Chapter 4
Madoc
The trestle leg wants a shim, not the curse I give it first.
I go down on one knee under the ribbon-seller’s table and find the joint I cut myself not four days back.
Already racked half a finger’s width out of true.
Good oak, cut clean, set level on ground that wasn’t level when I set it.
A hundred boots an hour will find every lie a man tells himself about flat ground.
I knock a wedge of cedar under the short leg, test it with my whole weight, and it holds.
“You’ll want to sweep the grit out from under this by evening,” I tell her. “Same again by morning, likely, till the ground packs down proper.”
“You built it, you fix it,” she says, already turning back to a customer with three yards of blue silk over one arm.
Half the stalls on this green stand on legs I cut.
I framed the long tables two winters back, out of oak I’d have used for something that lasted longer if the fair committee had asked me sooner.
I go under and around them every fair morning, same as I did last year and the year before.
Every joint wants testing under a crowd’s weight the wood was never built to answer alone.
It’s not glamorous work. Nobody thanks a man for a table that doesn’t fall down.
I’ve never much minded going unthanked for the things that hold.
The steward finds me before I’ve gone three tables down, same harried woman from three days back. Her list is still clutched to her chest, like it might blow off in a light wind.
“Two more down since noon,” she says, no greeting in it, only the trouble. “West row. Committee wants them standing before tomorrow’s dance.”
“I’ll see to them before dark.”
“You always do.” She’s off again before I can answer that, already flagging down some other trouble three stalls over.
Half this fair runs on wood I cut and joints I set two winters back, in a cold I remember better than I’d like to.
Nobody but her remembers who built it. That suits me fine.
A thing that holds doesn’t need its maker’s name carved into it to have done its work.
The green is thick with people by the time I get moving again, more of them than yesterday, twice what came through at dusk.
Fiddle going somewhere past the meat-pie cart.
A boy chasing a hoop through six people’s legs and getting cursed at in three different accents.
The whole fair smells of woodsmoke and roasting nuts and, under both, the particular sweetness that means I’m close to the honey row without having looked for it.
I go that way anyhow, tools still in my belt, telling myself it’s the stalls I’ve come to check.
Carys’s is the fourth one down, jars stacked in ranks that catch the light gold and amber and near black.
The clover honey looks sweeter for the ordinary tin she’s set it in.
She’s got a crowd three deep already, and she’s talking the whole time, never once still.
She holds up a jar to the light for an old woman.
She tips a spoon toward a child who looks like he’s never once been offered anything without a catch on it.
“That one’s linden,” she’s saying. “Tastes like summer decided to apologize for winter. Go on, it’s free, I’m not that kind of merchant.”
The boy takes it like she might change her mind.
She doesn’t. She never does, from what I’ve seen of her three days running.
She gives away more than any honest trader ought to, and somehow ends the day with more coin in her apron than she started.
Every soul she feeds a free taste off buys a jar before they leave, and tells two more people on their way out.
An old man leans on a stick at her counter a long while and says nothing.
He turns a jar of heather over and over, like the answer to some question sits written on the glass.
She lets him take his time. She doesn’t fill this one with the easy chatter she gives everyone else.
She’s read something in him I haven’t gotten close enough to read myself.
He finally sets three coins down and says only that his wife used to keep bees.
Her whole face goes soft and quiet in a way I haven’t seen on her yet.
She tells him to come back tomorrow, she’ll have a jar set by special, no charge on it.
He doesn’t argue. Neither do I, watching from three stalls off with a mallet still in my hand.
I’ve watched men build a whole trade on cunning and end up trusted by no one.
I’ve watched her build the same trade on nothing but plain warmth, and trusted by everyone inside an hour.
It’s not a thing I know how to do myself.
I recognize good work when I see it regardless.
A joint cut true and one only cut fast look near identical to anyone but the man who cut them.
Hers holds weight it was never nailed down to hold. That’s the part I can’t stop noticing.
Two stalls further on, an orc I don’t know is doing a brisk trade in mead, casks stacked behind him like siege stores.
