Chapter 14 #2
Maggie’s tray has gone flat against the inside of her elbow after two blocks of holding, and she has not lifted the cloth yet. The children are saving their nerve for the bonfire end, because they have done this before. She has not.
A boy in a heron mask runs up alongside her at the corner of Main and Fourth, stops half a step short, looks at the cloth on the tray, looks up at her face, and does not say anything.
“Not yet,” she says, gentle.
He nods at the cloth and runs back to his line.
I am two paces ahead of her and I do not turn around, but not yet lands at the back of my neck in the voice she uses at five when the door is locked, and it stays there the rest of the block.
Up ahead Auntie lifts her free hand once, palm down and flat, and the line slows. Two hundred feet of gravel between us and the bonfire. I count the candles without turning around. Twenty-seven. I don’t say so aloud. Behind me the tray on Maggie’s arm has not shifted.
The bonfire stack is the cedar and oak we hauled out here at the start of the week, the cedar Korren cut and the oak Olmar split, the whole of it twice my height. The wood is not yet lit. The sky above the water has gone the color of a fired iron pan.
Auntie steps off the gravel onto the packed dirt at the perimeter, and the line stops without anyone telling it to.
The brass bowl boy comes forward, six years old, fox mask up on his forehead, striker loose in his fist. He has been told what to do.
He looks at Auntie, and she nods once, and that is the permission.
He strikes.
The brass takes the note clean. It rings low, a tone that goes into the chest and stays half a beat after the bowl itself is quiet. Auntie lifts her hand and lets it fall, Olmar leans in with the lantern from his belt and tips the wick to the kindling, kindling to cedar, cedar to oak.
Orange starts at the bottom and climbs.
I have watched this fire come up forty-three times. I have not once watched it come up next to a woman in an oatmeal cardigan with a tray on her arm and the cloth not yet lifted. Her breath has just begun a shape it has not made before. The tray has not shifted. She is watching the wood.
The light catches her face, the heron mask still tipped back on her hair, and her mouth has come open and stayed there.
The children break first. Ten seconds of quiet at the base of the fire.
Then a small bear two paces from Olmar laughs at the heat hitting his nose, a fox laughs at the bear, and they’re moving.
The line dissolves into a ring around the stack.
Hands come up and lanterns come down, and faces turn pink before they turn gold.
A small dark shape works the edge of the fire ring. Olmar’s hand goes down without looking, and the cat lets it land.
Auntie crosses to the long table the boys set up at four, where three trays of ren-keva sit under cloth. Voshen made them. I helped. The honey came from Olmar’s hives, and the clove came from the jar with the chipped lid.
She lifts the first cloth, and the smell goes up before the bread does, honey and clove and the small bitter of the orange peel she puts in the dough for the warding side of the gift. A child on my left makes a sound that has nothing to do with English.
Auntie does not call the children up. She does not have to. They come.
Three trays, eight to a tray, twenty-four for the children. I helped count.
Maggie’s tray is the fourth.
She is a quarter step behind me on my right with the cloth still folded ready to lift, and she has not lifted it, because she is waiting for Auntie to give her the line.
Auntie has not turned around. She is handing a kid in a fox mask the warm thing in both his hands, and the kid holds it like a problem he plans to solve.
I turn a quarter step, not toward Auntie, toward Maggie.
Look at her, boy. The grandmother voice arrives at low volume, like she said it when I was twelve and had just spotted a thing I was already going to do.
The cloth on Maggie’s tray is warm against the back of my hand from the bread under it. The bread is gold with dark at the seam, eight of them, a thumb’s width across and a thumb’s width thick. The one nearest the corner is mine to take.
It does not go to a child.
It goes to her.
The lift is small, hand to hand, my right palm to the underside of her right palm with the bread between us and the heat of it coming through both.
The nickel band is warm from the tray. She takes it, and her hand does not close around it right away.
She holds it like you hold a cup somebody has brought you in their own kitchen.
Across the bonfire Auntie’s chin lifts. I do not look at her face, and I do not need to. The chin has done that since I was eight.
Olmar to my left has gone still, the kind of still he goes when he has seen a thing and decided to say nothing about it. Hattie is half a step behind him with her own bread in her hand, and she does not pretend not to see.
