3. Malvek
MALVEK
Iexpect her to quit within the week.
That isn't cruelty on my part — it's experience.
The mill work is grueling even for someone raised to it, and Wren has spent her life passing hand to hand across the trade roads, not hauling grain sacks or working the crank of a grinding wheel until her arms shake.
I show her the sluice gate mechanism expecting confusion.
Instead, she asks how the tension adjusts for water pressure, and asks it like she genuinely wants the answer.
"Tighter in the spring floods," I tell her, working the gear until it locks into place. "Looser in autumn, when the river runs low. Too tight and you'll snap the axle."
"How do you know which is which without a gauge?"
"You listen to the water." I glance at her, expecting the blank stare most people give when I say things like that. She's watching the gate instead, brow furrowed, filing the answer away somewhere I suspect she'll remember it.
By the second day she's hauling sacks nearly her own weight without complaint, and by the third she's humming while she works — some half-remembered tune with no real shape to it, drifting through the grinding room in a manner that doesn't belong there and somehow does anyway.
I find myself listening for it without meaning to.
"You've never done this before," I say, watching her stack the last sack of the afternoon's delivery.
"No." She wipes her forehead with the back of her wrist, leaving a streak of flour dust behind. "But nobody ever taught me anything before either. I like learning things. Keeps my mind off other things."
"You don't have to finish that."
"I know." She smiles, quick and unguarded, the kind of smile nobody in this village has offered me even once. "Thank you for not making me."
I turn back to the ledger before she can see whatever expression that pulls out of me.
She makes me laugh on the fourth day, which I did not think possible anymore.
We're repairing a section of loose flooring near the storage room, and she's holding a plank steady while I drive the nails, when she squints at the crooked line of boards already in place and says, entirely serious, "Did the last miller build this drunk? "
"The last miller was me."
"Oh." A pause. "Were you drunk?"
The laugh comes out low and rusted, more air than sound, but a laugh all the same. She looks startled by it, and something in me wants to hear it happen again.
"Demons don't drink," I tell her, driving the last nail home. "We simply build poorly when we're distracted."
"What were you distracted by?"
I don't answer that one. I gather the tools instead and tell her the flooring will hold now, and if she notices me avoiding the question, she's kind enough not to press it.
By midweek, I've stopped bracing myself for the day she asks to leave.
She works through the ache in her shoulders without mentioning it, though I see her wincing when she thinks I'm not looking.
I adjust the schedule without telling her why, giving her the lighter tasks in the mornings when the soreness sits worst, saving the heavier lifting for afternoons when her body has warmed into the labor.
"You changed the order," she says one morning, catching on faster than I expected. "We used to grind first, then haul."
"The grain settles better if it rests an hour before milling." It isn't entirely a lie. It also isn't entirely the truth.
She studies me with an expression I can't quite name, something between suspicion and gratitude, and doesn't push further.
I've learned already that she chooses her battles carefully — a habit worn into her by years of masters who punished questions.
I find myself wanting to unteach her that particular caution, though I don't know how a demon goes about convincing anyone that curiosity is safe.
That night, after she's gone up to sleep, I find her boots by the door again — the same ones I mended a week prior, already worn thin at the same seam from the pace she keeps.
I sit at the workbench and fix them properly this time, doubling the stitching so it holds through the season, using leather thicker than what the original cobbler chose.
I tell myself it's only sensible. A worker needs sound boots. Wet feet slow the work, same as I told her the earliest time.
I don't examine why I check the stitching twice before I'm satisfied, or why I choose the leather from my own good stock instead of the scraps I'd normally use for repairs this small. Some things are easier left unexamined, and I've had long practice leaving things exactly where they lie.
The following morning, she finds the boots outside her door and says nothing about them at breakfast, though I notice her glancing at my hands more than once across the table, like she's trying to reconcile the claws capable of tearing through stone with the careful, even stitches holding her boots together.
"You could tell me," she says eventually, setting down her bread.
"Tell you what?"
"That you're not what everyone says you are."
I consider the grain ledger instead of answering, running a claw down the column of numbers I've already checked twice this morning. "What everyone says and what I am aren't always different things. I simply choose which parts to show."
"Then I suppose I'm lucky you've chosen to show me the good ones."
I don't have an answer for that. I finish my bread in silence, and if the silence sits easier than it has in years, I decide that's a discovery worth keeping to myself for now.
Work continues through the week without further incident, the harvest deliveries steady, the grinding wheel turning from dawn until well past dusk most days.
Wren proves faster than I expected at learning the mechanisms, faster still at learning the particular rhythms of a mill she'd never set foot inside a month ago.
I catch myself measuring the days not by the grain processed, but by whether I've heard her humming yet, and I don't know when that shift happened, only that it has.