I began to walk past him, and almost stumbled on an apple in the road. Bending down, I picked it up. “I do not doubt you are about to ask me for something!”
“My lady!” He mocked hurt, a hand on his breast. “I am going to offer you something. I have things you will want to hear. Magic things. Things you wouldn’t believe—”
“I have no use for sweet songs today,” I cut him short. “Or any songs. And more to the point: I have no food for you.”
He nodded, unconvinced.
“Moussa, no food. None.” I glanced down at the apple in my fingers and tried to move it out of sight.
The creases around his eyes deepened. “My wagon can fit many, many apples…”
“Benefitting you, it seems, more than me.”
“Which you might be able to take to the market—and sell.”
“In exchange for some price you have not yet named.”
“A price that costs you nothing. A place to park my coach. A bit of cider you’ve already brewed. The market is in a few days,” he sang.
We regarded one another. And I calculated, weighing, weighing: apples and balls and money.
He wiggled his fingers, conjuring unseen riches. “I can fit four times as many bushels as your own carriage.”
“All right,” I finally agreed. “Pull in, up behind the hedge, where they can’t see you from the road.”
Maneuvering Moussa’s towering cart through the gate took a good quarter of an hour. To make the hard turn up through the arches, he painstakingly marched the horse—inopportunely named Lucky—one step forward and one foot back, again and again, until the load was appropriately oriented. Then, as if I hadn’t been standing watching the whole time, hands on my hips and a scowl on my face, he dismounted and came over to me. We clasped hands.
“It is good to see you,” he said.
“Poor Lucky.” I shook my head. “Next year she may outright refuse.”
“She has nothing to complain about.”
I raised my eyebrows and looked at the burdened cart. A small tambourine fell from the top and landed on the ground.
“A sign!” Moussa clapped his hands. If the traveling singer was capable of anything, it was reinterpreting events in his favor. “We must drink.”
“And I suppose you’d like me to supply the ale?” I went over to the horse and gave her a pat. “Hello, Lucky.” I offered the apple, which she took in her teeth, her lips tickling my palm.
“She gets to see the whole world. The moorlands and the cliffs and the ocean. She is the—”
“Luckiest horse in the world,” I finished for him. “I’ll add her to the stable with Arno.”
I could hear Rosamund and Mathilde talking as I entered the hall. Rosamund, sitting in a deep-set chair by the window, was using the day’s last light to sew a ribbon to a hat. She held it up to look at her work. “Perhaps I will wear it to market this week.”
Mathilde, reclined on a chaise next to a low-burning candle, turned a page of her book and did not look up. “I would not.”
The room offered evidence of their afternoon’s labor. Mathilde’s ledger lay open, the ink still drying across one of its pages. A spinning wheel had been brought out, and a fresh bobbin of thread sat on the table. A set of clean sheets lay folded on a bench. And a new pile of firewood had been carefully stacked next to the lit hearth, which filled the room with a weak warmth.
Rosamund frowned. “Well, I did not offer it to you; it is my hat!”
“Allow me to rephrase—you should not. It is an unbecoming hat.”
“You dunderhead! You only wish you could have a new fontange.” Rosie huffed, dropping the hat back into her lap. “And now I shall never make you one!”
Mathilde used a finger to hold her place in her book and leaned forward to address her sister. “It is I attempting to offer you wisdom. One might presume that you want to wear a new hat to draw attention and impress people and perhaps have an excuse to flirt. None of that can be accomplished in the ugliest, most regrettable hat in the kingdom.”
“Neither of you are going to market this week.” I stepped into the room. “So, you do not need to concern yourself with the hat any longer.”
