would be chicken but it was pig. Pig was a Salt Feast thing, for at Salt Feast they cooked a whole pig in the firepit and everyone got to eat as much of it as they could hold. So the taste of pig was a holiday taste to me in any case, but somehow this was even better. The meat had been sweetened, kind of, in some way I never knowed before.
“Did you taste this?” I asked Haijon. “It’s god-food.”
“It’s just bacon,” Haijon said. “Spinner, did you get one of these eggs? You can dip your bread in it, look.”
He showed her how to do it and she copied him, the two of them laughing when she spilled the yolk on her fingers and licked it up so as not to waste it. “You can be Rampart Breakfast,” Spinner said to Haijon, “since you know so much about it.” Then she said eggs used to be all white inside until the people of the old times used their tech to put gold inside them. “See, that’s why you Vennastins always pass the test. You eat eggs every day, and all that metal builds up inside you. The tech’s just recognising its own self.”
Haijon bridled a little. It was a joke that kind of had an edge to it. Leastways, it pricked him a little. “We don’t always pass,” he said. “My uncle Vergil didn’t.” Which was true. Vergil had lost an arm to a choker seed just before his fifteenth year-day. He was as close to dying as a word is to a whisper, and couldn’t go into the Waiting House. The next year, being on his feet again and supposed to be well, he went Waiting and was tested, but nobody thought he could be a Rampart. He was like the ghost of himself, pale-faced and solemn-quiet and almost not there at all. When he failed his test, people was sorry for him but also mostly relieved. Ramparts is meant to be strong, and that terrible wound had washed Vergil halfway out of the world. He didn’t have no strength that anyone could get a glimpse of.
But he was the onliest Vennastin to fail the test. And though Perliu said other folks had been Ramparts, as far back as anyone could figure it was Vennastins and more Vennastins and occasionally their wedded kindred. Like I said already, Spinner was not the onliest one by any means to wonder why that might be.
“So that’s one against all the rest,” she said now. “I’d still put odds on you to pass, Jon, if anyone would fade the wager. I’m gonna watch what you do and see if there’s a trick to it.”
“There’s no trick,” Haijon says, mightily put out now. “Why would you say that?”
“There’s always a trick,” Spinner says to him. “Look at this.”
She lifted up her knife and passed her hand over it a few times with the fingers all spread out. “Idowak, bidowak,” she says in a really low voice like as it was a man speaking. “Ansum, bansum.” She brung the knife down so it touched her fork, then when she lifted it up again the fork was stuck to it. Not stuck like glue, because it slid a little as she moved the knife this way and that way, but it didn’t drop.
Haijon and me was sitting there with our mouths wide open, like two jump-frocks. Shirew turned round and seen it too, and she near to dropped the pan and all the bacon in it, which would of been a shame.
“How you doing that?” I says to Spinner.
“I got magic in my hands,” she tells us. “Didn’t you know?” She was putting a grave face on, but she couldn’t keep it up no more and a laugh burst out of her. “It’s not old tech or nothing. It’s just a thing metal does, sometimes, if you stroke it or smack it against other metal. My father showed me. It happens to his knives when he strops them. For a while after he’s finished, if he puts them down close together they find each other and latch on. Not every time, but oftentimes.”
She put her hand on Haijon’s arm. “I’m sorry I said the testing was a trick,” she said. “That’s near to saying your family is dishonest, which I didn’t mean and wouldn’t ever think.”
It was a sweet apology, and furthermore I seen now how Spinner did the thing with the knife and the fork