Page 11 of The Demon Kept Me

"It was never lonely there." He turns his cup slowly between two claws. "I learned lonely here."

I don't have an answer that wouldn't sound like pity, and he'd hate pity more than anything I could offer, so I do the only thing that feels honest — I reach across the table and set my hand over his, over the claws that could open stone, and I leave it there.

His skin is warmer than I expected, and the charcoal markings along the back of his hand give the faintest glow beneath my palm, like embers under ash.

Neither soul moves. The fire pops. The wheel is silent for once, the river a low murmur beyond the walls, and the whole world seems to narrow to the four inches of table where my small callused hand rests over his enormous one.

"You should sleep," he says finally, roughly, but he doesn't pull away.

"So should you."

None of us does, not for a while. We sit with our hands touching and pretend we're only tired, and when I finally do climb the stairs to my room, I lie awake a long time — not listening for footsteps the way I used to, but turning over the shape of his hand under mine, the warmth of it, the way he held his breath as though afraid the smallest movement might make me take it back.

I've spent my whole life being owned by people who never once wanted me near them. I don't have a name yet for whatever this is — a demon who mends my boots in secret and holds still as stone the moment I touch him, terrified, I think, of frightening me off.

But lying there in the dark with the river running steady outside, I understand that whatever line there used to be between the master and the woman he bought has quietly gone, worn away the same as the boundary stone at the bridge, and I have no wish at all to find it again.

9

MALVEK

The harvest crests like a wave you see coming and still can't brace for.

The whole valley ripens at once, and every cart in Ashbrook seems to arrive at my door on the same three days. Grain stacks to the rafters of the storage room faster than the wheel can grind it, and Wren and I work from the first gray light until the lamp gutters, hauling and weighing and milling until my arms sing with the vibration and her hands go raw beneath the wrappings she's taken to binding them with.

It's the most dangerous stretch of the year. If the wheel fails now, or the sluice, or the last good millstone, the flour won't be ready before the passes close, and no amount of imported grain will reach a snowed-shut valley in time. Everything the village needs to survive until spring turns on these few brutal weeks.

Which is precisely why the saboteur has gone quiet, I suspect. He's waiting. Letting us exhaust ourselves. Choosing his moment.

I don't say that to Wren. She knows it already; I can see it in the way she checks the sluice pin every single morning now before she'll let the water through, running her fingers along the timber the way I taught her, reading it in the dark of dawn.

"Clear," she reports, climbing back up the bank, and only then does she nod for me to raise the gate. "For today, anyway."

"For today."

We grind until midday without speaking much, the work too loud and too constant for it, and there's a strange contentment in that too — the easy silence of two people who no longer need words to move as one. Garrik's cart comes and goes. Bren's after it, the boy lingering at the door to watch me heave a full sack one-handed onto the top of the stack, his freckled face split with a grin he doesn't bother hiding anymore.

"Did you see that?" he says to Wren, delighted. "One hand."

"I saw," she says gravely. "He's very strong. Now help me carry these, strong man's not the only one with arms around here."

He laughs and does it, and when he's gone I find I'm — not smiling, I don't quite smile, but something near it sits on me that I've no name for and no wish to lose.

It's in the lull after the midday rush, we each slumped on the grain sacks with water and the heel of a loaf between us, that I say the thing I've been turning over for a week and haven't found the nerve for.

"I want to change our arrangement."

Wren goes still, and the old wariness flicker across her face — the braced expression of someone who's learned that changes to an arrangement rarely come out in her favor. It's gone in an instant, but I hate that I put it there at all.

"Not — that's the wrong way to begin it," I say quickly, which is not a thing I say often, correcting myself midsentence. My tail betrays me, flicking against the sacks. "I mean I no longer wish you to work here as a hired hand. Or a bought one."

"You're letting me go?" Her voice is carefully flat, and I realize with a lurch that she's misread me entirely, that she thinks I'm sending her away, and the thought of it puts a cold in me sharper than any autumn night.

"No." The word comes out louder than the quiet room deserves. "Ancestors, no. The opposite." I make myself slow down. This matters, and I refuse to fumble it. "I'm asking you to run this mill with me. As my partner in it. Not my worker — my equal in the thing. What's ground here, what's earned here, the choices about how it's kept — half of it yours. Because you've earned that, and because —" I stop, because the next part is harder than lifting any stone. "Because I can't imagine the work of it without you anymore, and I've grown tired of pretending otherwise."

She doesn't say anything for some time, and I stand exposed as I have ever let myself be, a demon who has just laid something down in the open where it can be refused.

Then her face breaks open into the brightest thing I've ever seen it do, and she's laughing and there's water standing in her eyes at the same time, and she says, "Yes. Yes, you great stubborn creature, of course yes," and she throws her arms around as much of me as she can reach, which isn't much, her cheek pressed to the leather of my apron and her arms barely spanning my ribs.