Raven Meadows's Arc

Chapter 5 of 25

The gnome's trade did what Raven feared. Word spread through the marsh. By week's end, three strangers had knocked at her door, cold and hungry. She fed them at the hearth, then watched them go. She had nothing to house them in. Three broken huts still leaned in the yard, roofless, wet, useless. Finn slept by the fire because it was the only dry spot she owned. She could feed the world now. She still couldn't shelter one soul. So she went back to the huts. She hauled boards. She nailed and pried and cursed. By dusk the first hut had a wall that held. It had nothing else. Her hands bled through her gloves. She sat on a rough log by the fire and stared at the flames, too tired to lie to herself. One wall. That was the day's work. A branch snapped in the dark. A shape stepped into the firelight. Teal scales, gold horns, a leather vest. He held a stuffed bear under one arm, its ears crooked from clumsy stitching. This was the creature who kept coming back. He'd sat at her fire before and never lifted a board. She had never asked him to. She had never given him anything either. "You've been here before," Raven said. "You watch. You leave. What do you want?" "Nothing." Torryn sat on a log across the fire. "I came for the fire." "I've got three huts and no roof on any of them." She held up her ruined hands. "That's what showing up gets you. Nothing done and empty huts." Torryn looked at the leaning walls. He set the bear down carefully on the log. "Roofs are wood and heat," he said. "I have heat." He walked to the nearest hut. He breathed. A thin, controlled flame ran along the wet beams. Steam hissed off the boards. The soaked wood dried in minutes, dried enough to hold a nail, dried enough to take pitch. Raven had spent weeks fighting damp. He fixed it in the time it took her to stand. "You couldn't do this the first ten times you sat here?" she said. "You never asked." He breathed again along the second frame. "Now you did." They worked past dark. He dried the beams. She nailed them fast before the damp crept back. By deep night the first hut had a roof that shed water. Not pretty. But dry. A place a soul could sleep. Raven stood inside it, out of the rain that had started to fall. One finished hut. The first real one. She could put a stranger in it tomorrow. She looked at Torryn, drying his hands by the fire, the bear back under his arm. He'd given her the thing she couldn't build alone. Now she owed him something, and she didn't know his name yet, or what he was running from.