Page 21 of The Demon Kept Me

18

WREN

We put it all on the table by morning light — everything, in one place.

The copied seal. The waxed cord off the sluice pin. The auger from beneath the boat landing. My scribbled notes from a dozen valley kitchens. And the thing I carried home in my memory when I couldn't carry the parish books themselves: the name that sat atop every crooked purchase, every ruined farm, every load of grain that vanished off the books. Pike's, the trading house out of the neighboring valley, and the lean sandy-haired man in the fine coat who runs it and asks about dams.

"That's our man," Malvek says, laying the auger beside the seal like he's fitting two halves of a broken thing back together. "The buyer. The one from the ledgers, the one from the chapel yard. He's been three moves ahead of this village since the first millstone cracked." His burning gaze lift to mine. "And now he knows we're onto him. Which means he'll stop being patient."

"The vanishing grain," I say. "On the manifest. Weights coming in that never went out. Where's it going?"

"Stockpiled." He says it grimly, certain. "He's hoarding it somewhere the village can't reach. Think it through, Wren. You don't ruin a valley's harvest to sell it your own grain unless you've already got the grain waiting to sell. He's been filling a warehouse all autumn against the winter he means to make. First he breaks the mill. Then Ashbrook can't grind what little it has left. Then the snows close the passes, and a starving village with no flour and no mill has one door left open to it — his door, at his price, or they abandon their homes and he buys the land for a song come spring."

The cold, clean cruelty of it takes my breath. "He's not trying to rob us. He's trying to break us. The whole valley."

"He's trying to own it. Robbery's merely the road he's taking there."

I sink onto the grain sacks, turning it over. It fits. It all fits — every accident, every rumor he seeded that the demon was cursed, every neighbor ruined at exactly the moment ruin served him. He built this slow and careful over a whole season, and he built it counting on one thing above all: that when the mill failed, this village would blame the frightening horned creature working the wheel and never once look toward the charming man in the fine-cut coat.

"He picked you as his scapegoat before he ever cracked the first stone," I say slowly. "He needed the village afraid of you. That's why he fed the curse rumors. A cursed mill nobody questions. A cursed miller everybody's glad to see fail."

"Then the finest thing we can do to him," Malvek says, "is make certain the village looks the right way in the finish."

So that's what we do.

We take it to Garrik first, in his own kitchen, laying the evidence out on his scrubbed table while his wife pours tea nobody drinks. He's slow to believe it — not because he doubts us, I think, but because believing it means believing a respected trading house has spent a season trying to murder his valley by inches, and that's a hard thing for an honest man to hold. But Garrik has farmed beside that mill for decades, and when Malvek walks him through it, accident by accident, the old farmer's weathered face goes hard and grim.

"Every one of those ruins," Garrik says in the finish, tapping the manifest with one thick finger. "I knew the men they happened to. Good farmers, careful men, and each of them had just sold cheap to a smiling fellow in a good coat. I called it bad luck. Bad luck." He looks up, and there's shame and fury both in it. "It was never luck at all, was it."

"No," Malvek says. "It wasn't."

"Then he'll not have this valley." Garrik stands, and something settles across his broad shoulders that many a year of skepticism couldn't budge. "Not while I've breath. What do you need?"

It moves fast after that, the way a thing does once the right stubborn man sets his weight behind it. Garrik brings in Father Aldren, who listens with his gentle blue eyes going graver by the moment and then quietly agrees to speak to the families the way only a priest can, calming fear before it can curdle into the panic our enemy is counting on. Elsie appoints herself quartermaster of the whole business before anyone thinks to ask her, and starts organizing food and blankets for whatever's coming. Even Bren, seventeen and desperate to be useful, is set to carrying messages farm to farm.

And the village — the village that once turned its steps aside from Malvek season after season — begins, slowly and then not slowly at all, to prepare. To store grain in more than one barn so no single blaze can take it. To watch the roads. To ready themselves to stand between a smiling merchant and everything they have.

For a demon certain he'd earned nothing here but fear, I watch it land on Malvek like a strange weather he doesn't know how to stand in. These people are arming themselves to fight beside him. He doesn't say anything about it. But I catch the moment his throat works when Garrik claps a hand to his great forearm like he's any other man in the village.

It's late, the plans laid as far as they can be for one night, when Malvek turns to me with that particular set to his jaw I've learned to brace for.

"When it comes," he says, "and it's coming soon, I want you inside. Behind a barred door. Away from it all. He has already put his hands on you once, and I will not⁠—"

"No."

"Wren—"

"No." I set down the sack I'm tying and face him full on. "I know what you're doing. You're trying to fold me up somewhere safe so you can go be terrifying and noble and alone, the way you've done everything on your own. And I'm telling you no." I cross to him and take both his enormous hands in mine. "This is my home. Mine. Not just the place I live because you bought me — my home, that I chose, that I fought for in a dozen kitchens and a chapel yard where a man tried to make me disappear. I'm not going to bar a door and listen through the wall while everyone I love fights for it without me."

"If he hurts you⁠—"

"Then he hurts me while I'm standing beside you, doing something, instead of hiding." My voice softens, because I can see the fear under the command, and it's not fear for himself, it's never been fear for himself. "You told me at the river you were done grieving the life you lost and ready to fight for the one you found. Well, I'm part of the one you found. You don't get to fight for me by shoving me out of the fight. That's not how partners do it. And that's what we are now. You said so yourself."

For a stretched breath he looks at me, that fearsome exhausted tender face, and I watch him lose the argument the way he's lost every argument that ever mattered between us — not with defeat, but with something closer to relief, like a man setting down a weight he was tired of carrying alone.

"Partners," he agrees when the moment comes, rough and quiet. "Ancestors help me. Together, then."

"Together." I squeeze his hands. "Now let's go make sure this village is ready. Because that man is done being patient, and I don't intend to be caught unready when he stops."