Page 13 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

She pulls the blanket up around her shoulders. "Is this a song, because I want to prepare myself."

"It is not a song."

"Thank God."

"The one who sets the last piece of the day names one thing he got wrong. Out loud. Before anybody sleeps under what was built." I sit. The log takes my weight with about an inch of give, which is more than I would like. "One thing you got wrong, and never one thing you did well. Say it plainly and say it before the light goes."

She waits. "That's it?"

"That is it."

"Why?"

Four sentences is what this deserves and four sentences is what it gets, because my grandfather gave it to me in four and adding to it would be a kind of vandalism.

"Because a joint you will not admit to is a joint nobody checks," I say. "Every failure I have taken apart started as something a man carried around with him and did not name. If you say it, two people are looking at it in the morning. If you do not, it is holding up your roof by itself in the dark."

The fire moves. Her face goes orange and then gray again.

"That's a working practice," she says. "That's not a tradition, that's a checklist."

"It is both. The tradition part is only that we do it out loud where somebody can be embarrassed. That is the mechanism."

"That's diabolical."

"It works."

"Those are not opposites."

"Who taught you it?"

"My grandfather. He gave it to me in four sentences on a scaffold when I was six and never explained it again." The log under me gives another quarter inch, which I do not care for. Alder, probably, and further gone than it looks. I will pull it in the morning and put a spruce round in its place. "He held that a man who explains a rule twice does not trust the rule."

"Okay, but hypotheticals." She holds up a finger. "What if I didn't get anything wrong today?"

"Then that is the error."

"That's a trap."

"It is a mountain. There is no day up here where you got nothing wrong."

"What if the wrong thing was your fault and I just went along with it?"

"Then you name going along with it."

"What if it's embarrassing?"

"It is always embarrassing. That is the tradition part."

She points at me with the stick. "You've had this argument before."

"Eleven times, roughly. Every apprentice fights it for a week and then stops, and the ones who stop early are the ones I keep."

I set my hands on my knees. "I set the last piece, so I go first."

"Wait, you go first?"

"The one who set the last piece goes first. That is me, every night, unless you set the last piece." I let that sit for a second, because it is a real offer and she should have it. "Tonight, mine. I sited the fire nine feet from the tarp because the ground was flat there. The ground was flat there because it is a low spot. It has been draining under the fire all evening and I have been burning wet, which is why I used the resin knots tonight instead of saving them. I have spent something I did not need to spend, and I did it because flat ground made me lazy at four in the afternoon."