Raven Meadows's Arc

Chapter 18 of 25

Buck's axes were gone by first light, but the timber he left behind was not. Raven stood over the stacked trunks he had felled for spring building. Rough logs, still round, still bark-covered. Nobody at the haven could turn them into beams. Buck had done that with a swing and an eye. Now he walked north to the Ironbark, and the skill walked with him. The wood would rot before anyone learned to shape it. She found Torryn in human form at the longhouse hearth, cracking a pickled egg. He had joined her settlement for good after she cleared his debt, offering his flame and little talk. She dropped a length of Buck's timber at his feet. "I need this cut into flat boards," she said. "Straight ones. Enough for a whole season." Torryn looked at the log. "I burn wood. I don't shape it." He ate the egg. "Buck's the shaper. Buck's gone." "I know he's gone." Raven pressed her palm to the bark. "There has to be another way." She thought of the market rumors, the traders passing through the lower reeds. One had mentioned a barn upriver with a saw that ran on water. She had never seen it. She had no reason to trust it stood. But standing here counting rotting logs was worse. "There's a mill," she said. "Water-driven. Upriver." Torryn stood. "Then we haul." They loaded the Gemini Brothers' cart with green logs and followed the river until the barn appeared. Wide double doors hung open. A great wheel turned in the current and drove a saw inside. Stacked lumber dried in the yard. Sawdust covered everything. But the blade sat still. The gears had seized with rust and no one worked the floor. Raven climbed onto the platform and studied the mechanism. A log clamp. A track. The blade would bite if the wheel spun free. She traced the linkage to a locked pin, thick with grime. "The wheel turns," she said. "But nothing catches. This pin's frozen." Torryn set his hand near the seized gear. "Heat loosens iron." "Slow," she said. "Don't melt it." He breathed a thin flame across the pin. The iron glowed. Raven struck it with a mallet from the wall. Once. Twice. On the fourth blow the pin dropped free. She threw the clamp lever. The wheel's power ran through the gears, and the blade spun. They fed Buck's first log onto the track. The saw screamed and threw sawdust. A flat board fell away, clean and true. Then another. By dusk the yard held a fresh stack, enough to frame every spring build without a single skilled hand. Raven wiped grease from her glasses. She no longer needed Buck. She had the mill. But the mill sat far upriver from the haven, unguarded, cutting lumber the lower market would want as badly as her stored food.