The honesty startled another laugh from the men.
She pointed at the hard-packed earth. “I am five foot three on a good day, wearing a long dress. If I try to demonstrate anything in this yard, I’ll break myself, and then Edith will yell at me, and I am not emotionally prepared for that.”
Edith nodded. “Wise.”
Martin grinned. “Then it is a tale.”
“It is not a tale.”
“A charming tale,” Osbern said. “The tiny mistress who throws giants.”
“I dislike all of you.”
Hob’s grin softened into something warmer. “Nay, you don’t.”
That was the trouble. She didn’t.
These men should have frightened her. Some did, a little. They were scarred and loud and rough-edged, with blades at their belts and jokes that wandered into ditches without warning. They lived in a world where a man could die from a bad harvest, a bad lord, a nasty cut, or the wrong banner carried on the wrong day. They had followed Thomas into a battle that took most of their friends and still answered when he called. And now they were laughing with her.
Not at the strange woman from nowhere. Not at the faery whisper or the runaway wife cover. With her. It loosened something in Amelia.
She had been useful in the accounts. Useful in the harvest. Useful in the hall with lists and messages and clean hands. Useful was safe. Useful earned bread and a place at the fire.
But this was different.
This was belonging, thin as a first thread, not yet strong enough to bear weight, but there.
Thomas seemed to feel the shift too. His gaze moved over the men, the children, Edith standing with her basket, Amelia at the rail with her veil slipping and her curls escaping, and something in his face went still in a way that made her chest ache.
Thomas said, “Use Martin.”
Martin’s grin faltered. “My lord?”
Thomas looked at Amelia. “He is lighter than Hob, slower than Osbern, and too pleased with himself.”
“I feel described unfairly,” Martin said.
“You offered,” Thomas replied.
Amelia stared at him. “You believe me?”
“I believe in leverage.”
Something in the way he said it made her pulse kick.
“Well,” she said, because backing down now would be death by male smugness, “fine. But if I die, I want everyone here to know I was bullied by peer pressure and medieval masculinity.”
The men looked delighted.
Thomas’s brow creased. “Medieval what?”
“Never mind.”
She handed her wax tablet to Wat, then gathered the front of her gown enough to keep from stepping on it. “Martin, stand behind me.”
Martin obeyed with exaggerated care, as if approaching a skittish goat.
“Now put your arm around me. Not my neck,” Amelia said quickly when he lifted his hand. “My waist. Like you’re trying to drag me backward.”