Chapter 13
Carys
Iwake up happy, which is how I know I’m in trouble.
Not the bright determined happy I wear like a coat over cold weather.
The other kind. The kind that’s just there when you open your eyes, before you’ve decided anything, warm and heavy and unearned.
I’ve got a woodwright asleep under me, my ear over the slow drum of his heart, one of his enormous arms thrown across my back like he means to keep me even in his sleep, and outside the window the sky’s going pink over a valley with a god in it, and I am, against all sense and every hard lesson I ever learned on a road, happy.
I lie very still and let myself have it.
Five whole minutes of it, maybe more. His chest going up and down.
The good ache of last night in every part of me.
The rare enormous quiet of a man who talks to wood more easily than people, holding me like I’m the one fine thing he’s built that he didn’t have to find the fault in.
Then the fear comes, right on time, because the fear always comes for the happy. That’s the shape of me, and I’ve never once managed to outrun it.
It comes wearing a reasonable face, the fear.
It always does. It says: this has a shape, Carys, and the shape ends.
The fair ends in five days. The heather bloom’s coming and you’ve orders for it, up the coast, a whole season already promised to people who’ll be cross if you don’t come.
This is a fair-week thing. A caught-under-one-roof thing.
He’s kind and he’s enormous and he built you a cart, but a cart’s a thing you drive away in, that’s what a cart is for, and when the god’s dealt with one way or the other and the fair’s packed up, you’ll thank him and you’ll climb up on the lovely sprung seat he made you and you’ll go, because going is what you do, because staying is how you find out you were never as wanted as the wanting made you feel.
I’ve believed that voice my whole life. It’s kept me alive and it’s kept me alone and I’ve never once been sure which of those it was really for.
Madoc’s hand moves on my back, slow, half-asleep, and he says, into my hair, not opening his eyes, “You’ve gone stiff. The fear-voice talking again?”
“How do you know about the fear-voice.”
“You told me. In the shed. Wanting a place is how you lose it.” His eyes stay shut.
His hand keeps moving. “It’s a liar, that voice.
But it’s an old one, and old lies are the hardest to stop believing, so I’ll not tell you to just stop.
I’ll only say the once, and then I’ll let it be.
” He tips his head down till his mouth’s at my temple.
“You’re not a fair-week thing to me. You were a whole life the second you walked into my yard hissing about your goose.
I knew it before I liked it. I don’t need you to believe that yet.
I only need you to not drive off before you’ve found out whether it’s true. ”
I don’t cry. I’ve done enough crying in this loft. But it’s a near thing, and I press my face into his chest so he won’t see how near, and he lets me, and he doesn’t make me say anything back, which is the kindest thing he could possibly do, because I don’t have anything back yet that I trust.
That’s the morning. The afternoon is what decides me.
I’m on the green helping the innkeeper’s girls pin washing when the scream goes up, and it’s the worst kind, a mother’s scream with a child’s name inside it.
Every soul on the green turns at once. Out past the last stalls, past the marked thresholds and the driven iron, out on the open river-meadow where there’s no door to ward and no lintel to nail, a small girl is walking toward the wildwood.
She’s walking like the candle-seller’s boy walked, like the first cold child walked, that dreadful not-there drift, her arms loose and her feet sure and her little face turned up toward the dark trees like they’re calling her name in a voice only she can hear.
And there’s nothing between her and the eaves but grass.
Madoc’s marks hold the thresholds. They don’t hold a meadow.
A child on open ground walking toward the trees has no door to be stopped at, and the whole town knows it in the same breath, and the whole town starts to run, and every one of us is too far.
I’m closest, and I’m not close enough, and I run anyway with my heart in my throat, and it’s Ordun who saves her.
The old orc’s been dozing on a cask at the meadow’s edge and he comes up off it faster than a man his age has any right to, and he gets to her at a dead lurch and scoops her up bodily one pace from the tree-shadow, hauls her back against his chest with his two-fingered hand fisted in the back of her smock, and she wakes screaming and clawing to get down, to get to the trees, and he holds her through it, grim, until the wildwood lets her go and she goes limp and human and terrified in his arms and starts to cry for her mother.
