Page 17 of The Demon Kept Me

I have no answer to that which wouldn't sound like surrender, so I press my mouth to the top of her head instead, and let her doze while the light comes up grey and slow through the shutters.

The days have a shape to them now that I would not have believed a year ago. We rise together in the cold and she starts the bread while I start the wheel. We take our midday meal on the grain sacks with our shoulders touching, arguing over nothing — whether her humming has a tune in it (she insists it does), whether I could learn to bake if I tried (she insists I could, and I insist I have more sense than to try). She has taken to leaving small things where I'll find them, the way I had left boots and cloaks for her: a cup of tea gone to precisely the temperature I like it, a chair drawn near the fire, a hand laid flat between my shoulders when the day has worn me thin.

I do not know how to be cared for. I am learning it clumsily, the way a creature built for one purpose learns another late in life. But I am learning. And each evening when the final wagon has gone and it is only us two and the wheel and the river, I catch myself thinking a thought so dangerous I hardly dare shape it: that I would trade the black towers of Ti'lith and the whole of my lost homeland for this, for her, for one more grey morning with the second cup by the basin. A demon is not supposed to want. I want. I have given up pretending otherwise, at least to myself.

It is a good morning. I should have known the day would find a way to spoil it.

It comes in the deep of the following night — not a crack of stone this time but a roar of water, and I am on my feet and down the stairs with Wren a half-step behind me before I have fully surfaced from sleep. The mill floor below is already ankle-deep and rising. The main sluice has been forced full open in the dark, the gate wrenched off its new pin and jammed wide, and the low autumn river is pouring through the race far faster than the wheel can shed it, climbing toward the grain stores and the good millstone and everything that stands between Ashbrook and a starving winter.

"The gate!" I shout over the noise. "Hold the lamp, I need both hands⁠—"

We fight the river for an hour. I wade in to the waist and set my shoulder to the jammed gate while Wren braces the lever and calls the count, and between her steadiness and a strength no human miller could match we force the timber down against the current inch by grinding inch until the flood chokes off to a trickle and the water on the floor begins, slowly, to drain.

When it's done we sit soaked and shaking on the stairs above the waterline, and I hold the sheared pin up to the lamp, and my blood goes cold in a way the river never managed.

It isn't a chisel mark this time. Caught around the broken pin is a scrap of waxed cord — the particular kind used to bind ledgers and seal grain-sacks for long transport — and stamped into the wax at its end, half-melted but unmistakable, is a merchant's mark. Two crossed sheaves beneath an open hand.

"That's not a farmer's seal," Wren says slowly, leaning to look. "That's a trading house. A big one."

"A grain house." I turn the wax to the light, and the whole shape of it falls into place at last, cold and clean as a closed contract. "He was never trying to curse us, Wren, or frighten the village off me. He wants the mill dead before it snows. He wants Ashbrook so desperate for flour that they'll buy it from him at whatever price he names, all winter long, with no other mill standing to undercut him." I close my fist around the seal. "Someone with grain to sell wants this village to starve. And he's nearly patient enough to manage it."

Wren is quiet a moment, water dripping from her hair, and then she sets her jaw in that stubborn way I have learned to love and to dread at once. "Then we find out which grain house that mark belongs to," she says. "And we find out fast."

14

WREN

I've never had a reason to be nosy before. It turns out I'm good at it.

Delivering flour is the perfect cover. I've been carrying sacks down to the outlying farms myself these past weeks — partly to spare Malvek the boundary-straining trips to the edge of what the contract allows, partly because a woman with a warm loaf and a friendly word gets asked into kitchens that would never open their doors to a demon. And a kitchen, I've learned, is where people talk.

So I talk. I ask after everyone's harvest, and their aunts, and their aching knees, and somewhere in the middle of all that ordinary chatter I ask, light as anything, whether they've had any strangers buying grain of late. Whether anyone's offered to purchase their surplus outright before the snows.

The answers start to stack up into a shape I don't like.

"Funny you ask," old Hollis tells me, over his wife's tea, in a farmhouse two hours' walk down the valley. "Fellow came through in early autumn. Smooth sort, fine coat, quick eyes. Offered to buy my whole surplus at a fair price and haul it himself. Said the roads were likely to get dangerous, that a wise man sold early."

"Did you take it?"

"Course not." Hollis snorts. "Sell my winter grain to a stranger before I know how the season turns? My father'd claw his way up out of the churchyard to slap me. But I'll tell you what's queer." He leans in. "Three of my neighbors did take it. And they have all had bad luck since — a barn fire, a flooded field, a wagon axle snapped clean on a good road. Almost like a man wanted them short of grain and glad they'd already sold."

I keep my face easy and my voice easier, but my heart is going hard. "That is queer," I agree, and I file every name he gives me away to carry home to Malvek.

It's the same story in three more kitchens. A charming man in a fine coat, quick to buy, quicker to spread the notion that the roads were unsafe and the mill unlucky. Nobody caught his name — he was careful with it — but they all remember the coat, and the crossed-sheaves seal on the papers he wanted signed. The very same mark that came off our sheared pin.

In the last kitchen it's a sharp-eyed widow named Corrin who gives me the piece that turns my stomach cold. "He asked about the mill," she tells me, pouring tea I don't need but drink to keep her talking. "Not to grind at it. About it. How old the dam was, whether the wheel had ever failed, how many days' flour the village keeps against a hard winter. Odd questions for a grain-buyer. I thought so at the time and thought no more of it, till you came asking." She fixes me with a look. "You tell that demon of yours to watch his water, girl. A man who asks about a dam isn't thinking about your harvest. He's thinking about your river."

I thank her and I do not tell her she's a season too late with the warning. But I carry her words up the valley heavier than any flour sack, because they fit the seal and the auger and the sheared pin into one plain and ugly picture, and the picture ends with a broken dam and a drowned village unless we get ahead of it.

By the time I've walked the valley I have a merchant with no name, a trading house with a seal, and a pattern of ruined neighbors laid out clear as a milled measure. It isn't proof enough to put before a magistrate. But it's enough to know we're not chasing a phantom or a curse. We're chasing a man, and a greedy one, and greed leaves tracks.

What surprises me — what warms me the whole long walk home — is the village.

At the well, where Marta once told me flat out that Malvek was cursed, I come upon her giving that same lecture to a pair of newcomer women, and before I can say a word in his defense, Marta herself cuts them off.

"Don't be daft," she says, wringing out her washing. "That demon worked through a whole night to fix the stone so we'd have flour, and worked through a whole flood last week besides, I heard. Cursed men don't lose sleep keeping strangers fed. You'll mind your tongues about him under my hearing."

I duck behind the chapel wall so she won't see me grinning like a fool.