24. Stakes
Stakes
Stakes
He turned the thing over in his head for a while after, but no more animals turned up dead, and a man could only chew so long on a thing that gave him nothing new. Two kills, and close together. That might mean something, or it might mean a hungry beast had drifted on through and kept going.
He had a few notions where a winged thing might lie up, the stand of old timber and the high hill and the rocky ridge he had marked from Marge's pasture, but a man didn't walk up on a gryphon's den alone and half-ready and expect to walk back.
Until it showed itself in daylight or came down close enough to track fresh, there was nothing to be done that wouldn't get him killed.
So he put it where it belonged, at the back of his mind, and went back to work.
What he knew about gryphons wouldn't have filled a cup. The Silver Hands had hired out to guard men and goods, not to hunt monsters, and the work had mostly run to bandits and the odd stretch of road that wanted clearing.
He had put down a wolf pack once when a caravan camped in the wrong valley, dug out a goblin nest or two, and walked out of a fallen-in cave with a wyvern's head and a title he had never gone looking for.
A gryphon was none of those, and knowing its name out of a book was a long way from knowing how to kill one.
The bones of the Kettle's kitchen had gone in days back, and Sasha had sent him home to his own crops once the heavy work was done.
What was left was the finish, the trim and the edging and all the small slow work that came after the framing, so when the gryphon gave him nothing more to do, he went back down to see to it.
Sasha leaned in the doorway while he fitted a length of facing along the front of the counter.
The serving window stood open between the kitchen and the main room, the second stove sat squat and black against its flue, the sink was set, the racks were up along the wall, and the whole of it only wanted finishing now.
"It's going to be the best kitchen in the valley," she said. "I keep coming in just to look at it."
"It'll do you fine." Kain set a nail along the edge and tapped it home.
She went back out to the bar, where a few travelers had come in off the road, and Kain reached for the next length of facing. Footsteps came at the back of the room, and he looked up to find Carol letting herself in through the kitchen door.
"Since when do you get the run of the back of the Kettle?" he asked.
"Since I wanted it." She crossed her arms. "The whole town's been talking about Sasha's new kitchen.
I came in for fence wire and thought I'd see what the fuss was about.
It's nice. The kitchen, I mean. Our new fence looks just as good, but I won't brag on it.
This is near twice the room the old one had. "
"Kain's outdone himself." Sasha came back through with an armful of mugs.
"He makes a habit of it." Carol nodded at the prep bench where it ran along the wall. "You putting tile up behind that?"
"Tile?" Sasha asked. "We never had tile in the old kitchen."
"Before, your prep bench didn't have a wall behind it. Now it does." Carol laid a hand flat on the bare boards. "You'll throw sauce and grease up onto this all day long. Leave it bare and the wood rots, and what doesn't rot goes soft and sweet for mice and roaches. You want tile."
"Hadn't thought of that," Kain said.
"Can't say I had either," said Sasha.
"I've a box of it sitting in our barn doing nothing.
" Carol leaned on the counter. "We meant to redo the bathhouse a few years back, bought the tile for it, and then my father knocked a lantern into the wall and burned the whole thing to the ground.
We built it new, the old tile didn't match the new, and it's been gathering dust ever since. "
"Will your father mind?" Sasha asked.
"Not if he doesn't notice it gone. If he asks, I'll think of something." Carol grinned. "Worst comes to worst, I put it on the tab Kain already owes him."
"Hey," Kain said.
She slipped out the back, and Kain went on with the facing, and before long she was back with the box thudded down on the floor, a tile cutter under her arm and a pail of mastic in her hand.
"It's old, so let's hope it still holds." She crouched and started wiping the boards down. "Sasha, do you want these staggered or squared up? Staggered looks better, and it hides a bad cut, but it's more of a chore."
"You're the one laying them." Sasha set the mugs down. "You, or Kain."
"Staggered, then, and I'll make it look good." Carol turned a long rectangular tile in her hand. "If I felt fancy I'd run a third offset, but I don't, so we go halves. Hand me that bucket."
Kain went back to cutting trim while she buttered the wall and pressed the first tiles home. Matthew crawled in and dragged a hand through the sawdust, and Carol talked while she worked.
"Jeremiah told me something strange killed his goats. Said it spooked you."
"It didn't spook me." Kain shook his head.
"Made you uneasy, then."
"Made me curious. That's about as far as I can take you."
"I hear it flies. Drops down out of the sky onto a thing and takes hold." Carol let her voice go low and grim. "And then it sinks into your veins and drinks you down to a dry husk."
