Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Istarted the next morning.
He came in with wood and eggs and I was sitting at the table with the furs wrapped around my shoulders, my hair loose.
I never wore my hair loose. I kept it braided, pinned, pulled away from my face, the way a woman wears her hair when she wants to be left alone.
But this morning I’d run my fingers through it until it fell in dark waves past my shoulders, the way William used to like it, the way I knew made the line of my throat look longer.
I didn’t look at Dietrich when he came in. Just sat there with my hands wrapped around a cup of cold water, staring at the fire. Let him see the hair. Let him notice without being shown.
He noticed. I heard the pause in his step, half a second, barely there, but I was listening for it and I caught it the way a hunter catches the twitch in the grass that tells her where the rabbit is hiding.
He went to the hearth. Built the fire. Cooked the eggs. Set the plate in front of me. All of it in silence, all of it with his eyes fixed firmly on anything that wasn’t me.
“Thank you.” I set down the fork.
He looked at me. I’d never thanked him before. For days I’d taken the food without a word, without acknowledgement, eating it like it was owed to me. Two words and his whole body changed, shoulders dropping a fraction, the rigid line of his back softening just enough that I could see it.
“You’re welcome.” And then he left to chop wood, and I sat at the table and ate his eggs and felt something ugly and necessary take root in my chest.
The next time he checked the herbs, I moved closer.
He was at the shelf, turning jars in his hands and reading grandmother’s careful script on the labels. I crossed the room and stood beside him, close enough that my shoulder nearly brushed his arm, close enough that he could smell me.
“Which ones are going bad?” I asked. Softer than I’d spoken to him since I’d arrived.
He went rigid. I watched the tendons in his forearms pull taut, watched his fingers tighten on the jar he was holding.
“The comfrey,” he managed after a moment. “And the yarrow needs drying again.”
“Show me.” I reached past him for the jar on the shelf, and my arm brushed against his chest. A small touch.
He stepped back so fast he nearly knocked the mortar off the counter.
“You can check the rest yourself.” He crossed to the far side of the room where he stayed for the next hour, mending a hole in his coat with stitches that were too tight and too fast.
I turned back to the shelf and smiled where he couldn’t see it.
I let the shift slip on a morning he came in with water from the stream.
I was sitting on the bed with the grimoire open in my lap, openly now, no longer hiding it. The shift I wore was old, the neckline stretched wide from years of washing, and I’d tugged it to one side so it hung off my left shoulder, baring skin from collarbone to the curve where shoulder met arm.
I didn’t look up when he entered. Just kept my eyes on the page and let him see what I was showing him.
The bucket hit the floor too hard. Water sloshed over the rim.
“Careful.” I kept my eyes on the page. “You’ll flood the place.”
He said nothing. I heard him cross to the hearth, heard him crouch, heard the unsteady clatter of kindling being arranged by hands that had forgotten how to be steady. I turned a page and let the shift slip another inch.
He left twenty minutes later. Didn’t cook. Didn’t eat. Just grabbed his coat and went, and the bar scraped into place with more force than necessary.
I pulled the shift back up and stared at the door and told myself this was working.
It was working.
He was mending a snare at the table when I touched him.
Gut string threaded between his fingers, a wooden frame braced against his knee, his sleeves rolled up to the elbow.
The firelight caught the scars along his forearms, pale lines crossing over each other, some thin and old, some thick and ragged, a map of years spent living rough in a forest that didn’t forgive mistakes.
I crossed the room and stood beside his chair. Close. Closer than before. Close enough that the heat from his body reached mine through the thin linen of the shift.
“Dietrich.” I said it softly, letting the fight drain out of the word.
His hands froze on the gut string. His whole body went rigid — every muscle locking at once, a man bracing for impact.
I reached out and touched his arm. Just my fingertips against his forearm where the scars were thickest. His skin was warm and rough and I felt him shudder, a tremor that started where my fingers rested and ran up through his shoulder and down his spine.
The snare frame clattered off his knee and hit the floor.
“Don’t,” he breathed, but the word came out thin and airless, nothing like a command.
“Why?” I kept my hand where it was. Let my thumb trace a slow line along the inside of his wrist where the veins ran blue beneath the skin.
“Because I can’t ...” His grip on the edge of the chair turned his knuckles white. “You need to step back.”
