2. Wren
WREN
The mill smells like river water and cut wood, not the rot and mildew I braced myself for. I stand inside the door with my satchel still clutched against my chest, waiting for the moment his patience runs out and the true nature of him comes forward. It always does. Eventually.
He's enormous — taller than any man I've ever stood near, his shoulders filling the doorway like he was carved to block it.
The gray of his skin catches the lamplight strange, and his eyes are the color of banked coals, slit through the middle like a cat's.
I've heard stories about demons my whole life.
None of them prepared me for how quiet he is.
"Three rules," he says, and his voice is low enough that I feel it more than hear it. "Work honestly. Steal nothing. Do those two things, and no harm comes to you here. Ever."
I wait for the rest. There's always a rest — a caveat, a threat dressed up as kindness before the real terms show themselves.
"That's all?" I ask, because I can't help it.
"That's all." He turns without ceremony and starts up a narrow staircase, expecting me to follow. "The living quarters are above the grinding room. I'll show you where you'll sleep."
I follow because I don't know what else to do. Varek never explained anything, only pointed and expected obedience, and the silence of not knowing what's coming has always frightened me more than a raised hand ever could.
The room he leads me to hasn't been touched in years, I'd wager.
Dust sits thick along the windowsill, and the single chair in the corner has a leg that doesn't quite meet the floor.
But there's a bed, real and solid, and someone — him, it must be him — has already laid a folded blanket across it along with a plate of bread and dried meat.
"Eat," he says, like it's an order and not an offer. "You'll start work at first light."
He leaves before I can ask why there's food waiting for a woman he bought an hour ago sight unseen. I stand alone in the dust and the quiet and the strange, uncertain warmth of a full plate, and I don't understand any of it.
I don't sleep well. Every creak of the old building has me half-rising from the bed, listening for footsteps that never come.
By the time gray light creeps through the shutters, I've decided the silence itself is its own kind of unsettling, so I get up and do the only thing I know how to do when a place feels wrong beneath my hands.
I clean.
The stairwell first, sweeping years of dust and grain husk into a pile I carry out to the yard.
Then the sitting room below the living quarters, where cobwebs hang thick enough to catch moths, and a hearth sits cold and unused despite the chill already settling into the walls.
I find a cracked washbasin and scrub it until the crack is the only flaw left.
I find dishes stacked and forgotten, and I wash every one.
Nobody lives like this by choice. Nobody keeps a home this bare unless there's nobody left to keep it for.
Around midday, I hear him on the stairs, and I brace myself out of old habit, waiting for the moment he tells me to stop wasting time on things that don't matter to the grain.
Instead he stops in the doorway and looks at the room like he's never seen it before. His tail moves once behind him, low and slow.
"You didn't have to do this," he says.
"I know." I wring out my rag over the basin, not quite meeting the coal-red of his eyes. "I wanted to."
He doesn't answer that. He watches me a moment longer, something unreadable behind that fearsome face, and then he goes back downstairs without another word.
I catch myself smiling at the empty doorway, and I don't fully understand why.
That evening, dry clothes appear folded outside my door — a work dress, plain but sturdy, nothing torn or stained the way everything I own currently is. There's no note. No mention of it at dinner, which is bread and stew eaten in near-total silence at a table built for one.
"You didn't need to buy me clothes," I say, because the silence is starting to press on me more than any insult would.
"You need clothes that don't fall apart during work." He doesn't look up from his bowl. "That's practical. Nothing more."
I decide not to argue the point, though something in me wants to.
Nobody has ever handed me something without expecting payment for it later, and I keep waiting for the cost to reveal itself.
It doesn't come that night. It doesn't come the next morning either, when I find my boots — worn thin enough that I'd been hiding the holes with folded cloth — sitting cleaned and mended by the door.
I don't know what kind of master keeps rules this simple and still manages to feel more trustworthy than every soft-spoken cruelty I've survived before him. But for the first time in longer than I can remember, I fall asleep without listening for footsteps at all.