An eight-year-old girl stood on the other side of the oak anvil block, her boots planted square in the frozen shavings. She wore a cut-down wool smock smeared with flour paste at the hem. Her dark hair was tied back with two strips of dyed reed twine.
“My father puts a wooden wedge under the lip when his leg hurts too much to clamp it,” the girl said matter-of-factly. Her mittens stayed wrapped around the pot’s upper lug handle. He held the rounded belly flat against the curve of the iron horn. “Or I hold it. If you hit my thumb, my mother makes you peel the winter turnips.”
Tavan glanced over his shoulder from the bucket bench. “Leni, don’t pester the lady. Go ask your mother if the animal fat jars are boxed.”
“She’s not pestering me,” Nara said.
She looked at the child’s small wool mittens braced against the soot-blackened rim. Leni was not staring at Nara’s pinned left sleeve with pity. She wasn’t staring at Nara’s scarred face with the respectful terror that young sect students always brought into the presence of a fifth-realm ancestor. To an eight-year-old whose household had to be loaded onto an ox cart by sunrise, a woman with one hand trying to punch a hole in a round pot was simply a person doing a two-handed job the hard way.
