So she got up.
Mud clung to her knee. Her palm was slick with it. She wiped both hands uselessly on the wool blanket, then regretted that, because the blanket already smelled, and now it looked as if she had wrestled the sheep and lost.
“Fine,” she said to the tower. “Fine. You win round one.”
The tower didn’t respond, which was rude, but probably for the best.
She made her way back down the slope and into the bailey. A pair of women hauled buckets from the well. A boy carried a basket of onions almost as large as his chest. Chickens darted through the yard with the lawless confidence of creatures who knew no one had the energy to stop them. Near the stables, a cart stood half-sunk in the mud, one wheel crooked, while three men argued over it in the grim, unhelpful manner of men everywhere confronted with a repair.
Thomas was there with his sleeves shoved up over his forearms, dark hair still damp from the morning mist, mud on his boots and a smear of something dark along one wrist. The scar at his jaw looked pale against the roughness of his stubble, and the lines of his face were set in that stern expression that seemed to have been carved there by weather, war, and other people’s foolishness. He was listening to one of the men explain something with both hands while looking as if he had already lost patience three sentences ago.
Amelia stopped walking.
It was a deeply unfair thing, she thought, to be hurled into a nightmare and find the nightmare supervised by a man who looked like that.
“Do not say that out loud,” she muttered to herself.
Thomas turned his head as if he had heard her. His gaze found her across the yard, moved over the blanket around her shoulders, the mud on her skirt, her face, and sharpened.
He said something to the men, then strode toward her.
“Where have you been?”
The words were abrupt even though his voice was not. There was a rough edge to it, yes, but beneath that was something else, something that didn’t fit neatly with scowls and scars and the large sword at his hip.
“Looking for the wedding,” Amelia said.
AMELIA
It wasn’t the answer she meant to give. It simply slipped out.
His brows drew together. “The wedding?”
“Never mind.” She pressed her hand against the blanket, leaving another muddy streak. “You need help with the cart?”
His gaze lingered on her face a moment longer, and she had the strangest feeling he knew she was using the cart the way a drowning person used a plank. He merely looked back at the crooked wheel and jerked his chin.
“Hold where I tell you, and do not put your fingers near the iron.”
“That sounds ominous.”
One corner of his mouth twitched.
Amelia followed him to the cart because she needed something to do with her hands, and because standing still made the whole world crowd close. Thomas put her where he wanted her with a few words and a brief touch to her elbow. The touch was gone before she could decide whether to be offended by being positioned like a chair or grateful that someone seemed to know what came next.
She braced the cart when he told her, held the heavy iron pin when he put it in her palm. She watched.
Really watched.
The small, cold voice began filing evidence with the awful efficiency of an auditor.
No planes crossed the sky. Not one. No white contrails, no distant engines, no hum of something moving too high to see, no cars slowly driving down a non-existent lane. Only birds wheeling over the fields and the wet slap of boots in mud.
The cart was rough, worn, patched where wood had split, its iron fittings dark and uneven from a smith’s hammer. The rope was real rope, coarse enough to sting her fingers. The axle smelled of old grease. The men beside Thomas wore wool and linen and leather, all of it stained by work instead of designed to look stained by a costume department.
One of them had three teeth and didn’t seem troubled by the lack. A boy holding a horse by the bridle had a scar cutting through his upper lip that no neat modern stitch had ever touched. Everyone was thin in a way that made her think, uneasily, of hunger rather than those weight loss shots that were all the rage.
A woman crossed the yard carrying bread on a board. A child darted after her, barefoot in the mud. Somewhere, a hammer rang against metal, uneven and sharp. Smoke drifted low from the kitchens, mingling with the stench of animals, people, and wet hay.
