Chapter 7: Second Helping

Second Helping

Vesper drew the trace in a line of ash across the kitchen table and laid the root down in the middle of it.

What was left inside the root came up out of the black the way it had come up in her hand the night before: one thin thread of heat. It went once around the drawn line, unhurried. Then it let go, and the ash lay flat and gray, and that was all.

Wick came up out of the stove and sat on the burner, low and orange.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Worse than nothing.” Vesper wiped the table with the edge of her hand. “If it were still on the other side, the trace would have come back with a direction on it. Desmond was right.”

“So it’s here.”

“It’s here, and it’s hiding better than it has any business being. There isn’t much of it left on the root, either.” She turned the thing over. “It came through three months ago and nothing here has burned since. Which means either it’s the most careful fire anybody’s ever met, or it hasn’t been able to burn anything yet.”

“Which one.”

“The second one. Nothing crosses into this world without paying on the way in. Whatever it was over there, it’s less now, and a thing that’s less is hungry.”

“Hungry for what.”

“Whatever’s got power in it and can be eaten. Growing beds. Stock. Somebody else’s greenhouse.”

The flame in the stove pulled down and stayed down.

“Where does a fire hide in a town this size?”

“Anywhere it can pass for small.”

Vesper picked up her phone and typed: Sorrel, come by the house when you can. There’s something I want to talk about. Then she sent it.

The flame in the stove went still.

“You’re a devil, Vesper,” Wick said. “You’d do it to your own brother.”

“Nothing’s decided.”

Wick went back down into the stove, small and orange, and stayed there.

Sorrel came in the front door with the sack in one hand and got about three steps before Rennie hit him at the waist.

“Uncle Sorrel. You’re back.”

He put the sack in her hands. “From Nana.”

“Thank you. Thank you, Nana.” She hugged it against her chest. He stepped around her toward the kitchen, and she came with him.

He was almost to the doorway before he turned around. She was half a step behind him with her mouth open on a question she hadn’t asked yet, and then the mouth closed.

“Sorry,” she said. She swallowed. “Did you bring anything else? Anything to eat, I mean. You just — you smell like —“ She looked down at the sack in her arms. “You smell better than Nana’s biscuits.”

“No,” said Sorrel.

She was five, and she didn’t know what she was asking for, and that was allowed. Being smelled was a different thing when you were what he was. He had spent his whole life being looked at from across a room as dinner, and he knew the look when it was on a face.

The first time he had held her she was the size of a loaf of bread, and she had got his thumb in her mouth and chewed on it with no teeth at all, and he had stood very still and waited for Vesper to take her back. That was the year he moved into the shop. He still mostly lived there.

A laugh came off the balcony — small and wet and held in, like water going down a drain. Ruby had turned her flower toward the glass, which did not make the laugh any quieter. Sorrel looked at her until she stopped. Then he went inside.

Vesper put her head out of the bathroom. “Hey. Give me a minute.”

By the time she came out, Rennie was on her mat in the front room with her back straight and her eyes shut.

Sorrel leaned on the counter. “What is it.”

She told it to him short, the way she had been telling it to herself since before light: a fire on the other side, two hundred years of Desmond’s stock eaten in a night, a root mailed through the relay, a trace that had come back with no direction on it.

Sorrel listened all the way to the end.

“You’re going to use me as bait,” he said.

“I would never use my little brother as bait.”

“I can hear it in you.”

“Sorrel.”

“Say it plain.”

She dried her hands on the towel. “I want a few of your roots.”

He looked at her a moment longer. Then he turned his hand over, and three thin threads of root came loose along the inside of his wrist, and he put them in her palm, and neither of them said anything about that part of it.

There was a tray of soil already set out by the window. She pushed the roots down into it and drew over the top of it, and the soil began to move.

“What’s it for,” said Sorrel.

“A stand-in.”

It came up the way a plant comes up when it has all the time in the world. When it stopped it was a root the size of two fists, pale and heavy and pleasant to look at, and it read three hundred years old to anybody with an eye for the trade. Four hundred, to anybody greedy.

“It comes apart if somebody breaks it,” Vesper said. “Otherwise it sits there being old. Take it up and plant it in one of the beds at the shop.”

“Every practitioner in the county is going to want that.”

“Every practitioner in the county is going to want it and not touch it. Nobody digs in our beds.”

“Not yet.”

He turned the tray a quarter turn and looked at the root in it.

“The beds at the shop are outside the line,” he said.

“I know.”

“So whatever comes for this comes in on a side nobody watches.”

“I know that too.”

“You want me sleeping in the same building as your bait.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“Sure,” said Sorrel.

“And there’s the other half of it,” said Vesper. She picked up her phone and held it out to him.

It was a market listing. A root, photographed on a cutting board in good light, dated at three hundred years, with a price under it low enough to stop a thumb.

“For sale,” said Sorrel.

“For sale.”

“It’s a lie.”

“It’s bait.”

“Somebody’s going to report a price like that.”

“Somebody usually does.”

He gave her the phone back. He did not leave.

