“It is courageous to me, a Perpatanian. Do you want company back to the keep?”
She shook her head. “I want to be alone. I am …cheerless tonight.”
“I have two ears and a like mind,” I said.
She nodded and made her way down the street.
I watched her go, listening to the dancing feet, the clapping hands and the fiddle on the night air. I breathed in taking in the scent of countless blooms.
50. Apologies
“Edith?”
I turned to face Alric, coming towards me on the street. “I am coming,” I said on a sigh.
“No, I did not mean… may we speak?”
I stopped an arm’s length from him. “Speak.”
“I am sorry for this morning,” he said. Something in his tone was strained. “I resolve again and again to be honorable and cordial and I keep failing you.”
I did not know what to say to this.
“I do not know how to be your husband,” he said. “And for that I am sorry.”
I looked into his face and saw more emotion there than I had except for the night before our wedding when he called me his pillory. But this was not fury. It was sorrow. “And I have not been a wife in winters,” I answered him.“But when I was a wife the first time I had to learn that I must think before I speak. And if I can learn to do that, anyone can.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I was a hotblooded child and a hotblooded young woman. And now I am a woman reaching her middle winters and I am better about my anger, but not always. I mean, husband—,” my emphasis on the word as warm as I could make it, “I was short-tempered this morning and I too am sorry.”
“Your temper was in response to my own.”
“I think you have apologized enough.”
He placed his hands on his hips and looked at the ground and then back up at me. “And I did not mean I did not like the flax in your hair.”
I crossed my arms. “You have dug yourself out from your hole,” I said, my tone light.
There was an ease at the corners of his mouth, not a smile, but something. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small leather pouch and handed it to me. “I never got you a wedding present. I asked Anwyn to make it.”
I loosened the strip around the pouch and poured out a dainty chain onto my palm. In the half moon’s light it looked silver. “This is delicate,” I whispered, holding it front of my face.
“It is for your hagstone. I saw you hold it in Nyossa and I see you play with it in your pockets.”
I withdrew the hagstone from my pocket and undid the tiny latch on the chain and despite the late hour, I was able to see enough to thread it through the hole. I held up the two ends behind my neck and redid the latch, the stone settling in my collarbones.
When I looked up, Alric was quickly replacing his hands on his hips and I realized he must have been holding up his hands to help with the chain. He looked almost abashed.
“Thank you so much,” I enthused, touching the hagstone at my neck. “This is thoughtful.”
He nodded, but his head was hung.
My boy is difficult.
“Let us promise each other something,” I said as tenderly as I could.
He looked up. “Promise?”
