He was huge and warm, and he laughed at everything, a big rolling laugh that made you want to keep going just to hear it again. He told me a long story about Korfas getting lost in the shadow-wood that Korfas, standing right there, clearly had heard four hundred times and laughed anyway.
Then he pressed a second cup of cider into my hand before I'd finished the first, and when I asked why he had two, he looked baffled, like the answer was self-evident. "So I never run out," he said.
"That's either the saddest thing anyone's ever said to me or the most efficient," I responded.
"Both." He looked delighted, like I'd handed him a prize. "You're allowed to be both. That's the whole trick." He nudged the cup toward my mouth. "Drink. You're behind."
I was. He stayed a cup or two ahead of the entire party, easy and smooth and never once sloppy, just topped up, a careful inchof cider always kept between himself and whatever sat under the laugh.
He thought I was funny, and he thought I was beautiful; he said so plainly, three times, with the slightly stunned air of a man who couldn't believe his luck. He looked at me like I was a gift somebody had finally let him keep.
I didn't have a defense for being looked at like that.
I'd spent twenty-seven years being the fun one, the one men loved having around right up until they met someone restful and married her within a year. I had a whole filing cabinet of being wanted,almost.And here was a sweet, enormous man holding cider and looking at me like keeping me was the obvious and only plan.
So when the trial paperwork came up, two days later, in Nezara's clean little office with the clock ticking down on my whole life, I said yes to Zarcal.
I said yes with my head, which pointed out, reasonably, that I had one swing left, that Zarcal was kind and wanted me and would be good to me, that those were the words the scary blacksmith had used and even he thought I should take them.
My body, the traitor, kept leaning toward the door the whole time, toward something I still had no name for. Toward the forge and the smoke that hung over that end of town, toward a man who'd seen the back page of me in thirty seconds and told me not to waste my last try on him.
I signed anyway. I'm a high achiever. Always have been.
Zarcal's place was on the south road where it intersectst with the main street, a snug timber house he'd built himself and was so proud of that he showed me every joint and beam like introducing family. He'd made up a room for me, with a low bed and a stool and a lamp I could reach.
He'd done it badly and earnestly, the steps a little crooked, the shelf a hair too high, and the wrongness of it was somehowmore touching than if he'd gotten it right because you could see him measuring a problem he didn't understand and trying anyway.
He was a good man, and watching him try this hard was its own quiet ache.
He cooked. He told stories. Beyond a hand on my shoulder, he never once reached for me, courtly and careful, waiting for a signal I kept not giving. The first night I lay in the crooked little bed in the good man's good house and listened to him moving around after dark, restless, up at hours no settled person keeps, and I stared at the ceiling and wondered what the hell I was doing.
It was simple: Zarcal, kind. Zarcal, wants me. Zarcal, last chance. A snug house and a husband glad of me every day. Smart. Safe. The correct answer to the whole equation of my life.
I told myself the blacksmith was a closed door, and I'd learn to walk past it.
I'd warm to Zarcal, I decided; warmth was a thing you could practice, and I'd practiced worse.
The third day, I found a reason to walk into town. Smoke from the forge hung over the street, and I did not go in. I had that much sense. I just walked past it slowly, like an idiot, like a moth doing laps of a thing that would obviously burn it.
I caught one glimpse of Lorkin through the open front, stripped to the waist in the furnace light, a hammer coming down and sparks going up around him like the whole forge was breathing fire on his account. A wave ofwanthit me so strongly that I had to go stand behind the apothecary and have a word with myself.
"You're with Zarcal," I told the wall of the apothecary. "Zarcal is kind. Zarcal is the answer. You’re not going to torch your last good chance over a man who told you to your face he won't keepyou. You've been returned twice. You cannot afford taste. Taste is for women with options."
The apothecary wall, wisely, said nothing.
I walked back to the south road and the snug house and the good man, and I practiced warmth at him over supper, and I was, I think, fairly convincing.
It's the one thing I've never been bad at, and it has never once saved me.
4
LORKIN
I heldit together for five days.
I cleared the back orders and then forged orders nobody had placed, and another knife went up on the wall. When Korfas came by for a plow fitting and saw the rack, he opened his mouth, looked at my face, and shut it again.
Smart man, Korfas.
