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The golem who cares for my mother is patient, as I am not patient.

The golem who cares for my mother is kind. It is precise. I took everything I wanted to be as a daughter, and am not, and I put it into the golem. I’m still afraid I am failing her.

But the golem does not fail her. The golem gives her my carefully mixed healing potions every day at the fourth meridian bell, when I am in my workshop or harvesting supplies in the woods or standing at the topmost tower of the bursar’s library, staring at the sky. The golem never forgets to put in honey, or puts in too much. The golem can make the same favorite meals four times in a week and never complain.

My mother knows the difference. If anyone had the art to make a golem seem like a living person, it would be me. But that’s not what I was trying to do. I just wanted another pair of hands wrapping her legs with bandages and putting apple mush in her porridge and brushing her wispy hair. This illness has felled so many human nurses. I couldn’t think what else to do.

Perhaps I could have stayed home from the workshop, but I can’t imagine it. I don’t think I could. I think that is some other, imaginary daughter.

What I could do is build a golem.

The golem greets me when I get home at the end of the day. Most golems are blank-faced, neutral. Most golems are for much coarser labor, away from their makers. I made my mother’s golem serene. It has a gentle curve of cheek, a calm sweep of nose. It gives me the impression that they had a good day no matter what day they actually had. I always ask how my mother is, and the golem tells me whether there were small problems or little joys and then asks how my day was.

When humans ask this, I lie, as humans do. I say it was fine, or if it was really terrible I say that there were a lot of challenges, but I’m getting through them all right.

To the golem, I admit that I am not getting through them all right at all. And they are not challenges, they are failures.

Complete failures.

I want to prevent the heterokontic plague that has caused my mother’s decline. I want to make sure no one else suffers as she has suffered. As I have had to watch her suffer. As so many more have suffered. And it is not working at all. The runes I use, the symbols and the incantations and the ingredients, they all seem like they should go together to form a whole. But they do not form a whole. They lie there lifeless, and nothing gets better.

On this particular day, the golem says, “It has been a long time since you said work was going well. Thirty-seven days, which seems long.”

“Yes,” I say. In a human companion this might annoy me. But this golem tells me when my mother’s toenails are recalcitrant, when the bumpy green lesions are paining her, when she refuses to eat anything but pear mush. To the golem I can admit that I have no new ideas, and the golem understands that the old ones can only be recombined in so many ways.

The golem nods. Their serene face can be interpreted as sympathetic, if I want to. I don’t need sympathy, I just need rest. The golem has set aside a plate of chicken and biscuits for me from what it fed my mother earlier. I eat in blessed silence and then go to the bedroom to check on my mother, who is tucked in for the night.

My mother smiles up at me. “Mehi,” she says.

I freeze. That’s my name, my correct name. She knows it’s me. She hasn’t known it’s me for much longer than the thirty-seven days of work troubles. “Hello, Mama, are you having a good day?”

“I think so,” she says, chewing it over like coarse bread. “That statue you made me is awfully nice.”

“I’m glad you like it, Mama.”

“Other children don’t make their mothers statues,” she says happily. “Just mine.”

“No, that’s true. Just yours, as far as I know.”

“And you made that beautiful one. Thank you.”

“I know you like beautiful things, Mama.”

“What did you do today, Mehi?”

I hesitate. I don’t know where she is right now, I don’t know what she thinks the answers might be. Other than that I am her daughter, she loves me, and I made her a beautiful statue.

“Did you impress the Wizard Ordaffin? I know you were hoping you would.”

She is back when I was fifteen, looking for someone to teach me more than I could figure out on my own with my own runic dabblings. “He was very impressed.”

But she has wandered off again mentally, she is no longer attending to what I say. I hope that the world of her mind is a better-appointed one than the world she has had to live in lately. More comfortable, more entertaining. Less painful. I know that there are other wizards in this city who are trying to figure out how the heterokontic plague reaches the brain, but so far they’ve had no more luck than my work in stopping it has had.

The patients I see over the next few days remind me of the earlier stages of her illness, when she was clearer in her mind and also had no internal escapes from the pain. I put the different shaped runestones on them, a necklace here, a bangle there. I chant. I warble. I paint them with earths and pigments. I wait for the results. I watch the green blobs shift beneath their skin. I can do nothing about it.

I could do nothing when it happened to my mother, but that doesn’t stop me from trying. I keep hoping that I have learned something from her case. But the spread of the viridian patches makes me despair.

That night after we have sung my mother to sleep in strange harmonies that somehow work, I just want to sit at the kitchen table with a hot cup of mint tea and tell the golem about my mother. I give it the case history again. I built the case history into its very body, but I need to tell it again. Maybe I forgot something. Maybe I can improve the care it provides.

I am improving her care to a level that would have seemed intolerable to me before. It means so much to me now.

This time the golem interrupts me, gently. “What did your mother do before?”

I startle. “She was an archivist. She worked in the thaumatic library, as one of the head archivists. She worked mostly on books but also other archive materials.”

The golem nods. “That makes sense.”

“It does?”

“She’s very organized, even when I don’t know what she’s organizing. I like that. It’s comforting.”

I don’t know whether it’s comforting because I built this golem to care for my mother, or because golems like organization. I haven’t made very many golems. Anyway, I’m glad this one is pleased.

“She liked to dance,” I say. “When she could dance. The ring dances at festivals, mostly. Nothing fancy. She hates it when her hair gets in her face, that’s why we keep it so short. She always used to take me home to Greenrow, where she grew up, for the new year, when the irises came into bloom. She—”

I stop. I don’t know why I’m telling it these things. It won’t give my mother better care because it knows her as a person. She has a past and, however limitedly, a future, needs and wants and likes and dislikes, habits beyond her evening pear mush—but that won’t help the golem with her care. Or will it? I don’t know anymore. But something in me needs to share these things. Something in me needs to say them even if the person I’m saying them to is a strangely shaped person, made for the occasion.

