11. Marion
Marion
I’d been at the workbench forty minutes, grinding a root finer than it needed to go, watching him through the window.
It was mid-day, and he came out at the back with the spade in his hand.
He didn't ask. He walked the length of the herb bed without looking at me, set the blade in the soil at the far end of the rosemary line, and began to dig.
The rosemary bed had needed turning since the spring before last, and I told myself, every season, that I'd get to it before the next one ended.
I hadn't. The man at the back of my garden read the work my hands hadn't gotten to and put his own hands to it without asking me whether he could.
I should have been angry about it. Because of the hum in my sternum, I wasn't.
From the workbench, I could see his sleeves up to the elbow and the line of his forearm working, and feel the hum doing something to my body.
I crossed the kitchen twice to take him water. The second time, he didn't ask me. I took it anyway.
When the afternoon came, I crossed the kitchen again with the empty water-jug in my hand and stopped in the back doorway.
The light across the yard shone on the cottage, and the man coming back from the herb bed was outlined against it.
He had the spade in one hand. He had mud to the elbow.
There was a smear of mud high on his cheekbone where he wiped his face with the back of his wrist an hour ago and forgot about it.
I didn’t know why I noticed all these things.
He stopped at the back step. He set the spade against the wall and looked at me, and didn't move further.
His shoulders came down, which made the hum in me go three notes deeper. He didn't even look like a man who'd been working in a herb bed. He looked like a man who'd spent six years on a stump on a hill and had finally come down onto level ground.
I should have said something. Like the cottage, I was a doorway with a brass latch, and the right of the woman in the doorway was to speak first or not speak at all. So, I did something daring.
I didn't speak.
I reached up and wiped the mud off his cheek instead.
I did it without thinking. The hand that only ever touched the cheek of a boy found itself with the confidence to smear off mud from the cheekbone of the boy's father.
There was no beat between deciding and doing.
My hand was at his cheekbone with the small smear under my thumb before I told my hand to lift at all.
I had never been a woman who reached without thinking.
His hand wrapped around my wrist before I finished the wipe.
He didn't take it roughly. He took my wrist carefully, his thumb flat against the soft inside where the pulse was. And the pulse, under his thumb, was doing the thing the kettle did when the pressure dropped — a clear note my body had no business making in a doorway.
He held my wrist. He didn't move further. He looked at me and I looked at him, and the hum in my chest had never been louder. It was under his thumb, where the skin was thin — he could feel it through the pad of his thumb as I felt it through the bone, and we both knew he could.
He let go.
He didn't let go fast. He lowered my hand, and the warmth of his palm went off my wrist slowly.
I went back into the kitchen.
I didn't look at him. I crossed to the workbench, and picked up the small linen bundle I was tying for the peddler's order at the weekend.
I heard the basin on the back step. The careful steady run of water over the meat of his forearms. The splash he made with his hands at his face. The wringing of the cloth. I heard him take the cloth back inside the porch and set it on its hook.
He came in after a few minutes with his sleeves rolled up and the smear gone from his cheekbone, and he stopped at the edge of the workbench, still at that respectful arm's length, not touching my tools.
I didn't look up.
Cain looked at the row of ingredients in front of us.
"Rosemary, valerian, elderflower," he said, in the careful voice he used in the kitchen at the end of the afternoon. "Sleeping draught for a wolf-mother whose pup won't settle."
My hands stopped on the bench.
I looked at him for the first time since he came into the kitchen.
"How do you know that?"
He didn't answer for a beat. He looked at the three small things on the bench and not at me.
"My mother." His voice came lower. "She brewed it for me. The kitchen at Swiftwater smelled the same way your kitchen smells, when I was a child."
I didn't speak for a long beat.
I carried, for weeks, a quiet picture of the Alpha of Swiftwater as a man born in a stone keep with a sword in his hand. The man at my workbench was a child in a kitchen that smelled of valerian and elderflower. I didn't have a shelf for it.
I put the rosemary back. I lifted the kettle off the trivet and set it back on for the second time that afternoon.
"Tell me about her. If you want to."
Save for Theodora, I had never asked any adult to tell me about their mother.
