The morning after I believed her, I did what I always do when a department's numbers do not add up. I audited.
I sat at the round table with the ledger open to a fresh page and a stub of charcoal, and Clara across from me in her place, and I wrote down everything that was wrong.
Sleep: irregular.
Hygiene: neglected. See beard.
Food: adequate.
Conversation: one party.
Internal controls: none.
I looked at the last two lines for a while.
It is a strange thing to catch yourself. I am not a stupid man, and I had not been going mad all at once. It had happened the way a pipe rusts through, a little each day, in a place where no one was looking. A second cup. A voice I thought I knew. A name I could not find. I had been a very patient, very careful, very quiet kind of lost.
I wrote four rules.
1. I do not answer for Clara.
2. I leave the house once a day, even in snow.
3. I say the date out loud every morning.
4. Once a week, I write down one thing that is not about survival.
Then I picked up my dagger and a whetstone and, with great ceremony and a fair amount of blood, I shaved.
"HP 37 out of 38," I told her. "Don't say anything."
She didn't. I felt, for the first time in months, that this was a choice and not an answer.
The neighbors were the only other minds within a hundred miles that did not want to eat me.
I had been writing to them for a year, in acorn men and carved foxes and a little wooden boat, and they had been writing back in beads and buttons and bent spoons. It was the longest conversation I had had since the wall opened, and I had never once seen the other party.
I wanted to meet them. I was afraid of it. And I knew that if I did not do it now, while the rules were new and the ink was wet, I would not do it at all.
So I decided to make them a gift worth meeting for.
I took the model house down from its shelf and set it on the table. It stood a little over two feet high, tidy and small, with its steep roof and its leather door. Inside it there was nothing but a hearth and a marionette. I looked at the empty rooms, and I thought, no wonder he looks surprised.
I began to furnish it.
It took thirty-four days, and I have never been happier to be that tired.
I made a round table, the size of a coin, with two stools. I made shelves for the walls and a bed with a straw mattress and a tiny hide blanket. I carved a row of cups no bigger than a grain of rice, and a pot with a lid that lifted. I carved a lantern, and a broom, and a loaf of bread with a crust that I scored with the point of a pin. I made a window, a real one, with a shutter that opened and closed.
Every night I set each new piece inside, and arranged it, and stepped back, and the house looked more like a place where someone lived.
And with every piece, the Registry took note.
Skill improved: puppet craft (Lv. 7)
Then, a week later, Lv. 8. Then Lv. 9, on the day I finished the tea set. I could feel the work getting easier, in the particular way that is a pleasure and not an ease, as though my fingers had learned a language and had begun to dream in it.
On the thirty-fourth day, I carved one last figure.
I did not decide to. I sat down with a scrap of pale wood and my smallest knife, and it came out of the grain the way these things do. A little ragged-eared figure with a long nose and a patched loincloth, about the size of my thumb. I gave it a smile with too many teeth. I thought it was rather charming.
When I set it in the doorway of the tiny house, the air lit up.
Skill improved: puppet craft (Lv. 10 / 50)
EFFECT SELECTION. Choose one effect to add to this skill. Skills may be strengthened at skill levels 10, 25, and 50.
Steady Hand. Steadies the hands and improves precision when working with small parts.
Fast Worker. Shortens the time needed to craft.
Durable Creations. Things you craft resist wear and breakage.
I sat back and looked at the three lines with a feeling I can only describe as appreciation. After a year of nothing but my own voice, it was a pleasure to be offered a menu.
"What do you think?" I said, and then caught myself. "Never mind. I think."
Steady Hand would have been lovely. My hands are good, but a tremor is a tremor, and there are nights in a cold house when I have ruined a joint by a hair. Fast Worker would have given me back weeks of my life. The house alone had cost me forty-one days, and the dollhouse thirty-four.
But I kept looking at the third line.
Things you craft resist wear and breakage.
Everything I make is small and fragile. Everything I love is small and fragile. The marionette's bent arm, the model's leather hinges, the paint on a doll's face. I had spent a year watching the world try, patiently, to break what I made. I did not want it to be faster. I did not want it to be steadier.
I wanted it to last.
I chose Durable Creations. puppet craft (Lv. 10 / 50)
Added effect: Durable Creations.
Nothing I could feel changed. I picked up the little goblin and turned him over, and he looked exactly the way he had before. But I had the quiet, slightly smug certainty of a man who has made a good investment. I put him back in the doorway.
