A Knot in the Grain (10 page)

Erana thought about it. “I think you should
want
to have a house.”

“I'll ponder it,” he said, and slid back into the pool and floated out toward the center. A long-necked bird drifted down and landed on his belly, and began plucking at the ragged edge of one short trouser leg.

“You should learn to mend, too,” Erana called to him. Erana loathed mending. The bird stopped pulling for a moment and glared at her. Then it reached down and raised a thread in its beak and wrenched it free with one great tug. It looked challengingly at Erana and then slowly flapped away, with the mud-colored thread trailing behind it.

“Then what would the birds build their nests with?” he said, and grinned. There was a gap between his two front teeth, and the eyeteeth curved well down over the lower lip.

Maugie taught her young protégé to cook and clean, and sew—and mend—and weed. But Erana had little gift for herb lore. She learned the names of things, painstakingly, and the by-rote rules of what mixtures did what and when; but her learning never caught fire, and the green things in the garden did not twine lovingly around her when she paused near them as they seemed to do for Maugie. She learned what she could, to please Maugie, for Erana felt sad that neither her true son nor her adopted daughter could understand the things Maugie might teach; and because she liked to know the ingredients of a poultice to apply to an injured wing, and what herbs, mixed in with chopped-up bugs and earthworms, would make orphaned fledglings thrive.

For Erana's fifteenth birthday, Touk presented her with a stick. She looked at it, and then she looked at him. “I thought you might like to lay the first log of my new house,” he said, and she laughed.

“You have decided then?” she asked.

“Yes; in fact I began to want a house long since, but I have only lately begun to want to build one,” he said. “And then I thought I would put it off till your birthday, that you might make the beginning, as it was your idea first.”

She hesitated, turning the little smooth stick in her hand. “It is—is it truly your idea now, Touk? I was a child when I teased you about your house; I would never mean to hold you to a child's nagging.”

The blue eyes glinted. “It is my idea now, my dear, and you can prove that you are my dearest friend by coming at once to place your beam where it belongs, so that I may begin.”

Birthdays required much eating, for all three of them liked to cook, and they were always ready for an excuse for a well-fed celebration; so it was late in the day of Erana's fifteenth birthday that she and Touk made their way—slowly, for they were very full of food—to his riverbank. “There,” he said, pointing across the pool. Erana looked up at him questioningly, and then made her careful way around the water to the stand of trees he had indicated; he followed on her heels. She stopped, and he said over her shoulder, his breath stirring her hair, “You see nothing? Here—” And he took her hand, and led her up a short steep slope, and there was a little clearing beyond the trees, with a high mossy rock at its back, and the water glinting through the trees before it, and the trees all around, and birds in the trees. There were already one or two bird-houses hanging from suitable branches at the clearing's edge, and bits of twig sticking out the round doorways to indicate tenants in residence.

“My house will lie—” And he dropped her hand to pace off its boundaries; when he halted, he stood before her again, his blue eyes anxious for her approval. She bent down to pick up four pebbles; and she went solemnly to the four corners he had marked, and pushed them into the earth. He stood, watching her, at what would be his front door; and last she laid the stick, her birthday present, just before his feet. “It will be a lovely house,” she said.

Touk's house was two years in the building. Daily Erana told Maugie how the work went forward: how there were to be five rooms, two downstairs and three above; how the frame jointed together; how the floor was laid and the roof covered it. How Touk had great care over the smallest detail: how not only every board slotted like silk into its given place, but there were little carven grinning faces peering out from the corners of cupboards, and wooden leaves and vines that at first glance seemed no more than the shining grain of the exposed wood, coiling around the arches of doorways. Touk built two chimneys, but only one fireplace. The other chimney was so a bird might build its nest in it.

“You must come see it,” Erana said to her foster mother. “It is the grandest thing you ever imagined!” She could only say such things when Touk was not around, for Erana's praise of his handiwork seemed to make him uncomfortable, and he blushed, which turned him an unbecoming shade of violet.

