Make this story into stickman animation! The fourth had no...

Prompt

Make this story into stickman animation! The fourth had no horse. She had had one; it was lame at the bottom of the pass with a farmer who had given her his word and a lantern, and she had walked the rest. She was perhaps forty, in a wool coat gone black with wet, and the first thing she said was "I need a horse," and the second was "I can pay," and the third, when Anselm told her he kept none to sell, was "Then I'll walk." "Not tonight," said Corvin from the wall. She turned. "I wasn't speaking to you." "No. But you were speaking about the pass, and I came over it an hour ago, and it was closing then. By the second switchback you'll be in snow to the knee. By the fourth you'll be dead. No one will find you until spring, and what they find won't be worth the finding." "Then I'll be dead." "And what use are you to him dead?" She went very still. He had guessed, and it was not hard to guess. A woman walks up a mountain into a storm for one reason. "He's right about the pass," Anselm said quietly. "I've seen it do what he says. Sit down. Eat. It will clear by morning or it won't, and nothing you do tonight will change which." She sat. She did not eat. She said her name was Elin, that her husband was three days over the Saddle and sick in the lungs, that she had been at the lowland fair selling the year's wool when the neighbor's boy came with word, and that was all she said for a while. The dog, an old grey hound with a white muzzle, rose from the hearth, crossed the room, and lay down across her feet. "He's called Dog," said Anselm. "They've all been called Dog. I told myself it saves grief." "Does it?" "No." II. Supper was mutton and barley and the bread Anselm had made before the weather, and there was a dark beer that Corvin drank, and Hesper did not, and Tamsin drank without noticing while she wrote. The wind found the shutters and worked at them like something with hands. No one spoke much until Corvin, who had been watching Elin not eat, said, "You'll want strength to ride in the morning. That's the whole of it. You can't do a thing for him if you can't get up the hill." "I know that." "Then eat. Everything else people say is worth having — it all comes after breathing. You breathe first. Then the rest." "That isn't quite right," said Tamsin, not looking up. "Which part?" "The 'then the rest.' Breathing comes first — true. But first isn't highest. A foundation comes before a house, and no one ever lived in a foundation." "No one ever lived in a house without one." "No one ever bought a house for its foundation, either." She did look up then. "You've confused a condition with a value. People do." Hesper, by the fire, said: "What's the difference?" It was asked so mildly that Tamsin took it for an old woman's conversation and began to answer it as such, and got two sentences in before she understood the question had a floor under it, and stopped. "I mean it," Hesper said. "You're right that they differ. I've never heard anyone say how. Is a condition worth less than what it conditions? Or more? It's prior. Prior isn't a rank." "Oh, for—" said Corvin. Anselm set down the cloth he was holding, went to the cupboard behind the bar, unlocked it, came back with something closed in his hand, and set it down in the middle of the table where the salt would have been. It was a vial of thick green glass, no longer than a finger, stoppered with lead. Whatever it held was dark. "Since you're going to argue it anyway," he said, "you may as well argue it for something." He told them. He told it the way he had told it forty-one times, plainly and without much hope of being believed, and when the telling was not enough he took the bread knife, opened his palm from thumb to wrist in front of them, and let them watch it close. He had kept the inn for three hundred and six years. He had drunk the contents of a vial exactly like this one when he was fifty, because an alchemist had paid for a winter's lodging with two of them and a story, and the alchemist had died in the spring of a fever — "which told me something about the stuff; it keeps you from age, it doesn't keep you from everything" — and Anselm had wanted to know if he had been lied to. He had not. He had been run through once, in the second war to come up the road, and burned once, in the fourth, and neither had taken. "I've never tried the gorge," he said. "I'm not curious." The second vial he had carried for three centuries without giving it to anyone. "Forty-one times, when the pass closed and the right sort of people sat at this table, I've put it down and asked them what it's for. I've heard everything that can be said. If one of you says something I haven't heard, it's yours. If not, it goes back in the cupboard