The Clocktower Bet

The key stuck in the door of the Weaver's Rest, and Nellie Lowenstein gave it the same shoulder-jiggle she gave the clinic's supply cupboard every Monday morning, and it turned on the third try just like it always did. She was thirty-four years old, a nurse at the market-town clinic, and she had been looking forward to this week for four months, since the day she'd written Sun-Turn festival, cabin, alone on her calendar in ink so she couldn't talk herself out of it. She pushed the door open with her bag already swinging through ahead of her, and then she stopped, because there was a man standing in the middle of the one-room cabin, folding a shirt.

The man froze too, shirt half folded, and for a full three seconds neither of them said anything at all. Then he looked at the door, and she looked at the two traveling bags on the bed, and they both started talking at once, which resolved nothing, and then they both laughed, which resolved quite a lot.

"I have the booking paper," Nellie said, digging in her bag while still holding the door as a shield. "Weaver's Rest, Sun-Turn week, paid in full, Nellie Lowenstein."

"And I have mine," the man said, holding up a folded paper of his own. "Dean Blackwood. Same week. Same cabin. Well." He looked around the small room with its single bed, its narrow hearth, its one window looking out on the apple orchard. "This is going to be a problem."

They walked back to town together, because there was nothing else to do, and found the rental clerk's stall in the crowded square, and found the clerk, a harried woman with lanterns stacked behind her to the ceiling, already dealing with a family who had been given the same room at the Drowned Ox. The clerk checked both papers, went pale, and apologized in words so sincere and so repeated that Nellie stopped counting them.

"There's nothing else," the clerk said, spreading her hands. "The festival fills every bed in Thornwick. I can refund one of you, but there's no other cabin, no room, no loft, nothing until the Tuesday after Sun-Turn."

"We could split it," Dean said, and Nellie turned to look at him, because she had been thinking the same thing and had not yet worked up the nerve. "The cabin has a hearth, a table, and a bed I'd be happy to sleep on the floor beside. If nobody objects, I don't object."

"I don't object," Nellie said. "But only because it's Sun-Turn, and I've been promising myself one week where nothing is my fault and nothing is my job."

"And what do you do?" Dean asked as they walked back out of town, past the stalls of glowing healing herbs and the workshops where enchanted tools hummed in their racks like contented bees.

"Nurse, at the clinic. Three years now!" She sized him up as they walked, a tall man in his mid-thirties with ink on his fingers and dirt on his boots, which was an odd combination until he said he was a landscape architect and she thought, no, that's exactly right. "And you're the one who did the market garden behind the wool hall."

"You know it?"

"Everyone knows it. It's the only place in town where you can sit down in public without someone asking you to hold their baby."

He laughed at that, a real laugh, and the walk back to the orchard went quickly, and by the time they reached the cabin door again they had settled the practical matters, the hearth for him and the bed for her, the cooking split, the water fetched in turns, all settled so plainly and so fairly that Nellie felt something in her shoulders unclench for the first time in months.

* * *

The next morning the town was unrecognizable, every lane strung with colored lanterns and every corner holding a musician, and they went to the market together because there was nothing in the cabin but a loaf and a jar of honey. Dean stopped in the middle of the square, in sight of the clocktower with its old workshop door at the base, and turned to her with an expression she would learn to be suspicious of.

"I have a proposal," he said. "A wager."

"Go on."

"Whoever crafts the better gift for a stranger, using only what they can find in the orchard and the old workshop under the clocktower, wins the cabin. The whole week, alone, and the loser shares it without a single complaint."

"And you're confident because?"

"Because I grew up here and I know exactly what's in that workshop, because my uncle kept it before the tower stopped working its bell." He held out his hand. "And because if I lose, I still get a week of good company, so I can't really lose."

Nellie shook the hand, which was warm and a little rough across the palm. "Then you're wagering against a woman who grinds herbs for a living and has not lost an argument since she was twenty-five. Done."

* * *

The workshop at the base of the clocktower had not been opened in years, judging by the dust, but the great iron key still turned, and the door still swung, and inside it was a long low room crowded with the tools of a dozen forgotten trades. Lathes and planes hung on pegs, a workbench ran the length of one wall, and coils of fine copper wire sat in bins like sleeping snakes. Nellie moved down the bench with her sleeves pushed up, opening drawers, and in the third one she found a mortar and pestle of pale stone, heavy and unchipped, exactly the thing she had been hoping for.

"Found your weapon?" Dean called from the far end, where he had unrolled a sheet of parchment across a clear stretch of bench and was already sketching.

"I have," she said, carrying the mortar to the window for light. "And you've found yours, I see. Paper and a pen. Bold."

"Paper and a pen and a plan." He tipped the parchment so she could see it, a garden laid out in rings, herbs at the center, benches around the edge. "The Sun-Turn Prize goes to the best public green in the realm, and I've been meaning to enter for three years and never had the time. This week is my time."

So they worked, she at the window grinding dried flowers from the orchard hedgerow into fine bright pigment, he at the bench turning his pencil and muttering to himself, and the afternoon went by in the smell of crushed petals and graphite and the sound of the festival crowd far overhead in the square. It was, Nellie realized at some point, the first time in three years she had done something with her hands that nobody had asked her to do, and the thought was so strange she had to put down the pestle and look at it.

* * *

They worked in the orchard at dusk, because the best mint grew wild along the old stone wall and Dean wanted cuttings for his plan, and the light through the apple trees turned everything the color of honey. He talked while he cut, describing the herb garden as he saw it finished, the broadwalk where old men could sit in the shade, the low beds raised to a height so a person who had trouble kneeling could still work the soil, and Nellie listened and thought that this was a man who spent his days imagining comfort for strangers, which was a rare thing in anyone.

"And what about you," he said, holding out his hand for the mint she'd gathered. "You said nothing this week is your job. What is your job the rest of the year?"

"Everything," she said, and handed him the mint, and their fingers touched around the stems and stayed a half second longer than the stems required. "Nights, mostly, and the festival week is the first week I've taken off since I came to Thornwick. I moved here three years ago and I've been telling myself I'd rest since the first winter, and I never do, because there's always someone at the clinic who needs me, and it's easier to be needed than to be off."

"That's a hard habit to break," he said quietly, still holding the mint, not looking away from her.

"I'm practicing," Nellie said, and smiled, and somewhere up in the square the first lanterns of the evening were being lit, one by one.

The next morning began with Nellie sitting cross-legged on the hearthstone at six in the morning, which was a habit she could not break even on holiday, sewing a sachet shut with thread she had dyed herself the evening before. The cloth had come out a soft gold, the color of the petals she had ground, and inside it were mint and dried yarrow and three other herbs she had found along the orchard wall, the kind of quiet blend that eased a headache without making a person sleepy. She had been a nurse long enough to know that the best gifts were the ones a stranger could use on an ordinary Tuesday, and she thought a stranger at a festival, with too much sun and too much noise and too much cider, was exactly the person for it.

Dean sat across the room at the table with a fallen apple branch across his knees and a knife in his hand, and he had been whittling since before she woke, the shavings piling up around his boots like pale curls. He had taken a flat gray stone from the wall at the edge of the orchard, smooth on one side, and he was fitting the two together, branch and stone, with a patience she had only ever seen in surgeons.

"You've been at that thing since dawn," she said, threading her needle. "Tell me what it is or I'll assume it's a spoon."

"It's a sundial," he said, and turned it so she could see. The branch had become a small octagonal base with a sloped face, and the stone sat in it like a plate, and a thin wedge of copper wire, polished bright, stood up from the middle to catch the light. "For a windowsill. There's a mark on the stone for every hour of daylight, and the