Maugie laughed. “I will come when it is finished, to sit by the first fire that is laid in the new fireplace.”

Touk often asked Erana how a thing should be done: the door here or there in a room, should the little face in this corner perhaps have its tongue sticking out for a change? Erana, early in the house building, began picking up the broken bits of trees that collected around Touk's work, and borrowed a knife, and began to teach herself to whittle. In two years' time she had grown clever enough at it that it was she who decorated the stairway, and made tall thin forest creatures of wood to stand upon each step and hold up the railing, which was itself a scaled snake with a benevolent look in his eye as he viewed the upper hallway, and a bird sitting on a nest in a curl of his tail instead of a newel post at the bottom of the staircase.

When Touk praised her work in turn, Erana flushed too, although her cheeks went pink instead of lavender; and she shook her head and said, “I admit I am pleased with it, but I could never have built the house. Where did you learn such craft?”

Touk scratched one furry shoulder with his nails, which curled clawlike over the tips of his fingers. “I practiced on my mother's house. My father built it; but I've put so many patches on it, and I've stared at its beams so often, that wood looks and feels to me as familiar as water.”

Even mending seemed less horrible than usual, when the tears she stitched together were the honorable tears of house building. Maugie was never a very harsh taskmaster and, as the house fever grew, quietly excused Erana from her lessons on herb lore. Erana felt both relieved and guilty as she noticed, but when she tried halfheartedly to protest, Maugie said, “No, no, don't worry about it. Time enough for such things when the house is finished.” Erana was vaguely surprised, for even after her foster mother had realized that her pupil had no gift for it, the lessons had continued, earnestly, patiently, and a trifle sorrowfully. But now Maugie seemed glad, even joyful, to excuse her. Perhaps she's as relieved as I am, Erana thought, and took herself off to the riverbank again. She wished all the more that Maugie would come too, for she spent nearly all her days there, and it seemed unkind to leave her foster mother so much alone; but Maugie only smiled her oddly joyful smile, and hurried her on her way.

The day was chosen when the house was to be called complete; when Maugie would come to see the first fire laid—“And to congratulate the builder,” Erana said merrily. “You will drown him in congratulations when you see.”

“Builders,” said Touk. “And I doubt the drowning.”

Erana laughed. “Builder. And I don't suppose you
can
be drowned. But I refuse to argue with you; your mother knows us well enough to know which of us to believe.”

Maugie smiled at them both.

Erana could barely contain her impatience to be gone as Maugie tucked the last items in the basket. This house feast would outdo all their previous attempts in that line, which was no small feat in itself; but Erana, for once in her life, was not particularly interested in food. Maugie gave them each their bundles to carry, picked up her basket, and looked around yet again for anything she might have forgotten. “We'll close the windows first; it may rain,” she said meditatively; Erana made a strangled noise and dashed off to bang sashes shut.

But they were on their way at last. Maugie looked around with mild surprise at the world she had not seen for so long.

“Have you never been beyond your garden?” Erana said curiously. “Were you born in that house?”

“No. I grew up far away from here. My husband brought me to this place, and helped me plant the garden; he built the house.” Maugie looked sad, and Erana asked no more, though she had long wondered about Maugie's husband and Touk's father.

They emerged from the trees to the banks of Touk's river pool. He had cut steps up the slope to his house, setting them among the trees that hid his house from the water's edge, making a narrow twisting path of them, lined with flat rocks and edged with moss. Touk led the way.

The roof was steeply pitched, and two sharp gables struck out from it, with windows to light the second storey; the chimneys rose from each end of the house, and their mouths were shaped like wide-jawed dragons, their chins facing each other and their eyes rolling back toward the bird-houses hanging from the trees. And set all around the edges of the roof were narrow poles for more bird-houses, but Touk had not had time for these yet.

Touk smiled shyly at them. “It is magnificent,” said his mother, and Touk blushed a deep violet with pleasure.

