A smug, “Tougher.”
Jenn nodded. No wonder Scourge had complained. Though she hadn’t known better. Wainn’s pony had grown so tender-skinned with age they had to rub him down with soft rags or he’d protest, and she didn’t help with the village horses, having chores of her own in the mill.
Determined to do better, she rose on her toes and stretched, but with her arm fully extended, the scraper barely reached halfway.
“Tiny, aren’t you?” Bannan chuckled. Before she knew what he was about, he put his hands on her waist and hoisted her to the windowsill. “Try from here.”
For some reason, Jenn’s breath caught in her throat. Hoping he hadn’t noticed, she concentrated on finding her balance. Scourge gave her a doubtful look, but moved in reach. Copying Bannan, she put one hand flat against the beast’s warm neck and drew the scraper down with the other, pressing with all her strength. Wads of hair collected and fell. The hair that didn’t float up in her face. Jenn smiled, her lips firmly closed, and kept working.
After a few strokes, Scourge made a sound like a pot about to boil over. She stopped, alarmed, but Bannan merely gave him a pat. “He’s just happy. Aren’t you, idiot beast?”
“Itchy.” But the breeze in her ear was mild. “Better.”
Pleased, Jenn continued scraping. Bannan went to his kit and brought out a glove of woven rope, pulling that over his left hand. He applied the palm to Scourge’s flanks in sure short strokes, whistling almost soundlessly under his breath as he worked. He was careful where bone rose near the skin, his hands strong yet tender.
Having noticed this about Bannan’s hands, which was distracting and not what she should have noticed, Jenn began to feel warmer than she should.
“Where you’re from,” she said hurriedly. “Is it very different?”
“Vorkoun?” Bannan, thankfully, moved to the other side of Scourge. “She’s an old crone, wrapped in shabby walls and prone to damp. There’re ruins beneath her streets—none of which run straight, mind—and most families burn charcoal and oil, or haul dried manure from the countryside. There’s a stench for you on a lovely fall morning. Though the Lilem’s no sweeter, under her bridges.”
“No wonder you wanted to leave.” Jenn wrinkled her nose. “My aunt says Avyo is the most beautiful city in the world.”
He’d bent out of sight. “Avyo can afford it.” The words were bitter.
Maybe she hadn’t traveled, but Jenn wouldn’t have him think her unschooled. “Because Avyo’s the capital and heart of Rhoth.”
Bannan’s frowning face appeared above Scourge’s back. “Because our walls and blood protected her. Something those of Avyo, no offense to your lady aunt, chose to ignore when they bartered my city away!”
His anger wasn’t at her. It wasn’t childish, like one of Roche’s sulks, or pointless, like Old Jupp’s plan to embarrass other old people with stories about hats and parrots. This was a hard truth, an adult one, about the larger world and Jenn’s heart pounded with pride. Bannan spoke to her as an equal. As someone who would care about important things.
So she thought carefully before responding. “You kept the people of Vorkoun safe as long as you could, the way Uncle Horst protected me. Now I know about the curse and won’t take the road. Isn’t it their turn, to look after themselves?”
Bannan’s frown faded and he shook his head with a rueful chuckle. “You sound like my sister. Lila’d said, ‘soldiers don’t fix streets, peace does.’ I didn’t like hearing it. We argued up to the day I left.”
He’d left his sister?
Jenn looked away and scraped hair from Scourge, who’d waited with surprising patience. Scrape. Scrape. How could Bannan choose a settler’s bind if it meant leaving his family? What kind of person would do that?
“Jenn?” Bannan started around Scourge.
The only answer was someone who’d had to leave. Had Roche been right after all? Was Bannan some kind of criminal?
The scraper touched the line of cropped mane and Scourge plunged aside as if stung. Caught off balance, Jenn tumbled from the windowsill to land, sitting, on the stall floor. The hard stable floor.
“Are you all right?” Bannan stripped off the glove and tossed it aside to offer his hand.
“Yes.” Jenn scowled at Scourge. “What did I do?”
The great beast stepped forward, hooves a finger’s breadth from her bare toes, and lowered his head until his soft warm nose touched her ankle. “Itchy?”
