Page 32

TWO MONTHS AFTER THE SABBAT

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I sit cross-legged on the floor.

The dirty rug scratches at the meat of my thighs, the curve of my bottom, but it is a distant sensation, as though I am not entirely in my body, but rather just tethered.

Hedda senses the illness in me. The disease of guilt veiled with grief.

She won’t leave my side.

The moment I parked myself on the floor in the lounge, she scrambled her overgrown limbs for me, then curled herself up in my basketed legs. She doesn’t fit like she used to; her growth is quick, perhaps quicker since we are in the warped time of the Midlands, or perhaps that I am so dull in the head that I can make sense of very little.

That dullness weighs down my lashes as I reach out for the edge of the rug. I tug it back, and the hit of musky dust is a punch to the face.

My body jerks with a suppressed cough.

It’s no use, that dust has fast travelled down my throat to settle in my chest. With any luck, it is poison, and it will kill me.

I smack my hand once, twice on my chest.

Hedda remains utterly unfazed. Her eyes flare in the dimly lit lounge, sharp green blades, and she watches as I reach for the exposed floorboards with one hand.

My nails cut into the edge of a particularly wonky wooden board. With my other hand, I spindle a small blade, then dig it into the slight gap.

I wrench the floorboard upwards until it bows.

It cracks, loud enough to cringe me to the bones.

Hedda’s ears perk.

I pry out the board, teeth bared, my shoulders set against the threat that the wood might snap and splinter all over us.

It’s clumsy work with Hedda pinning my crossed legs down, and that I have to reach over her and bend around her, but I set aside the board before digging out the small wooden box from the floor. It’s hidden to the eyes of others, not just by the wooden planks, but by the dusting of feathers and cotton that I sprinkled all over it when I buried it here.

Softly, I place it on the floor.

The rusted clasp was once a lovely brass, but time and neglect has ruined it. I pick it off the latch before lifting the once-polished lid.

There was a time that, when I opened this box, I was looking down at little treasures. The beaded bracelet left behind by my mother was the main treasure—and it is gone.

Lost to time, lost in the move from Comlar to Hemlock, then Hemlock to Cheapside, vanished somewhere along the way.

Now, I look down at a different sort of treasure.

Ten thousand gold pieces.

I don’t need to think for a moment, a second, to know who left this chest of gold pieces on my bedchamber floor.

I left it there for phases before my mind started chugging back to life, however faint, however distant, and I hid it under the bed. But this dwelling is not secure, so when my mind worked a little harder, a little clearer, I moved it to the floorboards by the hearth.

I ghost my fingers over the warped pieces, polished to the touch, before I dig out a fistful.

I release my grip over the edge of the rug and watch the gold scatter. I count out the pieces into two piles: one, just eleven pieces, and the other pile a generous amount of two hundred.

The bigger pile is stuffed into a large leather pouch.

I fasten it with the drawstrings, firm, then stuff it into my coat’s inner pocket. Parchment crinkles in there, disturbed by the intrusion. The eleven pieces are tucked into the front pocket of the woollen, hooded coat.

“Up.” The word comes out from my raw throat, gravelled by intermittent sobs.

Hedda understands as though I speak clearly. She rolls off my lap and thuds to the rug before she flips onto her paws—then starts skidding around the lounge.

One of those moods, excitement that teeters on the edge of agitation. It often makes me think of a youngling high on sugar and on the precipice of a tantrum.

I am slower to get to my feet. I stay crouched for a beat to bury the chest in the floor, then force the board back into its slot.

I draw the hood over my unwashed hair. The loss of volume has it limp in the ribbon at the back of my head, and the faint smell of mildew is undeniable. But it is raining out, a constant drizzle beyond the window, so I care nothing about it.

Hedda’s skidding glee follows me into the kitchen.

The countertops are smeared with jam and butter and breadcrumbs and spilled milk that has been left out too long. The stink crinkles my nose as I grab the satchel off the bench.

We leave for the wet streets of Kithe—and our first stop is the messenger depot by my favourite sweetshop. But I am in no mood for sweets, so I am quick to dip in and out of the depot, where I pay for the delivery of the leather pouch of two hundred gold pieces, and a letter to go with it.

A small, slight letter to Pandora.

‘It isn’t much. But it is more than you deserve.’

I don’t know how true that is.

Even the bitterness in me, it feels so distant.

Pandora is an old wound, barely a scratch anymore; and all my concern is fixated on that one gaping hole in my chest.

