8. Now Stranger
NOW: STRANGER
Iwas going to snap and draw attention to myself.
“Gertie!” I said in a raised voice, leaning past Wynne and ignoring his chuckling comment about having my body up against his.
The old woman had set my jug down on the counter and was shaking her head at a drunken man cajoling her to keep serving him.
Another childhood playmate, Kent, the magistrate—a man who had six children to feed but had the audacity to look down on me for helping his wife prevent a seventh pregnancy—greeted Wynne and barely nodded at me.
They struck up a conversation about how the service was slow due to another influx of Perpatanian soldiers making their home in the keep.
I could tell their conversation was edging around something, and I guessed that they, as higher ranked men of Sheridan, had learned of the caravan too.
I cried out for Gertie again, the noise in the tavern drowning me out.
My senses were overwhelmed. The hollers from men around me were too loud in my ears.
The smells of barley and beer, sweat and pipe smoke were thick in my nose.
Across the room, I saw Thane stand from his table, eyes back on me.
He was going to come to me, to see me and speak to me.
I was not ready for him. We had not had a conversation just the two of us since we were teenagers.
Ever since my man had died, we had danced around each other.
I was his child’s aunt. He was my sister’s once husband and had been still by law before her death, though they had lived as friends for a long time.
Only a handful of folk knew what Thane and I had been to each other.
It was a secret that should remain secret.
I had never wanted Rowena to discover that she had, even inadvertently, played a role in my first heartbreak.
If he approached me, I was unsure that I could resist him.
I had run from such encounters for too long a time to remember how to even comfortably speak to Thane.
We were far from the boy and girl who had swum naked in the Nyossa streams together, myself far from the haughty young woman who had rejected a passionate young man’s pleas.
But Wynne was correct. The way was, if not quite clear for us, certainly without hindrances.
And as I stood there, praying to all four of the gods I worshipped—for Gertie to fill my damn jug, for Wynne to stop glancing at my bosom, for Thane’s approach to be interrupted—I saw him.
Without Thane’s head blocking him from my view, I saw a hooded man sitting at a table against the wall, with little candlelight on him and far from any of the windows.
He was in shadow, but I could still make out a lean frame folded in the single chair, elbows resting on the table, one hand holding a tin cup.
His other hand rested on a slim, small book.
And I could see the gleam of one eye watching me from under the hood.
The night was hot. All of the men were in some variation of a short-sleeved tunic, even the keep guard and the foreign soldiers having all stripped down to the cloth part of their uniforms. This man’s use of the hood was incongruous to me.
As if he could read my thoughts, he brought one hand to the edge of the hood and pushed it back over his head, that eye remaining on me.
I saw a face of angles and slants, bones just beneath the skin, mouth pulling to one side, nose aquiline but just off center, brows arched over a pale eye on his right side and on the other, a leather strap that wrapped around his head.
It was a sort of eye patch. His hair was a nondescript brown and cropped near to a shave at the sides of his head.
I could make out what seemed to be tattoos around his ears.
He appeared to be at least five winters my junior but had the air of an older man about him.
Over Wynne’s lackadaisical complaining to Kent—but still sensing his interest in me—past Thane’s steady approach and the cacophony around me, despite my irritation due to Gertie’s lack of urgency, I saw that eye flit up and down the length of me, saw his head tilt as if he was trying to see the entirety of my person.
When that eye returned to me to meet my stare with his own, that sly mouth’s pull to one side spread into a half smile and the brow over that eye lifted slightly, as if to say, “I’ve been waiting for you to notice. ”