Chapter 31
MARIS
The morning rush is thin but real.
By the time the first loaves come out of the oven, three customers are already waiting at the door.
I recognize all of them — regulars, faces I've sold bread to for years.
They come in without speaking much beyond their orders, which is fine.
They put their coins on the countertop and take their parcels and leave, and not one of them mentions the council or the rumors or Elin's ears or anything that happened recently.
I count that as a significant improvement.
The widow from the south lane comes in next and buys two loaves, which is one more than her usual.
She doesn't comment on it and neither do I.
The Cartwright's apprentice stops in for rolls before his midday break.
An older man I know only as the person who lives above the cooperage buys a seeded loaf and examines his change with the thoroughness of someone who has nowhere pressing to be.
The flow is cautious and quiet and nowhere near what it was before the scarf incident. But it's traffic, and it's mine, and by midmorning the display shelf has actual gaps in it for the first time in days.
Two women come in together around the tenth hour.
They're friendly — not warm exactly, but friendly, the manner of people who have made a decision and are following through on it.
One of them mentions Fenwood in passing, almost offhand, saying she never trusted the way he moved through the market.
The other one nods and says she'd heard similar things from her husband, who'd done business with one of the other caravan merchants.
Neither of them elaborates. Neither of them looks at me like they want a response.
"Good bread today," the first one says, when she unwraps the corner of her loaf to check the crust.
"It always is," I tell her.
They leave satisfied, which is all I've ever wanted from a customer.
Elin has been on her stool all morning, sorting pebbles and offering opinions on customer purchases that nobody asks for and everyone seems faintly charmed by.
Around the midday hour, when the rush has thinned to nothing and the square is in its quiet between-meal lull, I unlock the front door fully and prop it open.
"You can play on the stoop," I tell her. "Stay where I can see you."
She is off the stool before I finish the sentence.
I watch her settle on the top step with her pebble collection in her lap, arranging them into a line along the edge of the stoop with the methodical concentration she brings to things she considers serious work.
The square beyond her is ordinary — a few people crossing, a dog nosing at the fountain's base, the cloth merchant's stall open and attended.
And across the lane, near the gap between the grain merchant's shop and the cooper's wall, Kaedrin.
He's not hidden exactly — he never is — but he's positioned the way he always positions himself.
Back to the wall, sight lines clear in both directions, unhurried posture that reads as someone passing time but isn't. I've watched him stand watch enough to know the difference between idle and alert. He is always alert.
But today there's something else in how he looks at Elin.
I stay in the doorway and watch him watch her.
His eyes track every move she makes — when she drops a pebble and leans to retrieve it, when she holds one up to the light to examine its color, when she gets into a negotiation with herself over placement that takes three attempts to resolve.
He doesn't look at the roads the way he usually does when he's tracking threats. He looks at her the way I look at her.
I know that look. I've worn it every day for three years.
The particular attention of a person who finds someone fascinating and hasn't gotten used to them yet.
Pride, maybe, underneath the fascination — the recognition that this small, serious, impractical person is somehow yours and you are not entirely sure you deserve that.
He can’t know I'm watching him watch her.
Elin holds up a white pebble and turns it in the light, satisfied, and sets it at the head of her row. Kaedrin's expression stays the same on the surface, but something behind it does — a softening, brief and unguarded, gone before anyone less familiar with his face would catch it.
I lean against the doorframe, watching the square and thinking about logistics, which is my preferred method of not thinking about things directly.
He can't stand across the lane indefinitely.
That's a practical problem even before it's a personal one — eventually the investigation closes, the commission ends, and there's no professional reason for a dark elf bounty hunter to be posted outside a bakery in a small human town.
He'd need a different reason. A real one, with actual structure to it.
Which would mean what, exactly. The room above the bakery is small but workable.
The bakery itself is larger than it looks from outside.
He'd have to have something to do — he's not a man who sits quietly without purpose, and I've never been the kind of person who manages well with someone underfoot who has nothing to occupy them.
These are not small questions and I haven't asked any of them yet.
Elin is now sorting her pebbles into two separate rows according to a system I can't determine from the doorway.
Kaedrin has shifted his weight slightly and is watching her debate the placement of a grey stone with a patience that no one has ever displayed watching my daughter make small decisions, and I think: I should ask him.
Not now. Not across a lane in the midday lull.
