Chapter 4 #2
She lets go first. Steps back to look at her fixed awning.
In doing it, she tips her whole head back to find my face, same as she did that first night in my yard.
No caution in it. No flinch, no bracing for a man my size, that small automatic thing most people do without knowing they’re doing it.
She looks up at the whole height of me like she’s checking a repair she trusts was done right, plain curiosity and nothing guarded behind it at all.
Something in me goes very still.
My jaw sets before I’ve decided it should.
My hand, still holding the mallet, doesn’t move for a beat longer than handing a tool back to its owner ought to take.
Somewhere under my ribs a held breath sits and doesn’t let itself out easy.
The same held breath I’ve been carrying two nights running, in a loft with one bed in it.
Her, asleep on the far side of a wall I built too thin to trust.
“Good,” she says, of the awning, or maybe of something else altogether. Either way she says it like she means it plain.
“Good,” I say back, and mean the awning, mostly.
Ordun’s watching the whole exchange over the top of his casks with an expression I don’t much care for, something between amusement and a verdict already reached.
“Fixed my mead in under a minute,” he says, grinning like a man who’s found a new favorite joke. “Wonder how long she’ll take fixing you.”
“She’s not fixing anything of mine.”
“Didn’t say she’d finished.”
I don’t answer that either. Some retorts aren’t worth the breath, and an old soldier’s earned the right to make the ones he likes best. I go back to my rounds before he can put another one to me. There are stalls still wanting their joints checked before the light goes.
The rest of the row keeps me busy through what’s left of the daylight, a fresh peg here, a table squared there.
It’s work simple enough my hands finish it without much mind left over from me.
The dancing starts up proper once the sun’s down for good, couples spinning loose and easy in the cleared ground before the biggest bonfire.
Orc and human paired without either side minding who’s paired with who.
Ordun’s mead does brisk business in the firelight, that heather cutting a value into it the old crowd never asked for until today.
The fair runs long past dark, lanterns strung tree to tree.
The fiddle’s joined now by a drum and somebody’s off-key singing that improves with more mead in it.
I finish my rounds by full dark and find Carys packing the last unsold jars into a crate.
Bramble’s installed on the stall’s counter like he owns it, one orange eye daring anyone to disagree.
“Ordun’s watching my stall tomorrow morning while I set the last of the hives out,” she says, falling into step beside me as we start north. The fairground noise thins fast at our backs. “He offered before I even asked. Can you believe that.”
“Aye,” I say, and I can. I’ve believed stranger things of her in three days than I believed of most people in three years.
The lane climbs out of the last of the lantern-light and into the dark proper.
The fair-noise drops to a hum behind us, same as it does every night.
Ahead, where my own land runs up against the treeline, a scatter of cookfires burns low.
Fair-folk with no coin for a bed and no room left at any inn, camped in the stubble field at the wood’s edge same as half this overflowing town.
I’ve let them stay there without much thought.
Ground’s mine to lend and it costs me nothing.
A woman’s voice rises out of one of the fires, sharp and getting sharper. “Where’s she got to. Where’s the girl.”
I’m moving before I’ve decided to be, Carys a half-step behind me.
A small shape stands at the treeline’s very edge, past the last of the firelight, where the dark starts proper and the ground goes soft with old leaf-fall.
A child, five years old at the most, stands dead still with her back to the fires.
Her face is turned up into the black between the trees, like something up there has her whole attention.
“Hey,” I say, low, the same tone I’d use walking up on a spooked animal. “Hey there. Come away from the trees now.”
She doesn’t turn. Doesn’t so much as flinch at my voice.
No child her age has ever failed to do that before tonight.
I cross the last of the ground at a clip I haven’t moved at since the war.
I get a hand on her shoulder before she can take the one more step that would put her past the last low branch and into the dark proper.
Her skin is cold under my palm, past any ordinary chill a child gets from an evening with no coat on. Cold like stone left in shade all day. Cold like something in her has stopped doing the small quiet work a body does to keep itself warm.
