Chapter 5
Carys
The girl’s face is still behind my eyes when I wake, blank as a jar scraped clean of the last of its honey. I lie in Madoc’s bed a minute too long, staring at a ceiling that isn’t mine, before I remember whose loft I’m borrowing and why my chest still feels tight over a child I’ve never met.
She’s fine. Her mother had her back at the fire before I’d got my breath all the way back. But I keep seeing the exact second her eyes came back into her own face, like something had been standing in the room of her and only just now remembered to leave.
Bramble doesn’t grumble at me this morning.
That’s the part that unsettles me worse than the girl did.
Six years of waking up to that bird and he has never once let a morning pass without an opinion about it.
Today he just watches me from the foot of the bed, one orange eye steady, and says nothing at all.
“You too, huh,” I tell him.
He blinks, slow, and puts his head back under his wing like the conversation’s over. I decide that’s fair. I don’t especially want to talk about it either.
Downstairs the shop is empty and smells of banked coals and yesterday’s oak dust. Madoc’s already gone to walk the fair-stall joints before the gates open, same as every morning since I’ve been under his roof.
I find bread and a heel of cheese and eat standing at his bench, a habit already worn smooth after three mornings, and I don’t let myself look too long at the sill still lying by the door, the one he told me a week back wouldn’t take its mark.
It’s still there. Nobody’s touched it since.
Ordun’s watching my stall today, bless the man and his flat tusk and his opinions about clover mead.
That leaves me free to do the one piece of work that’s mine to finish.
Three hives left in the wagon, the last of the season’s setting, and a whole meadow of clover and heather waiting on me to bring them home to it.
I hitch the horse, load the last boxes steady against the buckboard, and go.
The meadow’s easy to find this time, which almost disappoints me.
My feet know this stretch of road now, sure and straight down the fork past the mill, no ford, no washerwoman, no confused cow.
The clover comes up gold and thick either side of the track, the hum of it rising off the whole field before I’m halfway across it, that low good sound that means bees working honest work in good light.
I set the three boxes in a good row beside the ones from before and settle them fast, my hands not needing my eyes for it by now. Three good hums come up under my palm, one after another, glad and busy over the clover, and I tell each one the same thing I always do, low, close to the wood.
“There. Settle in. Good bloom all around you, nothing to fret over.”
I mean it too, every time, right up until I reach the last hive in the row. The one that’s been wrong since the day I set it.
It hasn’t gotten better.
I stand a good ten feet off it before I go any closer, the same caution I’d give a dog that’s bitten me once already.
The hum inside still climbs and drops in that same sick rhythm, arguing with itself instead of working, and the air still goes thin and sour right at the edge of that box, same as it did three mornings back.
I know the wrongness by heart now. It hasn’t eased a hair.
I don’t put my hand on it. I learned that much, at least, from the nosebleed and the ringing and the whole hour it took my knees to trust the ground again.
“I see you,” I tell it instead, from my safe ten feet. “I haven’t forgotten you. I’m coming back before dark, and we’ll sort you out right then.”
The hive doesn’t answer. It never does in words. But something in the pitch of it eases half a note, like it’s only wanted somebody to notice it was still there.
Bramble, riding the wagon seat, has gone rigid again, the exact stillness he wore that very first night, neck low, eye fixed past the last hive at the stand of old trees rising at the field’s edge. He doesn’t honk. He doesn’t so much as ruffle. He just watches the treeline like it owes him money.
“It’s only trees,” I tell him, same as I told him that first night, and this time I don’t quite believe myself saying it either.
I’ve got the whole rest of the day free of me, Ordun minding my stall, and no earthly reason to go back to an empty loft before dark.
So I decide, with the confidence of a woman who has never once been right about this, that I’ll swing by the fair instead.
Check on my jars. See if the old man’s come back for his heather honey.
Maybe buy a length of ribbon for Bramble, who deserves nothing of the kind and would hate it, which is half the reason to do it.
I turn the wagon back toward town.
I do not arrive at the fair.
I couldn’t tell you the exact moment the lane stopped being the lane I meant to be on.
