11. Penny #2
And then there was Kit, walking beside me. His dark curls were a mess from the journey, and his tunic was rumpled, but his hand found mine and gave it a squeeze that settled my stomach. His warm brown eyes caught mine with a flicker of amusement. “Charming place,” he murmured.
We cleared a space between a ring of trees and got to work.
Anders dug a fire pit with the toe of his boot, Rosie unpacked the bedrolls, and Isla wandered off without a word, probably to circle the perimeter.
Kit and I dug out the pastries and jerky we’d packed for dinner while Anders cursed under his breath about our live sacrifice.
Since we’d stopped, Delilah had begun squirming and bleating, likely eager to stretch her stiff legs after days in the crate. Besides grating on our already frayed nerves, the racket was likely to attract attention to the camp we were building, so Anders was looking for a way to shut her up.
“She might be hungry,” I suggested.
The lumberman rolled his eyes. “I’m not about to waste time and rations on an animal that will be dead in a few hours. Didn’t you say we should kill the godsdamned thing? Why don’t you go ahead and finish it off now, then we can have a bit of peace.”
He pulled his machete free from its tie on his belt and brandished it.
“No!” I yelped, dropping the food I’d been holding to spring toward the caged animal.
Kit retrieved the discarded sweet rolls and straightened as he brushed away invisible dirt. “Find a good patch of grass, Pen,” he told me while leveling a sharp gaze at Anders. “Put Delilah’s crate on top of it. She can have a bite through the floor.”
Anders frowned but gave no protest while Kit and I abandoned our provisions for the cause of moving Delilah’s cage. She settled after that, and Anders sent Isla and Rosie to gather firewood.
“You two head into town,” he instructed Kit and me. “Find a path to the well where we won’t be spotted.”
“And what will you be doing?” Kit inquired, his eyes narrowed with suspicion.
Anders flashed the machete again, and I groaned. “I’m going to hunt,” he bragged.
“We brought plenty of supplies,” Kit told him. “We’re only out here until tomorrow.”
“All I found was bread and dried vegetables,” Anders whined. “Men need meat. If you’re not opposed, I could butcher Delilah.” He said her name in a mocking tone. “Surely we don’t need the whole body to poison the well.”
“Go find a rabbit or something,” I sneered, then gave a shooing flap of my hands.
Kit and I waited while Anders trotted off, then I gave a noisy huff. “Some people are less human than animals,” I muttered.
Kit looped his arm around me and pulled me in for a quick kiss on my temple. “You’re precious, you know that?”
I shot him a sideways look as we started toward the town and found a narrow bridle path. “Why do you say that?”
He shrugged. “I just… I’ve never met anyone like you.”
My eyes narrowed. “You think I’m being silly? About Delilah?”
We were getting closer to the village now. I could smell hearth smoke and the faintly sour tang of manure. The path widened into a road, the trees thinned out, but Kit didn’t let go of my hand.
He stopped walking and turned to face me. “No,” he said, and there wasn’t an ounce of teasing in his voice. “I really don’t. I think you’re being exactly the man I fell in love with.”
The words hit low and warm, and I couldn’t think of anything to say in return, but I knew that no one else could make me smile while walking into a doomed town.
Millfield was as sparsely populated as I’d first surmised.
It wasn’t difficult to plan a route by which the five of us could scurry in with Delilah on a lead and heave her over the edge of the old stone well.
I lingered too long at the site, using the last bit of daylight to gaze down, down, down into the watery pit.
A lump clogged my throat.
It would be a terrible way to die.
Kit seemed to sense my trepidation and hurried me back to camp before I could ruminate too long on our crime.
We arrived to the campsite in a commotion.
Anders had Rosie and Isla in his sights as he shouted.
“Well, if we don’t find the thing, we’ve come here for nothing!”
Rosie’s worried brown eyes found mine, and her interest signaled Anders to turn. He whirled around, swinging his machete with reckless abandon.
“You!” He leveled the oversized blade at me. “You ran it off, didn’t you?”
I raised my hands in surrender while Kit reached to the dagger at his belt.
“Ran what off?” I asked.
“The godsdamned sheep!” Anders bellowed. “You’ve been mooning over the critter all day, of course you let it go.”
I glanced around, searching the cleared area and finding the crate that had contained Delilah still in the patch of grass, but empty. The door hung open, and the rope that had been securing it was frayed on the ground.
Kit stepped forward and slightly in front of me, deflecting Anders’s wrath. “Penny was with me. In town. And the sheep was here when we left.”
Anders’s red face twisted in disdain. “Always so eager to defend him. Have you considered finding a less troublesome man to fuck?”
“Anders!” Rosie snapped, and Kit seethed.
“That’s too damn far.” He’d nearly unsheathed his knife as he pressed forward, muscles bunching beneath the linen of his shirt.
My skin prickled with angry heat, and my fists clenched as I prepared to follow Kit into battle, but Isla lurched into the space between us.
“If it’s gotten away, it’s only getting farther!
” she shouted, her pale face brightly pink all the way to the tips of her ears.
“And farther still while you stand here and bicker. Unless you want to steal a sheep from some farmer and bring more misery on this town, we’d best find the one we brought! ”
I wasn’t sure if I was more inspired by the point she made or the fact that I’d never heard her speak above a murmur, but I found myself nodding along. Everyone else must have felt similarly because the heat in the air dissipated in favor of cooling calm as new instructions were given.
“We’ll find her,” Rosie said, and as good as I felt about not having to rob the people whose water supply we were about to foul, I still didn’t feel good about poor Delilah’s fate.
Taking Kit’s elbow, I turned to begin a weary trudge into the woods, but Anders called after us.
“Oh, no. You two don’t go together this time. I made that mistake once. You each take one of the girls.”
Kit tensed again, readying for protest as the lumberman tagged on.
“Sorry, maybe I should be more specific. You don’t count, Penwell; you only act like a girl.”
“Bastard,” Kit grumbled, but this time he didn’t reach for his knife.
“Rosie, you go with him.” Anders waved her toward me. “Wherever he leads you, go the opposite way. I bet he knows exactly where he hid the damned thing.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but Rosie was already stepping up beside me.
Kit gave me a look, his expression somewhere between sympathy and rage. “Be careful,” he said quietly, reaching out to tug my sleeve, just once.
“You too,” I murmured. “And if Anders says one more word like that—”
“I’ll sit on him,” Kit said. “Crush his lungs. End of problem.”
That earned him a faint smile from me, but it was gone as quickly as it came. My boots were already moving, crunching through the brittle leaves as I turned toward the darker part of the woods.
Rosie followed without speaking, though I could hear the tension in her steps, sharp and deliberate beside me. The shadows deepened as we walked, the smell of moss and rot rising from the earth, thick enough to swallow our words if we’d had any to share.
I didn’t want to be out here. Not without Kit. Not chasing a sacrificial sheep like some villain from a cautionary tale. But there wasn’t much room for want anymore. There was only what needed doing, and who we had to be to get it done.