Amelia let out a broken laugh and touched Wat’s cheek. “No stabbing. Not today.”
“Tomorrow?” Alyson asked wetly.
Edith made a noise. “Saints preserve us.”
“Maybe not tomorrow either,” Amelia said, voice trembling.
Friar Huck came forward last. His brown habit was dusted with flour at one sleeve and there was honey on his thumb,which was such a Huck thing that it should have comforted Thomas, yet somehow made everything worse. He pressed a small twist of cloth into Amelia’s hand.
“Honey cake,” he said. “For the road.”
Belmaine looked offended. “She rides less than an hour.”
Huck smiled mildly. “Then it may sweeten an hour that sorely needs it.”
Amelia closed her fingers around the bundle. “Thank you.”
Thomas watched all of them touch her because he could not.
If he did, he would not let go and there would be hell to pay.
Amelia walked toward the palfrey, past him, and for one terrible breath, he thought she would pass without looking to him. Perhaps he deserved it.
Then she stopped beside him.
Close enough that he could smell the faint clean scent of lavender Edith tucked among the linens. Close enough that one escaped curl stirred against his arm in the wind.
She spoke softly, so none would hear.
“I told you the truth.”
His throat closed. “I know.”
Her eyes searched his face as if she were looking for the man she had trusted and finding only the armor he’d put between them.
“There are things I haven’t told you,” she said. “Impossible things. But not this. Never this.”
“I know.”
Her mouth trembled then, and it nearly killed him.
“Then why does it feel like you don’t?”
There was no answer that didn’t damn him. Thomas reached for words and found none. That was his curse. On battlefields, he always knew where to put his hands. Shield there. Sword high. Step left. Cut under. He knew how to use his body to keep men alive, or avenge them when he couldn’t. But here, with Amelialooking up at him as if he had become another door closing against her, he had only silence.
Belmaine had counted on that too.
Amelia waited one heartbeat longer, then she nodded once, as if some final account had balanced in her head and left them both poorer.
“Take care of Wat and Alyson,” she said.
“I’ll bring you back.”
Her smile was small and sharp and not a smile at all. “You keep saying that as if it changes the leaving.”
Then she walked to the horse, let Hob help her mount. Carefully. Gently. His face looked carved from old oak.
“Sit deep,” he muttered. “And if that one touches your bridle, bite him.”
