Chapter 38 Evera
EVERA
Sitting in the study, I closed my eyes, immensely grateful for the calm. The door was propped open, letting in sunlight and a warm spring breeze. I took a sip of white wine—light and crisp with notes of citrus.
“Thank you for this, Farren,” I said on a sigh, the tension leaving my body.
I watched her tear a piece of bread from the fresh loaf she’d brought from her family’s bakery, still warm, and cut a small bit of soft cheese to spread over it. “We both needed it, I think.” She smiled, but her usual warmth didn’t reach her eyes.
“Is something weighing on you?” I asked.
Humming thoughtfully, Farren dipped the spreading knife into a jar of fresh blackberry preserves and added it to her bread, mixing it with the cheese. “Nothing that is of any interest.”
“It is of interest to me,” I said, filling her glass back up to nearly half full.
Needing little encouragement, she swallowed her bite of bread and sighed haplessly. “Father says I must choose a suitor soon.”
From the time we were girls, Farren had always spoken highly of marriage and motherhood, and how desperately she looked forward to them.
It wasn’t my dream, but I understood her yearning, in a way.
The comfort of a man in your bed each night, waking to the giggling of children and the warmth of your husband’s smile.
Those things, admittedly, were desirable.
It was the complacency, the starching of self that came with marriage that dissuaded me.
But Farren and I were different in many ways, and I had no intention of discouraging her.
“Of all the men who have come for your hand, you do not take to any of them?” I already knew the answer, but she needed to express the her thoughts aloud to fully accept them.
“It is not that. I am grateful, truly. For I’ve had more suitors than I can expect as the daughter of a baker, and there have been several that were kind and young and charming …” Her brows drew together faintly.
Waiting for her to continue, I took another sip, letting the alcohol warm my belly and lighten my mind.
“I have been hoping,”—she sighed—“waiting, for one. But he has not come for me, and I do not think he will.”
There it was. I offered her a look of encouragement. “I will see what I can do. But you must be brave as well. Between your shyness and his aloofness, there is only so much that I can do.”
The corners of her lips quirked down, but Farren spoke no further on her feelings for Aureus. It was something she never fully admitted to, yet between friends, it was often not necessary for something to be voiced aloud to be understood.
“What of you, Evera? What of the guard?”
Heat warmed my cheeks as my thoughts turned to Neirin and to the kisses he’d given me. “He is a dangerous temptation,” I said, swirling my wine. “One I believe I am falling quite heavily for.”
The curtain to the back door swept open, and I tilted my head, expecting to find Aureus. When I sighed deeply, Farren turned in her seat to see who approached us.
“What are you doing here, Ruairc?” I asked, sobering.
Aureus came through the curtain next, his eyes briefly scanning the study chairs where Farren and I lounged, undoubtedly questioning the effects I had on her propriety.
“I wish to speak with you,” Ruairc stated, shuffling his feet, a look of hesitancy entering his expression.
I withheld my retort and softened my response. “There is another, Ruairc—”
“I am not here to court you.”
I raised a brow and exchanged a glance with Aureus.
The pinch of my brother’s lips suggested he was not aware of this change in intentions, though he was not outwardly displeased, either.
After our talk, Aureus had taken a step back on the topic of marriage.
Being raised with Leighis, we’d learned of the lore and the magic of the bonds; we held a certain level of respect for such things.
Though I was certain that in his eyes, Ruairc was still the better match.
And I could not, in all fairness, blame him for that. The cobbler was a safe choice.
“Then why have you come for me?”
“There is something I must say. It is important.” Scaling the few short steps up to the study, Ruairc nodded a greeting to Farren and held his hand out to me. “Please, Evera, walk with me.”
Though my first reaction was to deny him, the longing in his eyes made me uneasy—his intrusion presented the perfect opportunity to give Farren and Aureus a moment alone.
Leaning in, I spoke against Farren’s ear. “Feign that you are intoxicated.”
She faced me with a confused draw of her brows, but when I subtly raised a brow toward Aureus at the bottom of the steps, she flushed and nodded.
Sighing, I took Ruairc’s hand and allowed him to help me stand. It was the kind of thing a gentleman would do, yet it itched at my skin. Everything Ruairc did spoke to my inadequacies as a person, my need to depend on a man for every action.
