Chapter 40
KAEDRIN
Four Months Later
The flour sacks weigh more than they look.
I've learned this over months of carrying them through the back door before dawn, and I've stopped being surprised by it. I set them on the baking table, one at a time, and straighten up with the satisfaction of a task completed before the rest of the town has opened its eyes.
Maris is already at the worktable, her braid pinned up beneath a bandana with three strands escaping at her temple, her apron and hands white with flour to the wrist. She doesn't look up from what she's kneading. She knows the sound of me coming through the back door.
"Thank you," she says.
I lean down and press my lips to the tip of her nose. She wrinkles it but doesn't pull away.
I pull out the chair at the table and sit, and then I yawn — the full, jaw-cracking kind that comes from a full night's circuit of the town's perimeter.
Maris glances over her shoulder. "How was it?"
"Quiet." I press the back of my hand against my mouth. "Same as last week. Same as the week before."
"Mm." She turns the dough and folds it with automatic precision. "You think it'll stay that way?"
"For a while." I lean back in the chair. "There's no incentive to rebuild what Fenwood had, not with the courts watching the routes and a dark elf living above the bakery." The last part comes out more dryly than I intend.
Maris makes a sound that is definitely a suppressed laugh. "A dark elf protecting the town," she says. "Hestara actually used those words at the market last week. Protecting."
"I heard."
"She said it to Brennor like it was her idea."
"It was inevitable that it would become her idea." I watch Maris work the dough. "How long before it's been her idea all along?"
"Two more weeks." She doesn't hesitate. "Three at the most."
We're both quiet for a moment with the easy quiet that has replaced the other kind.
The hearth fire pops once. Outside, the square is dark and still, the pre-dawn hour that belongs to bakers and night watchmen and apparently dark elves who've traded bounty commissions for Brindle Hollow's morning streets.
The courts responded to my message six weeks after Vreth delivered it.
Two paragraphs — terse, official, the language of an institution that doesn't like precedent but sometimes makes exceptions for assets it wants to keep accessible.
I'm permitted to remain in the region. Local commission work is sanctioned.
The southern post has been filled by someone else.
The letter didn't say whether that was an accommodation or an acknowledgment that I'd made myself useful enough here to warrant the compromise, and I didn't ask.
I filed it next to the case documents in the pouch and went downstairs to help Maris move the heavy display shelf she'd been wanting repositioned for a month.
I culr my fingers around her hip now, easy and unhurried, and press my lips to her cheek. She leans into it briefly without breaking the rhythm of her hands.
"You should sleep," she says. "Before Elin's up."
"That’s my next stop."
She glances at me sideways, flour dust on her cheekbone. "Go. She'll have you sorting pebbles by color before the bread's out of the oven if you're down here when she wakes up."
"She reorganized the system last week." I stand. "There are now five categories."
"I know. She explained it to me for forty minutes." She turns back to the dough. "Sleep, Kaedrin."
I squeeze her hip and cross toward the interior stairs.
At the foot of them I stop and look back at the kitchen.
Maris at the worktable, the lamp on the shelf, the flour sacks on the table where I put them, the bread pans lined up and ready.
The smell of the hearth and the yeast and the early morning warmth of a bakery kitchen that's been running since before the rest of the world woke up.
I've stood watch in a hundred different places over eighty years. Cold outposts, hostile ground, border towns where nobody trusted anyone and everyone was right not to. None of them looked like this.
I go upstairs.
The sun is fully up when I wake.
The room is bright at the edges of the curtain and Maris's side of the bed is long cold — she's been downstairs for hours, which is ordinary and has stopped feeling like absence.
I lie still for a moment and listen to the house.
The muffled sounds of the bakery below, a customer's voice, the creak of the front door on its hinges.
Then Elin's voice, outside, high and carrying.
I dress and go to the window.
She's in the square below, Pip under one arm, engaged in what appears to be a complex negotiation with two children roughly her size.
One of them is the miller's grandson, who I've seen following Elin around the fountain twice this week.