"That much I can tell you is wrong," Kain said.
Her face fell. "So it's not a vampire."
"No."
"And here I've been sharpening stakes." She sat back on her heels. "They're fence stakes, but they'd make fine vampire stakes, and the garlic's coming up out in the garden. I had half a mind to go be Carol the Vampire Slayer."
"A vampire would have you down in three seconds, stake or no," Kain said.
"You don't know that." She glanced back over her shoulder. "I'm stronger than I look."
"I believe it."
"Wrestle me, right here, and you'll tap in three seconds. I'll guarantee it." She held up her fists.
"No wrestling in my kitchen." Sasha came through with another round of mugs.
"Arm wrestle?" Carol offered.
"It's not your arm I'd worry over." Kain set a nail and tapped it in. "You got the Willpower to throw off a charm? The kind of mind-magic that locks you up where you stand?"
"How would I know," Carol said.
"Then it has you before you ever raise the stake.
It takes hold of everyone close at once, sets you on your feet with your eyes open and your head gone soft, and you don't come back to yourself until you feel the fangs go in.
I've got the Willpower to weather some of it, and it would still rattle my skull. "
"You're making all of this up." Carol scowled at the wall.
"And vampires don't bleed goats and sheep, besides." Kain fitted another length of trim. "Now, a dragon gone vampiric is a different tale, but that's happened the once in all the years anybody's set down on paper."
"Once that anybody set down. Maybe it happened more, and nobody lived to write it."
"You read too many books," Kain said.
"My father says the same. I think he's a vampire himself, and he just doesn't want me learning a good way to put him down before he turns on me."
Sasha snickered on her way through. "I'll carry a stake when I come to settle the debt, then."
"How's that coming, anyhow?" Carol asked.
"No crop off the fields yet, so not far." Kain marked a cut. "I'll have something to sell before long."
"Don't let it slip. I'd hate for my father to take against you, and I'd hate worse to watch Roan walk back to our place." She pressed a tile flat, and the joke went out of her voice. "So what do you think it is? You don't know for certain, I know that. But if you had to give your gut."
"I don't deal in gut answers." Kain shook his head. "Say a thing and be wrong, and you've sent everyone off in the wrong direction. I've got my ideas. The moment I say one out loud and miss, the whole town's in a panic."
"I'm not the town."
"No. But the men at the bar leaning this way to listen are."
She couldn't argue that, so she went back to her tiles.
For a long stretch the only sounds were the low wash of talk out of the tavern, the knock of the hammer, the draw of the saw, and the wet drag of mastic going onto the wall, and now and then the scritch of the cutter snapping a tile clean.
They worked easy alongside one another, getting the kitchen the rest of the way done.
They were near finished for the day when Carol spoke up again. "Whatever killed those goats, it's getting closer."
"I know," Kain said.
He looked over at her where she knelt to the wall.
She had her back to him, and he could read it in the hunch of her shoulders and the tight set of her arms and the stiffness gone into her neck.
She had stock of her own to keep and a town she cared about, and the worry of it sat on her plain enough.
He turned the talk somewhere easier than that. "No big storms yet this year, at least."
"True." Carol came back up a little. "This time last year we'd already had two twisters come close by. My father says we'll get a few more toward summer, and he reads the sky like a page. If it rains with the sun still out, he says, it'll rain again inside the week."
"How's that work?"
"Couldn't tell you, but it holds true more often than not." She pressed another tile to the wall. "And a ring around the moon means you batten down."
"It's sun dogs that get me." Sasha leaned in the doorway. "Pretty as anything, but if you see them of an evening, you'd best hope you've still got a roof come morning."
The talk ran on to weather, the oldest dodge there was for not talking about the other thing, and it served well enough. Kain had his own store of it from the road, monsoons that drowned a camp and blizzards that buried one, and he traded them back while he worked.
He set the last nail into the trim and stepped back from it.
"There. Come look it over. I've still got the last of the edging to do, but the counter's finished out."
Sasha came and leaned her weight on it, then took up a stack of plates and set them out along the top, more than the old kitchen had ever held at one time.
"It's just what I've been wanting," she said.
"And I'm near done with the wall." Carol sat back on her heels. "I'll come finish it tomorrow. Won't take me long."
Kain looked the finished kitchen over. Sasha had what she had wanted out of it, near enough. He gathered up the tools and swept the offcuts into a pile, and left the last of the edging for the morning.