Chapter 16 - The Garden

The ground was frozen a foot down, and I had one hand.

I found that out on Monday morning, when I took Lily’s spade off the stable wall, ribbon and all, walked to the middle of the square her four red ribbons made, put my boot on the blade, and stood on it. The spade went into the snow and stopped against the ground underneath with a clank that went up the handle into my splint, and I said a word that made Bertha look round from her stall.

Lily was coming on Thursday. That gave me three days.

“I could dig it,” said Kit.

He was sitting on the edge of the horse trough in his half-laced shirt, solid, with his bare feet in the snow and his shadow lying across it, eating an apple from the sack Fenwick had brought out. He had been eating something every time I saw him since the fight. He ate in his sleep. Jory said he had woken in the night to find Kit chewing.

“I could dig the whole thing by tonight,” Kit said. “I carried the gate.”

“No.”

“Jory could do it in an hour. Jory dug the well.”

“It’s hers,” I said. “I’m digging it.”

Kit eyed my splint, and the frozen ground, and me, with his mouth full of apple and one eyebrow up.

“With one hand,” he said.

“With one hand.”

“Can I watch?”

“You’re going to watch anyway.”

“I’m asking,” said Kit, delighted with himself. “Rule two only covers your room.”

I thought about the ground for a long time, standing in the snow with my boot on the spade. I thought about Kit and Jory’s little fires on the tower stair, eighty-four of them, one on every step, each one thawing a ghost enough to lift a book one step higher. I went to the woodpile.

I built a fire on the garden. I built it in the corner of the square by the hitching ring, on top of the snow, a long low fire as wide as I could make it, and I fed it all morning, pleased as hell with myself. When it burned down, I raked the embers off with the spade, and the ground underneath had gone dark, wet and steaming for about the depth of my hand. I dug that. I dug it left-handed, with the spade handle jammed into my armpit and my splint held up against my chest, and it came up in black wet clods, and under it the ground was frozen again, and I stopped being pleased with myself. So I built the fire back up on the same spot and did it again.

It took me three days.

I would like to tell you I did it well. I didn’t. I had never dug anything but graves and holes to hide stolen things in, and it showed. It came out crooked, too deep in one corner and too shallow in another, with clods the size of my head. My left hand blistered by noon on Monday. The blisters broke on Tuesday, and I wrapped my left hand too, and dug with both hands wrapped and swore at both of them. My shoulders burned. My back burned. By Tuesday afternoon I had my shirt off in the snow, steaming in the cold, with soot on my chest and mud to my knees, and Kit sat on the horse trough and watched all of it.

He didn’t say much. He watched me as I had watched him and Jory in the copper tub, with his chin on his fist and his mouth open, and every time I bent over the spade I could feel his eyes go to my ass and stay there. It made my cock half hard for three days. I dug a garden for the woman I loved with a dead man watching my ass and a stiff prick in my trousers, and I don’t know what that says about me, but I know it’s true.

Jory came out on Tuesday evening with a mug of hot cider and stood beside the trough. I wanted the cider. I didn’t want whatever came with it.

“The far corner’s too deep,” he said.

“I know it’s too deep.”

“It’ll hold water. She’ll lose whatever she puts there in the first thaw.” He handed me the mug. “Put the clods from the near corner into it, and stamp them down. Don’t dig any more there.”

I looked at him. He looked back at me with his collar open and his arms folded. He didn’t smile. Jory never smiled when he was right.

“That’s not help,” said Jory. “That’s accounts.”

I filled the corner. I stamped the clods down. By Wednesday night I had a long square of black turned earth in the corner of my stable yard, steaming in the cold, with soot round its edges and four red ribbons on its corners and snow on all sides, and my hands were wrapped in rags and my back wouldn’t straighten. It was the ugliest bit of ground I had ever seen.

I stood in the yard and looked at it by lantern light.

“It’s good,” said Kit, from the trough.

“It’s crooked.”

“It’s crooked,” Kit agreed. “It’s good.”

Lily came on Thursday with the sun behind her.

She came on the hired pony with a basket on her arm and her blue wool scarf round her throat and a sack hung off the saddle, and Jory opened the gate for her and stepped back three full paces and bowed. Lily looked at him from the saddle. She looked at his shadow. She put her hand in her coat pocket, and the salt in it rattled. Jory bowed again, lower, and went inside without a word. I couldn’t stop smiling. I’d missed her all week, and she’d been in my yard half a minute and already won.

Kit stayed out of sight. I had told him to the night before, and he had pulled a face, and kept to it. He was at a window somewhere. I could feel it on the back of my neck. I didn’t look up.

