Thornwyn Mossbrook's Arc

Chapter 38 of 38

The elf slept through the night without fever. The girl slept curled against his side. Thornwyn slept sitting up against the deer, and woke at first light to the sound of the matron sweeping ash from her hearth in the next room. Thornwyn stood. Her leg held. She walked to the front room. The matron did not look up from the broom. "First frost was last night," the matron said. "Snow inside the week. You have a man who cannot be moved and a child who cannot sleep alone. You have no house." "I know it," Thornwyn said. "You cannot stay here. My rooms are full by the second snow. Sick children, old widows. That is the agreement." "I know it," Thornwyn said again. The matron set the broom against the wall. "There is the old trapper's cabin at the field's edge. Roof half gone. Nobody has claimed it in six winters. If you can close it up before the snow, it is yours. If you cannot, the elf stays in my back room and you and the girl sleep in the shed." Thornwyn went out into the field. Frost lay white on the stubble. The cabin stood at the tree line where the matron had said. Half the roof had fallen in. The door hung on one hinge. The chimney was sound. The walls were sound. She walked around it once. She counted what she needed. Beams. Thatch. A door. Chinking for the walls. Two days of work for a healthy woman with a healthy man. She had neither. She set the staff against the wall and put her hand flat to the log. She spoke the words she knew for wood, then the ones she did not know, the ones for a tree that wanted to be a house again. She felt the log under her palm remember its grain. The chimera came out of the trees. It lowered its antlers and set them against a fallen beam and lifted. The piebald deer came behind it, dragging a mouthful of long grass for thatch. Thornwyn worked between them. She pulled straight branches from the forest edge without cutting them, letting the wood come free where it wanted to. She wove them into the roof with words instead of nails. The sun crossed. Her hands shook. The deer pressed its flank against her hip when she swayed. She kept working. By dusk the roof was closed. The door hung true. The chinking was green moss, still living, sealed with her words. Smoke rose from the chimney where she had lit a small fire to test the draw. The matron came across the field with the girl on her hip and a pot of stew. She looked at the cabin. She looked at Thornwyn. "Bring the man tomorrow," the matron said. "You have a house."