I looked at them through the kitchen window, tired and enjoying a temporarily empty house even though their voices filtered inside. Daisy wove around my feet, likely hoping for scraps of the jerky I was chewing.
“Fine,” I said and threw her a piece.
I added cheese and bread to my meager lunch and made my way outside.
“I’m to town,” I said to them, passing them on my way to the stable. “I’ve comfrey oil to deliver, and then I will see Tessa. Need anything?”
“Gossip,” said Ilsit, looking up. “Tell us if there are any new names on the penitents’ list. I want to know who else I can say ‘good riddance’ to.”
Jade gave a diminutive snort and tried to hide her amusement.
Ilsit tossed one of her potato peels into Jade’s bucket. “Gods, my aim is good.”
Fox was making one of her soundless laughing exhales.
“Of course,” I said, leading Zara outside the gate.
Jade looked up. “You don’t think Tessa will go, do you?”
“Why in hell would she?” asked Ilsit, clearly in denial of the direction Tessa leaned.
“Adelaide is in the City of the Tower,” Jade answered.
The four of us looked at each other.
“Well, you’ve gone and named it,” I said. “It is not out of the question. I think she might go to Skow to see Adelaide and then maybe travel to Eccleston. It was her home.”
Ilsit glared into her bucket.
I do not want to lose her, Fox signed.
I blinked at her, our little signal ofyeswhen we were serious. Then I mounted my old mare and made for town. I put Zara at the hitching post and made my few rounds, a quick visit to people’s homes who, while they might not want to openly patronize the forager woman, still needed what I could provide. My head was down as I was always trying for an unnoticeable presence. I knocked on Tessa’s door, but she was not at home. I made my way back to the hitching post, a humble walk amongst the clusters of Perpatanian soldiers, unsure of what they did or where they went and leery of drawing their attention.
Before I could reach the town square, I was interrupted.
“Madam,” said an unknown voice.
When I looked up, I saw the one-eyed man standing in my path. His hood was drawn up as it had been in the tavern, but at this proximity, I could properly estimate his age at perhaps six or seven winters my junior. Up close, I could better make out the tattoos that crawled up the sides of his neck and curled around his ears and cheeks.
They were twin god snakes, just like the one inked on my right arm.
“Sir,” I said, nodding and making to step around him. I was confused at my reaction to him. He was not a Perpatanian and posed no threat to me. But my heart beat faster. Something about spotting him sitting alone that night in The Pale Horse had unnerved me.
“I’d have a word,” he said, his step matching mine so that he was firmly in my way.
I stared into his light-green eye, the other obscured by that leather strap.
He was taller than most men, lean rather than broad, though the arms and chest I could see through the hooded jerkin and tunic he wore were those of a man who was no stranger to manual labor. His waist and hips were slender, sporting an elaborately woven belt with a short sword in a scabbard on each side. His legs were long, clad in fitted leather breeches tucked into boots. But his apparelwas brown and simply made, unlike the more intricate Perpatanians’.
Again, I wondered where he hailed from.
One of his hands held that same slim booklet I had seen him with in the tavern. His other rested on one sword’s pommel. His stance, though he had put himself in front of me twice, was so casual, as if he would not mind if I told him no.
“Who are you?” I asked instead of answering him. I sorely wanted to know. I had spotted him two weeks prior and he had been in my thoughts, enough for me to be annoyed with myself and to wonder what he, a foreigner, was doing in Sheridan.
His mouth, a wry slash of a thing, quirked up at one corner. “I knew you would be a direct kind of woman. And I will be direct with you. Have you signed on to be a penitent?”
“You’re not being direct. You did not answer my question.”
