Chapter 29 #2
Thomas’s hand tightened around the parchment until the edge bit into his palm.
Amelia looked at him, not only with fear, but with trust. She expected him to be the man everyone believed he was. The man who stood between danger and those under his protection. The man who had told her she was safe with him. The man he wanted, saints help him, to be.
He wanted to draw his sword. Every old, brutal instinct in him demanded it. Step forward. Take Crale’s lying tongue. Put Belmaine in the mud. Let the law sort itself out around the bodies.
Hob would follow. So would half the yard. And Ashcombe would bleed for it. Again.
Thomas looked at the clerk. “You’ll write that Mistress Amelia goes under protest.”
The clerk nodded quickly. “Aye, my lord.”
“You’ll write that I deny Crale’s claim until it is proved before proper authority.”
“Aye.”
“You’ll write that if any harm comes to her beneath Sir Roger’s roof, I’ll hold him answerable before crown, Church, and every man in England with ears enough to hear me.”
Belmaine’s mouth tightened. “There is no need for threats.”
“That wasn’t a threat.”
Hob’s smile was grim. “He’s much clearer when he threatens.”
The clerk’s quill shook as he wrote on the wax tablet he had snatched from his pouch. Walter stood nearby, pale and furious.
Thomas turned back to Amelia. “I’ll come for you.”
For a heartbeat, the yard disappeared. There was only her face, white beneath the crooked wimple, and those green eyes holding his with a grief so clean it made him feel unmade.
“You’re letting them take me.”
“I’ll bring you back.”
“Those are completely different things.”
He couldn’t breathe around the truth of it.
Crale stepped toward her, gaining confidence now that the ground had shifted. “Come, wife.”
Thomas’s sword came clear of the scabbard with a sound that silenced the yard as Crale froze.
“No,” Thomas said.
Belmaine’s hand twitched. “Ashcombe.”
Thomas didn’t look away from Crale. “You will not touch her.”
Belmaine smiled thinly. “A husband may assist his wife to mount.”
“Hob,” Thomas said.
Hob moved at once and took the reins of the pale grey palfrey one of Belmaine’s men had brought forward.
A side-saddle had been arranged in an approximation of care.
The sight made Thomas’s stomach turn. The parchment.
The witnesses. The clerk. The horse. Even the hour, late enough that pursuit would look like rage and not law. All planned.
“Mistress,” Hob said, holding the horse steady.
Edith came down the steps with Amelia’s cloak. It was plain wool, dyed a brown that had seen better years, but Edith had brushed it clean that morning and mended the frayed edge with tiny neat stitches.
She didn’t hand the cloak to Crale or Belmaine, but walked to Amelia and settled it around her shoulders herself, tying the cord at her throat with hands that shook only once.
“You keep your wits,” Edith said.
Amelia swallowed. “I seem to have misplaced them.”
“Nay. They’re sharp enough to cut. Use them.”
“Alyson,” Wat hissed.
The little girl flew across the yard and threw herself against Amelia’s skirts, wrapping both arms tight around her. Her face crumpled into the wool.
“Don’t go,” she sobbed.
Amelia’s hand went to the child’s head. She closed her eyes as a single tear ran down her cheek.
Thomas looked away because he couldn’t look and remain standing.
Wat came too, slower, his face rigid with the effort to be a big brother. He stood before Amelia with fists clenched.
“I can stick him with my knife.”
A strangled sound came from the clerk.
Amelia let out a broken laugh and touched Wat’s cheek. “No stabbing. Not today.”
“Tomorrow?” Alyson asked wetly.
Edith made a noise. “Saints preserve us.”
“Maybe not tomorrow either,” Amelia said, voice trembling.
Friar Huck came forward last. His brown habit was dusted with flour at one sleeve and there was honey on his thumb, which was such a Huck thing that it should have comforted Thomas, yet somehow made everything worse. He pressed a small twist of cloth into Amelia’s hand.
“Honey cake,” he said. “For the road.”
Belmaine looked offended. “She rides less than an hour.”
Huck smiled mildly. “Then it may sweeten an hour that sorely needs it.”
Amelia closed her fingers around the bundle. “Thank you.”
Thomas watched all of them touch her because he could not.
If he did, he would not let go and there would be hell to pay.
Amelia walked toward the palfrey, past him, and for one terrible breath, he thought she would pass without looking to him. Perhaps he deserved it.
Then she stopped beside him.
Close enough that he could smell the faint clean scent of lavender Edith tucked among the linens. Close enough that one escaped curl stirred against his arm in the wind.
She spoke softly, so none would hear.
“I told you the truth.”
His throat closed. “I know.”
Her eyes searched his face as if she were looking for the man she had trusted and finding only the armor he’d put between them.
“There are things I haven’t told you,” she said. “Impossible things. But not this. Never this.”
“I know.”
Her mouth trembled then, and it nearly killed him.
“Then why does it feel like you don’t?”
There was no answer that didn’t damn him.
Thomas reached for words and found none.
That was his curse. On battlefields, he always knew where to put his hands.
Shield there. Sword high. Step left. Cut under.
He knew how to use his body to keep men alive, or avenge them when he couldn’t.
But here, with Amelia looking up at him as if he had become another door closing against her, he had only silence.
Belmaine had counted on that too.
Amelia waited one heartbeat longer, then she nodded once, as if some final account had balanced in her head and left them both poorer.
“Take care of Wat and Alyson,” she said.
“I’ll bring you back.”
Her smile was small and sharp and not a smile at all. “You keep saying that as if it changes the leaving.”
Then she walked to the horse, let Hob help her mount. Carefully. Gently. His face looked carved from old oak.
“Sit deep,” he muttered. “And if that one touches your bridle, bite him.”
Despite everything, Amelia looked down at him. “Bite him?”
“Or kick. You’ve little legs, but they’ve spirit.”
She made a sound that might have become laughter in a kinder world.
Belmaine mounted. Crale climbed onto his own horse with less grace, keeping well clear of Thomas’s blade. Wise again.
Thomas stood in the yard and watched as they turned toward the gate.