Old, by the set of him, grey gone heavy through his beard, one tusk worn near flat at the tip, ground down slow by a hard jaw and harder winters.
He’s got the look I know from men who came out the other side of something.
They decide the rest of their life is better spent selling something sweeter than what they used to carry.
Carys has already found him. Of course she has. She’s leaning across the gap between their stalls with a jar in each hand, talking at him like she’s known him a decade.
“You’re doing this wrong,” she tells him. “Mead wants honey with some backbone in it. That clover you’re cutting it with is fine for tea. Try the heather instead, it’ll fight you the whole way down and you’ll thank it after.”
“I’ve been brewing this mead since before you were weaned, girl.”
“And I’ve been keeping the bees that made the honey in it since before that. We’re both right. Try the jar.”
He looks at her like she’s a weather he hasn’t decided whether to trust yet, takes the jar, and tries it anyway.
Something in his face does a slow, grudging thing that I recognize because I do it myself often enough.
He doesn’t say she’s right. He pours a measure of the heather in beside his clover and doesn’t argue further.
From a man his age, that’s likely the same thing as saying it out loud.
“There,” she says, delighted with herself in the plain unguarded way she seems delighted with most things. “Ordun. See. Wasn’t that hard.”
“Nothing’s hard when you talk this much at it,” he says.
He’s already reaching for another jar off his own shelf, one he pours a taste of back at her without being asked.
Trade, plain and old as trading itself. I watch him watch her the whole while she drinks it, some careful thing behind his eyes I know the shape of.
A man deciding whether he’s allowed to like someone this fast, and giving up on deciding, and liking her anyway.
His hands, setting the casks down, move careful in a way that has nothing to do with the mead.
Two fingers gone from the left, old scarring, healed long before I’d have crossed paths with him.
A soldier’s economy in every motion, the same economy I catch myself using without meaning to most days.
He doesn’t talk about it. I don’t ask. Some things two old soldiers leave alone between them without a word passing.
Trust like that gets built plain and slow, no different from a joint I’ve tested twice and won’t insult by testing a third.
I’ve built things for men like that. Casks, mostly, and once a leg for a soldier who’d lost his own at a river crossing I’d built the bridge for.
Men who came home from something and had to learn a smaller, gentler use for the same hands.
I don’t need him to tell me his history to know the shape of it.
I read it off him same as I’d read a strain in a beam.
It’s there in the set of his shoulders, in how careful he is stacking casks he could probably still throw across a yard if the need arose.
She’s made a friend of him inside five minutes, the same as she made one of my goose-hating self inside one evening. It’s not a trick. I’ve watched close enough now to know it isn’t. She just walks toward whatever’s hardest to like in a room and treats it like it was always going to be easy.
I stand there longer than the stalls need checking, telling myself it’s still the joints I’m here for.
“You,” she says, catching sight of me before I’ve decided to be caught. “Perfect. My awning’s trying to fall on a paying customer and I like my customers unbruised.”
I go round to her side of the row. The pole’s canted hard on the near corner, canvas sagging under yesterday’s rain that never quite dried out of the seams. Simple enough fix, a fresh peg and a truer angle, work for one pair of hands.
She holds the pole steady anyway, both arms up over her head to brace it while I drive the peg home.
For a moment we’re close enough in the gap between stalls that I catch cut oak and clover honey both at once.
Hers and mine, tangled up together in the same narrow breath of air.
“Hold it there,” I tell her. “Don’t let it list.”
“I’m holding it. You’re the one taking your time.”
“Good work isn’t quick work.”
“Everything you say sounds like it should be carved over a door.”
I don’t answer that, mostly because she’s not wrong and I haven’t decided yet whether I mind.
I set the peg, test the angle with my palm flat against the canvas, and it holds true under a hard shove.
I go to hand the mallet back to her rather than set it down, since her hand’s already there waiting.
For half a breath both our hands rest on the same worn haft of wood, hers small and quick under mine.