Pip lay on the blanket every time Ysabet folded it.
The first time, she thought the wool was warm from the sun. She moved it to the bed and fetched her boots. When she returned, Pip had dragged itself up the stool and settled over the folded edge.
The second time she thought it wanted a place near the mouse’s box. She moved the box, gave it the sack it usually slept on, and put the blanket beside her coat.
By the third time there was no useful way to misunderstand it.
“Oh,” she said.
Pip’s larger eye followed her hand. The smaller one kept closing. Its foot, the bad one, lay against the wool like a twig somebody had bent in a pocket.
She sat on the floor rather than lift it again.
Outside, Rella was breaking up the last of Tallow’s supper. Mara told her that was enough. Rella said she knew. Tallow made a plaintive scratching that suggested he had understood neither of them.
“I’m taking the blanket,” Ysabet told Pip. “And you.”
It watched her mouth. The words could not do the work she wanted them to do.
She brought the traveling basket to the bed. First she put the mouse’s familiar box beside it, then the water lid, then a cloth parcel of clean clay. Pip touched each thing in turn. When she lifted the blanket’s free edge toward the basket, its forefeet hooked deep into the weave.
“All right.”
She left the edge where it was. Her useful hand had begun to cramp, and anger hovered near the exhaustion, waiting for a small enough thing to justify itself. She kept the hand on her knee until the impulse passed.
Chaska came in carrying dried onions and a bag of oats.
“Boatman’s wife says the west reach is blocked by a fallen willow. We take the long bend.” She stopped. “Have you grown an anchor?”
“Possibly.”
Chaska set the food down. She looked at the coat, the case, the folded blanket under Pip.
“It sees you gathering everything.”
“Yes.”
“Does it know gathering can mean it comes too?”
“I don’t think it knows where things go when they leave the room.”
Neither had an answer ready. Chaska went back to the kitchen to divide the food, leaving Ysabet with the irritating, patient work of being present.
After a while she put her damaged right hand on the floor, open as it would open. She tapped twice with her left fingernails beside it.
Pip reached down from the bed.
The contact brought dry pressure, a narrow place, the movement of something being pulled away. There was no picture of a person abandoning a creature, no sentence she could answer. Her own response was an ache in her chest, then the remembered weight of Pip’s basket against her hip. She did not know how much, if any, it received.
Its forefoot left her skin.
She stayed there. The mouse emerged from the box and limped along the cloth strip onto the bed. Pip opened the pouch for it. After a pause, it climbed down to the floor with the mouse sheltered inside.
Ysabet did not touch the blanket.
Pip crossed to the traveling basket, inspected the clay parcel, and took a small bite from the unwrapped corner. Only then did she fold the rest of the wool. She put it in the basket while the creature watched.
It climbed onto it.
She let out a breath she had not meant to hold.
Chaska appeared in the doorway. “Did you win?”
“I think we’ve packed.”
“That’s rarer.”
They ate in Mara’s kitchen. The dyer had sent a pot of beans because, she said, someone must have a proper pot and it would not be her until the flue was clean. Mara put most of the beans on Rella’s plate, then added more when she pretended not to notice.
“Quirin says the pigeon tried to hit him,” Mara told Ysabet.
“Good.”
“That’s what he said. Unpleasant profession.”
Ysabet helped wash the bowls. She could do that with her left hand and no particular intelligence. The ordinary task loosened something in her that the plans had kept tight all day.
Afterward she went to each resident. Kettle was asleep by the low wall. Tallow opened one eye, decided she had no food, and shut it. Sedge leaned into the cloth supporting her chest while Ysabet checked the bedding under her hind legs.
Mara stood beside the box.
“I’ll tell you if she gets worse,” she said.
“Send to Quirin first.”
“I know.”
“And if I don’t get back before—”
“I know that too.”
Ysabet stroked the marten’s shoulder, twice, where the fur still grew thick. She did not wake her for a farewell.
In the linen room Pip slept in the basket on the folded blanket. The mouse’s box was packed alongside rather than on top of it. Ysabet took off her boots, put them where she could reach them before dawn, and lay down in the bed that would be empty tomorrow.