I'll Carry It for You
“Farin.”
At the sound of her name, the fingers gripping my sleeve loosened a little. Farin, who had been watching my lips, lifted her eyes to meet mine. She seemed to be searching for something to say, so I waited, and after a moment her head dipped in a small nod.
“Yeah.”
Her hand fell away. I straightened my sleeve and picked up the key ring. Ara, standing beside the stairs, stepped aside to let us pass.
“Picked a room yet?”
“I was going to look at the beds first and decide.”
Ara glanced up at Farin, then turned her eyes toward the upper floor. It was a face that said she understood the problem without needing it explained.
I led the way up the stairs. When I warned Farin about the low ceiling, she braced a hand on the railing and bent forward. Every time I called her name, her head came around at once, so from the second warning on I simply pointed upward with my hand instead.
I couldn't very well let her crack her head open while she was watching me.
Past Ara's room, I opened the door of the guest room beside it. Of the beds I'd seen while cleaning, this one had seemed a little longer. Farin stepped inside and looked down at the bed, and I watched her standing beside it and revised my assessment.
A little longer was not going to be enough.
“Would you like to try sitting on it?”
Farin sat down at the end of the bed. Her knees rose high, though her feet rested fully on the floor. She braced a hand on the blanket and lay over onto her side. Before her head even reached the pillow, her heel slid off the end of the bed.
I stood at the footboard and said nothing.
There was a reason people checked measurements when buying furniture. Normally you worried about whether the piece would fit into the room — not whether a person would fit onto the bed.
“It's fine.”
Farin bent her knees. Her feet came onto the bed.
“I can sleep like this.”
“You'll be stiff and sore if you sleep that way all night, though.”
“Better than out there.”
I studied the bed against the wall and the floor that remained. I didn't have the money to order a new bed right away, but neither was I entirely without something to prop her feet on. The bed had no high board at its foot, so it seemed a matter of simply extending the length.
“First, I'll pull it away from the wall a bit, and look for something to put under your feet.”
When Farin stood, I crouched down beside the bed. This was one of the pieces I'd nudged along bit by bit while mopping the floor yesterday. Lacking the confidence to lift it whole, I had started to remove the bedding first.
“I'll take the blanket. If you could just step aside for a—”
Before my eyes, the legs of the bed rose.
Head raised, blanket still half-folded in my grip, I looked up. Farin had the bed frame in both hands. It wasn't one side tilted, either — the legs on the far side were off the floor as well.
“Where to?”
I couldn't answer right away. My eyes went back and forth between her arms and the hovering bed. She wasn't clenching her teeth against the strain, and her body wasn't tipping to either side. Her expression was nearly identical to the one she wore carrying empty dishes in from the table.
“...It isn't heavy for you?”
“I can manage.”
I looked down at the blanket in my own hands.
Technically, I could manage this, too.
“Please move it just a little toward the door. Stop there — and mind your feet when you set it down.”
Only after I'd said it did it occur to me that the feet closest to the underside of that bed were my own. I hurriedly backed away, and Farin slowly lowered the bed where I had pointed. The four wooden legs touched the floor one after another.
There was no thud.
I checked where the bed now stood and straightened my back. I had known she would be strong; I just hadn't imagined this. The fingers that had been pinching my sleeve a moment ago came to mind. If she truly wanted, she could have carried off the sleeve and me together. Although — wouldn't the sleeve tear first?
“You are remarkably strong.”
Farin looked at her own hands, then turned her gaze to me.
“More to move?”
“No, this is plenty. You've spared me a great deal of trouble.”
She took a step back from the bed. As I wiped the dust rings it had left on the floor, I accepted a new fact: from now on, there was someone I could ask before I went grunting and straining at things alone.
That someone stood directly beside me, watching me mop.
At the foot of the bed we set a low wooden crate from the storeroom. It came up a little short, so I laid a folded blanket over it and draped a long cloth across the whole thing. It couldn't be called pretty, but her heel would no longer be hanging in empty air.
Ara came in carrying the spare bedding I had left out in the corridor. When the drooping end of the cloth snagged on the threshold, she stopped and spoke to Farin.
“Lift that end for me.”
Farin reached out and raised the cloth. Ara freed the caught section and laid the bedding down across the bed.
“Spread this out too?”
“Yes. You can just cover it down to the foot.”
The two of them took the cloth from either side. Ara smoothed the crease down the middle while Farin gathered in the end that had slipped down toward the footboard. I checked once more that the crate wouldn't slide.
Once I stepped aside, Farin lay down again. This time her legs stretched out straight, and with her heel resting on the blanket she gazed at the ceiling for a while.
“How does it feel?”
“Fine.”
I'd already heard that answer, so I looked over the foot of the bed once more. At least this time her knees weren't bent.
“If the support shifts or it gets uncomfortable while you sleep, tell me. I'll measure the length and look into a proper bed.”
“This works, though.”
“Try a night on it first. Dozing for a little while in the daytime and sleeping through the night aren't the same thing.”
Instead of answering, Farin swept the hair from the pillow with one hand. Even after she sat up, she stayed on the edge of the bed, eyes on the blanket at her feet.
Ara asked from beside me.
“Isn't the blanket short for her?”
“Two is enough.”
“Then we're good. I'm in the room next door. Knock before you come in.”
