27. Chapter 27 #2
The rest of it went as Sira's cakes always went, and there is a peace in a recipe that never changes, a rhythm your hands remember when your heart's in an uproar.
A knuckle of rendered fat worked through the pale flour until it clung together.
A thumb of the honey they called ilit, the good dark honey the pride prized above anything, which Eleya fetched from her own small store without my asking and gave up more of than the cakes strictly needed, and I noted that, the giving of more than was needed, because you learn a person by what they're willing to spend on the thing they're making.
A scatter of dried bilberries, worked through gentle so they didn't bleed their colour out.
And then the pressing, the flour-and-fat-and-honey gathered into small rounds between the palms. The heating of the stone at the fire's edge until a flick of water danced and hissed across it.
"How do you know when it's hot enough?" Eleya asked, and there was something different in her voice now, the hostility gone out of it, only the plain hunger of someone who wanted to learn a thing properly.
"You flick water at it. If the drop sits and steams, it's not hot enough yet.
If it skitters about like it's frightened...
" I flicked a few drops from my fingers.
They danced and vanished, bringing the old satisfaction of a craft I knew well.
"Then the stone's ready for the cakes. Watch me do the first one. "
I laid the first cakes on the stone, and they took at once, the honey catching and browning at the edges, the smell of them rising sweet into the cold morning air, and I saw Eleya's face change at the smell as faces always changed at that smell, some old comfort in it that reached past whatever else a person was carrying.
I turned them once, lifted them off crisp at the edges and soft in the middle, and set them on a flat clean stone to cool.
Then I made her lay the next batch herself, guiding her hands off the heat before she burned them, until she had the way of it and could do it alone.
She made the last of them without any help from me at all.
And when she lifted them off the stone golden and perfect, small rounds of exactly the thing she'd tried and failed to make all morning, she went very still and looked at them for a long moment.
Then she looked at me, and her dark eyes were wet again but with nothing hostile in them now.
"I could not have..." She stopped. Her hands were shaking, I noticed, just slightly, the small tremor of hands when a thing matters far more than the thing itself would explain. "Thank you for this. I do not, I did not think that you, of all of them, would ever help me."
"I know you didn't." And there it was, the opening, the moment to say the thing I'd worked out somewhere in the grinding and had been carrying carefully ever since, waiting for the right shape to give it.
Because I had worked it out. I'm not slow, whatever two years of being made to feel small had taught me to believe about myself, and I'd sat beside this woman for an hour watching her pour more honey than she needed into a gift she'd wept over making, a gift for someone she couldn't afford to be seen making it for, and I'd have had to be a fool to miss the shape of it.
A woman doesn't hide a kindness that has nothing to hide.
I didn't know who. I want to be honest about that, I didn't have the name, and I was careful not to reach for it, because some knowledge is safer left half-made.
But I knew the weight of a love that had to be kept in the dark, because I'd carried my own strange version of it all summer, the fear that a heart the size of mine was a thing the world would punish me for.
And I knew, looking at Eleya's shaking hands and her wet eyes and the perfect cakes she'd made for someone she was terrified to be seen loving, that whatever this was, whoever it was for, it deserved no less grace than I'd finally learned to give myself.
So I chose my words as you choose your steps on breaking ice, for exactly where they'd bear weight, and nowhere they wouldn't.
"Whoever they're for," I said, gently, holding her eyes so she'd understand I meant every word and no more than I said, "they're lucky, lucky to have someone go to this much trouble, someone who'd grind seed to tears over making them something.
" I let that sit a moment, and then I gave her the rest of it, the true heart of it, plainly.
"There's nothing wrong with loving someone enough to make them something with your own two hands, Eleya, nothing wrong with it at all, whatever anyone's ever made you feel.
It's the best thing people do for each other.
I hope you know that, and I hope whoever gets these knows exactly what they've got. "
I watched her understand what I was telling her, and what I was carefully not telling her, and what I was promising by the not-telling.
I watched her understand that I'd seen, and that I'd already decided, and that the deciding had come out somewhere she hadn't dared hope it would.
Her face did a complicated thing, the fear and the disbelief and something breaking loose underneath, and for a moment I thought she might weep in earnest. Then she pressed her lips together and gave me a single small nod, and I gave her one back.
Between us in that nod passed the whole of a thing neither of us had said and neither of us ever would.
"You are not what I thought," she said at last, very low.
"No, I don't suppose I am," I agreed. "I don't think I'm what anybody thought, lately. Least of all me."
* * *
Sawa came back from the morning's hunt while the last of the cakes were still cooling.
Her arrival reached me before I saw her, the particular note the settlement took on when the hunt-leader came in with meat, the calling back and forth, the shift in the pride's whole attention toward the returning hunters; Eleya heard it too.
I watched her go still, watched her look down at the cakes she'd made and then toward the sound of Sawa coming, and I saw the terror come up in her again, the old fear of being seen, and I understood that we'd arrived at the exact edge of the thing I'd promised silently to protect.
I got to my feet. It was the only gift left to give, and I gave it without a word, I stood, gathered up my cracked quern-stone and the empty seed-bowl, and made myself into a woman with somewhere else to be, so that whatever happened next would happen without a witness who mattered.
I'd give them that; a person deserves to hand their frightened heart across without a stranger watching to see whether it's taken.