Chapter 395: Chapter 394 – Angered Noble Knight

The problem with trying to help people you’d spent your whole career treating as obstacles was that the people knew.

They always knew.

It was something Cassius had never thought about before today — before Millbrook, before the interface window and its glowing negative number and the specific quality of being ’evaluated’ by a ’building’ and found wanting. He had spent twenty-eight years learning to read people and had apparently spent none of those years considering that people were reading him back.

The old woman with the firewood didn’t take the help.

He’d seen her struggling with the bundle — the weight of it, the way she was leaning to compensate, the slow laboring progress of someone whose back was telling her things she was ignoring. He’d dismounted. He’d walked to her. He’d said, in a voice he’d calibrated to ’helpful,’ words he’d calibrated to ’assistance.’

She’d looked at him.

Looked at him the way you look at a dog that has been growling and is now wagging its tail, and you are trying to determine whether the transition represents a change of character or a change of tactic.

She’d said, “’No thank you, my son is coming,’” and had kept walking.

He’d stood in the street with his hands still extended.

His son had materialized from a side lane approximately forty seconds later and taken the bundle. The woman hadn’t looked back at Cassius. The son hadn’t acknowledged him. Both of them had continued down the street with the comfortable mutual assistance of people who trusted each other.

Cassius had stood there for a moment longer than he should have.

Then he’d gone to find someone else to help.

’’’

The child had been easier.

A small boy, six or seven, sitting on the fountain’s edge with a cut on his shin — not serious, the kind of scrape that happens when a child encounters a cobblestone with their leg instead of their foot. He was crying the way small children cry: with full commitment, both lungs, no negotiation.

Cassius crouched.

He had a field dressing kit in his bag — they all did, standard unit equipment. He opened it. He spoke to the boy in the measured tones of an adult attempting to project safety.

The boy looked at him.

Looked at his mask.

Looked at the men in travel cloaks standing at the street’s edge with the patient bored posture of people waiting for their superior to finish a civilian interaction.

The boy’s crying went from full-commitment to the specific wariness of a child recalibrating.

Cassius applied the dressing anyway.

The boy didn’t thank him. Didn’t run away either. Just slid off the fountain’s edge when it was done and walked back toward a woman at a nearby stall who looked at Cassius with the same quality the old woman had — assessing, unconvinced, waiting to see what the transition from the thing she’d seen earlier to this represented.

He’d earned three credits.

He knew this because the interface window had appeared in the edge of his vision — he’d managed to make it semi-persistent, a scout trick he’d learned from Rett, keeping the system display at partial opacity in peripheral vision — and he’d watched the number increment.

Negative forty-seven.

Negative forty-four.

He stood up.

’’’

Rett was doing better.

Of all of them, Rett had the least of the city in him — he’d grown up in a river town, had spent his youth tracking things through actual countryside rather than through court corridors, and his interactions with Millbrook’s population had the quality of a man who was slightly less startled by the idea that they were people.

He’d helped unload three carts.

His number was negative twelve.

Still negative. But trending.

Fellan was at negative seventy-one, which was worse than when they’d started, which meant he’d done something in the last hour that the system had noted unfavorably. Cassius didn’t ask what. Fellan’s expression suggested it had involved an opinion expressed out loud that should have stayed internal.

Jonah was negative thirty.

The others were distributed along a range that told the story of men trying to perform generosity without possessing it, which produced a specific quality of interaction that the population of Millbrook — a population that had been living under a credit system long enough to develop an instinct for authenticity — responded to with the flat patience of people who had seen this before.

An older man at a vegetable stall watched Cassius walk past.

Their eyes met.

The man said nothing. His expression said: ’I know exactly what you’re doing and I know exactly why you’re doing it and those are different things.’

Cassius kept walking.

His jaw was tight.

’’’

The hunters were the worst part.

Not worst in the sense of threatening — worst in the sense of being impossible to look at without the specific burning awareness of comparison.

There were four of them. Young — Cassius’s unit’s age or younger, two of them barely twenty by appearance, in the practical mismatched gear of people who worked for survival rather than appearance. They’d arrived in the market square around midday and had simply… started.

Helped the smith move a load of iron stock. Helped a woman replace a broken window shutter with three nails from a kit one of them produced from somewhere in a pack. Helped a farmer’s boy round up a goat that had decided the market square was its territory and was defending this position against all comers.

No audience. No ceremony. No calculation in any of their faces.

They were doing it because it needed doing and they were there.

Cassius watched one of them crouch by the cart that Celestia’s knights had partially repaired that morning — the wheel still not quite seated properly, the spoke replacement evidently not having fully solved the problem — and spend twenty minutes on his knees in the street doing the thing that actually fixed it, his hands black with axle grease at the end of it, the old man patting his shoulder with the warmth of someone thanking family.

The system was giving them credits.

He couldn’t see their numbers. But he could see the interface windows popping at the edges of their vision from six feet away — the faint gold glow of them, appearing and disappearing with the frequency of regular increments.

Cassius looked at his own number.

Negative thirty-nine.

He’d been at this for three hours.

The tower entrance was still going to tell him ’denied.’

’’’

He left his unit.

Not formally — no instruction, no assignment of a secondary commander, just the precise moment when he turned and walked away from them and none of them followed because the quality of his walking communicated that following was not the appropriate response.

He walked until the market noise was behind him.

The alley was narrow — the specific narrow of a gap between two buildings that had been built separately and had grown toward each other over decades until only a shoulder’s width remained between them. It dead-ended at a storage wall with rust-stained stone and a broken hook where something had once hung.

He stopped.

He stood there.

“’Sit,’” he said, under his breath. Not to anyone.

His hands were at his sides. One of them closed into a fist — the slow deliberate closing of someone applying conscious control to something that was trying to express itself as the other kind of closed.

“’Why the hell is this village making me so angry.’”

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