She spun, her heart leaping. There was nothing to see, only the backs of people and baskets and a brown cloak sliding into noise and vanishing like water into stone.
She looked down. A small square of folded parchment lay damp against her skin. Her hands shook as she opened it in the shelter of her body.
No greeting. No name. No politeness.
You are being watched.
You have made yerself dangerous.
Leave, or others will pay.
The letters were sharp as cuts. Her breath shuddered out of her at once. It left her chest hollow.
“Erica.”
Alex was beside her in an instant. He had moved without her seeing him move. She did not trust her voice, so she held out the parchment, feeling a shudder rack her body as he grabbed it.
He read it once, head bent, face unreadable. He read it again, slower. The air around him hardened, and the line of his jaw set like a stone that had seen winter after winter.
“Who gave ye this?” he asked, the urgency in his voice clearer than anything, despite the muffled sounds in the market.
Erica remained quiet, unable to speak for the most part. Noise kept swelling around them, but this time, it sounded far. She could not feel her fingers.
She imagined the words on the parchment blur and steady and blur again. A goat bleated near a pen, and a boy laughed at it. The way everything seemed to go on terrified her for some reason. The world did not know it had changed.
“This is me fault,” she whispered. “I shouldnae be here. I have doomed everyone.”
“Erica,” he said.
“The girls.” The words came fast, tumbling over each other. “Me maither. Ye. They will come for ye. For the children. I shouldnae have come. I shouldnae have approached ye at the festival. I should have been more?—”
“Erica!” His voice was firmer this time.
Her throat burned, and her mind ran wild. She imagined a rider at the gate with a dangerous message to deliver. One that cannot be stopped. She imagined a hand on Bettie’s shoulder that should never be there. She saw Katie’s ribbon trailing in the dirt. She saw her mother alone at a window that would just refuse to open.
Guilt blew up through her like cold wind from a stairwell.
She turned on her heel. She did not know where she meant to go. Away. Back. Any path that took danger out of a square full of lives that were not hers to ruin.
Alex’s hand closed around her arm. Firm. Grounding. No give.
“Enough.”
The word cut clean through her panic. It took the top off the boil inside her. She stopped and looked up into his face, finding no gentleness there. Only steadiness. Only the thing that had made men listen when he did not raise his voice.
“Breathe,” he said. “I need ye to calm down. Panic willnae solve anything.”
She obeyed because she could not think of anything else to do. Air went in slowly. It came out slowly. It did not stop the tremors in her fingers, but it kept the ground where it was. The market came back into focus as a pot clanged at a stall and a wheel rolled. The sun stood where it had been a moment ago.
Alex kept his hold till her breathing steadied. He did not look away.
“Nay one will touch ye,” he said. “Nay one.”
There was no heat in his words. No promise that needed swelling. It was a fact laid in stone.
He turned his head a fraction and scanned the square again. The edges. A knot of men near the well that had grown without buying a thing. A space that opened where there had been none a heartbeat ago. He shifted so his body covered her more.
“Where are the girls?” she asked. The fear still shook her voice. “I daenae see them.”
