Page 7 of The Demon Kept Me

"Everything's fine," I tell him, and it isn't entirely a lie. The mill runs. The flour will be ready on schedule. Whatever threatens Ashbrook hasn't won this round.

But standing beside Wren as the wheel turns, both of us hollowed out from a night without sleep and streaked with stone dust neither of us has bothered to wash off, I understand something has shifted between us, something the mill has no part in at all. She stood beside me through the night without being asked, without expecting anything in return beyond the simple fact of standing there. Nobody has done that for me since I lost everything that used to define what home meant.

I watch her disappear up the stairs to finally sleep, and I find myself hoping, foolishly, dangerously, that whoever threatens this mill never gives her a reason to leave it.

6

WREN

The rumor reaches me before I've even set down the day's bread. I'm walking through the square with a basket over my arm when I catch three women huddled near the well, voices dropping the moment they notice me approaching.

"—cursed, that's what it is," one of them is saying, an older woman I don't recognize by name. "Stone doesn't crack on its own. Not unless something unnatural's living inside those walls."

"That's not what happened," I say, before I've fully decided to say anything at all.

All three turn toward me, startled, like they'd forgotten I might be within earshot.

"Beg pardon?" the older woman asks, though her tone suggests she doesn't much care to hear my answer.

"The millstone. It wasn't a curse. Someone took a chisel to it deliberately — you can see the tool marks yourself if you don't believe me." I keep my voice steady, though my pulse is racing faster than I'd like to admit. "Malvek spent the whole night fixing it so the flour would still be ready this morning. That's not the work of something cursed. That's just work."

"And you'd know, would you?" the older woman presses, arms crossed. "Living up there, seeing only what he wants you to see?"

"I'd know because I held the lantern while he showed me the marks himself. Chisel gouges, evenly spaced. That's not a curse, Marta. That's someone with a tool and a grudge."

Marta's mouth thins, unconvinced but momentarily out of argument. The youngest of the three shifts her weight, glancing between us.

"You'd defend him," she says, not unkindly, just uncertain. "Living up there the way you do."

"I'd defend the truth," I say. "Whether I lived up there or not."

I leave them by the well without waiting for a response, my basket suddenly heavier than it was a moment ago, my hands trembling slightly with the effort of saying something I've never had the standing to say before in my life. Nobody has ever cared what I thought was true. It's a strange thing, being listened to, even by people who clearly aren't convinced.

Garrik finds me an hour later, delivering the week's grain with his usual grunt of greeting, though there's something more considering in his expression than I've seen from him before.

"Heard you gave Marta an earful by the well," he says, not quite smiling.

"I told her the truth."

"That you did." He sets the last sack on the scale, glancing toward the mill where Malvek is working. "He's kept this village fed since before you were grown, you know. Never once shorted a measure, never once turned away a family that couldn't pay full price come a hard season. Most folks forget that when they're scared."

"You haven't forgotten it."

"No." He says it simply, the way he says most things. "I've watched him work too many harvests to believe the stories anymore. Doesn't mean I'm not careful. It means I know the difference between careful and cruel."

His words echo something I told Malvek myself weeks ago, and I wonder if the whole village carries the same quiet arithmetic somewhere beneath the fear — years of evidence stacked against years of rumor, waiting for someone to finally tip the balance out loud.

I spend the afternoon helping Elsie and two other women bake bread for the week, using flour milled fresh from Malvek's repaired stone. The kitchen fills with warmth and easy chatter, and more than once I catch someone glancing my way with something closer to curiosity than suspicion.

"That flour's finer than what we got before the harvest started," Elsie says, working the dough between her hands. "Whatever he did fixing that stone, he did it well."

"He worked through the whole night to manage it."

"Did he now?" Elsie's eyebrows lift slightly, and I feel my face warm under her attention, though I couldn't say exactly why.

By evening, walking back up the hill toward the mill, I turn the day over in my mind — the women by the well, Garrik's quiet defense, Elsie's knowing look. Small things, none of them a revolution on their own. But I notice Malvek watching from the doorway as I approach, and something in his expression softens when he sees me, like he's been waiting to know I made it back safely.

"You were gone longer than usual," he says.