Moonbright

Chapter 26

I'm pinning the rail for the third time and the spacing is still wrong.

"Bram."

He looks up from the post he's hammering. He doesn't answer. He never answers. Bram's communication is forty percent silence, forty percent eye contact, and twenty percent grunts, and it works for him.

"Two inches lower on this end. Pigs are short. Pigs are also clever—they will lever. Four-inch gap at the bottom and they'll find the moonbright field, and we'll have purple bacon and dead pigs and three trade favors I cashed in for nothing. Move it."

He moves it.

"Thank you."

Grunt.

I press the rail flat against the post. He drives the peg. The hammer rhythm is steady. Working-day sound.

"And the goats are getting their own pen, don't argue with me.

Goats and pigs together is—no. I tried it once.

Bought two pigs at the market, walked them home very pleased with myself, put them down to meet the goats.

The goats had opinions. The goats had immediate, violent opinions.

Within thirty seconds I had a fight on my hands.

Within two hours I had a bite poultice on a goat and a pig eating my doorframe.

Within two days I was walking those pigs back to the man who sold them.

He refused a refund. Apparently it's a buyer-beware market.

I'm still bitter. Separate pens. Stop looking at me. "

He isn't looking at me. He never looks at me. That's the thing I've decided to project onto him.

"The market is six days. Maybe seven if Idris is being difficult about the cow, which he will be, because he is Idris, and Idris is a hoarder, but I have a small jar of paste that historically makes him reasonable—bribery is a public health intervention if the alternative is a stubborn dairy farmer—and we need two breeding pairs of pigs, one milk goat, no, two more milk goats, you can't have too many—and a young milk cow if Idris will part with her—"

"Mel."

"What."

"Breathe."

I take a breath. He goes back to hammering.

I straighten up. My back makes a sound it shouldn't make. Twenty-two and creaking. Excellent.

The clearing is full of working bodies. North end, Keer's raising the third dwelling.

Two wolves on the long beam, four humans bracing the posts, a fifth human up top with the lashings.

Keer at the load end, taking most of the weight himself because he's Keer, and that's what Keer does.

The beam goes up. He guides it into the notch.

His shoulders move under his shirt. A bead of sweat slides down his spine and disappears into his waistband.

I watch.

I keep watching.

Bram clears his throat.

I look at the rail. I look at Bram. Bram looks at the rail.

"I refuse to engage."

"Didn't ask."

"I'm refusing anyway."

He grunts. The grunt has flavor. Specifically, the grunt that means he is thinking something he is not going to say and wants me to know he is not going to say it.

"What."

"Nothing."

"Bram."

He gets back to the rail.

Across the way, Axan's running a chopping crew at the tree line—three young wolves and two humans, all working through what was meant to be one pile and is now four, because Axan delegates by pointing.

Kestria is halfway up a roof with two pups handing thatch up the ladder one careful armful at a time.

The woman with the slate at the central fire is the one who stepped forward at the standoff and said they'd come back. Minette, she said her name was. She came back the next morning with the families and she's been running them since.

Three children at the edge of the work. The boy from Minette's group, the small girl with the chipped tooth, and one wolf pup who has decided he is in charge of all of it. The pup has Nugget under one arm. The boy has a fistful of grain. The small girl is in charge of moral support.

"Don't squeeze her," I call.

"I'M NOT!"

"Support her bottom."

"She HAS a bottom?"

"All chickens have bottoms. That is in fact where the eggs come from. We will return to this curriculum at a later date. Support her bottom."

The pup supports Nugget's bottom. The boy holds out the grain. Nugget accepts the grain at her own pace, with the dignity of a queen who has decided this peasant's offering is acceptable. She's appointed herself their pet. Hens with jobs don't run away. I support hens with jobs.

Keer Jr. is six paces off, having opinions about the children's procession.

He is pacing. He has decided his hen has been kidnapped and he has decided he is going to do something about it and he has also decided that the something is going to involve a great deal of strutting and zero actual confrontation.

He paces. He bobs. He stops. He stares at Nugget.

Nugget stopped acknowledging his existence two days ago. He paces some more.

Then he commits.

He hovers near Nugget's nothing-pile—a small mound of feed-sweepings she has been guarding for personal reasons no one understands—and edges closer. Closer. The pup sets Nugget down. Keer Jr. arrives at the nothing-pile with the air of a creature who has decided to be tolerated.

Nugget pecks him.

Square on the comb.

He retreats four inches.

He returns to hovering.

Bram's hammer pauses. "Indestructible."

"He thinks she's playing hard to get."

"She is not."

"She isn't. He's confused her policies."

Footsteps behind me. Light. Quick.

"Healer."

Kestria. Ladder-flushed. Dust on one cheek. Three pieces of thatch in her hair.

"Wolf."

"Someone is wearing my brother's shirt again."

"This one is mine."

"It is now." She grins, and she looks too much like Keer when she grins, so I look at the rail. "This one was clean. Mine wasn't."

"Mhm."

"We had been up all night."

"Woah, I don’t want to know."

"Kestria."

"There's a tactical hydration phase, and there's a wearing-his-shirts phase, and one tends to follow the other, and I did try to warn you about this, and you said tactical hydration."

"It was tactical hydration. He gave me water. Once. Well, actually twice—there is no shirt clause in tactical hydration."

"There's a shirt clause now. Pack-wide. Axan has a bet."

"Axan can bite me."

