The Hills didn’t give me long to enjoy being useful.

  I was halfway through convincing my legs they remembered how to walk without wobbling when a runner stuck his head into the barracks and called my name.

  “Snake. Tharel wants you. Elder hall.”

  He flinched as soon as the word was out, like he’d stepped on a nail, then vanished before I could answer.

  Merrik, tying off a harness two bunks down, snorted. “That’s one way to wake up.”

  “Wasn’t asleep,” I said. My ribs disagreed. “What’s elder hall?”

  “Place where people with warm coats tell people with calluses what to do,” he said. “Go. Don’t be late.”

  That was as much reassurance as I was going to get.

  I rolled off the pallet, boots thumping to the floor, and let the hobnails bite stone all the way up the tunnel. The eye throb from the south walk had faded to background ache—enough to ignore until I didn’t. The mailbox flag sat at its usual four-count pulse, polite as a fire alarm that hadn’t decided whether the smoke mattered yet.

  The elder hall turned out to be a long, low room carved off one of the inner terraces. No tapestries. No fancy chairs. Just a heavy table with scars deep enough to catch light and a couple of benches that were worn to match the individuals seated there.

  Tharel stood at one end, arms folded. Martuk sat at the table, hands around a mug that might have been tea or water. Serh was against the far wall, bow unstrung but close, expression flat. A woman in a stained apron hovered near a side door that smelled of smoke and cooking fat.

  “Sit,” Tharel said.

  I did. The bench creaked in a way that felt honest.

  Martuk’s gaze ran over me the way he might look at a new brace—checking for splits, not feelings. His eyes lingered just long enough on my left eye to make the skin around it itch.

  “You walked the south wall,” he said.

  “With Serh and Merrik,” I said. “We found three problems. One serious.”

  “Serh’s report says you felt what the stone would do,” Martuk said. “Before it did it.”

  “That’s one way to put it,” I said. “My eye calls it trying to climb out the back of my head.”

  A flicker, maybe amusement, shifted the lines at the corners of his mouth. “The Hills have marked you,” he said. “We would be fools not to read what they have written.”

  Tharel made a noise that could have meant anything from agreement to keep your hands off my tools.

  “We are still arguing about how deep we read,” he said.

  “Today is not for arguing,” the woman in the apron cut in. Her voice had the efficient warmth of someone who scolded knives for dulling. “Today is for not wasting what we have.”

  She turned that look on me. “You used the eye on your boots?”

  “Yes ma’am,” I said caught in her whirlwind.

  “The cobbler is my cousin,” she said, clearly pleased by the bit of respect. “He bragged until my ears hurt.”

  She wiped her hands on the apron and nodded at Serh. “Bow.”

  Serh hesitated barely a heartbeat, then crossed the room and laid her bow on the table between us.

  It was shorter than a hunting longbow, layered wood and horn with a slight recurve, polished where fingers had lived for years. The grip was darker from sweat and oil. No ornament. No carvings but a bit of purple ink rimming the grip.

  “Identify it,” the cook said.

  Tharel’s jaw tightened. “Juela—”

  “If we are counting on his eye to keep our walls standing,” she said, “I want to know what it says about the tools I send out on them.”

  She had a point. Most people who could kill me in this place seemed to.

  I glanced at Serh.

  “Fine,” she said. “Just don’t drop it.”

  “Not planning to,” I said.

  I picked up the bow. One of the guards near the door shifted like he expected the limbs to splinter the second I looked too hard.

  It was lighter than I expected, balanced forward just enough to want to settle into a drawn curve. My thumb found the smooth hollow where someone’s thumb always went.

  Curiosity and common sense had a brief argument. Curiosity won.

  I focused on the boots and the sword, the way I had before. The mailbox flag twitched, then darkened.

  Text slid into place, cold and thin.

  Identify: Composite bow.

  Material: layered hardwood, horn, sinew.

  Condition: exceptional, well-maintained.

  Attunement: personal.

  Effect: increased accuracy with familiar user.

  Pain knifed through my eye, not as bad as the wall, but enough to blur the room edges for a heartbeat. I kept my face still anyway and set the bow back on the table.

  “Layered,” I said. “Exceptional condition. Likes the person who’s been using it for a long time. Doesn’t care about me.”

  Juela grunted. “Good. We agree.”

  She glanced at Serh. “You’ve been tending it?”

  “Since my mother died,” Serh said.

  That landed in the room like another brace, heavy and unmovable. No one stepped on it.

  Martuk, of course, watched for the echo.

  “And your eye reads that history as ‘soul-bound’?” he said. “Not as name, not as blood.”