He took the cup. He sat down at the kitchen table for the first time without permission, and held the cup in both hands as if it needed steadying, and he told me.
He told me about a dark woman who ran the household magics at Swiftwater before his father's mother decided the practice was too far below the dignity of an Alpha's wife and put a stop to it.
He told me about the kettle on her stove.
About the herb bed at the south wall of the inner court she was allowed to keep when the rest of her work was taken from her.
About the sleeping draught she still made him in her own chambers, in secret, until she died of a bad winter when he was eleven.
He didn't tell it long. Two minutes, if that. He stopped where the cold winter ended and the rest of the keep began, and he drank his tea.
"What was her name?" I asked.
"Ilse."
I held the cup in both hands and watched him drink. He went still — the stillness I’d learned meant the wolf in him was close.
The corner of my mouth moved.
It was a small private smile; slow at the corner.
Cain saw the smile.
He didn't look away. He didn't move.
My smile grew wider.
* * *
I served supper an hour later.
The stew had been on the back of the stove since morning and the bread was the loaf Cain brought up from the village days ago along with a wedge of cheese. I set the three bowls down at the table — mine at one end, Cain's at the other, Noah's between us at the long side — and I sat down.
It was the first time Noah ate with both his ‘parents’ at the table. He didn't seem to think about the table or the parents. He held his spoon in one hand and his bread in the other and scanned both our faces.
I caught him watching before he caught himself.
Cain ate slowly. He didn't eat well in the first weeks at my table and he was eating better now, and the pace of his spoon was the pace of a man learning that food at a table could feel like home.
Noah looked from me to Cain and back to me.
"Mommy?" Noah began.
"Mmm?"
"Are you going to marry him?"
I laughed.
It came out of my throat like a brittle thing, and I hadn't heard that laugh out of my own mouth in eight years.
Noah looked at both of us with the careful attention of a nine-year-old who asked a question he thought was a simple question, and then, knowing he might not get an answer yet, he went back to his stew.
I picked up my spoon, and put it back down. Picked up my bread instead.
“Eat your supper, Noah,” I told him.
“I am, Mommy."
“You're asking instead of eating.”
"You didn't answer."
The corner of Cain's mouth moved, a wry smile. I saw it move because I looked across the table at him for one half-beat before I remembered I wasn't going to. He was holding a sound in his throat, like he didn’t trust himself to let it out at the table.
I still had no answer for Noah, even though the most obvious one would’ve been no, I’m not marrying him. But part of me did not want to say that. So I stayed silent, and ate.
Sleep wasn’t kind to me that night.
The hum from my wrist that afternoon had moved into my ribs and stayed there as I lay in my bed. I turned onto my side. Then onto my back. I put one hand on my sternum like I put it there the morning after that dream, and still sleep remained unkind to me.
I rose at the first light.
The cottage was quiet. Cain was already in the yard, and Noah was still asleep with the wooden bird tucked under his arm.
I dressed and took my shawl off the peg by the door.
I took the wooden bucket and the carrying-stick off the porch and went out to the river.
The shallow turn east of the cottage had been my water-place for years.
I’d walked this path a hundred times. I knew where the stones were under the soil and where the roots came up at the bend, and I knew the exact angle of the descent through the trees where the path dropped down to the gravel bank.
I walked it slowly, and let the bucket rest against my hip. The woods between Swiftwater and Brackenhold were full of bird-song at that hour, and the low hum of bees in the heather. The air smelled of pine sap, warm earth, and the cold mineral edge of the water somewhere ahead.
I let my shoulders come down slightly.
The kitchen, the workbench, the cottage — it was all tiring, and I carried it without putting any of it down. The path to the river was the first ten minutes of the morning with nothing to carry.
I let my shoulders come down a fraction further.
The path turned, the trees opened. The bank dropped away to the gravel and the shallow turn of the water below. The sound of the river came up under the bird-song, and I started to slowly descend.
The hand at my back was so quick I didn't see it.
I didn't feel someone behind me until the hand was already on my shoulder-blade — flat, hard, the heel of the palm low and the fingers wide — and I had time, in the half-beat before the bank dropped away, to think one thing and nothing else:
This isn't how a body falls.
Then the water took me.