“You could have warned her,” Bannan said testily. To her, “He’s touchy around his mane. I’m sorry. I should have told you.”
Jenn laid her palm along Scourge’s cheek and firmly pushed his big head out of her way. As she rose to her feet, the wads of loose hair she’d so proudly scraped clung to her skirt. “I need to change.” Bannan had yet to see her stay clean or tidy, she thought glumly. She brushed herself, managing to spread hair where it hadn’t been. “I should go.”
“Wait. Please.” He took the scraper, but didn’t move out of her way. “If it’s something he said—” with a frown at Scourge.
“No.”
The frown became a worried lift of his brows. “That I said?”
“I’d like to leave.” Which was impossible when he wasn’t moving. Jenn couldn’t go around him without moving Scourge, who wasn’t moving either. To ignore them both and climb out through the window, however tempting, would not only be childish but, from past experience, show more bare leg than she should, no matter how she tried.
“I truly meant no insult to your aunt,” Bannan ventured earnestly. “You do understand—”
“How can I?” she blurted. “How could you leave your sister? You say you care about Vorkoun and her people, but you left them too.” Once started, Jenn couldn’t stop. “You shaved your beard!” Which made no sense. “Roche thinks you’re a bandit!” she said fiercely. “So do I!”
His lips twitched. “No, you don’t. I can tell, you know.”
That wasn’t fair at all. Jenn bristled. “If you’re such a fine and wonderful man, Bannan Larmensu, why are you here?”
“Ah.”
A rather pleased “Ah.”
An “Ah” whose warmth made Jenn reconsider flight out the stall window.
Before she could, she found herself unable to move as Bannan cupped her cheek in one broad callused hand and captured her eyes with his.
“I see the truth, Jenn Nalynn,” he reminded her gently. “Therein lay my use to Vorkoun. I found the liars. Exposed the spies. Sent them to justice and none of them loved me for that service, though they knew not my real name.” He leaned close, his voice soft, its foreign lilt more pronounced. “The treaty will release them all and I cannot have them learn who I was. Not for Lila’s sake. Not for her sons. I would die before risking them.” She felt the heat of his body, though they didn’t touch, as his head bent to hers. “Do you understand me now?” A whisper.
Jenn nodded that yes, she understood. She tried to say she thought him noble and valiant to sacrifice for his family, but the words were lost in her throat as Bannan’s hand abandoned her cheek for her neck. His fingers slid into her hair, in a way that didn’t feel at all like having Peggs braid it, and he dropped the scraper with an urgent clatter that startled them both in order to involve his other hand and its fingers in the same task.
How peculiar.
Jenn could have sworn she’d felt every feeling there was to feel, from joy to boredom to fury. Just this morning she’d been afraid and angry, pitied Wyll, and been sorry for herself. Not to forget being excited and hopeful and crushed by disappointment. This—this feeling that she had no feet and stood somewhere that wasn’t here and time itself had paused?
This was new.
Bannan’s breath feathered across her lips, inviting a kiss, waiting. To accept, she need only close the tiny space between. A lift of her toes would do it. A tilt of her chin. She had only to want the kiss.
Which she did, didn’t she? Warmth raced along her
bones. She wanted to kiss Bannan and be kissed the way she wanted her meadow and Peggs’ cooking, the way she craved candlelight and their father’s easy smile, and anticipated the look on Aunt Sybb’s face each spring when she stepped from her wagon and saw them waiting.
But not as much as she wanted the pebble.
Remembered, that hunger burned away all others, leaving cold, empty ash. “I need—” Jenn whispered desperately, her feet back on the cool earth of the stable floor, but nothing else right or real, “I need what isn’t here.”
Bannan’s fingers fell from her hair to her shoulders. He drew a ragged breath, then another, and Jenn searched his troubled face, wondering what truth he saw in hers.
“So it’s the dragon,” he said at last.
And she didn’t understand.
He could drown in the endless purple of her eyes, drown and be glad beyond any dream.
The breeze found his ear. “Fool,” it warned, this time with pity.
“What dragon?” Jenn asked unsteadily. Her face was pale, though spots of rose red graced the high bones of each cheek and her lips—
Bannan refused to look at her lips. Bad enough his hands were loath to leave her. His fingers tingled still from the silk of her hair and, oh, how his body burned. Heart’s Blood, when had such a simple touch affected him so? Never, was the truth.
