Chapter 26
Madoc
Istart building a home instead of a shop, and it’s the strangest work my hands have ever done, because for the first time in my life I’m building a thing I mean to be inside.
Forty years I’ve built for other people.
Hives for beekeepers, carts for carters, cradles for other men’s children, siege-works for generals, stalls for a fair, an anchor for a valley.
Every board I ever cut, I cut for someone else’s life, and handed it off, and went home to a bed above a workshop that was never anything but a place to wait between jobs.
A builder who builds for everyone but himself; there’s a kind of hiding in it, I see that now.
You can pour your whole heart into a thing and still keep yourself safe, if the thing is always for someone else, because a gift can’t be taken from you like a home can.
And now, at last, I’m building the dangerous kind.
The kind that’s mine. The kind I mean to keep and can therefore lose, and I stand in the yard the first morning with the fresh-cut timber smelling of my own trade and my own future both, and I make the first mark for the first joint of the first thing I ever built to keep, and my hand is not quite steady doing it, and I let it not be.
The loft was never a home. It was a place I slept above the place I worked, a bed I built too big for a life I didn’t expect to fill.
Now there’s a beekeeper in it who’s staying, and a criminal goose who’s decided my hearth is his, and a whole life that needs somewhere to be lived, so I do the thing I’ve spent five years never letting myself do.
I build for me. For us. I throw a proper addition off the back of the shop, two rooms and a real hearth and a window that faces the meadow where her hives sit, so she can see her bees from the bed, and I frame it slow and careful and I don’t cut a single corner, because it’s the first house I’ve ever built that I’m going to grow old inside, and a man builds a thing differently once he knows he’ll be there when the wood ages.
It’s slow work and I make it slower on purpose.
I could throw up two rooms in a week; I’ve built faster than that under fire.
Instead I take my time over every joint like it’s the anchor all over again, because in a way it is, it’s the thing that has to hold the rest of my life, and I find I can’t hurry it.
I cut mortise and tenon where a lesser man would nail.
I season the sills and set them true. I frame the window that faces the meadow so the morning light will fall across the bed, and I stand a long time getting the height of it right, because I mean for her to be able to open her eyes and see her hives from where she’ll sleep for the next forty years, and a thing like that you get right or you don’t do at all.
Carys watches me raise the frame and doesn’t offer to help, for once, just sits on a stack of my good ash with the goose in her lap and tells me I’m doing it wrong on purpose to have something to do with the wanting, which is exactly true and I don’t dignify it.
She’s not wrong that I could hire it done.
I don’t want it done. I want to build the walls I’ll live inside with my own hands, so that every time the wind comes off the meadow I’ll know the joint that holds against it because I cut it, and that’s not a thing I can explain to anybody but her, and I don’t have to explain it to her, because she reads it off me same as she reads a hive.
She keeps me company through the whole of it, which is its own kind of strange, because I’ve built alone my whole life, built at the edge where nobody watched, and now there’s a woman on my woodpile talking to the goose and the door-frame and me and her own bad sense of direction, and the sound of her fills the yard while I work, and it turns out I build better with her voice in the air than I ever built in five years of quiet.
I never knew that about myself. I thought the quiet was how I worked.
It wasn’t. It was just what I had. This is better.
Everything since she rolled into my yard with a broken box has been better, and I keep waiting to stop being surprised by that, and I keep not stopping.
Ordun mends slow, but he mends.
The grey goes out of him by degrees. The shallow breath deepens.
He’s up and about the Skep within a fortnight, slower than he was, leaning on a stick he swears he doesn’t need, ordering the whole town about from a chair by the fire like a war-captain who’s found the war’s over and hasn’t decided whether he approves.
The hand doesn’t come back. It stays white and cold and dead at the wrist, a soldier’s last wound, and he wears it plain, no glove, because he’s an old orc and he’s carried worse and he’s not about to hide the thing that bought a valley.
He learns to pour with his off hand. It’s the thing that matters most to him, more than the walking, more than the strength, because pouring is who he is, a man who’s poured for a hundred years, and the god took the hand he did it with.
