Edith endured one verse, then held up a ladle. “If the next line mentions the miller’s daughter, I’ll put that ladle somewhere it was not blessed to go.”
The song changed at once.
“Cowards,” Hob said.
“You especially,” Edith told him.
“I had not yet begun to sing.”
“I know the look of a man preparing sin.”
Huck nodded over his cup. “An important pastoral gift.”
Amelia laughed. Not the quick little sound she used to deflect Walter, or the soft smile she gave Alyson when the child crawled close with sticky fingers and way too many questions. This laugh was warm, slipping out of her before she thought better of it, and the whole hall seemed to brighten around the sound.
Thomas wanted, with a force that nearly unmanned him, to be the cause of it.
He looked away. The fire blurred for a heartbeat, orange light over blackened wood, and for one terrible instant it was not a hearth but a field, not laughter but men crying out, not harvest-home but Evesham’s red ruin reaching for him again. His hand tightened around his cup until the wood bit into his palm.
Then Alyson appeared at his side. She had honey on one wrist, a smudge of ash on her cheek, and the solemnity of a small woman bearing official orders.
Thomas looked down. “What have you done?”
“Nothing.”
“That is rarely true.”
“It’s true right now.”
“That is not the same thing.”
She held up both hands. “Mistress Amelia says I must tell you good night because I am too tired to remember my manners, and she says you’re to inspect my hands.”
Thomas looked over the child’s head.
Amelia was watching them from beside the hearth, her expression soft in a way that made something foolish run through him.
He looked back at Alyson’s hands. They were mostly clean, though the honey near her wrist had collected one suspicious oat flake and two crumbs.
He considered the matter gravely. “You will live.”
Alyson beamed. “I washed twice.”
“A fearsome achievement.”
“Wat only washed once.”
“I heard that,” Wat said from Amelia’s side.
“You were meant to,” Alyson said, with such perfect imitation of Edith that Hob wheezed into his cup.
Thomas leaned closer to inspect her hands again. “You may go to bed with honor.”
“Good.” She leaned against his leg for one brief, trusting moment before scampering back to Amelia.
The weight of that small body against him did something no mead could soften and no battlefield had managed to kill. It hurt. The way dawn hurt after a night one had not expected to survive.
At his elbow, Huck lowered himself onto the bench with the careful satisfaction of a man who had eaten well and intended to discuss truths no one had invited.