I lifted Lily down off the pony with my wrapped hands, and she looked at the hands, and at the splint, and at the soot I hadn’t got off my neck, and one corner of her mouth went up.

“I heard,” she said, “that you had visitors.”

“A few.”

“Forty-one,” said Lily. “Fenwick told me. Fenwick tells me everything now. He’s frightened of me.” She put her cold hand on my cheek, on the cut the candlestick had left there, and held it. “And Kaniz’s shift is in strips round your fingers. I can see the hem.”

“It was the cleanest thing in the house.”

“I know.” She kept her hand on my face a moment longer. She looked me over, all of me, and then looked me in the eye. “You killed someone.”

“Yes.”

“Up close.”

“Yes.”

She nodded. She didn’t ask who. She went up on her toes and kissed me, long, with her hand at the back of my neck under my collar, and her mouth was warm and tasted of the bread she had eaten on the road, and I held on to her with both hands, and my cock went hard against her skirt in the middle of my yard so fast it made me dizzy. She felt it. She laughed into my mouth.

“Show me my yard,” she said.

I took her round the stables.

I hadn’t thought about what I would say. I had thought about the digging for three days, and the ground, and the fires, and I hadn’t once thought about the moment I would have to stand next to her in front of it, and I stood there in the snow with my hands hanging and said nothing at all.

Lily looked at it.

She looked at the black turned square in the snow with soot at its edges, steaming where the sun hit it, and at her four red ribbons, washed and tied back on with one-handed knots that had come out wrong every time. She looked at it for so long that I broke first and explained.

“It’s crooked,” I said. “The far corner was too deep and I filled it. The clods are too big. I know the clods are too big. I had one hand. You said in spring, and it isn’t spring, but I thought if it was turned already you could…”

Lily walked away from me.

She went in her good boots straight across the turned earth to the middle of the square, sinking to her ankles, and knelt down in it in her wool skirt. She took off one glove. She pushed her bare hand down into the black dirt as far as it would go, up to her wrist, and held it there, and I stood in the snow behind her waiting to hear how badly I’d ruined it.

“It’s warm,” she said.

“I built fires on it.”

“I know.” She didn’t look round. “I can smell them.”

She knelt there with her hand in the ground for a while. Her back was to me. Her braid had come down out of her scarf, white-blonde against the black dirt and the red ribbons, and her ass sat on her heels in the wool skirt, small and round, and I looked at it, because I always look, and because it was Lily’s and it was in the garden I had dug for her, and that made it the best ass in the world for that one minute.

When she stood up, her eyes were wet. She wiped them on her wrist, with the dirty hand, and left a black smear across her cheekbone, and I stood there with my wrapped hands hanging, no use to anybody.

“You dug it wrong,” she said.

“I know.”

“It’s the best thing anybody’s ever given me.”

She opened her sack. She had brought bulbs, a sack of them wrapped in damp moss, small brown snowdrop bulbs and fat ones I didn’t know the names of. She knelt back down in the garden and put them in, one by one, in rows, measuring the spaces between them with her fingers, and she wouldn’t let me help, and I didn’t try. I sat on the edge of the horse trough where Kit had sat and watched her plant.

“There are fourteen rooms,” I said.

“I know how many rooms there are, sweetheart. I read the deed.”

“Six have beds. Four have fireplaces. There’s one on the south side, up the end of the gallery, that gets the sun all morning.”

Lily put a bulb in. She pressed the earth down over it with her thumb.

“I have a shop,” she said.

“I know you have a shop.”

“I have a shop, and a stall, and a lease, and a roof that leaks in the corner over the till, and forty-two gold that Fenwick still owes me in my head, even if it doesn’t on paper.” She put another bulb in. “I have a life I built myself, Samuel, in a street where everybody knows my name. I’m not going to come and live in the middle of nowhere in an inn full of dead men and rope.” She looked up at me from the dirt. “And you don’t want me to. You only think you ought to ask.”

My stomach turned over, because she was right, and because I had wanted her to say yes anyway.

“I’ll come out,” Lily said. “I’ll come and see my garden. I’ll stay for supper when I want to, and go home when I want to, and you’ll ride in and see me, and you’ll bring me things you stole, and I’ll make you tell me where you got them.” She put the last bulb in and pressed it down. “That’s all I want. I want it to be mine out here without being stuck here with it.”

She stood up and slapped the dirt off her skirt.

“Now take me somewhere,” she said, “where your dead men can’t watch.”

