The Chronicle of Epic Words
Garrick, the Aldren GuardIn service to Duke Aldren
A road-warden who trusts nothing he can't check against the roll — except one face he's never once managed to place.
At a glance
Sixteen years in service, and every one of them on his face. Old enough that the wall is a memory. Young enough that some nights it isn't.
- Home The Waymark Post
- Kingdom XI (The Letterwise Road)
- Faction The Crown
- Employer Duke Aldren
Garrick will not tell you his story unless you help him with his ledger first, and even then he'll give you the short version: ten years on the road, six before that on the wall, and a muster roll he needs rescued from twenty years of weather. He is the kind of man Duke Aldren keeps around precisely because he is not, by his own cheerful admission, interesting. He does not have opinions about the great houses. He does not speculate about the smudges creeping into seals and charters up and down the realm. He checks names against a book, logs what passes, and goes home. It is not glamorous work. It has, he'll tell you, never once let a thing through that shouldn't have gone through — and then, because he is an honest man, he'll pause and add, quietly, "Mostly never."
That mostly is the whole of Garrick, if you know where to look for it.
He grew up younger than the courier now pacing a groove into the dirt beside his post, and he took to service the way steady people take to it: completely, and without any particular flourish. The wall came first — six years of it, somewhere he says the name of the way other men say a scar — and then the road, which he prefers, because on the road the danger is mostly damp. Damp doesn't care about supposed to. House Aldren's books are meant to be the one thing on the Letterwise Road that is never in doubt, and every spring the rain sets out, patiently, to make a liar of them. Garrick's real profession, the one nobody put on a warrant, is standing between the weather and the truth with a fresh nib and a very long attention span.
He believes in the roll the way Pell believes in the delivery — which is to say, past all reason and slightly to his own cost. Everything else on this road, he'll explain, is faith: a letter is a stranger's word carried by a stranger, a seal is only wax until you know whose hand pressed it, an inn is a room full of people telling you things. The roll is the exception. The roll you can go back to. You can lay a finger on a line and know that a name was true on the day it was written, and if that sounds like a small thing to build a life on, Garrick would tell you he has watched men build lives on considerably less and lose them faster.
Which is why the one page he can't quite close bothers him the way it does. Somewhere in the smeared middle of the Waymark Post muster book is a season he can't file. A boy ran, that year — a poacher's son, hungry, nothing more to it than that, come up the road from Murklin and gone before a judgment at the Duke's hall could land on him. And in the same season a woman came through the Post asking after a family, polite and thorough, writing everything down in a neat hand and giving no name of her own for Garrick to write in return. He never placed her. He has never managed to, in all the years since — and placing people is supposed to be the one thing he is good at, the whole of his talent distilled to a single reflex. A man can carry a mystery like that lightly for a decade. Garrick carries it exactly, which is worse, because he knows the precise shape of the thing he cannot name.
If you take the trouble to sit with him and re-copy the whole ruined page rather than just the one name he asked after, you'll watch him set down a small dread he's been holding for the better part of a decade — just for an afternoon. He'll tear a clean copied page from the book and press it on you "for later," the way another man might leave a tip, and thank you with the brisk economy of someone already worrying about the next thing that might go wrong today. Then he'll wave the courier through, and watch the boy bolt down the road with the mild, permanent fondness of a man who has seen ten thousand satchels move and still, somehow, likes watching the ten-thousandth-and-first.
"Letterwise, they call this road," he'll say, mostly to the ledger, "because everyone on it is carrying somebody else's words, and none of it's theirs to read." House Aldren pays him to make sure the words arrive whole. Most days, that is the entire job. Some days — he won't finish the sentence. He's decided, again, not to. Best to let him get back to the book.
Tales & Rumors
He'll give you his history before he asks your name — 'Garrick. Ten years on this road, six before that on the wall' — the flat way some men give their height. But listen to how he says the wall. It's a fact he has stopped finding interesting about himself, except that it plainly isn't, quite, and he'd sooner change the subject than tell you why.
Ask him why one rain-smeared name can hold up an entire courier's satchel and he'll tap the ledger like it's scripture. 'Because the roll's the only thing on this road that doesn't lie.' Everything else on the Letterwise Road is somebody carrying somebody else's words on somebody's word — the roll, and only the roll, you can go back and check.
There is a woman he has never been able to place. She came through his post one season long ago, asked careful, thorough questions about a family, wrote everything down, and gave no name of her own. Nothing in it, he'll tell you — lots of folk ask after lots of things on this road. But he places people; it's the one thing he's supposed to be good at, and this one he simply never could, and it bothers him far more than he lets on.
How They Measure Up
A guardsman logs everything, himself included — though this is the one page he'd rather not check twice.
Six years standing a wall builds a particular kind of strength — the kind that's mostly about not sitting down. He has plenty of it left, and no occasion anymore to use it.
Stamps a satchel clean, logs a parcel straight, and has never in his life needed to do either of those things quickly.
A whole day at a stone marker in the rain with a ledger on his knee, and he's the one who looks fresh at sundown. That's the actual job, and he is very good at it.
Keeps twenty years of transit in a book and can tell you who came through in a given season without turning a page. It isn't cleverness. It's just that he never stopped writing it down.
Knows which travelers to search and which to wave through by the set of their shoulders — right up until the one he still can't read after a decade, which he thinks about more than he lets on.
Greets you the way a tired man greets anyone who might be useful: with relief he's trying not to show. It's not charm. It's honesty, which some people mistake for it.
Thoroughness — the reason the Duke keeps him and the reason he doesn't sleep. Nothing passes Garrick on faith; every name gets checked against the roll, every parcel logged. It is a fine creed, and it has exactly one crack in it — a visitor, years gone, whose face he has never once managed to file.
Where you'll meet him
You'll find Garrick at the Waymark Post, in Kingdom XI (The Letterwise Road) — which is to say one weathered stone marker and one extremely tired man, a courier's satchel pinned under his boot and a ledger open on his knee. The trouble is a muster roll gone soft and grey with twenty years of rain: a single soldier's surname has bled to a smear, two letters missing where the ink used to be, and until Garrick can write it down clean, the satchel doesn't move and the courier boy waiting on it is going to lose his mind by sundown. He won't wave it through on faith. He has never once waved anything through on faith — that, he'll have you understand, is rather the point of him.