Chapter 14 — Three Months
The extension had a roof by the second week.
Cidd worked on it in the mornings before training, in the evenings after dinner, in whatever hour offered itself between everything else that filled his days. Rhea helped where she could — she’d gotten considerably better at knowing where she could actually be useful versus where enthusiasm outpaced skill, which was its own kind of progress. Sylvaine, once her strength returned properly, contributed the specific patient competence of someone who had apparently built things before, in some century Rhea hadn’t thought to ask about yet.
By the end of the first month they had two rooms, walls, a working door, and enough of a foundation that it stopped looking like an addition and started looking like it had always belonged there.
By the end of the second month, they had moved in properly — separate rooms, though Rhea noted that Sylvaine’s door was rarely fully closed and neither, in practice, was hers.
By the third month, Ashfeld had mostly stopped staring.
That had been the harder part, if she was honest with herself.
The village had never been outright cruel — Ashfeld wasn’t built from that kind of people, she’d come to understand, the same practical quiet decency that had let Cidd settle here unquestioned for ten years extended, eventually, to her. But cruelty and fear weren’t the same thing, and fear had its own long memory that decency alone didn’t erase overnight.
Fox-types carried old stories.
She’d heard fragments of them over the years — tricksters, thieves of husbands and hearths, creatures who wore kindness like a coat over something else entirely. She’d grown up hearing variations of the same story in her own destroyed village, told by people who’d never met an actual fox-beastwoman and had no intention of correcting that. The stories didn’t need truth. They only needed repetition.
The first weeks in Ashfeld, she’d felt it everywhere — the careful distance people kept at market, the conversations that quieted slightly when she passed, the way mothers positioned themselves half a step between their children and her without seeming to notice they’d done it.
She hadn’t blamed them.
She’d simply braced for it, the way she’d braced for it her whole life, and gone about her days with her ears carefully neutral and her shoulders carefully loose and the specific exhausting effort of a person trying to prove, silently, through nothing but behavior, that she was not the story.
Cidd had noticed within the first week.
He hadn’t made a speech about it. That wasn’t how he did things, she’d learned — he didn’t lecture, didn’t perform outrage on her behalf, didn’t make the village’s fear into a battle to be publicly won. He’d simply, quietly, made sure she was visibly present at everything. Brought her to fix Aldren’s fence alongside him. Had her help at the market stalls in full view of everyone. Let the whole village see, repeatedly, without commentary, that the man they trusted most in Ashfeld trusted her completely.
It worked slower than a speech would have. It also worked more permanently.
Brenvar had been the first to really talk to her — not out of some grand change of heart, but because his gate needed fixing on a day Cidd was occupied elsewhere, and Rhea had simply been the one available, and Brenvar had needed his gate fixed more than he’d needed to maintain his careful distance.
"You’re good with your hands," he’d said, watching her work, sounding faintly surprised by his own observation.
"I hunted for a village for most of my life," she’d said. "You learn to fix things when nobody else is going to."
He’d grunted. Watched a while longer. "My horse likes you," he’d said, eventually, which she came to understand was, from Brenvar, close to a formal declaration of trust.
The miller’s wife had come around over shared washing, three separate mornings of standing at the same stream before she’d finally asked, hesitantly, whether it was true that fox-types could sense storms before they came. Rhea had said yes, mostly true, and had spent the next twenty minutes explaining the specific pressure-shift feeling in her ears that preceded weather changes, and the miller’s wife had listened with the fascination of someone discovering that a myth had an actual, mundane, entirely unthreatening explanation underneath it.
Word moved through a village the way water moved through a valley — slowly, then all at once, following whatever channel had been cut for it.
By the second month, children waved at her without being told it was allowed.
Sylvaine’s path had been different — quieter, in its way, though no less real.
Elves carried their own old stories, though hers ran less toward fear and more toward a kind of distant reverence that was, in its own manner, just as isolating. People approached her carefully, formally, as though she were something to be consulted rather than someone to simply know. It had taken the village longer to relax around her specifically because they weren’t sure how to be casual with something they’d only ever heard described in legend.
It was Ren, in the end, who broke through that one.
