Chapter 9
Casrian couldn’t stop staring at Rowan, though she refused to look at him.
He remembered her as a girl, the skinny, wide-eyed child who stood up to him so fiercely in the town hall at Jarn. The dirt-smudged, too-short dress. The dark hair coming loose from her braids. The way she begged him to prevent her mother’s trial.
She’d been—what? Twelve? Thirteen?
Too young for what happened to her.
He’d had no choice but to move forward with the trial.
There’d been multiple accusations. Evidence of fae blood in her line.
The trial had been inevitable, even if it had gone badly in the end.
The mayor was a vindictive bastard. The crowd was ugly.
Asher was injured in the fight, and they’d had to leave immediately afterward.
He’d returned to the capital feeling that his first patrol had been a failure.
He’d intended to resign and only the counsel from his commander had convinced him to stay another year.
He’d stayed. He’d gotten better at judging the mood of a town, at navigating the social undercurrents that could muddy the waters of an investigation. He’d gotten better at mercy.
What happened in Jarn had changed him, made him a better captain, hopefully a better person.
But that day…
He remembered the girl’s accusatory eyes, the way she’d screamed at the end. The memory had haunted him ever since.
Not that any of that could possibly mean anything to the woman before him, especially when those events had landed her here—in this sad little village of outcasts and criminals on the edge of the kingdom. In the shadow of the Black Woods. Alone with her blind mother.
He couldn’t imagine that innocent girl growing up in a place like Toam.
He’d never been to this village before, but he knew others like it. The homes made out of scraps. Open sewage in the streets. Crawling with thieves, drunks, and whores.
Witches.
They found lots of witches holed up in villages like this one. Along with men like George who wouldn’t lift a finger to help anyone if it didn’t benefit them in some way.
But Rowan wasn’t a girl any longer.
He was uncomfortably aware of that fact as he sat shirtless on her bed while she changed his bandage.
He tried to ignore the feel of her hands on his body, cool and competent as she unwound the cloth from his torso.
Her head was bent, dark hair spilling forward to hide her face.
She’d insisted this needed to be done now when he’d rather have run away from her.
Coward.
If she could stand to tend him, he could stand to be tended.
“Why are you doing this?”
She didn’t even look up from her work. “Doing what?”
“Stitching me up. Nursing me through the fever. It can’t matter to you whether I live or die.”
“It matters to my mother.” Her lips pressed together. “It matters to me too. I won’t be the kind of person who’d watch someone die when they could help.”
“You should have told me who you were when I first woke up.”
“Would it have made any difference?”
“Perhaps.”
Though he couldn’t say how. If she’d told him last night, would he have been able to sleep knowing who watched over him?
Behind her, Mistress Yahl moved around the fireplace.
She’d set tea to steep, her own blend. She’d sniffed the jars of dried herbs until she found what she was looking for.
Now, she was making eggs. She had the fixed, milky stare of a blind woman.
He didn’t know how she managed to cook without burning herself, but it must be routine because Rowan didn’t seem concerned.
Quietly, he asked, “What happened to her eyes?”
“You. The brand. There was an infection.”
He closed his eyes for a moment. Most brands healed to a light scar, some hardly noticeable. It was rare that they went bad.
Rowan jerked the last of the cloth away from his skin, and he hissed out a breath.
When she turned to toss the dirty bandage into the wash basin, he looked down at the wound.
There were three deep slashes curved about his side and lower ribs.
A few inches lower, and he’d have been gutted.
The stitches looked good. He’d been sewn up often enough to appreciate that.
There was some redness and swelling around the site, but it wasn’t the angry color of a rampaging infection.
Turning back with a bowl of water, Rowan began to clean him with a soft cloth. She went about it quickly, as if it pained her to touch him, but she was gentle enough. He didn’t think she was actually trying to hurt him.
He looked over her head while she worked, trying to ignore the press of her slight body against his thigh, the way the sun caught the red in her dark hair, the clean, warm scent of her.
Instead, he focused on the room beyond. On the thin wooden walls, bare save for the hooks holding their clothing—a jacket, a spare dress, a man’s shirt so small that he thought it must belong to Rowan. He’d seen no other evidence that a man lived here.
