His face scrunched, but he came around and took the reins from me anyway. I took the opportunity to tug him in by the collar of his shirt and steal a soft kiss. He leaned into the attention, and I obliged by giving him several more before taking my place behind the plow.
Penny led the horse, and we worked in silence for a full row before he spoke up again.
“How do you know so much about farming? You said you stayed with a farmer for a while…” He glanced back at me. “But you know too well what to do here for me to believe it was just for a while.”
A small smile crept across my lips. “‘A while’ might have been understating it,” I admitted. “I was with him for six years after I left the Bone Men.”
That memory was bittersweet.
It was my first taste of what it was like to have a family and a home that weren’t based on stripping away everything that made me who I was. But it ended far too soon, and with the reminderthat not everyone was so willing to abide a former cultist in their midst.
With a full day of work ahead, I had ample time to answer Penny's questions about my life, and no reason not to share. I started at the beginning, with my arrival at the mission outside Emberstead after my first branding. The Symbiarch, Nora, took me in, tended to my wounds, and left me to recover while she found a new place for me.
For two days, I sat in my assigned bed, the only soul in the sprawling infirmary, tucked away in the room as far from the entrance of the mission as they could put me. Pain throbbed and scorching heat licked across my skin every time the bandages taped to my chest scraped over the fresh brand beneath them. It was all I could do to keep my mind away from the memory of darkness and fire that had haunted my sleep for days, and I fixed my attention on picking at the fraying hem on the cuff of my left sleeve.
The door to my room stood open at my request, allowing me to watch any comings and goings. No matter how clean I thought I made my escape, I couldn’t shake the fear of my father bursting through the double doors at the other end of the hall, his face aflame with hatred and fury.
If he found me, if he tracked me there, I doubted I’d live to see Ashpoint again. He’d make good on his threat to sacrifice me to Eeus, and that would be that.
But when the doors finally swung open in the afternoon on the second day, it wasn’t my father keeping stride with the head Symbiarch of the mission. The man beside Nora Halmer towered over her. Every part of him was broad and muscular, and he clutched a straw hat in one large hand. His overalls were smudged with dirt and grass stains, and every strike of his boots left clods of black earth on the stone floor. Coppery hair sproutedabove bushy brows that were drawn low over his eyes as he spoke to Nora in hushed tones.
They were too far away for me to hear their conversation, but I shrunk against the pillows when Nora motioned to me and the strange man looked my way. He hung back a bit when she reached the door to my room, letting her enter first while he lingered outside. Nora rested a hand on my right shoulder to try to draw my attention, but I didn’t dare take my eyes off the large man.
“Kit, this is Delmer Blake.” She waved him forward. “He’s agreed look after you while you get on your feet.”
He ducked into the room, and his brows pinched when I flinched away from him. “Hope you like animals,” he said, his deep voice low and gentle. “I keep a bit of a menagerie. When you’re all healed up, maybe you can help me look after them.”
Since Clover, I’d avoided anything I might get attached to. Yet there was a part of me that wanted nothing more than to wrap my arms around something soft and bury my face in fur. No judgment or condescension, just quiet support.
But there had to be a catch.
There always was.
He wanted something from me. Maybe it would be enough to be useful to him. I would do almost anything if it meant going somewhere the Bone Men couldn’t find me.
When I didn’t respond, Nora squeezed my shoulder. “Delmer owns a farm out in Oakshire.” She moved to face me, half-blocking the farmer from my view. “He’s a good man, and he’ll take good care of you. You have my word.” Her kind smile eased the tension in my shoulders. “Everything is ready for you to go tonight, if you’re all right with that. Get you someplace more comfortable to recover. And I’ll be coming by a few times a week to make sure you’re healing all right.”
That assurance was all I needed. If things at the farm weren’t as rosy as she described, I could return with her when she came to check on me. Not that there was much stopping me from running away again if it came to that. I would not let myself be crushed under another cruel man’s thumb.
“Okay,” I said finally.
Over Nora’s shoulder, I watched a smile stretch across Delmer’s face. He looked so earnest, like an overgrown dog who’d just been told he was a good boy, that a little more of my unease dissipated.
“I’ll be glad for the company,” he said. “I hope you’ll like it there.”
I had.
His home was filled with the kind of warmth I barely remembered from when my mother was alive, and Delmer was as ready with praise as my father had been with disparagement. I settled in quicker than I expected to, and for six years, Delmer treated me like I was where I’d always belonged.
I was too old to be adopted, but he made it clear that I was his son in all but blood and name. He shielded me from the scorn of the citizens of Oakshire, often to his own detriment. No matter how much I insisted that it didn’t bother me—though it did—and that he shouldn’t let it affect his relationships with the townsfolk, he demanded their tolerance and would not accept any less.
He taught me how to run the farm, care for the livestock, and maintain the small house we shared. And when his health failed him far too soon, he assured me it would all be mine upon his passing, that he hoped the land would take care of me like he’d tried to.
It might have, if I’d been allowed to keep it.
Delmer was barely on the pyre before the town’s elders darkened my doorstep, making claims and casting judgment they never would have dared to say were he still around.
The townsfolk wouldn’t stand for me taking over the farm, and I found Oakshire entirely inhospitable. The shops were closed to me; no one would work for or with me. As such, I had two choices: let them buy the farm from me for half of what it was worth, or watch it fall to ruin because I was unable to run it alone.
