12. Chapter Twelve
Chapter Twelve
Beckett
We ate together most nights, all of us who weren't standing watch, and it was the nearest thing to family dinners I had left.
Not for reasons I would have said out loud.
It was only that I built this place out of a hole in myself, and dinner was one of the few hours in the day when I could feel that hole actually filling—everyone fed, everyone in one room, everyone safe.
The long tables filled. The hearth threw its gold up the stone.
Mara and her crew brought the pots down off the fire; mushroom and barley, root vegetables cooked soft and sweet, the last of the fall's dried venison shredded through for the idea of meat if not the weight of it.
We were short on fat and long on everything else, the same sentence I'd been writing every winter for five years, and somehow Mara could make even that taste like somebody loved you.
That was her gift. I kept the lights on. She made the light worth sitting under.
I didn't sit, mostly. I moved. Filled cups for the old ones whose hands shook, carried the heavy pot so nobody wrenched a back doing it, took the seat nearest the passage only when there was nothing left to carry.
Five years of habit set me between the room and the dark whether I chose it or not.
From there I could see all of it. Eighty-odd faces gone warm in the firelight, fed and safe for one more night on a mountain that would have killed every one of them given the chance.
For years that had been enough to look at. Just that.
It stopped being enough sometime in the last three weeks, and I knew exactly what changed it. I was doing a poor job of not looking straight at her.
She sat where I left the place for her without ever telling her I left it—the far end, back to the stone, the whole room in front of her and one door in her sightline.
I've done it on purpose the second night.
By the fourth I was doing it without thinking, which was worse.
A body learns what another body needs and then it just provides it, quiet, the way you bank a fire.
I told myself it was only good sense. You don't make a wary person sit with her back to a room; you'll lose her if you do.
That was true. It also wasn't the whole of why, and I got too old to pretend I couldn't tell the two apart.
Nessa had her horse back. She came for it that morning like I told her she could, solemn as a churchwarden, turned the mended leg over under the lamp from every angle, and pronounced it healed, and it hadn't left her fist since.
Now she clambered onto the bench beside me, uninvited, the way she climbed on everyone, and set the horse galloping down the table edge toward the woman three seats along.
"Look," she informed Trigger. "Beckett fixed it. It sleeped in his workshop."
"Slept," Trigger said.
"It slept in his workshop and now it's all better." Nessa studied her across the horse with the flat enormous seriousness only the very young can manage. "You're his friend now too. He fixes his friends. He went out in the storm and fixed you."
Something went sideways under my ribs. I opened my mouth to set the record straight—the record needed it badly—and found there was no version of the correction that didn't dig the hole deeper.
Down the table, one of the old men laughed into his cup.
"He fixes his friends," he repeated, delighted, loud enough for the near half of the table to catch it. "That what we're calling it now."
"Eat your supper," I said.
"I am eating my supper. A man can eat his supper and observe the world at the same time.
" He pointed his spoon at me, then swung it down the table to where Trigger sat gone very still over her bowl.
"I been observing. Three weeks of it. You know how many times I've watched you cross this room to put more in a bowl that wasn't empty yet? "
"Her bowl was empty."
"Her bowl is never empty. You keep filling it." He sat back, vastly pleased with himself. "You don't hover over my bowl like that. I'm wounded. I thought we had a thing, you and me."
The table began to enjoy itself. I could feel it turning my way—that warm, dangerous attention, the same crowd that would carry my worst worry out under a door for me now turning to watch me squirm over the one thing I couldn't hand any of them.
"She's a guest," I said. "Through the cold snap. Then she'll go her own way."
I heard it the second it left me. Heard how many times I said it. And so did Mara, who was working down the bench with the bread and did not so much as slow her hands.
"Sure she will," Mara said, the exact words she used on me in the storeroom a week back. Half the table laughed, because half the table heard the line before too, secondhand, passed around like every other thing down here I thought I was keeping to myself.
Even Evan got in, which stung worse than the old men, because the boy so rarely dared.
"You did smile," he offered, earnest, like he was being helpful.
