Page 14 of The Demon Kept Me

I don't expect her to make it a matter.

She makes it a matter.

"Malvek." She finds me at the workbench after she's found the cloak, and she's wearing it, wrapped in the russet wool with her chestnut curls loose around her face and her eyes bright, and she's beaming at me. "This is the warmest thing I've ever owned in my life."

"It's practical. The frost is early this year." I keep my eyes on the bolt I'm setting into the sluice frame, because looking at her wrapped in something I chose for her does peculiar things to my composure. "You'll work slower if you're shivering."

"That's what you said about the boots." She crosses the room, and before I understand her intent she's risen up on her toes and pressed a kiss to my cheek — quick, warm, gone before I've finished registering the shock of it, the brush of her mouth against skin no one has touched with kindness in longer than she's been alive. "Thank you. Truly. Not the practical thank-you. The real one."

I have faced infernal courts. I have stared down demons who could unmake a lesser creature with a word, and I never once lost my footing. One human woman rises up on her toes in a russet cloak, and I forget, entirely, what my hands were doing.

"You're welcome," I manage, and it comes out lower and rougher than I mean it, and she smiles like she's heard every word I didn't say beneath it before she goes to start the morning's work.

I stand there a full minute longer than the bolt requires, my tail betraying me against the leg of the bench, and I think — dangerously, helplessly — that I would weave her a hundred cloaks to earn that again.

But there's a hunt on, and sentiment is a luxury I cannot afford while a saboteur walks free.

We go down to the river together after the grinding's done, the pair of us, while the light still holds. It's Wren who thinks to check beneath the old boat landing — a rotted half-collapsed platform nobody's used in years, the last place a person watching the mill might stash what they didn't want carried back and forth.

"Here," she calls, on her knees in the mud, and her voice has gone tight. "Malvek, there's something under here."

I pull the rotted boards up with one hand, and beneath them, wrapped in oilcloth to keep the damp off, is a saboteur's whole trade. Chisels, the narrow kind that left those marks on the upper stone and the sluice frame. A pry bar. A coil of good rope. And an auger — a boring tool, the sort you'd use to sink a hole deep into timber where no one would think to look for it.

"He cached his tools here," Wren breathes. "So he wouldn't have to carry them past the village each time."

"Worse than that." I turn the auger over in my claws, and a cold understanding settles into me. "Look at the wear on this. He's been boring into wood, over and again. Not the mill — I'd have found it. Something else. Something he means to weaken slowly, so it fails all at once when he chooses."

Wren's face has gone pale beneath the flush of the cold. "The dam," she says. "The old river dam. If that goes⁠—"

"If that goes during a flood, it takes the mill and half of Ashbrook downstream with it." I wrap the tools back in their oilcloth. My mind is already turning it over, cold and fast. "This isn't the work of some jealous farmer with a grudge, Wren. Whoever this is has a plan with an ending to it. He knows this mill and this river the way I do. And he's patient enough to spend a whole season readying the killing blow."

"Then he's not just trying to scare the village off you anymore." She rises, wiping the mud from the knees of her dress, and there's fear in her eyes but that stubborn steel beneath it that I've come to lean on more than I'll say. "He wants people dead."

"He wants the village desperate," I correct her, though it amounts to the same. "And a drowned mill and a starving valley would make it so."

I crouch there in the dying light with the oilcloth bundle in my hands, and I feel the full weight of what it means. All this while I've run this mill certain that the worst thing the surface world could do to me had already been done — the contract, the exile, the slow hollowing of a demon who lost his king and his continent and his name for anything but grinder of grain. I was wrong. The worst thing would be to lose the small warm life I've so recently let myself build, and the woman who built it, to some patient stranger with an auger and a grudge for coin.

"We tell Garrik the whole of it tonight," I say. "The dam, the tools, all of it. I'll not keep the village blind to save my pride any longer. Not when the cost of my silence is measured in their children."

Wren looks at me like I've said something remarkable, though all I've done is decide to stop being a fool alone. "That," she says softly, "is the bravest thing I've heard you say."

"It's the most sensible. Bravery is for stories." But I let her lace her muddy fingers through mine as we climb back up the bank, and I don't pretend, even to myself, that sense is all it is.

I make a decision then that goes against every instinct my people bred into me — the instinct to bear the danger alone, to keep the weak clear of it, to let no one see the demon do anything so undignified as worry.

"You don't leave my sight on this property from now on," I tell her. "Not the river, not the far stores, not the yard after dark. Not until he's caught. If he'll pour water on our flour while we sleep a wall away, he'll not scruple at harming you to wound me."

I brace for her to argue. She's argued every other time I've tried to fence her in for her own safety.

Instead she steps in close, and she reaches up and takes my hand — my whole hand, claws and all, small fingers closing around what could crush stone — and she says, "All right. But that road runs both ways, Malvek. You don't go facing this alone either. Wherever you are, that's where I'll be."

And I, who have spent so long learning to want nothing and expect no one, find I have no argument left in me at all.

12

WREN

He tears his hand open on the dam.