to turn Haijon’s thoughts away from the hurt she done him. I admired her cleverness in that, which was not a sly cleverness but a thoughtful and a gentle one. That Spinner could be gentle or fierce by turns whenever there was need for one or for the other was part of who she was, and part of why I loved her.
Haijon said he knowed she never meant it, and went back to eating.
“And I’m gonna be soulful sorry,” Spinner went on, “when I go to live in Rampart Hold and they throw you out for failing your test.”
She timed it just right. Haijon had his mouth full of bread and bacon and he spluttered it all over the table in laughing. That made the two of us laugh like fools too, and even Shirew, though she said we was ungovernable and that Haijon was going to have to clean the table when we was done even if it meant going late to the Count and Seal.
She was only joking, of course. Nobody ever come late to their testing, or left it early. It was fixed like a star in the sky, if anything that’s only human could be said to be like that.
8
The Count and Seal was a room that didn’t have no corners to it. It was shaped like a circle. If that sounds strange, it’s because you’re imagining the Hold to be a wooden house with beams and timbers. That’s my fault, for I never said no different.
Rampart Hold wasn’t made out of wood; it was made out of stone. It was one of three buildings from the old times that was still standing in Mythen Rood, the other two being the lookout and the broken house. Rampart Hold stood three floors above the ground, and went down a considerable way under it. Its walls was grey, and grey slates made up the roof, that was long enough to fit four chimneys all in a line. You could tell it was a house from the old times because of all the windows it had, letting light into every room. Perliu said it was called the Little Stub once, which you might think was said as a joke because it’s so much bigger than any other house in the village. But I been to Birmagen and London and Baron Furnace, and I seen how big we used to build before we lost the knowing of it. Rampart Hold wouldn’t of been anything much at all in the old times.
To us, though, it was as big as big could get. It looked like part of a mountain got broke off and made into a house. There was a room you went into right away when you come in the door. It was all shiny wood that had got patterns in it, squares inside squares, and it had wooden stairs like the stairs up to the lookout, except that this wood had such a high shine to it you could see your face inside it looking back at you like in a mirror.
Only Ramparts and their kindred was supposed to go up those stairs. The top part of the house was family rooms, and it was called the residence. Even Vergil lived in the residence, for though he was no Rampart he was still Perliu’s son, Catrin and Fer’s brother. He was still Vennastin, and this at a time when Rampart and Vennastin had almost come to be like two ways of saying the same thing.
For the rest of us, when we come into Rampart Hold we would go on past them stairs, along a long, low corridor and into the Count and Seal. It was a room in the shape of a circle, like I already said, and it was bigger than you can imagine. There was rows of seats that was in circles too, and a round window in the ceiling. It was like whoever built the room had spun himself round and round for a long time beforehand and couldn’t see nothing but circles any more.
Also there was more of the shiny wood here, but with years and years of meet-days and testing days it was all scuffed and the shine wore away so you could only see it in a few places like on the edges of things or high up on the walls.
But the main thing was that the room went down as it went into the middle. I don’t know how to say it