Chapter 3
CHLOE
I watched a seven-foot killing machine save a goat, and it worked on me on contact.
Which was the wrong reaction, and I knew it even then. He was the scary blacksmith who'd banged out of the Agency like the building owed him money, the one Maisie had warned me off before I'd thought to ask.
But there he was, down on his knees in the mud, working a glowing goat's idiot head back out of the fence rails and telling it you were always fine, you idiot in a voice like gravel, gentling the panicked thing with hands that could have ended it without trying.
The dangerous-tender contrast of the man did something to my insides that fig cider couldn't be blamed for.
So naturally, I went over there. I have never in my life had a feeling I didn't immediately make worse.
"You've got a real bedside manner," I said. "The goat's lucky."
He stood up like I'd jabbed him with a hot poker.
Up close, he was a wall. I had to tip my head back to find his face, and his face was not glad to be found, all hard angles, a speck of soot he hadn't managed to clear away, and a scowl that looked load-bearing.
He ran hot, too. I could feel it off him in the chilly night air, the heat of a man who lived next to a furnace, and my whole left side leaned toward it without my permission.
"You should go back to the porch," he said.
"I just got here. I'm a delight. Ask anyone, they're all still laughing." I gestured back at the knot of people I'd left, who were indeed still laughing at something Korfas had said.
He didn't look at them. He didn't do the thing every other person on this rock had done since I’d landed: the glance over, the quick happy verdict that I was fun and harmless and worth a minute.
Lorkin just kept those flat gold eyes on me and let the silence sit, like he could stand in the cold all night and not be charmed by a single thing I had.
It shouldn't have landed the way it did. But I run on the laugh the way other people run on air, and I'd swept that porch twice since I came over without deciding to, who's smiling, who drifted, who's still mine, and his was the one face in the whole yard that hadn't handed me back a thing.
"So what's your deal?" It came out with less spin on it than I meant. "Maisie says you don't come to things."
"I don't."
"And yet." I'm not above stealing a good line, and Nezara had a great one. "Here you are. At a thing. In a clean shirt."
He looked at me a beat too long. His jaw worked. Then, low, almost like the words got out before he could stop them, he said, "You don't have to do that."
He didn't say do what. He didn't have to.
The porch noise went very far away.
I'm good at this. Genuinely good. I've deflected men, mothers, bosses, and one extremely persistent collections agent, and I keep a deflection for every occasion, layered on like armor.
But armor only works on the people who come to watch the show, and this guy had looked straight past it to where I was cowering in sheet metal and praying no one saw.
If he'd been cruel, I'd have had something to brace against. Kind and dead-on, I had nothing.
I'd talked to four therapists. A best friend who's known me since we were nine.
Not one of them ever once caught me mid-routine and just gently turned and stopped it all.
And somewhere under all my noise, gone quiet for the first time I could remember, my heart did a strange flip-flop I really didn't like.
"Do what?" I managed, and it was the only thing I could find. Once, I talked my way out of a customs hold with a straight face and a story I invented on the spot. I couldn't talk my way out of one quiet sentence from a scowling stranger next to a glowing goat pen.
Something flickered across his face. It wasn't a scowl.
For half a second he looked almost sorry, like he'd reached for a tool and grabbed the hot end, and the warmth that flickered up under the soot of him made the hook in my chest haul so hard I actually swayed forward half a step before I caught it.
And then he shut it down. I watched a door close behind his eyes, and when he spoke again, his voice had gone cold and even and final.
"You should meet Zarcal," he said. "He wants what you came here for. He'll be good to you." Lorkin stepped back, putting the night air between us, like he was the one who needed protecting. "Don't waste your last try on a man who isn't going to keep you."
Then he walked off into the dark past the lanterns, where I couldn't follow without making it a scene, and left me standing there having been seen all the way through and handed off in the same breath, like a parcel he'd signed for by mistake.
Don't waste your last try on a man who isn't going to keep you.
Butt face.
I couldn't even be properly mad about it. He wasn't wrong. He'd seen to the heart of me in thirty seconds and understood exactly what it had taken my two previous matches weeks to figure out: I wasn't worth keeping.
Zarcal was a lot easier to be around. After being read down to the studs by a man who walked off into the dark, easy was about the only thing in the world I wanted, and Zarcal was nothing but that.
