Chapter 17: Part Two — Three Years in Ashfeld
The village had opinions about Cidd Ashen.
This was not new — Ashfeld had always had opinions about its quiet resident at the edge of town, the man who fixed things before being asked and guarded the perimeter without being paid and made enchanting devices that should have required a master artificer look like minor household maintenance. But three years ago the opinions had been primarily about competence and reliability and the vague communal gratitude of a place that had found itself, without quite deciding to, under the protection of something it couldn’t fully categorize.
The opinions had evolved.
Specifically they had evolved in the direction that opinions in small villages reliably evolved when given enough time and enough proximity to a man who was, as Brenvar’s wife had put it once at the weekly market and which had since become something of an unofficial Ashfeld consensus — exactly what you’d want and nothing you’d expect.
He was young. Younger-looking than his years, which sat on him differently than age usually sat on people — not untouched, not unlined, but worn well, the way good tools wore. He was capable in the specific way that didn’t need to announce itself. He was kind without being soft. He listened with the full attention of someone who had nothing more important to do, which somehow managed to be true even when he had many more important things to do.
He had, as the miller’s wife had once observed during a particularly candid market morning, the quality of a man who had suffered enough to be gentle and worked enough to be strong and kept enough to himself that the not-knowing made you want to know.
Ashfeld’s women, ranging in age from the baker’s wife at sixty-one to the guard captain’s youngest daughter at nineteen, had formed a loose, unspoken, entirely deniable collective appreciation society for Cidd Ashen that expressed itself primarily through bringing him things — baked goods, vegetables from their gardens, mending that didn’t strictly need to be done — and finding reasons to be near the northern fence line during his afternoon perimeter walk.
None of them said anything about it directly because saying something directly would require acknowledging it and acknowledging it would require confronting the fact that the man himself remained, with impenetrable and slightly maddening consistency, entirely unaware.
Two people in Ashfeld were not unaware.
Rhea knew about the appreciation society because she was a fox, and foxes noticed things, and what she noticed specifically was the pattern of baked goods deliveries correlating with Cidd’s perimeter schedule and the way certain women found excuses to linger near the well on mornings he came to fill the house’s water reserve.
She noticed it with the specific feeling of noticing something you do not have the right to have feelings about and having them anyway.
She chopped wood in the side yard one morning while the guard captain’s youngest left a basket of something at the front gate and found, to her own irritation, that she was chopping it with more force than the wood strictly required.
"You’re going to split the block," Sylvaine said, from the bench nearby where she was mending something with the unhurried precision she applied to everything.
"The block is fine."
"The block has opinions about the force being applied to it."
"Sylvaine."
"I’m simply observing."
Rhea drove the axe into the block and left it there and turned around. "She brought him a basket."
"I saw."
"That’s the third this week from someone."
"I counted four," Sylvaine said mildly. "The baker’s wife on Tuesday."
Rhea picked the axe back up.
"You’re doing it again," Sylvaine said.
"I’m not doing anything."
"You’re chopping wood at a pace that suggests personal grievance against the concept of wood."
"I like chopping wood."
"You like it significantly more on mornings when someone brings him something." Sylvaine set down her mending and looked at Rhea with the expression she’d developed over three years of this — patient, fond, entirely without mercy. "Rhea."
"Don’t."
"It’s been three years."
"I know how long it’s been."
"Three years of living in the same house, helping build the extension, training with him in the mornings, eating every meal at the same table —"
"I know what three years is, Sylvaine."
"— and you have still not said a single word about it directly to him." She picked the mending back up. "Which is, given that you are otherwise one of the most direct people I’ve ever met in four centuries of meeting people, becoming genuinely impressive as a feat of avoidance."
Rhea pulled the axe free. "He’s —" She stopped. Started differently. "He doesn’t see it."
"He doesn’t see a great many things about himself that are plainly visible to everyone else," Sylvaine said. "That’s not the same as it being impossible."
"His daughters —"
"Are three years older and have developed the wisdom to want him happy over wanting him exclusively, which I watched happen gradually and with considerable admiration." She looked at the basket at the front gate. "He is also, in case you’ve missed the rather broad evidence of the past several months, apparently considered by a significant portion of this village’s female population to be —" she paused, searching for the precise phrasing — "comprehensively ideal."
"I hadn’t missed it," Rhea said, flatly.
"No," Sylvaine agreed. "You’ve been chopping wood about it for three months."
The village teased them.
This had started approximately eighteen months ago when Brenvar — whose social perceptiveness everyone underestimated because he spent most of his time talking to his horse — had watched Rhea track Cidd’s location across the entire market square for twenty unbroken minutes while conducting an apparently normal conversation with the miller’s wife about vegetable preservation and had said, to nobody in particular, in the carrying voice of a man unaccustomed to lowering it: she always knows where he is, doesn’t she.
