“That ain’t me being kind. I get she wants to mend fences, but it’s just her fence she wants to mend, not yours.”
“I understand why she did it,” Viv whispered, while Micah stroked her hair out of her eyes. “I never knew my siblings—they died before I was born—but the last one… the fever took them in one day. Suddenly. Like a wind running through the cave. One day they were here, and then they weren’t. Sasha’s mother told me. Then I came around, and Mother looked at me like she wanted to brick me up in my room. And she did, in a way. She bricked me up in her mind, so it wouldn’t hurt.”
“But it hurtyou,” Sasha said. Micah agreed. He’d blocked himself off from the world, sure, but he couldn’t imagine doing that to someone else. Especially a child. It unsettled him to think that his parents had effectively done exactly that to him.
“And she knows that. I don’t know what I want. I can’t expect her to, I don’t know, crawl over hot coals or something to prove how much she’s suffered. I’m just not ready yet.”
“She isn’t, either, if she doesn’t respect that.” Micah hadn’t meant to intervene, but the words came out anyway, and Viv looked up at him, her gaze sharp.
“You’re right. Maybe that’s why.”
Thankfully, no one came to the door again.
Viv slept most of the day, lounging on Sasha or Micah, mumbling half-real words in her sleep. She ate a little, and when the bed had been stripped and remade, the linens washed and hung by the fire to dry, she bossed Micah and Sasha into sitting on the mattress with her.
“I need pillows,” she said, tugging at Micah on one side and Sasha on the other. “Since I’m not a furnace anymore.”
Which was how Micah ended up sleeping in the bed with them that night, Viv swinging a leg over his while she lay her head on Sasha’s chest.
Slowly, she improved. Sasha did take her out to the field the next morning, and Micah spent a few minutes looking at the steps leading up past the door, mentally running over the sketches already filling his brain. It was always like that before he came up with a new design, every day bringing a revelation that subtly changed his plans. He lay in the sun with Viv while Sasha picked herbs that had been cleverly planted in the field—it turned out that the grasses above the Compound were all hardy plants that could be eaten. For all that Lukos was a harsh, dangerous place to live, it wasn’t barren.
A few nights later, when Viv was finally eating something other than broth, there was another knock on the door. This one, at least, wasn’t Viv’s mother.
“Sasha! Sasha Sasha Sasha!”
Sasha grinned and opened the door to a young boy and a girl who were hopping on their toes. They peered around to look at Micah, who blushed as the boy waved.
“We wanted to give your toymaker a thank-you,” the boy said. “For the magic boat.”
“And thedragon,” the girl said. “I’m gonna be one. I’m gonna breathe stone and scream at people.”
“Hey, good on you, Yulia.”
“There are maybe other letters, too,” said the boy, who must have been Timon. “If he wants them.”
“I’ll—I’ll write you b-back,” Micah said, and Timon grinned. His smile was almost exactly like Sasha’s.
“Mom made you mittens!” Yulia shouted, and Micah smiled nervously. He never knew how to act around kids, even if he liked making toys for them. But Yulia didn’t seem to mind. The two children spent a while talking excitedly to Sasha and then pattered off, leaving Sasha with a pair of mittens and several sheaves of birch bark.
“For you,” Sasha said. Birch bark paper was made out of the inner layers of birch trees, which grew everywhere in Lukos, and it looked as if the kids had only just started to learn how to write, based on the misspelled words and occasional intervention from an adult hand. Micah set the mittens on the table and looked at the first pages.
“‘Dear toymaker,’” he read. “‘I loved the dragon. Can you make it spit rocks? I deserve it because I’ve been good and I help Mama with preserveveveveveves. I love you. Love Yulia.’”
“Yulia’s a terror,” Viv said fondly. “I say give it to her.”
“I don’t think I can make a puppet spit rocks. Here’s Timon: ‘Dear toymaker, I like the boat. How do you make it move? Nan says you’re a witch. Did you know Aunt Viv is a witch? She is. She cured Nan when her hands were hurting. I like witches. I will be ten one day. I will count to ten for you.’”
“Smart kid,” Sasha said. “What are the other ones?”
Micah shuffled the letters. “From… other kids, I think. This one is from a boy who wants a doll, because he’s getting a little sibling soon. This one wants… Oh, a sword is probably a bad idea. Maybe a blunt one? And this is a little girl who just says she’s five and that I don’t need to give her a boat, but if I did, she’d let me… marry her mom. Oh no.”
Viv laughed. “Looks like you’re getting popular, Micah. You don’t have to make anything for them, though.”
There was a lightness in Micah’s chest, bubbling up every time he looked at the misspelled words so carefully scratched into the birch bark. “No. I want to. No one told me what they thought of the things I made, before. I don’t think they knew they could, because I lived so far away. I’ll need glass for the doll’s eyes, though.”
“Glass is easy,” Sasha said. “There’s a glassmaker at the other end of the Compound. She’s always saying something about the ground being good for it?”
“It is!” Micah smiled. “There’s this kind of sand you find on the beach near the rocks that’s perfect, and you can even color it if you know how.”