Farin nodded. Ara gave me a single glance and left the room. After the sound of her own door closing reached us, I held out a key.
“This is the key to your room. Keep it somewhere you won't lose it.”
Farin spread her palm open. When I set the key on it, her fingers curled slowly shut. The small key disappeared into the hand that had lifted a bed.
“I keep it?”
“Yes. It's the room you'll be using, Farin.”
Key in hand, she looked at the door. I showed her how to work the lock from the inside and explained that she could rest here whenever her work was done.
“I have to stay downstairs even with no work?”
“No. Once the task I've given you is finished, you're free to rest. If anything else comes up, I'll come call you.”
I hadn't gone to the trouble of preparing a room just to keep her planted on a chair in the dining hall. Nor did I intend to stand around holding a broom every hour that no guests happened to be about.
“For today, get yourself settled, and...”
I stopped. The only thing that had entered the room was the bedding I had carried up myself. In Farin's possession there was nothing but the key and the cord that tied back her hair.
“Is there luggage you'll be bringing separately?”
“No.”
“Then rest for now. If anything you need comes to mind, just tell me.”
Farin laid the key down on the blanket for a moment and tied her hair back with the cord. Once she had gathered in the loose strands that slipped free, she rose to her feet.
“Anything to move downstairs too?”
I looked toward the bottom of the stairs. The long dining table I had tried and failed to shift alone yesterday, mid-mopping, came back to me.
“There is. But it doesn't have to be today.”
“I'll do it now.”
That was the tone of someone confirming whether work remained to be done. I appeared to have hired myself a remarkably zealous employee.
I nodded, and told her that for anything heavy, we would decide where it went before it moved. However strong she was, a dining table deposited in front of the front door would mean no guest ever got inside.
Before heading for the stairs, Farin turned back once more. It was only after she'd retrieved the key from the bed and tucked it away inside her clothes that she followed me.
The man stood before a shop two alleys away from the inn.
Cargo unloaded from a wagon was blocking the street. While the porters hauled the crates inside, he asked the shopkeeper the room rates at the inn on the outskirts, and added a question of whether it was a fit place for a long stay.
The answer that came back was no recommendation.
“Skip that one. Look further in, toward the center. They say something strange walks around there at night.”
“What, does some beast come out of it?”
“A white-haired woman. Taller than the door, supposedly. Even the one managing the place didn't last long.”
The man nodded without asking further. It was the third time today he had heard much the same story. There were even tales of it carrying people off, but whenever he pressed for who had been taken, the answers grew vague. And the account of the man who'd seen it with his own eyes didn't match the account of the man who knew someone who had.
What was certain was this much: an ugly rumor clung to that inn.
And the caretaker he had met yesterday had been sitting inside it, alone, writing in a ledger.
The man drew the sheath at his hip back beneath his cloak. He had no intention of standing at that door dressed exactly as he'd been yesterday. He looped back to a stretch of road with a clear view of the inn and occupied himself beneath the awning of the shop across the way, feigning an interest in the goods.
The inn at midday was quiet. The door was shut, but no sign declared the place closed. Most of the upstairs windows had their shutters drawn; a single dining-hall window stood open on the ground floor.
He spared a brief glance into the dining hall, then looked away.
The caretaker was there.
It was the face that had refused to step aside in front of the stairs yesterday. In daylight he looked younger still. The man held that face in memory and resolved not to repeat the mistake of judging a man's skill by his age.
A short while later, something white passed behind the window.
The man's hands stopped.
At first he took it for a cloth being moved. But when a face that had been hidden below the window frame rose into view as the figure bent down, he realized, a beat too late, that the long thing trailing behind it was hair.
A woman.
She was carrying the thick dining table. Not tilting one end of it, not dragging it across the floor — through the window he could see the table's legs hanging free of the ground. And without setting it down, she turned her body toward wherever the caretaker pointed.
The caretaker did not retreat.
He came closer, in fact, and tapped a spot on the floor. The woman halted, and when the caretaker lowered his hand, the table sank slowly down after it. Neither of them moved with any urgency. It looked like work they had done together many times already.
The man lifted his hand from the shop's display shelf.
If that was the woman from the rumors, then his visit there had been no accident of chance. At the very least, the caretaker had known she was there — and the two of them were close enough that he could set her to work at will.
The memory surfaced again: why the pressure that bore down on the mind had failed to take hold of him. He had wondered if it was some object he hadn't recognized, but having watched the scene before him, another possibility now weighed far heavier.
The caretaker did not fear that woman.
Just then, someone else appeared from the back of the dining hall. Red hair came into view first, and fox ears soon after, above her head. The moment she saw the window, the woman stopped in her tracks and stepped to the side.
It lasted only an instant. But the man did not miss that face.
It was the woman he had been hunting.
The caretaker said something to the red-haired woman and moved toward the window. The man dropped his gaze to the goods on display. Even after he heard the door close, he did not leave his place right away.
He had found where she was. Under normal circumstances, that much should have been enough.
But now he had to start over, calculating who — and what — waited inside those walls. Whether he lay in wait for the fox to step outside, or brought in more hands, he could not simply march up the stairs alone the way he had yesterday.
The man set down the item he'd been holding and walked along the road. Only once the inn was well behind him did he mutter, low.
“What's in that place... was more than just a fox.”