  “Mailbox doesn’t do feelings,” I said. “Just parts lists and warnings.”

  “Good,” Tharel muttered. I was really starting to feel like this guy needs to stop broadcasting his feelings.

  Martuk’s gaze turned toward the side door. “One more,” he said.

  Juela disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a squat clay jar in both hands. It was the kind that might hold salt or grain—thick walls, chipped at the lip, dark stain creeping up from the base.

  She set it down in front of me. “This has not been right since the last hard freeze,” she said. “I want to know whether it is my imagination or my stores going bad.”

  “Smell it,” I said.

  “I have,” she said. “Smell does not always warn before stone fails.”

  Fair.

  I put my fingers against the jar. The clay was cool, rough where the glaze had flaked. A faint dampness kissed my skin at the base.

  I focused.

  The flag flared darker again.

  Identify: Storage jar.

  Material: fired clay, mineral glaze.

  Condition: compromised – hairline fractures at base.

  Attunement: none.

  Effect: increased seepage under temperature stress.

  The pain this time was a tight band behind my brow, not a spike. Manageable. I blinked through it.

  “Hairline cracks at the base,” I said. “Not just surface. If you keep it in the warm by the fire and then throw it in the cold, it’ll seep worse. Won’t break clean. Just slowly bleed out whatever you put in it.”

  Juela’s mouth flattened. “I thought so.”

  She scooped the jar back up like it had insulted her and carried it away. If my stare had cracked it, it had been doing the work for months before I arrived. I was just the poor idiot who got to read the failure line with a nail through his eye.

  “Keep using that skill on cookware, and you’ll eat well,” Merrik would have said. Juela didn’t joke. She came back with a smaller, sound jar and a slate.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  “If your eye can tell me when a pot, hook, or bin is going to fail,” she said, “you tell me. I will see that you are not hungry. And I will not send cracked stone to hold anyone else’s food.”

  “You’re not worried it breaks faster if I look at it?” I asked.

  “That’s your elders’ problem,” she said briskly. “My problem is not having grain on the floor mid-winter. If all the breaking lives in your skull, we can work with that.”

  Martuk actually smiled at that.

  Juela didn't joke, but she also didn't flinch. Most people had the grace to pretend the cost to me was imaginary. “We all have problems,” he said. “Matas’ eye may answer more than one.”

  Tharel’s gaze stayed on me. “At a cost,” he said.

  “I’m aware,” I said. My left eye still throbbed in agreement.

  Martuk set his mug down.

  “You have made yourself useful on walls and walk,” he said. “You are bound to our Heart and marked by the Hills. You are no longer a stranger at our gate.”

  Nice words. The way he said them made it sound less like praise and more like a clerk updating a ledger.

  “Provisional men sleep two to a pallet and eat last,” he said. “Full citizens choose work, hold say in allotments, and are not sent outside without pay.”

  I could feel the hook before he cast it.

  “You’re saying that like there’s a form I can fill out,” I said.

  “There is no form,” Martuk said. “There is a task.”

  Of course there was.

  I waited.

  “The monastery below us is older than Samhal,” he said. “Its seals fail faster each year. The Heart hums louder. We patch what we can from above, but the bad lines run deeper now than we can see.”

  He did not need to say the rest. I had felt that hum under my ribs since the Blessing.

  “You want me to go down there,” I said.

  “We want you to look,” Martuk said. “Others will go with you. No one walks the fire alone.”

  Tharel’s jaw worked. “Too soon,” he said. “He is barely steady on a wall. His eye is still changing.”

  “And the Hills do not care about our comfort,” Martuk said. “They care that the stone holds.”

  He turned his attention back to me.

  “Think on it today,” he said. “Come to the terrace at last bell. We will speak details then.”

  Which meant the decision was already made; they were only pretending I had a say.

  I pushed to my feet.

  “Am I dismissed?” I asked.

  “For now,” Tharel said. “Stay out of tunnels that smell of smoke or old dust.”

  “Helpful,” I said.

  Juela snorted. “You heard him, void-eye,” she said. “No wandering my pantry unless I ask.”

  I gave her a small nod and couldn’t help but smirk a bit walking away. That cook wasn’t comfortable around me by any means, but that was a genuine attempt to be nice. I let the hobnails carry me back out into Samhal’s narrow streets.

  ~

  The air outside had that brittle edge that said the sun was technically up somewhere, even if the rock didn’t care. I followed the familiar slope toward the barracks, letting my body make the turns while my head replayed Martuk’s words.

  Full citizen. Choose work. Not sent outside without pay.