Never again, it might be, too. He collected himself by turning away from her, gathering up the scraper and glove, taking another, slower breath.
There’d been such terrible longing in her face.
Just not for him.
“Your dragon,” he told her as he turned back, schooling his tone to a cool and courteous interest—the discipline of the marches, that was, where revealing weakness gave weapon to the enemy. Tir would be impressed. “Wyll.”
“Wyll’s not—” Jenn’s eyes widened. “Wisp?” Her surprise was genuine. “Why would you think that?”
“You do know what a dragon is.”
“I know they aren’t real,” she said dismissively. “They’re in stories.”
“Like wishings?” She flinched and he wanted the words unsaid, but it was too late.
“He’s not a dragon now.” She held out her hand for the scraper and resumed grooming Scourge’s shoulder, leaving Bannan no choice but to don the prickly rope glove and join her. As hair flew, he stole sidelong looks, seeing nothing more informative than the curve of a cheek whose softness he remembered all too well.
How was it fair, losing her to a creature of magic?
When Jenn Nalynn spoke again, her voice was thoughtful and low. “Wisp is what I called him, before. He didn’t want to be seen. He wouldn’t show himself, though sometimes I’d catch a glimpse in a shadow.” She hesitated. “I think that’s why he wouldn’t let me stay till sunset.”
“When he couldn’t hide.” At her questioning glance, Bannan admitted, “I know, Jenn. About Marrowdell and sunset.”
Her nose wrinkled. “What about them?”
Her puzzlement was real; what did it mean? “I saw for myself, the night I came to the farm. I saw a different Marrowdell.” Last night, he’d planned to show Tir, to see if sunset made a difference to his perceptions; being busy with lamps and unloading the wagon, they’d missed the fleeting moment.
Her small bare foot stamped the earth. “There’s only this.”
His heart sank. “To my eyes there’s more,” Bannan insisted. Was it only to his? “Come,” he urged, suddenly desperate. “I’ll show you.”
She followed him willingly enough to the row of trunks against the barn wall. “What do you see?” he said, laying a hand on one.
Jenn gazed at it, then glanced at him. “A trunk. Yours?”
“No. I mean, what’s it made of? Maybe if you look from here.” He took her elbow and pulled her to the side where shadows dappled the wood. “Here. See? Like your glimpses of Wisp.”
“I see it’s made of wood.” A tiny crease formed between her brows. “Isn’t it?”
What were the rules here, that made dragons different from trunks? “It’s stone,” Bannan heard himself say, too eagerly. “Finely polished. Perfectly fitted.” Ancestors Witness, he was making things worse. How could she believe him, against the evidence of her own eyes?
Jenn squeezed her eyelids tightly closed, her face scrunched with effort, then opened them again with a flash of intense blue. “Still wood.” She sighed. “I wish I could see what you do, Bannan. It must be wonderful.”
The truth. He found himself speechless.
As she regarded him, a dimple appeared, but all she said was, “Who would own a stone trunk?”
Jenn’s belief rushed to his head like wine; he wanted to shout and grab her in his arms. Instead, he told her, “These were in the storeroom. There are tracks, from wagons, on the floor. Almost a year old.”
“Mistress Sand,” she replied promptly. “Master Riverstone.”
Bannan blinked. “Who are—”
“Itchy!” The impatient breeze found his other ear. “ITCHY!”
“We’re coming,” Jenn promised, shaking her head. “Was he this demanding before he could talk?”
“Always,” Bannan said with feeling.
“Always,” the breeze echoed.
There was nothing to do but go back to grooming the not-horse, who settled under their ministrations with a smug flick of his tail.
The truthseer was glad of the respite. Sand and Riverstone? What sort of names were those? Made up ones, like Captain Ash, was his guess. Names used by people unwilling to reveal their own. He applied the glove to Scourge’s hind leg with care—the mane wasn’t the only touchy spot—and reminded himself this was Marrowdell, not the marches, and quaint local names shouldn’t come as a surprise. Besides, she was Wyll’s to protect, not his.
So now he lied to himself?
