Chapter 18 #2
We don’t talk about the working. That’s the rule she sets, wordless, and I keep it.
We don’t talk about the god or the cost or the thing she’s still carrying under the brightness.
She makes me sit down in the sun with my back against the good south wall of the shop, and she folds herself down next to me with her head on my shoulder and the goose flopped over both our feet, and she talks.
God, but she talks. Thirty years of a moving life poured out warm into one gold afternoon.
The town in the fen country where the whole population turned out to watch her get her wagon un-stuck from a bog and made a festival of it.
The lord up north who tried to pay her in poetry.
The winter she wintered in a barn with a family of eleven and a lame donkey and learned every card game a bored farmhouse knows.
The goose’s entire criminal history, which is long and involves at least one bitten bishop.
She tells it all light and quick and funny, and I hold still and let it wash over me, and underneath the funny I hear the other thing, the loneliness of it, thirty years of arriving and being loved for a week and leaving before the loving could turn to keeping, a whole life of festivals nobody asked her to stay past.
“Your turn,” she says, poking me. “You’ve had a life. I refuse to believe a man builds like you and has no stories in him. Tell me a good one. Not a sad one. I’ve had enough sad to last me. Tell me a thing that held.”
So I tell her about the bridge. The one in the war I built to bring down, that they ordered me to fail, and I built it too well to fail on purpose and it held, held through the whole siege and after, and there’s a village still using it that doesn’t know an orc who hated himself built it to be the one thing in that whole war that didn’t break.
I’ve never told a soul that. I tell her.
And I tell her about the first cradle I ever cut, for the innkeeper’s first grandchild, and how I stood over it three days getting the rockers right because I couldn’t build a thing to break anymore, I could only build things to hold a small life soft.
And I tell her about my grandmother’s hands steering mine over the ward-marks, winter on winter, and how I’m only now, at the end of everything, understanding she was giving me the one thing that would matter.
Carys cries a little at the bridge and laughs at the cradle and goes quiet at my grandmother, and she doesn’t fill the quiet, which is her rarest gift, and we sit in the sun with a criminal goose and thirty years of her stories and forty of mine, and it is the best afternoon of my life, and I know it while it’s happening, which is a thing a man almost never gets.
The town drifts in and out of the yard around us, readying, but gently, giving us our corner of sun.
Ordun plants himself on an upturned barrow and teaches a knot of human children an orc marching song with all the filthy verses left in, roaring it out, and the children shriek it back wrong and filthy and delighted, and their mothers pretend to be scandalized and don’t mean it, and one old human grandfather who lost a leg in the same war Ordun fought sits down beside him and sings the harmony he learned from the other side of that same war, two old enemies bellowing a filthy song at a pack of children on the afternoon a god might end them all.
Because Carys built them a town where an orc and a human child could sit in the same sun.
That, it turns out, is a thing worth being brave for.
That’s what we’re about to go out to the meadow and defend.
The dairyman comes to us near the end of the afternoon.
He crouches down in front of where we’re sitting, awkward, a big red weathered man with something wrapped in a cloth, and he holds it out to me, not Carys, to me, which is the thing that gets me.
It’s a wheel of cheese, the good hard kind that keeps, and it hasn’t soured, he’s kept it back special, wrapped in a damp cloth against the turning.
“For after,” he says, gruff, not meeting my eye.
“When it’s done and you’re both wanting a thing that’s more than bread.
My girl’s five,” he says again, like he did the night he brought his iron, like it’s the whole of his reason for everything, which it is.
“You’re the two standing between her and the dark.
A man ought to give the people standing between his girl and the dark a wheel of his best cheese.
There’s not more I’ve got. I’m not a brave man or a clever one.
But I keep good cows.” And he presses it into my hands and gets up quick before I can find a thing to say, and stumps off, and I sit there with a wheel of cheese in my lap like it’s the holiest object anyone’s ever handed me, because it is, and Carys is crying and laughing beside me, and she says, “Told you. You collect them. Even the ones you didn’t mean to.
Especially those,” and I don’t have a word for it, so I wrap the cheese back up careful and set it where it’ll keep, for after, on the faith that there’ll be an after.
And I watch her all afternoon, storing it, because I’m a man who knows exactly how a thing fails and I have a bad feeling in my bones about the fault-line I can’t read in her, and I’m laying up the sight of her in the sun against a dark I can’t yet name.
The light goes gold. Then long. Then the first green thread comes into it, out at the treeline, the high bloom rising, and the whole town goes quiet at once.
It’s the sight of it that ends the afternoon, that green-gold thread climbing up through the ordinary dusk out at the wildwood eaves, brighter than any bloom has a right to be, and every soul in the yard stops what they’re doing and turns to watch it come.
The high bloom. The night the green pours full.
The night the debt comes due. And the town moves, without being told, into the shape we drilled it into, because a frightened people that’s been given a job to do will cling to the job like a handhold on a cliff.
The mothers take the children down to the Skep.
That’s the hardest thing to watch, and I make myself watch it, because somebody should.
The little ones carried and the big ones walking, each with an iron nail in a pocket and a marked door ahead of them, and the candle-seller’s girl looks back over her mother’s shoulder at me and at Carys with her too-old eyes, the child the god reached for twice, and Carys blows her a kiss and mouths stay inside and the girl nods, solemn, and then the Skep door shuts on the lot of them and the innkeeper draws the bar across, and even from up here at the yard’s edge I hear it, the bar going down, and that’s the sound that tells the whole town it’s real.
The children are sealed. Everything else we do tonight, we do so that bar can come back up in the morning.
The volunteers stay. The brave frightened forty, human and orc, waiting by the anchor for the word to take their places, the green thread thickening in the trees beyond them, the cold beginning to come up out of the ground into the soles of every boot in the yard.
Nobody talks much. Ordun goes down the line one last time with a nail and a chisel, topping up a mark here, driving a loose spike there, an old soldier who can’t stand still before a fight, and I let him, because it’s how he prays same as the anchor’s how I do.
The clanswoman sharpens nothing and checks nothing and only sits, watching the trees, her lips moving in the old tongue over words I don’t know. And the green rises.
Carys stands up out of the last of the sun and brushes the grass off her skirt and takes a breath, and the afternoon’s over, and it’s time.
“All right,” she says, to the town, to me, to the goose, to the meadow, to the green thread rising in the trees.
Her voice is steady. Her eyes find mine, and there’s the shadow back in them now, the thing she’s carried all day, rising up at last to be told.
“It’s time. Everyone to the anchor. Madoc.
” She takes both my hands, and holds me back a step from the others as they move to the ring, the two of us apart for one last moment at the meadow’s edge.
“Before it begins. I promised I’d tell you the rest of it.
So here it is, and I need you to not do anything about it, I need you to just hear it, and then I need you to trust me the whole way down, like I trusted you. ”
I hold her hands. My heart’s gone to stone in my chest.
“Tell me,” I say.
And she does.