I reach them as her mother does. The girl’s unhurt.
Cold to the touch, blue at the lips, her little hands like a corpse’s, but breathing, crying, alive.
Ordun hands her up to her mother and steps back and doesn’t say anything, and his flat-worn face is grey, and he catches my eye over the sobbing woman’s shoulder, and he doesn’t have to say the thing.
I say it for both of us, low, so the mother won’t hear.
“The marks can’t hold open ground.”
“No,” Ordun says. “They can’t. And there’s three days of open ground between here and that bloom, and a dozen children in this town, and none of us can watch all of them every hour.
” He looks at the trees. “It near had her, girl. It’ll have the next one.
Or the one after. We got lucky and lucky runs out.
” He puts his good hand on my shoulder, heavy.
“You’ve got a look about you. You had it the day the mead soured.
You know a thing you’re about to go do something stupid about.
I’m too old to stop you and I’d not try.
But whatever it costs you, you weigh it against that.
” He tips his head at the shaking child.
“That’s what’s on the other side of the scale. Weigh honest.”
I weigh honest. It doesn’t take long. The bargain comes in the afternoon because a girl near walked into the dark on open ground while a whole town stood too far away, and I’ve never once been able to sit still inside a fear when there’s a thing I might do about it instead.
I go to the meadow alone.
I don’t tell Madoc. He’d stop me, or worse, he’d come, and this one I have to do without him, because the thing I mean to trade is mine to trade and I won’t have him talk me out of it or take a piece of it onto himself.
He’s at the anchor when I come to the shed, and I stand in the door a moment before he notices me, and I look at the thing he’s building.
It’s grown since this morning. The living rowan heart we near died pulling out of the wildwood sits seated in its dead-oak frame, and today he’s cutting the great root-joint below it, the piece that has to drive down into the worst ground at the worst seam and hold when a god hauls up from underneath.
It’s the biggest joint I’ve ever seen a man cut, and he’s bent over it with his whole self poured down through his hands, sawdust in his hair and his tongue between his teeth and five years of quiet turned at last to use, and I love him so much in that moment that it’s a physical pain, low under the breastbone, sharp as the fear.
That’s why I don’t tell him. Not because he’d stop me.
Because he’s got the one job he knows how to do, finally, the anchor, the thing standing between a whole valley and the dark, and I won’t be the thing that takes his hands off it.
The children are mine to save; the anchor’s his to build.
We each hold the piece we can. So I let him work, and I slip out without a word, and I go.
The Keeper comes soft to my small ask, grieving and gold, and I’m glad past saying it’s her and not the other one.
“I need to buy the children time,” I tell her, out loud, kneeling well back from the trees.
“The cold one said it takes the small ones who wander, between now and the high bloom. Madoc’s marks hold the fair but they can’t hold every child every hour, and I can’t build a working fast enough to save them, and I won’t spend the days till the bloom burying babies.
So I want to make a bargain. A small one.
Me to you, not to the cold one, I know better than to bargain with that.
You’re the sad one. You don’t want the children hurt any more than I do.
Tell me what a stay costs, and I’ll pay it, and don’t you dare tell me it’s too much, because I’ve decided, and you can hear that I’ve decided. ”
The grief in her deepens, and the terrible fondness with it, and she’s quiet a long moment, which frightens me more than a quick answer would have.
You are the first in an age to offer, she says.
That alone the green will remember. I can hold the small ones back from the dark until the bloom.
That much grace is mine to give. But grace given is grace owed, small one, and the green pays for nothing out of its own pocket.
It will take the cost from you. Not your life.
Not your listening, that it needs. Something smaller, and crueler for being small.
A pause, gentle as a hand laid on a hurt.
It will take your sweetness. Not the honey you sell.
The taste of it. You will keep bees till you die and never again taste what they make.
That is the price of holding the children safe until the bloom.
Choose knowing. Once given, I cannot give it back to you, not even I.
I kneel in the clover and I understand, all at once, exactly how cruel a thing that is, and exactly how small, and exactly why it’s both.