She is an old wound.

And still, I send her monies.

Hedda’s excitement picks up as we leave the depot—and start on the path she is now familiar with. The drizzle doesn’t stop us as we take the same path we have taken each phase for the past week.

The streets start to thin as we get closer to the edge of Cheapside before the cobblestone is vanished, replaced by the packed dirt trails leading to the farms.

The hooded coat protects me from those little falling droplets, cold enough to feel like ice on the flesh.

Hedda needs no coat, not with her natural one; the rain merely slides off of her.

She gallops ahead, and any time she gets too far, she stops herself, runs back to me, circles me as though to herd or rush me, then chases ahead again.

The hour it takes us to reach the watering hole is long and yet short. Time feels strange to me now. Suppose time has always been a strange concept to me, but especially now—as though it doesn’t exist at all.

But that time does exist, and it is one hour of it before we reach the watering hole for the ox and sheep farms.

It is something of a small lake or a large pond, but it isn’t natural. The earth doesn’t provide this to us, farmers dug it out themselves for their animals.

I feel little these phases, since Eamon took my heart to the afterlife with him, but I do sense a distant echo of wonder as we reach the water, and I see the flickers beneath the surface. Flickers of fish swimming. Fish that don’t belong in this water but rather came from the scat of birds who had eaten fish eggs.

Like time, nature is a strange thing.

Hedda pounces on the muddy shore.

I sit on the mud, cross-legged, and watch as she starts to hunt the fish. It was Kalice who bloomed the idea in me. A distant, faint memory of her faerie hound hunting fish in a pond. A small activity, but one that Hedda in her youth needs.

I neglected her.

But I need her.

So I drag myself out here, each phase, and let her play until she starts to slow—and then we eat the sandwiches from the satchel before we head back to Kithe.

This phase is no different.

An hour trek to the watering hole, two hours in the mud, then an hour journey back.

By the time we’re closing in on Kithe’s cobblestone, the scent of bakeries and ale wafting through the air, the distant calls of drunkards, I am frozen to the touch.

Beneath the coat, my flesh is pebbled and prickled, as coarse as the wool itself, and Hedda has transformed from white to brown.

My thoughts tangle around how to best wash her before returning to the dwelling, otherwise she will track her mud everywhere, all over the floors of course but also the armchair and the bed.

The washroom is communal between four dwellings, and it is a pain to cart the buckets of water back and forth between the well and the washtub itself, and I just can’t be bothered boiling the water.

The washroom in the tavern has a tap…

I flinch at the thought.

The tavern.

It is something I push out of my mind each time it dares flicker through my thoughts. I cannot afford to consider it, not even for a moment.

The tavern is his.

I haven’t stepped foot through those doors since Eamon died in my arms. That tavern was our dream, we worked on it down to our callouses and aching knees.

It was ours.

It took us a month, together, to build the foundations of our new life in Kithe.

It took one moment to destroy it all.

I am not ready to face the tavern, so for now, the well water will suffice.

Hedda often struggles a little in the cold washtub. She is first to dive into the stagnant, cold watering hole, but a bath is something else, a torture she squirms against.

I throw a huff down at her, trotting beside me, panting from her weariness. As though she reads my mind, her gaze cuts up, but her head doesn’t, and so it is an unkind side-eye she throws back at me.

With the warped time in the Midlands, she is already too close to adolescence. It takes two years for a faerie hound to become fully grown, one year to become adolescent.

But that applies outside of the time warped Midlands.

So here, her growth is quick, and it shows in her moods.

Those moods cling to us both as we wander Cheapside’s lanes and rodent-infested backstreets. Hedda snaps up a couple of voders on the way—but then tosses them aside when she spots the next prey to hunt.

I don’t chide her.

I don’t have the energy to do anything at all but let my legs carry my sagged, wet weight along the streets that start to grow a tad wider, a tad cleaner. But this is still Cheapside, and so Hedda sticks close to me all the way to the—

The tavern.

My legs carried me without thought to the front doors of the tavern.

I stand in the Square, shops and stalls planted in the centre, and I just… stare.

The sign above the shop has been taken down; old and decrepit, rusted and indecipherable. Eamon must have removed it before—

My teeth bite down on the inside of my cheeks.

I shove the thought of him down to the dark parts of my mind. Then I lock him away.

But my legs don’t move. Hedda sticks to my side, looking up at me, waiting for a command.

I have nothing to give her.

