“Or take toll where none is owed.”
“Mayhap.” Thomas stared down into the cup. “Mayhap worse. But unless the king himself chooses to look kindly on Ashcombe, none of it helps us.”
“The king himself is not in the habit of looking kindly on men who followed Montfort.”
“No.”
“Queen’s folk, mayhap,” Hob said slowly. “They travel too.”
Thomas looked at him.
Hob shrugged. “I listen when Friar Huck drinks.”
Despite the weight pressing down on him, Thomas almost smiled.
From the hall, Edith’s voice cut through a rising quarrel near the hearth.
“If that crust hits the floor, Wat, I’ll feed it to you with the rushes still on it.”
Thomas looked toward the doorway.
Across the hall, Amelia sat at the table again, head bent over a linen inventory. The window light touched her cheek, her freckles, the smooth line of her covered hair. She didn’t look up, but her quill had stopped moving.
Thomas’s eyes narrowed.
Hob saw it. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“That woman’s quill stopping is never nothing.”
Thomas looked at him.
Hob lifted both hands. “I’m old, not blind.”
“You are not old.”
“I am old enough to know when a woman is listening.”
Thomas looked back.
Amelia dipped the quill, wrote nothing, and then very carefully wrote something on a scrap of parchment that had not been there a moment before.
A small, dangerous sensation moved through Thomas.
Hope, mayhap. Or terror. With Amelia, the two had begun traveling in company.
Hob’s beard twitched. “There she is.”
“Do not sound pleased.”
“I’m not pleased. I’m entertained.”
“That is worse.”
“Aye.”
Thomas watched Amelia fold one hand over the scrap as Alyson wandered too close with her half-peeled apple and too many questions in her eyes.