Kestria's eyebrows shoot up. "Mel."

"What?"

"Don't say bite me."

"It's an expression."

"Not in this clearing it isn't."

I open my mouth. Close it.

"Oh. Right. Yeah, that's a—that's a whole thing, isn't it."

"It is."

"Keer would—"

"Lose his entire wolf. Yes. Don't say bite me anywhere near him."

"Noted. Officially noted. Stricken from the vocabulary. I yield bite me. Bite me is retired."

"Mel. You are still saying bite me."

"I'm saying it in retirement context. The retirement applies to general usage. Whereas if I want Keer to bite me—"

"MELORI."

"What."

"That is my brOTHER. Stop."

"I was clarifying the exemption—"

"There is no exemption."

She kisses the top of my head—not a feat, given height differentials—and moves on toward the roof. I watch her go. I don't think about the shirt. I think about the shirt for one beat.

Across the clearing, Dara has the healing station set up under a lean-to. The station's hers now. Has been since the standoff—she has steady hands and I have animals and that turned out to be the right division of labor. I help if she calls. So far she hasn’t.

A human man—one of Minette's, broad and sweating—is sitting on the stump with his hand out. His thumb is the color of an eggplant.

"Hammer?"

"Hammer."

"Yourself?"

"Yes."

"Excellent."

She wraps the thumb. He looks at her.

"Will I lose it?"

"No."

"Will it heal?"

"Yes."

"Will it stop hurting?"

"No."

"...thank you?"

"Don't smash it again."

He nods and leaves with his thumb in the air. She raises a hand at me without looking. I raise one back.

A shadow falls across the rail.

Cedar.

I don't turn around immediately because I have just decided I am a person with self-control. The decision lasts approximately two seconds.

I turn around.

Keer. Waterskin in one hand. Wood dust in his hair, sawdust on his forearms, sweat at his collar. He's been raising a beam. He looks it.

Cedar and sweat and sawdust. I didn't think sawdust would smell so sexy—

Keer's eyebrow shoots up.

Behind me, Bram grunts. He picks up his hammer and removes himself to the far end of the rail.

I turn my head to Bram. "Oh, shut it, Bram. Get used to it."

"Mm."

I turn back to Keer. "Hi."

He hands me the waterskin.

"I'm not dehydrated. I want to make that clear up front.

I'm drinking water at appropriate intervals.

Bram and I have a system. Well, Bram and I do not actually have a system, that was a lie.

Bram's refusing to drink water and I'm drinking water spitefully on his behalf in order to model the behavior.

He hasn't adopted the behavior. He's decided he's in a hydration competition.

He's losing the hydration competition and he refuses to acknowledge—"

His thumb at my cheek. Brief.

"Drink. Eat."

"That was—that was two words, Keer. You can't just—"

He's already walking back toward the dwelling.

Hmph. I drink the water.

Bram, after: "He's not wrong."

"Hammer the rail, Bram."

Another grunt.

I drink more water.

The water hits my stomach wrong.

I don't notice it for a second. Then I notice it. It sits there. Cold. Sloshing.

The post in front of me shifts slightly. Then it's not the post that's shifting, it's me. Heat goes up my spine and across my scalp and the back of my throat fills with what is not saliva.

I brace one hand on the rail.

I haven't slept. I slept four hours, maybe five. The wood treatment Axan uses on the corner posts smells terrible up close—black, sticky, acrid—and I have been bending over rails for three hours. That's all this is.

The heat goes. The cold replaces it.

I push off the rail.

"Pegs, Bram. Three more long pegs. Cross brace."

He looks at me. Goes for pegs.

I sit on the log. Not because I need to sit. Because the log is there, and it is sometimes useful to sit.

I drink more water.

Bram returns. He squats by the rail. He doesn't look at me. He doesn't look at the rail either, which is what tells me he is looking at me.

"I had bread. I'm fine. I'm—"

"Mm."

"—going to drive that peg in a minute, just give me—"

I don't get up. I sit. The clearing has too much in it. Hammers and voices and somewhere a child is shrieking and somewhere else a goat is shrieking back, and the heat and the cold trade places in my throat in a pattern, and the smell of the wood treatment is its own animal now, the smell is—

I stand up.

I make it three steps.

I'm bent over in the dirt with my hands on my knees. The bread comes up. Comes up again. My nose runs and my eyes water and there is nothing to be done about either until this stops. There is more bread in me than I remembered eating.

Bram is there. His hand is between my shoulder blades. Steady. Sparse. Bram.

I spit. I wipe my mouth with the back of my wrist. I straighten halfway.

"M'fine. Sorry."

"Don't be."

I crouch with my hand on the rail. My hair is sticking to my forehead. Bram's hand is still between my shoulder blades.

"I never puke."

He waits.

"The only time I've ever puked in my adult life was when I ate questionable mushrooms, which, given my profession, is deeply humiliating to admit."

"Must be the heat."

"It's not hot."

"Mm."

"Thank you, Bram. Helpful."

"Yeah."

I stop.

I'm crouched in the dirt, hand on the rail, and my brain is doing math.

Days backward.

Today is build day four. One. Two. Three. Four. Four days since the standoff. Before the standoff was prep day. Before prep day was the scouts and the gray blood and the dirt—

Oh.

Huh.

That explains the bread.

Bram's hand is still on my back.

"Bram."

"Mm."

"Where is Keer."

Bram lifts his chin toward the dwellings.

Keer—

I think I'm—