Ren had simply refused, from the very first week, to treat Sylvaine as anything other than a person who happened to be very old and knew a great many interesting things. She asked her constant questions with the same unfiltered directness she asked everyone questions, dragged her into village gossip as though she’d always been part of it, and somewhere in the accumulated weight of being asked what she thought about the baker’s ongoing feud with the miller over grain prices, Sylvaine had simply stopped being a legend and started being someone the village argued with over dinner.
By the third month she was correcting Elder Broft’s history lessons at the village hall, to his visible and genuine delight, and half of Ashfeld had taken to asking her opinion on things with the casual confidence of people asking their most opinionated neighbor.
The evening of the third month found them walking back from the market together, the two of them, the errands finished and the light going gold over the pine hills the way it always did this time of year.
"Three months," Rhea said, mostly to herself. "It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long."
"It also feels like considerably longer than that," Sylvaine said. "Both things are true, I find, about places that become home quickly."
Rhea glanced at her. "Home."
"Don’t look so surprised. You’ve thought it too."
She had. She just hadn’t said it aloud yet, the way she hadn’t said several things aloud yet, though Sylvaine had made it abundantly clear over the past three months that she knew exactly what those things were and was simply waiting, with unusual patience for someone who wasn’t naturally patient, for Rhea to arrive at them on her own timeline.
"Do you remember," Rhea said, "the first week. When I destroyed the kitchen."
"Vividly. Syla still brings it up when she wants to make a point about caution."
"And you were still barely conscious, and I told you it was nothing. That the way I felt about him was nothing."
Sylvaine said nothing, which was, Rhea had learned, one of her more effective techniques — the silence that left space for the other person to finish arriving somewhere on their own.
"It’s not nothing," Rhea said.
"I’m aware."
"I’ve known him three months."
"You’ve known him three months in a place where every day has meant something," Sylvaine said. "That’s a different measure than three months anywhere else." She looked at the village settling into evening around them — Brenvar’s lamp coming on, the baker’s chimney starting its evening smoke, the specific ordinary warmth of a place that had, somehow, become theirs. "I’ve had four centuries to learn that time isn’t the only thing that makes something real. Sometimes it’s just attention. Real attention, paid consistently, without conditions." She glanced at Rhea. "You’ve had three months of that from a man who has clearly not had it from very many other people in his own life."
Rhea thought about the fire size lesson, delivered without judgment. About the post holes, dug in comfortable silence. About every small, unremarkable kindness stacked one on top of another until they had become, without her quite noticing the accumulation, something she couldn’t imagine being without.
"His daughters still watch me," she said.
"His daughters watch everyone. It’s practically a household sport."
"They still remind me, occasionally, that he’s theirs."
"And yet," Sylvaine said, "you’re still here. Still choosing to stay, every day, knowing that. That tells you something, doesn’t it."
Rhea was quiet for a moment.
"What about you," she said. "You’ve had three months too."
Sylvaine’s expression did something complicated — the careful composure she wore like a second skin shifting just slightly, just enough for Rhea to see underneath it.
"I’ve outlived kings," Sylvaine said, quietly. "I’ve outlived people I loved, more than once, and I made a decision, a very long time ago, that loving quickly was a luxury I couldn’t afford, because everything I love quickly, I eventually lose slowly, and watching that happen over and over is its own particular exhaustion." She looked toward the house, toward the warm light already visible in the kitchen window ahead of them. "And then I woke up in a strange bed, in a village I’d never heard of, and the first thing I did was insult a ten-year-old’s competence out of habit, and by the end of that same day I understood, entirely against my own careful judgment, that I was in serious trouble."
Rhea looked at her.
"You never said that so plainly before."
"I say things plainly when they’ve stopped being avoidable." Sylvaine’s mouth curved, faint and real. "Three months, apparently, is my limit."
They walked the rest of the way in comfortable quiet, the village settling into evening around them, familiar now in a way it hadn’t been three months ago — every house recognized, every name known, every careful distance long since closed.
The house came into view. Warm light in the windows. The sound of the girls’ voices carrying faintly on the evening air, and underneath it, steady as always, his.
Rhea stopped for a moment at the gate.
"Sylvaine."
"Mm."
"I’m glad we didn’t go anywhere else."
Sylvaine looked at her — at the fox ears no longer held carefully neutral, at the shoulders no longer braced for distance, at three months written plainly across a face that had, for the first time in longer than either of them could easily measure, stopped waiting for something to go wrong.
"So am I," she said.
They went inside together.