THOMAS
Thomas had let Belmaine leave Ashcombe with Amelia because the law had stood between them like a drawn blade, and because one wrong move would have given the bastard exactly what he wanted.
He had endured it for as long as he could, then Crale’s smug face, the fear in Amelia’s eyes, and Belmaine’s hand closing around her arm had burned through every careful thought he possessed, leaving only one truth behind.
Ashcombe could not be saved by surrendering the woman who had saved it first.
So Thomas rode for Belmaine’s house with murder in his heart and Friar Huck’s honey cake crushed inside his tunic.
The cake had been given to him at the gate, thrust into his hand by the friar with the grave solemnity of a man passing along a holy relic instead of a slightly lopsided lump of flour, honey, spice, and stubborn optimism.
“For the road,” Huck had said.
Thomas had looked at him. Huck had looked back, round face damp beneath his hood, rain shining on his tonsure and beard. “A man rides better with food in him.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You’re furious. That isn’t the same thing.”
“I don’t have time for this.”
“Then chew quickly.”
Hob, already mounted beside him, had made a sound that might have been a cough if one were generous and had never met Hob.
Thomas had taken the cake because refusing it would have required speech, and speech was one more thing he had no patience for. He had tucked it away, gathered Galahad’s reins, and ridden through Ashcombe’s gate before anyone else could try to feed him, bless him, advise him, or tell him what he already knew. He’d let her down.
Amelia was with Belmaine. The thought rode before him, beside him, behind him, inside his ribs where breath ought to have been. Amelia in Belmaine’s house, with Crale’s false claim wrapped around her throat like a rope. Amelia with no kin, no standing, no way to make a court believe what she was unless Thomas found a way to tear the lie open before every witness who mattered.
He had sworn to bring her back.
He had also sworn, in the silence of his own soul, that he could not lose Ashcombe to save her unless there was no other way.
That was the sin of it. That thought. That ugly, necessary thought that kept pace with the soldier who wanted only to put steel through Belmaine’s soft, well-fed middle and be done.
A younger Thomas would have cut down every man who kept her from him, taken her up before him, and left judgment to God and their bodies for the crows.
That Thomas had been easier to understand. This one had widows in his hall, children beneath his roof, fields that would need sowing when spring came, tenants whose lives were tied to Ashcombe’s stones whether they liked it or not. He couldnot spend a manor’s future on anger, no matter how clean and satisfying it felt.
The old track unfurled beneath Galahad’s hooves, slick with rain and leaves. Hedgerows pressed close on either side, blackthorn and hazel clawing at cloak and stirrup. Beyond them, the fields lay low and wet beneath a pewter sky, the stubble dark with weather, the ditches running brown. The air smelled of mud, horse sweat, soaked wool, and the faint sour sweetness of apples fallen somewhere nearby and left to rot.
Hob rode at his right, broad shoulders hunched beneath a dark cloak, his beard dripping steadily onto his chest.
“You’re thinking too loudly,” Hob said.
“I’m going to get her.”
“I know.”
“Belmaine will use the law until law fails him, and then he’ll use whatever filth comes next.”
“I know that too.”
Thomas tightened his hand around the reins. Galahad’s ears flicked back, offended by the grip, and Thomas forced his fingers to ease. “There has to be another way.”
Hob glanced at him.
The words had come out without permission, dragged up by the rain and the road and the memory of Amelia standing in the solar with ink on her fingers, finding sense where Thomas had seen only ruin. She would say there was always another angle. Another route. Another list to make.
