The house was in need of repairs as well. Pieces of wood had begun to rot, and there was a leak into the bathroom, which was not the worst place for it, but still inconvenient. One of the windowpanes had been broken, and Isra had tried her best to replace it with a piece of glass she’d bought in town, but she’d gotten frustrated after spending what felt like half a day on it and eventually just patched it with a thick piece of birch bark and some sap. Her father had taught her many valuable things, and valuable skills, but home repair had never been his forte, and some of the damage that time and the elements had done, Isra had no way to undo. She had asked the water not to leak into her bathroom, and it had replied that it was incapable of doing otherwise, which was typical for water. That, too, she had patched, but it was a poor patch, not in fitting with the rest of the house, and it was clear that she would need someone’s help.
The house was a secret, which was a bit of a problem. People from the hex had come on three separate occasions, all when she was younger, but she had known they were coming from quite some distance away and left with as much as she could handle, obscuring her tracks. From what Alfric had said, they probably knew that she lived there, and given it had been two years, they had probably given up trying to catch her. One of her father’s friends had taken her in on a temporary basis after her father had passed and had told her that a girl of thirteen wouldn’t be allowed to live out in the woods on her own. She had already dodged the local school, with her father’s help, but if the hexmaster found out about her, then it was likely she would, at best, be forced to live with some well-meaning couple in Pucklechurch. The hex beastmaster had found Isra once, but only by going to her hunting grounds, and she had told her to take less from the woods, then inquired as to where she lived. Isra had lied and thought that it was probably an obvious lie. She’d avoided the town for a month after that, living off the land instead of trading things in, and when she returned, it was with great caution. She was worried that someone would spring out of an alley and arrest her. That hadn’t happened. From what Alfric had said, they knew who she was and where she was living but had given up on her, which was a bit of a relief.
Now she was eighteen but not quite willing to give up the secret of the house. There were a few that knew, her father’s old friends, but she spoke with them little, and they never came to visit. If she needed work done on the house, which she did, she supposed that she could see if one of them was interested, but her father had been secretive and mistrustful. They were friends in a weak sense, people who could be leaned on from time to time, but with whom no great secrets had been shared. And Isra had never forgotten the theft, which had been by one of those same friends. It had made it hard to trust. And if the house was no secret to the powers of the hex, if she was known and tracked, perhaps she could simply hire someone she would watch carefully.
Isra’s father had loved Tarbin and often mourned it. He hadn’t said why they couldn’t go back, only that it was impossible. Tarbin was quite some way away to the east, and Isra had only seen it through some of the books her father had brought over. It was a place of tall towers and baking sun, lush jungles that hugged the banks of rivers and deserts beyond them. Pucklechurch was far different, in very many ways, which perhaps accounted for some of the alienation that Isra felt when she went into town. The other part of it, apparently, was that she was a woods witch and the others were not.
The water from the tank drained through a grate and into the basin
below, where an evaporator was sitting and working at removing the
water. As the basin filled, dried-out muck was rehydrated, and the smell
of it was strong enough that Isra decided it was time to once again
remove the grate and scrape the basin clean of the accumulated oil,
hair, and general gunk. It would have to be the next day though, once
the dehydrator had plugged away at the moisture and dried everything. It
was one of Isra’s least favorite jobs in the entire house, but it was at
least one that she knew how to do, and once it was done, it wouldn’t
need to be done again for half a year at least, more if she was diligent
about bathing in the stream as often as she could. She had often
contemplated cutting her hair, to make the mucking out easier, since the
Tarbin headscarf meant that no one saw it anyway, but she
When the shower concluded, the water was getting overly hot. She had drained the tank too much, and the heating element was having too easy a time of it. She used tongs to fish it out, and remarried it to the cooling element, then toweled herself off and lay in her bed for a moment, resting and thinking, before getting dressed.