“Farren is drunk,” I told Aureus as I straightened my skirts. “Stay with her until I return?”
“The shop—”
“It is slow, and I will lock the door on my way out.”
Frustration creased Aureus’s brows, but he was, like Ruairc, a man of chivalrous intent. “Very well.”
Farren flushed a deep crimson. Addressing her glass and the half-empty bottle of wine from which I’d poured only once for myself, I questioned how much of an act she would truly have to put on.
I followed Ruairc down the steps, calling for Calix over my shoulder, wanting to give Farren and my brother time alone.
In truth, the boy was barely noticeable, tucked against the bookshelves, deep in his own world.
He’d become increasingly interested in Leighis’s books, and scrolls, and journals, and I often found him reading even when I woke in the night to relieve myself.
I’d asked him on several occasions what he was so interested in, but he always brushed the question aside. It was Leighis he took his thoughts to.
Abandoning his book, Calix stood and hurried to catch up to us.
As Neirin had claimed, the boy was extremely well-poised.
Never did he complain or act with reluctance.
A part of me was grateful for this, as he had more or less been placed in my care.
But this discipline came from ill treatment in his past, and that was a sobering thought.
We left the shop, and I locked the front door behind us.
“Did you only accept my invitation to leave the two of them together?” Ruairc asked.
I turned my gaze to him and narrowed my eyes. “How—”
The cobbler laughed, though it did not reach his eyes. “It is not a difficult thing to do, to fall for someone you grew up with.” He ran a hand through his hair. “And they do not hide it well, though they seem adamant in their refusal to admit their feelings to each other or to themselves.”
Calix, apparently having no interest in conversations about romance or courtship, ran ahead to the central well and worked at the rope, pulling up a bucket for himself. On this day, the market consisted of barely more than half a dozen stands, so it was easy enough to keep an eye on the boy.
“Aureus worries too much about the shop to consider a relationship for himself, and he is blind to her affections.”
“Is it that he worries about the shop, or that he worries about you?”
Frowning, I considered stepping down the few short steps to the market square. “Perhaps it is both.”
Leaving the faint hum of the market, we made our way to the road and set off at a leisurely walk toward the cliffside. Calix followed dutifully as I had anticipated, keeping a respectful distance back.
“What is it you wished to speak of?” I asked, bypassing idle chat.
Ruairc kicked at a stone as he walked. It skipped ahead of us, stopping in a crack where a puddle of water gathered from the prior night’s rainfall. “Your brother gave me your dagger.”
I balked.
Before I could respond, he held up his hand. “Though I am not a blacksmith, I understand the mending of things. When I saw it, I asked why you did not carry it, and Aureus would not confide in me. Yet he did offer it to me to repair when I proposed the idea.”
Unease twisted my stomach, and I stopped walking. “Speak plainly.”
“Very well.” Ruairc drew a bundle cloaked in burlap cloth from a leather bag strapped over his neck. Unwrapping the layers, he revealed my dagger, though it was not my dagger.
“You repaired it,” I observed on a breath.
“Yes. That is what I wish to speak to you about, and why I have decided to step down, to no longer court you.”
A short distance off, I caught Calix’s gaze. The boy seemed to have some form of intensified sense of hearing. Whether that was simply his observational skills, or whether he could read lips, or whether it was an effect of what he was, I could not say.
When I gave no reply, Ruairc continued. “It has always been in my nature, I believe, to fix that which is broken. As I did with your dagger.” He did not offer it to me, only held it in his hands, his eyes lowered to it.
“It is a common blade, really. I’ve seen several similar ones before, just like it.
It is because of that, that I was able to repair it to such a likeness of its original state.
Yet … When I did, I realized how incredibly wrong I had been to do so. ”
“This is what you came to tell me, that my dagger is exceptionally ordinary?” I fought to keep my impatience from my tone.
Ruairc raised his gaze, and I met his honey-brown eyes. “I’ve always measured things by their usefulness or adequacy. I deem an object valuable using my standards alone, but … perhaps it’s not my place to—”
Shaking my head, I cast my eyes to the coastline, where seabirds hovered and squalled. “A dagger is only useful if it’s sharp, Ruairc. That is my measure of value.”
“Evera, look at me, please.”
Reluctantly, I did.
“How many times have you used this dagger over the years? Countless times, yes? What have you used it for?”