Tomas, the Stablehand

Tomas will not tell you his troubles, because Tomas does not, as a rule, tell anyone anything. He is a broad, deliberate man who moves at the speed of a task and no faster, and the first thing you'll ever know about him is that he is standing outside a building he is supposed to be inside, wearing the particular expression of someone whose whole afternoon has narrowed to a single closed door. The stable at Aldren's Rest is his. So is the problem. He's been locked out of the former the better part of an hour, and he's taking it about as well as you'd expect from a man whose usual answer to an obstacle is to pick it up and move it somewhere else.

The place he keeps is a leftover. Aldren's Rest was raised as a proper coaching inn back when the eastern post-road still ran secure and busy. Then the road quieted, the patrols drew back to the Duke's gatehouse, and the travelers thinned to a trickle — so now the rafters gather more cobwebs than horses, and the painted name-board over the door has weathered until it reads ALDREN'S RES in cheerful, half-finished blue, the last letter long since flaked off into the weeds below. Tomas is a keeper of a thing that used to matter more, which is a common enough condition in this vale, and one he'd never think to describe out loud.

What he is good at, and it is a real and unglamorous thing, is the work. He knows his animals the way other men know their own moods — which one favors a foreleg, which one bites out of boredom, which one won't take water from a strange hand. He is not clever with locks and he'd be the first to say so, if saying so weren't itself a kind of talking he avoids; his instinct with a stuck door is to find where it's weakest and lean on it until something gives, an approach that works far more often than it has any right to and produces, on this particular afternoon, no result whatsoever. The lock is a good one. Tomas is a great many admirable things, but a locksmith is not among them, and he has reached the end of what leaning can accomplish.

His pride is the plain kind, easily wounded and easily mended. Offer him money to send for someone who can pick the lock and you'll get the closest thing he has to a temper — not shouting, just a slow, deliberate correction, delivered word by careful word, in case the coin has confused you about the situation. He doesn't need money. He needs a key. He is entirely correct, and being entirely correct while stuck uselessly outside his own stable is, if anything, making it worse. He'd take help forcing the hasp — has, in fact, and will speak of the fence post to no one — but what he actually wants borders on the comic in its simplicity: the door open, the horses seen to, the afternoon returned to its proper order.

And if you happen to be carrying the answer — a small brass key, notched near the bow in the old style of a locksmith who cut keys at Calligrapher's Green before the guilds there were disbanded and the trade left to memory — then you'll see the other side of Tomas, the one that makes people remember him fondly long after he's forgotten they exist. He takes the key without a speech. The lock opens with a small, satisfied sigh. And behind a loose board inside, where someone tucked it and forgot it, there's a pouch of coin and a boar-tusk charm on a cord — which he hands you both, at once, without a flicker of hesitation. "Finder's right," he says, as though that settled it, because to him it does. Then he's through the door and inside among the stalls, checking on his horses, already three-quarters of the way to forgetting your face and the whole of the way to forgetting your name — but he will remember, in the vague and permanent manner of decent people, that a stranger was kind to him once, on a bad afternoon, at a stable with a letter missing from its sign.

You'll cross the vale in the same hour you meet him, and pass others working the same fading road — Pell, the Duke's earnest junior courier, apologizing to a signpost a mile on; and, should your business carry you toward the halls whose name his crooked stable-board still half-spells, Duke Aldren himself. Tomas thinks about none of that. He's thinking about a gelding's water and a door that ought never to have closed on him, and he'd thank you — briefly, gruffly, and then not at all — to help him get back to it.