Chapter 6 #3
The old clanswoman looks at her a long moment.
Then she nods, once, the nod you give a thing you’ve confirmed and don’t much like confirming, and she turns and goes back toward the grey banner and her cook-fire and leaves the two of us standing in the last of the light with the wood gone black behind us.
“Carys.”
“I was going to tell you,” she says. Fast, low, not like herself at all. “I was. I just wanted one more ordinary night before I had to. That’s all it was. A bad reason, I know it’s a bad one, I’ve been doing it my whole life, wanting the one more night before the leaving starts.”
“Tell me what.”
She looks up at me. All the way up, fearless as ever, except her eyes are wet at the rims and she’s not letting it fall.
“Last night,” she says. “In the meadow. The sour hive. I reached for it like I’d reach for any sick hive, and something reached back.
Out of the trees. A shape, and a voice like bees in a wall, old and grieving and glad to have found me, and it told me the green’s owed, and it isn’t finished with me.
” Her voice cracks clean down the middle on the last of it.
“I’ve got a nosebleed to show for the first time it happened and nothing at all for last night except a color I can’t name and the surest thing I’ve ever felt in my life, which is that it knows me, and it wants something, and it started with me. ”
I stand there with my hands empty. There’s a strain in this I can feel plain as any beam, and no beam to point at, no joint to true, no wedge to drive.
A thing that should hold, not holding. It’s her the green went to.
The one who can hear it. And she’s been sleeping two floors up in a bed I built, carrying it alone, wanting one more ordinary night before the leaving starts, because leaving is the only answer her whole life ever taught her to a thing that wants to keep her.
“You weren’t going to run,” I say. It comes out rougher than I mean it.
Her chin comes up. “I don’t know. Maybe. I always run.” She says it plain, no flinch, handing me the truth of herself as plain as she hands anyone the truth about her own bad wood. “It’s what I do when something wants a piece of me I’m scared to give.”
The lanterns come up along the fairway behind us, gold and ordinary, and the fiddle starts up for the second night of dancing, and none of it reaches the little pocket of dark the two of us are standing in at the edge of the green.
Past her shoulder the wood stands where it’s always stood, closer to the lane than I ever let myself notice, patient, the old woman’s word for it, owed, her word too, and it’s got its eye on the one person in this whole overflowing fair who walked into my yard three weeks back with a broken box and a mean goose and no notion at all that she was the thing a waking green would want first.
I don’t have a plane for this. I said that last night, sitting alone with a cold nail turning in my hand. It’s truer now, with her standing in front of me telling me the green knows her name.
But I built the stall she’s standing beside.
I built the box her bees are alive in. I built the bed she’s been carrying this alone in, two floors up, wanting one more night.
My whole life, when a thing was going to fail, my hands knew it before my head did, and I never once could stop the failing. I only ever got good at knowing.
I’m tired of only knowing.
“Then don’t,” I say.
She blinks. “Don’t what.”
“Run.” My voice is iron and I let it be.
“Not tonight. Not till we’ve had a look at the shape of this together.
You don’t carry it up my stairs alone one more night.
” I hold her eyes so she can’t slide off it.
“I read what’s going to break for a living.
I never once had a use for it before now. Let me look at yours.”
She stares at me a long moment. Something moves behind her wet eyes, the same thing that moved that first night in my yard when I gave her a room and she couldn’t work out why.
Then she laughs, wet and cracked and real, and drags the back of her wrist under her nose the exact way she must have wiped the blood the first time.
“That,” she says, “is the least romantic offer anyone’s ever made me, and I’ve never in my life wanted to say yes to anything more.”
“Wasn’t an offer.”
“I know.” She’s still crying and still grinning, both at once, which only she can manage. “That’s the part that got me.”
We walk home together in the dark, the fires falling behind, the black wood rising on our left the whole way.
She talks the whole while, too fast, emptying out a week of held silence one word after another.
I don’t say much. I don’t need to. My hands are already turning it over, the shape of a thing that shouldn’t be failing and is, and for the first time in five quiet years I’ve got a reason to be good at the one thing I was ever good at.
The wood watches us go. I feel it now, plain as cold iron, and I don’t pretend I don’t. It wants her.
It’s going to have to come through me.