Chapter 7 #2
Ordun’s stall is the first thing I see, and it stops me dead.
He’s pouring off his best cask into the dirt.
A grey-gold rope of ruined mead splashing into the grass, and the old orc standing over it with his flat-worn tusk set hard and his two-fingered hand steady on the tap, emptying a winter’s brewing into the ground because it’s turned to something he won’t sell a soul.
“Don’t,” he says, without looking up, when he clocks me coming.
“Don’t tell me it’ll pass. I’ve smelled a lot of things go bad in my life.
This one’s not going bad. This one’s being taken.
” He shuts the tap. Sets the empty cask down soft, a kindness to a thing that’s given him nothing back.
“You know something about it. I watched your face this morning when the boy came up. You’ve the look of somebody who’s met the thief. ”
I don’t lie to him. I’ve decided I’m done lying to the people whose stock is dying beside mine.
“I’ve met it,” I say. “I don’t understand it yet.
But I’ve met it, and Madoc and I are going to see what’s owed and whether it can be paid, and I’d take it as a kindness if you didn’t run the town off before we’ve had a proper look. ”
Ordun studies me a long moment, then Madoc behind me, then the treeline past the both of us.
“Huh,” he says, which from him is a whole speech.
“The joiner and the bee-girl against a thing that sours mead out of a shut cask.” One tusk hitches up, the closest thing to a grin the old orc keeps.
“I’ve backed worse odds. What do you need. ”
“Time. And for you to keep pouring the bad stuff on the ground and not down anybody’s throat.”
“That much I can do.” He goes back to his casks.
Then, low, not turning: “Girl. Whatever it wants. Don’t you go handing it yourself.
I’ve watched better than you decide they were the only coin that’d settle a debt.
” His hand pauses on the next tap. “Debts like that never do settle. They just take what you give and come back owed.”
I don’t have an answer for that, because it lands too close to the thing that reached back at me in the meadow, so I only nod, and we leave him to his sad brave work, and I carry his warning around the rest of the green with me while the fair pretends to be a fair.
It’s worse the further I walk it.
Ordun’s the loud edge of it; the quiet middle is worse.
The dairyman whose churn split is sitting on his own upturned pail with his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging, just looking at the pail, a big red weathered man gone small, and when I slow he looks up at me with such plain bewilderment that I nearly can’t bear it.
“Fifty year my family’s kept that herd,” he says, to me, to nobody.
“Butter every market day since my grandfather’s grandfather.
I churned it same as always. Same pail, same hands, same cows.
” He turns his palms up, helpless. “How do you spoil butter that’s still in the cow at dawn.
” I don’t have an answer that would help him and I won’t hand him one that wouldn’t, so I crouch and put my hand on his big forearm like you’d steady a shaking hive, and he lets me, and that’s all I’ve got to give him, and it isn’t enough, and we both know it.
Two stalls down a honey-seller I know a little from the coast circuit, a sharp practical woman named Bettan who’s never been afraid of anything in the fifteen years I’ve crossed her road, is packing her cart to leave.
Not selling off. Leaving. Dumping grey jars into the ditch behind her stall and stacking the empties fast, her mouth set in a hard flat line, and when she sees me her face does something complicated and lands on shame.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she says, though I haven’t said a word.
“You didn’t see the inside of my brood boxes this morning.
I did. The comb’s weeping grey, Carys. The bees are walking off the frames.
I’ve buried two whole colonies before noon and I’m not staying to bury the rest and I’m not staying for whatever buries them.
” She jams a crate down hard. Her hands aren’t as steady as her voice.
“You’ve got that look you get when you know a thing.
If you know a thing, you ought to be loading too, not standing there letting it get a better hold of you.
” She stops. Softer, almost pleading, one road-woman to another.
“Come south with me. Right now. Whatever this is, it’s rooted here, and you and me, we don’t have roots, that’s the point of us. Leave it to the ones who can’t run.”
And God, but it’s the most reasonable thing anyone’s said to me all day.
It’s my own oldest wisdom in another woman’s mouth.
Load the cart, take the south road, be gone before the strange gets stranger, and let it be somebody else’s valley.
I’ve done it a hundred times. My feet know the way to the Brown Bridge without asking.
“I can’t,” I say, and I hear how strange it is coming out of my own mouth. “It came to me, Bettan. It knows my name. Running just means it follows.”
She looks at me like I’ve told her I’ve decided to hold my breath till I’m a fish. “Then you’re a fool,” she says, but there’s no meanness in it, only fear, “and I’m sorry for you,” and she goes back to her packing, and I move on before I can talk myself onto her cart.
The candle-seller has her boy by the wrist, gripping him too tight, like every mother on this green has gripped her children since the night that little girl went cold at the treeline and Madoc had to haul her out of it.
She’s got him held to her hip and she’s watching me come, and when I try to give her the smile I give everyone she doesn’t give it back.
Her eyes go past me to the north, to the dark line of trees, and then to me again, and I watch her put a thing together that I can see her wishing she wasn’t.
The bee-girl came with the fair. The souring came with the bee-girl.
Her arm tightens round her boy and she steers him the other way down the row, not quite running, and it lands in me colder than the god did, because she isn’t wrong that it started when I came, only wrong about which way the wanting runs.
That’s how it’ll go, if we don’t get ahead of it. I’ve seen a scared hive turn on its own queen. A scared town’s no different, and I’ve just watched the first face decide the trouble wears my shape.
The mood’s gone thin all over, hive-thin, that jittering brightness a colony wears right before it swarms. Everyone too loud, laughing too fast, a whole town deciding at once to have a very good time before something makes them stop.
I should pack. Every sensible bone I own says pack the wagon, load the good hives, get down the south road over the Brown Bridge before whatever’s in those trees decides jars aren’t enough.
It’s what I’d have done anywhere else. It’s what I’ve always done, the second a place turns strange on me. Leave before it can turn stranger.
Instead, when the fiddles start up in the long gold evening and the whole nervous town pours onto the green to dance its fear off, I grab a fistful of Madoc’s sleeve and haul him toward the noise.
“No,” he says, planting like an ox.
“Yes.”
“I don’t dance.”
“I’m not asking you to dance. I’m asking you to stand very still in the middle of a lot of people who aren’t a furious green god, and let me stand next to you, and pretend for one song that the worst thing on this green is your face when somebody suggests fun.
” I keep hold of his sleeve. “I have had a genuinely terrible day. A god yelled at me and my honey died. I would like one song. You’re going to give it to me because you’re secretly a soft touch and I’ve cracked your code. ”
That grudging thing tugs at his face again, the near-thing, the almost. He lets me pull him to the edge of the dancing.
We don’t dance. He stands at the ring of it like a post somebody sank, and I stand tucked into the lee of him out of the crowd’s elbows, and the fiddles go, and the fire throws everything gold, and for the length of one reel I don’t reach for anything or read anything or run from anything.
I just stand close enough to a warm enormous man that I can feel him breathe, and I let the music be louder than the thing in the trees.
At the end of the song his hand finds the small of my back. Barely. A weight there and gone, careful as everything he touches, testing whether it’s allowed before it commits.
It’s allowed. God help me, it’s so far past allowed.
I don’t say that. I lean back into his hand the half inch it takes to tell him without saying it, and I feel him go still all over, and neither of us moves, and the fiddle starts the next reel, and somewhere out past the lanterns the trees stand black and patient and owed, and for one more song I choose not to care.