Perhaps this is why she was nervous to tell me about her home, and I willnotvalidate her fears.
There.Thatis resolve: an action I feel strongly about and that will require my active commitment to make come to pass.
Not simply to rein myself in, but to pay attention to her cues, to do whatever is necessary so that I do not contribute to her feelings of discomfort in her own home.
My presence at all is an obstacle to that, so I must mitigate it.
It occurs to me that Tasa feeling she has to mitigate her presence among her neighbors bothers me, but this is different. It is. Sages are different.
I banish the thought and focus on the task at hand.
Discipline I can do.
There’s plenty of space to sleep on the floor, which I can do too. Not happily—my bones aren’t young enough for that anymore—but it’s been a recurring part of my training.
But I find a small closet with extra blankets—lotsof extra blankets, which makes me wonder just how cold it will get at night, and decide I can take a page from Tasa’s book and build something: a pallet on the floor.
Then again—would Tasa find this intrusive, having me sleep in her bedroom? Or would it be more intrusive for me to sleep in her sitting room, pressuring her not to make noise when she returns home hungry? To sleep in her workshop, so she can’t freely use her time to pursue the many interests in her mind?
Ultimately I decide the floor of her bedroom is the best option. My pile of blankets still looks intrusive, and somehow out of place even in this house where everything is, in theory, out of place, but all the rest of it fits somehow.
I don’t have a place with her. Even if I have forced myself into her world, seized a corner of her space.
I fold the bread.
It’s afternoon now, and I go to eat the cheese and cured meats Tasa left out for me. Apparently predicting that I would tell her I could go without—she was not, after all, prepared for a house “guest”—she informed me that food is most often what she is traded for her labor and that she has more than she can eat before it goes bad.
This bothers me, too.
I’m glad that she isn’t in danger of going hungry, of course.
But why should she have to accept food that she doesn’t need, if she might need something else? Blankets apparently are plentiful, but what if she needs new boots or a coat? What if she wantsa new, beautiful book for herself, but has no currency? If she is performing necessary labor, why should she not have the same ability as any other villager to acquire for herself whatevershechooses?
On the heels of that thought, another, more dangerous follows: Why should she have to perform labor to deserve to have enough food?
I fold the bread.
According to Tasa’s instructions, now I need to leave the dough to ferment for hours before touching it again.
I’m out of tasks to fill my hands.
In the silence of the empty mountain, my uselessness creeps back in relentlessly.
As I clean the sticky dough from my hands, only now does it occur to me to wonder how she has running water on the side of a mountain with no magic, and I resolve to ask.
There, that’s something I can do. I can ask questions.
Tasa said that taking people’s burdens on can be a true help, and the gods know I would rather take hers than mine right now.
After a brief internal debate—am I really going to fill the book with evenmoremundane thoughts? Then again, perhaps these questions are also about how to live—I bring the book with me to my pile of blankets.
Where I will, I hope, intrude the least on a generous woman who clearly doesn’t want me here, and who can blame her?
I write questions like:
What can I do to make my presence here less of a burden?
May I organize your workshop?
