His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 194

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< Chapter 194

Sloane

the sixth morning, the room was warm when I woke up.

That was the first thing I noticed, every day, before I opened my eyes. Not the light, or the sound of the stream, or the smell of woodsmoke and wet stone. The warmth. The first two nights we had slept in our coats, all three of us, in a heap by a fire that smoked so badly we had to leave the door open, with the wind coming down off the ridge and the snow blowing in across the floor. Now the chimney drew. The door shut. The wind went past the house instead of through it.

I lay there and listened to it go past, and didn’t move.

Malachi was already up. I could tell by the cold place at my back. I could hear him outside, somewhere above my head, and then the scrape of boots on stone, and a soft thump as he dropped down off the edge of the roof into the snow beside the door. Teague was snoring by the hearth, on the pallet of pine boughs and blankets he had made himself the first day and refused to move from since, with his stitched arm across his chest.

It was a small room. Square, low, with walls of gray stone two feet thick and one narrow window looking out over the stream. A hearth at one end, big enough to stand in, black with a hundred years of smoke. Rafters overhead, half of them new. A floor of flagstones that had taken me most of the second day to scrub, on my knees, with a bucket of stream water and a brush made of heather, until my hands were raw and I could see the stone again under the dirt and mouse droppings and the leaves of sixty autumns.

Malachi and I slept on the other side of the fire, on a bed he had made the second night out of the broken tabletop laid across two stones, with pine boughs underneath and every blanket we had on top. It was too narrow, and too hard, and it creaked if either of us turned over. Neither of us had suggested he sleep anywhere else.

There were four other rooms in the house. We had shut the doors on all of them. One had no roof at

all, and a birch tree growing up through the floor. Another had a nest of something in the corner that none of us had wanted to look at closely. They could wait. This one was enough.

I got up, slowly, the way my leg made me do everything first thing in the morning, ‘and put m wood on the fire, and went to the window.

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I went looking for Moonhaven first. I always did. The way you put your tongue to a sore tooth

every morning there was nothing I could touch. We were too far. The mountains were in the way Ravenwood, and a long cold stretch of nothing in between. I could feel the thread of the link, faint, at

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Two nights ago, I had felt something. Very faint, like music from a house a long way across a lake. A

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The valley looked different every day. It was the light, I think. On the first day, coming down off the ridge in the snow with the packs on our backs and Teague half carried between us, it had looked like the end of the world. A long gray cleft between two black hills, with a stream at the bottom of it, and the mine workings scarred into the slope above. Spoil heaps, humped under snow. The blackmouth of an old shaft, boarded over. A long collapsed shed with its roof caved in like a broken spine. And down by the water, where the ground flattened out, a handful of stone houses, five or six, scattered ong the bank with their roofs fallen in and their windows empty.

Nothing moved. No smoke. No tracks. Not even birds.

Tiernan had been right about the smell. It was in the ground, faint, under the snow. Something mineral and sour, old stone and old metal, that made Rhea wrinkle her nose and want to sneeze. It wasn’t bad. It was just wrong. It was the smell of a place nobody had wanted for a very long time.

We had walked down the bank past the houses, one after another, looking. The first had no roof at all. The second had a roof and no walls to hold it up. The third had been a byre once, and still smelled faintly of it, after all this time.

The fourth was this one.

It sat a little apart from the others, on a rise above the stream, with its back to the hill. Its roof was sagging in the middle but still on. Its door was off its hinges but still there, propped against the wall inside, as if someone had meant to come back and fix it. In the room with the hearth, there had been a table, broken, and a single chair with three legs, and on a shelf by the window, a blue tin cup, dented and rusted through, sitting there by itself the way someone had left it sixty years ago.

Malachi had stood in the doorway and looked at it for a while. Then he had put down his pack.

“This one,” he had said.

***

He was coming round the side of the house now, with snow on his shoulders and a coil of rope over

one arm and a hammer in his hand, and he saw me at the window and stopped.

Six days on the roof. That was what it had taken. He had gone up the first morning, before it was properly light, and come down at dusk, and gone up again the next morning, and I had stood at the bottom with my arms folded and told him he was going to break his neck, and he had said probably, and gone on. He had taken down the rotten rafters and split new ones out of a fallen larch up the slope, and hauled them up on the rope one at a time, and pegged them in. He had pulled the old slates off where they had slipped, and sorted the good from the cracked, and put the good ones back.

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I opened the window. The cold came in round me, clean and sharp.

“Is it finished?” I said.

He looked up at the roof. Then at me.

“It’ll hold,” he said.

From him, that was poetry.

***

Teague woke when the smell of the porridge got to him. He sat up on his pallet with his hair standing on end and his good hand rubbing his face, and grunted, and held out the hand for a bowl.

His arm was healing. The witch’s stitches had held, and the wolf in him had done the rest, and the cuts were pink and puckered now, shiny at the edges. He could make a fist. Not a good one. He had made one at me every morning since, solemnly, over his porridge, the way you would show a teacher your homework.

He did it again now. I nodded. He looked pleased, and ate.

Malachi came in and shut the door behind him, and it shut. Properly. With a click. He stood there with his hand on the latch, as if he couldn’t quite believe it either.

Then he came and sat down on the floor by the hearth beside me, close, and held his hands out to

the fire.

They were a mess. Raw at the knuckles, the backs still red and shiny from the burns, the palms split from the cold and the rope. He had wrapped the worst of them in strips of the old shirt at night, the way the witch had shown him, and taken the strips off every morning to work, because he said he couldn’t feel the hammer through them.

