Chapter 15 #2
“Not like you,” Amelia said.
He looked smug.
“A man like you would probably require a follow-up maneuver.”
Hob put a hand to his chest. “She wounds me.”
“You’d survive.”
“Aye, but would my pride?”
“Unclear.”
Wat scrambled up. “Show us.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I enjoy having all my limbs in their current arrangement.”
Martin spread his arms. “You may throw me.”
Amelia looked him over. “Absolutely not.”
“Afraid?”
“Yes.”
The honesty startled another laugh from the men.
She pointed at the hard-packed earth. “I am five foot three on a good day, wearing a long dress. If I try to demonstrate anything in this yard, I’ll break myself, and then Edith will yell at me, and I am not emotionally prepared for that.”
Edith nodded. “Wise.”
Martin grinned. “Then it is a tale.”
“It is not a tale.”
“A charming tale,” Osbern said. “The tiny mistress who throws giants.”
“I dislike all of you.”
Hob’s grin softened into something warmer. “Nay, you don’t.”
That was the trouble. She didn’t.
These men should have frightened her. Some did, a little.
They were scarred and loud and rough-edged, with blades at their belts and jokes that wandered into ditches without warning.
They lived in a world where a man could die from a bad harvest, a bad lord, a nasty cut, or the wrong banner carried on the wrong day.
They had followed Thomas into a battle that took most of their friends and still answered when he called. And now they were laughing with her.
Not at the strange woman from nowhere. Not at the faery whisper or the runaway wife cover. With her. It loosened something in Amelia.
She had been useful in the accounts. Useful in the harvest. Useful in the hall with lists and messages and clean hands. Useful was safe. Useful earned bread and a place at the fire.
But this was different.
This was belonging, thin as a first thread, not yet strong enough to bear weight, but there.
Thomas seemed to feel the shift too. His gaze moved over the men, the children, Edith standing with her basket, Amelia at the rail with her veil slipping and her curls escaping, and something in his face went still in a way that made her chest ache.
Thomas said, “Use Martin.”
Martin’s grin faltered. “My lord?”
Thomas looked at Amelia. “He is lighter than Hob, slower than Osbern, and too pleased with himself.”
“I feel described unfairly,” Martin said.
“You offered,” Thomas replied.
Amelia stared at him. “You believe me?”
“I believe in leverage.”
Something in the way he said it made her pulse kick.
“Well,” she said, because backing down now would be death by male smugness, “fine. But if I die, I want everyone here to know I was bullied by peer pressure and medieval masculinity.”
The men looked delighted.
Thomas’s brow creased. “Medieval what?”
“Never mind.”
She handed her wax tablet to Wat, then gathered the front of her gown enough to keep from stepping on it. “Martin, stand behind me.”
Martin obeyed with exaggerated care, as if approaching a skittish goat.
“Now put your arm around me. Not my neck,” Amelia said quickly when he lifted his hand. “My waist. Like you’re trying to drag me backward.”
Martin glanced at Thomas.
Their lord’s face had gone very still.
“Gently,” Amelia added.
Martin’s arm came around her waist.
Amelia hated how vulnerable the position felt, even in play. The memory of the class came back in fragments. The instructor’s voice, the rubber mat under her bare feet, the sour smell of old sweat and disinfectant, her own nervous laugh when a man twice her size had grabbed her from behind.
Breathe. Drop your weight. Turn into him. Take the balance he thinks belongs to him.
She planted her foot between Martin’s boots.
“Are you ready?” he asked, far too cheerfully.
“No,” Amelia said. Then she dropped her weight, twisted, hooked his wrist, and used his own forward lean against him.
Martin made a sound like a startled goose. One moment he was behind her, the next he was on his back in the dust, blinking at the sky.
For one suspended heartbeat, no one moved, then Wat shouted, Osbern nearly fell over the rail, and Hob slapped both hands on his thighs and laughed so hard that no sound at all came out.
Someone by the stables bellowed, “She felled him!” and three more men came running as if battle had broken out and they were furious to have missed the good parts.
Martin raised one hand from the ground. “I withdraw all earlier remarks.”
Amelia pushed her veil back with as much dignity as she could manage while her heart tried to escape through her ears. “Good.”
Thomas wasn’t laughing.
That should have worried her, except his eyes had gone dark and bright in a way that made every inch of her skin remember it was alive.
“Well done,” he said.
Two words. Quietly given. They landed harder than all the laughter.
Alyson, sticky with honey and thrilled beyond sense, flung both fists into the air.
“Dung-souled hedgepig!”
Hob made a strangled sound. Osbern turned his face into the rail. Martin, still flat on his back, began to shake.
