“Not that much further.” Actually, they’d stopped a good distance from the gravesite—neither of them being fool enough to spar, let alone swive, where blood-drinking vines might still be lurking—but sound often carried further than people thought. “They’re likely making noise enough of their own, and we don’t hearthat.”
Erik smiled, distinctly smug. “We werena’ paying very much attention, were we?”
Undeniably, he had a point. Toinette couldn’t even reprove him on the grounds of overconfidence, especially when his smile still retained a trace of sensuality and the afternoon light slanted alternate patches of brightness and shadow over his muscular chest, giving the crisp hair there an even more intense glow.
“No,” she said, going back to her hair. The pine needles were legion. That only supported Erik’s argument that Toinette hadn’t noticed any of them insinuating themselves. “But it doesn’t matter. Mortal hearing’s far shorter than either—and it wouldn’t distinguish the sounds we were making from, say, animals crashing around.”
“Not too far off, at that.”
“Speak for yourself,” she said. “And most men take their shirt offbeforebedding a woman. Just a piece of helpful advice for your future.”
Erik shrugged. The muscles in his back rippled, a sight that commanded Toinette’s attention almost long enough for her to miss his response. “I was hot,” he said, “and you hardly gave me time.”
“Hmm,” she said. Since she’d not bothered with her dress except to let Erik hike up the skirt, she had no real response, save for bending down to find the cord she’d used to bind up her hair. In so doing, she missed Erik tying his hose—a pity, both to miss it and that it happened. The soreness around her ribs gave her an idea. “They’ll believe we were sparring, if we tell them. Especially with your lip. If they did hear anything, which they didn’t.”
“You know a great deal about mortal hearing.”
“I know how to pretend it’s the only kind I have.” The cord was broken. Of course. Toinette sighed and shook out the remains of her skirt. “If your senses are too good, people think you’re odd.”
“I suppose they might,” said Erik, sounding as though the thought had never occurred to him. “My whole family is odd, if you ask their villagers—either at Loch Arach or my father’s keep.”
“Yes,” she said, “I heard. A few times, in my youth. Never seems to do your people any harm.” Toinette fought to keep bitterness out of her voice.
It was an easier struggle than it had been at other times. As Erik had perhaps intended, at least where the sparring was concerned, everything that they’d done in the clearing had helped. Toinette had lost herself in the moment, in pain and pleasure and the mix of both. Action had burned off her nervous energy and broken her mind out of the sharklike circles in which it had been moving.
“Anyhow,” she said, “if they do know what happened, what does it matter? They know everything else now.”
Toinette tossed her hair back as she spoke and thrust out her jaw. She could speak boldly enough, as though she didn’t wonder what further doubts such knowledge might cause among her crew. She could go halfway to convincing herself.
Yet, when they returned to the beach, she took care to stand some ways apart from Erik.
The men fell silent at their approach. Samuel looked to have been silent already: he sat on a rock, staring out across the ocean at the setting sun. Sence and Marcus, building the fire, likewise probably hadn’t been talking, knowing Sence, and Franz was crouched by their shelter, rosary moving steadily and slowly between his fingers. His lips stopped moving as he looked up, but that was all. John kept cleaning fish, but Raoul, to whom he’d been talking, let both knife and flesh dangle from his hands.
Toinette had gone most of her life without being the object of uneasy stares. It had happened twice in the last week, and it felt no easier than it had at thirteen. As she’d learned to do, she kept her head up, her shoulders back, and her hands dangling loosely at her sides, badly as she wanted to do otherwise—cover her neck, for instance. She doubted that Erik had left any marks, and surely he hadn’t left any that would stand out in the dim light of early evening, but she couldn’t be certain.
All of the crew were alive. Except mayhap Franz and Samuel, all of them seemed capable of keeping on with the tasks that would let them stay that way. None had attacked her.
One had to start somewhere.
Toinette started by standing and waiting, with the last light of the sun coming down over her shoulder and the waves washing up the beach. She stood with empty hands and let the men decide when they would speak to her, if they would speak at all. She didn’t look at Erik.
There were such moments: you stood at the wheel and watched the storm, knowing that it would break or not, and you’d weather it or not, and you’d done all you could. Gamblers spoke of letting the dice fall, and riders—which Toinette had never been—of letting the horse have its head. At times, any action but waiting could only hurt your cause.
Her stomach rolled. She felt sweat collecting under her arms and behind her knees. Nobody could see any of that, so it didn’t matter. She thanked God for fifty years’ practice not being sick.
“What do we do now?” Sence asked. At first, a human voice sounded almost alien, and the words might have been Greek. But he went on, asking without panic or complaint, simply acknowledging that the future hadn’t vanished, only changed. “Do we live out our lives here?”
“We eat first,” said Marcus, and bent a gimlet eye on Raoul. “If we’re not too busy gawping to get the food ready, that is. I told you: it’s better to make plans with everyone who might have knowledge, and it’s better still to make them on a full stomach.”
“Can we help with the fire, then?” Erik asked.
Sence shook his head. “Just about done, m’lord. Best sit down.”
Toinette was glad he’d suggested it. She wouldn’t have liked having to ask, and she wasn’t at all sure how long her knees would hold her.
Nineteen
The fish was good, silver-white and flaky, and if boiled nettles weren’t precisely what Erik would have chosen as a dish to go with it, hunger did not leave him inclined to be picky. Eating occupied both his mouth and hands, so that he didn’t fall into the temptation to fidget, nor to talk only to hear his own voice.
