21. Room to Work
Room to Work
When the second plot was finally done he leaned on the shovel and looked the garden over.
"There. More ground than I had a use for last year." He ran his eye down the rows. "I'll get you into potatoes, and then we'll see about the rest."
"Kain."
Oren came down the road at a run, and Kain straightened up off the shovel. The boy looked to be in a hurry, and the light was getting on toward evening, which likely meant the one thing.
"What's wrong?" Kain walked over to meet him.
"It's Sasha again. She's in a bind down at the Kettle and sent me to fetch you."
"Tell her I'm coming." Kain fished a copper from his pocket and flipped it to the boy. "For the run."
Oren caught it, and Kain went for the barn. He saddled Roan and rode up the road toward town, and came up on the Kettle to find a crowd of horses tied along the rail out front.
The place was drawing more strangers than it ever had, word of it getting around since the festival.
He took Roan around back and tied him there, then came in through the rear. Sasha was moving fast between the tables and the bar, hard-pressed to keep up with the room.
Kain caught her eye, took up a place behind the bar, and looked out over the crowd.
"What brings the lot of you?" Kain said, drawing the first ale. "Passing through?"
"Stag hunting," one of them said. "Word is the White Stag's been seen hereabouts."
"The White Stag." Kain drew the ale and set it down. He didn't doubt the creature. Dungeons turned out stranger things than a white deer, some of them so far past strange that a man came back from one unsure what he had even fought. A rare beast loose in the hills he could believe.
It was the rest of it he couldn't.
"They say if you take it down, you get a wish granted," the man said. "Mine's to be the richest man alive."
"Mine's true love," said another.
"Mine's a quiet house out in the woods, where nobody can find me," said a third.
Kain drew the next ale and said nothing.
There was no such thing as a granted wish.
He had worked for men who could buy a province and watched them want for the one thing coin wouldn't bring, and he had put his brother's flask in the ground at the corner of his own field with his own hands.
Whatever a man wished for, he built it, a day and a bit of grit at a time, and the only wish worth the name was the one a man made come true himself.
A stag couldn't hand you that. Nothing could.
His brother had wished for a farm. Kain was standing in the only wish he had left of him, and it was a long way from the one he would have asked for.
"You could just go and build the house," he said to the third man, setting the ale down in front of them, "and skip the deer." The man frowned, as though hunting a stag for it was the surer road, and to him it likely was.
He and Sasha worked the room until the crowd thinned and the last of the hunters drifted out to their fire. Matthew was on the floor by then, crawling fast across the boards, far surer of himself than he had been even a short while back.
Sasha dropped onto a bench, and Kain came around the bar.
"Something wrong?" Kain asked.
"I don't know," she said. "Yes. No. I don't know." She crossed her arms, thinking it over. "Sorry to drag you up. They all came in at once and I couldn't keep up on my own."
"That's what I'm for." Kain leaned against the bar. "You ever think about taking on help, though? I'll come when you send for me, but a boy running the road to find me is no way to keep a full house fed."
"Thought about it. Money's tight for that right now." She was quiet a moment. "What I'd want more than another pair of hands is a better kitchen."
"What's wrong with this one?" Kain asked.
"It was built for my father, who had longer arms than I do." A small smile crossed her face. "He laid it out to serve twenty a night. Most nights now I'm doing thirty, sometimes forty. I don't send for you until it's past forty, but well short of that I'm already struggling."
"How does a bigger kitchen fix it?" Kain asked.
"More stove space. More room to plate up. As it is I can lay out four or five plates at a time, no more. With a longer counter I could set out ten or fifteen and send them all at once." She spread her hands. "Room for more mugs. A second keg on tap. That kind of thing."
Kain went over and rapped his knuckles along the wall, then put his head into the kitchen. The room ran narrow, a single half-wall standing between the prep counter and the storeroom behind it.
He leaned over the half-wall and looked the whole layout over.
"Take this half-wall out, and you'd near double the room you've got to work in."
"Take it out and where do I work?" Sasha asked. "That half-wall's all my counter."
"Then we move it." Kain set a hand on the wall between the storeroom and the tavern floor.
"This one's load-bearing, so we don't just punch through it.