The chapter published at www.NovelPhoenix.com was reproduced here without permission, while reading it on NovelPhoenix supports the author.
I left the house outside on the step that night, with the lantern lit and the tiny door ajar.
It looked like something out of a story. A small, bright, furnished house, glowing in the dark at the edge of the woods, with a little ragged goblin standing on the threshold. I could not have made it more inviting if I had tried. I went back inside and sat on my stool with my hands between my knees, and I did not sleep.
At first light, I looked through the crack in the door.
She was kneeling on the step.
She was small. A goblin, about the height of Clara's waist, with dull green skin and a face too narrow for its ears, one of which had been torn through at the edge and healed crooked. She wore a necklace of beads and buttons and a scrap of blue glass, and she held the tiny goblin in both hands, and she was looking at his face.
Goblin Lv. 4
She turned him over. She ran her thumb along his ears. She held him up beside her own, and compared, and something in her narrow face went very still.
Then she reached into the pouch at her belt and laid something on the step, very carefully, beside the house.
It was a broken comb with three teeth missing, wrapped in a leaf.
I stopped breathing.
I knew that comb. I had put it back into a dead goblin's pouch, and the pouch back on his belt, and a root had taken the lot before the morning. I had no idea how she had it. I only knew, with a very cold and very clear certainty, who it had belonged to, and who had killed him. Find the original chapter at NovelPing.
I did not know if it was a gift or an accusation. Possibly both. Possibly there is no word in any language for what it was.
I opened the door.
She did not run. I will always remember that. She went rigid, with the goblin figure in her hands, and her yellow eyes went wide, but she did not run.
I stood in the doorway with my hands open and low. I had a dagger on my belt, and I did not touch it. I did not speak, because I did not speak goblin, and because I had no words in any language that were big enough.
So I did the only thing I knew how to do.
I went back inside, and I picked up the marionette, and I came out, and I sat down on the step an arm's length from her. I let the little wooden figure stand on the stones in the frost, with its bent arm and its faintly surprised face. And I made it bow.
She flinched. Then she stared.
I made the marionette look around, slowly, as if it had only just woken up. I made it find the little goblin in her hands, and point, and put its hands to its cheeks. I made it take off its tiny carved hat and hold it to its chest.
She made a sound. A click, and then a soft, startled, wheezing noise, like a kettle. I did not know what it was. Then I saw her shoulders shake, and I understood that it was laughter.
I turned the marionette around. I made it pick up the comb, and gently, with both hands, set it down before her. Then I put the acorn man I had carved that morning next to it, and I bowed, myself, with my hand on my chest.
"I'm sorry," I said, in my own language, which she did not understand. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
I do not know what she heard. But she looked at the comb, and at the acorn man, and at me. She did not forgive me. I do not think forgiveness was what either of us was dealing in. But she picked up the acorn man and held him up to the light, with her narrow face very quiet, and she nodded, once.
She came back that evening, with seven others.
They sat in a half circle at the edge of my clearing, in the twilight, like children at the front of a play. There were old ones and young ones and one with a bandage around its head. None of them spoke. Their yellow eyes shone in the last light. They had come for the show.
I lit the lantern. I sat on the step with the marionette in my lap, and I gave them one.
It was a very simple play. A small wooden man finds a button on the ground and is delighted. He admires it. He puts it in his hat. He walks on, and finds a second, and a third, and soon he cannot carry any more, and he is spilling them, and chasing them across the stones. A goblin, with a crooked ear, laughed so hard that she fell backward and kicked her feet. The one with the bandaged head applauded with two sticks.
I have never had an audience before. I discovered that I was very good at it.
Deed recorded: Performed a puppet show.
Experience gained: 0 XP
When it was over, they did not leave. They sat there in the dark, eight small shapes in a ring, and the crooked-eared goblin got up and came to me. She moved slowly, with her hands out. She put something small and heavy into my palm and closed my fingers around it.
It was a pellet of clay. When I opened my hand, my thumb came away stained a deep, bright red.
She tapped the marionette on its cheek, where three scratches still ran down the wood. Then she tapped my palm. Then she smiled, with a great many teeth.
Paint.
I sat there in the lantern light, with a hand full of red clay, and I did not trust myself to speak.
That night I wrote in the ledger. It was not about survival.
Day 457.
Level: 14. XP: about 8,400.
Skill: puppet craft Lv. 10, with Durable Creations.
Wire: eleven feet, untouched.
-Crossed out Find paint-
I have not spoken for Clara in fifty days. I have others to talk to now.