My eyes lift to his lips, and everything disappears. The light behind me and the darkness around him, the Gauntlet and my village, the territory of Prosperitus.
Anathos itself.
“You lie.” My words are mostly breath. Which is a curious feat, for there is no air in my lungs.
“Look at me,” he commands. “You can’t really see anybody without meeting their eyes.”
Something in his tone awakens me out of the stupor, and I drop my stare to the copper. It abruptly appears as it was before, the surface dingy and dull.
“Never,” I mumble. “I will never look at you.”
“Is my injury so ugly…” His hand rises, as if he’s brushing his scarred cheek. “That it disgusts you.”
“No.”
“Now you lie,” he drawls. “Both my eyes work quite well, you know, in spite of what the one appears, so my ugliness is well familiar to me.”
“I’m under a Pox cloak,” I snap back. “Your physical appearance and any of its imperfections don’t matter to me.”
“So look at me properly and prove it.”
By way of response, I hold the penny out. He does nothing. “Take this back.”
“It’s yours.”
“No, it’s not. And I’m not going to be indebted to you or anyone else.”
“The services that earned its worth have already been tendered.” He sweepshis hand off to the side. “My meal and ale have been delivered quite readily. And I have been delivered to this room.”
I drop the coin, which bounces on the bare floor. It’s still chiming as I leave him in the darkness by himself.
Yet I am the one who is alone as I flee everything that he wants, and all I must deny:
Hide.
SixMy One and True Friend.
“Sorrel, your desire to cheat Death of its due is going to be the death of you.”
It’s the following morning, and I ignore that haughty proclamation for the pretense of stocking a small hearth with more hardwood. The kettle is almost ready, and I have the last of my driedunsleeleaves in the base of a tin mug. As I measure the dwindling stash of oak logs, I know I need to gather more when I go harvesting outside the wall.
“Did you hear what I said,” the former Lady Marehomen of Prosperitus demands.
“Stop deflecting.” From under the hood of my cloak, I glare across my shoulder. “You’re going to drink all of this, and you’re not going to care if it’s bitter.”
“I will drinksomeof it and I will complain the entire time.”
Over on the pallet, my elderly friend, Mare, lies swaddled in mismatched blankets that I’ve collected from the lodging house’s stock and snuck out to this abandoned shoe shop. Lying there, so frail, so drawn, she’s as an infant newly born into the world, incapable of caring for her most basic needs, relying on me to come when I can. Every time I show up here, I run the risk that we’ll both be discovered, but she’s a burden I can’t put down. No one else in the village will care for her, and my conscience carries enough already.
I also happen to like her tart company.
“I am not here upon Anathos’s soil for much longer,” she says. “Why must you prolong my agony.”
My friend’s words slice through me. She was not my first stop on this glum and cold daybreak. I went to check on Elly and didn’t get farther than the back alley behind the farrier’s quarters. He was loading her body onto a cart, hisdaughters and niece hovering in the doorway as if they all wished they could follow her into her grave.
Assuming he even bothers to dig her one.
“You are quiet today,” Mare observes.
