Ryo set the broom upright and went to the door. He lifted the latch and pulled it in so the hinges wouldn't shriek. A girl stood there with her fists bunched in a patched cloak. She was thin the way marsh folk got in winter, all wrists and jaw and big eyes set in a face that hadn't decided if it wanted to be hard yet. Her hair was braided and then half fallen out like she'd done it while walking.
"You're slow," she said. "But you opened. That's something."
"I was sweeping," Ryo said. "If I don't finish the lane, the dust settles back."
She pushed past him as if waiting for permission would offend her bones. She didn't go far, just onto the boards past the threshold, and stood with her hands on her hips looking around like someone counting debts in her head.
"It doesn't smell like rot," she said. "That's a mercy. It smells like old ale and hot ash. You can work with that." She looked at the broom in his hand and then at his clothes. "You're not from here. You hold things like they matter even when they don't."
"They matter to me," Ryo said. He let the door rest closed and set the latch. "What's your name?"
"Anna," she said. "Anna Marris if you need the second name for papers. I'm not here to put my name on anything. I'm here to work. I'll scrub floors. I'll haul water. I can hold a knife but I don't lie to you and say my dice are even. I learn if shown. I don't steal and I don't break things on purpose. If you're going to tell me to wait and come back when the thaw comes, say it now and I'll swear at you properly and go swear at the miller next."
Ryo took in the frayed hem of her cloak, the raw red on her knuckles where the cold had bitten, the way she kept her weight on the balls of her feet, ready to move. He thought about Mara's warning about pouring for coin and about his own need for hands to put the place back into shape.
"I can't pay coin until I have a license," he said. "The village will fine me if I hire a staff and start selling cups before I'm stamped and listed. I can cook a pot and you can eat out of it. If you work today, I'll feed you today. I'll put your name in my book. When the license is stamped, I'll look at my book and pay what I owe in coin across the first week. I keep track because people forget and then they call it a quarrel. I don't want quarrels."
Anna's shoulders dropped a fraction as if a knot had loosened. "I take food today," she said. "You can put me in your book. If you don't pay when the stamp comes, I will come throw your stools into the ditch and shout at you until your ears fall off. That's fair."
Ryo nodded. "Fair."
She looked around again, slower this time. Her eyes went to the darkest stain on the ceiling and followed its line like she was watching water drip. "Roof leaks there and there. We can put buckets until you get pitch. If you don't scrape the well before summer, it'll go to mud and you'll be sick for a week for no good reason. The door's wrong. It drags on the hinge. We should lift the pins and rehang it so it doesn't wake the dead."
"You sound like you've worked in rooms like this," Ryo said.
"I've stood in rooms like this and watched men pretend they knew what they were doing," Anna said. "Then the stew burned and they blamed the girl for not stirring when they never told her to stir. I left when the last one threw a spoon. He didn't mean to hit me. He meant for the wall. It hit me anyway."
Ryo watched the way she held her left arm slightly behind the right. There was a deep line across the back of her hand, old, healed. He decided he was not going to ask her to say more unless she wanted to.
"I'll show you how I want it done," he said. "If you do it how I show you, I won't throw anything. If I've chosen a bad way, you can tell me. If your way is better, we will do it that way and I'll say so."
She stared at him like he'd spoken in a language she'd learned from a book and never heard out loud. Then she gave a sharp little nod. "All right," she said. "Show me."
Ryo handed her the broom. "We start at the far wall," he said. "No big gestures. You want the dirt moving where you want it and nowhere else. Wet the bristles enough to catch the dust, not enough to streak. Pull benches with your hip, not your hands, so you don't catch your fingers. Sweep with the grain so the dust doesn't settle into the seams."
Anna dipped the broom. She swung it like a scythe and knocked the wedge from under a table leg. The table rocked. A clay mug rolled. She grabbed for it and fumbled it against the edge of the bar. Ryo stepped in, hand out, and caught it without the clack of ceramic on wood. He set it down.
"Slow," he said. He wasn't angry. He kept his voice where hers could rest against it. "You'll be faster in an hour if you go slow now."
She flushed. "I know that," she muttered, looking at the floor. "I do. I just don't like the feeling of people watching me do nothing."
"You're not doing nothing," he said. "You're learning where the floor pulls and where the broom grabs. That matters."
She squared her shoulders and tried again. This time she lifted the bench with her hip and slid the broom in a short, steady arc. Dust gathered in a light line. Her first lane was crooked. Her second was straighter. By the third she was keeping them even and her breathing matched the movement.
Ryo let her find the rhythm. He crossed to the hearth, set the pot on the hook, and built a small fire. He didn't push it. He shaved curls, laid twigs like a ladder, lit them, and fed the flame small until it built its own heat. Water went on. He added onion and a pinch of salt and a strip of dried fish from his bundle, watching the pot find the simmer rather than demanding it.
