Page 3 of The Demon Kept Me

Around midday, I hear him on the stairs, and I brace myself out of old habit, waiting for the moment he tells me to stop wasting time on things that don't matter to the grain.

Instead he stops in the doorway and looks at the room like he's never seen it before. His tail moves once behind him, low and slow.

"You didn't have to do this," he says.

"I know." I wring out my rag over the basin, not quite meeting the coal-red of his eyes. "I wanted to."

He doesn't answer that. He watches me a moment longer, something unreadable behind that fearsome face, and then he goes back downstairs without another word.

I catch myself smiling at the empty doorway, and I don't fully understand why.

That evening, dry clothes appear folded outside my door — a work dress, plain but sturdy, nothing torn or stained the way everything I own currently is. There's no note. No mention of it at dinner, which is bread and stew eaten in near-total silence at a table built for one.

"You didn't need to buy me clothes," I say, because the silence is starting to press on me more than any insult would.

"You need clothes that don't fall apart during work." He doesn't look up from his bowl. "That's practical. Nothing more."

I decide not to argue the point, though something in me wants to. Nobody has ever handed me something without expecting payment for it later, and I keep waiting for the cost to reveal itself. It doesn't come that night. It doesn't come the next morning either, when I find my boots — worn thin enough that I'd been hiding the holes with folded cloth — sitting cleaned and mended by the door.

I don't know what kind of master keeps rules this simple and still manages to feel more trustworthy than every soft-spoken cruelty I've survived before him. But for the first time in longer than I can remember, I fall asleep without listening for footsteps at all.

3

MALVEK

Iexpect her to quit within the week.

That isn't cruelty on my part — it's experience. The mill work is grueling even for someone raised to it, and Wren has spent her life passing hand to hand across the trade roads, not hauling grain sacks or working the crank of a grinding wheel until her arms shake. I show her the sluice gate mechanism expecting confusion. Instead, she asks how the tension adjusts for water pressure, and asks it like she genuinely wants the answer.

"Tighter in the spring floods," I tell her, working the gear until it locks into place. "Looser in autumn, when the river runs low. Too tight and you'll snap the axle."

"How do you know which is which without a gauge?"

"You listen to the water." I glance at her, expecting the blank stare most people give when I say things like that. She's watching the gate instead, brow furrowed, filing the answer away somewhere I suspect she'll remember it.

By the second day she's hauling sacks nearly her own weight without complaint, and by the third she's humming while she works — some half-remembered tune with no real shape to it, drifting through the grinding room in a manner that doesn't belong there and somehow does anyway. I find myself listening for it without meaning to.

"You've never done this before," I say, watching her stack the last sack of the afternoon's delivery.

"No." She wipes her forehead with the back of her wrist, leaving a streak of flour dust behind. "But nobody ever taught me anything before either. I like learning things. Keeps my mind off other things."

"You don't have to finish that."

"I know." She smiles, quick and unguarded, the kind of smile nobody in this village has offered me even once. "Thank you for not making me."

I turn back to the ledger before she can see whatever expression that pulls out of me.

She makes me laugh on the fourth day, which I did not think possible anymore. We're repairing a section of loose flooring near the storage room, and she's holding a plank steady while I drive the nails, when she squints at the crooked line of boards already in place and says, entirely serious, "Did the last miller build this drunk?"

"The last miller was me."

"Oh." A pause. "Were you drunk?"

The laugh comes out low and rusted, more air than sound, but a laugh all the same. She looks startled by it, and something in me wants to hear it happen again.

"Demons don't drink," I tell her, driving the last nail home. "We simply build poorly when we're distracted."

"What were you distracted by?"