Chapter 9
Rose was awake well before the sun rose. She lay curled up under the covers trying to get the remnants of a bad dream out of her head. She had dreamt that she stood in the street in front of the hotel, shouting out nonsense that sparked a riot. She was trying to find a place to hide but everything was so murky that she couldn't see where she was going. She was overcome by an oppressive dread and forced herself to wake up.
Whether or not it was the fault of the dream, she felt even more unhappy about her confrontation with Stanno than she had the day before. She was ashamed of the way she reacted, and she resented having been provoked into it in the first place. She ought to have had her fill of people raising their voices in anger at each other. Well, at least she'd stopped short of smashing his head in with a brick.
Normally, she would lounge in bed for a while, enjoying the luxury of her holiday, but now she felt restless. Annoyed at herself, she threw off her blankets, put on her robe, and went downstairs. Pashmina was just bustling out of the back office and stopped when she saw Rose.
"You're up early!" the girl remarked. "I just put the kettle on, so there'll be tea soon. Unless you'd like coffee!" she added eagerly.
Rose had to smile. Pashmina had been anxious to try out her coffee brewing skills. "I'd love some coffee."
Pashmina practically bounced with excitement. "Oh, good! I'll bring it out as soon as it's ready. Atash went to get you a newspaper."
Rose smiled at her fondly. They were such a cute couple and their eager efficiency was comforting. "Thanks, Pashmina."
She went out into the garden and sat at one of the tables. It was a little cooler this morning than it had been, and she pulled her robe more closely around her. She still felt a little sleepy, so she closed her eyes while she waited.
The previous evening at Auntie Nenya's had been something of a trial. Rose tried to act cheerful, but it wasn't easy. Atash, who was there at Pashmina's insistence, covered for her by keeping up a lively conversation. After dinner, he remarked on how tired Rose looked, which she honestly did, and they were able to excuse themselves without appearing rude. When they returned to the hotel, Stanno's workshop was sealed up, but there were slivers of light coming from between the wooden panels. Rose looked away quickly. She couldn't exactly pretend he didn't exist, but being reminded of him gave her a twinge of bitterness.
She heard muffled voices from inside the hotel and then footsteps at the door to the garden. Thinking it was either Atash or Pashmina, she opened her eyes. Standing in the doorway was Stanno, looking doleful, a bit disheveled, and somewhat sleep deprived. Rose felt an initial irritation, but the man looked so hangdog that she didn't have the heart to give him the grief that she could have. She wasn't quite ready to be magnanimous, either, so she was left with nothing to say.
Stanno ended up speaking first, and that was with some difficulty. "I'm…probably the…um…last fellow you want to see right now…"
Rose lifted a shoulder. She could think of a few other faces she'd rather never see again. "So what brings you here?"
She hadn't noticed before that he had one hand behind him, and he brought it forward. In it, he was holding a wooden box, a little smaller than a shoebox. "I…uh…wanted to give you this," he said, stepping closer. "That is…if you'll accept it."
He set the box on the table. Rose leaned forward to look more closely at it and drew in a little gasp. It was made of cedar, and there was a simple braided border carved into the lid.
"It just has a couple of coats of tung oil," Stanno said. He spoke as if giving a poor excuse for something he'd done wrong. "It might still be a little sticky."
Rose brushed the surface of the lid with her fingertips. The soft finish wasn't sticky at all, and it felt like silk. She opened the lid, which lifted smoothly on little brass hinges, and she picked it up, releasing the distinctive aromatic scent. She closed the lid and turned the box over. On the bottom was carved a curious little design. She had noticed the same design on the carved shutters in her room, and she realized that it must be Stanno's signature, or at least his initials. She turned it right side up again, admiring the delicate carvings.
"This is beautiful!" she breathed. She looked up at Stanno. "You must have been up all night doing this!"
He shrugged. "Well…not all night."
Rose gave him a look of gentle reproach. "Stanno, you didn't have to do that!"
"It's the only thing I can do without making a complete cockup out of it." Betraying a restless frustration, Stanno lifted his hands and let them drop. "I don't have much else to take pride in. Anyway," he went on in something close to a mumble, "I'm sorry."
