There was warning in it. Weariness too.
She looked back at him. “I won’t tell anyone.”
“I know.”
That struck her harder than it should have.
Outside, thunder rolled farther away now, moving down the valley, leaving Ashcombe wet, battered, and still standing. The fire threw warm light across Thomas’s face. He looked like a man carved out of endurance and grief, but not a sword. Never only a sword.
“Good night, Thomas,” she said.
For a moment, he said nothing.
Then, quietly, “Good night, Amelia.”
She climbed back to the loft with her heart too loud and her sleeve still damp, aware of every creak of the ladder, every sleeping breath around her, every inch of space between propriety and disaster. By the time she found her pallet, someone had moved it away from the leak and tucked an extra blanket at the foot.
She knew without asking who had done it.
Amelia lay down, staring into the dark while the storm moved off and the dripping hall counted the seconds beneath her. She should have been thinking of home, of Bree, her mother, airplanes and hot showers, and coffee in paper cups.She should have been building a plan, because that was what she did when the floor fell away.
Instead she saw Thomas by the fire, turning a cup in his scarred hands, saying the names of the dead.
She saw him look at her when she told him he was not a sword, replayed his voice saying her name.
There was no spreadsheet in the world that was going to save her from this.
Amelia closed her eyes against the dark, but the truth had already found her. Whatever waited at the end of this road, whatever sword or storm or choice the world meant to throw at her next, some part of her had crossed a line tonight without taking a single step.
And no plan she made would put her safely back on the other side. She was utterly in love with him.
THOMAS
Thomas should have sent Hob to the market. That was the plain truth of it, and he knew it even as he stood in the stable yard after dawn, tightening Cygnet’s girth and telling himself, in a voice he didn’t believe for one moment, that the matter was sensible.
It was sensible for the lord to go himself, because the coin in the coffer was thin enough to show bone, and every measure of salt, iron nail, barley, lamp oil, and winter cloth had to be bought with the kind of care usually reserved for negotiating ransoms.
It was sensible for Amelia to come with him, because she kept the accounts and had a way of turning three coins and a goat into a plan. She should see what coin bought in the market, he had said. She should understand the prices, the weights, the quality, the ways merchants smiled while picking a man’s purse through his own pride.
It was sensible, therefore, that she ride behind him, because there was no second mount to spare. Hob needed one horse to check the lower fields, Walter had sent a boy with the mule to fetch timber pegs, and Galahad was too much horse for a woman still learning that animals did not come with handles. Where wasshe from that she didn’t know how to ride? He dismissed the thought.
The air smelled of wet straw, horse, woodsmoke, and the sharp bite of autumn. Chickens scratched near the wall with the lawless certainty of thieves. Somewhere in the kitchen yard Edith was scolding a boy for dropping onions, and from the hall came the faint clatter of bowls being stacked.
Amelia came out of the hall, wearing the green gown, the one that made her skin look like fresh milk, smooth and without blemish or scar. Over it she had a brown wool cloak clasped at the throat with a plain pin, and her veil had been arranged properly for once, covering most of her hair. Most. A curl had already escaped near her ear. It rested against her cheek in defiance of every law of God, man, and Edith.
She carried a small leather satchel against her hip. Walter had lent it to her only after making her swear not to put the market accounts in the same compartment as bread, cheese, or anything damp.
Walter’s trust, like Ashcombe’s coin, came in small amounts and under strict conditions.
Amelia crossed the yard carefully, lifting her hem away from the worst of the mud.
“Your road is mostly mud,” she said when she reached him.
“My road?”
“You’re the lord. I assume you’re responsible for everything unpleasant within the walls.”
“That explains much.”