9. Marion
Marion
The dream was very specific.
I was at the workbench in my own kitchen with my back to the doorway, grinding a root, and a hand came to rest at my back.
The hand was steady and warm and I didn't flinch at it.
The hand stayed where it was for one long beat, and then it moved — slowly — and came up the line of my side and cupped my jaw.
The thumb settled against my cheekbone. The palm was warm at my throat.
A low, careful voice said my name at the curve of my ear in a register I hadn't heard him use.
Marion...
I shivered.
The kitchen in the dream became something I shared with someone else, and I shivered against that, and the dream went as it did: with the shape of the hand, the warmth at my jaw, and the low voice at my ear refusing to go.
I woke up cold.
The flush at my throat where his palm had been in the dream was a flush I had never woken up with.
I lay in my bed in the back room with the dream still on me and breathed in.
I knew whose hand it was. I knew whose voice it was.
I didn't say either name in my own head. It was something my body had learned at the kettle, across the table from a man who didn’t look at my face when our hands touched. It made the hum worse. Or better.
The kettle began to whistle in the kitchen.
He’s put it on.
I came out into the kitchen with the dream still under my skin.
Cain was at the workbench. He'd been awake for an hour. The kettle was off the boil, on the trivet, and there was a wooden bowl of pitted cherries he'd picked from the tree at the back of the yard, set on the table. He didn't look up when I came into the room.
“Good morning,” he said, low and careful.
"Good morning," I said.
I crossed to the stove, and reached for the kettle.
My hand was less steady than it was the morning before. The handle of the kettle was hot, and my grip wasn’t my usual one, so the kettle slipped. I caught it with my other hand a half-beat before it would have gone to the floor. The water came up the side and almost over the lip.
Cain looked up.
He didn't move from the workbench.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"Yes." I set the kettle down on the trivet with both hands. "I just… didn't sleep well."
He didn't ask why. He didn't say anything for a long beat. Then he went back to the cherries.
"Did you?" I asked in return.
"No."
"The couch?"
"It's not the couch."
He didn't lift his eyes from the cherries when he said it, and I didn't lift mine from the kettle.
The kitchen went very quiet. I poured my tea. My hands were mostly steady now. Then I sat across from him at the table.
The flush at my throat was still there. The dream was still under my skin.
He pushed the bowl of cherries across the boards toward me with two fingers at the rim. I took a cherry.
"Thank you," I said.
"They were ripe," he stated.
"You climbed the tree."
"I climbed the tree."
"It's not built for a man your size."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth and went still. "It is not."
I ate the cherry. The flush was still there.
Late morning, Cain was in the yard with Noah — and a small block of pine and a folding knife.
He was teaching the boy to whittle.
I stood in the kitchen doorway with a basket of laundry on my hip and watched.
The boy's small hands were clumsy at first — the knife went the wrong way, the cut was too deep, the small block of pine split in his hand — and Cain didn't take the knife from him.
He guided Noah. He moved the boy's hand on the haft, showed him how to hold the pine against his knee so the grain ran with the cut, and let the boy try again.
By the third try, Noah carved a small wonky shape that was almost recognizable as a bird.
My throat ached.
I didn't name the ache. I set the laundry basket down on the back step and stood in the doorway with both hands on the doorframe and let my eyes rest on my son's face for one long beat. Noah’s face was the face of a boy who’d made a thing he hadn't known an hour ago he could make. Beside him, Cain looked like a man who’d given away something he hadn’t known he was allowed to give.
I crossed the yard.
I knelt in the grass beside them. I didn't touch either of them.
“Look, Mommy! I made it!”
Noah held the wonky bird up to me with both hands. I took it from him, and I turned it over in my palm. I didn't say it was beautiful, because it wasn't. Noah didn't need the lie.
"It's yours. You made it." Because that was what mattered about it.
Noah beamed. Cain, kneeling at the other side of the boy, looked at me over Noah's head for a beat too long.
I didn't let my face move.
I handed the bird back to my son. He turned it in his hands and looked at the wonky angle of the wing like the wooden wolf on the flat rock at the fence on his birthday — with delight, with pride.