There’s a fork I’m sure I remember, and then there isn’t, and then there’s a stretch of birches I’d swear I’ve never walked before, and then the trees thin out and there’s a yard full of pale stacked oak in front of me, and lamplight isn’t even lit yet because it’s the middle of the day, and I am, once again, good and lost, arriving somewhere I know how to find only by accident.
“Well,” I tell the horse. “At least it’s a good accident.”
Madoc’s shop sits quiet in the early afternoon, door standing open, the sign he means to be back soon. No hammer going, no plane against grain. Just the smell of cut wood warming in still air, and under that, close and familiar now as my own hands, beeswax.
I tie the horse loose to the post and go in, since a door left open is as good as an invitation where I come from, and since getting lost gives a girl the right to wander through wherever her feet land her.
I’ve been in this shop three mornings running. I’ve eaten breakfast at that bench, swept that floor, slept above it. I don’t think I’ve actually looked at it once.
I look at it now.
There’s a cradle standing near-finished by the back wall, rockers curved so clean they look poured rather than cut, the headboard carved with a run of leaves that climbs one side and settles into a single open blossom at the top, like it grew there instead of being made.
I run one finger along the join where rocker meets rail and can’t find the seam.
It’s just wood, and then it’s just more wood, and somewhere in there it decided to become one whole piece instead of two.
Past that, a shelf of small things I hadn’t clocked before either.
A carved bird no bigger than my thumb, wings half-spread, feathers cut so fine I’d believe they moved if I blinked wrong.
A box with a lid that fits so true it holds itself shut without a latch.
A whole rack of spoons, plain, ordinary spoons, except every single one of them is beautiful in a way spoons have no business being, the bowl of each one worn thin and smooth like it already knows a hand.
“Oh,” I say, out loud, to no one. “You’re good. You’re actually good.”
I’d known he was good with a beam and a plank. I’d watched him true my own sprung box in one night without being asked to. I hadn’t put together, somehow, that the man’s hands do this too, on the side, in whatever hours a joiner has left over from mending fair-stall sills.
I find the beeswax by smell before I find it by looking.
That’s how I find everything. A crock of it sits on the end of his bench, soft gold, half worked into a cloth already dark with use.
I lift the cloth and breathe it in, and it’s not just wax.
It’s my wax. The exact honeyed weight of it, the one I skim off my own combs and sell in blocks at the honey row for candle-makers and carpenters both.
“You finish your wood in beeswax,” I say to the empty shop, grinning at my own discovery like it’s the best gift anyone’s handed me all week. “That’s my trade sitting right there on your bench, and you never once said.”
The cradle, the spoons, the little bird, all of it rubbed to that same low warm shine.
Not varnish, not oil. Wax. My wax, or wax exactly like it, worked into his wood until the two of them stop being two separate things and start being one finished thing that smells of both a hive and a tree at once.
I’m still standing there with the cloth in my hand, grinning like an idiot at a crock of wax, when the light in the doorway changes.
“That’s not yours to handle.”
I don’t jump, mostly out of stubbornness. “I wasn’t handling it. I was admiring it. There’s a difference.”
Madoc fills the doorway, tool belt still on, sawdust caught pale in the crease of one forearm. He looks at me, and then at the crock in my hand, and then, longer, at the cradle behind me, like he’s only just remembered it’s there for anyone else to see.
“You’re meant to be at the fair.”
“I am well aware of where I’m meant to be,” I say. “I set out for it with real conviction. Turns out my feet have their own opinions about my itinerary.”
“You got lost coming from the meadow.”
“I got lost coming from the meadow, past the meadow, and through several trees I’ve never met, and landed here instead. It’s a whole talent. I’ve been cultivating it for years.”
His face shifts, that small grudging thing again. Not quite the near-smile from the woodpile that first morning, but a close cousin of it, the kind of near-thing that costs him something to let show. He sets his tools down on the bench with more care than most tools ever get.
“You do this on purpose,” he says. “Getting lost.”
“Absolutely not.”
“You always end up here.”