I would like it noted that I did not like the town on sight.
I liked it a little by the second bridge.
Odo Brandt was waiting for us at the end of the road, a very large man with a gray beard and two missing fingers on his left hand, leaning against a lamppost like it owed him money. Behind him stood a hand cart and a boy to push it. When Elise climbed down from the wagon, he looked at her for a long moment, and then said, in a voice like gravel in a bucket:
"You've gotten thin."
"Everyone says that."
"Everyone's right." He walked up and hugged her so hard that her feet left the ground. "You idiot. You absolute idiot. You never wrote."
"I'm writing now."
"Years too late." He set her down. His eyes were wet, and he glared at me over her shoulder as if it were my fault. "And you must be the wife."
I had prepared for this. I stood up very straight. I put my hood back, just slightly, so my ears could be seen, and gave him my coldest look.
"I am the Demon Lord of the Black Throne."
"Right," said Brandt. "Tea?"
I blinked.
"There's a kettle at the house," he said. "Keeper of Rolls. I sign for every lease on Water Lane. It's a quiet street. Nobody asks questions on Water Lane, because they're all too busy minding their own ducks." He looked at Toby, who was hiding behind Clara. "Is that the boy?"
"That's Toby."
"I'll need his name for the book. Nobody's reading the book." He winked. It was a terrible wink, with half his face. "Come on."
Valeria stayed with the wagon at the edge of town, with a hen on each shoulder and an expression of deep reserve. She would be somewhere near, she said. She would not be seen. We believed her about the second part.
Water Lane runs along the south side of the town, between the last canal and the first fields, and it is the nicest street I have ever walked down.
I did not say this aloud.
The houses were small and tall and the color of honey, with green shutters and window boxes, and behind each one, I could see, the land ran down in a long green slope to the water. There were low stone walls and wooden landings. Somewhere, ducks were having an argument.
"This one," said Brandt, and stopped.
It stood a little apart from the others, at the end of the lane, with a willow tree trailing its branches into the canal. It had two floors and a slate roof and a porch with a bench on it. It was painted a soft gray, and it had a wide front door, scraped and plain, that nobody had ever thought to paint.
I walked up the path very slowly and looked for flaws.
The chimney was perfectly straight. I found I minded this a little.
I looked for a loose shingle. There wasn't one. I looked for some time.
Inside, there were more rooms than I could count at once. A kitchen with a stove that had four burners, and a table long enough for six. A sitting room with a window seat. A narrow staircase going up, to three bedrooms, and a fourth, tiny one under the eaves with a round window. The floors were scrubbed. Somebody had left a jar of salt on the counter.
I picked it up. It was very good salt.
"It's the old canal-warden's house," said Brandt, from the doorway. "Empty three years. The Guild's glad of a tenant who'll keep the garden."
"The garden?" said Elise.
"Through the back."
I knew before I opened the door. I have never been able to say how. It was only that something in the air had changed. It was a green smell, wet and soft and alive.
I stepped out onto the back step.
Grass.
It ran from the door to the water in one long, gentle slope, thick and cool and astonishingly green. There was a stone wall at the bottom, and a little wooden landing, and the canal beyond it, quiet and clear, with the willow leaning over. On the left side was a small bed of black earth, already dug, against a sunny wall. On the right, a coop with a tidy wire door.
I did not move.
In three hundred years, I had ruled a land of ash. Everything I had ever owned was black, or gray, or scorched. I had seen grass in the human villages from the air, and on the road to the cabin, and in the garden, where I had been told not to step on it. I had never owned a single blade.
"You always take your shoes off in the garden," said Elise softly, beside me. "When you think nobody's looking."
I could not speak.
"I asked for grass," said Elise. "I told him it had to have grass."
"...Idiot," I said, and my voice did not work properly.
"I know."
I stood there a long time. Then, because there was no one in the garden except my wife, I stepped down off the porch, took off my boots, and set my bare feet in it.
It was cold. It was damp. It was the best thing I have ever felt.
"Don't," I said, to Elise, who had opened her mouth.
