Chapter III
MARIS
The afternoon lull arrives around the third hour past midday.
I pull out the spare mixing bowls and set Elin up at the low end of the counter with a cup of water, a small scoop of flour, and a pinch of dried herbs that won't hurt anything. She immediately begins combining them with the intensity of someone conducting important research.
"Soup," she announces.
"It’s beautiful soup," I agree, and go back to wiping down the display shelf.
I keep her behind the counter with me. Partly because the square is still busy with caravan traffic and I don't want strangers peering in and getting a long look at her.
Partly because she pulled the scarf off twice before noon, and I've lost patience for chasing it across the floor.
Here, I can see her. Here, I can intercept.
She stirs her flour-water mixture and hums to herself. I restack the empty bread baskets and check the oven temperature and watch the door between tasks.
Two customers come and go. A woman wanting rolls for her husband's supper.
A young man buying whatever was cheapest, which turned out to be the heel loaves I'd marked down.
Elin offers both of them a detailed description of her soup, and both of them smile at her with the cautious warmth people reserve for small children they don't intend to engage with further.
The square outside quiets by degree. Merchants start covering their stalls. The caravan workers drift toward the alehouse. I start thinking about what I'll feed Elin for supper and whether I have enough eggs.
The door opens.
I turn with a greeting already forming, and it dies before it reaches my mouth.
He fills the doorframe, tall, dark-haired, pale grey skin and angular features, silver eyes that move across a room, taking everything in.
He's wearing a traveling cloak marked with road dust, and there's a hunter's seal on the strap across his chest that wasn't there three years ago.
Everything else is the same. The controlled stillness.
The way he holds himself like he's prepared for the room to become a problem.
Kaedrin.
Three years collapse into nothing, and I am standing in my kitchen on a stormy autumn night, watching a soaking wet dark elf try to decide if he should apologize for dripping on my floor.
He'd looked so carefully composed, even then.
I'd given him a dry shirt and a bowl of soup because it seemed cruel not to, and he'd thanked me with the stiff formality of someone unaccustomed to receiving help.
By the time the fire burned low and the storm showed no sign of breaking, the careful formality had thawed into something quieter. Something honest.
I'd woken to an empty bed and not even a note. A few months later, I'd woken to a different surprise all together.
I have not moved. My hand is still on the bread basket. He's scanned the room and found me, and for one unguarded moment something crosses his face that I can't read before it's gone.
"Maris," he says.
I set the basket down. I keep my voice level.
"What are you doing here?"
I mean to follow it with something practical. Something that takes control of the situation before it becomes a situation. But movement at the edge of my vision stops me.
Elin has climbed down from her stool.
She moves out from behind the counter with her bowl still in her hands, completely unconcerned. He’s a new face. A new potential friend. She stops two feet in front of Kaedrin, tips her head back, and stares straight up at him.
He is very tall. She is very small. She examines him with the same focused attention she gives the flour-water soup.
"You're grey," she says.
He looks down at her. His expression doesn't change, but he goes stiller than a tree in the woods. His eyes move across her face slowly. They stop at her eyes.
Her silver eyes. His silver eyes.
My heart drops straight through the floor.
I should move. I should cross the counter and scoop her up and put her behind me, but my feet have made their own decision, and that decision is to stay exactly where I am while my pulse hammers at the base of my throat.
Elin is still staring up at him with her flour-dusted hands wrapped around her bowl. The head scarf is slightly askew, one dark curl falling loose across her ear. Not enough to show anything. Not yet.
Kaedrin's gaze lifts from her face and finds mine across the counter.
He doesn't say anything. He doesn't need to. The question is already there, fully formed, in the way he looks at me and then back at her and then at me again. The math is written plainly on his face.
The remaining customers in the bakery are the problem.
Three of them, spread across the small shop — a woman pricing the last afternoon rolls, two men near the window who came in together and have been talking over a shared loaf for the past half hour. None of them are looking at Kaedrin directly, which means all of them are watching him sideways.
Elin has stopped a few feet from him, bowl still in hand, staring straight up with no awareness whatsoever that she should stop. Kaedrin stands just inside the doorway. A deep crease in his brow as he stares at Elin. His head tilts slightly to the left.
He hasn't looked at me yet. He's looking at her.
I watch his face. I watch the frown deepen, not with displeasure. He’s working something out. His unusual eyes move across Elin's features slowly — her curls, her small jaw, the grey at her temples. He doesn't move. He barely seems to breathe.
I come around the counter.
"It's rude to stare, sweetheart." I take Elin's free hand gently and turn her toward the back stairs. "Go up and get your dolls. Bring the small one down for me."
Her little face narrows in a silent protest, then decides the dolls are worth it. She hands me the bowl and disappears through the back doorway, her footsteps thumping up the wooden stairs.
I set the bowl down and turn to face him.
"I need you to leave," I say in a soft, steady voice. "Right now, before this becomes something I can't fix."
He finally looks at me. He opens his mouth.
"I mean it." I don't let him get there. "I don't know what brought you back to Brindle Hollow, and I don't need to. Take whatever business you have and conduct it somewhere that isn't my shop."
He closes his mouth. His arms cross over his chest, slow and deliberate, and his gaze drifts back toward the staircase where Elin disappeared. He looks at the empty doorway for a moment longer than necessary.
Then his eyes find me.
"It's good to see you, Maris," he says. Dry as salt.
"I'm sure it is." I hold his gaze. "Door's behind you."
One of the men by the window has gone quiet. The woman pricing rolls is taking a very long time to make her selection. I can feel the shift in the room, the way attention consolidates when people sense something worth listening to.
"You haven't changed," Kaedrin says.
"You've had three years to notice that. You chose not to." I step slightly to the side, putting myself more squarely between him and the staircase. "I'm asking you nicely. Leave."
His lips twitch, a thin, uncompromising line. His eyes drop briefly to the staircase again, then return to my face. He holds my gaze for three full seconds, which is long enough to make a point and short enough to avoid a scene.
Then he shrugs. One shoulder, unhurried.
He turns and walks out. The door swings shut behind him.
The woman at the roll display clears her throat and sets two rolls on the counter. "I'll take these."
"Of course." I wrap them without looking up. My hands are steady. I take her coins and thank her and watch her leave, and then I watch the two men by the window finish their conversation and go, and then the bakery is empty.
I stand behind the counter in the quiet and look at the door.
Upstairs, I can hear Elin's footsteps crossing the floor, the soft thump of her pulling something from the toy chest. She'll be down in a minute with the small cloth doll she takes everywhere and an update on whatever the doll has been doing since morning.
I turn and start washing out Elin's mixing bowl.
He looked at the stairs. He looked at them twice.
I scrub the bowl harder than it needs and stack it on the drying rack and move on to the next task, because that is what there is to do.