“I have the key,” I say to the crown of his head, blackened now with new thick growth. He will not look at me. “I’ve stolen it.” His forehead furrows. He might mean, So what? Or, Not before time. Or, My itchy neck is ready for your sword. Take off my head, and let’s be done with it.

“I’ve stolen it,” I say again. He needs to know I’m taking risks for him. “I have been instructed not to let you go until you’ve served every moment of a week. But I think you know, I’m the only friend you’ve had about these parts. I’ve never wished you any harm …” His forehead furrows for a second time: So what? “I’m free to walk away, if you prefer.”

“Do what you will.”

“What is your name?” I need to make a friend of him.

“It’s mine to keep,” he says.

I’m tempted — momentarily convulsed by the impulse, in fact — to bring the sword down sharply on his neck. He is enraging me. I do not feel I’ve earned his disrespect. Instead, I only lay it flat across his infuriating forehead, and slowly tell him with my mouth no distance from his ear what his situation is: “There’s no one else can help you now. There’s no one left excepting me. And, as you see”—I rattle them—“I am the master of the keys.”

“Say what you want from me.”

“I want a little help with farming. For a day.” This time he nods. A day of farming is a task he understands. “And there are other recompenses … for the time you’ve spent … with us.” I tell him briefly that the villagers have gone. The masters and the sidemen too. So he is free, as soon as we have finished with the field, to walk among our cottages and help himself to anything he wants. There’re animals that he can take. And winter food. And if he chooses he can fill a wagon with our produce and our implements and draw them to the nearest marketplace. “I’ll make the pair of you”—he lifts his eyes, to mark my slantwise mention of his wife—“quite rich. For just a single day of labor in my field.” My field, indeed. My true and only field. “What do you say?”

“I say you are the man who holds the sword. I say you are the master of the keys.”

I hope to be less clumsy with the keys, but I can’t tell without testing them one at a time which will shoot the lock. My hand is shaking. I have to drop the sword down on the ground, so that I can use both hands. I put my foot onto the shaft, so that he cannot snatch it up as soon as he’s released. Of course, he’s in no state to snatch at anything. He sinks down to his knees the moment that I lift off the topmost beam. I’ve freed him to collapse. I let him sit and rub his legs and arms, while I stand back deciding if it’s safe to trust the man. I think I’ve bought him with my promises of wealth. In all honesty, he could freely rub the blood back into his limbs, then club me to the ground and still be free to help himself to anything he wants, including my short sword. But there has been something in his manner that I trust. A scheming man would not have treated me with such disdain. He’d not have told me, Do what you will. A scheming man would have been more eager to offer help and quick to let me know his name. A scheming man would have lied, and he’d have made promises to break.

I take a chance and leave him recovering in the grass while I walk back along the lane toward the manor house. I mean to fetch him water and a little bread and cheese. I pick up windfalls for the man on my way back. I’m half expecting him to have fled, or armed himself with one of the churchyard stones, the sort his wife used if she murdered Willowjack, and used again on Mr. Quill last night, in dreams. But he is still sitting by the pillory. His back is resting on its shaft. His legs are stretched out across the ground that he has scuffed for the past few days. He evidently still has pins and needles in his feet and arms. He is flexing his shoulders, and in pain. But I can tell that, not so long ago, he’d been a tough and worthy man. He’s cut a bit of barley in his time. He looks much like a weary harvester, glad to have his apple, bread and cheese.

I tell him I’ll return when he has eaten and is stronger. That frown again. But this time it’s a frown that gives me confidence. The meal I’ve brought to him and he’s accepted signifies a truce. He’s broken bread with me. I do not think he’s had such hospitality from any other villager or either of the masters. I take a further chance, and put the short sword at his feet. “Defend yourself if anybody comes,” I say, though it doesn’t make any sense for me to take that risk. No one will come. No one except his wife, perhaps, or Mr. Quill, unlikely though that seems. But I’ve shown I trust him, and hold his future welfare close to me. Laying down my sword has made a comrade out of him, a fellow victim of the world. I am the scheming one, it seems. If Mistress Beldam’s watching us, and I suspect she is, she will see that I’m a friend. I even whistle as I walk away to show how confident I am in him, and her.

But as soon as I’m out of earshot I let my whistling stop. Now I am talking to myself, drawing up a list of things to do. At first it feels like any other day at summer’s end. There’s fuel to cut and stack. There’s field keeping and hedge trimming that must be done. There’re falling walls and damaged barns to fix. This is the season of repair. It also is the season of prepare, when we make ready for the coming spring. I know that I will need some oxen for my task. We have a team of four allowed to pasture on the fallow fields and in the commons. They are sweet-natured animals, despite their crescent horns and deep bullish dewlaps. They have only to rest and eat all day and contend with nothing but the flies. The one thing they have to bother them is work, and that’s sporadic hereabouts. It saves them from the butcher, though. So long as they are strong, they’ll not end up as beef or leather. We’ll not make cups out of their horns, or fashion bobbins, toys and dice out of their bones, or even boil down their hoofs for glue, until their natural deaths. Our oxen lead an easy life.

I can’t remember exactly where we have tethered them, and so I have to go from gate to gate until I catch sight of their white snout patches and the insides of their comical pink ears. Their bodies — donkey-gray and mottled — blend in with the undergrowth. There’re only two of them today. The smallest of the four. My neighbor families have taken the other two with them, first to draw their carts of family goods and then, perhaps, to trade them at the next village they reach. I rope the remaining pair, lead them on their strong, bone-weary legs down the lane and tie them at our tool barn, where they’re content to graze on fence weeds by the door. Oxen do not have the reasoning of horses and so they tend to be more pliable and patient. They’re steadier; their winter keep is cheaper too. A horse will smell the saddle in another room or hear the pulling on of riding boots and start to kick in protest. An ox won’t know he’s needed for draft work until the moment that he has to pull — and even then he can’t be bothered to protest.

I’ve always loved this little barn. It’s ramshackle. It never mattered if the light got in, or rats, or rain: we didn’t keep anything edible inside. We let the martins and the swallows nest in it, the robins too. We didn’t mind if nettles set up house. When I was a greenhorn here and working none too usefully with the Saxtons on the land, I used to be the one they’d send — their big, slow-witted child — to collect and return their working tools. I think they had a lot of fun with me, demanding things they knew I could not recognize by name. Bring us some seed-lips and the suffingales, they’d say. We need some hog-yokes and a beetle wedge. Even when I’d learned exactly what they meant, I’d still persevere with bringing back the least required of implements — a mold spear when they meant a cradle scythe; a weed hook when they wanted one for reaping — just for the pleasure of their laughter. And also for the pleasure of having to visit the tool barn once again.