We cut an opening, set a header across the top to carry the weight, and frame it square.
Run a counter along the bottom for a sill.
You set the plates up on it, and folk take them from the tavern side themselves. "
"I'm starting to see it," Sasha said.
"Half of this is wasted as it stands. That half-wall eats more room than it's worth." Kain knocked it once with the side of his fist. "It'd work. And you'd have the room to put in another stove or two right along here."
"That sounds good," Sasha said. "What would it run me?"
"A few meals." Kain looked the wall over once more. "Four days. Maybe five."
"Four days?" Sasha raised an eyebrow.
"I'll start in the morning."
He rode up early the next morning and set to it. Sasha shifted her cooking to a makeshift table beside the bar and hung a sign out front about the work, awkward but workable.
Matthew watched from the floor as Kain pried the outer boards off the wall. They came away easy, the lower ones half rotted through already, near due for replacing whatever else he did.
He took the counter top off whole and set it by, then started in on the half-wall itself.
The half-wall ran nowhere near the ceiling, so it carried no load, and taking it down was simple enough. The only hard part was keeping Matthew clear of it. The boy, for his part, seemed set on getting underfoot at every turn.
As Kain pulled the side boards loose, Matthew scrambled in close and reached out a finger to touch them. Kain lifted the baby and set him back a few feet, then tore the rest of the boards free.
Behind them ran the hollow inside of the wall, strung through with old spiderwebs, and Matthew drooled and made straight for it on his hands and knees. Kain scooped him up off the floor once more.
"Not a chance." Kain set him off to the side, crossed his arms, and gave him a hard look, and Matthew sat down and stared right back up at him. Kain held the look a moment, then carried the loose boards out the back door where he had been piling the scrap.
By the time he came back, Matthew was in among the rubble again, turning a long nail over in his fingers.
"Your mother would skin me if she saw that." Kain took the nail away and lifted him up, and Matthew looked at him without the least concern.
Sasha was out in the front room just then, sweeping up and wiping down the tables. Kain looked about, then dragged a few chairs over, tipped them onto their sides, and fenced off a little square with them, and set Matthew down inside it. The baby looked up at him with an air of profound injustice.
"Sorry, partner. All's fair in love, war, and carpentry."
He came in to it day after day. The top boards off the old counter were still smooth and sound, and those he set aside to keep. The rest he hauled down to the farm a load at a time to burn.
By the time the last of it was out, the half-wall was gone and the storeroom ran straight on into the kitchen as though it had always been the one room.
It opened up more room than even Kain had reckoned on. The half-wall had been thicker than either of them guessed, and pulling it out gave back the counter's footprint, the wall itself, and a dead corner of the storeroom besides, a space that had been too cramped to stack another barrel in.
Sasha walked out across the bare floor, taking it all in.
"This is going to be something," she said.
"Haven't cut the serving opening through to the tavern yet, but that's short work. A few hours to break the hole through, a few more to set the header and frame it square so it isn't just a raw gap in the wall."
"The counter runs right there, along that wall.
" Sasha whistled. "Near twice as long, and storage under the whole of it.
Every one of those barrels fits right under there.
" She started pointing as she went. "Which frees up that wall over there.
I'll shift the wash station across to it, closer to the back door, so it's less of a haul with the water, and no splashing it near the food.
And with the wash station moved, I've room for a second stove right here.
Oh, and I'll finally have the space for a grinder.
You've no idea how long I've wanted a grinder. "
"What for?" Kain asked.
"Meat. Vegetables. You can put near anything through it, and it's far cheaper than buying it ground already." Sasha rubbed her hands together. "This is going to change everything."
Kain took up a piece of chalk and started marking her ideas onto the bare wall as fast as she gave them. Her voice climbed and quickened as she planned, running on ahead of his hand, and he kept after it as best he could.
"And I'll hang the pots over here. Right now they're shut in the back and the mice get into them. A second counter here, and I'll move this across to there. We'll want a second flue run up for the new stove, but that's no great trouble."
Kain marked it all down along the bare wall as she went, line after line of it. The kitchen had years of solved problems stored up in her head, and all he had needed to do was give her the room to lay them out.