He went to the well and drew two buckets, not letting the rope burn his hands. When he brought them in, Anna had two neat mounds of dust by the door and a sheen of sweat on her forehead.
"You moved the wedge back under the table," Ryo said. He'd seen the way the leg sat without rocking. "Good."
"I held it with my foot while I leaned the table," she said. "You can yell if you need words to pay me."
"I don't have to yell," Ryo said. He set one bucket on the counter. "When we wash mugs, we do it in this order: scrape, wash, rinse, scald, dry. If you skip the scrape, the water turns to soup and you're wasting the lye. If you skip the scald, you'll think you're clean and you're not."
She rolled up her sleeves. The skin under the cuffs was red and tight from the cold. "What do I scrape with?"
He showed her the edge of a thin, flat piece of wood smoothed to a dull edge. "This. You don't need to cut. You need to lift. Hold the mug upside down and scrape where the lips go. It's always worse where the lips go."
She worked as he showed her. She wasn't graceful, but she didn't need to be. He watched if she rushed and saw her catch herself and slow down. She dipped the mug, scrubbed, rinsed, and then held it in the steam above the pot before setting it on a clean cloth to dry. Her hands were sure by the fifth mug and automatic by the tenth.
"Why are you careful about the order?" she asked, not stopping moving.
"Because it works," he said. "Because if I do it the same way every time, I can tell when something's different that shouldn't be. If a mug doesn't come clean in the order, I know there's a problem with the water or the lye and not my hands."
"That sounds like something a priest would say in a story," she said. She said it without scorn, more with a kind of wonder that someone had made a rule that didn't come with a backhand.
"It's just how I keep my head quiet," he said.
They went on like that until the stack of mugs no longer had that thin film on the lip when he checked it against the light. Anna nicked her finger once when she set a mug down carelessly and caught a chip. She hissed and stuck the finger in her mouth.
"Bucket," Ryo said. He took her hand gently. He dipped it in hot water and then in the rinse, which was cooler. He dried the cut and pressed the edges together with clean cloth before he wrapped a strip of linen around it. "Keep it dry. Change the cloth when it gets wet. If it reddens, tell me."
She watched him work like she didn't know what to do with hands that didn't shove hers aside. "You talk like an old woman who's patched three kids," she said.
"I was told this by someone who kept a kitchen working when everyone else was sick," he said. "It stuck."
She flexed her hand and nodded. "It stings less already."
He ladled stew into a bowl for her and one for himself and set them on the counter because there was no table yet that didn't wobble. She ate like someone who had made a plan not to spill a drop and didn't want to break it. Halfway through, she stopped.
"You're not charging me," she said.
"No," Ryo said. "You worked. You eat."
"Some men would hand me a cup and say I owed them after," she said. "Then they would tell me I smiled too much or not enough or that if I wanted to keep eating I should try harder at being pleasant. I don't do that anymore."
"You work," Ryo said. "You eat. When the license comes and I pay in coin, you tell me if I'm short. I will check my book and we will make it right. If I'm wrong, I will say so. If you're wrong, you will say so. If we can't agree, we will go to Mara and she will tell us, and then we will stop arguing."
Anna looked down at her bowl, then up at him. "You say it like that because you mean it," she said. "It's strange."
"It's simpler," he said. He took the last spoonful slow. "When we finish the room, I'll talk to the reed-cutters about the roof. Do you know who to ask?"
"Three brothers downriver cut reed," she said immediately. "They're fair if you don't try to cheat them. If you try, they'll piss in your thatch and you won't know until spring. Their names are Ren, Toller, and Finn. If you ask for Finn, he won't talk to you. Ask for Ren. Ren looks like a plank and talks like one. He means what he says. They'll want stew for the day and coin for the pitch. They'll bring their own shoes to climb. You'll need to set a ladder and a rope."
"Good," Ryo said. "After we sweep, we'll lift the door and set it right so it doesn't wake the dead."
She grinned at that. It was quick, there and gone. "I said that," she said, like she'd won something small and worth having.
They worked until the light outside went from white to the darker blue that meant the day had chosen to end. Ryo rehung the door with Anna holding the pins. He set a wedge under the latch side so the sag wouldn't pull the wood. The latch lifted without scraping when he tested it. He replaced two pegs on the bar shelf. Anna found a loose board near the far wall and showed it to him instead of hiding it; he made a note to bring a brace and nails.
Twice, someone paused at the window. Ryo saw the shadow move and felt the way a room changes when eyes are on it. The first shadow moved on. The second lingered. He walked to the door and opened it.
