Chapter 15 #3
Wat looked down at his hands. “He saved us.”
“I know.”
“After Blackmere.” The boy’s voice went small and flat, the way children’s voices did when they spoke of something too large and painful. “Alyson doesn’t remember all of it.”
Amelia kept her face neutral.
“He gave us his cloak,” Wat said. “It smelled of blood and horse. I had a knife. I thought he would take it, but he told me to keep it if it comforted me.”
Amelia blinked hard.
Across the yard, Thomas turned the young man’s blade aside and nodded in approval. The soldier grinned as if he had been knighted.
Wat swallowed. “I didn’t stick Hob with it.”
“That was considerate.”
“Hob said he’d be more than cross.”
“I believe him.”
Wat’s mouth twitched, but the shadow in his face remained.
Amelia wanted to put an arm around him, but she didn’t know if he would allow it, this small boy with his old eyes and grief folded up beneath ordinary hunger. So she leaned her shoulder lightly against his leg where he sat on the rail, just enough that he could move away if he wished.
After a moment, he leaned back.
Another stitch.
The drill ended near midday, when the heat had settled thick over the yard and even the flies seemed drunk with it.
Men stripped off padded coats and poured water over their heads.
Someone produced onions, bread, cheese, and a crock of pickled cabbage that made Amelia’s eyes water from six feet away.
Small beer passed from hand to hand. Edith’s barley cakes vanished as if the basket had never existed.
Amelia inspected more hands. The garrison submitted with the weary drama of martyrs.
“Again?” Martin said.
“You just had your hands on the ground.”
“I was knocked there against my will.”
“The dirt doesn’t care.”
Osbern held up his hands. “Mine are clean.”
“There is blood on your thumb.”
“That is my blood.”
“And therefore beloved to you?”
He grinned and washed.
Thomas came last again, because Thomas apparently believed lordship required being the final person to care for himself. He stood before her in the shade of the ash tree, dust on his boots, sweat at his throat, a scrape along one knuckle that had not been there that morning.
Amelia looked at it.
He followed her gaze. “It is nothing.”
“Men have been saying that since the dawn of time.”
“It is merely a scratch.”
“It is a dirty scratch.”
“Is there another kind?”
“Yes. The kind that has been washed.”
His eyes warmed. “You are relentless.”
“Thank you.”
“That was not praise.”
“I have chosen to receive it that way.”
She took the jug and poured water over his hands. The water ran brown at first, then clear, tracing over the raised scars on his knuckles, the strong tendons, the small new cut. He rubbed his hands together with the soap and watched her, not smiling now.
The noise of the yard seemed to drift farther away.
Amelia was suddenly aware of everything.
The heat, the smell of leather and dust, the rasp of the water hitting the ground, the damp curl stuck to the side of her neck, Thomas’s hands beneath hers.
All morning she had been bold because bold was easier than afraid.
Now, with his attention fixed on her and the whole sunlit yard around them, she felt strangely shy.
“That class,” he said quietly.
She blinked. “What?”
“The one where a small woman throws a big man.”
Of all the things.
“Are you laughing at me too?”
“Nay.”
He said it so simply that she believed him.
Amelia lowered the jug. “It was a self-defense class.”
His brow furrowed. “Defense of self?”
“Learning how to get away if someone grabs you. How to use balance, elbows, knees, whatever you have.”
His face changed. Not dramatically. Thomas didn’t do dramatic. But the warmth left his eyes, replaced by something hard and intent.
“Who grabbed you?”
“No one.” When his expression did not ease, she added, “Not like that. It was just a class. Women take them where I’m from.”
“Because men are dangerous there?”
She almost laughed. Almost.
“Men are dangerous everywhere.”
He looked down at his wet hands.
For a moment she thought he might argue.
Say the usual things men said, that good men protected women, that danger came from bad men only, as if every woman alive hadn’t learned to take note of the exits in a room before she learned how to make small talk.
But Thomas didn’t insult her by pretending the world was gentler than it was.
Instead he took the drying cloth and said, “Then it was a wise class.”
That nearly undid her. She looked away first. “Well, no one here believes it.”
“I didn’t say that.”
Her eyes flew back to his.
He dried his hands slowly, still watching her. “I said it was wise.”
Before she could ask him what that meant, Walter called his name again, and the moment snapped like thread pulled too tight.
Thomas’s jaw flexed.
“You are very popular today,” Amelia said.
“I miss when everyone feared speaking to me.”
“No, you don’t.”
He looked at her for a long moment. “Nay. I don’t.”
He left before she could do something ridiculous, like fling herself into his arms. Amelia stood there with the jug in her hand and her heart behaving like it had been startled out of a hedge.
Edith came to stand beside her. For a while, the two women watched Thomas cross the yard, Walter already holding up the roll like a banner of doom.
“He’s a good man,” Edith said.
Amelia kept her voice light. “Even with the scowling?”
“Especially with it. A man that pretty with no scowl would be unbearable.”
Amelia choked.
Edith looked pleased with herself.
“I didn’t say he was pretty,” Amelia managed.
“No. You’ve more sense than to say it where Hob can hear.”
Amelia covered her face with one hand. “Is subtlety dead?”
“Never met her.”
A laugh escaped before Amelia could stop it.
Edith’s gaze moved over her face, sharp as a needle but not unkind. “You’re settling.”
She looked toward the hall, the stables, the lists, the children sharing a barley cake on the rail, Hob cuffing Martin lightly on the back of the head for saying something idiotic.
Amelia swallowed. “I’m not from here.”
Edith’s expression didn’t change. “I know.”
The breath caught in Amelia’s chest.
Edith snorted softly. “I know you’re not from Ashcombe. Not from any place I can name either, mayhap. But you’re here now.”
“For now,” Amelia said.
Edith was quiet long enough that the yard filled in around them, men laughing, horses shifting, a hammer ringing from the smithy, Alyson’s high voice asking Wat whether clotpole was a word she could say if she whispered it.
Edith patted her arm. “For now is where most of us live.”
Amelia had no defense against that.
Edith picked up the empty basket. “And for now, you can help me tear linen. Hob will get them bruised again before supper, and if you’re to keep fussing over clean hands, you may as well learn to bind the damage when the hands are attached to fools.”
“I don’t know much about tending wounds.”
“You can tear cloth, can’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Then we begin there.” Edith started toward the hall, then glanced back. “And Amelia?”
The sound of her name, without mistress, without suspicion, without the careful distance of a household still deciding what she was, settled warm and unexpected in her chest.
“Yes?”
Edith’s mouth softened. “You did well today.” Then she marched toward the hall as Amelia followed, wax tablet under one arm, veil slipping, curls escaping, dust on her hem, and the sound of men’s laughter at her back.
She hadn’t found a way home, hadn’t found the sword, and hadn’t solved the terrifying fact that somewhere, impossibly far away, her mother and Bree and an entire century would be wondering where Amelia Quinn had gone.
But by the time she reached the hall and set her hand to the linen, she had clean hands, three new curses, a garrison that laughed when she spoke, and one warrior lord who had looked at her across the lists as if her watching had pleased him more than victory.
It wasn’t a plan, it wasn’t safe. It was, however, a place to begin.