Hob.
Huck.
The three who had seen the door open. The three who had looked through seven hundred years and said nothing.
Hob caught her eye across the hall. His humor softened, just for a moment, into something steadier. A promise without words.
Huck, seated near the hearth with honey on his bread and prayer still tucked somewhere behind his eyes, gave her the smallest nod.
Thomas’s hand closed over hers.
He knew where her thoughts had gone. Of course he did. The man missed entire conversations about fabric and propriety, but could read fear in the angle of her fingers.
“No one else knows,” he said quietly.
Amelia looked up at him.
His voice lowered so only she could hear. “No one else needs to.”
A tightness she had not known she carried loosened beneath her breastbone.
“Edith suspects.”
“Edith suspects everything.”
“That’s true.”
“She knows enough to guard you. Not enough to grieve what she cannot fathom.”
Amelia blinked against a sudden sting in her eyes.
Thomas’s thumb brushed over her knuckles, careful of the cut. “Your truth is yours.”
She looked at him for a long second, this impossible medieval man who had every legal right in his world to command, question, expose, and claim, and who instead sat beside her in a smoky hall giving her ownership of herself.
No wonder she had stayed. No wonder she would choose him again. Before she could answer, the horn sounded from the gate.
Every voice in the hall stopped.
The shift was instant. Laughter gone. Cups lowered. Hands moving toward knives. Hob straightening from the wall, all jest burned away. Thomas rising in a single smooth motion, one hand already at his sword.
Amelia stood with him.
Thomas looked down at her cream gown, the green ribbon Alyson had tied around her wrist as a “betrothed lady token,” and the stubborn set of her chin.
“You were about to tell me to stay behind,” she said.
“Aye.”
“Was it going to work?”
“Nay.”
“Good. We’re learning.”
His jaw tightened, but his eyes warmed for half a heartbeat before he turned toward the door.
The hall doors opened to cold daylight.
