Chapter 1 #2
I lead the horse north on foot, the wagon creaking, Bramble riding the seat like a small furious king surveying a kingdom that has wronged him.
The houses thin and get older the further I go.
The fair-noise falls away behind me into a hum I can still feel through the ground.
The light goes from gold to that deep honeyed amber that means I have an hour before true dark, maybe less.
I am not, strictly, incapable of finding a straight road.
I have simply never met one that agreed with me.
This one is no different. I take what I am sure is the north lane, and it decides, after a hundred paces, to become somebody’s washing yard.
Three lines of wet linen drop toward my head.
A woman up to her elbows in a tub looks at me, my wagon, and my furious goose.
She has the patience of someone who has seen stranger things come through on fair week, and long since stopped asking why.
“Sorry,” I tell her. “Wrong turning.”
“Most people’s are, dear,” she says, and goes back to her wash.
I back the whole rig out from under her laundry, apologizing the entire way, and try again. I find the tannery, or a tannery, and the fork just past it. I take the left of it, dead certain, same as I always am right before I am wrong. It ends at a cow byre and one cow who could not care less.
“This is not a workshop,” I tell her.
She agrees by doing nothing at all.
I turn the whole rig around, which takes three apologies and one very insulted goose. I go back, take the right fork instead, and that one curves and forks again somewhere past a stand of birches. I lose the river altogether, which should not even be possible. A whole river. Gone.
“I am not lost,” I tell the horse, who has heard this before and does not believe me any more than the horse before her did. “I am scouting. There’s a difference.”
There isn’t. That’s the thing about me. I could get lost between my own two feet if you gave me long enough.
The loose box knocks behind me, board on board, a small wooden heartbeat keeping time with my wasted steps. It thumps hard enough that I hear a bee’s answering buzz go sharp and unhappy inside. I stop the wagon, climb up, and put my palm flat against the wood.
“I know,” I say, low, close to the seam where the frame has slipped. “I know it’s a rough road tonight. We’re almost there. Hold on a little longer for me.”
It’s an old habit, older than me by a good margin.
The woman who raised me talked to her bees the same way, every day of her life, rain or shine or grief.
She told me once, near the end of her, that a hive would forgive you almost anything if you were honest with it first. I didn’t understand her then.
I still tell the bees anyway, some nights out here with the dark coming on and nobody else to talk to.
It’s the one thing of hers I never had to lose along the road. Most nights, it still works.
The hum settles. Not happy. Patient, maybe. I will take patient.
The light keeps going. My feet hurt. For one low moment, walking a lane I do not know behind bees I cannot fix fast enough, the brightness I keep over everything wears thin.
The whole shape of the road sits there underneath it, plain as the boards knocking behind me.
Every town I have rolled into just like this one.
Every one I have rolled back out of again before anyone could get too used to having me around.
I breathe in instead. Wax, and dust, and somewhere under both of those, faint but real, the green cut smell of fresh-sawn oak.
There. My nose again. The one thing about me that never lies.
I follow it, off the lane I was never sure of anyway, straight across a stubble field.
The horse blows at the change of ground, and Bramble is outraged at the indignity of grass under his feet.
The smell goes from a thread to a wall, oak and something warmer under it, beeswax maybe.
I come out through a gap in a hedge at the edge of the trees.
Bramble stops complaining.
It is so sudden I almost walk into the horse.
He has hissed and honked and cursed the whole road since the fair gates.
Now, with a workshop in plain sight and lamplight spilling gold across a yard stacked high with pale seasoning wood, he goes rigid on the wagon seat.
Neck low, one orange eye fixed past the buildings, locked on the dark line of trees rising beyond them.
He does not honk. He does not move. He just watches the wood go up the hill into full dark.
Something in his stillness is so unlike him that the hair lifts along my arms before I have decided to be afraid of anything at all.
“It’s only trees,” I tell him, and put a hand flat on his back to feel him breathing, quick and light under my palm.
He does not agree or disagree. He only goes on watching the hill, silent, until I click my tongue at the horse and we move past the gap toward the lamp.
Then, and only then, does he shake himself out of it and go back to hating everyone in reach.
I decide it is the strange place, or a fox on the wind, or nothing at all, and I do not look at the trees again.
The workshop is a good one. Timber framed, tall, a yard of oak and ash stacked in long true ranks under a roof somebody built to last and meant to keep that way.
Lamplight low and gold in a wide open doorway.
The sound of a tool going against grain inside, slow and even, a sound like something being talked down out of a temper.
I’ve walked up to a great many strangers’ doors in my life. I square my shoulders, wipe my hands on my skirt because they’ve gone to wax and nicks again same as always, and lead the horse into the yard.
“Hello the house,” I call. “I am sorry, I know it’s late.”
The tool stops.
He comes to the doorway, and I have to tip my head all the way back to find his face.
He fills the whole frame of it, shoulder and forearm, a head and a half taller than me and built to match.
The lamp sits behind him, so for a moment he is only a shape, two tusks catching what light gets around the edges of him.
Then he steps down into the yard, and the last of the day finds his face proper, grey-green and weathered like river stone.
His eyes, when they land on me, are a dark warm gold I would know anywhere in the world.
It is the exact color I pull out of a good comb in a fine linden year, and sell for twice what the clover fetches.
He looks at me. He looks at the goose. He looks at the wagon, the crooked wheel, the whole travel-worn length of my life parked in his yard. Every line of his face says no before he opens his mouth.
“There’s no room in town.” His voice comes up from somewhere under the floorboards. “You know that, or you wouldn’t be at my door.”
“I do know that,” I say. “I’m not here for the room.
” I am, more than anything, here for the room.
“I’m here for the box. My hive’s sprung its joint on the road, and I’ve got bees to move into it tonight or lose them.
Half the fair sent me to you and said you’re the best joiner in three valleys and the worst company in all of them.
So I thought, well. I don’t need him to be good company. I just need him to be good.”
He looks past me at the box for the first time, at the crack of it visible even in this light. Something in his face sharpens, the look of a man just handed a puzzle he already knows how to solve.
“Bring it round back,” he says. “I’ll look at it before I bank the fire.”
Something happens at the corner of his mouth. Small, grudging, nothing you could call a smile. But it moves.
Bramble picks that exact moment to launch himself off the wagon seat and hiss at him with his entire body, wings out, neck low. It is the full performance he saves for people who have offended him just by existing.
The orc looks down at one furious one-eyed goose declaring war on him in his own yard, and does not step back an inch.
“That,” he says, “is the ugliest creature I have ever seen.”
“He knows,” I say. “He’s very proud of it.”
The man who does not like the look of anyone crouches down slow, to put himself eye to eye with my horrible goose, patient as a held breath. I stand in his yard in the last of the light with my whole broken life behind me, and something turns over, unhurried, low in my chest.
I think, oh.
Oh, this is going to be trouble.