Chapter 19 #2
“I’ll be outside,” he managed.
He stood. His hands left my hair and I felt the absence of them like cold water. He didn’t look at me, kept his eyes on the floor, on the wall, on anything that wasn’t my bare shoulders above the waterline, and walked to the door and opened it and stepped through it and closed it behind him.
I sat in the cooling water and pressed my fingers to my mouth and tasted him on my lips and didn’t pretend I didn’t want more.
The water went cold before I got out.
I was sitting by the fire in my damp shift, combing my wet hair with my fingers, when he came back.
He didn’t come in empty-handed. He carried a bundle folded over his arm. White fabric, soft, carefully held like it mattered.
“I found this,” he began, holding it out without quite meeting my eyes. “In the back room. Your grandmother’s medicine cupboard, behind the jars. Wrapped in cloth and hidden.” He paused. “I think she put it there on purpose.”
I took it from him. Unfolded it.
A dress. White linen, finer than anything else in the cottage.
Not rough homespun but a weave that was softer, woven tight and smooth.
The collar was embroidered with small flowers in thread that had once been bright and had faded to soft colors.
Blue cornflowers, red poppies, green leaves stitched with tiny, precise stitches I recognized immediately.
“Grandmother made this,” I breathed, my fingers tracing the embroidery. “The stitching — it’s the same hand that labeled the herb jars. The same tiny flowers she put on everything.”
He nodded. “I thought so too.”
I held the dress up against myself. The bodice was fitted, the waist narrow, the skirt falling in a simple line to the floor. It had been made for a woman my size, my grandmother’s size when she was young, or Sophia’s size, or mine.
“I’ll turn around,” he offered.
He faced the wall. I pulled the damp shift over my head and dropped it, then lifted the white dress and let it fall over my body.
The linen settled against my clean skin, cool and soft and smelling faintly of cedar from the chest where it had been stored for two decades.
The bodice fit close, the embroidered collar sitting just below my throat.
The sleeves were long, the cuffs stitched with the same tiny flowers.
The skirt whispered against my legs when I moved.
It fit. As if it had been waiting for me.
I reached for the red cloak where it lay folded on the bed.
Drew it around my shoulders and fastened it at my throat.
The red wool against the white linen. The cloak I’d stitched by candlelight over the dress my grandmother had sewn.
A piece of a woman’s life, separated by decades and a forest and a death, brought back together on her granddaughter’s body.
“You can turn around,” I told him.
He turned.
He stopped.
His mouth opened and nothing came out. His eyes moved from the red cloak to the white dress to the embroidered collar to my face, clean and flushed from the bath, framed by damp dark hair that was already starting to curl as it dried, and whatever he’d been about to say died somewhere between his brain and his tongue.
I’d never seen a man look at a woman the way he was looking at me. Not with desire, though that was there. Not with admiration, though that was there too. It was recognition. Like he was seeing a person he’d imagined so many times that the reality of her had become impossible to believe.
“What?” I demanded, self-conscious under his stare.
He swallowed. Tried to speak. Swallowed again.
“You look like...” He stopped. His words had gone strange.
Thick and rough, catching on a knot in his throat.
“At the market. When you were a girl. You had a red ribbon in your hair and honey on your fingers and I couldn’t.
..” He broke off. Pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes.
“I’m sorry. I just… I wasn’t expecting.. .”
“Wasn’t expecting what?” I asked softly.
He dropped his hand. His eyes were bright and the amber in them caught the firelight and turned it to gold.
“You,” he answered. “Standing in this cottage. Wearing her dress and your cloak. Looking like everything I ever ...”
He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. The sentence completed itself in the way he looked at me, a man seeing the girl from the market grown into the woman in front of him, standing in a cottage he’d kept for twenty-two years, wearing the red that meant blood-keeper and the white that meant something new.
I didn’t know what to say. The moment was too large for words, too full of history and grief and longing and the strange, impossible fact that everything in this cottage had been waiting for me to arrive.
The dress in the chest. The sage on the shelf.
The cloak around my shoulders. The man by the fire.
“Thank you,” I managed. “For finding it. For keeping it safe.”
He nodded. Looked at the fire. Looked back at me. Looked at the fire again, like he couldn’t hold his eyes on me for too long without a part of him giving way.
“I’ll start supper,” he offered.
He crossed to the hearth and started working with his back to me, and his hands were shaking on the pot and his shoulders were rigid and I stood by the bed in my grandmother’s dress and my grandmother’s cloak and felt a crack open inside me that all the anger in the world couldn’t seal shut again.
I looked down at the embroidered flowers at my wrists. Traced a cornflower with my fingertip. Grandmother’s hands had stitched these tiny petals decades ago, sitting by a fire just like this one, in a cottage that was now mine by inheritance and survival and the stubborn refusal to die.
The white dress and the red cloak. The healer and the blood-keeper. The woman who’d been hunted and the woman who was learning to hunt back.
I sat down at the table and opened the grimoire and started reading the combat pages again, and if my eyes kept drifting to the man at the hearth, to the breadth of his shoulders and the steadiness of his hands and the way the firelight played across the scars I’d traced with my mouth, well.
That was between me and the dress and the red cloak and the ghost of a woman who’d stitched flowers into linen because she believed her granddaughter would someday need something beautiful to wear in the middle of a war.