When we arrived at Faller’s home, greeted by the scent of baking clay and copper, we came around back to the yard where he had been keeping Rowan on nice days because “sun is good for everyone, even grumpysoternlike this.”
Rowan already had a guest.
There was a woman—hair white as the moon—crouched near the entrance to the yard, her arms crossed atop her knees as she watched Rowan.He was in the same place I’d seen him before, leaning against one of the woodshed posts, though he wasn’t tied up as last time.Faller had realized Rowan wouldn’t run away.I had forbidden him from running, but even if I hadn’t, I expect he wouldn’t have abandoned me.He still thought us trapped among enemies.
“We should leave him be, I think,” Fell said with a mischievous grin.
“Certainly not,” I said.I could tell even from the distance Rowan was bothered by how the stranger watched him—he was sitting too rigid.
I approached, stepping around the woman at the fence’s opening.
“Hello,” she said sweetly as I passed.
“Hello,” I said, throwing a look that saidwhat do we think of this oddity?in Dania’s direction.
When I reached Rowan, I crouched and nodded a little toward his visitor.“Who’s she?”
“I have no idea,” Rowan said, keeping his voice low.He sounded tired.Unenthusiastic.His eyes flicked to her and then back at me.“She’s come four times now.”
“Maiden?”Fell called out to her as he sat down next to Rowan, offering a skin of mead which Rowan—as per his usual moodiness—did not accept.
“Ha!”she called back.
“You will come and drink?”Fell lifted the mead skin.
The woman stood and approached—her feet were bare and dirty, and her legs slender, marked in Northern tattoos.She was obnoxiously pretty.
“I will come, but I will not drink,” she said.“I am herb-fasting for the time being.”
“Ah, what herbs?”Fell could speak to anyone about anything.Normally, I adored that about him, but this woman… I wanted him not to see her.
“Nettle,” she said, taking a seat between Dania and myself, tucking her legs into her chest.
“Nettle?”Fell laughed.“You are a witch, then?”
“Not a witch,” she smiled.“I am a…friendto the plants, with many scars to prove it.”She held up her hands, and they were indeed covered in scratches, presumably from harvesting thorned herbs.
“My friend says you have come to visit him more than once?”I said, my eyes darting back to poor Rowan, who was unable to understand anything that was being said.He looked to be holding his breath, perhaps a little scared by the strange woman who’d been watching him and was now sitting across from him.
“Yes!”She smiled.Perfect white teeth.“I was mushroom-fasting before the nettle.They told me to visit him.”
“Who did?”I said.
She smiled again.“The mushrooms.”
I turned to Rowan, my teeth clenched in judge-filled disdain.“She says mushrooms told her to come see you.”
He snorted.“So, she is mad then?”
“Not mad,” Dania said.“You surely had them near the Arched Cliffs.The red caps with white spots… I can’t remember what we called them in Islish?—”
“Oh,” Rowan said, his face looking like he might laugh for a moment before he steeled himself.“She ate them by accident?”
“Probably on purpose,” Dania said.
“They’re not good for her,” Rowan said.“Someone should tell her.”
Someone should tell her to leave us alone, I thought.
