The Work on the Kitchen Table

The basket was worse than Perrin had described.

Jon had attempted to strengthen one side without allowing for the tension in the other. The result leaned with an air of exhausted determination. Someone had put apples into it, perhaps to encourage it through usefulness. Three had escaped.

Ada stood over the kitchen table.

“You might make it into two smaller baskets,” she suggested.

Perrin looked offended on behalf of the trade. “You might make it into a warning.”

Jon set down the kettle. “It was holding things yesterday.”

“So was the shelf before it fell,” Mara said.

They ate late. Nobody had planned the meal for exactly the number of people present. Mara stretched it with bread; Hobb brought over cheese on the pretext that they would otherwise make him eat it alone. Ysra sat in her old chair and stared at the mark where Ada had once burned the table with an improperly cooled tool.

“I thought you'd sanded that out,” she said.

“We tried,” Jon replied. “It was determined.”

Ada touched the dark patch. The room held so many things that had happened without being entered anywhere official.

After supper, Perrin showed her the back room. His bedding lay as it always had. The quarry shirt had been washed and folded at the bottom of a chest rather than burned or left where he would have to see it every morning.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Ada asked.

“Not now.”

“All right.”

He sat on the bed. “I told the man taking the statement that Venn kept changing what the food cost.”

“Good.”

“He wanted dates. I didn't know all the dates.”

“You can say that.”

“I did.”

Ada sat beside him.

“They gave me some of the money.”

“Not all.”

“No.” He looked at his hands. “Dad said I don't have to spend it on the house.”

“You don't.”

“I might buy something stupid.”

“That sounds promising.”

He smiled at last, a small expression that belonged to him rather than to the person everyone was trying to help.

The next morning they opened the workshop.

The official seals had already been lifted under the new order, but Jon had waited for Ysra before rearranging the tools inside. Dust lay over the shelves. A spider had occupied the corner above the drying frame and appeared unwilling to recognise the licence restoration.

Ysra stood in the doorway for a long time.

Ada let her.

They did not put everything back exactly as it had been. The broad binding station was lowered. A padded rest was fixed along one side of the table. Ada moved the tools she used most often so she could reach them without making her injured hand support the rest of her body.

Jon made the rest badly once, listened to the corrections and made it better.

That afternoon, Dema came carrying a pot with a lid tied down by string.

“I heard you were home.”

Ada took the pot. “You didn't need to bring food.”

“I needed the large pot back before the next preserving day. There was food in it. We have solved two problems.”

She looked at Ysra, then at the altered worktable. Neither woman offered the other a speech.

“Will you walk with me?” Dema asked Ada.

They went to the church by the ordinary approach. The ground was soft from recent rain. Dema wore boots with one heel repaired in a different material. She walked steadily, stopping once to move a thorn branch from the path.

At Bren's grave she knelt with difficulty and cleared the fallen leaves.

Ada stood a little apart.

“It is shorter,” Dema said at last.

“Yes.”

“He isn't here to be pleased about it.”

“No.”

The absence remained exactly the size it had been before the road was corrected. Ada could not bear the thought of anyone using this visit as a neat ending to the story she had told in the Regent's room.

Dema rose and brushed dirt from her knees.

“Still,” she said, “I can come without spending the whole day getting here.”

They stood together for a while. On the way back, Dema asked whether the Chancellor had been as tiresome as his notices. Ada said he had managed more words without improving them. Dema laughed, suddenly and fully, and Ada was grateful without mistaking laughter for the end of grief.

That evening, Jon took them out in the boat before the light failed. Perrin insisted on handling the rope. Mara brought blankets and complained when everyone pretended not to need one. Ysra watched the bank pass without tracing a line in the air.

Ada lay back against a folded coat.

There were no prepared claims on the little stretch of water beneath them. The boat moved because Jon and Perrin took turns with the oars. When the current caught, they adjusted. When Mara asked to turn back, they did.

At the landing, Ada reached automatically for the heavy rope, felt her hand hesitate and gave it to Perrin.

He took it without making a kindness of the act.

They went inside before the lamps burned low.