The Hearth Contract

Chapter 20: Because It's Cute

Because It's Cute

"Because it's strong," Rennie said.

She'd worked on that answer the whole way out from the furnace room, because it was a strange question and she wanted to have it right. Nobody else ever asked why. A hearth-fire was strong and she wasn't yet, and that was the whole of it.

She said it walking backward down the steps so she could watch him take it. He took it the way he took everything, without doing anything with his face. Rennie counted it and moved on.

"There's more out here," she said. "Not the furnaces."

She wasn't going to introduce him to the pots. Not on a first day. He'd only go home and tell somebody, and then it would be everywhere.

"The herbs are mostly in Mom's pocket," she said. "What's out here is Nana Iris's."

Nana Iris had put the beds in along the back fence one spring because she was bored, and nobody had straightened them out afterward: basil, parsley, and a stand of chives that had gone to flower and stayed that way. Everything in the patch had a shine under the leaf. Nothing in it had ever missed a meal.

He stood at the edge a long time, reading a row of basil like it was a page.

"That one's for the cakes," she said then, and pointed at the tree by the fence, the one with pink all over it. "Mom picks them before they drop."

He looked up. She waited for the question. Nothing came. She'd stood there long enough.

So she jumped.

Four steps back, and then at it. It was a good day; she cleared the fence, and her shadow went out across the basil and came back. He took half a step and put his hand up to catch her. She landed on her feet and let it pass.

She had the flower in her fist. She held it out to him.

"For you."

"Why are you giving me that."

"Because it's cute." She pushed it at him until he took it.

And then he raised it to his mouth.

Not to his face. Past it, up over his chin, higher than a person holds a flower to look at it. Rennie watched the whole trip. It stopped short of his teeth and stayed there a second, and then he said, "Thanks," and put it in his pocket.

She thought about asking. She'd asked him six questions already that day and she was starting to hear herself doing all the talking, so she didn't.

He kept it, though. It stayed in his pocket, and Rennie put that away somewhere safe.

Behind her, something laughed.

Two somethings, low, about the height of the rail. By the time she turned around, the planter at the end of the back steps had gone perfectly still — the stillness of a thing that had been moving a second ago — and a fistful of dirt was drawing itself back down under the rim.

Rennie got between the boy and the steps and started talking. She talked him around the front of the house and kept it up the whole way, so that if anything laughed again, he'd be listening to her instead.

* * *

Wren had said she was going to go find her father. She came in here instead, shut the door, and knew exactly what she was doing while she did it.

The retreat was over. She'd come out of it that morning. It was supposed to have settled her hands, and her hands had spent the week going ahead of her instead.

In the living room, with the new one on the rug, the cold had come off her before she noticed it. Her mother had said her name once, and the room had come back to itself, and that had been the end of it.

Footsteps in the hall. Her mother didn't knock. She came in and sat on the end of the bed, which put her between Wren and the door without looking like it.

"Wren. You don't like him."

"I never said that."

"You didn't have to." A pause. "Wick told me what you know. So it isn't him. You don't want Rennie binding with him."

"He's dangerous," Wren said.

"He is."

"Then why are you letting her do it."

"I'm not letting her do anything. Getting a fire isn't done in an afternoon. I sat across from one for two days and two nights once, and neither of us won." Her mother waited, and when Wren didn't have anything to put there, she said, "If you think she's going to get hurt, then that's your job. You told her you'd go with her tomorrow."

"You're sneaky," Wren said.

Her mother put a hand on Wren's head. Wren allowed it.

"Whether she takes him is up to her," her mother said. "If she doesn't like him, my teacher can pack one up and send it here."

"Mm."

So it was watch and see. Rennie was going to want what she wanted, and nobody had ever talked Rennie out of anything, and in the morning Wren was going to school, and she'd stand where she needed to stand. If it went wrong, it would not be because she'd been sitting in her room with the door shut.

* * *

Rennie's mother kept him another hour.

The basics: where to stand, where to put his hands, how to keep what was in him from showing on the outside. She corrected him four times. By the end he could do it, and the reason it mattered was one he'd worked out long before she started teaching him anything.

She asked him to stay for dinner. He said Ms. Tanner was expecting him.

At the door she looked past him at the beds for a second, the way you look at something you've been keeping an eye on. He didn't ask her about it.

He put the flower in the bike basket and rode.

There was a version of this where he stayed. He kept arriving at it from new directions and it came out the same every time: it wasn't the worst place he'd been. The terms were simple enough. Get out of the boy's body as fast as the body would let him. Get strong enough to stand up to whatever strike came for him on this side. After that he could go anywhere or nowhere, and nobody would get a vote.

He still wasn't going to be a hearth-fire. The kid hadn't asked him. She'd asked the fire — strong, that was her reason — and he'd taken her flower anyway. She was easy to be around. That part was true. It just wasn't the same thing as wanting to.

At Ms. Tanner's he stopped the bike at the end of the driveway and ate the flower.

He hadn't decided to. It was in the basket, and then it was in his mouth, and once it was there he chewed, because that was what you did with food. It should have tasted better than it did. He'd eaten worse things that had done more for him, and this one was a garnish. The only thing he could put it down to was Second Helping. Too many of those cakes, and now nothing else measured up, flowers included.

He looked up.

Ms. Tanner was on the steps, looking at his mouth.

He swallowed.