." She shrugged. "But then who's here?"

18.7.863 · Two days off the road. The one they go round

The third, and the only genuinely uncomfortable encounter of the summer.

She lives alone, an hour off the lower road, Darkness-connected and at Intent as best I could judge. Nobody fears her for anything she's done, because she hasn't done anything. I checked at some length, in three villages, assuming there'd been an incident, and there wasn't one.

What there is: people can't read her, and don't like it.

She's quiet, comfortable in the dark, doesn't carry a lamp and doesn't fill silences. Every one of these is a perfectly ordinary way for a person to be, and in aggregate, in a small district, they have added up over eleven years to a woman that carters go round rather than past.

She was courteous to me and gave me tea and answered everything I asked. She has no complaint she is willing to make. When I asked whether it bothered her she said it had, once, and that she had got used to it, and then said, without any prompting from me, that the worst of it was that nobody was doing anything wrong.

I went back and forth on whether to include this. It's in because I think it's more representative than the beloved healer, and because the healer will get written about by somebody eventually and this woman won't.

A district of decent people has quietly arranged itself around avoiding somebody for more than a decade, without any one of them ever deciding to.

29.7.863 · Compiled. What they ask for

I started keeping a tally in the fifth village of what people say they would ask a practitioner for, given one chance.

Almost nobody asked for anything dramatic. Two people said money and both were joking. One boy of about nine said he would ask to be shown something, which is the answer I would have given at nine and possibly now.

Everything else fell into three groups, and I've arranged them by how often they came up rather than by how much they matter.

Water. By a wide margin. Wells, springs, the finding and the fixing of them. In a district where a failed well can end a holding, this is a serious ask and a practical one.

A verdict. More common than I expected, and I found it uncomfortable. People want a practitioner to settle a dispute by saying which party is right, on the apparent grounds that somebody from outside who cannot be got at will be fair.

I put this to a Saltmarch courier later and she went quite tight about it and said it happens constantly. Couriers are trained to refuse, she said, and refusing is worse than useless because the village then decides your refusal meant something.

Someone found. A son who went east. A daughter who went to a House and has not written. This one was almost never phrased as a request. It came out sideways, in the middle of other conversation, and then got waved off.

9.8.863 · Where the fear actually lives

I went looking for fear of practitioners and didn't find any worth reporting.

There's caution, which is sensible and mild, and a strong dislike of being noticed. But I found nothing I could call fear of practitioners, and I asked directly in every village.

What people are frightened of, in order, as best I can compile it:

Weather and the failure of a harvest, which wins easily, as I should have predicted.

Officialdom: licensing and assessment, and anybody who arrives with a ledger. This was universal and entirely unrelated to practitioners as such. A clerk frightens people considerably more than a courier does, and when I asked why, three separate people gave me some version of the same answer, which is that you know where you are with a practitioner and you never know where you are with a form.

The Deepening, but distantly and in the wrong shape. It functions in these villages as weather does, an occasional catastrophe that happens to other districts. Nobody I met had seen any. Everybody knew somebody who had. Every account I chased dissolved on contact into something else, usually hard times or a bad neighbour.

And, in three villages along the eastern edge and nowhere else, the dark itself, in a way I could not get anyone to be specific about and which I suspect is much older than any of the above.

17.8.863 · What would you do if your child showed signs

I expected this to be delicate. It's the only question everybody answered straight away.

You send word.

The two people who were openly sour about the Houses said it too, and one added that you send word first and have the argument afterwards.

The reasoning is practical to the point of bluntness, and I heard the same reasons nearly everywhere.

That the child will be housed, fed and taught at somebody else's expense, in a place with a physician.

That a child who awakens without help is in danger. Everybody had a version of this and about half had a specific story, almost always secondhand, almost always a fire.

That it is the only route out of the Borderlands that has ever existed for a child of no property.

That last was said to me without a trace of bitterness, as a fact about the shape of the world, in roughly the tone one would use to mention that the river floods.

What nobody said, though I'd gone expecting it, was that the child might come home.

24.8.863 · What they call it

Kept because idiom outlives doctrine, and these are worth more than most treatises.

Marked. Of a child showing signs. All eleven villages. Nobody could tell me marked by what, and two people were surprised to be asked.

Gone to the Groves. Of any child taken by any House, including Houses nowhere near the Groves. Vaulin evidently got there first and the phrase set.