“Next I will lay a path around the edge of the pool, so that my visitors need not pick their way through brambles and broken rock.” They turned back to look at the water, gleaming through the trees. Touk stood one step down, one hand on the young tree beside him, where he had retreated while he awaited his audience's reaction; and Maugie stood near him. As they were, he was only a head taller than she, and Erana noticed for the first time, as the late afternoon sun shone in their faces, that there was a resemblance between them. Nothing in feature perhaps, except that their eyes were set slanting in their faces, but much in expression. The same little half-smiles curled the corners of both their mouths at the moment, though Maugie lacked Touk's splendidly curved fangs.

“But I did not want to put off this day any longer, for today we can celebrate two things together.”

“A happy birthday, Erana,” said Maugie, and Erana blinked, startled.

“I had forgotten.”

“You are seventeen today,” Maugie said.

Erana repeated, “I had forgotten.” But when she met Touk's turquoise eyes, suddenly the little smile left his face and some other emotion threatened to break through; but he dropped his eyes and turned his face away from her, and his hand trailed slowly down the bole of the tree. Erana was troubled and hurt, for he was her best friend, and she stared at his averted shoulder. Maugie looked from one to the other of them, and began to walk toward the house.

It was not as merry an occasion as it had been planned, for something was bothering Touk, and Erana hugged her hurt to herself and spoke only to Maugie. They had a silent, if vast, supper around the new-laid fire, sitting cross-legged on the floor, for Touk had not yet built any furniture. Maugie interrupted the silence occasionally to praise some detail she noticed, or ask some question about curtains or carpeting, which she had promised to provide. Her first gift to the new house already sat on the oak mantelpiece: a bowl of potpourri, which murmured through the sharper scents of the fire and the richer ones of the food.

Into a longer silence than most, Erana said abruptly, “This is a large house for only one man.”

The fire snapped and hissed; the empty room magnified the sound so that they were surrounded by fire. Touk said, “Troll. One troll.”

Erana said, “Your mother—”

“I am human, yes, but witch blood is not quite like other human blood,” said Maugie.

“And I am my father's son anyway,” said Touk. He stretched one hand out to the fire, and spread his fingers; they were webbed. The firelight shone through the delicate mesh of capillaries.

“Your father?”

“My father was a troll of the north, who—”

“Who came south for the love of a human witch-woman,” said Maugie gravely.

Erana again did not ask a question, but the silence asked it for her. “He died thirty years ago; Touk was only four. Men found him, and … he came home to the garden to die.” Maugie paused. “Trolls are not easily caught; but these men were poachers, and trolls are fond of birds. He lost his temper.”

Touk shivered, and the curling hair down his spine erected and then lay flat again; Erana thought she would not wish to see him lose his temper. She said slowly, “And yet you stayed here.”

“It is my home,” Maugie said simply; “it is the place I was happy, and, remembering, I am happy again.”

“And I have never longed for the sight of my own kind,” said Touk, never raising his eyes from the fire. “I might have gone north, I suppose, when I was grown; but I would miss my river, and the birds of the north are not my friends.”

Erana said, “My family?”

“You are a woodcutter's daughter,” Maugie said, so quietly that Erana had to lean toward her to hear her over the fire's echoes. “I … did him a favor, but he, he had … behaved ill; and I demanded a price. My foster daughter, dearer than daughter, it was a trick and I acknowledge it.…”

She felt Maugie's head turn toward her, but Touk stared steadfastly at the hearth. “You always wanted a daughter,” Erana said, her words as quiet as Maugie's had been, and her own eyes fixed on Maugie's son, who swallowed uncomfortably. “You wish that I should marry your son. This house he has built is for his wife.”

Maugie put out a hand. “Erana, love, surely you—”

Touk said, “No, Mother, she has not guessed; has never guessed. I have seen that it has never touched her mind, for I would have seen if it had. And I would not be the one who forced her to think of it.” Still he looked at the flames, and now, at last, Erana understood why he had not met her eyes that afternoon.