Rose sighed and considered the carpenter for a moment. He had none of Kaihan's winsome charm. At the moment, there was very little that was actually charming about him, but Rose found herself deeply touched. She couldn't help feeling a bit of remorse herself.
"I'm sorry, too," she said quietly. "You know, for calling you an asshole."
A smile pulled halfheartedly at a corner of his mouth. "Don't apologize. You were right." Then his brows puckered thoughtfully. "So…Rada didn't talk about me?"
"Only in a general way," Rose replied.
"What about Andakar?"
"All he said was that you and he have history."
"Hm." Stanno scratched an unshaven cheek and frowned down at the box on the table. Presently, he seemed to have either made a decision or worked up a certain amount of courage. He looked up to meet Rose's eyes with forlorn hope. "Would you be willing to drive out to the foothills with me? There are some things I'd like you to see and I…uh…have some things I'd like to tell you and…I'd rather be away from here when I do." He paused for an answer, but then blurted out, almost angrily, "I can understand why you wouldn't want to—"
"No, I'd like to come," Rose said.
"It's not like you—" The carpenter stopped with his mouth open when he realized what she had said. "You would?"
Rose nodded. "I would. But don't you have work to do?"
Stanno waved his hand. "This is more important." He gazed somewhat anxiously at Rose. "The thing is, you'll be stuck with me out in the middle of nowhere, and you may end up wanting to be as far away from me as possible."
Rose could feel herself wanting to smile, but she didn't want to make light of the poor man's misery. She stood up, picking up the cedar box. "Let me change my clothes."
8888
They rumbled along a dirt road in an old army truck that Stanno had recently paid off. It was a serviceable vehicle, not built for comfort. Rose hoped he didn't pay too much for it. Behind them, in the bed of the truck, were a couple of barrels, a shovel, and a long iron rod that had one pointed end and one chisel end. Up in the cab, at Rose's feet, was a basket of food that Pashmina and Atash had hastily thrown together. When the young man handed it to them as they left, he was stifling a grin.
It was a long drive, nearly two hours. Once they were past the crop fields they reached open desert. The road began to rise and the desert thinned out to rolling hills of yellow grass and scattered oaks. The river flowed along their right and off to their left could be seen a wide span of square and rectangular shapes just below the surface ground like bones that hadn't been buried deep enough. It struck Rose that she was catching a glimpse of the ruins of Old Ishval she'd been hearing about, and in the back of her mind, she would have loved to stop and explore.
At the forefront of her attention, however, was a story that Stanno was telling her. It concerned the extraordinary circumstances that led him, in his selfishness and pride, to commit an act of utter heartlessness. He did not, of course, think in those terms back then. It wasn't until much later that he realized the villainy of his actions and the full extent of his loss. The life he ended up ruining was his own.
When he finally talked himself out, he looked drained, and he stared grimly out the windshield, waiting for some reaction from Rose, but not asking for one. She really wasn't sure what to say. When the minutes began to tick by, Stanno slowed the truck and came to a stop, turning off the engine.
"I could turn around and take you back," he muttered.
Rose let out a sigh. "Don't be silly! There's no reason for that."
"Don't you hate me?"
"Do you want me to?" Rose shot back as a challenge.
Stanno gave her a sullen look. "No," he muttered.
"Well, good! I'm glad we got that established," Rose said, allowing a bit of sarcasm in her tone. She folded her arms looked out the window, mulling over what she had just heard, a confession of sorts. "I have to say, what you did was pretty cheap. There's no getting around that."
"No."
"You must've been a real schmuck back then."
Stanno scowled a little. "I'm going to guess that's an insult."
"Yeah. It's something my boss Willie calls people sometimes. It's not nice. The thing is," Rose went on after a moment's consideration, "I find it hard to believe that you're the same person who did that."
Stanno frowned at his hands where they rested on the steering wheel. "No, it's still me."
"Well, it's partly you," Rose replied. Her brows knit in thought. Then she pointed out her window toward the site of the ruins. "See that?"
Stanno glanced out the window with a puzzled look. "What about it?"
"That's history out there," Rose said. "You can just see it, but it's mostly buried. They're going to start digging it up, and I bet they'll find some amazing and wonderful things." Still gazing out the window, she went on, "Rada said—in your defense, by the way—that some history doesn't need to be dug up." She looked back at Stanno. "I figure if she, of all people, can say that, then it must mean that you've become a different sort of man."