I took one of them. I didn’t ask. I turned it over in my lap and looked at it, the way he had looked at my leg on the first morning in the cabin, and he let me.

“You’re a fool,” I said.

“I know.”

“You could have waited for the weather to turn.”

“And you’d have slept in your coat for a month.”

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I didn’t let go of his hand. I sat there on the warm flagstones by the fire with his ruined hand in my ap and Teague slurping porridge on the other side of the hearth, and the stream going by outside under the ice, and I felt something I didn’t have a name for.

It wasn’t safe. Nothing about it was safe. We were three rogues in a dead valley that nobody wanted, on bad ground, with nothing to our names but what a neighbor passing through had left on e doorstep. Somewhere out there, a woman with a burned hand knew exactly where we had been and how easily she could find us again.

But the door shut. The roof held. The fire drew.

And the three of us were in one room, warm.

***

I learned to split wood that week.

I had never done it in my life. There had always been someone to do it. Men in the yard behind my father’s house, and then boys from the warriors’ hall, and then Malachi, every morning, before I was awake. I could hold a blade and throw a man twice my weight over my hip in the training ring, and I couldn’t split a log to save my life. The axe bounced. It stuck. It went in sideways and stayed there, and I had to stand on the log and wrench it out. It took me three days to stop missing altogether, and I hated every minute of it.

Malachi didn’t help. That was the strange thing. He stood at the corner of the house with his arms folded and watched me miss, and miss, and miss, and didn’t say a word, and didn’t come over to show me, though I could see his hands itching to do it.

On the third day, the axe went into the log, and the log split, clean, in two, and the halves fell away

on either side of the block.

I stood there with the axe in my hands and stared at them.

Behind me, I heard him laugh.

I turned round. I had never heard him laugh. Not like that. Not out loud, with his head back and his eyes shut and his whole chest in it, standing at the corner of a dead house in the snow with his arms still folded. It was a big laugh, rough and surprised, as if it hadn’t been used in years and had come

out stiff.

I didn’t know what to do with it. So I threw a split log at him.

He caught it. Still laughing.

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He didn’t laugh that time. He just looked at me across the snow, the way he had looked at me in the hut, the first night, with the fire om one side of his face. As if he couldn’t work out how he had got

Then he came over, and took my face in his ruined hands, and kissed me. In the daylight. Whe middle of the woodpile, with the axe still in way hand and snow coming down, and Teague waything from the doorway with a bowd of porridge, chewing,

It was the first time he had kissed me where anyone could see.

When he let go, I didn’t say anything. I just looked at him. And then att Teague, in the doongue

Teague swallowed his porridge. He looked at the two of us, and the axe, and the split logs on the ground.

“About time,” he said. And went back inside,

***

He asked me that evening.

We were sitting on the doorstep, the two of us, the way we used to sit on the porch steps at the cabin, with the door open behind us and the warmth of the fire coming out round our backs. The sun had gone down behind the ridge. The stream was lourd in the dusk. Teague was inside, banging pans about with one hand and singing something tuneless under his breath, which he never did, and which neither of us mentioned.

Malachi had been quiet since the woodpile. Not the old quiet. Something else. He sat a step below me with his forearms on his knees and his ruined hands hanging between them, looking down the valley at the dead houses along the bank, going blue in the dark.

“Sloane,” he said.

I waited.

“Do you want this?”

I looked at him.

“This.” He didn’t turn round. He tipped his head at the valley. At the spoil heaps, and the black mouth of the shaft, and the five broken houses, and the one with a fire in it. “A house with one room and a roof I put on with my hands. Bad ground. Nobody for miles. Nobody who’d have us if we went looking.” He paused. “And me.”

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it wasn’t. I’m not going to hold you to any of it.”

“Malachi-”

you want Moonhaven,” he said, “when this is over, if it’s ever over, you go. I’ll walk you to the line myself. If you want somewhere else, anywhere else, you tell me where, and I’ll get you there.” Something moved in his jaw. “I only want to know. That’s all. Before I put any more slates on that roof. Whether I’m building it for three people, or for two.”

The stream went on. Inside, Teague dropped something, and swore, and went on singing.

I looked at the back of Malachi’s head. At his shoulders, and his ruined hands, and the slates on the roof above us, which he had carried one by one from a house with no walls.

I thought about Moonhaven. About my old room, and the training yard, and Cassandra in the kitchen in the mornings, and Abby on the wall of the sheepfold saying it’s going to be your home again, if you want it.

I wanted it. Some of it. I would always want some of it.

“I can’t see myself there anymore,” I said. “In Moonhaven. I’ve tried.”

He turned his head.

“Every morning, at that window. I try. And it’s all still there. My old room, and the yard, and the kitchen. I can see every bit of it.” I swallowed. “I just can’t see me in it. It’s a room I used to live in.”

He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me, in the blue dusk, with the firelight behind me on his

face.

“I can see this,” I said. “You on that roof, swearing at the slates. Teague burning the porridge. That terrible bed.” My voice wasn’t steady. I let it not be. “I can see me in this.”

“Three,” I said. “Build it for three.”

He looked at me a moment longer.

Then he turned back round, and looked down the valley again, at the dark. And after a while, without a word, he reached back over his shoulder, and found my hand on my knee, and held it.

We sat there until Teague shouted that the food was burning, which it was.

***

Tiernan came eight days later, a little after noon.

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Then I saw his face.