“Thank you.” What else could she say?
“Aevrin already knows about the money. Now go on, you two have fun. And don’t forget to get yourself something pretty.”
She left the study. It was a quiet walk to the front door, beams of afternoon light spilling through the windows of the house, dust motes tumbling lazily through them. She sat on the stairs to tie on the boots Evelya had given her, wincing a little. They were too big, and she could feel blisters forming.
It was good pay. If she stayed, she could pay back Aevrin for those healer’s fees. She could save up enough money to get back east comfortably, and find a new employer without having to take the first offer she got. If she stayed…
She wandered back into the sunlight to see Aevrin waiting at the cart, leaning against the rim with his thumbs in his pockets. The bull hitched up to the front looked unbothered, cropping the sparse tufts of clover within his reach. Cassia gave him a wide berth anyways, just in case he decided to incinerate her.
Aevrin straightened and lifted two fingers to his hat in a hello, then offered her a hand up. The treacherous skirt split wide open again as she hopped up to the bench of the cart, showing off the full length of one thick-thighed leg.
Hopefully he didn’t think she was trying to get his attention. With luck, he hadn’t even noticed. Just because he was a good, nice man didn’t mean he had the slightest interest in her. She didn’t belong here and she knew it.
Aevrin
NormallyAevrindidn’tmindsilence. In fact, he preferred quiet moments to loud. But as they drove the cart away from the ranch, he found his mind spinning, hunting for something to say. He felt like he ought to be talking to Cassia. Or maybe he just desperately wanted to be.
She made his head turn in the most awful way. Saints, sometimes he could hardly string a sentence together in her presence. He kept soaring between being furious at whoever’d hurt her (the bruise on her face was a constant reminder) and telling himself that staring would make her uncomfortable. The way her skirt kept slipping open over her thick thighs was enough to scramble any hot-blooded man’s mind.
But it was completely immoral to have thoughts like that when she was so vulnerable. It didn’t matter if she was the prettiest girl to step foot in Dawn Ridge, or if he’d happily trade his soul to have thighs like hers wrapped around his head. Justimagining it felt wrong. There would be no courting of Cassia Clarek, no matter what his body had to say about her.
They were five minutes in when Cassia started humming quietly under her breath. He was surprised at first. Then his ears perked as he recognized the tune, an old ballad calledThree Hearts. Her head was still turned away, watching the jagged, sun-bright peaks as they rolled down the road; smoke wreathed Mount Vesithia today. A moment later his left foot tapped along on the floor of the cart. He murmured the chorus under his breath.
“Down in the valley with the fairest flowers, the young one shot but the–”
“That’s not how it goes,” Cassia said, turning to him with wide eyes.
“What?”
“It’s ‘all three shot.’”
Aevrin frowned at her as the cart lurched forward over the bumpy road, the metal bits of the driving harness jingling.
“No, it’s not.”
“You must’ve heard it wrong,” she insisted.
He set one eye on her and kept the other on the road with a frown. Of all the driving bulls, Tiny required the most attention. He was liable to go off on a burner if Aevrin loosened the reins at all.
“Miss Cassia, my great-grandfather taught me that song.”
“Then it must be different all the way out here. It was all three, how I learned it.”
“You can’t prefer ‘em all getting shot, miss. That’s no ending.”
“Well, how doyouthink it goes, then?”
By the time they reached town, they’d sung it through twice together: dueling versions, each raising their voice insistently atthe parts that clashed. There was wind in her hair and laughter in their throats.
Larie lived on the second floor of her bright orange house, but the ground floor was a worn clothing store and possibly the fanciest thing in Dawn Ridge. Most of it was just the kind of clothes people wore around these parts, but sometimes Larie got in fashions from the inner Empire that nobody quite knew what to do with, or even how to get on. Of course, it also had dull items like plain, sturdy stockings, or tins of leather polish and nut-shell toothpaste. Like many of the other shops in Dawn Ridge, she didn’t just supply the tiny town, but also the surrounding ranching community for miles in every direction. There were no towns further west than Dawn Ridge, but thereweremore ranches.
Aevrin held the shop door open for Cassia, then tugged the hat off his head and followed her inside. He watched Cassia pause and take in the rows of colorful clothing and the back wall lined with shelves of boots and hat racks. The shop was a little dusty and perfumed with a spicy fragrance.
The long-haired brown cat in the back meowed a loud alarm to her owner, from where she perched on a tall set of shelves, tail lashing.
“One moment!” A cheery voice called from beneath the counter on the left. A moment later the voice’s owner popped upright, a pair of red boots in one hand and a polishing rag in the other. Larie was pale, nearly pink, with deep smile lines and dark hair twisted high on her head. “Oh, Aevrin! This must be Cassia?”
“Hey, Larie. Yup, this here is Miss Cassia,” Aevrin said. He didn’t miss Cassia’s soft flinch at another stranger already knowing her name. He jammed his free hand awkwardly into his pocket, the other gripping his hat tightly.