  Alea would have told me to get the terms in writing. Alea wasn’t here. The only contract that seemed to matter in Talmehl was the one the Hills wrote in bone.

  Near the barracks entrance, Serh waited with her back to the wall, bow over her shoulder again, expression unreadable.

  “You let him touch it,” I said.

  “He did not drop it,” she said. “And now I know how the Hills see it.”

  “‘Personal,’” I said. “That bother you?”

  Her mouth twitched. “It bothers me that they look at people the same way.”

  Fair.

  She pushed off the wall. “Walk,” she said.

  We took a side tunnel I hadn’t used often, narrower than the main ramps. The stone underfoot was smoother here, polished by fewer boots over more years. It smelled less of smoke, more of old dust and cold water.

  “You will say yes,” Serh said finally.

  It wasn’t a question.

  “If I say no,” I said, “do I still get the better food?”

  “No,” she said. “You get sent back to walls and watched until someone decides the risk of keeping you is worse than the risk of not.”

  “Nice to have options,” I said.

  We walked in silence for a bit.

  “They’re just using me,” I said, because leaving it unspoken felt worse.

  “They are using you,” she said. “So am I. So is Merrik. So are you, when you tell Juela where her jars will fail. That is what a hill-hand is. A hand, not a guest.”

  The words should have settled something. They didn’t.

  “You don’t have to like it,” she added, after a beat. “You just have to choose where you are willing to be used.”

  I guess this is sort of like a contract in that way. I can supply all the best practice examples in the industry, but at the end of the day, you're going to do it the way the guy who signs the check says to.

  “And you?” I asked. “Where does your choice land?”

  Her jaw tightened.

  “I chose Samhal,” she said. “I came back when I could have stayed gone. I chose the walls. I chose to keep the fire under the rock instead of running to someplace that pretends not to hear it.”

  She stopped at a junction where three tunnels met and pointed with her chin down the leftmost.

  “That way takes you toward the lower cisterns,” she said. “Bad footing. Stay away unless someone who knows the path walks first.”

  “That sounded suspiciously like advice,” I said.

  “That was work talk,” she said. “This is advice.”

  She shifted her weight, meeting my gaze square on.

  “The elders will keep asking you to use the eye,” she said. “They will not always see the cost. Say no, sometimes.”

  “You think they’ll listen?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “But you will still have said it. And when you fall, you will know which pushes were yours and which were theirs.”

  I huffed out something that might have been a laugh.

  “Comforting.”

  “I am not here to comfort you,” she said. “I am here to make sure you do not fall off the wrong edge by accident.”

  She hesitated, then added, softer, “If you feel the flag flare when they talk about the monastery, say so. Even if they do not like the words.”

  “Because the Hills might be warning us?” I said.

  “Because the Hills do not warn,” she said. “They only lean. I would like to know which way before I put my feet down.”

  We walked back toward the busier tunnels. Her shoulders were tighter than usual, the line of her mouth thinner.

  “You sound like you don’t trust what they’re doing,” I said.

  “I trust that they want Samhal to stand,” she said. “I do not always trust who they are willing to stack under the braces.”

  “Good to know where I rank,” I said.

  She didn’t answer that. At the barracks turn, she peeled off without a goodbye.

  ~

  The rest of the day tried to be normal.

  Tharel kept me off the south walk, maybe because the eye was still sulking, maybe because he didn’t want me near another loaded joint until the elders finished arguing about my deployment. I ended up on small jobs: checking a few braces in inner tunnels, hauling a crate two levels down where the stone felt thicker and the hum of the Heart pressed harder against my teeth.

  Juela found me once to shove a pair of hooks and a cracked ladle into my hands.

  “Next time you’re bored, look at these,” she said. “Tell me which one breaks first. Away from my storeroom.”

  “Nice to be trusted,” I said.

  “Nice to be used correctly,” she shot back.

  By mid-bell, my eye had settled to a manageable ache, and I’d learned that even mild Identify use stacked headache like shingles on a bad roof. One piece at a time, until the whole thing wanted to cave.

  The mailbox flag pulsed, patient, every four seconds. Once or twice, when conversation on the terraces turned toward “deep work” and “the fire under the Hills,” I thought the halo around it shaded darker, but that might have been my nerves.

  When I finally flicked it open, the usual status pane sat there—and one thin new line at the bottom:

  Cognitive strain: elevated.

  Recommendation: resource allocation adjustment.

  No explanation. No arrows. Just another problem the system had noticed and wasn’t kind enough to solve.

  If it wanted me to dump the hoarded points into something, it could at least label which bucket made the headaches hurt less—Perception, Willpower, whatever counted as brain-bracing. The pane stayed blank and polite.