I turn her by the shoulders, gentle as I’d handle a joint I already know is cracked. Her eyes find mine a full breath too late, empty of anything a child’s eyes ought to hold. Not fear. Not sleep. Nothing at all, like a room with the lamp carried out of it.
Then, all at once, she’s just a frightened little girl again, blinking up at a stranger twice her mother’s height. She starts to cry, plain and unremarkable, the ordinary tears of a child who’s wandered somewhere she wasn’t meant to go.
Her mother’s there a breath later, scooping her up, already scolding and weeping in the same ragged voice, promising every threat and every kindness in the same sentence.
The father comes up out of breath a moment behind her, thanking me twice over before he’s so much as looked at his own daughter proper.
I tell him it’s nothing, not the whole truth of it.
I step back to give the family the room grief and relief both want, now that the fear’s passed through them.
He doesn’t ask why a girl her age went that far from a fire that fast. Neither do I ask out loud, though the question sits in me plain as the missing warmth in her skin did a moment past.
I let them go and hang back a step. I don’t say the rest, the part I’d almost said. No child wanders that far from a fire without noticing the cold and the dark both. This one hadn’t noticed either.
Carys is very quiet beside me. Quieter than I’ve heard her be since she walked into my yard.
I go the last few feet myself, past where the girl stood.
I crouch at the treeline, palm flat against an old exposed root, same as I’d feel out a beam before I trust my weight to it.
Nothing under my hand but cold bark and colder ground, ordinary as any root in any wood.
No mark cut into it. No sign a single soul’s touched this ground with tool or intent in longer than I’ve been alive.
Whatever reached out here left no more trace behind it than a held breath leaves once it’s let go.
That unsettles me worse than a visible wound would have.
A strain I can see, I know how to answer.
The nails in my belt pouch have gone cold against my hip, past any chill the evening air alone could put there.
The same cold the ash board carried the night I cut it new for her hive box.
Iron that’s sat warm against a man’s body all day, now carrying a chill it has no honest way to carry.
I press two fingers flat against the pouch and feel it plain.
The same wrongness I felt in that stall sill a week back, the one that wouldn’t take its mark no matter how many times I planed it true.
I don’t have a word for what just happened here that I trust. I have a word for what a beam does before it goes, and this was that, felt in a place I’ve no beam to point to.
Something under this ground is carrying a strain it was never built to carry.
It just showed its hand in a five-year-old girl standing still as a post at the edge of my own land.
“She’s all right,” Carys says, watching the mother carry her back to the fire. Her voice has none of its usual brightness in it. “She’s all right now.”
“Aye,” I say. I don’t believe it, not as much as I’d like to.
We walk the rest of the way to the shop without much more said between us.
The fires stay behind us, the black wood rising up ahead on our left the whole way home.
It stands closer to the lane than I’ve ever let myself notice before tonight.
I bank the fire lower than I need to once we’re inside, more because my hands want a task than because the coals want banking.
Carys goes up the narrow stair without her usual chatter trailing behind her, Bramble silent for once under her arm.
I sit a long while on the bench by the cold sill, the one that never took its mark.
I turn one of the nails from my belt pouch over in my fingers until it’s warm again from nothing but my own hand around it.
Upstairs a floorboard creaks once and goes still.
Out past the shop window the treeline sits exactly where it’s always sat.
Same black shape against a sky gone deep, unhelpful blue, the hour before true dark finishes settling in.
I’ve built things my whole life by trusting what my hands tell me a beam is carrying. Tonight my hands told me iron went cold that has no business going cold. I’ve slept five years in this yard without once feeling the ground itself lean toward anything.
I don’t have a plane for that. I don’t have a joint to true it with.
I set the nail down, bank the fire the last of the way, and go up the stair slow. On one side of a wall I built, the woman sleeps. On the other, the wood stands dark.
I don’t know yet which of the two is keeping me up longer.