He put the tray down by the door and came back and sat on the floor at the end of Rennie’s mat, and then he let himself go quiet, which was the same as letting go of everything he kept pulled in all day. The room got heavier. Rennie, who had been starting to bend, straightened up, and stayed that way longer than he had expected her to.

When she opened her eyes she found him sitting there, and then she smiled so wide that he had to look at the floor.

“Thank you, Uncle Sorrel.”

“…You’re welcome,” said Sorrel.

She got up and straightened her shorts.

“Vesper,” he said. “You found someone.”

Vesper hung the towel on the oven door. “Maybe. It’s early.”

Rennie stood where she was and looked at the shelf over the stove, where the tin was.

Then she got the step stool out, took the tin down, took two candies out of it, put them in her pocket, put the tin back, and went to wash her hands.

Sorrel watched her do it. She had never in her life put a candy anywhere but in her mouth.

“Who are those for,” he said.

“Nobody,” said Rennie, and turned the water on.

“While you’re here,” Vesper said. “I’ve been thinking about the house.”

Sorrel waited.

“If I take a student, that makes it a house, and a house wants a name. I’ve got one.”

“Don’t.”

“Second Helping.”

He looked at her.

“That’s the shop,” he said.

“It’s also a name.”

“It’s what Nana says at the table when you tell her you’re full.”

“It’s a good line.”

“It’s about food, Vesper.”

“It’s about second helpings,” said Vesper.

Sorrel put two fingers against his eyes.

Rennie shut the water off. “She hasn’t decided yet,” she said, in her politest voice, the one she used when adults were being rude to each other, and looked up at Sorrel with her eyebrows high. “And Uncle Wick didn’t like it either.”

“Right,” said Sorrel. “And you’re not using me as bait, either.”

He picked up the tray, and the root in it, and went out past the balcony, where Ruby had found something else to laugh at, and walked back to the shop, where he lived, and where he would be sleeping in the same building as his sister’s bait.

“Order up,” Ms. Tanner said through the window. “Owen—“

Cinder had the plate.

He carried it out to the man at the end of the counter.

“Thanks, kiddo,” the man said.

Cinder went back for the next one. The room was full and then it wasn’t. By seven-thirty there was one table left and Ms. Tanner was scraping the flat top with the corner of her spatula.

“Take something up with you,” she said.

He made a plate out of what was left — chicken, a biscuit, green beans that had been under the lamp too long — and carried it up the back stairs.

The room over the diner wasn’t his. He carried plates, and answered the door, and didn’t make anybody curious, and in exchange he got the room and the food. It had been long enough now that the town had stopped looking at him twice.

He ate standing up, out of the plate, chicken first and then the biscuit. It went down the way everything went down, and when the plate was empty the hollow in him was exactly the size it had been before he started. Nothing on it had had any power in it. That was the trouble with being fed.

The two hornworms were where he had left them, on the leaves he’d brought up from the kitchen, and they had stopped chewing when the door shut.

“You’re back,” said the smaller one. “Do you have anything else to ask? Because if you don’t, we’d like to go home.”

“Tell me about the land spirit.”

“We told you.”

“Tell me again.”

The bigger one shifted on its leaf. “He runs it. Everything past the line.”

“Everything like what.”

“The practitioners. The green. The wardens work for him, and the wardens hand out the permits, and you can’t live here at all without one. We’re on the roll. That’s how we get to stay.”

“Where is he.”

“Nobody’s seen him,” said the smaller one. “Nobody sees him. He doesn’t come into town. There’s the line, and past the line is his.”

“What is he.”

“Who?”

“The land spirit.”

The two worms looked at each other as much as that was possible.

“Nobody knows,” said the bigger one.

Cinder sat down on the end of the bed. The plate was on the floor at his feet. The branch propped in the window hadn’t moved in days.

“You said the woman is strong.”

“Vesper?” The worm came up on its front legs. “The strongest there is. She makes the tonics everybody buys, and she’s good to us, and she answers when you ask her something.”

“You could ask her to teach you,” said the smaller one. “Everybody likes her.”

“…You can go,” said Cinder.

The worms didn’t move.

“Really?” said the smaller one.

“Really.”

They went down the wall in a line, and one of them stopped on the sill and looked back at him for a second before it went out under the door.

He went through it again the way he had been going through it all day. He needed the shape of this place — who held the line, who held the town, who you went to for paper. What he had was two worms who had told him everything they knew twice, and everything they knew came down to a man nobody had ever seen.

Which left the woman. Strong, and kind, and easy to ask. Which also made her the one person in the county most likely to look at him and know what he was.

He knew what that cost. He had known it since the first thing he could remember, which was a greenhouse: a long bed of dark soil under two lamps, and a half-circle of people standing over it with their hands folded, deciding what he was for. He had been small enough then to see all their faces at once. They had not been cruel about it. They had talked about him the way people talk about a good crop.

Everything after that had been more of the same.

Below him, Ms. Tanner turned the water off and started stacking the chairs.

“I’m never going to be anybody’s fire,” he said.