Page 25 of Add To Hoard

Working the shear face stone into the crack in the basalt overhang, the piece he told me about, flatter grain, better weight distribution than the rounded chunk I dragged out of the forest yesterday, and I stop to wipe my palms on my trousers and look at them. The rope burns have faded. Not gone, not healed exactly, but retreated, the angry red of them softened into something older and quieter. The hook-catch scar on my forearm has lost the tight, slightly raised quality it has had for three years and settled flush with the surrounding skin. The cut from the fish knife, which should still be pink and recent, has closed cleanly.

I look at my hands for a moment longer than the situation requires.

“The island,” I think. “Or the spring. Or both.”

I am not going to think too carefully about what it means that a place trying to kill me is also, apparently, fixing my skin. I wedge the stone and go back to work.

The overhang takes most of the morning. The wedging has to be done in sequence — base first, then the mid-point of the crack, then the top where the separation is widest, and each piece has to be seated properly before the next one goes in or the whole thing will shift under pressure and I will have made it worse. I work it the way I work everything: methodically, without rushing, checking each piece before I move to the next.

I am finishing the mid-point wedge when I become aware that I am being watched.

I keep my eyes down. In the four days I have been here, in the four days I have been on this island, that looking up immediately is a way of giving something the satisfaction of having gotten my attention, and I am not in the habit of rewarding that. I set the wedge, check the seat, check it again, and then straighten and turn.

He is at the treeline, leaning against one of the black-barked trunks with his arms crossed and the expression of a man who has been standing there long enough to have developed opinions about what he is watching. The morning light catches the silver in his hair and I note it the way I have been noting things about him against my better judgment since approximately the second time he came to the beach.

“It’s holding,” I say, gesturing at the overhang. “You could say something useful, or you could continue doing that.”

“Doing what.”

“Standing there looking like you’re judging the structural quality of my work from thirty feet away without having touched a single piece of it.”

Something moves in those eyes. Not quite amusement. Adjacent to it.

“The mid-point wedge is slightly high,” he says. “It will hold in dry conditions. In a significant storm the water ingress will push it.”

I look at the wedge. I look back at him.

“Are you going to come and show me, or are you going to continue being decorative?”

The adjacent-to-amusement thing happens again, stronger this time. He pushes off the tree and crosses the sand toward me and I am struck again, with not any more grace than the previous times, by the simple fact of how much space he occupies. Not aggressively. Just — completely. As though the air around him has made a prior arrangement.

He crouches beside the overhang and puts his hand on the wedge and I watch his fingers assess the seat of it with the same attention I gave it myself and feel a rearrangement in my chest that I decide is professional respect and nothing else.

“Here,” he says, and repositions the wedge by a quarter inch with a precision that should not be possible with hands that size. “The grain runs this way. You seat it with the grain, not across it.”

I look at the repositioned wedge. I look at his hands, which are still on the stone. I look at the burn scars visible above his collar where the morning light catches them, silver-white against bronze, and my eyes move up to the silver in his hair before I catch them doing it and redirect.

“I would have found that,” I say.

“Yes,” he says. “After the first storm.”

I open my mouth and close it. He is not wrong and I am not going to pretend he is wrong when he is not wrong, but I am also not going to thank him twice in two days because that seems like a pattern I should be careful about establishing.

“The basin still needs clearing,” I say instead. “Are you going to help with that too, or is hands-on work beneath a dragon lord.”

He stands. “I’ve moved mountains.”

“Literally, presumably.”

“Literally.”

I almost smile. I catch it before it fully arrives, but it is a near thing.

We work the basin together through the midday hours and it is strange in a way I do not have clean language for — strange not because it is uncomfortable but because it isn’t. The part I was not prepared for. He works without being directed and without directing me, which I had not expected from a man six centuries old who is accustomed to everyone in his vicinity doing exactly what it says. He reads the problem and addresses it and when our hands reach for the same piece of silted debris at the same moment and his fingers close over mine briefly before he pulls back, neither of us mentions it.

I am also not going to think about the fact that his hands are warm. Warmer than the air temperature accounts for. I am filing that under ‘volcano island, thermal creature, not relevant’ and moving on.

“You haven’t asked me what happens tomorrow,” I say, when the basin is running clear and I am washing the silt off my forearms in the fresh water.