Chapter 6 #2
He tips the cask. Sniffs the mouth of it.
His good humor drops off his face for the first time since we walked up.
“That’s gone,” he says, quiet, to himself more than us.
“Whole cask. It was sound this morning, I racked it myself, and it’s gone to vinegar in the barrel with the bung still in.
” He looks up, and for a breath he’s not the loud old trader, he’s something older and warier.
“Third one this week. Sweet stuff souring in sealed casks, no cause to it. You keeping bees,” he says to Carys, and it isn’t quite a question, “your honey doing the same?”
“Not the jars,” Carys says. Careful. Bright gone thin over it. “The hives have been strange, off in their humor, a season I can’t read right. But the honey in my crates is holding, so far. If it starts turning in a sealed jar like your mead has, I’ll know we’ve a real trouble.”
“Mm.” Ordun bungs the ruined cask and shoves it back with his boot, and pours her a cup off a sounder one, and makes himself grin again, but it doesn’t reach all the way up. “Bad season for sweetness. Well. More mead for the rest of us, while it lasts.”
We move on. Carys is quiet for a few steps, which she never is, the ruined cask sitting between us unspoken.
She talks again after, too bright, and I don’t, mostly, which suits us both.
She’s easy to be quiet next to, which is a rarer thing than the loud ones ever seem to know.
But I’ve got a cask of soured mead in my head now next to the cold nails and the marks that won’t take, and my hands are stacking them like they stack the loads on a frame, quiet, working out where the strain’s coming from.
It’s near dusk when the camp business finds us anyway.
An old clanswoman comes across the green as the light goes long, leaning on a stick she doesn’t lean on much, grey gone all through her braids and the honor-marks on her arms so old they’ve near sunk back into the skin.
She stops at Ordun’s mead-stall, two down from Carys’s, and I watch her without meaning to.
Anything left over from an old life pulls at a man like that.
She buys nothing. She stands at the edge of the camp with her back to it and her face to the north, to the dark line of my wood rising past the last of the lantern-light, and she goes still, the stillness that took that child last night, except she’s a grown woman and there’s nothing empty in it.
There’s the opposite of empty in it. She’s listening to something, hard.
I go over. I don’t decide to. My feet take me before I’ve settled it, over toward a wall a scout swore was sound and my hands swore wasn’t.
“Grandmother.” The old word for a clan-elder, not my own kin. It comes out of me rusty. “You’ve a look about you.”
She turns. Reads my arms, my hair, the gap where a token should be, same as the boy did.
Only she doesn’t falter over it. Something in her face settles, like she’s placed a thing she’d been half-expecting.
“Long Vein hands,” she says, “cut Stonefang marks. And no clan on you now at all.” She says it without heat. A fact, laid down. “You left.”
“I did.”
“Mm.” She looks back at the wood. “You built here. On this ground. Under that.” A tilt of her chin at the black treeline. “Long time?”
“Five years, near.”
“And it’s gone wrong this season.” Not a question either. She’s still looking north. “You feel it. In your hands, likely, if your hands are any good. A thing that should hold, not holding. Marks that won’t take. Iron gone cold with no fire near it.”
The green tilts under me. It did this in the meadow last night, except there’s no meadow and no fae, only an old woman saying my own week back to me like she read it off my palm.
“My grandmother had a tale,” I say. Slow. “About a green that wants paying. Marks cut into a doorframe every high summer. I stopped believing it about the time I learned what actually holds a wall up.”
The old woman’s mouth does something that isn’t a smile.
“Your grandmother believed it enough to teach it to a boy who’d forget it.
That’s how it gets kept. Half-believed, and taught anyway, till it’s needed.
” She reaches out and taps the back of my hand with one hard finger, right where the nails have sat cold in my belt pouch two nights running.
“It’s needed. The tithe’s not been paid in this valley in longer than my grandmother’s grandmother.
The green’s remembered it’s owed. It always does, in the end.
It’s patient, and it’s owed, and this high summer it’s woke up hungry to collect. ”
“Then I’ll ward it out,” I say. “Iron and true marks. I’ve started already.”
“You’ll slow it.” She says it flat, not unkind, plain as you’d correct a boy who’s proud of half a plan.
“Cold iron stings it and a true mark holds a threshold a while, and that’s worth doing, it’ll buy your town its nights.
But you’re thinking like a man building a fence, and a fence stops a thing that comes at you level.
This doesn’t.” She lifts her stick and sets its point to the ground between us, and leans a little of her weight down through it, into the dirt.
“It pulls from under. From the root. You don’t fence a pull from below, you’d as well fence the tide.
A thing that pulls from under, you hold by giving it something to pull against that’s rooted deeper than it is, and by paying back what’s owed, and no fence ever paid a debt.
” She lifts the stick. “Your grandmother’s marks were never the whole of it.
They were the door. There was always more to the old holding than one man cutting one mark, and it wanted more than one kind of hand.
But that’s lore for whoever can hear it, not for a joiner with cold nails in his belt.
” She takes her hand back. “You’d best find her, then.
There’s always one, when the green stirs. It’ll go to her first.”
“Her,” I say.
The old woman looks past me. I turn.
Carys is standing three feet off, a jar forgotten in each hand, her face gone the color of the wax on my bench.
She’s heard all of it. And she’s not surprised.
It’s the not-surprised that stops my breath.
A woman who talks her way through every hard silence she meets is standing dead quiet with all the blood run out of her face, and she is not one grain surprised.