Chapter 10 #2
She stands in the shed door a long moment, looking at the low bed and the sprung leaf and the racks cut to the exact size of her boxes, boxes I measured off her own wagon while she slept, and her face does a thing I’ve not seen it do before.
All her words leave her. The chattiest soul on the coast stands in my shed door with her hand over her mouth and nothing at all coming out of her.
“It’s not finished,” I say, because the quiet’s unbearable and I’ll say anything to end it. “Wheels want another day. I’ll not have you carting live hives on a rig that’s been trying to kill them since before I met you. That’s all it is. It’s a cart. Don’t make a thing of it.”
“You measured my boxes while I was asleep,” she says, from behind her hand.
“You’d have argued if you were awake.”
“I would have. I’d have said it’s too much and you’d have said something insufferable about wood outliving the man who cuts it and I’d have cried, and now I’m doing the crying part anyway, so you’ve saved us both the argument and gone straight to the crying, which is efficient, and I hate it, and it’s the kindest thing anyone’s built me in my whole life, and there’s a goose asleep in your shavings, Madoc, your mortal enemy is asleep in your shavings. ”
“He adopted me.”
“I can see that.” She wipes her face with the back of her wrist and comes in and crouches down by Bramble, who cracks one eye at her, decides she’s acceptable company for his new favorite boot, and shuts it again.
“You awful traitor,” she tells him, wet and fond.
“Three weeks I’ve had you hissing at this man and now look at you.
” She looks up at me from the floor, from beside my boot and my sleeping goose and my hive-cart cut to her boxes, and whatever’s on her face isn’t a thing I’ve got a plane to true or a word to hold.
“You collect us,” she says, quiet. “Broken things that hiss at you. You just quietly build us a place and wait for us to notice we’ve stopped leaving. ”
I don’t have an answer for that. I go back to the wheel.
The envoy tests my wards that night.
I’m awake for it, on the loft floor at the foot of her bed, third night now, and I feel the cold before I hear anything.
Every nail I’ve driven in this house goes cold at once, a wave of it moving through the frames, and I’m up with a bar of iron in my fist before I’ve thought about it.
Out past the window the tree-line’s gone that hard thornish bright she told me the cold one wears, and there’s a pressure on the whole house, a leaning, a great patient weight testing every seam I’ve closed, looking for the give.
It finds the one board. My own doorsill, the mark that won’t take, the near board to her. The pressure gathers there, and the wood groans, and for one bad breath I think it’s coming through.
Then it holds.
Barely. The iron either side of the bare board holds what the board can’t, and the pressure breaks against it and drains back toward the trees, and the cold goes out of the nails slow, and the thornish light thins, and the house is only a house again, ticking in the dark.
Carys is sitting up in the bed, both hands fisted in the blanket, wide awake.
“It held,” she whispers.
“Barely.” I set the bar down. My hand’s not steady and I let it not be.
“It pushed on the one board that won’t take the mark, and the iron round it held what the board couldn’t.
This time.” I look at the black window. “It’s learning where I’m weak same as I’m learning where it is.
Next time it’ll push harder. Or somewhere I haven’t thought of. ”
“Then you’d best finish building whatever you’ve been sketching on the shed wall,” she says, and I didn’t know she’d seen it, and of course she’d seen it, she sees everything that isn’t a road.
“Because I don’t think a fair full of nails is going to be enough for very much longer.
And I’m tired, Madoc. I’m tired of it pushing and us barely holding.
I want to stop bracing and start answering. ”
“So do I,” I say, and it’s the truest thing I’ve said in five years. “So do I.”
Neither of us sleeps the rest of that night either.
But she comes and sits on the floor next to me at the foot of the bed, blanket round the both of us, her shoulder against my arm, and we watch the black window together till the birds start, and it’s the least alone I’ve been since before the war, sitting up against a thing too big for either of us with the warm weight of her leaned into my side and a goose snoring on the stair.
When the light comes grey I go down and look at the sill.
I need to know what last night cost me, and a board tells the truth if you know how to read one.
I crouch at my own doorstep in the cold dawn and put my hands on the bare unmarked sill, and it’s worse than I feared and about what I expected.
There’s a split in it that wasn’t there yesterday, a hairline run clean along the grain from the jamb toward the middle, the exact fracture a beam gives when it’s been loaded past what it wanted to carry and held anyway.
And the wood’s weeping. Not sap. Sap doesn’t run in cut-and-seasoned oak.
This is clear and cold and it beads along the split like the board itself is sweating, and when I touch it my fingertip goes numb to the second knuckle.
The iron either side held. The board took the strain the iron couldn’t reach, and the board is failing.
One more night like that, maybe two, and the split runs the whole way and the sill lets go, and the only door in this house that won’t take my grandmother’s mark is the door two floors under where Carys sleeps.
I kneel there a while with my numb hand flat on the sweating wood and I read the one thing off a board that no soldier ever likes to read, which is how long a failing thing has left. Not whether. Whether was never the question. How long.
Not many. That’s the answer. Not many at all.
So the anchor can’t be a winter’s careful project. It has to be built now, fast and right both, which are the two things that never yet went together in anything I’ve made. I get up off my own cold step with the clock ticking loud in me for the first time, and I go wake the forge.
I start the anchor that morning. Not the whole of it, I haven’t the whole of it yet, but the first true piece, the pile Ordun named, the thing that goes deepest. I go through my whole stock of seasoned timber and none of it’s right, because seasoned wood is dead wood, and a dead thing can’t root, and this has to root.
It wants living wood, green-cut, sap still in it, a thing that’s still half a tree and might be argued into being one again in the ground.
I know it like I know a joint before I’ve cut it.
I’ll have to take it off the wildwood eaves, off the green’s own trees, which is a mad thing to bring back to a fight against the green, and also the only thing that’ll hold, and I set that problem aside for a braver hour.
For now I take my biggest, straightest oak, the longest-seasoned beam I own, and I start squaring the frame, all the dead bracing that carries a load but doesn’t itself need to root, the braced structure the living heart will seat into once I’ve got it.
Deep-set. Braced every way a load can come.
The rooting heart I can’t cut till I’ve got green wood in my hands, but I can build everything it’ll join to, so the hour I have it the whole thing goes up fast. I cut the first joint of the thing that has to hold a god, and my hands haven’t moved this sure in five years, and I don’t stop to wonder at it.
Carys comes out to the shed mid-morning with bread and hard cheese and the goose at her heel, and she doesn’t ask what I’m building, because she can see it’s the thing off the shed wall standing up in the world at last. She just sets the food on the bench where my hands will find it, and settles onto the stack of good ash to watch me work, one knee up, chin on it, quiet for once, keeping me company while I cut the first piece of the thing that might save her.
I could get used to this. It steals up on me over the chisel, with her warm and watching on the woodpile and the goose asleep in the shavings and the anchor taking shape under my hands.
I could get used to not being alone against it.
And that scares me worse than the cold one does.
Not the losing. Everyone loses, in the end; I made a whole trade of knowing exactly when.
The wanting to keep. That’s the new thing, and I’ve got no plane for it, and no ward against it, and no wish to be rid of it, which is the most dangerous part of all.