Page 53 of Moonless

She comes and sits where I point. I’m waiting for her to ask what work, or tell me where I can put my hearth, or at least look at me the way she does when she’s deciding how to annoy me next. Nothing. She sits there with her arm held in and waits for me to tell her what’s next.

I put the linen in her lap and tell her how I want it. Folded along the length, rolled tight, edges even, finished ones beside her.

She does it. One-handed, ends pinched together, thumb pressing the fold flat before she rolls. The first one goes down on the stone with the edges even and the loose end tucked under. I never said anything about the end. She picks up the next.

I stand close enough that the fur on my arm brushes her cuff. She keeps rolling.

“Tighter. They’ll come loose when I carry them.”

They wouldn’t. There was nothing wrong with it and she knows it, and she unwinds it anyway and does it over, every turn pressed flat, and holds it out for me to check.

I’d rather she threw it at me. I’d stand here and let it hit my face.

I take it between the two blunt fingers, and it holds when I let go. I knew it would. My ears are back and I can feel them in my hair. I give it to her, and she sets it by the first and reaches for another strip.

I was eleven the last time I stood this close to someone and couldn’t do anything. Father said run, and at least I had that. Run, and I ran. Since then there’s always been something for my hands, bodies to bury and shelves to keep and seams to mend on shirts nobody wears. Two hundred years and I’ve always had somewhere to put my hands.

And this one gets up when I tell her and rolls linen that was already rolled, and I’ve got nothing. What do I do with that. Tell her to roll it again?

I let the breath go through my teeth. “Enough.”

Her hands stop with the strip stretched between them. She looks up and waits for the next order, and she’d take one. She’d take any order I gave her right now, and days ago I couldn’t get her to drink water without an argument.

I take it out of her hands and gather the rest off her lap, and I fold and roll it myself with my claws clear of the cloth. The last one goes beside hers. Hers is tighter.

She got up, though. Two days of furs and food and she didn’t turn her head for any of it, and I said get up and she got up. I said tighter and she took apart a roll that didn’t need it. Give her a job and she does it.

Exactly.

If the Gulon went out of me. I don’t know what I’d be. But I’d still have the shelves beyond the pool, and the roll every new moon, and the fire. I’d get up for those. I’d grumble about it and I’d get up.

She’s got nothing to look after.

Chapter 13

“Leave it.”

Days without saying a word, and the first one out is about a cushion.

His hand stops, and when I open my eyes both ears are on me, his fingers still curled around the little roll while he waits to see if I mean it.

“I said leave it alone.”

He lets go but stays crouched by the pallet with his claws on his knee, so I push myself up on my good hand, and when his comes for my elbow I jerk away hard enough that the bandage pulls.

“For fuck’s sake, stop touching me.”

He takes the hand back, and I’m sitting up and breathing hard.

“You keep bringing things in here. I don’t want any of it!”

He looks at me from under the pale fur.

“This isn’t saving me, Rauk.” I throw both arms out, and the shoulder pulls and I don’t care. “I’m just another thing to keep! Don’t you see that!”

His ears fold down into his hair.

“What else have you got back there?” Days of nothing, and now I want to explode. I point past him at the inner passage. “Clothes nobody can wear? Things you keep clean for people who aren’t coming back?”