Evil for Evil by K. J. Parker

she nodded into the corner of the barn, “I’ll help
     you over there.”
    “Might as well be now,” he said.
    She bent down and he put his arm round her neck. Not the first time he’d done that, of course; not the first time with a redhead.
     The most he could claim was, she was the first one-eyed woman he’d ever been cheek to cheek with. Her hair brushed his face
     and he moved his head away.
    “You’re standing on my foot,” she said.
    He apologized, perhaps a little more vehemently than necessary. Her hair smelled of stale cooking oil, and her skin was very
     pale. When they reached the corner, he let go and slithered to the floor, catching his knee on the way down. That took his
     mind off other things quite effectively.
    “It’s all right,” he gasped (she hadn’t actually asked). “I just …”
    “Be more careful,” she said. “Right, I’ll leave you to it. I’ve got work to do.”
    When she’d gone, he pulled open the nearest sack and peered inside. It looked like a sack full of small steel rings, as though
     they were a crop you grew, harvested, threshed and put in store to see you through the winter. He dipped his hands in, took
     hold and lifted. At once, the tendons of his elbows protested. A full-length, heavy-duty mail shirt weighs forty pounds, and
     it’s unwise to try and lift it from a sitting position.
    He hauled it out nevertheless, spread it out on the floor and examined it. Mezentine, not a top-of-the-range pattern. The
     links were flat-sectioned, about three-eighths of an inch in diameter, each one closed with a single rivet. A good-quality
     shirt, like the ones he was used to wearing, would have smaller, lighter links, weigh less and protect better. This one had
     a hole in the back, just below where the shoulder blade would be, and the area round it was shiny and sticky with jellying
     blood. The puncture had burst the rivets on five of the links; must’ve been a cavalryman’s lance, with the full impetus of
     a charging horse behind it, to have done that. He looked a little closer, contemplating the twisted ends of the damaged links.
     So much force, applied in such a small space. He’d seen wounds before, felt them himself; but there was more violence in the
     silent witness of the twisted metal than his own actual experiences. That’s no way to behave, he thought.
    She’d been right; it was much easier to understand than sewing, though it was harder work. He needed both hands on the ends
     of the wirecutter handles to snip through the damaged links, and after he’d bent a few replacement links to fit (one twist
     to open them, one to close them up again), the plier handles had started blisters at the base of both his thumbs. The only
     really awkward part was closing up the rivet. For an anvil he used the face of one of his two hammers. The only way he could
     think of to hold it was to sit cross-legged and grip it between his feet, face up, his calf jamming the handle into the floor.
     He tried it, but the pain from his injured knee quickly persuaded him to try a different approach; he ended up sitting on
     the hammer handle and leaning sideways to work, which probably wasn’t the way they did it in the ordnance factory at Mezentia.
     Hauling the shirt into position over the hammer was bad enough; lining up the tiny holes in the ends of the links and getting
     the rivet in without dropping it was torture. He remembered someone telling him once that there were fifty thousand links
     in a really high-class mail shirt. He also remembered what he’d paid for such an item. It didn’t seem quite so expensive,
     somehow.
    “Is that all you’ve done?”
    He looked up at her. “Yes,” he said.
    “You’re very slow.”
    “I’ll get quicker,” he replied. “I expect you get into a rhythm after a bit.” He picked up a rivet and promptly dropped it.
     It vanished forever among the heaped-up links on his lap. “What happens to all this stuff, then?”
    “We sell