Lark Supervises: Elves of Nine Ashes Short Story #3

Lark is seven, and she is the supervisor of a drainage trench.

Nobody exactly gave her the job. She was appointed for one afternoon, and has since extended the appointment to the whole village on her own authority, and nobody has thought to tell her otherwise. Every morning she walks the line from the Leaner's roots to the drainage hollow and writes down what she finds.

Eleven stones. Two fingers of water. Clear.

It has been the same for nineteen days. A village where everything is working turns out to be a difficult village to supervise.

Then nine feet of Tamsin's garden wall turns out to be lying in the grass, and to have been lying there since the Thaw, and nobody has done anything about it.

So Lark does what a supervisor does. She interviews the owner. She counts the stones: sixty and more, and she is honest about the and more. She writes a page headed Assignments (Given Properly), with names and times and tools on it, and she reads it out at the forge. And Brenn the smith sets his hammer down and asks her one question she has no answer for.

The answer was already in her notebook. She wrote it down herself, three pages back, and did not hear it.

Lark Supervises is a story about a wall, a widow, a four-year-old who does not speak, and the difference between telling somebody to do a thing and asking them. It is the third of nine standalone short stories from the elven village of Nine Ashes: slice-of-life cozy fantasy at its most low-stakes, with no chosen ones and no dark lords, nothing at risk but a garden and somebody's dignity, and a great deal of care taken over both.

For readers who loved Travis Baldree, Becky Chambers, Katherine Addison, Victoria Goddard and T. Kingfisher.