By evening Pip had eaten most of the potter’s payment.
It left a lump the size of Ysabet’s thumb beside the low board. She had seen it do the same with brick. This time she did not pick the offering up; she left it where it lay while she prepared the residents’ food.
Tallow needed his saucer held level. If she put it on the paving he tipped it over, ate from the ground, then complained about the grit. Kettle had found the greens before Ysabet finished chopping them. Sedge accepted her small portion of offal from a spoon and declined the last piece by biting the spoon.
Only after all three were fed did Ysabet warm her own supper.
She ate on the doorstep. A little bread, an egg, the last spoonful of onion broth. The sack of clay stood beneath the table in her room, well away from the bag of flour. She had tied both with the good string.
Pip watched from the shelter.
Occasionally its mouth moved. At first she thought it was still chewing. Then she put her bowl down and saw its mouth stop too.
“You’re very interested in a disappointing meal.”
The amber eye shifted to the bowl.
Ysabet moved it to one side. Pip did not follow. It watched her hand returning to her lap.
She stayed on the step a while longer.
It was the first evening since the sale that nothing immediately needed doing. The hurdle was sound. The mouse had eaten and gone back inside the warm fold. Mara had shut the bathhouse front door and gone home. Outside the yard, carts passed toward the north road, their wheels loud on the crossing stones.
Ysabet heard another sound beneath them.
A scrape, then a knock.
Her hand tightened on the bowl.
Pip was moving the empty saucer across the brick. It lifted an edge, found nothing underneath, and let it fall.
She put the bowl down carefully.
She had not dreamed of the pale ground. Last night, interrupted by the mouse, she had dreamed instead of a miller paying her in things she could not use. Today the memory had come while she worked: a breadth without trees or sky, the slow striking sound somewhere beyond it. Her mind had tried to fit it into the pottery yard. The cart axle turning. The kiln door hanging from its hook.
None of them had been the same.
She could ask another tamer. Quirin knew more unusual beasts than anyone in Bent Reed. He would want details, and she had very few she trusted. He would also want to see Pip. She was not sure whether that reluctance was caution or simple embarrassment at needing help so soon after buying something she could not name.
Pip lifted the saucer again.
“There’s nothing under it,” she said.
It let the saucer fall.
“I’ve looked.”
She finished her supper and washed the bowl. When she came back, Pip had moved the saucer against the low board and was trying to slide it beneath.
The clay offering lay on the other side.
Ysabet picked it up and put it in the dish.
Pip backed away.
“Wrong?”
It looked from the dish to her hand. Its mouth made a faint clacking noise, nothing like speech.
She took the clay out again and laid it where it had been.
Pip approached, touched it with a forefoot, and pushed it toward her.
“I can’t eat that.”
There was no reason to think it knew what she meant. It had brought her something from its own food, and she had put it back twice. She wondered how often she had done the same to a creature and called the creature stubborn.
She carried the lump to the bench and made it into a small, crooked cup.
The potter would have laughed. Its base was too thick and its walls rose unevenly where her right hand had failed to support them. She pressed the rim smooth with her left thumb. The effort left a little clay crescent beneath the nail.
Pip came to the board to watch.
Ysabet put the cup on the bench beside the lamp.
“There.”
The creature remained where it was. Whether the cup satisfied it, or whether it had merely lost interest in the argument, she could not tell. She washed her hands and brought the plain brick Pip had been following with its eye.
She sat beside the enclosure.
This was where it had happened yesterday. The board still bore a faint line from Chaska’s pencil, transferred from the edge of her book. Ysabet moved her knee away from it, leaving more room between her body and the crate.
Pip took a piece of brick. It ate slowly, holding the fragment between the two narrow front feet. Grains fell around the saucer. Its eye closed partway with each bite.
Ysabet kept her right hand on her knee. Not offered. Just there.
Attention. Invitation. Witness. She had recited the three practices in the guild room, then passed her examination by making an animal walk where she wanted it to walk.
Her mother’s letters still lay beneath the bed, wrapped around papers from that same year.
Pip finished the fragment. It cleaned one foot with the edge of its mouth and came toward the board.
Ysabet looked at the place where Chaska had sat. If she waited until someone was present every time she might be frightened, the potter would never see her again and neither would any creature beyond this enclosure.
She tapped the brick twice.
Then she turned her right palm upward.
Pip stopped.
The courtyard sounds continued. A child ran past the wall, calling to someone who did not answer. Tallow scratched his chin along a post. In the baths, water dripped from a pipe Mara had sworn was empty.
The little foot approached her fingers.
Ysabet’s stomach tightened before it touched. She made herself breathe out.
Three toes settled against her palm.
For a moment nothing happened.
Then her mouth filled with dryness.
She could feel something granular between surfaces that were not her teeth. Pressure, a slow crack, a small release of warmth. Her own tongue moved, searching for the grit. It found only the taste of supper.
One knee felt very far away. Beneath the dry sensation lay several points of weight spread across a surface she knew was brick. She could still see her boots on that same surface.
Pip’s eye opened wider.
Ysabet almost drew her hand back. She stopped at the first movement, her shoulder pulling tight, and the strange pressure thinned.
Pip lifted its foot.
The dryness vanished.
No pale ground. No falling weight in the distance. She sat with her palm open, feeling the soft air move across it.
“All right,” she said. “That was different.”
Her voice came out louder than she had intended. Pip retreated to the dish, took a fragment, and bit it.
She waited for the dryness to return.
It did not.
Contact, perhaps. She knew what a clay fragment looked like in a sideways jaw. Her mind was capable of supplying the rest.
She rubbed her left thumb over her lower lip.
Pip turned toward the movement. Its forefoot hovered above the dish.
Ysabet laid her hand flat on her thigh.
Pip lowered the foot.
Neither tried again.
She brought the old bill and tried to find room between the feeding notes. There was none. In her room she found a stitching pattern she no longer needed, folded it plain side out, and wrote on the back.
Evening, third day. Second contact after two taps. No landscape. Dryness and pressure in mouth; possible feeding sensation. Contact broke when foot lifted. Pip withdrew afterward but ate.
Below that she began, Seemed less frightened, then crossed it out.
Outside, the saucer knocked against the brick again.
She returned to the doorway. Pip had finished eating and was standing beside the low board. The mouse’s nose protruded from the chest fold. Its whiskers moved in the draft.
Pip lifted one foot and put it down twice.
Ysabet stayed still.
It lifted the foot again, placed it on the board, and left it there.
She did not know whether it was copying the sound or asking for her hand. She could have made either explanation fit. Her palm still tingled. The muscles along her back ached from holding them so carefully.
“Not again tonight,” she said.
She placed a final piece of clay beside the saucer, well clear of the offered foot, and turned the lamp down.
Pip watched until she reached the door. Then it picked up the clay and carried it beneath the shelf.
The crooked cup stood on her bench. It was too soft for water and too small for anything useful. Ysabet moved it out of the drip from the old pipe before she shut her door.