Chapter 33
MARIS
The afternoon rush comes back all at once, the way weather does — no warning, then suddenly everywhere.
By the second hour past midday the bakery is fuller than it's been for a while.
Real traffic, not the cautious trickle of the past few days — families stopping in together, the mill workers buying in bulk for the week, two merchants from the far side of the market who've never come in before and seem pleased with what they find.
The display shelf empties faster than I can restock it from the back.
I'm out of practice with this volume. My hands work the right motions but the rhythm is off — I lose track of whose coins I've taken, start wrapping two orders at once and confuse myself. An older man asks for dark rye and I hand him seeded before catching it.
"Elin." I catch her between customers. "Can you take the bagged loaves around to the people waiting? Just walk them through and let people take what they ordered."
She straightens with the importance of someone receiving a serious assignment. "I know how."
"You do," I agree, and load her small arms with four paper-wrapped packages.
She moves into the crowd with the confident inefficiency of a three-year-old on official business, stopping to discuss each parcel with its recipient. The customers find her charming. Two women crouch down to talk to her. She handles this with professional patience and then moves on.
I go back to the counter and focus on the coins and the orders.
The cloaked figure comes in around the third wave of customers.
I notice because of the hood, pulled forward despite the mild afternoon.
Every other person in the bakery has their face open to the room — the hood reads wrong against the easy sociability of a busy shop.
The figure is lean, keeping to the edge of the crowd, not approaching the counter.
Not browsing the display shelf either. Just present, moving slowly through the press of people with no apparent purpose.
My hands keep working. I wrap a parcel, take a payment, and thank the customer.
I look for the figure again. Still at the edge, slightly closer to the center of the room now. The hood is deep enough that I can't make out a face, just a jaw line. Lean. Sharp.
The next customer asks for two honey muffins and I get them bagged while watching the cloaked figure in my peripheral vision. The crowd shifts — a family moving toward the door, two men stepping in — and I lose the figure in the press for a moment.
I look for Elin.
She's near the window with the last of her parcels, explaining something to an older woman who is listening with the polite attention of someone who has grandchildren. Her curls are loose, the scarf slightly askew, the way it always ends up by afternoon. She's fine. She's right there.
A man at the counter asks about the seeded rolls and I answer him without looking away from the window side of the room.
The cloaked figure is moving again. Not toward the counter. Toward the window.
I take the man's coins and lean sideways to see past the customer in front of me. The crowd thickens near the door — another group coming in — and for ten full seconds I can't see the hooded figure or Elin through the press of bodies and the late afternoon light cutting through the window glass.
"Excuse me," I say to the next customer, and come around the counter.
I'm three steps into the room when Elin screams.
It's a short sound, sharp and sudden, and it cuts through every conversation in the bakery at once. The crowd goes still in the way crowds do when a child makes a sound like that — a collective freeze, heads turning, the specific suspended moment before anyone knows what happened.
Then the front door swings open and bounces hard against the frame, and the cloaked figure is gone.
And so is the scream.
The silence after it is total and terrible. I'm already at the window, already looking at the spot where Elin was standing, at the older woman who is pressed against the wall with her hand over her mouth and her eyes on the door.
The spot where Elin was is empty.
The last parcel is on the floor, paper split open, a seeded roll sitting on the bakery boards.
I am out the door before I have decided to move.
The square is full of the wrong faces.
I spin left, then right, scanning for a hooded figure, for a child, for any shape that moves wrong against the ordinary afternoon foot traffic. The bakery customers are spilling out behind me, and I'm already moving toward the lane that runs alongside the building when someone grabs my arm.
"The south side." A woman I half-recognize — one of the mill workers' wives. "He went south. I saw the cloak."
I pull free and go south.
"Did you see her?" I stop at the corner and turn back to the growing cluster of people outside my door. "Did anyone see where he took her?"
"Toward the market lane." A man pointing. "He had something — someone — bundled under his arm. I thought it was a parcel."
My stomach drops.
"The child." The older woman from inside, the one who'd been talking to Elin. She's shaking. "Someone grabbed the child."
"Did anyone see his face?" I step toward the group. "The person who took her — did anyone see?"
Two people speak at once. I hold up my hand and turn to the woman nearest me, the mill worker's wife.
"I saw him when he pushed through the door," she says. "The hood came back when he shouldered it open." She presses her lips together. "It was that merchant. The one from the council. Fenwood."
The name lands and I hear it go through the crowd — a ripple of recognition, of reassessment, of something that sounds like shame.
"Which way." I say it flat. "Exactly which way."
"Market lane." The pointing man again. "Then he cut toward the south gate. Moving fast."
I'm already walking and people are following me, which I don't have room to think about. Someone calls from behind me that they'll get the town wardens. Someone else says they'll go for the bounty hunter. I don't stop walking.
"Maris." Brennor's voice, suddenly close — he must have been in the square when it happened. He falls into step beside me, his hand briefly on my shoulder. "Which way are we going?"
"South gate." I keep my pace. "Fenwood has Elin." The whole time, my heart races and my hands shake like I can’t stay inside my own skin.
My daughter is gone!
He says nothing and stays with me, which is the right choice.
The market is mostly cleared by the time we reach it — the word has moved faster than I have, and people are already stepping aside, already looking at me with an entirely different expression than the one they've been wearing around me.
A woman I don't know well takes my arm for one second as I pass, presses it, lets go.
"My husband's gone for the bounty hunter," she says. "He'll be fast."
I nod and keep moving.
Someone near the south gate says they saw a man carrying something toward the forest road. A farmer who was bringing his cart in confirms it — a cloaked man, moving quickly, something wrapped against his chest that was fighting him. The farmer's face is dark with something that looks like fury.
"I thought it was goods," he says. "If I'd known — "
"Which road," I say.
He points me to the old forest path, the one that runs south before it bends east toward the ruins.
I turn toward it and the crowd behind me is larger than I realized.
Half the market square has followed, and they're not following out of voyeurism — they're grim-faced and purposeful, the wardens moving through them toward the front, two men I recognize as the cartwright and the grain merchant flanking them without being asked.
Brennor stays at my left. The crowd presses forward at my back.
"We'll find her," he says.
"I know," I say, because the alternative is not something I will allow to exist.
“Tell us everything,” the grain merchant warden says. “And we’ll organize a search party.”
My breath trembles as I start to talk.