Chapter 14 #2
“Aye. Well.” He claps my shoulder with his two-fingered hand, hard, the grip of a man who’s decided a thing about you.
“Then I’ll be here when the load comes on.
Somebody’s got to hold the fence while the clever ones do the clever part, and I’m too old for anything but standing where I’m put.
” He fixes me with a look before he goes, gruff and level and not to be argued.
“When it comes to it, joiner, you don’t leave me minding the mead down the hill where it’s safe.
Wherever this working wants a body that won’t flinch, that’s where you put me.
I’ve spent enough years watching young fools do the standing while I poured.
Not this one.” And he stumps off down the hill before I can answer, an old soldier telling me the only way he knows how that he doesn’t mean to watch this from the safe end, and I stand alone in my yard with the thing I built and let that settle in me, warm and uneasy both under the cold that’s coming.
I don’t hide what I’m building anymore. I raised it in the open with a dozen neighbors’ hands on the ropes, and I want the cold one to see it standing when it comes to look, and I want it to see whose hands helped stand it up.
It comes to look that evening. Of course it does.
The cold hits the yard all at once, every nail gone to ice, and the thornish light climbs the treeline, and the pull comes with it hunting Carys, and this time I don’t wait to be sure.
I step between. I put the whole of myself between the woman I built the cart for and the thing that means to take her, and the cold comes into me instead of her.
It’s like standing in a river of ice up to the chest. A pull dragging at the marrow of me, patient, enormous, and worse than the pull is the offer folded into it, because the cold one is old and clever and it doesn’t waste its strength shoving at a wall it can’t move.
It looks into me instead. It finds the deepest wanting in me like I find the fault in a beam, unerring, first try, and it shows it back to me.
And it isn’t power it shows me, and it isn’t peace. It’s her.
It shows me Carys safe. That’s the cruelty of the thing, that it knows me well enough not to tempt me with anything for myself.
It shows me a green-gold country with no cold in it and no debt and no bloom coming to take her, and Carys kept there, whole and unhurt and never again afraid, never again bleeding from the nose over a hive, never again reaching into a dark that wants to keep her, safe forever, out of the war entirely, if I’d only step aside and let it have what it’s owed and be done.
It shows me the one thing I’ve wanted since the first day I let myself want her, which is a world where the thing I love can’t be taken from me, and it says, gentle, terrible, you can have that, joiner, you can have her safe forever, all you have to do is stop holding the door.
For one breath it near takes me. God help me, it near does, because a man who’s spent his life certain he’ll lose everything he lets himself want is a man half in love with the idea of a thing that can’t be lost.
Then I understand what it’s actually offering, which is a cage with her in it, and me on the outside, having handed her over to be kept safe like you keep a bird safe by never letting it fly, and I would rather stand in this ice till it stops my heart than be the man who traded her freedom for her safety and called it love.
I don’t step aside. I stand in the cold and I hold, and it hauls at me and finds no give, because I have spent my whole life learning exactly how a thing fails and I have decided, tonight, in my own yard, that I am not going to be a thing that fails her.
The anchor stands at my back. The iron holds the yard.
And I stand in the ice between a god and a beekeeper and I do not move, and after a long while the cold breaks against me and drains back toward the trees, and I’m on one knee in my own dirt shaking with it, and Carys has got her arms around me from behind, and her face against my back, and she’s saying my name.
“You stood in it,” she says, wrecked. “You put yourself in it. Madoc, it could have taken you, it wanted to take you, the cold of it was all over you.”
“It offered me you,” I get out. “Safe. If I stepped aside. That’s the cruel of it.
It didn’t offer me power. It knows me. It offered me you kept safe, and all I had to do was let it have what’s owed.
” I turn, still on my knee, and look up at her.
“I didn’t take it. Not because I’m brave.
Because a you that a god kept safe wouldn’t be you.
You’ve got to be the one who chooses to stay, or it’s just another cage, a kind one, but a cage.
I’d not have you in a kind cage. I’d sooner stand in the ice. ”
She looks down at me, and there’s a thing in her face I haven’t earned and can’t quite believe I’m seeing, and it stops the breath in me, because it’s the thing my whole wound is built around not deserving.
I have spent my life being useful. Building the thing, mending the box, standing in the cold.
Useful, I know how to be. A man can make himself useful to anyone, and I have, all my life, and it kept me from ever having to find out the other thing, the worse thing, the thing the binding’s going to make me say out loud in two days if we live that long.
Which is whether a man who’s only ever been useful gets to be chosen.
Whether, when the words are said and the green is listening, she’ll choose me, or only my usefulness, the cart and the iron and the wall of me between her and the dark.
Whether I’m the thing she keeps, or only the thing that keeps her.
I don’t know. That’s the truth I can’t build my way out of. I can stand in any ice there is. I can raise any anchor. I cannot make a woman choose the man under the usefulness, and I have never once in my life let anyone close enough to have to find out they wouldn’t.
“Say it,” Carys says softly, still holding my face, reading me, reading everything, because she reads people like I read wood, and there’s no fault-line in me she hasn’t found by now.
“Whatever just went across your face. Say it. We said the binding-words wait till after the bloom, and they can, but that wasn’t a binding-word just now, that was a hurt one, and I want the hurt one. ”
“I don’t know if you’ll choose me,” I say.
It comes out of me rough and low, harder to say than the war was, harder than leaving my clan.
“When it’s the words and the green’s listening.
I know you’ll thank me. I know you’re fond of the cart and the iron and the wall of me.
I’ve been useful to you, and I know how to be that, I’ve always known how to be that.
I don’t know how to be the thing under it.
I don’t know if there’s a thing under it worth choosing, once the usefulness is set aside.
And I’m afraid the green will hear that doubt in me and know the binding for a half-truth and kill us both for it, and it’ll be my fault, because I never learned how to believe I was anything but the wall. ”
Carys is quiet a moment. Then she does a thing I don’t expect. She takes her hands off my face and she steps back, and she looks at me kneeling there in the ruined yard, the whole enormous scarred useful length of me, and she says, “Get up.”
I get up.
“Now stand there and don’t do a single useful thing. Don’t fix anything. Don’t build anything. Don’t stand between me and anything. Just stand there and be Madoc, the man, no tools, no wall, nothing you do, only what you are.”
I stand there. It’s the hardest thing she’s asked of me yet, harder than the ice, and my hands don’t know what to do with themselves without a task in them.
She looks at me for a long time. And then she crosses the yard and she puts both her hands flat on my chest, over the heart, not the scars, not the strength, the heart, and she says, “There. That. The thing under the usefulness. I found it my first week here, you great fool. It’s the reason I stopped watching the road for the morning I’d leave.
Not the cart. The cart’s lovely and I’d have driven off in it.
It’s this. The man who won’t hand me the comforting lie.
The man who cried over my dead bees. The man who just told a god no to my face because he’d rather I chose him than was safe from him.
I don’t keep the wall, Madoc. I keep the man who can’t believe he’s worth keeping.
Him. You. And in two days I’m going to say so out loud with a god listening, and it’s going to be the truest thing I’ve ever told anybody, and you’re going to hear it and finally believe it, and then we’re going to save this whole stupid valley together.
Those are the rules. I made them. It’s my wagon. ”
I don’t have a word for what happens in me then. I build things for a living. I’ve got a word for everything. I don’t have one for this.
So I do the thing I do instead of words. I gather her up into me, careful of every inch of her, and I hold her in a ruined yard next to an anchor built to hold off the end of the world, and I let myself, for the first time in my whole useful life, believe her.