Chapter 241: A Gift Without Reason (2) [BONUS]

She came back the next afternoon carrying a bundle wrapped in a clean blue cloth.

She held it with both hands, the way she had carried the mirror, and she walked very carefully, as if the floor might move under her. Pudding was not with her this time. Encrid suspected it had been left in the kitchen on purpose.

"Here," Sera said, and put the bundle in his lap.

It was warm.

Encrid unfolded the cloth. Inside was a small round loaf, a little flat on one side and a little burnt on the bottom. The top had been brushed with honey, and someone had pressed a pattern into the crust with the tip of a spoon. It looked like a flower with five petals.

"It’s a plum blossom," Sera said quickly. "It doesn’t look like one. Hanne said it looks like a cartwheel."

"It looks like a plum blossom," Encrid said.

"You’re just being kind."

"I’m being honest. It has five petals. Cartwheels have more spokes than that."

Sera laughed, and then looked embarrassed that she had laughed, and sat down on the stool.

"I made it myself," she said. "Hanne only told me what to do. She didn’t touch it once. I asked her not to."

She looked at her hands while she spoke. They were thin hands, still a little pale, but there were no silver lines under the skin now.

"I couldn’t do it before," Sera said. "Bread, I mean. You have to push the dough for a long time, and my hands were always too cold. They’d go stiff after a few minutes, and then I’d have to sit by the fire, and then I’d get tired. Hanne used to let me shape the rolls at the end. That was all."

She pressed her palms together.

"This morning I pushed the dough for the whole time. My hands got warm instead of cold. Hanne cried a little. She pretended it was the onions, but we weren’t cutting any onions."

Encrid held the loaf and did not know what to say.

"Father told me," Sera went on. "Not everything. He never tells me everything. But he said there was a man who gave him the cure that made me well. And he said that man was you."

She looked up at him.

"So thank you. For my hands. And for the bread, I suppose, since I couldn’t have made it without them."

Encrid looked down at the little burnt loaf.

He thought of the cellar under the Crooked Lantern. A blade at his throat. A woman with winter-river eyes asking what he wanted in return. He had come to the Blue Moon with information to trade, and he had traded it. He had asked for Rael’s address. He had asked for a promise. He had been careful and clever, and he had got what he needed.

He had not done it for a girl he had never met.

"You don’t need to thank me," he said. "I didn’t do it for any reason. And I’ve already been paid."

Sera frowned.

"Paid? By who?"

"By your father. He carried me off a bridge that was falling into a gorge. I would say that settles the account."

"That’s not how thank-you works," Sera said firmly. "You can’t pay for a thank-you. It isn’t for sale. Hanne says if someone gives you a thank-you, you just have to keep it."

Encrid opened his mouth to argue and found he had nothing to argue with.

"All right," he said. "I’ll keep it."

"Good."

Behind her, the door was open a hand’s width. Encrid had not heard anyone come, but he knew who was standing there. He had learned to feel the Reaper’s presence the way one felt a change in the weather.

The Reaper did not come in. He did not say anything. He only stood in the shadow of the hall with his arms at his sides.

Encrid could not see his face clearly. But he saw the man’s hand move once, slowly, and rest against the frame of the door, as if he needed something to hold.

"You’re a good person," Sera said. "Father says so too. He says there aren’t many."

From the hall, very quietly, the Reaper said, "There are not."

Then he was gone.

Encrid sat with the warm bread in his lap and felt a discomfort he could not name.

A good person.

He thought of the sheet of paper containing the cure he kept in his head. The list he had made on the stone bench, while the Sage sorted his herbs. Arthur. Rael. Gus. The People he needed. People the story would gather around, like water in low ground.

He had not been lying when he called it a cold way to think.

And now a girl had baked him bread because she thought he had helped her for nothing.

’I’m not sure I am what they think I am,’ he admitted to himself.

But he did not say it out loud. It would have been unkind to take the thank-you back after she had told him to keep it.

? ? ?

That night he put the loaf on the table by the window, still wrapped in its blue cloth.

He wanted to eat it in the morning, when he was awake enough to taste it properly. It seemed wrong to eat something like that half asleep. The window was open a little, because the Sage said the cold air was good for his lungs.

In the morning, the cloth was folded neatly on the table.

The loaf was gone.

There were crumbs on the windowsill. Only a few, and a small smear of honey on the outside edge of the stone.

Encrid stared at the windowsill for a long time.

"That was a gift," he said finally. "For me."

{ It was given to this house. I am in this house’s garden. }

"That’s not how gifts work."

{ The girl said thank-yous cannot be bought. She said nothing about bread. }

Encrid pressed his fingers to his eyes.

"Was it at least good?"

There was a pause. It was a very long pause, for a creature that usually answered at once.

{ It was adequate. }

That afternoon, Sera asked him what he thought of the bread.

Encrid thought about the honey on the windowsill and the folded cloth and the long pause.

"It was gone before I knew it," he said.

It was the truest thing he could tell her, and she smiled so brightly that he did not feel guilty at all.

? ? ?