“The people you mentioned,” Bannan ventured, keeping his tone easy. “Who are they?”
“Tinkers.” The word sounded happy; these must be friends and he, wrong. “If the trunks are theirs, I don’t understand why they’d leave them here. We’ve room in the mill; they know we’d be glad to help.” Her tiny frown returned.
“I’ll put them back in the storeroom,” he said quickly.
Jenn gave him another sidelong look, this with a small smile. “I shouldn’t bother. It’s your barn. And they’ll be here soon, anyway. For the harvest,” she explained, then nodded. “I’ll ask Mistress Sand about the trunks and why they look like wood, except to you.”
Scourge turned his head to stare.
If he’d needed proof of her sheltered life . . . “Please don’t.” For a wonder, he sounded calm.
“Why?”
Bannan leaned a shoulder against Scourge, a creature doubtless aware of secrets and their cost, and said dryly, “My dear lady, not everyone believes what I say I see.”
“You’re a truthseer.”
“Not everyone believes in the truth either.” He was sorry to upset her, but he’d be sorrier still if Jenn’s tinker friends were the type to fear those of uncanny ability, a lesson he’d learned long before becoming “Captain Ash.”“Please let me judge for myself whom to tell, or not. Trust I’ve some experience in the matter.”
Jenn shook her head, but not, he was relieved, in denial. “Once you’ve met Mistress Sand, you’ll change your mind. She’s a friend. And very wise. You’ll like her.”
Unshakable as Tir’s, her loyalty. Was it another of her potent feelings? Bannan retreated behind courtesy. “I look forward to making her acquaintance,” he said stiffly. Was he like Wyll, unable to say no to anything Jenn Nalynn wanted of him? Did she have that power? “I reserve the right to keep what I see to myself.”
“Of course. That’s your decision,” she assured him, then gave him a shy look. “Though I’d be glad—very glad and grateful—if you’d tell me more of what you see that I can’t.”
His defenses crumbled. What should he say? What could he? “I see the dragon Wyll once was, and
the silver of the road. I see—” you, Bannan thought, and stopped before revealing how she looked to his deeper sight, how radiance filled her slender form as though she were light itself beneath her skin. “Yesterday, as the sun’s last rays passed over the valley,” he said instead, “I saw the land itself as something new, something strange and beautiful at the same time. The light turned into—colors—I’ve no names for the colors,” he admitted with frustrated joy.
“I wish I had your eyes.” Jenn closed hers and leaned her forehead against Scourge. “This Marrowdell is all I have,” she said with wrenching hopelessness. “All I’ll ever have. I know what’s here and it’s—it’s not what I need.”
Wyll being here, Bannan told himself, heart thudding in his chest, Wyll being here. The dragon wasn’t who or what Jenn Nalynn wanted either.
Her hand moved fitfully over brown hide. Scourge laid back an ear, but didn’t object. “I was going to see the world, Bannan Larmensu of Vorkoun.” She turned her face to watch her finger as she drew a shape in the hair with its tip. “I had a map. Of Essa and Thornloe. Of the Sweet Sea and Eldad.” She reached further and drew more. “Mellynne.”
No farm maid, Jenn Nalynn, content with her life. For the first time he realized the cruelty of her curse. He must be patient to win such a troubled heart, that Bannan saw clearly, and regretted his earlier impulse. Patient and understanding. Perhaps something more. “Lila’s husband went to Mellynne, once,” he offered. “All the way to Channen.”
“The capital?” Jenn looked up, interest gleaming in her eyes. “What was it like?”
“He—” didn’t say, wasn’t the truth. The truth was, Bannan hadn’t asked. They’d had little in common, other than Lila’s fierce love. He’d been a soldier; Emon Westietas heir to a barony and destined, upon his father’s upcoming retirement, to represent Vorkoun in Avyo’s House of Keys. While Bannan patrolled the marches, Westietas had studied, appeared at public functions by the baron’s side, and taught his pet crows clever tricks. He’d ridden not horses, but three-wheeled mechanicals; the rage among the idle rich and the bane of sheep on quiet country lanes. To hear Lila tell it, she’d been impressed by Emon’s addled attempt to set a speed record by coasting down a local mountain, though he’d broken an arm and leg.
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