Chapter 17 #2
The tear in the world hangs open. The cold pours out of it and I stand in the pour of it with my chin up and my whole craft laid bare, one small mortal woman with a nosebleed already starting, holding a note I have no business holding, and I do not look away from the held-light horror of its face, because the whole of what I am is a woman who walks up to the hurting thing and puts her hand on it and says I’m here, and I have never in my life meant it more than I mean it at this monster crowned in dead roses.
I hear you. I hear you. Let the child go.
And the terrible beautiful thing looks at me across the frost and the burst jars and the scattered town, and for one long moment something moves behind the held light of its face that might, in a thing that used to keep promises, have been the memory of being trusted.
The pull eases. The pointing hand wavers.
It lets the child go. She drops, gasping, into her mother’s arms, alive, cold but alive.
You, it says, and there’s a new thing in the dry voice now, and it frightens me more than the hunger did.
It’s interest. You hear me true. Not the little witch’s flattery.
You hear the whole of it, and you named it in front of them, and you meant it.
The held-light gaze fixes on me, and the pull comes, but slow now, considering.
Then you understand, little voice, better than any of them, that I am owed, and that being owed is the only justice I have left.
Tomorrow your builder raises his little wall and you sing your little song and you think you will pay me in a promise made new.
Perhaps. Or perhaps I will simply take the truest coin in this whole faithless valley, which is the one soul in it who actually heard me, and be more than paid.
The tear begins to close. Sleep well. Sing your goodbyes.
Tomorrow one way or another I am finally, finally paid.
The veil seals. The cold drains. The lanterns come back up over a fair strewn with broken glass and soured honey and a town on its knees, and the frost melts off the summer grass, and it’s over, and everyone’s alive, and nobody’s dancing anymore.
For a moment the whole fair just breathes.
Then it moves, all at once, like a kicked hive moves, everybody at once and nobody sure where to.
Mothers snatching up children. Somebody sobbing.
The candle-seller on her knees in the grass with her girl crushed to her chest, rocking, and her boy stood over the both of them with his small fists up like he means to fight a god bare-handed if it comes back, and I have to look away from that, the boy with his fists up, or I’ll come apart.
And then, into the frightened noise, the innkeeper does the bravest thing I see all night.
She gets up off her knees, and she picks up an unbroken jug, and she starts pouring.
Mead, into whatever cups aren’t smashed, her hands shaking so hard she spills half of it, and she shoves a cup at the nearest white-faced farmer and says, too loud, “Drink it. We’re not done.
It came to frighten us and by God it did and now we’re going to stand here in the mess of it and finish our own party, because tomorrow we’ve got a god to answer and I’ll not have us answer it having spent our last free night on our knees.
” And people take the cups. Shaking, weeping, they take the cups, because a bossy woman with mead is exactly what a broken crowd needs, and somebody rights a bench, and the fiddler picks up his cracked fiddle and finds he can still play it, and the town does not scatter home.
It stays. It cleans the glass and pours the mead and stands in the wreckage together, human and orc, and refuses to be sent to bed frightened, and it’s the second-bravest thing I’ve ever seen a town do, the first being what they’ve all promised to do tomorrow.
Madoc’s got me before I’ve stopped shaking. Ordun’s got the candle-seller’s girl and her mother both, an arm round each. The old clanswoman is on her feet in the wreckage with her stick, and she’s looking at me, and her face is grey.
“It’s decided it wants you,” she says, low, so the frightened town won’t hear.
“Not the tithe out of the jars. Not the children. You. It’s found the one thing worth more than the debt, which is the one soul who finally paid it the respect of hearing it true, and now it means to keep you whether the working holds or not.
” She grips her stick. “Girl. Tomorrow, when the working opens the door, it will not reach for the town. It will reach for you, and it will be reaching not to collect a debt but to keep the only thing that ever made it feel less alone in a hundred years of being cheated. And that, God help us, is a far harder hunger to build a wall against.”
I look at Madoc. He’s heard it. His face has gone to the grim architecture, the builder reading a load he already knows is going to come on wrong, and his arms are tight around me like he means to hold me here against the whole green world.
“Then we hold,” I say, and my voice doesn’t shake, which surprises me.
“Same as always. It wants to keep me. Well. It’s going to have to learn the same lesson I did this week.
There’s a difference between kept and chosen, and I’ve already chosen, and a thing that has to take you was never going to be the thing you stay for.
” I turn my face up to Madoc’s. “Tomorrow we open the door and we say the words and we make the first bargain new, and if it reaches for me instead of the tithe, then you hold, and I choose, out loud, so loud the whole green hears which keeping I picked. That’s the plan. ”
“It’s a terrible plan,” Madoc says, rough.
“It’s ours.” I press my forehead to his chest. “One more night. Then we find out if a beekeeper who chose on purpose can teach a wronged god the difference. Take me home, old man. I want to sleep in the bed I’m not leaving, one more time, before the morning that decides everything.”
He takes me home. The town cleans the glass by lantern-light behind us, and marks its doors, and holds its children close.
He stops at the anchor before we go in. I knew he would.
He can’t walk past a thing he built the night before it has to hold without laying hands on it, and I stand back and let him, because a man says his prayers however he was taught to, and Madoc was taught in wood.
He walks the whole of it in the dark, his palms reading every joint, testing the great root-joint with his shoulder set against it, laying his ear to the living rowan heart like you’d listen to a sleeping child breathe.
He drives one more brace he decides it wants, there in the dark, by feel, the last cut he’ll make on the thing before it stands against a god.
And when he’s done he stands with both hands flat on it a long moment, and I see his lips move, and I don’t ask what he said to it, because some things a builder says to his work aren’t for anybody else to hear.
“It’ll hold,” he says, when he comes back to me. Not quite sure. Never quite sure. “It’s the best thing I’ve ever built. Whatever else I’ve been, I built one true thing at the end of it.”
“You built a lot of true things,” I tell him, and take his enormous cold hand, and lead him inside. “I’m one of them. Come to bed.”
And I lie awake in the dark against the slow drum of a chosen heart, and I don’t tell Madoc the thing I’ve understood that he hasn’t, which is that a working needs a thing given freely, and if the green reaches to keep me tomorrow, there might come a moment where the only free thing left to give it, the only coin that settles a debt this old and this lonely, is me, chosen, walking in.
I don’t tell him that. Not tonight. Some things you carry one more night alone, so the person you love gets one more ordinary morning before you hand them the terrible shape of what tomorrow might cost.
So I lie there with his arm heavy and warm across me and his breath slow at last against the back of my neck, a man who finally believes he’s worth keeping, sleeping the sleep of a builder who’s done everything his hands can do, and I hold the secret for him, like he held the floor for me that first strange night, and I watch the grey come up slow at the window, the last dark before the morning that decides everything, and I am not sorry.
Here’s what I’d want him to know, if it goes wrong tomorrow and I don’t get to tell him.
I ran my whole life from wanting a thing this much, and I stopped running here, with him, on purpose, and even if it costs me everything I’d not trade one ordinary morning of it back.
I chose it. However it ends, I chose it, out loud, and that’s what I was ever trying to learn how to do.