Chapter 25
Penny
Icould have stayed in Stagcross forever.
I would have done well to die and be buried in that bed with Kit sprawled atop me, drunk on bliss and filled with thoughts of a future that looked brighter than ever.
It was hard to leave, but I was hopeful, and a small part of me was eager because every passing day was one day closer to my return home.
And now, that return home would be full of good news about my intended.
Mother would love him. After he spent half of his last visit patching up the farm, she already thought fondly of him.
And Sayla, well… As she pointed out, Kit had strong shoulders, and I had eyes.
And lips. And hands. And all of those were all over Kit, which he tolerated with only a bit of annoyance while trying to pack our things the next morning.
Despite my giddy interference, we loaded the wagon and made it onto the road in decent time.
The journey back to Ashpoint might otherwise have been sobering, but I was elated, thinking beyond the Bone Men’s cold, snowy city to the spring flowers and sights of Eastcliff.
I would still ask Warren to make a chain for Kit, and when we came back in the fall for harvest, I would put it on him, and we would have a beautiful wedding ceremony.
We would be husbands—family—and we could stay there. Home at last.
I was still a bit afraid of scaring Kit off with my thoughts and plans but, after a few hours of travel, I could hold my tongue no longer.
I’d grown up on the farm uncertain of my future, doubtful of the likelihood of wedded bliss, but that hadn’t stopped me from imagining exchanging vows in front of a wall of sunflowers, or sharing a first dance beside the pond while sunset painted the sky.
Kit held the reins and directed the horse while I spouted off with my sketchbook open across my lap, half-sketched with the sights I described to him, vividly recalling how stunning the farm was in autumn with the leaves turning and the barn bursting with crops.
Kit would look stunning there, too, his skin sun-kissed and his shirt soaked with sweat.
I’d glimpsed something similar the day we finished Mother’s chore list, and I hadn’t forgotten.
We made it back to Ashpoint quicker than I was prepared for.
As we got closer, I talked less and worried more about another chilly reception.
Memories of our arrest and detainment in the Ossuary prison were haunting.
It was a reminder of our tenuous position here, and I’d felt so helpless.
So weak both physically from the cold, and emotionally while the city guards treated Kit and I like criminals.
In some ways, I supposed that’s what we were, plotting the cult’s downfall while fully immersed in its midst.
Fortunately, our return was uneventful. We took the horse and cart all the way to the front door of our little cottage where Kit unloaded our shared bag while I ventured inside.
It was a pleasant surprise to find the house warm and occupied. Thoma sat on the living room floor in front of the fireplace with Ember curled around his neck and Nutmeg frantically chasing the feather on a string he was dragging around for her.
Thoma startled to my entry, but his surprise gave way to excitement as he removed Ember from her perch so he could stand.
Kit crowded in behind me with our bag slung over his shoulder, and Ember scampered past me to scurry up his pant leg. I grinned and shed my cloak before enveloping Thoma in a hug.
“Welcome back, you two,” Thoma said, his voice muffled against my shoulder.
“Thanks,” I replied. After a firm squeeze around his shoulders, I pulled back and held out my cord-tied wrist, smiling so wide I could barely speak. “It was an eventful trip.”
Thoma scrutinized the leather wrap, marveling same as I did over the hand tooled design. Thinking of Kit working on it in secret, planning and plotting weeks in advance, made me giddy all over again.
Finally, Thoma looked past me and winked at Kit. “That doesn’t look like a crate full of rats.”
I snorted and waved my other hand dismissively. “We left the rats,” I replied, then clarified, “and not on a farm.”
That had been the first of many surprises, the best of which Thoma announced with a smile.
“And you came home engaged.”
Nutmeg trotted across the floor dragging the feather stick to drop beside my boot. I scooped her up and gave her a little side to side swing before tucking her against my chest.
“It was amazing. Kit was…” Blushing, I glanced back as Kit hung his cloak on the hook by the door and tucked Ember in the crook of his arm. “He is amazing.”
When I faced Thoma again, he had one brow cocked and his lips tipped upward as well. Amused. It came as a relief to see him in good spirits considering that talk of engagements or weddings may have been like salt in his still-fresh wound.
I kept quiet for a moment, trying to gauge his interest or tolerance for such a discussion until he baited me in a teasing tone.