But soon.
He crosses the lane just before I go back inside.
I hear him coming before I see him — the particular sound of his gait, unhurried and even. Elin spots him first and straightens on the step, the grey stone still in her hand.
"You came over," she says, as if this is significant information.
"I did." He crouches beside her stoop and looks at the pebble rows. "What's the system?"
"Color and weight," she says. "The heavy ones go on this side."
He examines the arrangement seriously. "The grey one goes there." He points to the left row.
She considers this. She puts it on the right. "No, this side."
He looks toward me instead of arguing, still crouched, and nods toward Elin. "She looks comfortable."
"She does." I lean against the doorframe and cross my arms. "Children move on faster than adults. They don't carry things the same way."
"She's resilient." He stands. "She gets it from you."
I feel heat move into my face and I look past him at the square. He reaches over and brushes his fingers along my cheek — just the once, light and brief, before he drops his hand. Elin is fully absorbed in relocating three pebbles to the heavy side and misses it entirely.
"Are you eating tonight?" I ask. "If you have time, between searching for Fenwood."
"I'll make time." He glances back at Elin. "Both sides look the same weight to me, for what it's worth."
"Don't tell her that," I say.
"I wouldn't dare." He gives Elin one last look, then turns and crosses back to his post.
I watch him go, then look down at Elin, who has now separated the rows into three distinct categories for reasons I haven't worked out.
"Inside soon," I tell her.
"Five more minutes," she says.
I give her ten.
The afternoon customers come in twos and threes.
Nothing dramatic, nothing demanding. A young mother with a toddler on her hip who buys rolls and smiles without stiffness.
Two farmhands who split the cost of a loaf and argue cheerfully about whose turn it was to pay last time.
An older man who wants a specific seeded loaf I've already sold out of, and accepts a dark rye instead without complaint.
When I flip the sign and bolt the door, the display shelf is genuinely empty. Not because I baked less — because people bought it.
I stand in the quiet shop and glance at the empty shelf for a moment.
Then I go start dinner for three.
I haven't consciously decided on three portions — my hands just do it.
A third bowl, a third cup, a larger pot than usual.
Elin takes her post at the counter and provides running commentary on the vegetables I'm chopping.
I hand her a small piece of carrot and she eats it with the gravity of someone conducting a quality assessment.
"Good," she decides.
"High praise," I say.
I get the bread out for the table and find myself setting three places without thinking about it. The realization doesn't land as strange the way it might have a few weeks ago — it settles with the quiet naturalness of something slipping into its correct position.
The soup simmers. The bread cools on the board. Elin finishes arranging her pebbles along the kitchen windowsill and shifts to explaining to Pip why the seating at the table is arranged the way it is.
I stir the pot and listen and let the evening do what it's doing.
There's nothing pressing right now. No rumor to contain, no mob to watch, no council summons tucked under the door.
Just soup and bread and the sound of my daughter's voice filling up the kitchen, and outside somewhere, Kaedrin working his way through whatever thread of the investigation is still pulling at him.
I didn't expect to feel this. Not this exact thing — the particular ease of it, the absence of the brace I've been holding in my shoulders, the breath I've been keeping at half-capacity finally dropping all the way down into my lungs.
The kitchen is the same kitchen it was this morning and last month and three years ago.
But something in it is different, and the difference is that I'm not standing in it alone anymore.
I gave up on the idea of not being alone a long time ago.
Not dramatically — just quietly, the way you give up on things that seem to require circumstances you can't manufacture.
I'd made my peace with it. Elin and the bakery and Brennor bringing flour on Fridays and Sister Anawyn stopping in when the weather turned — that was enough, and I'd meant it when I told myself so.
I crack the door to let the steam out and wipe my hands on my apron.
Then I hear his knock. Two raps, the way it always is.
"Come in," I call.
The latch lifts. Elin slides off her stool and crosses the kitchen in six quick steps, planting herself in front of him before he's fully through the door.
"We're having soup again," she informs him.
"Good," he says.
"I picked the carrots." She has not picked the carrots. She ate one carrot and supervised the rest.
"Then it'll be better than usual," he says, and steps inside and pulls the door shut behind him.
I set the ladle on the rest and turn to get the bowls. The kitchen is warm and close and full, and I carry the bowls to the table and don't try to name the feeling settling through me, because it doesn't need a name to be real.