There wasn’t a room in the River Bell where they couldn’t watch. But there was the hayloft over the stable, where Kit and Jory had told me they never went because Kit didn’t like the ladder, and I climbed the ladder after Lily with my eyes on her skirt the whole way up, and pulled it up behind us.

I won’t tell you all of it. Some of Lily is mine.

I’ll tell you she undressed me, because my hands couldn’t, and did it slowly in the cold, piece by piece, and kissed every bruise the Deacon’s people had left on me, and there were a lot of them, and she found every one. I’ll tell you she made me lie back in the hay and keep my hands over my head, out of the way, and climbed onto me in nothing but her scarf. I’ll tell you she rode me in the gray light from the gaps in the boards, taking her time about it, watching my face with those blue eyes, and that when I tried to move she put her hand on my chest and pressed me down into the hay and said, “No. Mine,” and I let her. She came with her head back and her braid down her back and my name in her mouth, and I came a moment after, so hard the hay went into my hair, and she lay down on top of me afterward with her cheek on my chest and her black-smeared face against my heart.

Somewhere down in the inn, the bell rang once.

“Was that them?” Lily asked, against my chest.

“That was us,” I said. “It rings whenever anybody comes.”

“Every time?”

“Every time.”

She thought about that. “That’s going to be a very noisy bell,” she said.

She went home before the light went. She ate supper first, at the corner table in the common room, Maple’s stew that Kaniz had learned to make, and Kit and Jory served it in clean shirts and never came within three paces of her chair, and Lily said “Thank you” to Jory when he slid the bread down the table to her, and Jory went pink to his ears. Kaniz sat across from her and the two of them talked about bulbs for an hour, and about the Tome’s spelling, and about me as if I wasn’t at the table, which I didn’t like at all and couldn’t stop listening to. When Lily got up to go, Kaniz kissed her on the cheek. I had never seen Kaniz kiss anybody on the cheek in my life.

I put Lily up on the pony at the gate. The sun was going red on the willows.

“Ride in on Sunday,” she said. “Bring me something.”

“What?”

“Something you stole.” She leaned down out of the saddle and fixed my collar, which was crooked, and left her hand on it. “And sell something, Samuel. Fenwick told me about the gold. I did your sums on the way out. Two dead men eat more than a mule, and you’ve got ten gold and a winter.”

“I know.”

“You’ll be broke by the new moon.”

“I know.”

“So go and steal something,” said Lily, and kissed me, and rode out under the gatehouse into the red light, and didn’t look back once, which was how I knew she wanted to.

The bell rang three times after midnight.

Kit and Jory were asleep, for once, both of them, in the room next to mine, and Kaniz was asleep against my back, and I had been lying awake with my hands throbbing listening to the river, and I knew the difference by now. When Kit and Jory rang it, it rang by itself. This time somebody was standing at my gate in the dark, pulling the bell rope.

I went down with my second dagger in my left hand and my coat over my bare shoulders, wondering how many friends forty-one men had. Jory was already at the bottom of the stairs, solid, with a lantern, and Kit behind him with an axe.

“One,” said Jory. “On foot.”

I crossed the yard and opened the hatch in the gate.

She was standing in the snow under the gatehouse arch with the lantern light on her, and I knew her before I saw her face, by the ears. She was foxfolk, black-furred from the tips of those tall ears to the end of the tail that swung behind her in the snow, and she wore what she had always worn, which was nothing much: black leather straps across a black-furred body, a scrap of a leather bodice and a scrap of a skirt, a belt with a crop and a coiled whip at her hip, and a long dark cloak thrown wide open in the middle of winter, because Ashara had never been cold in her life. Her golden eyes were bright in the lantern light.

“Samuel,” said Mistress Ashara. “You have bought a house.”

I opened the gate. My hands did it while my head was still trying to work out what to say. I hadn’t seen her since the stables, before the warlock job, when she had laid her crop across my ass hard enough to make me yelp and Bertha stamp in her stall, and vanished while I was still stinging, and my ass remembered her before the rest of me did. It clenched. My cock, which had been fucked into the hay that afternoon and had no business doing anything, sat up in my trousers and saluted.

Ashara walked in under the gatehouse. She looked at the new post, the yard, the pink stains still showing in the trampled snow by the gate, the lantern and the two ghosts, and Kit with his axe, and I wanted her to like it, which I would have died before saying. Kit stared back at her. His eyes went from her ears to her tail and back up and stopped on the whip at her hip.

“Mistress,” said Kit, faintly.

Ashara put her crop under his chin. She did it so fast I didn’t see her hand move. She lifted his chin with the end of it until he was looking at her face, and held it there.

“No,” she said.