and you forget you saw it. You'll find you mostly will." For a moment the only sound was the shutters. "Why the right sort of people?" Hesper asked. "People who already know what they'd do with it. You can see it on them. Three of you walked in already arguing. One of you walked in with no time for argument. And I've had mine since before your grandmothers were born." "And who judges?" Corvin said. "You?" "I'm holding it." "Then whoever holds it decides. That's power, innkeeper. You've conceded my case before I've made it." "I'm holding it because I can't die," Anselm said. "That isn't power. That's furniture." III. "You want a reason," Corvin said. "I want one I haven't heard." "Then you'll not have heard this, because I've never said it." He put both hands flat on the table, as if it were a map. "Name a good. Any of you. Bread, a child, a book, a god. I'll name the hand that takes it. "When I was nine, men came to my village. They had horses and iron. We had a priest, a schoolmaster, and my mother. The priest was wise — everyone said so; he'd settled every quarrel in the valley for thirty years. The schoolmaster could read in three tongues. My mother loved me more than anything on the earth; she said so every night, and it was true. By noon the priest was hanging from the oak, the schoolmaster's books were warming the men's hands, and my mother's love did precisely what you'd expect against four men who had the power to do as they liked. Nothing. It did nothing. "So don't talk to me about goods. Everything you'll call good tonight is a thing you hold on loan from whoever is stronger than you, and the loan can be called in any morning. Power isn't one good among the others. It's the wall around all of them. Take down the wall and you'll see what the rest are worth — exactly what they fetch on the back of a cart. "And that" — the vial — "fixes the one flaw in every wall ever built. The keeper dies. Then his sons fight, and the wall comes down from inside. Every peace I've ever served under died with the man who made it. Give me a keeper who doesn't die, and I'll give you the first peace in the history of the world that holds." Anselm said, after a moment, "I've heard the wall. Twice. Not the keeper who doesn't die. That one's new." "Then—" "New isn't the same as good. Let the others speak." Tamsin had put down her pen. "If I give you my bread," she said, "I have less bread. If I give you what I know, we both have it. It's the only good in the world that multiplies by being divided. It's the only one that can't be taken by force — you can burn the schoolmaster's books, Captain, but you can't burn what he'd already put in the heads of the children who ran. It's the only one that compounds: everything I know makes the next thing cheaper to learn. And it's the only one that is the same for everyone. Your bread is yours. His power is his. But the comet is coming on the same night for the king and the goatherd, and it does not care what either of them deserves. "It's good twice over. Good in itself — the moment you understand a thing is the best moment there is, and anyone who's had it knows I'm not exaggerating. And good for every other thing. Your medicine is knowledge, innkeeper. Your tactics are knowledge, Captain. Hesper's wisdom, whatever it turns out to be, is knowledge of a particular subject. "Every horror I've read of was somebody not knowing something. What causes the plague. What the river does in spring. What the king was actually like. Ignorance kills more than malice does. Malice gets the credit. "What's it for? I've worked out, from records in three dead languages that disagree with one another, that a certain comet returns in four hundred and six years. I'd like to see it. I'd like to know if I'm right. That's all. I won't dress it up." "The multiplying by dividing I've heard," Anselm said. "The comet, no." Hesper did not move from the fire. "Captain, you named the hand that takes each good. Let me name the hand that ruins a good without taking it. "Health in a brute. Gold in a fool. A sword in a frightened boy. Three hundred years in a man who doesn't know what to do with an afternoon. Every good named at this table tonight I can turn into a curse without touching it — I need only change the hand that holds it. And if I change the hand to a wise one, the curse lifts. Your power becomes protection. Your knowledge becomes medicine. Your long life becomes — well. An inn. Which is not nothing. "So there is one thing on this table that is good no matter whose hand it's in, because it is the knowing-what-to-do-with. It cannot be misused. Misuse is what it isn't. Everything else is good on a condition. This is good without one. "I say this as someone who had all your goods and not this one. I had power: I was chancellor to