14. Wren
WREN
I've never had a reason to be nosy before. It turns out I'm good at it.
Delivering flour is the perfect cover. I've been carrying sacks down to the outlying farms myself these past weeks — partly to spare Malvek the boundary-straining trips to the edge of what the contract allows, partly because a woman with a warm loaf and a friendly word gets asked into kitchens that would never open their doors to a demon.
And a kitchen, I've learned, is where people talk.
So I talk. I ask after everyone's harvest, and their aunts, and their aching knees, and somewhere in the middle of all that ordinary chatter I ask, light as anything, whether they've had any strangers buying grain of late.
Whether anyone's offered to purchase their surplus outright before the snows.
The answers start to stack up into a shape I don't like.
"Funny you ask," old Hollis tells me, over his wife's tea, in a farmhouse two hours' walk down the valley.
"Fellow came through in early autumn. Smooth sort, fine coat, quick eyes.
Offered to buy my whole surplus at a fair price and haul it himself.
Said the roads were likely to get dangerous, that a wise man sold early. "
"Did you take it?"
"Course not." Hollis snorts. "Sell my winter grain to a stranger before I know how the season turns?
My father'd claw his way up out of the churchyard to slap me.
But I'll tell you what's queer." He leans in.
"Three of my neighbors did take it. And they have all had bad luck since — a barn fire, a flooded field, a wagon axle snapped clean on a good road.
Almost like a man wanted them short of grain and glad they'd already sold. "
I keep my face easy and my voice easier, but my heart is going hard. "That is queer," I agree, and I file every name he gives me away to carry home to Malvek.
It's the same story in three more kitchens.
A charming man in a fine coat, quick to buy, quicker to spread the notion that the roads were unsafe and the mill unlucky.
Nobody caught his name — he was careful with it — but they all remember the coat, and the crossed-sheaves seal on the papers he wanted signed.
The very same mark that came off our sheared pin.
In the last kitchen it's a sharp-eyed widow named Corrin who gives me the piece that turns my stomach cold.
"He asked about the mill," she tells me, pouring tea I don't need but drink to keep her talking.
"Not to grind at it. About it. How old the dam was, whether the wheel had ever failed, how many days' flour the village keeps against a hard winter.
Odd questions for a grain-buyer. I thought so at the time and thought no more of it, till you came asking.
" She fixes me with a look. "You tell that demon of yours to watch his water, girl.
A man who asks about a dam isn't thinking about your harvest. He's thinking about your river. "
I thank her and I do not tell her she's a season too late with the warning.
But I carry her words up the valley heavier than any flour sack, because they fit the seal and the auger and the sheared pin into one plain and ugly picture, and the picture ends with a broken dam and a drowned village unless we get ahead of it.
By the time I've walked the valley I have a merchant with no name, a trading house with a seal, and a pattern of ruined neighbors laid out clear as a milled measure.
It isn't proof enough to put before a magistrate.
But it's enough to know we're not chasing a phantom or a curse.
We're chasing a man, and a greedy one, and greed leaves tracks.
What surprises me — what warms me the whole long walk home — is the village.
At the well, where Marta once told me flat out that Malvek was cursed, I come upon her giving that same lecture to a pair of newcomer women, and before I can say a word in his defense, Marta herself cuts them off.
"Don't be daft," she says, wringing out her washing. "That demon worked through a whole night to fix the stone so we'd have flour, and worked through a whole flood last week besides, I heard. Cursed men don't lose sleep keeping strangers fed. You'll mind your tongues about him under my hearing."
I duck behind the chapel wall so she won't see me grinning like a fool.
It's happening everywhere, in small ways.
Garrik defends him at the tavern. Bren has half the village children convinced Malvek could wrestle a bear and choosing not to is a mark of his nobility.
Elsie tells anyone who'll listen that the mill's bread has never been finer and the miller never fairer.
The fear the village once wore is wearing thin at last, worn down not by any grand proof but by the accumulated weight of a many small honest days.
And somewhere in that long walk back up the hill, flour dust on my sleeves and the seal drawn carefully on a scrap of paper in my pocket, it lands on me without warning — this is home.
Not the mill only, and not Malvek only, but everything: the well, the crooked rooftops, Marta's fierce loyalty and Bren's tall tales and Elsie's knowing looks.
I have a place here. People who'd notice if I stopped coming.
For a woman who spent her whole life being carried from valley to valley in the backs of other people's carts, that is a thing so enormous I have to stop on the road and press my hand to my chest until I can breathe around it.
Malvek is in the yard when I come up the hill, watching for me the way he does now, and the sight of him — enormous and grim and unmistakably relieved that I've come back safe — finishes what the road started.
"You found something," he says, reading it off me before I've said a word.
"I found a lot of somethings." I cross to him and take his big clawed hand in both of mine, right there in the open yard where any villager might see, and I don't care who does.
"But first there's a thing I need to say, and I need you to actually hear it and not tuck it away for later the way you do. "
His brow furrows. "Wren—"
"I'm not leaving. Not for a warmer town, not if the contract never breaks, not if this whole valley catches fire.
I've spent my life being taken places I never chose.
This is the first home I've ever chosen to stay, and I choose it, and I choose you, and I'll go on choosing it every morning if you'll have me.
" My voice cracks. "So whatever we find at the end of this, whatever that seal means — you're not facing it alone, and you're not facing it as a man with nothing to lose.
You've got me. I promise you that. I'll not abandon you. "
He only looks at me, that fearsome face gone still and open, and then he lifts my hands to his mouth and presses his lips to my knuckles, careful of the fangs, gentle as anything that size has any right to be.
"I believe you," he says roughly, and I know what those three words cost a creature who spent years learning to believe in nothing. "Now. Tell me about the seal."