Chapter 37
MARIS
Elin is solid and warm and real in my arms.
I don't say anything when she reaches me. I just pull her in and hold her, my face pressed into her curls, one hand cradling the back of her head. She smells like forest and old stone and something underneath that is just her, and I keep her there while the courtyard noise continues around us.
She squirms after a bit. "Mama. Too tight."
I loosen my hold but don't let go. I lean back enough to look at her face — checking, the involuntary full-inventory a parent does after a scare. Both eyes, both ears, the small nose, the chin. A scrape on her palm from landing on the courtyard stone. Nothing else.
She looks at my face and her brow draws together. "Why are you crying?"
I press my lips together for a moment. "Because I missed you."
"I was only gone for a little while."
"I know." I wipe my cheek with the back of my hand. "I got scared when I didn't know where you were."
She considers this with some gravity. "I knew where I was."
"That helps a little." I pull her back in and she lets me, her chin on my shoulder. "Here." I press Pip into her hand.
She takes the doll and pulls back to examine her, checking the seams and the embroidered face with the thoroughness of a mother reuniting with her own child. "She's cold."
"She was waiting for you on the path."
"I dropped her." Elin looks briefly guilty. Then she tucks Pip under her arm and settles against me again, apparently satisfied.
Around us, the courtyard has transformed.
The townspeople who came through the ridge with lanterns are spreading out across the ruins, their lights catching the stacked crates, the bound smugglers, Fenwood on the ground with his wrists roped behind him.
I hear the reaction move through them in real time — the recognition, the low comments, the silence of people whose remaining doubts are dissolving in the light of what they're looking at.
Geld stands in front of one of the open crates. His eyes find the artifacts for a long moment, then looks at Fenwood, then looks at me.
"There's your dark magic," he says. It comes out quiet and without flourish.
A woman I know from the mill district comes forward. "Maris. I'm sorry." Two plain words, nothing attached to them, but her eyes hold it and that's enough.
Others follow. The cartwright. The older woman who'd been talking to Elin in the bakery when it happened, who now presses my arm and doesn't say anything at all. Pella nods at me without coming closer, and I nod back, and we leave it there for now.
Hestara Dunwick is here — I hadn't noticed her until she steps forward with the careful deliberateness of a woman choosing her words and their placement. She looks at Elin first, then at me.
"The council was wrong to let fear drive the process," she says. "That sits with me. It should sit with the council." She pauses. "I'm sorry, Maris."
It's more than I expected from her. I accept it with a nod and don't ask her to say it again.
The apologies are real and I receive each one, and none of them are what I care about right now.
What I care about is the weight in my arms and the smell of my daughter's curls and the fact that she's already more interested in Pip's condition than in the surrounding drama, which is exactly as it should be.
"Ellie." I shift her on my hip. "You need a bath."
She looks at the ruins around her with mild interest. "Can we come back here?"
"Absolutely not." I turn toward the path down. "Say good night."
She waves at the ruins in general. I start walking.
Brennor falls into step beside me without being asked, his lantern lighting the path ahead. Sister Anawyn joins us from the other side. Most of the townspeople follow, peeling away from the courtyard as the wardens take over the scene behind us.
I look back once. Kaedrin is standing over Fenwood, speaking to the two wardens, his traveling cloak dark in the lantern light. He's all right. I can see that from here, the controlled steadiness of a man managing an aftermath. I return to the path.
"Thank you," I say to Brennor. "Both of you."
"Don't," Brennor says. The way he says it means he doesn't want thanks, which I already knew.
Elin has her head on my shoulder. Her grip on Pip is loosening as we walk, the way it does when she's dropping toward sleep. When we reach the creek path her eyes are closed, and at the road she's breathing slow and even and her doll has nearly fallen twice.
The bath can wait until morning. I carry her the rest of the way home.
The summons arrives the following morning, slipped under the bakery door.
My feet are rooted to the kitchen floor and I read it twice. Council letterhead, Hestara's seal, and two names at the top — mine, and Elin's.