I'd known him a little already, the way you know everyone after a few months in a town this size, the funny one at the edge of every gathering with a cup in each hand. I'd just never let myself really look, because the first two trials had eaten my attention and then my confidence.
That night he turned the whole warm weight of himself toward me on purpose, and it was a different thing entirely.
He was huge and warm, and he laughed at everything, a big rolling laugh that made you want to keep going just to hear it again. He told me a long story about Korfas getting lost in the shadow-wood that Korfas, standing right there, clearly had heard four hundred times and laughed anyway.
Then he pressed a second cup of cider into my hand before I'd finished the first, and when I asked why he had two, he looked baffled, like the answer was self-evident. "So I never run out," he said.
"That's either the saddest thing anyone's ever said to me or the most efficient," I responded.
"Both." He looked delighted, like I'd handed him a prize. "You're allowed to be both. That's the whole trick." He nudged the cup toward my mouth. "Drink. You're behind."
I was. He stayed a cup or two ahead of the entire party, easy and smooth and never once sloppy, just topped up, a careful inch of cider always kept between himself and whatever sat under the laugh.
He thought I was funny, and he thought I was beautiful; he said so plainly, three times, with the slightly stunned air of a man who couldn't believe his luck. He looked at me like I was a gift somebody had finally let him keep.
I didn't have a defense for being looked at like that.
I'd spent twenty-seven years being the fun one, the one men loved having around right up until they met someone restful and married her within a year.
I had a whole filing cabinet of being wanted, almost. And here was a sweet, enormous man holding cider and looking at me like keeping me was the obvious and only plan.
So when the trial paperwork came up, two days later, in Nezara's clean little office with the clock ticking down on my whole life, I said yes to Zarcal.
I said yes with my head, which pointed out, reasonably, that I had one swing left, that Zarcal was kind and wanted me and would be good to me, that those were the words the scary blacksmith had used and even he thought I should take them.
My body, the traitor, kept leaning toward the door the whole time, toward something I still had no name for. Toward the forge and the smoke that hung over that end of town, toward a man who'd seen the back page of me in thirty seconds and told me not to waste my last try on him.
I signed anyway. I'm a high achiever. Always have been.
Zarcal's place was on the south road where it intersectst with the main street, a snug timber house he'd built himself and was so proud of that he showed me every joint and beam like introducing family. He'd made up a room for me, with a low bed and a stool and a lamp I could reach.
He'd done it badly and earnestly, the steps a little crooked, the shelf a hair too high, and the wrongness of it was somehow more touching than if he'd gotten it right because you could see him measuring a problem he didn't understand and trying anyway.
He was a good man, and watching him try this hard was its own quiet ache.
He cooked. He told stories. Beyond a hand on my shoulder, he never once reached for me, courtly and careful, waiting for a signal I kept not giving.
The first night I lay in the crooked little bed in the good man's good house and listened to him moving around after dark, restless, up at hours no settled person keeps, and I stared at the ceiling and wondered what the hell I was doing.
It was simple: Zarcal, kind. Zarcal, wants me. Zarcal, last chance. A snug house and a husband glad of me every day. Smart. Safe. The correct answer to the whole equation of my life.
I told myself the blacksmith was a closed door, and I'd learn to walk past it.
I'd warm to Zarcal, I decided; warmth was a thing you could practice, and I'd practiced worse.
The third day, I found a reason to walk into town. Smoke from the forge hung over the street, and I did not go in. I had that much sense. I just walked past it slowly, like an idiot, like a moth doing laps of a thing that would obviously burn it.
I caught one glimpse of Lorkin through the open front, stripped to the waist in the furnace light, a hammer coming down and sparks going up around him like the whole forge was breathing fire on his account.
A wave of want hit me so strongly that I had to go stand behind the apothecary and have a word with myself.
"You're with Zarcal," I told the wall of the apothecary. "Zarcal is kind. Zarcal is the answer. You’re not going to torch your last good chance over a man who told you to your face he won't keep you. You've been returned twice. You cannot afford taste. Taste is for women with options."
The apothecary wall, wisely, said nothing.
I walked back to the south road and the snug house and the good man, and I practiced warmth at him over supper, and I was, I think, fairly convincing.
It's the one thing I've never been bad at, and it has never once saved me.