a king. I had knowledge: I had the granary accounts to the bushel. I had life, and more health than I deserved. And I signed the edict that sold the reserve grain to pay for a war, and the following spring I learned what my goods were worth without the one I lacked. Twelve thousand. I know the number. The number is knowledge. Knowing not to have made it is the other thing. "One more. Someone must judge this. Whoever does must know what matters more than what. That is not power, Captain. Nor knowledge, Tamsin — knowing there are five of us and one vial is knowledge; knowing which of us it ought to go to is not. You cannot so much as hold this contest without conceding to me." "I've heard the hand that ruins," said Anselm. "From a priest, as it happens. He didn't have twelve thousand to put behind it." He turned the vial a quarter-turn on the wood. "I'll give you mine, since I'm the fifth. You all argue while breathing. "Three hundred years of speeches at this table and every one of them has that in common. Wisdom, power, knowledge: things a living creature wants. Nothing wants anything dead. Good is a word in living mouths. You don't set life on the table beside the others and weigh it. It's the table. "Tamsin will tell me a condition isn't a value. I've had that twice. Tell me what value you've got without it. Death doesn't take one good off the table. It takes the table. And this is the only thing on earth that takes death off. Not one of your goods does that. "The other thing you'll tell me is that I must be bored. That a man who's seen three hundred springs has run out of wanting. I've waited forty-one nights for someone to say it so I can answer: you've never tried it. I have. The wanting doesn't run out. The bread is different every morning. You people are more surprising than you can imagine from inside yourselves. I've buried fourteen dogs and I'd take a fifteenth tomorrow." He stopped. "Only the company runs out. I'll say that, since Hesper's been honest. Everything else keeps." They looked, then, at Elin, because she was the one left. "I don't have one of those," she said. "You have one," said Hesper. "You've simply never had to say it out loud." IV. "Power to do what, Captain?" Hesper asked. "Whatever needs doing." "Then it's a drawn bow, and you've told me nothing about where it points. Name the target." "To keep what's mine." "Including the power?" "Including the power." "Then you want power to keep power, and you've described a fever, not a good. Try again. What were you keeping, at nine?" He didn't answer for a while. "My mother." "Yes. So the bow points at her. The good was her, and power was the arm you didn't have. I'm not mocking you. I'm correcting your grammar. Power is a verb's helper. It wants a noun." "And wisdom? What's that for? 'Living well,' you'll tell me. Then it's a helper too." "Yes. I'll grant it. It's a means. It is the one means that cannot be turned against its end. Your sword can be used on its owner. Wisdom cannot be used foolishly. That's not a boast; it's what the word means." "Then it's the one thing you can't lend me. When the wall is breached you can't hand me your wisdom over the parapet." "No. That's true. It's the least portable good there is. Your point, Captain." "And it isn't yours, by the way," said Tamsin. "What isn't?" "Power. A king's power is ten thousand men agreeing, renewed every morning. It lives in their heads, not his hands. You've picked the only good in the room that's stored entirely in other people." "Then I'll own the people." "That's what they all say right before they don't." Hesper turned on the bench. "Tamsin. What's worth knowing?" "Everything." "The number of hairs on that dog." "Trivially—" "You said everything. Either the hairs on the dog are worth knowing, or you have a sieve you haven't mentioned. What's the sieve?" "Relevance. Knowing what's worth knowing is itself knowledge." "Relevance to what?" "To what matters." "And what is mattering? Not what matters. What it is, for a thing to matter." Tamsin opened her mouth and closed it. "I don't have a definition." "No. It isn't a fact about the world. There's no instrument for it. You'd have to ask one of us, and whichever of us you asked would hand you their own good. That's the hole in the middle of your knowing. You know what is. Nothing in what is tells you what for." "That's a fault in the user, not in the knowledge." "The man who built the engine that broke our western wall knew more about stone than any mason in the city. He also knew precisely what it was for; he'd priced it. Knowledge of the consequence didn't move him one inch toward the good. Knowing doesn't push. Something else pushes." "What?" "I was hoping someone would say." "Who will you ., "

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