“No,” I said aloud into the golden air, the sun’s dying light casting a decadent gleam over the clapboard and stone homes, the small river, the mill’s wheel, the spires of some of the finer houses, and the pitiful weather vanes swinging from a stuffy, slothful wind. It was as if Brother Air, that intangible Tintarian god, wanted to provide our town some relief from the heat.
“No dead husbands and no pagan gods,” I continued. “Stop ruminating.”
And so, I carried on to The Pale Horse, grateful for my somewhat coarse hair being undone and covering most of my shoulders. Nearly one hundred men were inside the tavern, some sharecroppers, some guards from the keep and soldiers from Perpatane—a continual delegation of them always in our town. There was a lone woman behind the counter, and she was more than old enough to be my mother.
“Gertie,” I said, sidling up to her alongside a group of loud men. I set the jug on the counter.
The old woman nodded at me, took the jug in hand, and turned to a wall of barrels behind her.
“How goes it, Robbie?” came a familiar man’s voice.
Wynne, an old friend of Thane’s, stepped to my right side, cutting me off from the group of men. He was what some women might call charming and what all women would call randy. He tried his hand at anything in a skirt, and if it was not for a fondness leftover from childhood, I would have no love for him.
“Or should I ask how goes it with Thane?” he rephrased.
Wynne was one of the few who knew about Thane and me. And now that my sister was gone, now that my man had died more than five winters past, he felt it was appropriate to wink at me, to smile, to imply,I know the two of you used to pleasure each other in the woods half a life ago.
His smile irked me. I was a woman with a headache and a tremendous decision to make. I barely thought of my smile back at him or telling him I hoped his evening was fair.
“Look at him pine for you, madam,” Wynne continued, leaning on the counter, eyes cast over my figure. “You know heknowsyou come collect your medicinal whiskey on tenth-day nights. That’s why he is here. He, a lord’s son, has his drinks here with commoners just to see you. He could swill in his father’s keep, but no. He comes here to see a glimpse of his old flame.”
I did not respond that I had just seen Thane hours ago, nor did I look to the direction he bent his head. A snipe came to my tongue, sat on it, and nearly pounced forth from my lips, but Tessa’s echo overpowered it.
You can be nice when you want to be nice.
“You only call me ‘madam’ in that tone,” I rejoined. “It is mocking, and we are too old for teasing.” My words were brisk but my face sedate.
“I can never get to you, can I?” he replied, bringing his cup to his lips.
“Whatever do you mean?” I asked, eyes cast to Gertie, who, my jug in her hand, was talking to another patron.
“You know,” Wynne said, his unoccupied hand suddenly near myface, his forefinger turning my chin back to him. “I can nevergetto you.”
His sudden frankness—his overt sexual interest—felt dreamlike, as if I was having a conversation underwater. I was already living with the reality of an entire world at war, of having people to protect. But I tried to shake it off. This was not new. Wynne was a tomcat.
I turned my face back to the barmaid. “Do you mean because I do not swat your arm and blush like most other women?”
“That is true,” he answered me. “But what I do mean is I have tried my luck with you since boyhood, despite you being my best friend’s one true love, and you have no notion of my efforts.”
“Sir, you have a wife and children at home in a grand house.”
“What is a little rutting between two old friends?” Wynne asked, his finger again on my chin. “I am sure I could scratch all your itches.”
“Oh, you make it sound so nice,” I quipped, but my tone was light.
“Well, if you will not let me have you, throw that poor man a favor,” he said, head bent again towards the corner table where Thane sat with some men in the Perpatanian soldiers’ garb, likely officers rooming in the keep.
As if he felt my gaze, Thane looked up. When he found me, his nod was brief, but there was a knowing in that handsome face, an old nameless acknowledgment of us and what we had once been to each other.
“Your sister’s ghost wouldn’t care,” came Wynne’s voice in my ear, closer than it had been. “She had her affair with the chandler woman, and there was no enmity between Rowena and Thane over it. They were better as friends than man and wife.”
8
NOW: STRANGER
Iwas going to snap and draw attention to myself.
“Gertie!” I said in a raised voice, leaning past Wynne and ignoring his chuckling comment about having my body up against his.