She closed it. She grinned so hard that her whole face creased. I let her.
We spent the afternoon unloading, which meant that Brandt's boy wheeled our things in from the wagon, four trips in the hand cart, with the hens riding on top, deeply offended, while Brandt carried things up the stairs, Clara told him where to put them, and Toby ran up and down the stairs eleven times to see if the rooms were still there.
He chose the little one under the eaves with the round window. He lay on the floor and looked at the ceiling for ten minutes.
"It's the right size," he reported.
"Good."
"It's the wrong stair, though."
"Which stair?"
He pointed. "The third one doesn't creak."
I looked at the staircase. I looked at the third step. I put my weight on it. Nothing. It was a perfectly solid, perfectly silent piece of oak, and I understood, with a small, odd drop in my chest, that I had promised him.
"I'll fix it," I said.
"Okay!"
"Tomorrow."
"Okay!" said Toby, and went back to the ceiling.
The hens went into the coop and immediately began to complain. Dumpling went out to the back step with Toby, who explained the canal to it at some length, and it opened its mouth very slightly at the water, as though it had never seen so much of anything. The tomato crate went to the sunny bed. I did not plant it. I told it there'd be a ceremony.
By dusk, the table was set with six places, though we were only four. Toby counted them twice.
"Why six?"
"It's a very large table," I said.
"But we're four."
"I know."
"And Dumpling's five."
"And the rabbit," said Clara, very quietly, from the stove, with her back to us, "is six."
Nobody said anything. I put the rabbit on the sixth chair myself.
That night I kept my promise and checked her stitches by lamplight, in our new bedroom. The gold line was clean. The silver had faded to a pale pink, and the skin around it was warm and ordinary. I checked it twice. Elise said, "Yes, Doctor," and I said, "Don't," and she lay very still while I pressed my palm over the scar for rather longer than was medically necessary.
Then she was asleep, and I was not.
I could not sleep.
This was not a problem. I merely had a number of important things to survey. At midnight I came down the back stairs in my nightdress, with the rabbit under one arm, which Toby had appointed me to guard, and walked out onto the lawn, and lay down in the middle of it.
It was dark. The canal murmured to itself. A frog said something rude. Above the willow, the stars were thick as salt.
I lay there with a rabbit on my stomach and my tail in the grass, and I felt, very faintly, every blade.
"You're lying on the lawn," said Clara.
I did not leap. I turned my head, slowly. She stood at the back door in her gray coat with a blanket over her shoulders.
"I am surveying it."
"On your back."
"It is an advanced technique."
She came down the steps and sat beside me, a little too close and a little too careful. She did not say anything. After a while, she lay back too, with her hands behind her head, and we both looked at the stars.
"I counted the doors," she said at last. "Front, back, cellar. And the windows. I counted twice."
"I'm sure."
"There's a latch on every one."
"Yes."
"I tested them all." She was quiet. "They're good ones. Better than the cabin's."
"I know."
"It didn't make me feel better."
"No," I said. "It doesn't, for a while."
She let out a long breath. I did not look at her. A lawn is an excellent place for a conversation, because nobody can see anyone's face.
"I've been practicing something," I said.
"What?"
"A sentence."
I felt her turn her head. I looked firmly at the willow.
"It is three words long," I said. "I have said it to the tomato. Eleven times. I do not stumble. When I try it on Elise, my tail does a thing."
"I know. I heard you through the wagon canvas. Eleven times." She considered. "The sixth one was the best."
I put the rabbit over my face.
Clara laughed. It was real, short and helpless, and it was the best thing I had heard all day. When I took the rabbit away, she was wiping her eyes with the blanket.
"She'll like it," she said. "At any moment."
"I am aware."
"I'm only saying."
"Thank you."
"Mm." She tipped her head onto my shoulder, a little at a time, as though testing whether it was allowed. "It's a good lawn."
"It is a very good lawn."
I lay there with a rabbit and a daughter and a sky full of stars. I did not tell anyone I had been handed both in the same week. I thought it was something to keep, for now.