"Where does it go, Mommy?" he asked me.
"On the windowsill."
"With the others?"
"With the others." I smiled.
He stood, and ran across the yard with the bird in both hands.
Cain didn't speak. He sat back on his heels with the folding knife loose in his hand. His face held mourning, as if for something he had lost once already — except this time, it was a small wonky bird in a boy's hand crossing a yard toward a kitchen windowsill.
"You're shaking." He said it low. He didn't say my name.
"Am I?"
"Your hand."
I looked at my hand. It was. Very slightly. I picked up the laundry basket and stood with it on my hip and didn't answer him. I went back inside.
I hung the laundry on the line at the back of the yard, and my hands shook the whole time. I didn’t know why. Or I knew exactly why, and didn’t have the room in my chest to say so.
I pinned the shirts. I pinned the boy's breeches and the sleep-shirt with the cuff he chewed on through every fever-bright night. I pinned the man's spare shirt, which appeared in the wash a week ago and had been appearing in the wash every week since.
I went back inside, unable to take all the thoughts in.
* * *
Late that night I came into the front room with a glass of water and a candle for the small lamp by the workbench.
I didn’t expect to find Cain asleep.
Head back against the arm of the couch, one boot on the floor, the other tucked under him. His sword on the floor where it was every night since the storm, the lore book I read to Noah open on his chest.
The Lore of Small Magics.
I stood very still in the doorway with the candle.
I watched him sleep. Watched the steady rise and fall of the book on his chest. The cover was something I knew like the lines of my own palm — the worn corner where Theodora's thumb rested every time she turned a page at this kitchen table, the old water stain in the bottom right where I set a cup of tea down on it at thirteen.
Now, the book was on the chest of a man who'd been in my house for weeks.
I crossed the front room and knelt at the side of the couch. I lifted the book, slowly, careful not to wake him, and marked the page he stopped at with the piece of dried elderflower I used as a bookmark for fifteen years.
The elderflower was small, dry, and the color of the late summer dusk it was gathered in. I pressed it the summer Theodora taught me how to press flowers, between the pages of a heavier book on the kitchen shelf. I’d marked my pages with elderflower ever since, because she did.
I held the book in my lap for a beat before I set it down.
It was warm. It had been warm against his chest.
The memory of the afternoon Theodora gave me the book came up whole, like it meant to stay.
I was twelve. The witch had set the book on the kitchen table between us. She pressed her hand flat on the cover.
“This is yours now. There are things in here you'll need to know before the world tells you what you are.”
I read it through three times by the end of the next winter.
The witch was the only family I'd ever had. She stood at the same kitchen door on the morning of my eighteenth birthday and said she was going to travel for a while. She walked through the door eight years ago and never, in any of those eight years, walked back through it.
The lore book was on the side table now.
The page was marked. The elderflower was inside the cover. The book was a thing I'd shared with no adult in eight years.
I didn't yet have a word for what marking his page cost me.
Cain had been in my house for about six weeks now.
Cain and Noah were in the yard that afternoon with a folding knife and a piece of pine, and Noah’s face was the brightest I'd seen in five years.
Noah was nine and a half-wolf, and every week an inch closer to the father he hadn't known, six weeks ago, he had — and every week an inch further from the structure I built around him for five years.
The cottage door let the witch out and hadn't let her back. The cottage door let the man in. The cottage door, if I read the last six weeks correctly, was going to let the boy out next.
I stood up from the couch with hands that were, again, shaking.
I went to the back room.
I closed the door behind me, and stood with my forehead against the wood of it for a long beat — cool against my skin.
I didn't let myself cry. I hadn't cried at this door since the morning of my eighteenth birthday and I wasn't going to start now, in a back room with a man asleep on the couch on the other side of a wall in my own house. I held the tears with both hands.
The cost didn't leave my chest.
I stood at the back-room door with my forehead against the wood of it and listened to the cottage breathe.
The hum in my chest was a sound now.
It didn't go where the scanning was built to put it. I had no shelf left in the cottage for what it became. I went back to my bed in the back room and lay down on it.
I didn't dream.
The flush at my throat was gone by morning. The hum in my ribs was not.