The old woman had set my jug down on the counter and was shaking her head at a drunken man cajoling her to keep serving him.
Another childhood playmate, Kent, the magistrate—a man who had six children to feed but had the audacity to look down on me for helping his wife prevent a seventh pregnancy—greeted Wynne and barely nodded at me. They struck up a conversation about how the service was slow due to another influx of Perpatanian soldiers making their home in the keep. I could tell their conversation was edging around something, and I guessed that they, as higher ranked men of Sheridan, had learned of the caravan too.
I cried out for Gertie again, the noise in the tavern drowning me out. My senses were overwhelmed. The hollers from men around me were too loud in my ears. The smells of barley and beer, sweat and pipe smoke were thick in my nose. Across the room, I saw Thanestand from his table, eyes back on me. He was going to come to me, to see me and speak to me.
I was not ready for him. We had not had a conversation just the two of us since we were teenagers. Ever since my man had died, we had danced around each other. I was his child’s aunt. He was my sister’s once husband and had been still by law before her death, though they had lived as friends for a long time. Only a handful of folk knew what Thane and I had been to each other. It was a secret that should remain secret. I had never wanted Rowena to discover that she had, even inadvertently, played a role in my first heartbreak.
If he approached me, I was unsure that I could resist him. I had run from such encounters for too long a time to remember how to even comfortably speak to Thane. We were far from the boy and girl who had swum naked in the Nyossa streams together, myself far from the haughty young woman who had rejected a passionate young man’s pleas. But Wynne was correct. The way was, if not quite clear for us, certainly without hindrances.
And as I stood there, praying to all four of the gods I worshipped—for Gertie to fill my damn jug, for Wynne to stop glancing at my bosom, for Thane’s approach to be interrupted—I saw him.
Without Thane’s head blocking him from my view, I saw a hooded man sitting at a table against the wall, with little candlelight on him and far from any of the windows. He was in shadow, but I could still make out a lean frame folded in the single chair, elbows resting on the table, one hand holding a tin cup. His other hand rested on a slim, small book. And I could see the gleam of one eye watching me from under the hood.
The night was hot. All of the men were in some variation of a short-sleeved tunic, even the keep guard and the foreign soldiers having all stripped down to the cloth part of their uniforms. This man’s use of the hood was incongruous to me.
As if he could read my thoughts, he brought one hand to the edge of the hood and pushed it back over his head, that eye remaining on me.
I saw a face of angles and slants, bones just beneath the skin, mouth pulling to one side, nose aquiline but just off center, brows arched over a pale eye on his right side and on the other, a leather strap that wrapped around his head. It was a sort of eye patch. His hair was a nondescript brown and cropped near to a shave at the sides of his head. I could make out what seemed to be tattoos around his ears. He appeared to be at least five winters my junior but had the air of an older man about him.
Over Wynne’s lackadaisical complaining to Kent—but still sensing his interest in me—past Thane’s steady approach and the cacophony around me, despite my irritation due to Gertie’s lack of urgency, I saw that eye flit up and down the length of me, saw his head tilt as if he was trying to see the entirety of my person. When that eye returned to me to meet my stare with his own, that sly mouth’s pull to one side spread into a half smile and the brow over that eye lifted slightly, as if to say, “I’ve been waiting for you to notice.”
9
NOW: LIST
Tessa agreed to visit the farmhouse the next day and help me explain what Perpatane would offer to Sheridan. I myself did not know how to break it to Ilsit and Jade. Jade had not left the forest or my farm except to visit the tinkers’ tents since she was eleven winters old, and she was nearing forty. Ilsit had only just been declared dead by her husband, and being seen in town was inadvisable.
The four of us adults sat at my worktable while Fox collected the tin dishes from our lunch and piled them in a bucket for washing.
“They can’t make you sign the list,” Tessa was saying.
“I’m not signing any godsdamned list that Gerard is behind,” Ilsit declared, her voice going over Tessa’s.
I shushed Ilsit. “Let her finish! Go on, Tessa.”
Ilsit blew her pipe’s smoke in my face. A day or two after she had moved in, she had fished Magda’s old bone pipe out of a tin cup and started using it as her own.
“They wouldn’t let you or Jade sign it anyway,” sighed Tessa.
“Why in hell not?”
“Because we are listed among the dead,” Jade said.
Tessa nodded. “But you would have to come with us. You two can’t stay here alone. And another thing to think on—and I hate to say it—but we’ve no man. I would prefer if we had the protection of more than Thane. We’ll barely see him along the journey. He’ll be busy. It will be hard on the five of us, even if we pack and prepare well.”
Ilsit stood from her chair. “You talk as if you plan to sign!”
“Sit down,” I ordered and snapped my fingers at her.
“Am I a hound?” Ilsit shot at me. To Tessa she said, “I cannot believe you even think of this. After what they’ve done to all of us.”
“Tintar will march again,” Tessa said. “We are on the Nyossa border. We would be crushed by them. In hours. And Robbie’s farm first.”
“They cannot march an army on those skinny paths!” Ilsit was triumphant in her rejoinder, jabbing her pipe at Tessa. “And we’re a far cry from the main road up north that cuts through half of the forest. And still too far from the south road that cuts through the bottom of the forest before the marshlands.”
“You are correct.” Tessa was patient, almost amused. “But we are still a town funded by the very country that has declared war on Tintar. I don’t know that we should chance it.”
“Perhaps,” Jade chimed in. “But also perhaps we let them leave, the priest, the lord and his guard. Our families.”
