Chapter 10
They reached the village as afternoon shadows lengthened across the snow.
Llanrhyd was barely more than a cluster of stone houses around a church and an inn, but after a week in the wilderness it looked like paradise.
Oliver led them directly to the inn, The Quick Fox according to a weathered sign that creaked in the wind.
Inside was warmth. Light. The smell of roasting meat that made Megan’s stomach clench with sudden, desperate hunger.
The innkeeper was a stout woman in her fifties who took one look at them and her expression shifted from wariness to practical sympathy.
“Rooms?” she asked in accented English.
“Two rooms, a meal, and someone to tend the horses.” Oliver set coins on the counter, more than necessary, enough to buy discretion.
Within minutes they’d been installed in two small but clean rooms. Webb collapsed onto the bed in the first room, the fight entirely gone out of him.
“Don’t fall asleep yet,” Megan said. “I want to clean the wound once more now we have proper supplies. Eat something first.”
“Thank you, Megan.” He looked up at her with the particular exhaustion of a man who has been holding himself upright on determination alone. “I owe you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You rescued me. I’m merely returning the favor.” She glanced at Oliver. “You look like you’re about to collapse too. Go eat. You’re no good to anyone if you faint from hunger.”
He nodded and headed downstairs.
Megan worked quietly, cleaning Webb’s shoulder with hot water and the herbs she’d been conserving and rebinding it with fresh cloth from the innkeeper’s supply.
Webb bore it without complaint, ate the bread and cold meat she pressed on him, and was asleep before she’d finished tidying.
She sat for a moment watching his chest rise and fall, that old reflex of checking that a person was still breathing, and then went to find Oliver.
She heard his voice from the top of the stairs before she reached the common room, low and careful, speaking with the innkeeper. When she came down he was already moving toward her with food.
“Penharrow’s men are here,” he said quietly. “Searching the village.”
Megan went still.
“Three of them. The innkeeper sent them away.” He set the food on the small table near the window of Webb’s room, and she sat and began to eat, because her body needed it regardless of what her mind was doing. “We should leave tonight, but the horses need rest.”
“We all need to rest.”
“I know.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Which means we’re trapped. If we stay, they might find us. If we leave, we might fall from exhaustion before we clear the valley.”
Megan set down her bread and crossed to the window.
Below, the village street was quiet in the fading light, snow still thick on the rooftops, a few figures moving at a distance.
She scanned them out of habit, looking for the particular quality of purposeful stillness that she’d learned meant men who were watching rather than simply living.
“It’s me they want,” she said. “Not you. Not Webb. If I left alone—”
“No.”
“Oliver—”
He crossed to her and turned her to face him. “I didn’t pull you out of that river to let you walk back into Penharrow’s hands. We stay together.”
“Even if it gets you killed?”
“Even then.”
She looked at him, at the uncomplicated certainty in his face, and felt the familiar internal argument flare and then, strangely, subside.
She had stopped being surprised by him, she realized.
She had started simply believing him, and she wasn’t sure when that had happened, and she wasn’t sure what to do about it.
“You’re an idiot,” she said.
“Probably.”
“A noble idiot.”
“I’ll take that.”
They stood close. Closer, she noticed, than they’d been since the river.
The room had contracted somehow in the last minute, or she had stopped maintaining her careful margin without meaning to.
She could see the tiredness around his eyes, the week of it written into every line of his face, and underneath that something that had been there since the cave and hadn’t left.
He looked at her the way he had in the water. As though she were something he’d established a prior claim on, somewhere below the level of conscious decision.
She thought, with sudden clarity, I could step toward him.
The thought arrived not as a temptation to be considered and dismissed but as a simple recognition of what was available.
She could close the small remaining distance between them.
He would not reach for her first; she understood that about him now, that he would hold himself back with both hands before he let himself reach for her without permission. But if she moved, he would not retreat.
She understood, in the same moment, that she wanted to.
Not from gratitude, not from proximity or loneliness or the distorted arithmetic of captivity.
She wanted to because of the cave and the river and fourteen conversations conducted in whispers and firelight, and because he had turned his hand over in the dark and held hers and not asked for anything else.
She was still deciding when the door opened.
