Chapter 3
Carys
Something creaks under me that isn’t the wagon boards I’ve slept on for six years, and for one long blink I don’t know where I am.
Then it comes back in order. The loft. The stair that scraped his shoulders on both sides going up.
A bed built for a man twice my width. So wide I rolled into the middle of it without meaning to, and woke up starfished like a child in a field.
Bramble is a warm furious lump against my hip, one eye already open and judging the ceiling for existing.
“Morning,” I tell him. “Don’t start.”
He starts anyway, a low grumble that means the day has begun without his approval.
I sit up into cool air and the smell of a window left open all night, pine and wet grass.
Under both hangs the ghost of sawdust, the smell that seems to live in every board of this place whether Madoc has planed anything nearby or not.
Sun’s up but not high. Early, then. Early enough that the birds outside are still arguing about it.
I cross to the window before anything else, an old habit, checking the weather before I check myself.
It looks north, past the yard and its ranks of pale seasoning wood, up into the dark run of trees at the top of the rise.
Morning or not, the wood holds its shadow like it has better things to do than lighten along with the rest of the world.
Bramble, from the bed, doesn’t so much as lift his head toward it.
Last night he couldn’t stop watching that same line of trees.
I decide not to puzzle over a goose’s moods before I’ve had breakfast, and go to find my boots.
I find my boots, my skirt gone stiff with yesterday’s dust. I go down the narrow stair one hand on each wall, same as he must, though the walls give me plenty of room to spare on both sides. Bramble rides my shoulder like he has always lived there.
The shop smells of banked fire and cut oak. Madoc isn’t in it. There’s sawdust swept into one neat pile by the door, not there last night. Beside the pile, set square in a patch of early light like it has been waiting for me on purpose, is my box.
I know it before I’m all the way across the floor to it. I’d know that box blind, by smell alone, same as I know everything else that matters.
Except it isn’t my box. Not the one I rolled in here with, split down its whole length, sprung at the corner, boards knocking like a bad tooth the last three days of the road.
This one has a new length of ash down the near side, pale and raw and honest, the grain of it running true.
The joint at the corner is pegged, not nailed, two clean dowels driven flush.
I run my thumb along the seam and feel nothing.
No gap, no give, no place for a road to work its way back in.
He did this in the dark. After I was asleep. After a full day of fair-stall sills and a stranger’s goose declaring war on him in his own yard.
Something warm moves through my chest and settles low, under my ribs, and stays there.
He said nothing about it last night beyond the promise of it. He isn’t here now to say anything about it either. That’s how the man operates, I’m starting to understand. He doesn’t tell you a thing is done. He puts it where you will find it and lets the finding be the telling.
“Well,” I say to the box, since there’s no one else in the room to say it to. “You clean up nice.”
The box doesn’t answer, being a box. It never has, and I’ve never let that stop me.
I find him out back at the woodpile, stacking split lengths onto a rack with more care than most men spend on things that can thank them for it.
He has his sleeves shoved up, forearms banded with old pale scars I didn’t have the light to see last night.
He doesn’t look up when I come out, though something in the set of his shoulders says he heard the door.
“You mended my box,” I say.
“Mm.”
“In the dark. After you’d already spent all day fixing somebody else’s threshold sills.”
“Wood doesn’t care what hour it is.” He sets another length on the rack, squares it with one finger like it might argue otherwise. “Neither do I, much.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got.”
I stand there a moment with my arms crossed, trying to work out the shape of a man who will build a thing half the night.
Then act, when I notice, like I’m the one who’s accused him of something.
He goes on stacking wood. Bramble, from my shoulder, gives him one long assessing look and doesn’t, for once, hiss.
“Thank you,” I say, plain, because plain is the only currency I have ever seen him accept.
“Don’t need thanking for a joint I’d have cut anyway.” He glances at me then, quick, gone again before I can hold it. “Bees settle all right in the spare box?”
“Grumbling. Same as they’ve a right to, after that road.” I follow his eyes to the shed door, where I moved them last night by lamplight, borrowed and temporary. “I’ll get them home this morning. Into the one that’s theirs.”
