Page 4 of The Demon Kept Me

I don't answer that one. I gather the tools instead and tell her the flooring will hold now, and if she notices me avoiding the question, she's kind enough not to press it.

By midweek, I've stopped bracing myself for the day she asks to leave. She works through the ache in her shoulders without mentioning it, though I see her wincing when she thinks I'm not looking. I adjust the schedule without telling her why, giving her the lighter tasks in the mornings when the soreness sits worst, saving the heavier lifting for afternoons when her body has warmed into the labor.

"You changed the order," she says one morning, catching on faster than I expected. "We used to grind first, then haul."

"The grain settles better if it rests an hour before milling." It isn't entirely a lie. It also isn't entirely the truth.

She studies me with an expression I can't quite name, something between suspicion and gratitude, and doesn't push further. I've learned already that she chooses her battles carefully — a habit worn into her by years of masters who punished questions. I find myself wanting to unteach her that particular caution, though I don't know how a demon goes about convincing anyone that curiosity is safe.

That night, after she's gone up to sleep, I find her boots by the door again — the same ones I mended a week prior, already worn thin at the same seam from the pace she keeps. I sit at the workbench and fix them properly this time, doubling the stitching so it holds through the season, using leather thicker than what the original cobbler chose.

I tell myself it's only sensible. A worker needs sound boots. Wet feet slow the work, same as I told her the earliest time.

I don't examine why I check the stitching twice before I'm satisfied, or why I choose the leather from my own good stock instead of the scraps I'd normally use for repairs this small. Some things are easier left unexamined, and I've had long practice leaving things exactly where they lie.

The following morning, she finds the boots outside her door and says nothing about them at breakfast, though I notice her glancing at my hands more than once across the table, like she's trying to reconcile the claws capable of tearing through stone with the careful, even stitches holding her boots together.

"You could tell me," she says eventually, setting down her bread.

"Tell you what?"

"That you're not what everyone says you are."

I consider the grain ledger instead of answering, running a claw down the column of numbers I've already checked twice this morning. "What everyone says and what I am aren't always different things. I simply choose which parts to show."

"Then I suppose I'm lucky you've chosen to show me the good ones."

I don't have an answer for that. I finish my bread in silence, and if the silence sits easier than it has in years, I decide that's a discovery worth keeping to myself for now.

Work continues through the week without further incident, the harvest deliveries steady, the grinding wheel turning from dawn until well past dusk most days. Wren proves faster than I expected at learning the mechanisms, faster still at learning the particular rhythms of a mill she'd never set foot inside a month ago. I catch myself measuring the days not by the grain processed, but by whether I've heard her humming yet, and I don't know when that shift happened, only that it has.

4

WREN

The bread is what changes things first.

I bake a loaf my second week here, mostly because the kitchen feels too bare without something warm in it, and I leave it cooling on the windowsill without thinking much of it. By the time Garrik arrives with his cart, the smell has already drifted into the yard.

"That yours?" he asks, nodding toward the window, and there's something almost suspicious in the way he says it, like good bread from this place doesn't fit whatever picture he's carried of it for years.

"Mine," I say. "Would you like a slice before you head back?"

He hesitates, glancing toward the milling floor where Malvek is working, then back at me. "Wouldn't say no."

It's a small thing. A slice of bread, a farmer lingering an extra few minutes in a yard he usually leaves the moment his business is done. But I notice it, the way people's shoulders ease when there's something warm to hold, and I decide I like being the reason for it.

Not everyone softens so easily. Elsie corners me outside the bakery a few days later, flour dust still on her apron, her round face pinched with the particular worry of someone about to say something she believes is for my own good.

"You be careful up there, girl," she says, low, glancing past me toward the mill. "Demons don't stay gentle forever. I've heard the stories same as anyone."

"He's never raised a hand to me."

"Not yet." She pats my arm, not unkindly. "Just — mind yourself. That's all I'm saying."

I thank her for the concern because I know she means well, but I carry the words back up the hill with me, turning them over the way I've turned over every warning anyone's ever given me about the people meant to frighten me. The trouble is, none of it matches what I've actually seen. Not the fresh boots. Not the food waiting outside my door. Not the low, rusted laugh I've heard twice now and keep hoping to hear a third time.

I spend the following days clearing out the storage rooms nobody's touched in years — broken furniture stacked against the walls, chairs with missing legs, a cabinet warped so badly the door won't close. I drag what can be saved into the yard and mend what I can with the tools Malvek keeps organized along the workbench, each one hung in its exact place like he's catalogued every item in this building down to the nail.