The other is a girl with red braids who lives above the cooperage.
The three of them are circling something on the cobblestones — a game with rules I can't determine from this angle — and Elin is explaining the rules to the other two with the authority of someone who invented them and expects compliance.
Her skin catches the midmorning light. The grey is more pronounced now than when I arrived — her temples, her forearms, the line of her jaw all reading clearly as dark elf blood.
Her ears are uncovered, the points visible above her dark curls.
She's shed the scarf entirely over the past two months, a gradual process that happened so naturally that I'm not certain anyone marked the exact day it stopped appearing.
The miller's grandson says something. Elin corrects him. He accepts the correction and they resume the game.
I watch until the round ends and Elin begins explaining the next stage, then I go downstairs.
The bakery is in its late-morning rhythm — a few customers lingering, the display shelf down to the last loaves of the day.
Maris passes me behind the counter without ceremony and puts a heel loaf in my hand, which is how she indicates I should eat something.
I eat it standing while I wrap two parcels for the woman at the counter, who thanks me with an easy manner.
She doesn't call me by name yet. She calls me "the tall one," which Maris finds funnier than I do.
The afternoon takes me out along the old forest paths.
Fenwood's routes are quiet. They've been quiet for three months, and I expect they'll stay that way — the eastern courts put three additional hunters on the territory after the case closed, and word travels in criminal circles as fast as it travels anywhere.
The ruins sit empty and weathered on their ridge, the courtyard cleared, the crates gone.
I walk the perimeter and find nothing worth noting.
I'm back in town before the market closes.
The bench outside the bakery is where I find them.
Maris has her legs stretched out and her crochet project in her lap — something in blue-grey wool that's grown considerably since I last saw it.
Elin is on the stoop with the wooden horse and Pip, the two of them conducting what sounds like a formal summit.
The afternoon light is gold across the square, the long slant of it that comes in the last hour before sunset.
I sit beside Maris and put my arm around her shoulders. She leans into it without looking up from her work.
"Anything?" she asks.
"Nothing." I watch Elin introduce the horse to a new scenario involving the fountain. "Quiet."
"Good." She works the hook through a loop. "Elin made a friend today. The cooperage girl."
"I saw them from the window."
"She invited her to come play tomorrow." She glances at Elin. "Elin spent twenty minutes explaining the rules of whatever game they were playing."
"I noticed." I watch my daughter gesture emphatically with the wooden horse. "She gets that from you."
Maris makes a sound of protest and keeps crocheting.
The square settles around us into the end of the afternoon — stall holders closing up, the fountain catching the last of the gold light, a dog crossing the cobblestones on its own business. Ordinary. Unchanged and changing, both at once.
"I've been thinking," Maris says.
"About what."
She turns the work in her hands and doesn't quite look at me. "Elin's going to keep looking more like you. Every month." She glances at the square. "It would be easier for her, eventually, if she had someone else around who looked like her."
I study the side of her face. She's watching Elin with the expression she wears when she's already decided something and is presenting it as an open question.
"A sibling," I say.
"Not immediately." She pulls a loop through. "Elin first. But — eventually." She does glance at me now, briefly. "If that's something you'd want."
I look at Elin, who has placed Pip on the horse's back and is now conducting some kind of procession across the stoop. The grey of her skin is warm in the afternoon light. Her ears catch the sun.
"Yes," I say. "That's something I'd want."
Maris nods once, satisfied, and goes back to her crochet.
We sit while the sun drops behind the roofline and the square goes to early shadow.
Elin's procession continues. The wool in Maris's lap grows by steady increments.
My arm stays around her shoulders and she stays where she is, and the bench is solid beneath us and the bakery door at our backs is warm from the day's ovens.
Eighty years of arriving and leaving and arriving somewhere else. Dozens of towns that looked like this one and none of them that felt like it.
My eyes take in the square, at my daughter on the stoop, at the woman beside me who built something worth staying for without knowing I was going to stay.
This is the last place I'm going to leave.