Thomas growled.
Alyson looked up at Amelia with grim admiration. “Will you teach me?”
“No,” Thomas, Edith, Walter, and Father Martin said at once.
Alyson scowled. “Everyone says no.”
Amelia bit the inside of her cheek. “When you’re older.”
“How much older?”
“Old enough not to throw Wat into a trough just because he breathed near your honey cake.”
Wat looked offended. “I wouldn’t.”
“You would,” Alyson said.
“I might.”
Edith dabbed at Amelia’s cheek. Amelia hissed once, and Thomas’s hand curled into a fist.
Amelia reached up and touched his wrist. “I’m all right.”
He looked at the bruise, then at her. “No,” he said softly. “You’re not.”
Amelia’s fingers tightened around his wrist. “No. But I’m here.”
The same words from the orchard. This time, in the warmth of his hall, with the people of Ashcombe around them and Belmaine bound below the dais, they struck him differently.
Alyson watched their joined hands with great interest. Wat did as well.
Walter made a noise somewhere between a cough and a dying hinge.
Edith sighed. “Saints spare me from men and their delicate nerves.”
Pickering, without looking up from his papers, said, “For the record, I have seen nothing improper.”
Hob choked.
Friar Huck lifted his cup. “The law has eyes when it needs them and mercy when it doesn’t. A marvel.”
Pickering looked at him. “Friar.”
“What? I was complimenting you.”
“You were interfering.”
“With grace.”
“With persistence.”
“Grace is persistent.”
Amelia started laughing again, though this time it wobbled at the edges. Thomas sat beside her , his wet mail creaking, his shoulder brushing hers.
Rain hammered the roof. Firelight moved over stone. Clerks scratched at parchment. Hob murmured threats at Crale in a tone so pleasant it would have unsettled stronger men. Walter argued quietly with one clerk over the proper spelling of a field boundary that had been mistaken for a witness. Huck distributed honey cakes from a suspiciously deep sleeve. Edith bullied everyone into warmth, food, and obedience.
Amelia ate two bites of pork, half the bread, and one honey cake. Then she leaned into Thomas, just enough that no one could call it a swoon and everyone could see she was no longer holding herself up by will alone.