“What happens if I don’t?”
He turned his head just enough that I could see his profile, the scar across his cheekbone, the way his lips were pressed together so tight the blood had left them.
“Something I can’t take back.” He exhaled it like smoke and went quiet.
I held the touch for three more heartbeats. One. Two. Three. Then I stepped away and crossed to the bed and sat down and picked up the grimoire like nothing had happened.
He stood from the chair so abruptly it scraped backward across the stone. Then he walked out. Didn’t take his coat. Didn’t bar the door. Just walked into the snow in his shirtsleeves and disappeared into the trees.
The door stood open, cold air flooding the room.
I could have run. Right then. He’d left the door unbarred and he was gone and the forest was right there.
But the timing wasn’t right. He’d come after me too quickly, would track me through fresh snow before I’d gone a mile. I needed him more than distracted. I needed him destroyed.
I got up and closed the door myself. Sat back down and waited.
He came back an hour later. Soaking wet, his hair plastered to his skull, his shirt clinging to his chest. He’d been in the stream. In winter. In water cold enough to stop a heart.
He looked at me from the doorway with eyes that were half fury and half a thing I didn’t dare name.
“Don’t do that again,” he warned.
“Do what?” I asked, and let my gaze travel down his wet shirt and back up again, slow enough that he could feel it.
He barred the door from the inside that night. Slept in the chair by the fire with his back to me. I lay in the bed and listened to him not sleeping, the uneven breathing, the creak of the chair when he shifted, the long stretches of silence that were louder than sound.
One more push and he’d shatter.
I lay in the dark and planned the last move.
He was restringing his bow by the fire the next morning, fingers working the cord with quiet concentration, when I came to sit across from him.
I didn’t try anything. Didn’t touch him, didn’t arrange the shift. I just sat there and watched his hands work, and after a while I spoke.
“What wood is that?” I asked.
He looked up, wary, searching my face for the trap. When he didn’t find it, or thought he didn’t, he glanced down at the bow.
“Yew.” He turned the shaft between his fingers. “Cut it three winters ago from a tree near the eastern ridge.”
“You made it yourself?”
“Who else would make it?” he scoffed. He ran his thumb along the curve of the limb. “You learn the feel of a bow the way you learn anything worth knowing. Slowly. With your hands.”
“My husband used to say something like that about his hunting knife.” I traced the rim of my cup with one finger. “He’d sharpen it for hours and talk to it like it could hear him.”
His hands stilled on the cord. Just for a moment — a hitch so small I almost missed it. Then he went back to working the string.
“William.” He didn’t look up.
I went cold. “How do you know his name?”
He kept his eyes on the bowstring. “I know the forest. I know who walks through it.”
“He’s been dead for years.” I kept my tone careful.
“I know,” he replied, and the flatness of it, the weight, told me he wasn’t guessing.
“Did you know him?” I pressed.
His fingers pulled the cord tight and tested the tension. “I knew of him. Tall man. Broad. Hunted with a group of six.” He paused. “Laughed louder than any of them.”
My throat tightened. That was William. Exactly William — the man whose laugh could fill a clearing and make the birds go quiet.
“How do you know what his laugh sounded like?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. Just wound the cord around the notch with practiced fingers and reached for the beeswax to seal it.
“Dietrich.”
“I’ve lived in this forest a long time.” He shrugged one shoulder. “You hear things.”
That wasn’t an answer. I wanted to push, wanted to grab his shoulders and shake the truth out of him. How much had he watched? How long? Had he been in the trees when William walked out our door for the last time? Had he been there when —
I stopped the thought before it could finish. I didn’t want to know. I wasn’t ready to know.
“He told me once he fought off a bear with a belt knife and a piece of cheese.” I only shook a little.
His mouth twitched. “A piece of cheese.”
“Aged cheddar. Very hard. He said you could kill a man with it.”
He laughed. A short sound, startled out of him before he could swallow it, rough from disuse and over almost as soon as it started.
But real. I watched the way it changed his face, the scar shifting, the lines around his eyes deepening, the hard mask cracking just long enough for me to see the man underneath.
“He had six men with him when he went in the last time.” I let that one settle. “They never found all the pieces.”
The laughter died. He set the bow down and looked at the fire.