"Earlier. When she came in from her shift.
I saw it." Then he seemed to register, a beat too late, that he just testified against me in open court, went red to the ears, and applied himself very hard to his bowl.
I decided I would remember it the next time he asked for a day off the eastern rotation.
I looked at Trigger, because I owed her that much. She didn’t ask to be made the room's entertainment, and a woman who spent five years making herself invisible was not going to thank a table full of strangers for turning a lamp on her.
She wasn't cringing, though. That surprised me. She set her spoon down and she was looking back at the old man with a level, flat calm that would have stopped a lesser heckler where he sat.
"He fills the bowl," she said, "because he did the math on what I weighed when I walked in here, same as he does the math on everything else in this place. It's not romance. It's inventory."
The table came apart. The old man slapped the wood.
And she almost, almost, let the corner of her mouth go.
Then she caught me watching. She turned my own habits into a joke, a way to get us both out from under the room’s attention, and now I caught her at it.
For one second, across the whole gold length of that room, the two of us just looked at each other, both holding back the same not-quite-laugh.
We were in on the same thing—the joke, and the truth under it, and the thin space between the two.
Then she picked her spoon back up, and I bent to stack the empty pot, and the room saw all of it, every bit, and had the grace to half-pretend they didn’t.
Maddox came in near the end, snow still melting off his shoulders, and got himself a bowl and ate it standing, the way a man eats when he's been out too long to sit down politely.
He said nothing in front of the room. But he found my eye over the heads of the others and gave the smallest tip of his chin toward the passage.
Later. I gave him the same back, and none of it was for anyone else to read.
Not tonight. Whatever he walked in carrying, it would keep till the tables cleared. That was another thing I learned the hard way. You don't crack the mountain open over your people's one warm hour. You let them have the hour. The dark would still be waiting when the bowls were washed.
Later, when the common room thinned to the clean-up crew and the two old men banking the fire and arguing about it, I went down to my own room forty feet under. I sat on the edge of the bed I built. And I did the thing I’ve been putting off all night…I told myself the truth.
I was in trouble.
Not the useful kind. Not the kind with a fix in it; a fuel line, a fence, a count run short that you solve with your hands and your hours and a good night's cursing.
The other kind. The kind I spent five years making sure never got near me again, because I knew what it would cost, and I already paid it once.
There wasn't enough of me left over to pay it twice.
I loved three people in my life all the way down to the bottom of myself.
The world took all three inside a season.
And I built this whole mountain over the crater that left so I never again had to stand at the edge and look straight down into it.
That was the trade. I kept everyone alive, but I let myself love no one.
Keeping no one was the price of keeping everyone alive.
For five years I paid that price, and I had the nerve to call the numbness peace.
Then a starving woman leveled a rifle at my heart and wouldn't give me her name. Three weeks on and I was crossing a full room to fill a bowl that wasn't empty, and the whole place could read the shape of it before I would let myself say the word for it.
Love. Such a small, dumb word for a thing that could level everything I built.
Because that was what the old man's spoon pointed at. That was the thing under Mara's sure she will. The danger was never that she would leave. I could live through her leaving; I lived through worse than a stranger walking back out into the snow.
The danger was that she would stay. That I let her all the way in, past the walls, into the room I kept swept and empty in the middle of myself.
And then the mountain would do what the mountain always did—what it was already limbering up to do somewhere past the tarn, in the killing cold. And it would take her too.
And there is no building tall enough to raise over a crater like that one. Nothing left to keep the lights on for.
Up in the high country, things that shouldn't be walking were walking uphill in the dark, and Maddox was standing by the passage right now waiting to tell me how many.
That was a fear with teeth. But it was a fear I knew the shape of; you count it, you plan it, you put your body between it and your people until your body quits.
I lay back in the dark and found, God help me, that I'd sooner face that one.
That I'd rather climb the mountain toward the things in the snow than walk the corridor toward the thing at the end of my own dinner table.
The things in the snow could only kill me, and the woman on that bench could do something I had no wall built against at all.
She could make me want to live through it.