A boy of fifteen stood there with a reed bundle on his shoulder. He tried to look bored and failed. "I wanted to see who bought it," he said.
Ryo looked at the reed bundle and then at the boy's hands, which had the cuts of someone who worked and not the soft look of someone who didn't. "You're Ren's brother?" Ryo asked.
"Toller," the boy said, straightening, because he'd been seen. "Ren sent me to look if the roof was worth our time. He said if it is, we'll come in two mornings with pitch and get it done before the frost bites harder."
"It's worth your time," Ryo said. "It'll be worth mine when it's done. I'll cook a pot. You can stand in my doorway and eat and I won't charge."
Toller nodded like that was expected and correct. He shifted the bundle. "One more thing," he said. "Brann's boys were at the bend. They asked me if I'd seen who bought the place. I told them I don't talk to men with white shirts in winter."
"That was wise," Ryo said.
"He had a knife," Toller said, not exactly afraid, more like reciting a list of things that were true. "He wanted me to see it. He didn't take it out. He showed the handle. Ren says men who show the handle want someone to tell them they're dangerous because they're not sure themselves."
"Ren sounds like a man who has seen a few winters," Ryo said.
Toller grinned. "He has." He lifted the bundle a notch higher. "Two mornings," he said again, and trotted off.
When Ryo closed the door, Anna was watching him. "You going to pay Brann when he comes," she asked, "or you going to tell him to go lick a fish tail and choke on a bone?"
"I'll ask him for a writ and for his name for my book," Ryo said. "If he has neither, I'll send him to Mara. If he reaches for a hand on a girl who works here, I'll put his hand on the floor and he can pick it up himself."
Anna's mouth opened. She tried to decide if he was joking. She saw that he wasn't. "You don't look like a man who can do that," she said softly. "You look like a man who can count spoons so nobody steals one and know when the bucket will swing back before it does."
"Then that is what I am," Ryo said. He didn't raise his voice. "I don't want a fight. If he wants one, he can go find it somewhere else. If he brings it here, I will stop it and then I will go back to sweeping."
She let out a breath like she'd been holding it all winter and hadn't noticed. "All right," she said. "I'll come back at dawn. Don't lock the door if you want me here before the frost goes off. The latch sticks when it's cold."
"I fixed the latch," Ryo said. "It shouldn't."
She smiled that quick smile again. "Right," she said. "You fixed it."
He walked her to the door as a habit. He didn't need to, but it was how a place learned its owner's steps. The sky had gone dim to the west and darker to the east. He stood with his hand on the lintel until she disappeared past the bend.
He banked the fire. He wrote "Anna Marris—work for food, coin owed later" in a small book he had cut from spare paper and wrapped in oiled cloth. He set his cap on the peg behind the bar and found that it hung straight and didn't slide off.
The quiet in the room wasn't empty. It was full of small right things: the door that shut without dragging, the bench that didn't wobble, the broom leaning bristles-up the way it should so it wouldn't bend.
At the edge of his thoughts, something pressed and settled as if the house itself had breathed easier.
Routine: established.
He didn't look up for it. He went to the corner where the stain was darkest and tapped the beam with his knuckles, counting the sound. He made a list in his head: pitch, reed, nails, pins for the door, more cloths, a better knife if he could find one that didn't cost a week's bread.
The knock came after full dark. Not a polite knock. A rap with a ring on wood, sharp and quick, three times. Ryo set the broom aside. He walked to the door and slid the latch.
He opened it a hand's width. A white shirt filled the gap, clean where it shouldn't be. A thin man smiled with half his mouth and leaned in as far as the door allowed.
"Evening," he said. "First night, we drink free. That's what my boss said to tell you. We'll be by tomorrow for our taste and our share. Write it in your little book so you don't forget. We're friendly like that."
Ryo looked at the man's hand on the door, the knuckles blue from cold, the nails clean and soft. He met the man's eyes without any heat to offer.
"Tell your boss I asked what writ he'll show me," Ryo said. "Tell him to bring it. I'll have my book open."
The thin man's smile faltered like it hadn't expected that kind of answer. He tapped the door twice with his ring as if to leave a mark the wood would remember, then he turned and walked into the dark without urgency.
Ryo shut the door and set the bar. The latch slid home without a sound. He went back to the hearth and fed the last coal a bite of wood to keep a little heat in the stones through the night. He sat on the bench and listened to his own breath and the small crackle under the iron.
In the morning, he told himself, he would fetch nails and find Ren. But when he turned to the bar to put the book away, a faint smear stood out on the wood near the latch—red-brown, small, a thumbprint pressed meanly just below the iron. It hadn't been there an hour before. He wiped it once with a cloth. It didn't fade. He held the lamp close and saw it for what it was. Someone had marked his door with blood.