  ~

  Last bell came with a low chime from somewhere deep in the rock—a sound you felt more in your bones than your ears. People changed shifts. Fires banked. Kids I didn’t know were taken inside by parents who gave me the kind of look you save for a strange dog on a leash.

  The terrace Martuk had named overlooked one of the narrower streets, a notch cut into the rock with a waist-high wall and a good view of Samhal’s inner layers. Ropes stretched above like extra lines on a warped stave, holding nets, pulley rigs, and the occasional laundry line.

  Tharel was already there, hands on the wall, looking down. Martuk stood a few paces back, his posture as patient as stone erosion. No Juela this time. No Serh. No Merrik.

  Just the men who got to decide where the cracks went.

  I joined them at the wall. The drop wasn’t huge—two levels to the street below—but the view carried all the way across Samhal to where the rock thickened toward the monastery gate.

  For a moment, we all watched people move: a pair of kids chasing each other along a safer ledge, an older woman checking a rope line for fraying, a man in a builder’s harness arguing with someone over a crate’s weight.

  “Every line there,” Tharel said quietly, “is one more thing I do not want to see in the air when the ground starts to move.”

  He straightened, turned to me.

  “Martuk has made his offer,” he said. “You have had the day to gnaw on it.”

  “Not much meat on that bone,” I said. “Mostly risk.”

  “Risk is what we have,” Martuk said. “Safety is what we buy with it.”

  He stepped closer, eyes on the monastery-thick rock.

  “You know what sits under us,” he said.

  “I know there’s something humming hard enough to rattle my fillings,” I said. “And that you keep patching cracks instead of moving.”

  “Some things you cannot move,” he said. “You can only brace.”

  Roofing logic. I understood that much.

  “You go down with a team,” Tharel said. “You read stone and walls as far as you can safely go. You come back and tell us where the bad lines are worst. We plan work from there. You do not fight. You do not run ahead. You do not touch anything that glows.”

  “Reassuring,” I said.

  “If we wait,” Martuk said, “the Hills will choose the timing for us. You have seen what that looks like.”

  I thought of the futures stacked around that bad patch on the south walk—workers falling, carts going over, weight cashing in all at once. Waiting hadn’t helped there.

  “Full citizen,” I said. “If I do this and live. That’s real?”

  “Yes,” Martuk said. “You eat as we do. You have a say at council. We record you as ours, not borrowed.”

  “And if I die?” I asked.

  “Then you die doing what the system dragged you here to do,” Tharel said bluntly. “Reading bad lines. Better under our feet than under some stranger’s.”

  Martuk didn’t contradict him.

  The mailbox flag pulsed in my periphery. For a heartbeat, the halo around it did darken—sour gold edging into something closer to blood.

  I focused.

  A thin, reluctant line of text appeared.

  Behavioral data: candidate for local node deep-assessment.

  Risk class: elevated.

  Recommendation: deployment.

  That was all. No warning. No “are you sure.” Just a tick box I hadn’t even been asked to check.

  I let the panel fade.

  “Say yes,” a part of me said. “Get what safety you can.”

  “Say no,” another part said. “They’ll send you anyway, just with fewer promises.”

  Alea would have asked what the ladder was sitting on.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll go.”

  Tharel’s shoulders relaxed by a fraction. Martuk nodded once, as if we’d just finished trading weights of grain.

  “We take three days to prep,” Tharel said. “Gear, routes, choosing who goes where. You rest the eye when you can. No wall walks tomorrow. Small work only.”

  “Generous,” I said.

  “You are no good to us blind,” he said. “Or dead before you reach the door.”

  Martuk’s gaze stayed on me a moment longer.

  “The Hills are not kind,” he said. “But they are consistent. You have already survived things that should have broken you. Use that.”

  The way he said it made it sound less like encouragement and more like an order from the weather.

  He turned away.

  “Martuk. Before you go, I’m sure you have seen the way the village treats me.” I rattled off before I could change my mind. “As a warrior I cant trust my back to them and not for no reason. I request one thing as a future citizen, allow me to pick my own help.”

  Tharel clapped a hand, heavy and brief, on my shoulder. “Go eat,” he snarled in my ear. “And tell Juela that if she overloads you with cracked pots before we go under, I’ll make her carry them herself.”

  Martuk turned around, “That’s enough Tharel. This is fact you speak. Make sure those you chose do not return broken as you.”

  “I’ll pass it on,” I said.

  As I headed back toward the smells of stew and smoke, the hum under my feet felt louder.

  Hill-hand. Hand for the Hills.

  Soon enough, they were going to see how much weight I could really pull.