Peter shot me a quick look. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to, okay?”
Roderick let out a booming laugh. “That’s sound advice, boy! Now, don’t you two have a knitting booth to open up today?” He pointed at me and Lochlan.
“No,” Lochlan answered, arms folded across his chest. “The market’s closed today.”
“Why?” Peter asked. “I thought they were open almost every day.”
“And they are. But today’s the annual Day of Mourning,” Lochlan reminded him. “That’s why the roads were so empty and why they were moving the caravan today, remember? They wanted to do it on a less crowded day.”
Roderick clapped a massive hand against his forehead. “That’s right, I’d forgotten.” He opened the bag of pixie dust again so the golden glow illuminated his scarred and bearded face. “Take the day off, lads. We’ve done plenty for now.”
“It would be a good day to take the pixie dust somewhere safe,” I suggested. “Is there a place you can keep important things like that until we need it?”
“I have a few ideas,” Roderick said with a grin. “But Peter’s right. We can’t move it quite yet. There’s time, and I’m tired from that little heist, aren’t you?”
“No.” Even though I hadn’t slept much the night before, the hospital bed had provided better quality sleep than what I was used to, and I didn’t feel tired at all.
“Me neither,” Peter said immediately.
“I am,” Lochlan put in as he picked up his knitting. “After everything we did, I say we take the day off.”
“I’m not tired,” I insisted.
“How about we go to a cemetery together?” Peter answered with a wicked smile. “Let these two old men take a nap. Do you have anyone you want to pay your respects to?”
A cold hand gripped my heart. Until that moment, I’d never thought to look for my family names in a graveyard, but once the thought occurred, I couldn’t shake it. Why hadn’t I been combing through the graveyards?
“Yeah, I want to go look for someone,” I said. “But we can’t go looking like this. You’re a fugitive and I just broke out of a hospital. People could be looking for us.”
Peter’s mouth twitched. “No problem.” He strode into one of the back rooms, then returned with a bundle of fabric thathe shook out to reveal a long black dress and a veil. His face was momentarily visible before he draped the dark face covering across his nose and mouth, then pulled the veil over his face. “Who would ever question a widow in mourning? There’s one for you, too.” He held the other bundle out to me.
Roderick chuckled deep in his throat. “For a baby, you sure are a sly one.”
“Gil’s the baby, not me. I’m of age,” Peter reminded us.
My jaw jutted out in defiance as I pulled on the dress over my tunic and breeches. “I’m almost fourteen. That’s old.”
Roderick scoffed. “I doubt you even have hair on your chest yet.”
“I don’t need to prove anything,” I said mulishly.
“See? Point proven.”
I finished pulling the long black gloves up to my elbows and draping the veil over my face. “Where did you get all this?”
“It belonged to my wife,” Roderick said gruffly.
Peter paused. “I’m sorry. Would you prefer we don’t use it?”
Roderick hitched a smile back onto his face. “I’d prefer you did. She ran off and left me long ago. I wouldn’t care if you burned everything she touched.”
There was an awkward pause while Peter and I looked at each other. I could see through my own veil well enough, but I couldn’t see Peter’s face beneath his.
“Here,” Lochlan said, handing each of us a delicate knitted handkerchief. “No mourning widow would be complete without something to dab her tears away.”
Peter dipped his handkerchief into the kitchen’s water bucket and pressed a hand dramatically to his chest, hobbling along with his back bent. “Thank you, my dear boy,” he crooned in a falsetto voice from beneath the veil that sounded a little like Auntie Mable. “Come along, Agatha. We must be on our way.”
On the summersolstice each year, Berkway took a day to remember and honor the dead, and the cemetery courtyard was crowded with black-clad figures, all of them somber and slow-moving as they came to pay their respects. Bells tolled softly in the distance, each sound vibrating through the stone path beneath my feet. Incense burned at the front gates and we walked through the haze.
