Chapter 2
Madoc
The oak fights me for the first inch, then gives, easy.
Good oak always does, once it decides you mean it.
I roll the chisel a shade flatter and the curl comes up clean and pale, sweet with the smell of the tree it used to be.
My hand finds the shavings pile at my knee without me looking for it.
It’s done this long enough it doesn’t need my eyes anymore.
Threshold sills, pulled from the old fair-stall frames when the committee hauled them out of the shed this spring and found the bottoms gone soft with rot.
Cut a fresh mark, true up the face, drop them back under the doorframes before the gates open.
Work I could do half asleep, and most of this week I have.
This one won’t sit right.
I set it flat and sight down the length of it, the care I’d give any beam before I trusted a roof to it. I find nothing wrong with my eyes. The face is true. The mark’s cut clean, deep enough, at the same hand’s angle as the rest of them. It ought to slide home in that doorframe like it grew there.
Instead there’s a drag low in it, a strain sitting where no strain has business sitting in oak this dry.
I’ve felt that particular wrongness before, in bridge timber a season before high water took the footing out from under it.
I felt it in a siege ramp two days before the far end let go and put six men in a ditch that wasn’t meant for them.
I don’t feel it, as a rule, in a stall sill some carpenter cut before I was born, out of wood that’s had three winters to finish drying.
It’s had time to settle into whatever it’s going to be.
I set my palm flat against it and wait. Wood doesn’t answer in words. It only tells me where the strain sits and leaves me to guess at the rest. A man’s shoulders will do the same, carrying a weight he’s never once named out loud.
My grandmother had a tale for this, told to me back before I’d have thought to doubt her.
Something about a green that has to be paid, and marks the old orcs used to cut fresh into a doorframe every high summer.
Whatever came collecting would find the house warded, so it went, and pass on by.
She told it low, half-laughing at her own telling, as if she didn’t quite believe it herself.
She told it anyway, because it had been handed down to her and she’d nothing better to do with it than pass it along.
I believed it at six. I stopped believing it somewhere around the first time I built a real wall and learned what holds one up, in truth.
It’s a fireside tale. It has no more business in a plank of oak than luck has in a plumb line.
I plane it again anyway. Twice. It still won’t take the mark clean, so I set it with the others that won’t and pick up the next.
I spent longer than I like admitting learning to hear a beam before it goes.
Siege work teaches a man that fast, if the man wants to go on breathing.
I built the things that broke the other side’s walls, and the things that carried our own weight over rivers that didn’t want crossing.
I got good at both, good enough that command stopped asking whether a structure would hold, and started asking only how long.
I’ve never once been proud of how often I was right.
When the war ended I didn’t go back to my clan, and I didn’t stay a soldier either.
I came here instead, north edge of a town nobody important has ever bothered to hear of, and I built things people keep instead of things they lose.
Hives. Cradles. Cart wheels. Most of the fair’s own stalls stand on legs I cut with my own hands.
It suits me well enough. A man who spent a war learning exactly how a thing fails doesn’t want for work when he decides, after, to build the kind that doesn’t.
The light’s long gone amber by the time I give up on the last sill worth trying tonight.
I don’t bank the fire yet. I light the lamp instead and take up the smoothing plane.
I run it down the rail of a cradle I promised a woman on the river road, for her daughter’s naming day.
I lose myself a while in the sound of it, that long even hiss of steel over grain.
It asks nothing of me and gives the same back.
It’s the best kind of quiet I know. Work instead of silence.
Silence by itself has never been a thing I trust. It’s only a held breath that hasn’t decided yet what it’s holding for.
A wheel comes up the field track outside, uneven, one beat lower than the other three, like a man walking with a stone caught in his boot.
Under it, fainter, a board knocking loose against its own frame every turn.
And under both of those, a goose making a sound I’ve never once heard a goose make.
A long ragged string of war noise, fit for something built twice its size.
I set the plane down.
Nobody comes up this lane after dark unless they’re lost or selling something. Or in trouble bad enough that a joiner’s shop at the edge of the wood looked better than turning back toward town. I go to the door already guessing which.
A woman’s voice comes out of the dark of my yard, hailing the house, an apology in it for the hour.
That one wasn’t in my guessing.
I go to the doorway. She’s small enough I have to look down and find her past the horse’s head, past a wagon with a wheel gone crooked.
A crack runs the whole length of the middle box lashed to its back, ash by the color, sprung bad at the corner joint.
A goose is doing everything short of catching fire on the seat behind her.
She looks like she’s walked the last mile on will alone and nothing under it.
Face gone thin with tired. Dust ground into her skirt at the knee.
Hands nicked up, the exact wear a woman gets from wax and edges both, every day, for years.
I read all of it before I’ve decided one single thing about her.
It’s no different from reading a beam before I trust my weight to it.
Wagon wants a wheelwright. Box wants a joiner tonight or she loses the hive in it by morning.
And she wants a bed. By the state of her, she’s not going to find one anywhere in town tonight, or she wouldn’t be standing in my yard asking a stranger instead.
I step down off the sill into the yard.
She tips her head clean back to find the whole of me. Most people do, the first time. She doesn’t flinch doing it, though. That tells me something too, though I couldn’t say yet what.
I already know what I’m going to say before I open my mouth.
There’s been no room in this town since noon, and I told myself an hour back I was done answering that particular knock tonight.
I say it anyway, because it needs saying, and because looking at her a while longer doesn’t change the truth of it, whatever else it might do.
I tell her what she already knows and came up my lane knowing, that there’s no room left in town, and that she’d not be standing in my yard at this hour if there were. It comes out harder in the yard air than it did in my head.
“I do know that,” she says, and then she tells me what she does want, plain as a dropped hammer.
Not the room. The box. A hive sprung on the road, bees to move tonight or lose by morning.
Half the fair sent her up my lane, she says, and she gives me back the character reference they handed her without a blink, the worst of it included, and allows as how she doesn’t need me to be good company. Only good.
Nobody’s put it to me that plain in longer than I can place.
Most people work up to the insult slower, or don’t manage it at all.
I look past her at the wagon for the first time since she started talking.
The crack runs the whole seam of that box, wide enough I could lay two fingers in it from here without trying.
Something in me settles the moment I see it.
It always does, when a problem turns out to be one I already know how to answer.
Split ash board. Sprung joint. Frames shifted loose inside from the road.
I could put that right half asleep. Whatever else the woman is, whatever else tonight costs me, the box is simple. The box I can fix.
I tell her to bring it round back, that I’ll have a look at it before I bank the fire.
I feel my own mouth do something small at that and let it happen. She looks like she could use somebody’s mouth doing something near friendly at her tonight, even if it’s only mine, and only barely.
That’s when the goose launches itself off the wagon seat, its whole small body given over to the effort, wings out, neck low. It hisses like a thing that means to be taken dead serious. Picked fights with worse than me before, by the look of it, and lost every one without learning the lesson.
I don’t step back. Four years of war teaches a man which threats want answering and which only want to be seen trying. This one wants to be seen trying.
I tell her it is the ugliest creature I have ever laid eyes on, and I mean it as a courtesy. She tells me the goose knows it, and is proud.
I go down on my heels anyway, slow. A spooked animal wants slow.
So does a green recruit about to do something foolish out of fear more than sense.
The goose gets both courtesies at once. Eye to eye with it.
It stinks of goose and river mud and outrage.
One eye fixes on me, orange and furious.
The empty socket on its other side sits puckered shut and proud of itself, like the loss of it was a victory rather than a wound.