“He is cultured. Well-bred…” Christine said thoughtfully.
“Insipid. Cowardly.” Tristan retorted
“Is cowardice the good manners not to insult another?” Christine said.
“It is the unwillingness to confront.”
“Confront in order to insult and denigrate.”
“To speak truth. Even if it is not palatable to the other party,” Tristan countered.
“Should I walk in a different direction? You seem like guests at a private function,” Blanche said breezily.
Tristan blinked, realizing that he and Christine were standing mere feet apart in the middle of the pavement. The market swept around them as though they were an island in the middle of a river. Blanche smiled sweetly when Christine looked at her. Christine blushed, looking at Tristan.
“Not at all. Let us walk together so that I might guard you against…”
As he spoke, Tristan forced his eyes from Christine, conscious of the desire to look nowhere else. His gaze ran over the market with the eye of a general, mapping the square without appearing to look. There, the cooper’s boy with the news-sheet.
There Christine, taking Blanche’s arm but glancing back at him, and there the old woman selling posies. Christine’s bronze hair against her pale neck. Her roseate cheeks and emerald eyes, there, the pair of clerks who kept glancing and whispering.
And, just under the awning of the apothecary, a man whose clothes tried and failed to be respectable. His hat was low, his attention elsewhere whenever Christine turned, then too fixed when she did not. Tristan’s skin went cold, then hot. Christine and Blanche had paused at the window of a milliner's shop. Blanche said something that made her smile—a sliver of summer on the drab street.
The man under the awning shifted closer, drifting the way a thief drifts by not drifting at all, merely allowing the crowd to carry him. Tristan’s hands were very still. He stepped away from the ladies and took a long route to the watcher, moving as if idling.
A tin-smith hawked ladles; a piper sawed at a reel. The man in the hat kept to the shade, now angling toward the narrow cut between the milliner and the barber, an alley no wider than a man’s shoulders.
Blanche touched Christine’s sleeve.
“On second thought, that straw is hideous. Come see the blue ribbons.”
She turned Christine away from the alley, but the man adjusted, patient. Tristan came up the far side and stopped outside the barber’s, where the alley gave out onto the lane behind. He leaned against the sun-warmed brick, the picture of boredom.
When the man slid past the corner and into the alley’s mouth, Tristan caught his sleeve. The fellow jerked, looked up, and found himself staring into a pair of eyes the color of winter sea.
“Afternoon,” Tristan said softly, “lost your way?”
“I beg pardon, sir,” the man tried to wrench free, “you mistake me.”
“I rarely do,” Tristan’s hand tightened, not visibly, but with the implacable pressure of a trap closing, “your name.”
“Thomas,” the man said. Sweat prickled his lip.
“Family name.”
“Thomas,” he repeated.
Tristan smiled without warmth. “And I am Duskwood Duskwood.Try again.”
The man’s glance flicked toward the milliner’s shop. Christine laughed at something Blanche said. The sound resounded like a bell. Tristan’s grip tightened an infinitesimal turn.
“Name,” he said.
“Gale,” the man stammered, “Henry Gale. I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Not yet,” Tristan said. “But you will, unless I explain the world to you. Attend carefully, the woman you were following belongs to me.”
The words came out cold. Not the snarl of a wolf but the inevitable terminal promise of a gathering storm cloud.