The bed pushed against the far wall was covered by a pathetically thin mattress.
His blanket lay neatly folded at its foot.
There was the table, rough but sturdy in the center of the room with two stools underneath.
The rocking chair. His saddlebags in the corner, stuffed with more personal belongings than they had between the two of them.
A bundle of dried lavender had been placed in an earthenware crock on the table.
The flowers, the faded curtains over their one window, the rocking chair—they were the only luxuries in the whole place.
He remembered thinking their cottage in Jarn had been humble, but it had been a palace compared to this.
A sick feeling spread from the pit of his stomach. “How did you come to live here?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Where else would we go? To our country estate? My palace in Caetris?”
“Rowan…” Mistress Yahl murmured in soft rebuke as she set a plate full of eggs on the table and sat down on the stool across from him.
He forced himself to look at her ruined face—the ugly scar, the glassy unseeing eyes. “I’m sorry for what happened in Jarn.”
The words felt pitifully small.
“The day of the trial, I thought… There was no hard evidence. No witch sign. The accusations were thin and all over the place. There was no suggestion of an affinity for anything other than herbcraft and no sign of corruption in that. You heard my report.”
“Everyone in town did,” Mistress Yahl said. “It didn’t make a difference. They’d made up their minds already.”
“There were a lot of witnesses,” Rowan said bitterly. “A whole line of them. Everyone wanted to get a chance to stand up there and tell a wild story.”
“I hadn’t seen that before,” he told them. “I wasn’t prepared for it, the kind of mania that can catch up an entire town and drive them to do reprehensible things. I came to look for you after. One of my men was injured by the mob, and we had to take him all the way to Andur.”
Mistress Yahl took a sip of her tea. “We had to leave immediately after the trial. They wouldn’t let us stay. We would have been days gone by the time you were able to make it to Andur and back. It was kind of you to try.”
Rowan snorted her opinion of that.
“The mayor told me you’d likely returned to the capital. He said you had wealthy relatives there.” He’d wanted that to be the truth. He sometimes thought of them when he saw a dark-haired mother and daughter climbing out of a carriage or entering a shop in Aresdal.
Mistress Yahl grimaced. “No one in the capital would have helped us even if we had the means to travel there.”
Rowan scooped a yellow waxy substance out of a jar and began to smooth it over his ribs.
He flinched at the sting, and her eyes flicked up. “Don’t worry. It’s just simple herbcraft. Nothing in it that will corrupt your immortal soul.”
“I flinched because it’s cold, not because I’m frightened of you.”
“Hmm,” was all she said, smearing the stuff liberally over his wounds before taking up another bandage and setting it in place.
She leaned in close to wrap the bandage behind him. Her long hair slipped over his skin, light as a whisper. Her breath was warm and sweet against his neck.
He forced his attention away from Rowan’s touch and back to the hovel he’d consigned her to, back to her mother’s blind eyes. “Did the priest not try to help you?”
“Father Anson?” Mistress Yahl shook her head. “No. You’ll remember he cast the Church’s vote against me.”
“Most branded women remain where they are,” he said. “The crown doesn’t take their homes. You should have been able to stay.”
“The mayor wanted us out,” Mistress Yahl said. “And there was the fine to pay. The town council claimed my house and property to pay for it.”
“If you had petitioned the Church, they might have covered it. Most priests care for the people under their direction. They’re usually the ones who help the witch get back on her feet. The goal is restoration, forgiveness, renewal.”
Rowan scoffed. “Does the Church renew the skin back to their foreheads? Do they restore sight? Lost reputations?”
“There are other branded witches just as there are other thieves missing hands who still find a way to go on and live full lives.”
“It’s a barbaric practice,” she said. “It should be stopped. I don’t know how you can live with it.”
He caught her gaze and held it. “If you’d seen the damage a witch can do, you would understand the necessity of so harsh a warning.”
“My mother never hurt anyone.”
“That’s not what the town decided.”
She tugged at the bandage hard. “You were the one who branded her.”
There was that.
Mistress Yahl frowned at her daughter. “The mayor and priest cast the deciding votes, Rowan. You know that. The captain tried to convince them otherwise.”
“He didn’t try hard enough,” Rowan muttered as she wrapped the bandage around him again.