“She liked dingy flowers,” I say softly, so softly that a human could not hear me. I know the golem can. “The ones that were two or three days past their prime, with the petals falling off. She still loved those.”

“I can keep flowers around as long as you like,” says the golem. “As long as your mother likes. I don’t have to clear them away.”

“Thank you,” I say, staring into my empty tea mug. I don’t know what else to do about any of this.

My experimental runes are so clearly failing that the next day I admit defeat and say goodbye to the patients who have let me work on them. We are all quiet, subdued. I wish I could point them at someone else whose work is likely to help them before it’s too late, but I don’t know of anybody. They will have to do their best with their loved ones, as we have, and it is a stark and uncomforting best. The quiet follows me home at the end of the day. Nothing has bloomed in my mind or in my workshop. I have nothing to add to the conversation. I hold my mother while the golem gives her a sponge bath. I eat in silence.

But after its report of the day, the golem has a more personal question. “What will I do when your mother dies?”

I take a deep breath. I had not expected this question when I made the golem, but it had occurred to me in the weeks since that it would probably come up. The golem is more of a person every day, and a smart person at that. I couldn’t imagine it not asking. And now here is the moment. “I mean, we can think about that now, but also you may have other thoughts when the time comes. If you want to do more care work, I can help you find someone else to take care of—there’s no shortage of people in need. But if you think you’d be more fulfilled by pursuing something else—if you’re enjoying cooking and want to be a chef, if you want to try something completely different, playing the dulcimer or traveling with the caravans or whatever—we can make that work.”

There is a little pause.

“I meant, do I wake you if you’re sleeping, what do I do if you’re at the workshop, that sort of thing.”

“Oh.”

“Those other questions are very good questions too.”

I put my head in my hands on the table. I am very tired, but I can do this, I know how this works, I just have to explain it to the golem. How it should send one of the neighbors to my workshop, how it should wash the body and wait for me to come. It nods encouragingly. Guilty for giving it the answers it wasn’t seeking, I try to be as precise as possible about an imprecise subject.

I don’t think the problem is lack of precision. But the golem is very patient with me.

Without a plan for what spells to make next, my day at the workshop is not the escape it so often is. I can’t fool myself that I am helping people like my mother. I am doing nothing. I am staring into the air, potions and incantations and the best training the Wizard Ordaffin ever gave an apprentice, all going to waste while my mind is empty.

I return home, but there is nothing for me to do. The golem is doing it. My mother is disoriented and silent, flailing sometimes but mostly docile. The green patches writhe under her skin. I watch the golem work and think about how futile my own efforts are.

“I feel like you should have a name,” I tell the golem.

“So do I,” says the golem. “But not yet. My name will come. But not today.”

“How will we know when it does?”

“I’ll tell you.”

“Oh. All right.”

“I think I am not ‘it’ anymore, though,” says the golem. “I think I am ‘they.’”

This should not surprise me, but it does. “All right. The golem cleans their hands? That sounds right?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll do it that way then.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank you for telling me.” I drink the last of my tisane and stand up. “I’m going to go out and get a pie from the street vendor.”

“Enjoy your pie,” says the golem.

I do not. But it is not the pie’s fault. Nor is it the piemaker’s; he gives me a tired smile, tries to make a silly joke. We are all very tired now, and the man who sells pies at the end of my street—Rusfus, I think his name is, or Rudin, or something like that—is feeding a lot of people who go from labor to labor, who find home no respite just now. I make myself smile back at him, drag myself through an equally bad joke.

We are all doing the best we can.

I know that I am walking to avoid going home, but right now I need that, I need to just walk into a neighborhood where I know no one, where no one thinks of me as my mother’s daughter or a promising wizard or anything, anything that I am except another weary person walking down the street on a cool evening.

I know I couldn’t do this without the golem. I would have to hurry away from the piemaker, whatever his name is, back to the house to cook pear mush while I shove the cooling pie into my mouth. I will go back to my mother, I will sing to her and hold her hand. But not until I’ve walked a little farther.

I look at the firelight glow filling the windows as dark falls and wonder how many other people would have been revived by just a little walk. Maybe I’ve had it all wrong. I wanted to cure this horrible plague. I still do. But I already know something I can do that helps. I am really, really good at making adaptable, specific care golems.

And I keep getting better at knowing my own golem as a person. So I think that with their help, I can make this work for the other golems, too. Golems will have to be strong. I can make sure they are implacable about their own needs.

I go back to find out whether the golem wants a walk, too, while I sit with my mother.

“No,” says the golem, “but I could sit on the stone wall at the end of the street. I like that.”

“Go ahead,” I tell them. “I can manage for now.”

When they get back, I tell them about my plan to make more golems, to find out more about my neighbors and make golems for their needs. And I ask if they will think about helping the other golems when my mother dies, figuring out what else they can do, what else they want to do.

The golem pauses. “I will think about it,” they say. “I might want to help the other golems, but I might not. But one of us will. Probably more than one.”

I nod. “That’s fair. This is . . . this is really good. I’m relieved to have something I can do.”

“It’s been a long winter,” says the golem, and even though it has never known any winter but this one, any spring but this one, I nod along.

“I . . . if we’ve done the things that need both of us, I’d really like to start this now. Tonight.”

“Go,” the golem says. “We’ll be here when you get back.”

“Not forever,” I remind them.

“No. But today.”