Maggie’s hand closes around the ren-keva.
“You,” she says, the word coming out in a voice I have not heard from her in the seven hours of this day, not the bell and not the kitchen but lower than both. “Harsk.”
“Yes.”
She looks at the bread in her hand. She looks at me. She doesn’t eat it yet.
“That is not for me.”
“It is now.”
A beat of fire, the crack of green cedar at the base, a child laughing forty feet off, the heat on the right side of my face.
She lifts the bread to her mouth and bites.
Thirty years of bread, and three hundred first bites I have watched, give or take. Her mouth moves once. Her eyes close for the length of one breath and open again.
“Oh,” she says.
The word is small, and she does not say anything after it.
She balances the tray on her left forearm with her right hand still at the half-eaten bread, and she does not say anything else.
Across the fire Auntie hands a ren-keva to the dove girl, and the dove girl looks past Auntie at Maggie holding the bread that came from my hand, and there is a flicker in her face of something a child will ask about later.
Veshar comes up at the edge of the table with his lantern still at his belt and takes a ren-keva in both hands and with no comment. He nods at the tray on Maggie’s arm. She lifts the cloth so he can take a second one. He takes the one she offered and drifts back toward the heat.
The bonfire pops once and throws a small ember to the gravel, where it goes out before I have to step on it.
Olmar at my elbow does not speak, and Hattie behind him does not either.
Maggie sets her tray on the long table next to Auntie’s three, and the back of her hand brushes mine for the count of one breath as she does it.
She does not look at me. She takes a step toward the children to begin handing the bread out, the fourth set of hands now.
Voshen taught her the move with the wrist all week, and she has it.
The second ren-keva of the night goes to a small stag in a coat too big for him, and he takes it in both hands, and Maggie says something low to him and he laughs. The laugh is one she has earned, and the earning shows in her shoulders.
Auntie crosses behind me and does not stop, but she puts her hand at the small of my back for the length of one step and then she is past. The hand was not heavy.
The fire is at full height, and the heat pushes at our backs. A step back from it puts the cold on my shoulders. My hand is empty. The cloth I lifted is on the corner of the table where she set it back down, folded with the edges square.
Maggie turns her head over her shoulder and finds me at six feet ten in the dark behind the light. She does not smile. Her eyes hold mine a beat, steady, the look that is not a smile and means more than one, and then she turns back to the children.
The bowl boy strikes the brass a second time, and the note travels. In twenty minutes the children will go home, and in an hour the fire will come down, and the walk back is two blocks of dark and a flight of stairs that has never had her on it.
The pencil stub is in the pocket of my coat. My thumb finds the four sides of it. One, two, three, four.
I step back into the dark at the edge of the light and wait for her.
The walk back from the gravel turnout is two blocks of dark and one of streetlamp.
The fire is behind us, and the smell of cedar smoke is on her sweater and on the back of my coat.
Twenty paces of mine are forty of hers. She does not match my pace and I do not slow to match hers, and we arrive at the back door of Finley’s at the same time anyway.
Pine Street is empty. The lamp above the door is five years overdue for a new bulb, low and yellow, and everything in the throw of it is either copper or shadow.
Her shoulder is at my elbow. Her hand is at her side, the tray left behind at the fire, and the nickel band catches the lamp once and goes back to wood-colored.
The key for the back door is on my belt.
I take it off and put it into the lock and turn it without looking at her face.
The door opens. Presso comes around the corner of the prep counter from inside, half ear up, takes a single step toward me, sees who is behind me, and stops.
She does not come any closer. She sits as I hold the door, and Maggie steps in behind her.
There is a beat at the threshold where her shoulder touches the door jamb and her boot makes a half-pause, the foot deciding what the head has already decided. The pause is small. It is also the longest beat of my night.
She goes through. I close the door and lock it. The key goes back on my belt, because that’s where the key lives.
The stairs to the upstairs are at the back of the prep room, wood, steep enough to count, fifteen years of going up them at the end of nights nobody walked next to me.
“This way,” I say.
“Alright.”
I count to four in Orcish in my head at the bottom step. The count is for the door at the top. Not for her.