Edith’s mouth softened. “You did well today.” Then she marched toward the hall as Amelia followed, wax tablet under one arm, veil slipping, curls escaping, dust on her hem, and the sound of men’s laughter at her back.
She hadn’t found a way home, hadn’t found the sword, and hadn’t solved the terrifying fact that somewhere, impossibly far away, her mother and Bree and an entire century would be wondering where Amelia Quinn had gone.
But by the time she reached the hall and set her hand to the linen, she had clean hands, three new curses, a garrison that laughed when she spoke, and one warrior lord who had looked at her across the lists as if her watching had pleased him more than victory.
It wasn’t a plan, it wasn’t safe. It was, however, a place to begin.
THOMAS
The weeks between harvest and Michaelmas narrowed like a noose and filled themselves with all the small labors that kept Ashcombe alive. Grain was counted, roofs patched, rents argued over, stores stretched, and Amelia learned that a manor could survive a battle and still nearly be murdered by damp, hunger, and badly copied numbers.
Michaelmas came grey and cold at the end of September, with a wind that worried at the shutters, smoked the rushlights sideways, and carried the smell of wet leaves, hunting dogs, geese, and warm bread into Ashcombe’s hall.
Michaelmas was the feast of Saint Michael and All Angels, one of the great quarter days when rents came due, accounts were settled, servants were hired or dismissed, and every manor remembered that heaven might be merciful, but landlords kept ledgers.
For the first morning in three years, Thomas walked beneath his own roof to face the king’s reckoning without the taste of ruin in his mouth.
It wasn’t comfort. Comfort was too soft a word for a man who had woken before dawn with numbers running throughhis head like soldiers breaking formation. It wasn’t confidence either, though he would have liked that very much and would have treated it kindly had it appeared. It was something leaner and warier, a thin strip of ground beneath his boots where there had been only marsh before.
They might survive the day. A might was not victory, but after Evesham, after weeks of rotting thatch, thin barns, false tallies, grieving tenants, Belmaine’s smile, and Master Pickering’s name hanging over them like a blade on a rotten cord, Thomas would take might and call it mercy.
The hall had been made as orderly as Ashcombe could manage, which meant Edith had bullied it into submission since before sunrise. The trestle tables had been set straight. Fresh rushes covered the worst of the old, though no amount of sweeping could fully conquer the smell of smoke, dogs, ale, men, wet boots, and every meal that had ever been eaten beneath that roof. Two extra benches had been brought in from the storehouse. A clean cloth, one of the better ones, had been laid over the high table, and because it was Michaelmas and because Edith had a sense of occasion she would deny under torture, a little dish of honeyed apples sat near Thomas’s cup.
The apples were for the tenants, she’d said.
They were not. Thomas had eaten one before anyone saw him and had been left with the unsettling certainty that Edith knew anyway.
At the far end of the hall, the doors stood open to the yard, where folk gathered in little knots, stamping cold from their feet and clutching what they had brought. A man in patched brown carried a sack of beans over one shoulder. Widow Maud stood beside him with a covered basket. The miller had come with coin and flour, dust still clinging to his brows. Two brothers from Lowmere argued in whispers over a folded strip of parchment that likely contained excuses instead of payment. Someone’schild cried, was hushed, then began again in the stubborn way of small children and rain.
Payment day.
Court day.
Reckoning day.
Thomas had faced armed men on fields and in alleys, in Welsh rain and French mud, and once on a narrow bridge where one wrong step would have sent him into a river in full armor. None of those men had made his stomach knot the way the sight of his tenants did now.
Soldiers knew what a sword was for. A tenant who came with two hens where he owed four, and hunger behind his eyes was a more difficult opponent.
“Stop looking as if you’re about to execute someone,” Amelia said softly.
Thomas glanced to his right. She sat beside him at the high table, not in Walter’s chair, because Walter would have turned purple and perhaps expired in it, but near enough that the household understood what had changed even if no one named it aloud. She wore the blue wool gown Edith had altered, taking in one side and letting out another with muttered comments about women who refused to be shaped properly. The gown brought out the emerald in Amelia’s eyes and made her hair look even redder where a few curls had escaped beneath the edge of her veil.
She had tried to cover it. Thomas had seen the effort. He had also seen her hair defeat linen, pins, prayer, and one of Edith’s sterner looks.
A curl had sprung along her temple and rested against her cheek like a thing placed there to test him.
There was ink on the side of her thumb. She had a stylus tucked behind one ear, a habit she had begun a few days ago and which Edith declared improper, Walter declared irritating, andThomas declared nothing at all, because he had noticed far too often the curve of her ear when she reached for it.
Before her lay the rolls. Not Wexford’s old snarled nest of crabbed hand, false marks, and smug misdirection, but Amelia’s remade rolls. Clean columns. Clear names. Marks cross-checked against tallies, stores, rent, labor owed, labor given, coin paid, coin forgiven, coin promised. It was still Ashcombe’s poverty scratched into parchment, but for the first time in months, mayhap years, it was honest poverty.
Honest poverty, Thomas had learned, could be fought. False accounts were arrows in the fog.
“I do not look as if I am about to execute someone,” he said.
“You look as if someone has told you execution would improve the morning, and you’re considering it.”
Walter, seated on Thomas’s other side, made a sound that might have been disapproval, though with Walter, disapproval was as constant as breathing and needed no occasion.