34. Wren
WREN
Ashbrook decides, without much consulting either of us, that our wedding is going to be the largest thing the valley has seen in some time.
It starts with Elsie, the way most large warm things in this village start with Elsie.
She corners me in the mill one morning, silver-blonde hair escaping her scarf, and informs me — informs, not asks — that a demon and the girl who saved the harvest cannot simply mumble their vows to Father Aldren in an empty chapel and call it done.
"You'll have a proper wedding," she says, in the tone of a woman who has already begun baking for it.
"All the valley. Music and all. We've earned a reason to be glad, and by heaven we're going to take it. "
And the valley takes it. All of it. At once.
I stand back over the following days and watch, half-astonished, as a village that spent an age crossing the road to avoid the man I'm marrying begins, unevenly and not in a sudden surge, to come round to him.
It isn't the whole of Ashbrook, and it isn't overnight — there are still a few who'll not step inside the mill, still an older woman or two who mutter the word cursed out of the side of their mouths and always will.
But the flood changed something that rumor never could.
You cannot watch a man hold back a river with his own body to save your grandchildren and go on believing he's a monster, and enough of Ashbrook watched it that the balance has finally tipped.
Farmers who called him cursed at the well a season ago now argue cheerfully over who'll donate the best of their stored cider.
The blacksmith, who fought at Malvek's shoulder against the flood, hammers out iron brackets for the lanterns without being asked and won't take a coin for them.
Marta organizes the women into a small fierce army of bakers and menders and decorators, and old Tomas, who we carried out of his flooding cottage on Malvek's arm, whittles a set of wedding cups from good pale wood and presents them to me with his hands shaking, not from fear this time but from the effort of not weeping.
They bring gifts. That's the thing that undoes me, over and over, through those busy days.
Handmade things, most of them, because coin is scarce this deep into winter but love, it turns out, is not.
A quilt stitched from a dozen households' spare cloth.
A carved cradle-to-be, given with a wink I pretend not to understand.
Beeswax candles, dried-apple garlands, a fiddle promised for the dancing.
Every one of them a small declaration from a family that once feared my husband-to-be and has decided, wholly and out loud, to love him instead.
I keep having to step outside into the snow to collect myself.There is so much to be done, and I throw myself into all of it the way I threw myself into cleaning this mill.
Elsie and I bake for three days straight, the mill floor warm and floury and loud with women's chatter, until every surface holds cooling loaves and honey-cakes and the little spiced buns Ashbrook saves for its gladdest days.
Marta drills the children in a song they mean to sing us, badly and at the top of their lungs.
The barn is swept and hung with dried-apple garlands and the promised lanterns.
And through all of it the gifts keep coming, left on the mill's doorstep like offerings — a pair of knitted gloves, a jar of somebody's best preserves, a wooden spoon carved with two figures I understand, when I look close, are meant to be a small woman and a great horned man, side by side.
I hold that one a long time before I can set it down.
Because I remember. I remember with a clarity that aches the woman who first came up this mill lane, soaked and shaking in the back of an elf-merchant's cart, braced for another cruel master, certain her whole life would be a thing done to her by people who owned her.
That woman could not have imagined this.
Could not have dreamed a valley of strangers would one day fill her wedding with handmade candles and dried-apple garlands, or that the terrifying horned creature who bought her would turn out to be the safest harbor she'd ever known.
I was so afraid that first day. I stood in the yard and counted the ways this new owner might hurt me.
And instead he cared for me in a hundred wordless ways and pretended he hadn't, and here I am, choosing a wedding cup carved by a man I helped save.
Malvek bears the whole business with the baffled dignity of a creature who has no earthly idea what to do with being celebrated.
The congratulations are the hardest for him, I think — harder than the flood.
He knows how to fight. He does not know how to stand in his own mill yard while farmer after farmer grips his hand and claps his great shoulder and tells him, plainly and gladly, that they're happy for him.
I watch him fumble it a dozen times a day, gruff and stiff and visibly overwhelmed, and I watch him slowly, slowly start to bear it easier.
By the third day, when Bren bounds up to demand whether demons dance at their own weddings, Malvek answers, "This one is about to learn, it seems," so dry that the boy howls with laughter, and something in me sings, because that is a man growing comfortable being loved.
"They treat you like one of their own now," I tell him that evening, the two together finally alone in the warm grinding room, the day's helpers gone home. "Like a friend. Not a monster. Do you feel it?"
"I feel it." He says it quietly, turning one of Tomas's wedding cups over in his enormous careful hands.
"I don't entirely trust it yet. For the longest time, the other thing doesn't wash out in a season.
But — yes. I feel it." His crimson gaze finds mine.
"You did this, you know. All of it. The village didn't warm to me.
It warmed to you, and then it looked at me through your eyes and saw something other than a demon. "
"That's not true." I cross to him, take the cup from his hands, set it down.
"They saw you hold back a flood with your own body.
They saw you spare the men who came to kill them.
I didn't make them love you, Malvek. I made the mill warm enough that they'd finally come close enough to see what you are. "
And it's true, I realize, looking around the mill floor — the mill that was a cold hollow tomb the day I arrived and is now the beating heart of every soul in the valley.
People come here now for more than flour.
They linger over bread and gossip by the fire I keep lit.
Children do their chores underfoot and beg stories from the demon they once feared.
The warmth I brought to this one building, a loaf at a time, a mended chair at a time, has spread out through the whole of Ashbrook like heat from a hearth, until there's no telling anymore where the mill's warmth ends and the village's begins.
I did that. The frightened girl in the cart did that.
"Come here," I tell my demon, and I tuck myself under his arm in the firelight, and we stand together and let the whole glad valley plan its celebration around us.