Chapter 24 #2
I’d not have paid a coin of any of it if there’d been another road. There wasn’t. There’s only ever the road there is, and you walk it, and you pay what it costs, and you carry the dead, and you hold the living, and you build the next thing anyway.
Carys sleeps till mid-morning, which I’ve never once seen her do, the woman who wakes at the grey hour with the road already in her head, and I let her, and I do the small ordinary things around the quiet house so she can.
I feed the goose, who accepts it as his due.
I set the fire. I put out bread, and a saucer of honey out of pure stubborn habit before I remember, and then I leave it out anyway, because I’ve decided I’ll set that saucer out every morning of our lives whether she can taste it or not, a small daily arguing with the thing the green took from her, a way of saying it doesn’t get to have even that, not really, not the ritual of it.
She’ll know what it means. She reads me like weather.
She comes down at last, sleep-creased and slow and quiet, wearing my shirt, and she doesn’t say good morning, she just crosses the room and folds herself into me and stands there a long while with her forehead against my chest, breathing, and I hold her, and I feel her be alive and here and mine in the warm morning, and it’s better than any word either of us has.
Then she takes my hand and we go to the yard’s edge and stand in the circle of my arm looking out at the gentled trees, and neither of us says much, because there’s too much and it’s all the one thing.
“It’s warm,” she says at last, of the wildwood. “The ground. It’s never been warm.”
“It’s learning.”
“I told it I’d teach it.” She leans her head against my arm.
“One bloom at a time. Forever. I’ve got a god to raise now, apparently, on top of everything.
That’s going to be a strange marriage-portion to explain.
‘And what does the bride bring to the union?’ ‘Oh, a wagon, three hives, a criminal goose, and joint custody of a reformed nature spirit.’”
“Ordun said there’s a wedding.”
“Ordun’s decided a great many things from a sickbed.
” But she’s smiling, wet, at the trees. “Yes. There’s a wedding.
After he’s well enough to drink at it, not one day before, I’ve told him he’s not allowed to die and he’s not allowed to rush, he’s got to do both at exactly the right pace. He says he’ll try.”
She’s quiet a moment, and then she says, softer, not looking at me, “I’ve never planned anything past a season in my life, you know.
Thirty years. I never once knew where I’d winter.
Couldn’t let myself. You start planning a next year and you start wanting it, and wanting a thing was always how I lost it.
” She turns her face up to me, and there’s a wonder in it, the same one I feel in the ground under my hand.
“And I just told an old orc I’d marry you at the turn of the season.
That’s a plan. That’s months off. I said it without even flinching.
I stood in this yard and made a plan for a year I mean to be alive and here and yours for, and I didn’t check the road once.
” She laughs, wet and amazed at herself.
“I think you broke me. In the good way. I think I might be a woman who plans things now. God help us both.”
“We’ll plant next spring’s bloom together,” I tell her, because it’s the truest planning I’ve got, and because I want to watch her hear it.
“Down the south meadow. Clover and linden. You’ll tell me where and I’ll turn the ground.
It’ll come up the year after and the year after that, long after this morning, and we’ll both be here to see it.
” She goes still against my side, and I feel her take it in, a man handing her years, on purpose, out loud, the thing she spent her whole life not letting herself be given.
And she doesn’t run from it. She leans in harder, and that’s her answer, and it’s answer enough.
I’ve been carrying a thing in my pocket since before the bloom.
I took it out of the stuck drawer the morning we went to cut the anchor’s heart, the small thing my hands made the first night I let myself want her, and I’ve carried it every day since against the chance that there’d be no after, that if the working took one of us I’d at least have had it in my pocket, the one true thing I ever made, near me at the end.
Three days it’s ridden there. I’ve put my hand to it a hundred times without taking it out, like you touch a wound to check it’s still there.
And every one of those times I found a reason not to give it.
Too soon. Too much. Not the right morning.
The truth is I was afraid, the same old fear, the fear that’s run me my whole life, that if I handed her the one thing I made for no reason but wanting to, and she saw it plain for what it was, she’d know the whole of me, the useless wanting heart under the useful wall, and she’d not want it.
But I said the words last night. Out loud.
In front of a god. There’s no wall left to hide the wanting heart behind, and I find, this morning, standing in the warm dawn with her leaned into my side, that I don’t want the wall back.
So I stop finding reasons. I take it out now, because there’ll never be a truer morning than this one, a saved valley and a warm wood and a woman I said the words to out loud in front of a god, and because a man who’s learned at last that he’s allowed to be chosen ought to be brave enough to hand over the proof of how much he wanted to be.
I put it in her hand.
It’s a bee. A small carved bee, no bigger than the top joint of my thumb, cut from the good cherry I’d hoarded for a headboard I’d never build, its wings half-lifted, every hair of it cut fine as the feathers on the little bird she found in my shop that first day.
I’ve rubbed it to a shine in her own beeswax, so it smells of both our trades at once, a hive and a tree.
I made it the first night I let myself want her and couldn’t say so, and I’ve carried it three weeks not looking at it straight, and now it sits in her small wax-stained palm, and she goes very still, and the whole chattering brightness leaves her face, like it only does for the truest things.
“You made me a bee,” she says, and her voice isn’t steady at all.
“You keep them alive,” I say. “I couldn’t make you one that flew.
But I could make you one that won’t die on a bad road, and won’t sour in a shut jar, and won’t ever leave.
One that stays. It’s a foolish thing. A whittle.
I made it the first night, before I’d have admitted I’d want to give it to anybody.
” I close her fingers over it with my own.
“It’s the first thing I ever built that I built only because I wanted to, not because it was useful.
It’s no use at all, a wooden bee. It doesn’t hold anything up or keep anything out.
It’s only itself, and it’s yours, and that’s the whole of what it’s for. ”
She holds the wooden bee in both hands, over her heart, like she put her hands on my chest in the ruined yard, and she doesn’t say anything smart, and she doesn’t fill the silence, and she cries, plain and quiet, in the warm morning, over a useless wooden bee cut by a man who only ever said what he was in the things his hands made.
“I’m keeping it forever,” she says. “One morning at a time. Starting now. This one. Good morning, Madoc. I choose you. And your bee.”
“Good morning,” I say, and I mean the morning, and her, and the bee, and the warm wood, and the whole ordinary saved world, all of it, at once.