“Good,” he said.
Thomas looked at him. “What is good?”
“Nothing.” Huck picked up the basket. “Merely admiring Winifred’s judgment.”
Amelia tucked the honey jar against her ribs. “Please tell Winifred she has excellent timing.”
“I shall not,” Huck said. “It’ll make her impossible.”
Edith took the empty bread board and gave Amelia one long look. “Do what you must, but do not forget that clever women still need supper.”
“That sounded loving and threatening.”
“It was both.”
Thomas stepped closer, lowering his voice. “Do not go beyond the walls without telling me.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
His expression suggested he had grave doubts about the honesty of that sentence.
“Amelia.”
“I heard you.”
“Nay. You listened. There is a difference.”
She hated that he knew that.
For one heartbeat, the hall, the gossip, the cold, the watching men beyond the ridge, all of it narrowed to the space between them. His hand lifted slightly, as if he meant to touch the honey jar, or her arm, or perhaps the curl near her cheek that had fought free of her wimple again. Then he stopped himself.
Thomas could face a dozen armed men without blinking, but one loose curl apparently required a council of war. Amelia smiled despite herself.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
Outside, the wind pushed at the door and sent a thin whisper along the rushes. Somewhere beyond Ashcombe, a man in Belmaine’s colors was likely figuring out what had gone wrong and deciding what to try next.
Mistress Bell’s salt had been the warning. Huck’s honey had been the answer.
Amelia held the jar a little tighter and went to find paper and ink.
THOMAS
The mill report lied. Col and Hob had said the wheel was sound, and Thomas had believed them, because Col and Hob were competent men who had never lied to him in their lives.
But Col and Hob had examined the wheel, not the sluice. And the sluice was the problem.
Thomas discovered this at dawn when the miller’s boy came pounding through the gate with mud to his knees, leaves in his hair, and the expression of a child who’d been sent to deliver bad news.
The sluice gate had slipped in the night. Half the millpond had poured itself into the lower meadow, the wheel wouldn’t turn properly, and the mill couldn’t grind.
He’d been standing near the stable with one hand on Cygnet’s neck and his mind somewhere along the Worcester road when the boy arrived.
Amelia heard the commotion and came outside wrapped in her cloak, the hood fallen back from her face, her hair pinned up thoroughly, not a curl escaping anywhere. It gave her a severe look that didn’t suit her at all.
She took one look at the miller’s boy and said, “Is it the sluice?”
