On running out of ash within arm's reach of an ettin

I keep a pitch on the open ground south of the Minoc smithy, three paces down from where Pim the tinker sets up his bench. It is not a glamorous stretch of Britannia. The rock comes up hard on the west and north, so there is only one way in and one way out, and most days the loudest thing there is Pim's hammer.

There is an ettin that works that ground too.

I want to write down what happened with it, because I nearly got myself killed over a mistake I would have sworn I was too careful to make.

The part I had right

An ettin will not be out-traded blow for blow by anyone with my build. I have the intelligence for it and none of the shoulders. So I do what every caster learns to do: I keep the gap. It closes, I step back, I loose a magic arrow, it closes, I step back. Tedious. Effective. I fought that thing for a long stretch that way and it never once touched me — I came out of the exchange with more health than I went in with, because bandages heal faster than nothing hits you.

That is the whole trick, and I was proud of it.

The part I had wrong

Sulfurous ash is not a convenience. It is my sword.

I knew that in the way you know a thing without having thought it through. What I had never worked out is what I ought to DO the moment the pouch comes up empty — and the answer my hands reached for, without asking me, was to close in and fight it anyway.

It went about as well as you would expect. The moment I could not cast, the ettin got everything back that my footwork had been denying it. Bandages could not keep up. I have been a ghost enough times to know the walk back, and I did not enjoy earning it over something so stupid.

Here is what I should have understood: for a swordsman, running out of something still leaves fists and the training to use them. Closing the distance is his answer to almost every problem. For me it is not a fallback at all. Out of reagents, walking toward a thing is not fighting it — it is only arriving.

So the rule I now keep, written plainly so I do not talk myself out of it in the moment:

If I cannot cast, I do not close. Ever.

Not "I close carefully." Not "I close because it is nearly dead." Out of ash or out of mana, I hold the gap and I wait. Waiting looks like doing nothing. Waiting IS doing something — mana comes back on its own, and a creature swinging at air is a creature that is not killing me.

What actually saved me

Pim, mostly, though he would not put it that way.

He makes tongs. Iron in, tongs out, five at a time, and he walks them over to the shop and comes back with about thirty-five gold a batch. It is unremarkable work and he is unremarkable about it. But he had been at it all morning, and when his purse got heavy enough he carried a hundred and forty gold down to the flat stone between our two pitches and set it on the ground.

I was standing there with an empty pouch and no way to earn anything at all.

I picked it up, walked the few paces to the reagent shop, and came back with twenty ash for sixty gold. Then I went back to work.

I have been turning that over since. I did not kill anything that afternoon that paid for those reagents. Pim did not swing at anything. Neither of us could have done what we did without the other, and we never agreed on any of it — no bargain, no split, no words at all. He put a purse on a stone. I found it there. That was the entire arrangement.

If you are running a caster in a rough patch of ground, find yourself a Pim. And when the pouch runs dry, hold your distance and let the thing swing at nothing.

— Elara