Kit swallowed. “Yes, mistress.”

She took the crop away and looked at Jory. Jory didn’t say anything. Jory, who had looked at Kaniz with her shift round her ribs and sat down straight through a table, took one long look at Mistress Ashara and stepped back a full pace.

“Sensible,” said Ashara, and walked past him into my inn.

She stood in the middle of the common room and turned round once, looking at all of it: the gallery, the bar with its carved birds, the fire I had banked, the egg in its crate by the hearth, and the Tome at the end of the bar with its eye wide open. I stood by the door and waited for her to tell me what was wrong with it.

“A FOX,” said the Tome, overjoyed. “Boy, you have let a FOX into the house. In my day the margraves bred them for the hunt and the hunt never once caught one.”

“It talks,” said Ashara.

“It never stops.”

“It is a pity.” She sat down at the corner table, crossed her legs, and set a roll of paper on the table in front of her, tied with black ribbon and sealed in black wax. She nodded at my hands. “What happened to your hand?”

“A man with a club stood on it.”

“And the man with the club?”

“I put my thumbs in his eyes.”

“Good.” Her golden eyes moved from my right hand to my left, wrapped in Kaniz’s rags, black with dirt and blisters. “And this one?”

“I dug a garden.”

Ashara looked at me for a long time. Her tail moved once against the floor. I had never once worked out what that tail meant.

“I heard about your forty-one,” she said. “The Guild Master told me. He said you took the wall alone and killed the man who led them with your own knife.” She tilted her head. “He said you were slow on the wall. Was he right?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” said Ashara. “You were always slow on walls.” She untied the black ribbon. “Sit down.”

I sat.

“There is a contract,” said Ashara. “The Guild is brokering it for a client who does not wish to be named, and I have been asked to find a rogue for it. It is a retrieval. A set of rings, three of them, magical, taken from somewhere in gnome territory. The client wants them back and does not want to say from whom.” She unrolled the paper on the table and turned it to face me. There was writing on it, and a seal, and a number at the bottom. “That is the fee.”

I read the number. My hands throbbed. I read it again.

“That’s a lot of money for some rings.”

“It is a lot of money for some rings,” Ashara agreed. “It is also a lot of money for a boy with ten gold, a winter, a mule, a slave, an egg, a book that never stops, and two dead men who eat. Fenwick talks to more people than your florist.”

“Why me?”

“Because I was asked to find a rogue,” said Ashara, “and you are the one I made.”

My throat went tight. I looked down at my wrapped hands on the paper so she wouldn’t see. Up on the gallery, Kaniz’s chain clinked. She had come out to listen. I thought of Lily in the red light at the gate. So go and steal something.

“Rogues do not do politics,” said Ashara. “What do rogues do?”

“Contracts,” I said.

“Then do this one.” She put a pen down on the paper beside my hand. “Left-handed will do. Your right-handed signature was never any better.”

I signed it. It came out worse than my name on the deed. Ashara looked at it, sanded it, rolled the paper up and tied the ribbon, and stood.

“You leave in a week,” she said. “When the hand will close. Go to the Guild for the maps.” She swung her cloak round her shoulders. At the door she stopped and looked back over her shoulder at me, and her golden eyes went down me, the whole length of me, as they always had in the training yard, and I sat up straight on the bench without deciding to. “Stand up, Samuel.”

I stood up.

She crossed the room in three steps, and the crop came off her belt and cracked across my ass so hard I went up on my toes and yelped, out loud, in front of my staff.

“That,” said Ashara, “is for being slow on the wall.”

I stood there with my ass on fire and my eyes watering and my cock harder than it had been all day, which I will never explain to anyone, and Ashara put the crop back on her belt.

“And one more thing,” she said. “You will have company on this job. I did not choose it. I was not asked.” She looked past me into the far corner of the common room, the dark one under the gallery stair, where the firelight didn’t reach. “It chose itself.”

I turned round.

Felix was standing in the corner.

He had his back to the wall in his black coat, perfectly still, exactly where I had found him on moving day, when he had been testing the corners. For standing in, he had said. He had his arms folded and his blond hair loose and a smile on his face, and I had no idea how long he had been there, all night probably, or all week.

“I’ve already signed,” said Felix. “Mine’s in the Guild’s copy. Under yours.” He came out of the corner into the firelight and looked at my wrapped hands, and at Ashara’s crop, and at my face, which I could feel burning. “Gnome territory. Three rings.” His violet eyes came up to mine. “I’m not going to help you, of course.”

“Of course,” I said.

“I’m only coming to watch,” said Felix.