“Mmhmm. I’m glad you like it, though.”
If I’d had any doubts, the way he was currently tearing into a chicken leg would have removed them. I chuckled to myself.
“What did you think of the others?” I asked. “Reimond and Thoma?”
“They were friendly enough.”
Stabbing a carrot with the tines of my fork, I held it up to a beam of fading sunlight. “I think they might be a couple.” I meant to sound casual but couldn’t keep my gaze from darting rapidly to Kit, checking his reaction.
Finishing another bite of chicken, he grunted. “Oh?”
I nodded and waited. Surely he had more to say than that. I certainly did. But rather than fuel my curiosity or share my interest, Kit redirected.
“That other one, Otis, makes me uneasy,” he said.
My shoulders sagged. I stuffed the carrot in my mouth. “Why?”
“He knows too much.” Kit’s brows pinched. “And he cares about things that don’t concern him. I didn’t think about it until after everyone left, but I wonder if he’s the ‘O’ my father keeps mentioning in his journals.” Standing, he moved to the cabinets, then got out a tin cup and filled it in the sink. “I want you to stay away from him, Penny,” he said over his shoulder. “I don’t trust him.”
I rolled my eyes, reluctant to abandon the topic of Reimond and Thoma. Not only did I hate the way reading those journals made Kit look like he’d been punched in the gut, but he also didn’t know—how could he?—how novel it was to meet other people like me. To see two men in a relationship, and as happy as Reimond and Thoma seemed to be, filled me with a kind of wistful hope I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt before.
“You don’t trust anyone,” I muttered.
Kit returned to the table but stopped before sitting and frowned down at me. “That’s not true.”
I pitched back in my seat and crossed my arms. “You have nothing but bad to say about everyone here, but they seem all right to me.” Rosie and her father, the vendors in town, even Levitt, all appeared to be normal people like the kind I knew back home. My brother may have beenthe most fiendish of them all, which was a sobering thought.
Kit gripped the wooden back of his chair, still on his feet. “I trustyou,” he said softly.
The statement felt somehow profound. “Do you?”
He processed for a moment, then nodded. “I do. Because you aren’t like them.”
With a huffed breath, I grabbed a chicken leg from my plate. “That’s what Rosie said.”
“She seems pretty taken with you. Think you’ll spend more time with her?” Kit slid into his seat and set his cup down.
“She wants to teach me how to make pecan tarts next time. Says there’s an orchard near here.”
Grabbing his fork, Kit set to work on his meal once more. “There is. And as long as you bring some tarts home, I suppose I can’t complain.”
I grinned. “Of course I will.”
Kit waved to the plates piled with food. “Good. Now, eat before it gets cold.”
25
Kit
Ispent the next morning and early afternoon at the forge working my way through items on the repair rack while Penny tried his hand at carving the handle of an old broken chisel. He took about as well to the new medium as he did to drawing, and the pride on his face when he showed off his work was wonderful to see.
Rosie came by mid-afternoon to pick him up for his baking lesson, which freed me up to start the work I’d been mentally planning since the previous morning.
Penny’s knife would be a match to my own: large enough to do damage, but small enough not to be overwhelming. I’d seen one of similar size among the tools at the farm, so it would hopefully feel familiar to him. If nothing else, I could count on him to be proficient enough with wielding it to know which end to stick into an attacker.
Though, if I had my way, he’d never be in enough danger to need to use it.
Whoever had run the forge before me kept it well stocked with material, and I selected a suitable sized ingotof steel and set to the task of heating and shaping. The world around me faded out, and the methodical work lulled me into a peaceful sort of focus.