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
Kit chuckled as he joined us. His arm draped across my lower back in the same spot it had rested most of our ride home. “I hardly think you could stop him,” he said, then planted a kiss on the side of my head.
I shimmied against him while balancing a squirming Nutmeg and my satchel slung across my chest.
Drawing a deep breath, I began, “Kit planned the whole thing in Stagcross. Have you been there?”
Thoma shook his head.
“It’s the most incredible place,” I gushed. “They had reindeer, and drinking chocolate, and colored glass, and an art store…” The awareness of my satchel reminded me of its contents. “Oh! I got new pencils! Hold on.”
I opened my arm to let Nutmeg leap down and retrieve her feather stick, and I followed her to the floor. Kneeling, I opened my bag and dug out my sketchbook and the roll of colored pencils to spread out for Thoma’s inspection.
While I unfurled the bundle of pencils and flipped to the newer pages in my book, Thoma and Kit carried on overhead.
“Congratulations,” Thoma said.
Kit responded with a warm, “Thank you.”
“Look at the colors,” I gushed, almost as enamored as I’d been the first time I saw them. I touched my finger to the page where I'd tested shades of green, then scooped up a few of the pencils and offered them to Thoma. “Do you want to try them?”
He snickered. “I can’t tell if you’re more excited about this or the proposal.” He knelt beside me while I stretched out onto my stomach and grabbed a pencil with a fiery orange lead. Thoma scribbled beside me, first powdery blue then iris purple, then a brown that looked exactly like pecan shells.
I had barely begun when he set them aside and looked at Kit, who stood back, watching.
“You did well, Kit,” Thoma told him.
Kit huffed a laugh. “Lucky for me, he’s easy to please.”
I rolled onto my side to pin him with a narrow look. “Nothing about that was easy!” I exclaimed, then turned to explain to Thoma. “It was the grandest thing anyone's ever done for me. You should've seen the inn. And the bed…”
Kit let out a choked sound that brought my rambling to a halt. “I think I'll put some dinner on.” His booted feet clunked by on his way to the kitchen, where he paused. “Thoma, have you eaten?”
Thoma pushed to standing and held up his hands. “I shouldn't impose. I’m sure you’re tired and eager to get settled in.”
“And I'm sure Pen is eager for a bit of company besides mine,” Kit replied. “It's rather hard to impress me with the tales of our travels, seeing as I was there.”
I snorted and carried on coloring while Kit began rifling the kitchen cabinets for something to turn into dinner.
Thoma lingered on his feet a few seconds before Nutmeg returned with the feather stick and Ember in tow.
Convinced by the cats if nothing else, Thoma dropped to sit cross-legged beside me.
He took up the stick and began tempting the kittens with it, sending them skittering this way and that in a tandem chase.
“Well,” Thoma said at length. “It all sounds far more interesting than anything going on here. Though, Rosie and I have been spreading the word about the resistance.”
Kit's clattering in the kitchen ceased, and I glanced up to see him looking our way with an uneasy frown.
Thoma had his back to that room, so he didn't see Kit's visible discomfort as he carried on.
“I say busy, but it's rather slow going if I'm honest. Safer that way.”
That assurance earned an exaggerated nod from Kit, who had retrieved our kettle to fill with water for coffee. I chuckled to myself. The man was predictable since the day I met him. Nothing in this house happened before or without coffee.
The sink was still running when I heard a knock at the front door. Setting my pencil in the center of my sketchbook, I stood and called toward the kitchen, “I'll get it!”
The words had barely left me when Kit reentered the living area, wiping his hands on his trousers as he brushed past me.
“You just relax, sweetheart,” he said. “And maybe talk about something else for a bit.”
If I hadn't known better, I would have thought he was expecting someone.
Perhaps he was. If I'd learned anything in the past few days, it was that he was willing and able to surprise me.
With that in mind, I might have been excited by an unexpected visit, but I felt disquieted instead, and stayed on my feet.
Neither Thoma nor I talked about anything as Kit swung the door inward to expose a pair of cloaked Sentinels on the stoop.
My heart leaped into my throat as the first sentinel spoke.
“Mister Koesters, your presence is requested in the Ossuary.”
Kit cast a fleeting glance over his shoulder at Thoma and me.
“Requested?” I echoed as tension crept up from my feet. “Or required?”
