Footsteps heralded Gramma’s arrival. He watched Cassia's face whip up towards the sound.
“Thought I heard voices,” Prisca said from behind him in her crackling, smoke-sundered voice. “What, you weren’t gonna come say hi?”
Abashed, Aevrin turned over the back of his chair. Gramma Prisca stood in the wide kitchen entryway, arms folded as she stared down the two of them. She was hale for her early seventies, gray-haired but still tall and straight-backed. She wore a yellow jerkin over her light, billowing dress. Thin-rimmedglasses, usually worn on the chain around her neck, perched now on her nose, proof she’d come straight from the ranch accounts she spent most of her time running.
“Sorry, Gramma. I was real hungry,” Aevrin said.
“This is the girl?” Gramma tucked her chin and peered over her glasses to scrutinize the newcomer.
“Miss Cassia Clarek,” Aevrin supplied, his head turning unconsciously to look at her. She’d barely touched her plate, but she ran a napkin over her pretty lips as she quickly stood. He didn't miss the way her smallest finger trembled as she formally clasped her hands together before her in the imperial fashion. He'd seen the greeting before, mostly among travelers and cattle buyers.
“Ma’am, I’m–” she started to say.
“Now, you sit right back down,” Gramma interrupted sternly. “Don’t be getting up on my account, girl. Go on, eat. You done yet, Aevrin?”
He turned back to his plate, where a bite-sized square of griffon was the only thing that remained.
“Yup.” He stabbed it with his fork and shoved it quickly in his mouth, then stood, still chewing, to balance his plate on the precarious stack in the washbasin. “I can clean up tonight. Don’t wanna waste any more daylight. The fenceline…”
“You’re off to rest, not work,” Gramma informed him. “We don’t need you falling off Kazeic and cracking your head open.”
“Well, I told Miss Cassia I’d show her to Ash’s…”
“You leave Miss Cassia in my capable hands, now,” Gramma said sharply.
Aevrin struggled silently for a moment. He didn’t want anyone else showing Cassia around, or asking if she needed anything, or telling her it was going to be just fine. He wasn’t sure he wanted anyone elsetalkingto Cassia. Whichwas odd. She ought to have plenty of people showing her all manner of kindness, but for some strange reason he wanted to do it all himself.
A very stupid part of him, the ‘pure dumb cowherd’ part, as Gramma would have put it, seemed to think that since he’d saved her once she was now his full responsibility. Either that, or he just wanted her to be.
Gramma Prisca gave him the oddest look, eyebrows raised. It wasn’t worth fighting with the matriarch, not without real reason to. You picked your battles with Gramma, and even then, you mostly lost. The cowherd sighed. Cassia was watching Aevrin’s Gramma with what he worried was wide-eyed awe rather than the fear she properly deserved.
“Fine.” He reached up to tip his hat to Cassia, then remembered he wasn’t wearing it, and blinked away his exhaustion again. “If you need anything, miss…”
“Thank you, Aevrin,” she told him softly. “For everything.” She’d still barely touched her plate and she was looking at his chest, as if afraid to meet his eyes.
With a wistful glance over his shoulder, he abandoned the prettiest damsel in distress he’d ever seen to his Gramma’s iron clutches.
Cassia
Aevrin’sGrammapouredherselfa cup of a golden, thin liquid from the pitcher on the counter—it looked like room-temperature grallo—and settled into the chair Aevrin had just vacated. Cassia cleared her throat and glanced at the painting hanging over the table, not wanting to be caught staring at the intimidating woman. Despite her sensible clothes, she immediately reminded Cassia of a thunderstorm crammed into human form.
The painting showed the mountains at sunset, with a smudge of a shadowed cowherd flying a red dragon over the burning fields in front of the peaks. She’d seen paintings of Zhavek before, but until a few weeks ago she'd thought they were overdramatized with their raging fires, clouds of smoke, and peaks like shards of shattered, jagged pottery.
They were not. It hardly seemed habitable.
“You going to finish that food, or you gonna let it go to waste?” Gramma Prisca asked at last, scrutinizing Cassia.
Cassia tore her gaze away from the art and willed herself to take another bite, and another. She was hungry. Starving, really. It was just that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten such a terrible plate of food. Odd meals scrambled together by kitchen folk who were too tired from feeding the big people upstairs were one thing, but this was made utterly without skill in the messiest kitchen she’d ever seen.
The carrots were drier than plaster and under-seasoned, crusty on the bottom and cool all the way through. The flat steak was vaguely familiar, but it appeared to be something other than cockatrice, the closest match she could come up with. Aevrin had burned it nearly black on the outside without heating the middle. It was tougher than a shoe, and had too much salt. If anyone had shown up at one ofherkitchens cooking like that, they’d have been immediately dismissed and possibly shrieked at by some over-tired, high strug man with a bristling mustache. She took a gulp of water, and forced herself to take another bite.
She was still sore all over, her jaw included, and chewing so much was a little difficult.
“You’re lucky Aevrin found you when he did,” Gramma Prisca informed her flatly.
Cassia choked down the dry carrot in her mouth and nodded quickly.
“I know I am. I certainly owe him a debt.”
