Chapter 25 #2
Someone should teach them, the green says. Someone who knows the lesson now.
I don’t answer that. I file it away, cold under the warm, a thing for later, a thing for after the wedding and the settling and the first sweet season of a life I chose.
But I don’t forget it. That’s the way of a thing like that, once a god’s said it into your palm at dusk.
You don’t get to un-know it. It sits in me all through those first warm weeks, under the tea and the hive-stands and the children waving, a small cold weight that says the world is bigger than one saved valley, that there are lonely old powers waking under it that no one remembers owing, and no beekeeper anywhere who can hear them, except one.
Except me. I spent thirty years running from the whole idea that I might be needed somewhere permanently, and it turns out I’m needed everywhere, by the loneliest things in creation, and only I can go, and I just put my hives down on ground I swore I’d never leave.
I haven’t told Madoc. That’s the part that sits worst, the old familiar shape of it, me carrying a hard true thing alone so the person I love gets one more sweet season before I hand him the weight of it.
I know better now. I promised him no bracing alone, and I meant it, and I’ll tell him.
Soon. After the wedding, maybe, after the first winter, when there’s time to say it right.
But not yet. For now I let him have the settling and the planning and the man he’s become who plants next spring’s bloom out loud, and I hold the far cold thing by myself a little longer, one last secret, and I tell myself it’s a kindness and I half believe it.
That’s a problem for later. For now, I’ve got hives in good ground and a foul cup of tea I can taste and a man who found it for me, and a wedding to plan, and an old orc getting stronger by the day who has informed the whole town he intends to give the bride away since her own people are all dead and somebody responsible ought to do it and it’s certainly not going to be the goose.
I went to him about it, actually, when he first announced it, sat by his sickbed meaning to tell him gently that he didn’t have to, that I’d never had anyone give me away and never expected to and wouldn’t hold it against him if he’d rather just drink at the thing.
And he looked at me with those flat-worn old eyes and said, “Girl, I burned a hand off for you. I’ve earned the right to walk you up an aisle.
Don’t you rob a dying man of his one good deed.
” And then he ruined it entirely by adding that he wasn’t actually dying, he’d decided against it, but the principle stood, and if I argued he’d give me away twice out of spite.
So he’s giving me away. I’ve got a father for the length of one aisle, at seventy, an orc who decided to love me in three weeks and paid a hand to prove it, and I’ve cried about that more than I’ve cried about the honey, if I’m honest, because a woman who spent her whole life belonging to no one is about to be walked up an aisle by somebody who chose to be hers.
Nobody warns you that the belonging, once it finally comes, hits harder than any leaving ever did.
The town’s made me theirs, is the thing.
That’s the part I keep not quite believing.
I’ve rolled through a hundred towns and been welcome in all of them like a good fair-day is welcome, for the week, for the honey, for the laugh.
This one’s different. This one saved a valley alongside me and lost things doing it and decided, somewhere in the losing, that I’m not a fair-week thing, I’m a Thistledown thing now, one of theirs, permanent, a fixed point on their own map.
The candle-seller brings her boy by to say hello to the goose most afternoons, and stays for tea, and one day brought me a dozen of her best beeswax candles she’d made from my own wax, for the woman who saved her children twice, and wouldn’t take a coin, and I cried on her in her own shop and she let me.
The innkeeper’s saving me the good room for the wedding party out of pure stubborn affection and has appointed herself general of the whole affair whether I like it or not.
The dairyman leaves a round of his best cheese on our step every market day and never knocks, just leaves it, like you’d leave an offering, and Madoc’s built up a whole shelf of the dairyman’s cheeses that neither of us can bring ourselves to be the first to cut into.
Even the old farmer who called Madoc soft in the head for cutting marks tips his hat to me now on the green, gruff, and once said, “Fine work, that god-taming, missus,” like I’d shod a horse well, and it was the highest praise that hard old man has ever paid a living soul and we both knew it.
Children I don’t know wave at me across the green.
That’s the one that gets me every time. I’ve rolled through a hundred towns and never once been waved at by a child who knew my name before I’d sold them honey, because I never stayed long enough for a child to learn my name and want to keep it.
Now there are children in Thistledown who’ve known my name their whole short lives, who’ll grow up and tell their own children about the bee-girl who talked down the god, and I’ll be here to watch them grow, and that’s a kind of forever the green never offered me, the only kind I ever actually wanted, the kind made of ordinary years in one place with people who remember you.
I stand in my own meadow, on my own good ground, with my own settled hives and my own gentled god and my own whole town, and it lands on me all at once, the size of it, the thing I ran from my entire life because I was so sure it would never be offered and even surer I’d lose it if it were.
I stayed. And it held. And nobody’s decided they’re done with me.
That’s the sentence I turn over most, standing in my own meadow three weeks in.
Nobody’s decided they’re done with me. Every morning I wake braced for it, a little, out of thirty years of habit, braced for the day the town gets tired of the bee-girl or Madoc looks at me across the breakfast and I see the beginning of the end of it in his face.
And every morning it doesn’t come. The candle-seller still brings her boy.
The dairyman still leaves his cheese. Madoc still reaches for me in the grey before he’s even awake, his hand finding my hip like it’s checking I’m real and staying, and every morning I am, and slowly, slower than the green learns its lesson, I’m learning mine, which is the same lesson, which is that a staying you’re not braced to lose is the only kind worth having, and you only get it by staying long enough to stop bracing.
I’m not there yet. But I’m closer than I’ve ever been, closer every morning nobody decides they’re done with me, and I’ve started to understand how it’ll go, in the end.
One of these mornings, years off, I’ll wake and not brace at all, and I won’t even notice the day it happened.
That’ll be the whole of the healing, for me and the god both.
Not a moment you can point to. Just a fright that got quietly bored of me while I wasn’t looking, the same as it did the morning I fed the goose instead of loading the wagon.
I mean to tell Madoc that, one of these days, because he needs it worse than I do, the man who still can’t quite believe he’s allowed to be kept.
But I’ll get there first, I think. I’m the one who’s had thirty years of practice at the not-believing.
I’ll wake up un-braced before he does, and then I’ll turn over and teach it to him, slow, the same as he taught me everything else.
Turns out that was always going to be the bravest thing I ever did.
Not talking down a god. Setting a hive on ground I’m not leaving, and letting the fright have its sharp edges, and staying anyway, morning after ordinary morning, and finding out, slow, that a place can want you to stay as much as you wanted staying, and that it’s real, and that it holds, and that the sweetness the green took isn’t the only sweet thing in a life.
Most of it, it turns out, you can still taste.
You just have to be brave enough to stop moving long enough to find out.