Page 27 of The Demon Kept Me

They don't cheer. Farmers facing a flood don't cheer. But I see it settle into every face around that dying fire — the same hard readiness I've come to know in Wren, in Garrik, in this whole stubborn valley — and it is worth more than any cheer ever spoken.

Wren finds my hand in the dark. I close mine around hers.

Tomorrow the storm. Tomorrow the dam. Tomorrow we learn what the village is worth when they finally stand as one.

24

WREN

The storm arrives the next afternoon like something with a grudge, and I'm out on the supply routes when I find the thing that turns my blood to ice.

I've taken it on myself to walk the paths between the scattered grain stores one last time before the weather closes in — checking the barns hold, the barrels are full, the routes to high ground stay clear. It takes me along the river track above the mill, past the old wooden dam that's held the race steady since before any of us were born. The rain's already coming sideways, the river below swollen and brown and loud, and I nearly hurry past the dam with my hood up against the wet.

Nearly. But something snags my eye where the bank drops away beneath the structure, and I stop, and I climb down through the whipping rain to look, and what I find drives the breath clean out of me.

The supports. The great timbers that brace the dam against the weight of the water — someone has been cutting them. Not through; that would show, would fail too soon. Cut most of the way and then packed with mud and moss to hide the fresh wood, notched deep on the downstream side where no one walking the top would ever see, timber after timber after timber all along the dam's spine. Weeks of it. Patient, hidden, murderous work. The dam is standing on a lie. It looks whole and it is already broken, held together by habit and the last uncut third of its own bones, and it needs only one hard push — one surge of storm-flood, or one final cut, or one keg of powder in the right place — to let the whole river through at once.

The man told Malvek true. This is the blow. Everything else was noise.

I'm still crouched there, fingers in a sawn notch, doing the cold arithmetic of how little is holding the valley's death back, when I hear them over the rain.

Voices. Above me, on the dam's top. Men's voices, and the wet slap of boots, and one of them says, "—finish the last two supports and she's ready to go the moment he gives the word—" and I understand, crouched frozen in the mud, that I have walked straight into Pike's men come to make their final cuts.

I don't breathe. I ease back under the lip of the bank, into the roar and shadow of the swollen race, and I start to move — slow, slow, one handhold at a time, downstream, away from them, toward the mill. The rain is my friend now; it covers the sound of me. It's the mud that betrays me. My boot slips, a rock goes into the water with a splash that the storm isn't quite loud enough to swallow, and a voice above barks, "There — down there! Someone's under the bank!"

Then I stop being careful and I run.

I have run from men my whole life. I know how it's done — you don't run from, you run toward, toward people, toward light, toward the one place they can't follow. I go downstream along the treacherous bank with the river snatching at my heels and two of Pike's men crashing down after me, and I don't look back because looking back is how you fall, and I fix every scrap of my mind on the one thought that matters: the mill. Get to the mill. Get to Malvek. Warn them, or the valley entire drowns not knowing why.

The bank tears at me. A branch opens my palm. My russet cloak — Malvek's cloak — catches on a snag and I tear it free and keep going, lungs burning, the mill's lantern-light finally, blessedly swimming into view through the sheeting rain. I scream his name into the storm with everything I've got left, and the storm eats most of it, but not all — because a shape enormous and dark comes vaulting out of the mill yard and down the track toward me, and the men behind me take one look at what's coming and break off into the trees rather than meet it.

Malvek catches me before I fall, both arms around me, and I'm soaked and shaking and bleeding from the hand and I've not once before been so glad to be caught.

"The dam," I gasp against his chest, "Malvek, the dam, I saw it, they've cut the supports, near all of them, weeks of it, it's held together by nothing — one more push and the whole river comes down on us, they were up there finishing it when I⁠—"

"Slow. Breathe." But his eyes have already gone hard and far away, and I know he's heard the only part that matters. "How many supports still hold?"

"A third, maybe less. And they mean to cut those tonight, or breach it when the storm peaks. I heard them say they only wait on his word."

He's moving before I've finished, sweeping me up the track toward the mill and shouting for Garrik, and the whole plan remakes itself in his voice as he goes. "The dam changes everything — we can't only hold the mill, if the dam goes the mill is already lost. Garrik! Split them. Half here on the barns and the doors as we planned. Half to the dam with me — every strong back, every rope, every brace we've got. If we can shore the last supports before the flood peaks we rob him of his blow."

"And me," I say, still in the circle of his arm.

He stops. I feel him wanting to say it — get inside, bar the door, stay safe — feel the old fear rise in him, the need to fold me away somewhere the water can't reach.

"Don't," I tell him, before he can. "I found it. I'm the only one besides those men who's seen exactly which timbers are cut and where. You need me at that dam, Malvek, and you know it, and this is my home and my valley and my fight the same as anyone's. You're not putting me behind a door tonight."

For one heartbeat he wars with himself. Then, ancestors bless him, he doesn't try to fence me in. "Then you stay where I can see you," he says roughly. "Every moment. That's the whole of what I ask."

"That I can give you."

There's one thing left to do before the fight, and we do it together in the fading light — the homes nearest the river, the low cottages that will be first under the water if the dam lets go. We go door to door in the driving rain and we get the old ones out. Tomas with his bad hip, leaning on Malvek's arm. The widow Corrin, who once warned me to tell my demon to watch his water, wrapped in a blanket and hurried up toward the chapel on the high ground. Two families with small children, carried and coaxed and sent climbing away from the river toward the safe stone of the chapel where Father Aldren waits with his counting songs.

By the time everyone is clear, the light is gone and the storm has found its full voice, and thunder rolls down the valley like the sky itself is breaking open over us.

Somewhere upriver, in the dark and the rain, Pike's men are gathering for the last of it. I can feel them out there the way you feel a held breath before it's let go.

Malvek takes my hand. His markings glow faint through the downpour, banked and ready. Below us the river climbs its banks, brown and furious, straining against a dam that's already half a corpse.