A knack, versus a practitioner. The distinction described above, entirely consistent across the whole road.

Good boots. Occasionally used as a noun, always slightly dry. "Two good boots came through Thursday."

Owed a night. Of a household that has housed a House member. It isn't resentful, just a category of account that everybody understands and nobody can settle.

And a children's counting game, three villages, with local variation in the middle lines:

One for the fire and two for the flood, Three for the stone and four for the wind, Five for the light and six for the dark, Seven for the one that came back wrong.

I asked four adults about the seventh line. Three said it was just a rhyme and one of them was annoyed with me for asking. The fourth said it was about the Deepening, then said she wasn't certain, then said her mother would have known and that her mother is dead.

I've written it down exactly as sung and I'll leave it there.

2.9.863 · Bellwater. The man who met one

In the ninth village there is a man of about seventy who met a practitioner of real standing, once, thirty-odd years ago, and has told the story ever since.

He knows he's told it too often, and said so before starting, which disarmed me.

She came through after a bad winter, stayed two nights, did something to the wellhead that has not needed repair since, and left. He never learned her name or her House, or what she'd been doing in the district. He described her as tired.

"Everyone wants me to say the well was the marvel," he said. "It wasn't. The marvel is she sat in the Bell four hours and let my father talk about drainage at her. She asked him questions, and she wasn't pretending."

Thirty years, in a village where very little happens, and the part he kept is the four hours.

I've been carrying that around since Bellwater.

11.9.863 · A wanderer at the ford

The fourth and last, the only one at Mastery. I nearly left this out, because I'm not certain I have the right.

He is perhaps sixty, unaffiliated, and lives above the ford in a house he built. He has been there nineteen years. The nearest village is an hour and a half distant and he does his own carrying.

I won't say what he's connected to, because he asked me not to, and it doesn't matter to anything below.

He was hospitable and clearly glad of company, in a way he was careful not to make me responsible for. We talked most of a day.

Why here?

"Because at some point people stop being able to have you." He said it without any self-pity at all, which made it worse. "Nobody's frightened. Everything just gets arranged around you. You come into a room and the room changes shape. You get an opinion about the fence and suddenly it's decided."

So you left.

"I moved eight miles. That was enough." He smiled. "They come up. Three or four a month. If somebody's ill or the ford's bad. If a child's marked and they want a second opinion before they send word. That's a good amount of people. That took me a long while to find."

I asked whether he considered himself part of the district.

He took a while over it.

"I'm a feature of it," he said. "Like the ford."

19.9.863 · Closing, at the ford

I set out to learn how the Borderlands sees practitioners and found that mostly it doesn't see them at all, which my own arithmetic should have told me in May and which I didn't properly believe until Ashcombe.

Some conclusions, offered as opinion and marked as such.

The countryside is in awe of the Houses rather than of practitioners, which is the more accurate of the two, since the Houses are what it actually encounters: a courier or a licensing clerk, or a tender who comes twice and promises nothing.

A practitioner in the Borderlands is a weather event. Rare, consequential, unpredictable in arrival, and impossible to plan around. Villages absorb them and carry on, the way they do good years.

The room pays the cost of using it. I didn't know this in May, and I'd never have found it by interviewing practitioners, because they aren't there afterwards. Hallow Bridge is three days of consequence from one obviously good act by a woman who has certainly forgotten it.

The unaffiliated pay for it in a currency the Houses never touch. The drover has hidden a thing about himself from his own village for twenty years to keep his life. The healer can't stop and can't fail. The woman off the road is avoided by decent people for no reason any of them chose. The man at the ford moved eight miles to be reachable at a rate a person can survive. All four have made an arrangement, and all four had to invent it alone, because the Houses have solved this problem institutionally for their own and have never written down how for anybody else.

And the practitioner down the lane isn't one. He's Tam, and he finds water. Close up and over enough years, the extraordinary becomes a man with a knack, and nobody involved is ignorant. It may be the healthiest thing I've documented.

I'd like to write something for these eleven villages rather than about them, and I've no idea what it would say. Nearly everything I know that they don't is either irrelevant to their lives or unkind to tell them.

I ate better this summer than on any enquiry I've ever run, and nobody was paid. Two households won't take a letter from me because they've decided we're square. We aren't, and I won't be able to explain to them why.

Eleven villages between the eastern stands and the lower ford. Four unaffiliated practitioners, three of whom asked for something to be left out, all of which has been left out.