Chapter 2 #2
It hisses at me a second time, a long ugly stream, and doesn’t attack, though the not-attacking looks like it costs the bird something dear.
I hold still and let it look its fill. Most animals settle once they’ve decided a man isn’t going to flinch at them.
This one doesn’t settle exactly, but the hissing thins toward something closer to grumbling, which for a creature built like this one is likely the whole of its peacetime.
I straighten up. My knees complain about it. They always do, these days. “He’s not wrong to be careful,” I say. “Strange yard. Strange dark.”
She watches me with the goose a beat longer than a stranger sizing up a new yard needs to. Something in her shoulders comes down a half inch, tired dropping out of her much as weight drops through a beam once you’ve found where to brace it.
“He doesn’t usually get eye level with anybody,” she says. “Usually it’s just the hissing and the biting and hoping for the best.”
“He can hiss all he likes back here. Bring the wagon round.”
“I’m Carys,” she says, like she’s only just remembered that part’s owed, and puts her hand out plain, no fuss on it.
“Madoc.” My hand near swallows hers whole when I take it. It does that to most hands. I let go before the fact can sit too long between us.
She leads the horse round the side of the shop into the yard proper, past the ranks of seasoning wood stacked head high under the eave.
She stops the wagon in the spill of lamplight falling out the open back door.
I go straight to the box without waiting to be asked twice.
My hands know where to start before the rest of me’s caught up.
The split runs the whole board, corner joint sprung a good hand’s width out of true.
The frames are canted hard to one side, where the road’s been throwing them for what looks like days running.
I lay my palm flat against the mesh. It’s the first thing I do with any board before I trust my weight to it.
I feel the hive stir under my hand. Grumbling.
Tired. Not panicked yet, though another hour on a road this rough would’ve started them there before long.
“Whoever cut this board did it thin,” I say. “Ash wants more heart in it than this, for a box that’s going to ride roads.”
“That would be me,” she says. “I was younger, and cheaper wood was cheaper.”
“It shows.”
“Everyone keeps telling me that tonight.”
There’s something dry in how she says it, not stung by it.
More like a woman who’s heard the plain truth about her own work often enough to have made a kind of peace with hearing it said.
I like that better than I expect to. I’ve known men twice her size who couldn’t take that same sentence without their jaw going tight on them.
I ease the lid, careful, feel the hum climb half a note under my hands and then settle back before it decides I’m the trouble in this.
The frames have shifted but nothing’s broken.
Comb’s whole. Whatever’s kept this hive alive through a bad box and a worse road, it isn’t luck.
It’s her. I don’t say that part out loud.
“I can fix this tonight,” I say. “New board, proper joint, pegged instead of glued so it rides better next time you hit whatever put this crack in it. Won’t be finished before full dark, but the bees can sit a night in a spare box of mine. I’ve got two seasoned and empty in the shed.”
Her whole face changes at that, open, nothing careful left in it. She wasn’t sure, until this exact moment, that I meant to help her at all, rather than just look at the problem and name it.
“Thank you,” she says, plain, no flourish on it, which I trust further than I would if she’d made a show of the gratitude. “I’ll pay what it’s worth. And for a wheelwright too, when I find one, though God knows how I find anything in this town.”
“Wheelwright’s Tomas. Two lanes east past the smithy. Tell him I sent you or he’ll make you wait a week out of spite.”
I straighten from the box and let myself think about the rest of it, the part I’ve been not saying since I first took the state of her in.
Town’s full. Every bed in it’s been gone since noon, likely since yesterday, given how thick the fair’s hauled folk in.
She’ll sleep under this wagon tonight, goose included, one more of the fairgoers already crowded onto this green with nowhere else to put their heads.
Unless somebody does something about that.
I’ve a spare room over the shop that hasn’t held anything but dust in longer than I care to reckon.
There’s a bed in it I built myself, sized for me, which means sized for near anybody.
There’s no shape of turning her back out onto that road tonight that sits right in me.
The whole town’s stuffed to its rafters, and she’s dead on her feet in my yard.
I’ve never yet found a good reason to do a thing that doesn’t sit right just because it’d be simpler.
“There’s a room over the shop,” I say. “One bed in it. Yours tonight, and however many nights the box work runs, if you don’t mind sharing walls with sawdust.”
She blinks at me like I’ve said it in some other language. “You said there’s no room in town.”
“There isn’t. This isn’t in town. It’s mine to give or not, and I’m giving it.”