“Good box now. It’ll hold.”
“I know it will. You built it.” I say it lighter than the warmth under it wants me to say it. If I let that show all the way through, I’m sure the man will find something urgent to do with his hands and not come back for an hour.
He grunts, which I’ve already learned means agreement, argument, and everything in between depending on which eyebrow moves.
I don’t let the moment sit long, awkward as it wants to get.
Letting a silence sit has never been a skill I had.
“Right,” I say, rubbing my hands together like I am about to lift something heavy, which, one way or another, I am.
“I’m not the kind of guest who sleeps in a man’s bed and eats whatever bread he’s got.
I don’t wander off to sell honey like I didn’t cost him a night’s work and half a shed.
I earn my keep. That’s the whole of my policy on the matter. ”
He studies me a long moment, the same patient look he gave the goose, a man deciding whether a new problem in his yard is one worth arguing with. “You don’t owe me labor for a room.”
“I didn’t ask if I owed it. I told you I’m doing it.”
“That’s not how owing works.”
“It’s how it works when I’m the one deciding what I owe.
” I look around the yard, at the stacked wood, the cold forge, the trestle with a split board still lying on it from last night.
And land on the obvious thing. “Breakfast. I can cook. I’m not going to burn your kitchen down, if that’s the face you’re making. ”
“That’s not the face I’m making.”
“It’s very close to the face you’re making.”
The set of his jaw loosens a fraction, not quite the grudging thing from last night.
Closer to actual amusement, fighting a war it’s going to lose on principle.
“There’s eggs. Hens two doors down trade for cut kindling.
” He nods toward a door at the side of the shop I hadn’t clocked as a kitchen at all, being mostly wood-shaped like everything else here.
“Bread’s gone hard. There’s a knife for it, if you don’t mind fighting for your breakfast.”
“I have fought harder men than a loaf of bread for less.”
I go in and find the kitchen is what I would have guessed from the man.
Plain and orderly, built for someone who eats to keep working rather than for the pleasure of it.
I crack eggs into a pan already warming from a fire he must have built up before I came down the stairs.
I’m halfway through deciding this morning’s going well when Bramble, forgotten and unshut, spots the hen-yard through the open door.
He goes off after it like the second coming of every war he has ever imagined himself fighting.
The noise that follows isn’t describable in polite company.
There is a great deal of honking. There is, at one point, a hen airborne in a way hens aren’t built for.
Madoc’s voice comes from the yard, low and flat, the words impossible to make out.
It sounds a great deal like a man negotiating a truce with a creature who has never once honored one.
I put the pan off the heat and run out in time to see my goose backed into a corner of the woodpile. One enormous orc stands over him, arms crossed, not touching, not shouting, just there, taking up the whole width of the goose’s escape and waiting him out.
Bramble hisses. Madoc doesn’t blink. Bramble hisses again, with less conviction behind it. Madoc waits.
“You could just grab him,” I say.
“Grabbing an animal that’s decided to be brave gets you bitten.” He doesn’t look away from the goose. “Waiting him out gets you a goose who’s bored of hissing.”
“That’s either the wisest thing or the strangest thing anyone’s ever said to me about my own goose.”
“Could be both.”
We stand there together, the two of us, watching one furious bird run out of reasons to be furious.
Bramble folds his neck down at last, mutters something goose-shaped and put-upon, and waddles past Madoc’s boots without so much as a farewell hiss.
He heads straight back toward me, like the whole disgrace was somebody else’s idea.
“He’s decided you’re the one hen who fought back,” I tell Madoc.
“He’s decided wrong. Hens don’t argue with me either.”
“Nobody argues with you. That’s not the same as being right.”
That gets a short breath of a laugh out of him, more air than sound, and I decide breakfast has waited long enough.
We eat standing at the bench, because there’s nowhere in this shop built for sitting that isn’t also built for planing wood.
Eggs and hard bread that fights back, as promised.
Against every reasonable expectation I walked in here with last night, it’s one of the nicer mornings I can remember having.