The market had heard him.
The market had thought about it.
The market had, collectively and irrevocably, agreed.
After that it became the kind of thing that was known without being officially stated — the specific social consensus of a small village that had watched two women arrive broken at its gate and had watched them rebuild themselves over three years into people who belonged here, and had watched, alongside that rebuilding, the particular way they were both oriented, quietly and constantly, toward the same person.
Elder Broft mentioned once, entirely without guile, that it was good for a man to have people who cared about him that specifically.
The baker’s wife started making two portions of everything she brought over.
Lenne Garren, visiting for the autumn market, took one look at the household dynamic during dinner and spent the rest of the evening barely containing herself.
"You know," she said to Rhea, while helping clear plates, in a voice pitched below the general table noise, "in Drenfall they’d have sorted this out in a week."
"Sorted what out," Rhea said, with the dignity of someone pretending not to know what was being sorted.
Lenne looked at her.
Looked at Cidd, talking to Sylvaine about something at the other end of the table.
Looked back at Rhea.
"Right," she said. "The wood chopping makes more sense now."
Sylvaine’s version was quieter than Rhea’s. It always had been — four centuries had taught her to feel things deeply and show them in small controlled increments, which in practice meant that people who knew her well could read her completely and people who didn’t know her well assumed she felt nothing.
Cidd, she had come to understand, was somewhere in between. He noticed more than he let on about most things. Whether he noticed this specific thing she genuinely wasn’t sure, and the uncertainty was its own particular experience for someone who had spent four hundred years being quite certain about most things.
What she knew was this:
She had stopped choosing not to care approximately two weeks after arriving in Ashfeld, in the middle of a breakfast that had been too warm and too ordinary and too full of the specific texture of a life being lived well, and had never successfully unchoosed it since.
She had stopped pretending she hadn’t chosen it approximately three months ago, in a conversation with Rhea on the back step after everyone else had gone inside, when Rhea had finally said I don’t know what to do with this and Sylvaine had said neither do I and they had both sat with that for a long time before going to bed.
What she hadn’t done was say any of it to him.
He was, she reflected, simultaneously the easiest and most impossible person she had encountered in four centuries. Easy because he was genuine — no performance, no guile, nothing between what he was and what you saw. Impossible because he directed that genuineness outward with such totality that turning it back around, making him the subject rather than the source, felt like trying to redirect a river with your hands.
He took care of things. He took care of people. He had done it so long and so thoroughly that he had apparently lost the ability to notice when the care was flowing back toward him.
She intended, eventually, to do something about that.
She was, she told herself, simply waiting for the right moment.
Rhea, who had been listening to her say this for three months, had finally told her two weeks ago that the right moment would not announce itself and she should perhaps consider creating it, which was the most direct Rhea had ever been about anything that wasn’t hunting or cooking.
Sylvaine was considering it.
The morning three years after their arrival found all of them in the clearing before dawn, which had become, without formal decision, simply how mornings worked now.
Cidd ran his forms. Rhea worked through the sword basics he’d been teaching her — she’d taken to them with the natural aptitude of someone whose body already understood controlled force and needed only the specific vocabulary added. Sylvaine practiced her own forms nearby, different from his, older, the specific fighting style of an elf who had trained in an era that predated most of Anastacia’s current martial traditions and which Cidd had watched once and then asked her, very directly, if she’d be willing to show him the foundation.
She had shown him.
He had learned it in three sessions and improved on it by the fifth, which she found simultaneously irritating and deeply, helplessly impressive.
The village was still asleep. The pine hills were dark. The clearing was quiet except for the sound of movement and breath and the early birds beginning their tentative first notes.
Rhea stopped mid-form. Looked at him.
He was in the middle of something complex — a combination she recognized as one of his evolved skills made physical, the kind of movement that had stopped being a technique and become a language. She watched his hands. The specific quality of his attention, fully inside the motion, nothing held back.
She thought about the basket at the front gate. About the guard captain’s daughter and the baker’s wife and the miller’s wife and the twenty other women in Ashfeld who had noticed what she’d noticed and unlike her were apparently unconstrained by the specific paralysis of living in the same house as the thing you’d noticed.
She thought about Sylvaine saying the right moment will not announce itself.
She thought about three years.
She went back to her form.
The right moment, she decided, would present itself when it was ready. She was a hunter. She knew how to wait.
She was also aware, distantly, that what she was hunting here was not something that responded to patience the way prey did.
She was working on that distinction.