Stanno raised an eyebrow at her. "And what sort of man would that be?"
Rose smiled. "The sort of man who would stay up all night building a beautiful little cedar box just to say he was sorry."
Stanno searched her face for a moment, hope slowly dawning in his eyes. "You don't hate me?"
"No, I don't. As a matter of fact, I'm actually kind of flattered."
Stanno looked a little surprised. "Flattered?"
"Uh-huh. It must have been very hard to let down your guard and reveal something like that about yourself." Rose's smile grew. "You must think an awful lot of me to trust me like that."
Stanno regarded her for several moments in quiet amazement, then he turned to gaze out the windshield at the landscape around them.
"Bloody hell," he murmured to himself. He looked back at her and smiled. It was a handsome, genuinely charming smile. "I knew there was something different about you."
"Oh, pfft!" Rose exclaimed dismissively. "I'm no different from anybody else!"
"No?" With a little grin, Stanno reached out and gave the pink locks of Rose's hair a tug. "Where did you get these, then?"
Rose batted his hands away. "I was born like this, all right?" She gave him a playfully stern look. "Are we going to just sit here and yack all day or was there something you wanted to show me?"
"Ah!" Stanno started the engine back up. "We're nearly there."
8888
"This looks like a good one." Stanno reached down and picked a plump acorn from the ground.
Rose stepped close to him and watched as he gave the cap a push with his thumb. It popped easily off the acorn. He then inspected it for any damage or rot, then nodded to Rose. "This'll do."
He headed off to an open space away from the other oak trees and held the acorn out to Rose, who handed him a shovel in exchange. This was the third acorn they'd planted together. He'd already planted several this year, and he proudly showed her the seedlings that had sprouted from the year before.
"Don't the acorns just fall and sprout by themselves?" Rose asked.
"Yes, they do," Stanno replied. He drove the shovel into the hard ground, digging through the tough dormant grass and down about a foot and a half of topsoil. He then took the iron bar and drove the pointed end deeper into the ground to start breaking up the layer of hardpan, or kalcheh. "They send down a taproot, they grow into a fine oak tree, which lives for years and years and then finally dies. But then I come along and cut them down, so I have to make sure I replace them."
"That's very civic minded of you."
"Hardly." Stanno turned the iron bar to start chipping away at the kalcheh with the chisel end. "It's mostly greed. I'm just replenishing my stock."
Rose opened her hand and held out the acorn. "How long will it be before this actually grows into a tree that you can cut down and make something with?"
Stanno glanced at her with a smirk. "I'll probably be too old by then."
"Does anybody ever come out here to admire these oaks?"
Stanno turned over another spadeful of dirt. "Not that I know of."
"So are you practicing good conservation?"
For a few minutes, Stanno concentrated on breaking up the clods of soil and picking out the white, rocky chunks of kalcheh, tossing them aside. "When my father first started teaching me his craft," he said finally, " he would take me out here in a donkey cart and show me where the oak he used came from. He taught me everything about wood and woodworking, from the acorn to the table."
"What a lovely memory!"
"Not exactly," Stanno replied. "Remember, I said we came out here"—he pointed to the ground—"in a donkey cart. It took ages. And being stuck with my father for that long wasn't pleasant. He was temperamental and a hard taskmaster. But he knew his craft. And he told me that I had to do the same thing with my sons." He started refilling the hole with the prepared soil. "I don't have any sons, but at least I have these trees. So I guess that's why I do it."
Although he spoke matter-of-factly, Rose found his remark to be touchingly sad. Then, as he held his hand out for the acorn, another thought occurred to her. Stanno glanced at her as she gave him the acorn and he paused, studying her face.
"What?" he asked.
Rose gave a little start, not realizing that she was smiling. "Oh…it's nothing," she said with a little shrug and a blush.
His gaze held hers steadily. "Oh, come! Tell me."
"It's just…" Rose lifted her hands to indicate the oak trees around them. "It's sort of like you brought me out here to meet your family."
Stanno regarded her with an amused, quizzical look for several moments, deepening her blush. Then he shook his head. "You may not think you're different, Rose," he said, admiration in his voice, "but you're not like anyone I've ever met."
