Nik turned back to me, his smile thin. “Polite knock. As you know, we need to speak with them.”
“Try again later. They need peace and quiet.”
Nik leaned down, keeping his blue eyes on me. “While your protectiveness is very admirable, he’s the only one who really knows what happened, so we’ll be talking to him now. Would you rather step aside and let us in, or should we move you aside?”
I sneered. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t,” he agreed, then gestured to Galen. “But he would.”
If I had any doubts Galen would toss me out of the way, his look guaranteed it. I bet I could outrun him. But since starting a fight in Ferren and Innis’s doorway wasn’t going to help, I stepped back. The guards followed me in.
Ferren looked back at me, and I saw the fear come into her eyes.
“Ferren,” Nik said. “We met yesterday. We’re bodyguards for the prince.”
Her gaze slipped over them before settling on Innis again.
Wren ignored them until the ointment was applied to hersatisfaction. Then she replaced the linen gently atop it, rose, and gave the guards a look. “They don’t need harassment.”
“Good,” Nik said. “We aren’t here for that, so no one will be disappointed.”
Innis moaned, and his eyes fluttered open. He looked terrified until his wife touched his arm, and his body visibly relaxed. That was a rare kind of love.
“You’re safe,” Ferren said. “You’re home and safe. It’s all over.”
“So hot,” he said.
“You’ll cool down,” she said, adjusting the cloth on his forehead, her lips tight together, as if to hold in a ragged sob. “You’ve gotten some remedies, and you’re going to be fine. Everything is going to be fine.”
He nodded, swallowed. Then he realized there were soldiers in the room, and his eyes widened.
Nik moved closer, crouching down to meet the man’s gaze. “Innis, we work for the prince. He was concerned about you.”
“I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t want to do it.”
“We know,” Nik said. Then he looked at me, apparently expecting me to explain the situation. I hadn’t signed up to take orders from the prince’s guards but understood this wasn’t the time to argue.
I shifted so Innis could see me. “We think you were…possessed,” I said. “By an Anima.”
“A ghost?”
“Yes. We think the Anima, or someone helping the Anima, found you before you entered the market. Do you remember anything?”
He squeezed his eyes shut. “I was at the garden.”
“The communal garden,” Ferren clarified. “Everyone whoagrees to work it for three years gets a plot. Helps those of us without land grow a bit, make extra coin.”
Nik nodded.
“It’s too early for much, but I thought there might be a few early radishes, and the innkeeper buys what we can grow. Found a handful of wee things,” Innis said, holding his index finger and thumb a scant width apart, “but coin is coin.”
That it was.
“Weren’t no one else in the garden that late, but I saw something move past. Thought it was Old Cleary come to complain.”
“Old Cleary?” Nik asked.
“He shoed horses ’til he got too weak for it. Now he roams about and checks on people.”