“Requested,” the second sentinel confirmed in a harsher tone. “By the Right Hand.”
My hands curled into fists, and the anxious feeling that had plagued me as we approached Ashpoint’s gate returned in force. The Ossuary had guards and prison cells and people who would think we were villains if they knew of our intentions—if they heard the news Thoma and Rosie had been spreading.
Kit didn't question or argue. He merely took his cloak from the hook on the wall and slung it around his shoulders.
I hated to see what looked like defeat in his posture.
I knew him well enough to recognize it wasn't as simple as that, but he was always more inclined to relent than resist. He believed things went more smoothly that way.
I didn't doubt it, but one could very smoothly slide into an early grave if they simply laid down and let it happen.
“Suppose he should refuse,” I called over while Kit was fastening the collar of his cloak. “What would happen then?”
Kit shot me an exasperated look, then turned toward the sentinels. “I'm not refusing,” he told them.
Their grizzled faces bent in twin frowns as Kit looked at me again.
“I'm sure it's nothing, Pen,” he said. “And, on the subject of nothing, the cabinets are all but bare. Take Thoma and get something to eat at the tavern. I'll join you in a bit.”
Thoma’s hand rested heavily on my shoulder.
I hadn’t even noticed him standing. I was inclined to shrug him off and pursue when the Sentinels swiveled out into the snowy dusk and Kit dutifully followed.
Instead, I stayed where I was put and rubbed my hand over the leather cord tied around my wrist. It felt fragile somehow.
Everything did, including the silence that shattered when the front door swung shut.
I stared at it and twisted the cord around my arm, reeling with the rapid shift from the waking dream that was Stagcross to this. A joyful return interrupted. It felt like I’d fallen through a cloud and hit the ground hard. It knocked the air out of me.
“Do you want to go to the tavern?” Thoma asked. “No sense waiting here.”
“What if it’s Merrick?” The question tumbled out of me, riding on the realization of the way I’d left things a few days earlier. Bolting out of the city after confronting my half-brother in his home. Giving him the same treatment his wife had given Kit.
Merrick was prone to stewing, calculating, and he’d had time to bide during our absence. Ample opportunity to bend Levitt’s ear and fill his head with lies. Or truths.
Thoma’s forehead creased. “What about Merrick?”
I spun toward him as nausea added to the breathless clench in my chest. “I did something. Kit doesn’t know about it…” I grimaced. “Though he may be about to find out.”
Thoma didn’t press while I considered my parting words to Merrick, then ground my teeth at the knowledge that my reluctant sibling would never let me be the one to finish a fight.
Everything began and ended with him; it always had.
Growing up, I’d been constantly pinned under his thumb, but here, in a city he seemed to own, it felt more like being ground under his heel.
Recounting the story of my pre-dawn raid on Merrick’s house made me sound a bit like a madman.
Thoma’s face went slack and pale as he listened, offering infrequent nods as I grew more and more aggravated.
At Merrick, then at myself because if Kit was being dragged before the Right Hand to answer for my behavior, I had no one else to blame.
I spoke quickly to get through it and found myself struggling to string words together by the end. Flushed and furious, I wrenched my hand around my wrist until it was nearly rubbed raw, and when the last bit of honesty trickled out, it left me feeling drained.
“One of these times I'm afraid they'll take him from me, and I'll never get him back.” I glanced over at Thoma and received another halting nod in response. But he must have understood that better than most, so I turned and grabbed him by the arms.
“I need him back, Thoma,” I insisted. “I need him out of here so he can be with me. So we can run the farm together and have a real life away from this awful place.” All my plans and hopes and dreams felt like they were falling, too. Fledgling things that had barely taken off.
I tightened my grip on Thoma’s biceps and fixed my gaze on his. “I want to end it now. End it all. I—”
“Penny?” Thoma laid one of his hands on mine.
The touch, or maybe the sudden hardness in his expression, stopped me.
“Wh-what?” I sputtered.
“Let's go.”
I blinked, fighting the slide down the slope of panic. “Go where?”
He took a step back to free himself from my grasp, then took my hand in his. It didn’t feel like Kit’s. It wasn’t as tender or affectionate or warm, but it was welcome, and I tightened my grip.
“They aren't taking Kit away from you,” Thoma said. “Not tonight and not for good. Now, let's go to the Ossuary and get some answers.”