3. Remmen
REMMEN
“You should go back to your office.” Even as I said the words, I knew the enticing little human at my side would ignore me.
Not enticing.
Off limits.
I stared down the street and did my best to ignore her before I did something to give myself away.
“You agreed to show me around town,” Anne reminded me, as if it hadn’t happened yesterday afternoon. “I just want to get a feel for this place. I think it will help. Where can a girl get a cup of coffee around here?”
That made me huff. “Good question.”
Her eyes widened and she looked as horrified as a man facing down two gladiators. “I’ve been patient for a week, please tell me this planet has coffee.”
“Something that passes for it, I suppose.”
She liked coffee, did she?
It was none of my business what she liked. I kept walking.
“The apothecary keeps something bitter the old crews used to boil in the pits, when there was nothing else and a man needed to stay awake through a dark night,” I said. “It’s the nearest thing we have. It tastes like a punishment.”
“One man’s punishment is another woman’s dark roast. Tell me more.”
I looked away to hide a smile. “I’m being honest. You asked me for the town, counselor. This is the town.” I nodded up the muddy length of it, where the mist was lifting off the roofs in the first real light. “Bad coffee. A great deal of mud. Men who will not talk to you.”
“You really oversell the place.”
“It’s home.”
Her almost-laugh got in under my guard. Heat spread low in my gut. I put my eyes back on the street where they belonged.
A wood sled had bogged at the west end and two of the loggers were arguing about whose fault the ruts were.
The cider house door stood open, which meant Halben would want an hour from me about a missed delivery before noon.
Somewhere behind all of it Korfas was waiting with all the little decisions he wasn’t confident enough to make himself.
He would have gladly volunteered to show Anne around.
That wasn’t happening.
“That’s the market,” I said instead. “You can get figs, cured goat, whatever the woodwrights have finished. The forge is at the far end. We don’t have the fineries of other planets, but we make do.”
“And you’re in charge of it all?”
“Allegedly.”
I introduced her as we went. To Ossick, who kept the feed store and stared at her hands until I said her name twice.
To a pair of the younger bulls hauling barrels, who went shy as calves and forgot how to speak.
To old Drevus at his loom, who was rude to her, which was Drevus being welcoming.
She took all of it easily, no flinch at the size of them, no chatter to fill the quiet.
She’d nod, ask one plain question, and let the answer sit.
She was good at this. Too good. If she got a bull in her office, he’d be blubbering in minutes.
“Give it time. They’ve known you a week. You may not know this, but minotaurs are a hard-headed lot.” I stepped her around a slick of mud without thinking about it, my hand not quite pressed against her back, but close enough to feel heat radiating off her skin.
We came up on the goat pens at the market’s edge, and I felt the day turn before I saw why.
Zarcal was there, offloading a load of cheese from a hand-cart, and he straightened when he saw me and went carefully, painfully still, the way he did around me now.
He was thinner than he should have been.
He nodded at me, one short drop of the chin, before he looked back at his cheese like it could rescue him.
I wasn’t letting him go that easily. If the counselor should talk to one man, it was him.
“Zarcal,” I said.
“Remmen.” He looked at Anne and twitched his eyebrow. “Is this one of your head shrinkers?”
“I mostly go by Anne,” she said and held out a hand. Zarcal didn’t take it.
He went back to the cheese with his shoulders set against us both, and I stood there a breath too long. There was nothing I could say to him here, nothing that wouldn’t betray a confidence, not that there were any secrets in this town.
The counselors were here because of him. He knew it, I knew it, and neither of us could say so.
“We’ll leave him to his work,” I said, and steered us on.
Anne didn’t ask. I’d braced for the question, but she’d watched the whole thing and kept her mouth shut and matched my pace up the street.
“The forge,” I said, because I needed to say something, and pointed us at the smoke.
Lorkin was at the door of it with a hammer in one fist, terracotta hide streaked with soot, the ground-down stubs of his horns dark against the glow of the forge behind him.
He watched us come the whole way. Chloe was perched on an anvil out of the heat, boots swinging, and she was off it and across the yard before we’d properly stopped.
“Welcome,” she said to Anne. “We need more pretty faces around here.” Lorkin made a slightly offended sound that his wife ignored. “I’m Chloe.” She took Anne’s hand in both of hers. “We do drinks on Friday at the tavern. You’re coming. It isn’t optional.”
“She’s hard to argue with,” Lorkin agreed, not moving from the door.
“Thanks for the invite, but I’m not sure it’s appropriate. I’m here as a counselor, not a…” she hesitated.
Chloe sensed weakness and pounced. “You will be there on Friday. And as for inappropriate, that’s what the drinks are for.”
Anne was frozen in place and shot me a glance clearly asking for help, but there was none to give. Chloe had landed in New Knossos like a bomb and the whole town seemed to bend toward her. If she had Anne in her sights, the counselor was doomed.
Lorkin wasn’t looking at his wife. No, he looked from me to Anne and back again, slow, and one corner of his mouth quirked up under all that soot.
Six months ago I’d meddled in his life and signed him up for a match through the Agency.
Since he was now happily mated, I considered it a success, and the meddling worth the ire.
But he was looking at me as if… No. This was not the same. It couldn’t be.
I got us out of the forge yard before Lorkin saw too much, and after the ambush from Chloe, Anne was glad to move along.
By then the sun was well up and the street was full and I’d spent two hours I would pay for. Korfas would be circling. The wood sled was still bogged. Halben would have worked himself into a state about his delivery.
I needed to take her back to her office and leave to earn my keep.
I looked down at her instead. Anne had mud on one boot and her hair coming loose.
She was squinting up the street at my town like she meant to make it home whether it wanted her or not.
Everything in me pulled toward her, heavy and slow.
I made myself stand still. She was forbidden.
For the sake of the town, she had to be.
But I did not want to hand her back to her empty office and go be the mayor.
So I didn’t.
“There are steads past the ridge,” I said. “The ranches. You said you wanted to know how we actually live.” I heard myself keep going and couldn’t stop it. “It’s an hour out. I have a truck.”
She blinked up at me.
For a moment I thought she’d have the sense to refuse, and I told myself I wanted her to.
But she smiled and it could have blotted out the sun. “Yes,” she said. “God, yes. Anything but that office.”
I couldn’t stop from answering her smile with my own. “Let’s go.”