Victor Grimholt's Arc

Chapter 1 of 9

The baby crawled toward the skinning knives before Victor could set down his tea. He caught the child by the back of her shift, one-handed, the way he'd lift a rabbit for the pot. She laughed. Victor did not. Three days ago, someone had left her on his doorstep in a basket lined with straw, and he still did not know her name. He knew only that his house was a slaughter house dressed as a home, and that he had decided, against every instinct in his long, quiet life, to keep her. He carried her through the front room and counted the ways she could die before supper. The hearth burned open. Cleavers hung at knee height. A jar of lye sat under the washbasin. On the workbench, curing hooks dangled like question marks. "Meat," he rasped down at her, "knows where the blade is. You don't. Yet." She grabbed his beard. He let her. The knock came at midday. Livia Nightwind stood on his stoop with a folded bundle and a covered basket, unbothered by the crows on his gate. "I heard," she said, gentle as a poultice. "May I come in." It was not a question. She stepped past him, took one look at the open hearth and the low cleavers, and set her basket on the only clean chair. From the bundle she drew a yellow onesie shaped like a rabbit, floppy ears sewn to the hood. "For her. Wool inside. She'll be warm, and you'll see her coming. Yellow carries in a dark room." Livia stayed the afternoon. She did not scold. She pointed. Victor followed her finger and worked. He dragged his ironbound chest from the cellar, the one with the reinforced bands and the old clasp lock, and moved every blade, every powder, every bottle marked with a skull into it. He turned the key and hung it on a nail above the door frame, higher than a child could ever reach. He built a gate for the hearth from a scrap of fence. He raised the lye to a shelf. Livia sat on the floor in her red dress and sang something low and tuneless to the child, who watched her the way cats watch water. By dusk the house was not safe, but it was survivable. Victor stood in the doorway of his own kitchen and looked at the yellow shape asleep on Livia's lap. "I don't know how to feed a thing that isn't dead," he said. Livia smiled without looking up. "Then I'll come tomorrow. And the day after." She rose, laid the child in the empty basket by the banked fire, and left the onesie's hood pulled up over the small, breathing head. Victor locked the chest again. He did not sleep. He sat by the basket and watched the yellow ears rise and fall.