Belmaine would face inquiry, not immediate ruin, though ruin had begun sharpening its knives.
The queen’s letters would matter. Sir Aymon would speak. The rescue would travel farther than any rumor Belmaine had started. By morning, the tale would be on the road with Pickering’s clerks, in the mouths of guards, in the saddlebags of men who thought themselves discreet and never were. For tonight, royal scrutiny had turned.
For tonight, that was enough.
Thomas looked toward the stair one last time.
“I’ll do better,” he said, though no one was near enough to hear.
Hob, unfortunately, had excellent ears.
“You’d best,” he said.
Outside, rain washed Belmaine’s mud from the stones of Ashcombe’s yard, and inside, beneath rafters blackened by generations of smoke and survival, the castle exhaled.
THOMAS
Three days after Sir Aymon de Sauveterre departed Ashcombe with Pickering’s sworn notes, Belmaine’s signet, and enough outrage to fuel three royal inquiries, Thomas discovered peace could be nearly as unsettling as danger.
A man could put his back to a wall, count blades, watch hands near belts, listen for hooves on the road, and endlessly pace.
Peace sat in the hall at dawn while Edith bullied the household into eating porridge thick enough to mortar a wall. Peace sounded like Alyson arguing that if Amelia was allowed honey in hers, then justice demanded the same for all small children. And peace was Wat carrying two cups of small beer without spilling either and looking so proud of himself that Hob pretended not to notice when the boy added three new swear words to a retelling of Osric falling in the mud.
And peace was Amelia sitting near the hearth with a bruise fading yellow along one cheek, her hair braided over one shoulder because Edith claimed her hair had been through enough and deserved order. She held a cup of willow-bark tea in both hands as if it were poison.
“It tastes like an angry tree,” she said.
Edith folded her arms. “Drink it.”
“I have questions about the evidence behind this remedy.”
“You have a bruise. This will help.”
“I also have taste buds.”
“Not if you keep talking.”
Amelia looked at Thomas. “Are you hearing this?”
“Aye.”
“And?”
He looked from her to Edith, then back again. “I have survived Evesham, Belmaine, and Walter. I am not choosing death by Edith before supper.”
Hob thumped his cup on the table. “Wise.”
Walter, seated two places down with a roll tucked beneath his elbow because the man trusted no table without parchment on it, sniffed. “I do not see how accounts compare to war or Belmaine.”
“No,” Amelia said. “You wouldn’t.”
Friar Huck spread honey on a heel of bread with the absorbed devotion of a man conducting holy rites. “The willow will help. The honey would help more.”
Edith glared at him.
He added another smear. “Spiritually.”
Thomas watched Amelia’s mouth curve despite the weariness in her face, and the tight place beneath his ribs eased. Not gone. Never gone.
