“Do not thank me,” he said, more roughly than he meant.
She went quiet.
He hated himself before he finished. “I am the worst danger, mistress. You’d do well to remember it.”
Cygnet’s hooves struck the packed earth before the gate.
A moment passed, then she said, carefully, “Is that what you think?”
He did not answer. Because every truth in him had become a knot he could not cut without drawing blood.
They rode beneath the gatehouse and into Ashcombe’s yard. Hob came forward to take the mule. Wat ran up to ask if there had been bandits. Alyson asked for apples before remembering manners and asking if there had been apples. Edith appeared in the hall doorway, took one look at Amelia’s face, and then atThomas’s, and her eyes narrowed with the precision of a drawn knife.
Thomas dismounted, helping Amelia down because not helping would draw notice, and because touching her one more time seemed both punishment and necessity. She did not look at him when her feet touched the ground. She thanked Cygnet instead, stroking the mare’s neck with a hand that was steadier than Thomas deserved.
“You rode well,” he said.
It was too little. Too late. Coward’s coin.
Amelia looked at him then. Her face was composed, but her eyes were not. They were green and hurt and far too knowing.
“Careful,” she said softly. “That almost sounded like praise.”
He had said those words to her once in the solar, when the accounts had first begun making sense beneath her hands. Hearing them returned to him now should have amused him.
It did not.
Before he could answer, she turned and went to Edith, already opening the satchel and speaking of salt, cloth, nails, and the price of peas as if nothing at all had happened on the road.
Thomas stood beside Cygnet with the reins in his hand and watched her go.
Hob came to stand beside him. For once, the man said nothing. Thomas would have preferred mockery. He could answer mockery. He could snarl at it, bat it aside, survive it.
At last Hob took the reins from him. “Market went well?”
Thomas looked toward the hall, where Amelia had disappeared into warmth, work, and women who would see too much.
“We got what we needed.”
Hob grunted. “That was not what I asked.”
Thomas turned on him. Hob looked back, broad and weathered and impossible to frighten after all these years. There was no laughter in his face now. Only old loyalty and older grief.
Thomas looked away first. “The road is not safe,” he said.
“Nay,” Hob said. “Roads seldom are.”
“She does not know how men look for weakness.”
“She learns.”
“Not quick enough.”
“No one does, at first.”
Thomas’s jaw worked. “I should have sent you.”
“Aye.”
