Chapter 8 #2
I set the second nail through gritted teeth with the cold running clean up my arm to the elbow, and the mark holds, and I feel it hold, feel the pressure find no give and slide off and go looking down the row for a weaker board, and it’s the first time in five years my hands have braced a strain that pushed back on purpose, and God help me, some buried soldier’s part of me stands up glad.
“You feel that,” Ordun says. He’s stopped. He’s got his two-fingered hand flat to the door-post beside me and his flat-worn face has gone hard and still. “Something just leaned on your fence, joiner.”
“It did. And the fence held.” I flex the feeling back into my dead hand. “Cut the rest faster. It’s awake and it’s looking for the board we missed.”
And there’s a board we missed. I find it at the very end of the west row, a pitch stood empty, the stall stripped and the trestle-boards left leaning where a honey-seller packed out in a hurry this morning and took the south road rather than stay for another night of this.
Somebody said her name was Bettan. Her threshold’s bare wood, no mark, no iron, nobody left to ward for, and the cold’s found it.
It pours off that empty pitch cold as a cellar door left open in winter, running out into the lane, and the two stalls on either side have gone grey at the boards though I marked them both this morning, the strain finding the one gap and pushing hard enough to sour what it can’t cross.
“Left in a hurry,” Ordun says, toeing a dropped jar-lid in the grass.
“Left the door open behind her.” I kneel to the abandoned board and cut the mark into it anyway, into a stall with no owner and nothing left to keep, and drive the iron, and the cold slides off it and goes quiet, and the grey stops creeping on the boards to either side.
A woman ran to save herself and near handed the thing a road in.
I don’t blame her for it. Running’s a fair answer to a strange dark.
But I cut the mark she didn’t stay to want, because a gap in a line is a gap whether or not anybody’s standing in it, and I’m learning fast that this thing doesn’t need a door held open long. Just left open once.
Carys works the middle while we work the edges, doing the thing only she does, walking up to every scared soul on that green and making them feel, for the length of one conversation, that somebody’s got a hand on the thing that frightens them.
She doesn’t lie to them. I catch pieces of it all afternoon and it’s a finer craft than mine.
A woman with a spoiled churn’s got hold of her sleeve, asking is it a curse, is it them, did they do some wrong thing, and Carys takes both the woman’s hands and says, plain, no smile pasted over it, “You didn’t do a thing.
It’s old and it’s owed and it’s got nothing to do with your soul or your churn.
Something wrong is happening and two of us who understand a piece of it are working on it right now, the grumpy joiner and me.
Have a jar. It hasn’t turned yet. If it does you bring it back and I’ll owe you one.
” And the woman goes off steadier than she came, not lied to, just held, and I think it’s the finest working on this green and it hasn’t a scrap of iron in it.
I get my proof near dusk, and I get it the worst possible road.
The candle-seller’s boy, five or six, drifts off the end of the green toward the west trees with the same not-there set to him the girl wore two nights back.
His mother’s screaming his name before I’ve turned my head.
But he stops. Dead at the mouth of the lane, one pace short of the dark, at the foot of a stall I marked at midmorning, and he stands there swaying at the line of it and doesn’t cross.
Can’t cross. The cold nail I drove into that threshold-board holds bright in the last of the sun, and the boy stands over it shaking his head slow like a man walking out of deep water, and then his mother’s got him, and he’s just a crying child again, and the whole west end of the green has gone silent watching a nail do a thing no nail has any business doing.
Everybody looks at me.
I don’t say I’m half-guessing. Some marks a man cuts on faith and lets the faith do its own work. I pick up my mallet and I cut the next threshold, and after that nobody laughs, and the old farmer’s back before full dark asking quiet if I’ll do his after all. I do. I mean the no-told-you-so.
“You warded a whole fair today,” Carys says, as we walk the last of it home in the long gold light, my empty barrow rattling ahead of us. “On a tale your grandmother half-believed.”
“It took clean everywhere but one board.” I look back at the green, the lantern-lines rising, the little nail-heads catching the last sun down the whole row of stalls, iron I set with my own hands against a thing I can’t see.
“Every frame on that green holds its mark now. All but the one.” I don’t say which one.
My own doorsill, back at the shop, the nearest board to her of all of them, the single mark on this earth I can’t make hold.
The strange won’t let me close the one door that’s got her behind it.
She slides her hand into the crook of my arm, easy, like she’s done it a hundred times, like it’s nothing at all, and it undoes me worse than anything a god’s said yet.
“Come home,” she says. “You’ve cut enough for one day. Come home and let me feed you something that isn’t stale.”
I let her keep her hand where it is the whole way up the dark lane, and I don’t argue about the meal, and I tell myself both of those are only tiredness.
That’s the second night I don’t sleep two floors from her.
I don’t make a thing of it, and I don’t ask.
I bring my roll up the narrow stair at dusk and lay it on the loft floor at the foot of the one bed I built, my back to the door I’ve nailed shut against the wood, and I tell myself it’s the guarding of it and nothing else.
A man doesn’t leave the thing a god wants alone at the top of a house all night.
I’d have done the same for Ordun. I’d have done the same for the goose.
It’s a lie and I know it’s a lie about the time she blows out the lamp.
The loft goes dark and small around us. Her breathing settles into the shape sleep wants, and doesn’t quite tip over into it, and I lie on a hard floor a body-length from a bed with her in it and I don’t sleep either, and the two of us lie there in the dark not-sleeping and both of us far too honest to pretend we don’t know the other one’s awake.
“Madoc.”
“Aye.”
“Are you comfortable down there.”
“No.”
“Good.” A rustle. The bed’s rope creaks. “I’d have felt terrible if you said yes. I’m going to feel terrible either way, but at least now it’s an honest terrible.”
I don’t answer that. There’s nothing honest I can say to it that I trust myself to say into the dark of a room this small, with her a hand’s reach away and a warm night making the space between the floor and the bed the shortest and the longest thing I’ve measured in years.
I lie still. I mind my own breathing so it doesn’t give me away.
I set my mind on the cold nails in the frames I drove, one and then the next and the next, instead of on the reasons to close the little distance, and iron holds better than want, so I hold to the iron.
Out past the window the wood stands black and patient and owed. Inside, above me, close enough I can hear the exact moment she gives up on pretending and just lies there breathing in the dark same as I am, the woman I can’t find the fault in waits out the night in a bed I built for nobody.
I’d cut a thousand marks. I’d drive iron into every frame I own.
I’d stand on the stair till the wood rotted around me.
I have never in my life wanted so badly to be good enough at holding a thing together, and never once been less sure that wanting it hard enough would be the thing that made it so.
Morning comes grey at the window. Neither of us slept. Neither of us says so.
She sits up in the bed with her hair gone to ruin and looks down at me on the floor, and I look up at her, and for one long breath in the grey light there’s nothing between us but a foot of cold air and every single thing we’ve both spent the night not saying.
Then Bramble waddles in from the stairhead, sees the two of us being quiet at each other, and honks his flat outraged honk at the pair of us like we’ve personally wronged him by existing before he’s been fed.
Carys laughs, wrecked and grateful, and the moment lets us both go, and I get up off the floor to see about a fire and a hive and a god in the trees, in that order, because those I know how to do.
The wanting I’ll carry unfixed, same as I carry everything I’ve never learned to put down.