I drop my gaze from the bleak spot where the sign was once bolted, and I look at the doors. Wooden, grooved, new brass handles installed by Forranach. Nothing looks out of sorts. No splintered wood or broken glass—no one appears to have broken in.

I sort of expected that.

A refurbished tavern, stocked with drink, then abandoned… It should be raided.

And yet it isn’t.

I fist my hand deep into my pocket.

The jangle of keys is quick to answer.

Stagnancy steals me for a heartbeat.

I am unmoving, fingertips on the cold bite of keys, Hedda leaning into my leg, eyes on the untouched doors of the tavern.

My throat thickens. I swallow down the swell before I fist my hand around the keys.

It’s just the washroom.

It’s just the washroom.

It isn’t a cemetery.

It isn’t a disrespect.

I can use the washroom.

And I’ll be quick, in and out.

Those thoughts linger… but they don’t reach my body. I am stagnant, still; boots planted on cobblestone.

My fist loosens, and I release the keys before fishing my empty hand out of my pocket.

The washroom at home will suffice.

Before I can turn my back on the tavern, the roll of wooden wheels rumbles over the cobblestone.

I cut a glance down at the lane, a path too narrow for any carriage to squeeze through, and I see the wheeled chair coming out of the darkness.

Forranach’s eyes gleam on me.

My jaw tenses.

I ache to turn and run.

I have not seen Forranach—or anyone, for that matter—since Eamon died. When a knock comes at the door to my dwelling, I ignore it.

But Forranach finds me here.

His gaze pins me. His hands on the wheels jut faster; the muscles along his arms ripple with the sudden rush towards me.

I wait.

And in the time it takes for him to wheel to me, I understand: The reason the tavern hasn’t been ransacked or raided is because of him.

Forranach must have taken it upon himself to visit the tavern, perhaps look after it until I decide what to do.

I don’t even know if I can decide anything for the tavern. Daxeel is the investor, the ownership might have fallen to him; and since I was not invited to any will reading, if there even was one, then I assume my name is not on the deed at all.

Forranach rolls to a slow stop beside me.

Hedda gallops onto his lap.

His mouth curls in disgust, not at her, but at the mud she has now smeared his trousers with.

“I have been caretaking in your absence,” Forranach says after a moment, a too-long pause of awkwardness between us, because he does not know what to say.

I have a different sort of problem.

It’s not that I don’t know what to say to others, it’s that I don’t want to speak at all.

I force an answer, my voice somewhere between a whisper, a murmur, a grunt: “Why?”

He glances at the doors of the tavern, polished black paint glossed all over the ridged wood. “Your male paid me to.”

My male…

There’s a fleeting frown creasing my brow. “Daxeel?”

His chin jerks, a curt and sharp nod.

“He is no male of mine. Not anymore.”

Forranach doesn’t give an answer.

I ask, “Why did he want a caretaker?”

He could sell it for more than it was purchased for, since we worked so hard on bringing it to a standard not often seen in Cheapside.

Forranach’s shoulders jut with a harsh shrug.

I sigh and look down at Hedda, shivering on his lap. “We are only here for the washtub. It has running water.”

“You will lock up when you leave?”

“Yes.”

“Then I am not needed.” Forranach taps Hedda on the bottom, a gesture to move her off his lap.

She growls in answer, but obeys and—with a huff—jumps to the cobblestone.

His hands grip the wheels, but he pauses and his furrowed look is aimed at me. “Who would’ve thought it?”

“Hm?”

“That you and I have this much in common.”

My frown is the only answer I give.

He wheels back, once, twice, then before he turns around, his gravelled accented voice comes, “I lost my leg in battle. The grief wasn’t only for the leg… it was for the loss of war. I can’t return. Ever.”

Still, that frown is etched onto my features. Maybe my mind is too sluggish to understand what that has to do with me.

“I lost everything to that grief. I even lost my wife.”

Niamh’s face, sharper than a fistful of knives, flashes in my mind. And with it, comes a faint understanding, faint memories—that she only ever visited me at Forranach’s dwelling. She doesn’t live there.

Forranach isn’t done with me. “If you close yourself off when grief finds you, and you let it rot you, you will be like I was… before you came with a job for me. Strange what a little purpose can do to grief.” He starts to wheel away. “Best thing you can do for Eamon is honour his dream.”

I watch him until he’s gone down the dimness of the lane, and I can’t make him out anymore.

I cut a glance down at Hedda.

She blinks up at me.

“Bath.” That’s all I say.

Her teeth bare in answer.