All of us found work to occupy us. Jade, Fox, and I began to clean out the building piled with ash and debris. It had been a home for older boys in tutelage preparing to apply to Eccleston’s many universities. I tried to assign Adelaide the most simple tasks, as she was little help. Dermid, Reed, and Keir found arduous work as day laborers helping to rebuild the sacked parts of the city. Tessa sought out and found folk she knew from her previous life who helped her and Ilsit find work in a fellow chandler’s, rolling and making candles, their backs sore each day from lifting cauldrons of wax.
At the end of each day, the nine of us were exhausted.
The city guard visited with grain for our horses and thin mattresses stuffed with straw so that we no longer had to sleep on the floor. We were told an officer of the city would visit us once a moon to inspect our restoration efforts and collect the rent we were to pay.
It took Thane some time to reach Eccleston. What caused him delay was the work practically demanded of him by the mining territories, who needed more transportation than ever before. In setting up that business, he was held back, but when he reached us he brought more provisions and coin.
Adelaide hurtled out of the house when she heard his voice greeting Tessa in the street, throwing herself into his arms.
Thane, guessing his daughter was not ready to be pulled away from her stepmother, joined us living in the boys’ home and tookone of the rooms for himself. His drivers and other men would meet him in the street, and we realized he was operating his transport business from the house.
Thane reported that the fire in the Tower of Skow had angered the penitents within. They had apparently, walking past the burning channels and fountains, secured their horses to their wagons and plowed past the soldiers at the skull’s eye entrances. Some were returning to the low country, no matter the threat of Tintar, and some made for Eccleston.
“Well, look at that,” Ilsit muttered to me. “Your little fire trick saved a thousand odd souls as well as us.”
She had been trying for a joke. We smiled sadly at each other, and she took my hand. It was like a promise, a plan that one day we might laugh again.
97
NOW: WISHFUL
Ilsit, Fox, and I had been sharing a room. One night, when I came to bed, they were both sprawled out on the wide mattress and there was no room for me. I had spent an evening in the stables, rubbing Zara down, kneading her, and cooing in her ear. She seemed content in Eccleston, grubbing on the grains provided by the city and happy to be led up and down the street to stretch her old legs. I had never lived in a city this large, this noisy and busy, and I felt like she was a touchstone to the beauty of Nyossa for which I longed. I had not seen a tree in more than a week, and it felt wrong.
I tiptoed across the hall to Reed and Dermid’s room. They were both asleep on their narrower mattresses. I slipped in next to Reed, and he stirred and pulled me close to him without question.
“I’ve missed this,” he whispered into my ear, his lips on my brow. “And I’ll miss you even more next week.”
He explained that Thane had found a week’s work for him and Dermid in a mine. Then he explained that Keir had the idea to buy the house from the city and not just rent it, and that Reed and Dermid could earn much more in a mine than in the city. We spoke in whispers for nearly an hour. Reed said he was going mad amongstall the buildings, that like me he missed forests and rivers. But mostly, he worried for Dermid and did not want him going to the mines alone.
“He says he wants to be by himself, but I can’t let him. We are all wrecked by the loss of her,” he said, his hand stroking my hair. “I feel a rending in my chest, when I turn my head to say something to her and Evangeline is not there. At times, I feel like I won’t weather it.”
I held him close and wiped away the tear that slid out of his eye.
“There’s tattooing done here,” he went on. “It’s common. I’m—I’m going to have someone finish putting her name on my hip.”
“I think that is a fine idea.”
“When I return,” he began, after some more time had passed, “I have things I want to speak about to you. About us.”
Ignoring the dip of uncertainty in my belly, I asked, “What about?”
Reed exhaled through his nose. “Give it a week. I need time to make my argument, present my case to you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m going to ask you to be mine,” he answered. “However you’ll have me. And do not answer me tonight. Let me have a week of hope.”
“Reed. We have only known each other a season or so. I am?—”
He placed his fingertips over my mouth and then kissed me. “Just a week of wishful thinking,” he whispered. “Let me have that, won’t you?”
I fretted for a week while he and Dermid were gone. So many conversations of importance were had in that house during that time, but I was barely present for them. Jade announced that Keir had asked her to marry him, that they had applied for citizenship in Eccleston, and that she was registered as a woman, so they could legally marry. Tessa and Thane decided they would rent a smaller house nearby with Adelaide, from which Thane could run his business. Ilsit left the chandler’s and had found work in the public school the city was slowly rebuilding for Eccleston children.
“Right now they just need people who can read and write, and I can do that. I think I’d make an exemplary teacher,” she had declared at our surprised faces and then went on to complain about having lost Magda’s pipe in Skow.
While shopping for food with me, Fox met a woman in the market covered in tattoos. This woman also did not speak and, though their gestures differed, they quickly began conversing with each other. The woman came to visit our house and asked Fox to draw a series of things on a slate with chalk. Then she asked Fox to apprentice to her as a tattooist.
It is good, interesting work, and something I would prefer to other labor,she justified.And tattoos are popular here. I liked foraging, but you never really trained me in the midwife part. Nor did I want to be trained.
