Chapter 16
Madoc
The rider comes for her the morning before the bloom, and I find out exactly how healed my old wound really is, which is: not all the way, and maybe never all the way, but healed enough.
He’s a young courier off the coast road, mud to the knees, and he’s got a satchel of folded orders for one Carys the bee-woman, who he’s been chasing town to town for a fortnight because the heather’s come early up north and everybody who paid her ahead wants their combs set before the bloom’s off.
He reads the names out at her stall in the fair while I stand two rows back pretending to check a joint.
Lord this. Widow that. A whole season, promised and paid, a hundred miles of road with her name written all down it, waiting.
The old wound wakes up and says its old thing, quiet and reasonable and poisonous.
There it is. That’s her real life. The road, the orders, the season already sold.
You’re a fair-week’s roof and a good cart.
That’s the pull, and it’s got a hundred miles of it, and you’ve got a shed and a god.
Let her go. It’s what she does. It’s what she’s always done.
I make myself keep checking the joint. It’s a true joint. It doesn’t need checking. I check it anyway, because the alternative is watching her face while she decides, and I’ve built my whole peace on never once making a person decide about me where I have to see it.
I hear her, though. Nobody within fifty feet of Carys ever fails to hear Carys.
“Tell them I’m not coming,” she says.
The courier stops mid-name. “Beg pardon?”
“The heather orders. All of them. Tell them Carys is sorry, and she’ll refund what’s owed, and she’s not coming north this season, nor likely any season after, because she’s found a town that needs her worse and a man she’s not driving away from, and she’s putting her hives down.
” A pause, and I can hear the grin come into her voice, that reckless bright thing she does at the edge of a cliff.
“You can also tell them, if they push, that there’s a god in the trees here and I’m the only soul alive who can talk it down, so my dance card’s a bit full for the foreseeable. That usually ends the conversation.”
“There’s a—” The courier gives up. “I’ll just tell them you’re not coming.”
“That’s the wiser choice.”
I come round the stall then, because I can’t not, and she turns and finds me already there, and her face when she sees mine isn’t careful or bracing or bright-over-cold. It’s just glad. Plainly, wholly glad, a woman who’s cut a hundred miles of her own road loose on purpose and isn’t sorry.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I tell her, low, and it comes out with more gravel in it than I intend. “The orders. Your season. You could have kept the road open. I’d not have held it against you, keeping the road open.”
“I know you wouldn’t.” She reaches up and flicks the front of my shirt, which is as high as she reaches.
“That’s exactly why I could cut it. A man who’d have made me choose between him and the road, I’d have run from before the fair was out.
You never once asked me to choose. So I chose.
That’s how it works with me, you great fool, you’ve had three weeks to learn it.
Don’t ask, and you get everything. Ask, and I’m gone over the bridge by dawn.
” She goes up on her toes and I bend down and she kisses me plain in the middle of the fair, in front of the whole honey row, in front of Ordun who whoops like a much younger orc, and it’s the first thing I’ve ever let a town watch me be, and I find I don’t mind.
“There. Now everybody knows. Put it in the working.”
The town closes round us after that, and it’s a thing I’ve not felt since before the war.
It starts with Ordun, who’s been backing us since the first souring, and it spreads from him, and I watch it spread all through the long gold evening from the foot of my own anchor, and I can’t quite make myself believe what I’m seeing.
They come up the hill to my yard. It stops me cold.
Five years I’ve lived at the north edge on purpose, the last built thing before the wild, and the town’s given me a wide berth the whole of it, the big unclanned orc who mends your cart fair and cheap and doesn’t want your conversation.
And now, in the failing light, they come.
Not all at once. One and two at a time, up the lane they’ve always avoided, each of them stopping a moment at the edge of the yard like they’re not sure they’re allowed, and then coming in.
The dairyman comes first after Ordun, with a barrow of old iron, horseshoes and a broken ploughshare and a fistful of bent nails, everything he owns that’s iron, and he sets it down at my feet and says, gruff, not meeting my eye, “For the marks. Cut ’em where they’ll do good.
My girl’s five.” That’s all there is to it.
He doesn’t know what a ward is. He’s brought me his iron anyway because his girl’s five.
The candle-seller comes with her boy, the one the mark held at the threshold, and she stands in front of me a moment working up to a thing, and then she just says, “I’m sorry.
For how I looked at your woman, that first bad day.
I thought she brought it. I was wrong. She’s the only one who can hear it and you’re the only one who can hold it and I was frightened and I picked the wrong people to be frightened of.
” And she puts her boy’s hand in mine, the small warm hand of the child my iron kept out of the dark, and it undoes something in me I’ve kept knotted up five years.
The innkeeper comes with bread and a temper, having watched half her stock go grey, having decided the grumpy joiner and the loud bee-girl are the only two people in this town doing one useful thing about it, and she starts ordering everyone about before she’s through the gate, and nobody minds, because a bossy woman with bread is exactly what a frightened crowd wants.
The wheelwright comes. Two of the Stonefang traders come down from their camp, the young one who took my word on his wheel among them, and stand a little apart, orcs at the edge of a human town’s yard, until Ordun bellows at them to quit lurking and come lift something, and they do, and that’s the first human-and-orc working shoulder to shoulder in this yard, and it won’t be the last. The old clanswoman comes last and slowest, and doesn’t lift anything, and sits herself down on my chopping block like a queen taking a throne, to watch the end of the tale she’s carried her whole life come true or come apart.
By full dark there’s forty souls in my yard, human and orc both, at the foot of the anchor, and every one of them is looking at Carys and me, waiting to be told what a person does against a god.
I don’t know what to tell them at first. I’ve spent five years being the man who does the useful thing alone so nobody has to owe him. Carys knows better. Carys always knows better about people.
“Iron,” she tells them. “He needs every scrap of cold iron in this town, and hands to set it, because tomorrow night the wards on the fair have to hold while we do the working out at the trees, and they’ll only hold if there’s enough of them and they’re set true.
And you.” She points at the innkeeper. “The children. When the bloom comes tomorrow night, every child in this town is inside, behind a marked door, with an iron nail in their pocket and their mother’s hand in theirs, and nobody, nobody, wanders.
I bought them one kind of safe. You keep them the other kind.
” She turns a slow circle, taking in the whole knot of them, human and orc shoulder to shoulder in a woodwright’s yard.
“The green woke up angry because the two peoples who made a promise to it forgot the promise and forgot each other in the same hundred years. So the thing that answers it can’t be one woman and one orc alone in a field.
It has to be all of you. Humans and orcs, standing together, choosing this town together, out loud, where the green can see.
That’s the promise, made new. You’re not helping us with the working.
You are the working. We just say the words. ”
I look at her across the yard, this small sun-browned woman who reads streets wrong and people right, teaching a town its own salvation, and the last of my old wound goes quiet, because a man who’s useful is a man who stands alone, and I am not, tonight, standing alone.
I’m standing in a yard full of people she gathered, the same knack she worked on a hissing goose and a grumpy joiner, and it lands on me at last, what she meant that first week.
She collects the broken things and builds them a place and waits for them to notice they’ve stopped leaving.
She’s done it to a whole town in three weeks.
So I put them to work, and that undoes the last of me, because I’ve never in my life directed forty pairs of hands at anything but a siege.