Amelia covered her mouth. Thomas looked as if he had taken an arrow and preferred it. Edith rounded on the entire yard. “Which flea-bitten sack of donkey spleens taught that child such filth?”
Alyson beamed. “You said blistered foot.”
“That was anatomy,” Edith snapped. “Different matter.”
The men roared. Wat collapsed against the rail. Hob actually wiped tears from his beard. Even Thomas turned away, shoulders moving once, twice, before he mastered himself.
Amelia looked at Alyson, who was glowing with the terrible pride of a child who had just discovered language could be weaponized.
“We are all going to hell,” Amelia said.
Thomas glanced back at her, mouth fighting a smile. “Some of us were already bound there.”
“Good,” Edith said. “Then you can carry Martin.”
When Martin had been hauled upright, dusted off, and mocked to within an inch of his remaining dignity, the yard settled slowly back into itself.
Then Walter came bustling from the yard, a roll beneath one arm and displeasure carrying him faster than his legs.
“My lord,” he said. “Master Hugh says he cannot carry grain because his back is afflicted again.”
Hob groaned. “His back has more complaints than a widow at tax time.”
Walter ignored him. “And Mistress Quinn is needed in the solar if these lists of hers are to continue breeding.”
“My lists do not breed,” Amelia said.
Walter looked at the wax tablet in her hand. “There are more every time I see you.”
“They’re multiplying in a responsible manner.”
Thomas looked at her. “Can lists do that?”
“In the right conditions.”
“What conditions?”
“Neglect, confusion, and men saying they’ll remember things.”
Hob nodded as though this were wisdom from a holy text. “That will do it.”
Walter pinched the bridge of his nose.
Edith, who had been watching Amelia with narrowed eyes, suddenly said, “Let her be a moment.”
Walter blinked. “Edith?”
“She’s been running since sunrise. The rolls will not shrivel if they wait while the lass breathes.”
Amelia turned to her, surprised.
Edith didn’t look soft. Edith probably looked soft only in a dark room during a fever dream. She stood broad and solid in her brown gown, the sleeves rolled back, grey streaks in her dark hair, a smear of flour near one cheekbone. But her eyes had gone kind in that brisk, terrifying way of hers.
“You may come help me with the linen after,” Edith said. “I’ve torn sheets enough to bind an army, and if these dolts keep collecting bruises, we’ll need every strip.”
Amelia smiled.
Edith looked away first, but the corner of her mouth twitched.
There it was again. Another stitch.
Thomas stepped closer, low enough that only Amelia heard him. “You have won them.”
She looked up at him. “Who?”
He glanced toward Hob, Osbern, Martin, the children, even Walter pretending not to listen and Edith pretending not to care.
“My men.”
Something in his voice made the words more than an observation. A warning, maybe. Or wonder. Or fear. Thomas was not a man who gave pieces of himself easily, but his people were pieces of him whether he admitted it or not. To be accepted by them was to step closer to him.
Too close, perhaps.
Amelia tried for lightness because the alternative was feeling everything.
“I did it with soap and threats.”
“A fearsome combination.”
“Don’t forget thumb inspections.”
“Never.”
The faintest smile touched his mouth.
Behind them, Martin nudged Osbern and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like sweet words of wooing, which earned him an elbow to the ribs from Hob and a look from Thomas that should have turned him to salt.
Amelia pretended not to hear, which was becoming one of her most valuable medieval skills.
The sun slid higher. The men returned to drill.
Walter finally lured Thomas into a conversation about stores, routes, and who could be spared to help mend the south fence before the next rain.
Edith took Alyson back toward the kitchens with promises of more honey if she stopped sticking her fingers in the crock.
Wat stayed with Amelia, sitting on the rail and swinging his legs, watching the men with the solemn hunger of a boy who wanted to become every brave thing he saw.
“Will you learn to fight?” Amelia asked him softly.
He shrugged, but his eyes never left Thomas. “Hob says I’m too small.”
“You’ll grow.”
“Hob says not soon enough.”
“Hob is a cheerful soul.”
Wat glanced at her. “I want to be like him.”
“Hob?”
“Lord Thomas.”
Amelia followed his gaze.
Thomas had taken a blade again, this time correcting a younger man’s grip. He stood behind the soldier, adjusting his arm, patient in the way people were when the lesson mattered. His voice carried, low and rough.
“Your wrist here. If you hold too tight, the blade owns you. Hold too loose, and you lose it. Again.”
The young man tried. Failed. Tried again.
Thomas didn’t mock him or shout. Merely corrected, demonstrated, stepped back, and let the man find the motion.
Amelia’s throat tightened.
“I can understand that,” she said.