I placed my hands on my hips and sighed. I stepped closer. “Allow me this one lenience and I will not trouble you again. I promise.” I would get past him this one time and worry about subsequent foraging for god trees another night.
I could not quite see it, but I knew he was smiling that unbothered smile in the dark. “I am afraid your regular enchantments will not work for you this evening. I’m not like other men who crumble because you simply speak to them.”
“Crumble? What are you—Salt man, I begin my fortieth winter. I do not rely on charm. I’m asking you to let me pass. Again.”
He shrugged. “You have your tasks and I have mine. Go back to your people and your wagon. Try again another night with a weaker man, a guard with no ability to resist a woman’s wiles.”
“Wiles,” I said, dragging the word out. “You speak as if I am a maid with an unlined face. I know you only use the one eye, but really.”
He surprised me then and gave a low laugh. It was sensual, a note of satisfaction in it, as if he was glad for my being glib. “Thank you.”
“Thank you for what?”
“For mentioning it. So many folk dance around it. As if should they notice my only having one eye, they will draw my own attention to it. As ifIdo not know that I only have the one eye and they are frightened to be the one to tell me.”
I snorted. “I do not consider myself indelicate, but nor do I consider myself an idiot. I would have assumed you would have known, by now, that you only have the use of the one eye.”
“No,” he said, and his voice was even lower, smokier. “You are far from an idiot, madam midwife. You are, in my estimation, very clever.”
Though I opened my mouth to correct his continual use of “midwife” in regards to me, I did not speak because I was distracted by that voice. There was an ever-present rasp to it, a grating quality, as if he went long periods without using it. And as I could not see him very well, I noticed it more.
“You reference your age quite a bit, you know,” he continued.
“You reference my possessing the alluring qualities of a beautiful young woman. And I am not?—”
Now he snorted. “You must think me the idiot now.”
“Explain.”
“You point out my having one eye. You know that I know I have one eye, yet when I point out you are beautiful, you act as if you do not know that you are beautiful. In a younger woman, this is forgivable,maybe even a bit charming to some men, but now letmebe the one to reference your age.”
I squinted, trying to make out his face.
“You say you are forty,” the Vyggian explained. “A woman that age has figured out what her face and figure can do for her. She has more than figured it out. She is adept. And what I say to you, lady, is that I know what you are about when you sweetly ask if you can leave the perimeter of this camp.”
“I was not sweet,” I protested, but my voice was thin and breathy.
He made ahmmnoise.
“Sir,” I tried again, “you must let me leave camp for a short time. It is important. You are the one who tried to convince me to come based on this caravan’s lack of a midwife. I need supplies.”
“Supplies you could have more easily collected at the dinner hour? Supplies you seek in the shadow of night when the sun has made itself scarce? What supplies are those?”
“Am I a criminal to you? I don’t know what you could be accusing me of.”
The Vyggian gave a lazy shake of his head. “I’m not on watch tomorrow night. Some Perpatanian whelp who cannot resist the curvature of a woman will be more susceptible to your petitions. Go back to your bed, Robbie. And be more careful.”
My name in his mouth, said with that rasp, made the hair on the back of my neck prickle.
“How do you know my name?”
He tapped the side of his head, releasing one hand from where he had his arms crossed on his chest. “I have one eye, but I have two ears.”
“And I still do not know your name, Vyggian.”
The one-eyed man gave another of those slow smiles and said, “I like being your salt man.”
26