So he learns the other one. He’s clumsy at it and he curses the air blue and he spills good mead down his own front and does it anyway, night after night, in front of the whole common room, refusing to hide the learning the same as he refuses to hide the dead hand, an old soldier who’s decided that if he’s to be maimed he’ll be maimed out loud where everyone can watch him beat it.
I fit him the rig, in the end, like I said I would, a jointed wooden cradle that clamps to the cask and holds a jug steady so he can tip it one-handed, and he curses me for a soft fool the whole time I’m fitting it and uses it every night after and never once thanks me, which is how I know he’s grateful.
But the night that matters, he doesn’t use the rig.
The night that matters he waves it off, and takes up a full jug in his one good hand, and pours a cup clean and steady, not a drop wasted, the first true free-hand pour he’s managed since the bloom, and he sets it down in front of a startled young farmer without a tremor.
And the whole common room, which has spent three weeks pretending not to watch him practice, erupts.
Cheers, and stamping, and someone banging the tables, a whole inn full of people roaring for an old orc who poured a cup of mead, and Ordun stands there in the middle of it and tells them all to mind their own business, and his eyes are bright, brighter than the maiming, brighter than the pain, because a man who thought the war was the last useful thing he’d ever do has just found out he can still learn a new thing at seventy with one hand and a town that loves him, and that, I think, watching from the corner, is a finer recovery than any that happens in the body.
He’s teaching himself to carve, too, one-handed, because he’s decided the boy who’s sweet on the candle-seller’s daughter needs a courting-gift made and there’s nobody else to teach the fool.
It started as something to do with the long evenings and it’s become the thing that’s healing him faster than any of the innkeeper’s broths, because it turns out a man who’s spent his life pouring for others needs, more than he needs his hand back, to find a new way to be useful to somebody young and scared and in love.
I find them at it in the Skep some evenings, the old maimed orc and the human boy, a knife and a bit of soft pine and a candle between them, Ordun growling instructions and pinning the wood under his dead hand like a clamp, which is the one job the dead hand’s still good for, holding a thing still while the living hand works.
He can’t carve fine anymore. The boy’s gift will be rough.
But Ordun knows what a courting-gift is for, which isn’t to be fine, it’s to say a thing the boy hasn’t the words for, and he teaches the boy to put the not-having-the-words into the wood, and I stand in the doorway watching an old orc teach a human boy to speak love in pine, and I think about how a thing can be broken and still make things, how a hand can be dead and still hold the work steady while the rest of you learns a new way to give, and I go home and I hold the woman I’m marrying a little tighter for it.
Because we’re marrying. That’s what still stops my breath when it lands, some ordinary moment, hammering a peg or banking the fire.
A rootless beekeeper who leaves before anyone can keep her is marrying me, on purpose, out loud, in front of the whole town, and she chose it, freely, and she’s not going anywhere, and I get to build a house I’ll grow old in with her in it, and there’s a part of me that spent five years being the wall that still can’t quite believe the man behind it gets to have this.
It catches me at odd moments. I’ll be planing a board and the thought will just arrive, unannounced, she’s marrying me, and I’ll have to set the plane down and stand there a breath while it goes through me.
I spent forty years certain of exactly one thing about myself, which is that I was the useful kind and not the kept kind, the sort of man you’re glad to have mend your cart and gladder to see go home.
I built a whole life on that certainty, a careful narrow life at the edge of things, and it turns out the certainty was a lie I told myself so the wanting couldn’t get at me.
She saw through it in a week. She looked at the wall I’d made of myself and she didn’t try to knock it down, she just kept choosing the man behind it, plain and stubborn, morning after morning, until I ran out of ways to not believe her.
And now she’s marrying me. Me. The wall.
And I stand in the half-built house I’m raising with my own hands for the two of us to grow old inside, and I let the impossible size of it go through me, and I hit the peg, and I keep building, because the building is the only prayer of thanks I’ve got.