Elin is at the table eating porridge. She looks up when I don't move for a moment. "What's that?"
"A letter from the council." I fold it and set it on the counter. "They want to see us today."
"Both of us?"
"Both of us."
She looks at her porridge, then at me. "Should I wear my good dress?"
"Yes," I say, and go put the kettle on.
I tell myself there's nothing to fear on the walk to the square.
The crates are in custody. Fenwood is in custody.
Every fact I have points to resolution, not another hearing.
But I've sat in that council hall in the wooden chair with my daughter in my lap and the town at my back, and my body doesn't forget it as easily as my mind wants to.
Elin holds my hand and wears her good dress and doesn't ask further questions, which is unusual enough to suggest she's reading the tension off me and deciding not to add to it.
We turn the corner toward the council hall and stop.
The hall is empty. The square is not.
Hestara stands at the fountain with the other council members behind her.
Surrounding them — the market stalls open and unattended, their owners standing out in the square with their customers, Brennor near the front with his hat in his hands, Sister Anawyn beside him.
The cartwright. The mill workers. Geld, who gives me a nod that costs him something.
Pella is there but looking at her shoes.
Most of the town.
Hestara steps forward when she sees us. She looks different outside the council hall — smaller, somehow, without the table and the authority of the room. She extends both hands and I give her mine, which takes more effort than it should.
She takes them and holds them.
"On behalf of the council," she says, and her voice carries across the square without requiring volume, "and on behalf of Brindle Hollow — we owe you an apology.
You and Elin." She glances down at Elin, then back at me.
"We let fear lead us. We turned it toward two of our own, and that was wrong.
" She tightens her grip briefly. "It won't happen again.
The two of you belong here. You are part of this town and part of this community, and you are always welcome. "
The square is quiet and still.
Then someone from the back — I think it's the cooperage worker, though I can't see clearly — calls out: "We can't live without those honey buns."
Laughter breaks through the square, genuine and releasing.
"Or the seeded rye," someone else adds. "My husband would leave me over the seeded rye."
More laughter. Brennor makes a sound into his hat that I think is him trying not to smile. Even Hestara's mouth softens.
Elin looks up at me. "They're talking about your bread."
"They are," I say.
"I told you it was good."
I squeeze her hand.
I let Hestara's words land in the places they're meant to reach, and I feel the anger and the fear and bracing begin to release by slow degrees.
Not all at once — it doesn't work that way, and I'd be suspicious of myself if it did.
The crowd that cheered the honey buns was also the crowd that stood in the hall while my daughter was called a monster, and some part of me will remember the distance between those two things for a long time.
But most of them came into the forest last night with lanterns. And that matters too.
"We're glad to be here," I say, to Hestara and to the square and to all of it. "I look forward to many more years."
A few people applaud. The woman who can't live without the seeded rye calls something else that gets another laugh and the gathering starts to loosen, people drifting back toward their stalls and their mornings with the eased energy of a thing resolved.
Hestara releases my hands. She looks at Elin once more with something in her face that doesn't quite reach apology but tries.
Elin looks back at her with full steely eyes and the patient assessment of a little girl who has not yet decided what she thinks.
"Your bakery will be very busy tomorrow," Hestara says to me, which is the most practical thing she's ever said to me, and I appreciate it more than a longer speech.
"I'll make extra," I tell her.
She nods and steps back. I take Elin's hand and we stand in the square while Brindle Hollow resumes itself around us — the stall holders returning to their displays, the fountain doing what it always does, the morning light moving across the cobblestones the same way it always has.
The acceptance is real and also cautious and also going to take time, and I understand all three of those things simultaneously.
I know this town. I know how long memory runs in a place where everyone knows everyone else's grandmother.
But I also know that the market will be busy tomorrow, and Dora will probably come back for her morning bread, and Brennor will bring flour on Friday, and the bakery will smell like yeast and woodsmoke before dawn.
"Can we go home?" Elin asks.
"Yes," I say. "Let's go home."