Thomas looked over his shoulder. “Is aught amiss?”
Walter’s face suggested many things were amiss, beginning with creation itself. “The rye will not cut itself, my lord.”
“No,” Amelia muttered. “But wouldn’t that be nice.”
Thomas heard her. His eyes came back to hers, and for a moment the chill of morning, the bustle of the yard, the fear of failing, all of it faded around the two of them.
Then Hob bellowed, “If everyone has finished gazing at everyone else like May Day calves, mayhap we might save the harvest.”
Amelia nearly swallowed her tongue.
Thomas turned very slowly.
Hob looked innocently toward the sky.
Walter, to his credit, had turned Amelia’s list into something that looked far more official and far less like the frantic work of a woman who still wanted coffee. The reeve, a square man named Osbern with straw-colored hair and one eye that watered constantly, stood with him and called names from a tablet while Walter marked them with a stylus. Men were sent to the low rye first, just as Walter had advised, for that ground held damp longer and would rot if rain came. Stronger backs went to cutting. Quick hands to binding. Younger boys were set to carrying water and gathering cords. Older women minded the smallest children under the shade near the hedgerow while still helping with mending, sorting, and stripping anything useful.
Edith was in charge of the food and drink.
Amelia carried the tablet, checking names, making certain the bread and cheese went with the right group, that water and small beer followed the workers, that no one took the cracked jug Walter had sworn was perfectly serviceable until it leaked down Wat’s leg. She moved between Edith, Walter, Hob, and Osbern, passing information the way she once passed messages between caterers, florists, lighting technicians, and a notorious tech guy whose vision for simple elegance had involved seven hundred chocolate boobies and three emotional breakdowns.
Only now the boobies were grain and if they failed, people might starve.
No pressure.
By the time the sun finally cleared the ridge, the fields had come alive. The rye stood tall and pale gold, heavy-headed and rustling in a faint wind that smelled of damp earth, crushed grass, and summer’s last green breath. Beyond it, the manor spread in uneven patches. There were strips of barley and oats, stubble from the first cut fields, hedges thick with bramble,distant cattle flicking their tails, the silver thread of water where the brook turned through the meadow. The Malvern Hills lay soft and blue on the horizon, half haze and half promise.
Amelia had seen beautiful places in her life. Hotel terraces lit with fairy lights. Gardens arranged for weddings. Corporate retreats in mountain lodges where everything smelled like cedar, expensive soap, and people pretending not to check email. But this was beauty with dirt under its nails, alive and hungry and utterly indifferent to whether she understood it.
A line of men moved into the rye. The first sweep of the scythes made her stomach dip.
The blades whispered through the stalks in long, even arcs, each man stepping, swinging, stepping again, the motion rhythmic and deadly graceful.
It was not like the lists, where Thomas with a sword made violence look brutally controlled. This was labor, but there was skill in it, and a kind of rough music. Sweep, fall, step. Sweep, fall, step. The cut rye went down in shimmering rows, and behind the cutters came the binders, women and men both, stooping to gather the stalks and twist them into sheaves with bands of straw.
Thomas worked among the cutters. He could have stood on the rise and watched like a lord in a story, issuing orders while everyone else sweated through their clothes. Instead he had taken his place in the line with Hob two men down and Osbern beyond him, and he swung the scythe with the same contained strength he seemed to bring to everything. His dark tunic pulled across his shoulders. The muscles in his forearms flexed each time he guided the blade. Sweat darkened his hair at the temples.
Amelia turned very deliberately away and nearly walked into a basket of cheese.
“Careful, mistress,” said a girl of about fourteen, biting back a grin.
“I was watching for holes.”
“In the air?”
“Yes.”
The girl gave her a look that said Amelia had just confirmed all rumors of faery blood but was too polite to mention it.
Excellent.
She found Edith beneath a tree. Bread had been divided into cloth bundles. Cheese sat wrapped and shaded beneath damp linen. Small beer filled several jugs, and a bucket of well water sat nearby for those Amelia kept forcing to drink so they wouldn’t get dehydrated, despite Walter’s repeated statement that too much water would wash the strength out of a body.
It wasn’t a battle she could win, so Amelia stopped trying to explain.
“How are we doing?” Edith asked.
She checked the tablet, already smudged with dirt and a spot of what she sincerely hoped was cheese.