The innkeeper entered carrying towels and a basin of hot water, her eyes moving between them with a knowing practicality that suggested she had walked in on worse.
“For washing,” she said, setting them down. “The other room’s ready when you want it, my lord.”
Oliver’s face remained composed. “Thank you.”
When the innkeeper left, Megan turned back to the window. The moment had passed. She was aware of it passing and not with relief, but with the particular register of a loss, small and sharp and noted.
“You should rest,” Oliver said. He had moved toward the door. “Stay in here with Webb tonight. Lock the door. Don’t open it for anyone but me or the innkeeper.”
She turned. “Oliver.”
He paused in the doorway.
“Thank you,” she said. “For everything.”
Something moved across his face. He nodded once and left.
Megan lay in the dark for two hours and did not sleep.
She heard the village settle. She heard Webb’s steady breathing and the occasional creak of the inn, and outside the distant sound of wind picking up again across the rooftops.
She lay on her side with the small kitchen knife close to her hand, not because she’d decided to use it in the way she’d used it to comfort herself in Penharrow’s house, but because the weight of it had always made her feel less like a person who had no options.
She was thinking about Penharrow’s men in the village. She was thinking about the three of them in this inn, exhausted and undermanned, one day from safety. She was thinking about the door.
She was also thinking about the window. About the step she had not taken.
She pressed her palm flat against her sternum and stared at the ceiling, and when another hour had passed and her mind had not quieted, she got up.
She didn’t think about it carefully. She crossed the hall.
Oliver was behind the door before she’d finished opening it, the barrel of his pistol at her temple.
In the half-second before he recognized her, she felt his absolute readiness, the total absence of hesitation, and then it was gone, his hand dropped, he pulled her inside with one smooth motion and locked the door behind her.
“Are you all right? Is Webb—”
“Webb is sleeping.” She felt her face heat slightly, which was new and not entirely welcome. “I couldn’t settle. I know it’s stupid. I know we’re not safe here and having me in your room instead of Webb’s doesn’t change that.” She stopped. “I just—”
She didn’t finish. She didn’t have the words for what she’d come for. The honest version was, in your presence I believe we’ll survive this, and she couldn’t say that without also saying everything else.
Oliver looked at her for a moment. Then he moved to the chair by the window, settling back into the watchful stillness he’d clearly been maintaining for hours.
“Take the bed,” he said. “I’m on watch, anyway.”
She hesitated. Then she crossed to the bed and lay down, pulling the blanket up, and looked at him once across the dark room. He was already staring at the window.
She was asleep within minutes.
Oliver watched her sleep. He recalled his conversation with the innkeeper and the too close a call with Penharrow’s men. He couldn’t bring himself to tell Megan about that.
The common room had been quiet—just a few local men drinking ale and speaking Welsh in low voices. They’d eyed Oliver with the usual suspicion afforded to English strangers, but the innkeeper’s presence seemed to vouch for him.
Oliver ordered enough food for three people. The food had arrived; roast beef, fresh bread, vegetables that tasted like heaven after days of dried meat. Oliver forced himself to eat slowly, though his body screamed for him to devour everything in sight.
He was halfway through the meal when the door opened and three men entered.
Oliver recognized the look of them immediately—the hard eyes, the way they scanned the room, the barely concealed weapons. Penharrow’s men.
His hand went to his pistol under the table as the men approached the innkeeper. They spoke in Welsh, too quickly for Oliver to follow, but he caught one word. Megan.
They were asking about her. Describing her, probably. Asking if anyone had seen an English lord traveling with a fair-haired woman.
The innkeeper’s eyes flickered toward Oliver for just a moment. Then she shook her head, responding in rapid Welsh that Oliver couldn’t decipher.
The men weren’t satisfied. One of them pulled out a purse, clearly offering money for information. The innkeeper shook her head again, more firmly this time.
Oliver sat very still, his hand on his pistol, calculating odds. Three against one. He was exhausted, half-starved, his reactions dulled by a week of hardship. If it came to a fight, he’d probably lose.
But he wouldn’t let them take Megan. Even if it meant dying here, in this Welsh inn, surrounded by strangers who wouldn’t remember his name.