More accurately, Kit stood at odds with oblivious Anders who had gone so far as to crack some eggs in a skillet and was watching them fry while two slices of bread sat out on the counter. The shadows on Kit’s face grew dangerously dark as he glowered at the other man, who didn’t stir to awareness until I passed the dining table.
Anders craned his neck to look over at me. “House has two bedrooms, doesn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered.
My eyes flicked over to catch Kit’s, but neither of us gave any further response before Anders added, “And only one bag for the two of you? This is an awfully cozy arrangement.”
“There’s a hole in my bag,” I offered, though I worried the flush in my face betrayed me.
The packed knapsack slid off my shoulder to hit the floor with a thump.
Anders nodded and poked at the eggs with one of my new wooden spoons. It was all I could do not to march over there and snatch it away from him. It was for mixing, not cooking. The heat would singe the wood…
Rather than intervene, I hung back. Kit did, too, while Anders rambled on.
“I must say, Kit, you cut an imposing figure wielding that knife. I brought my own blade, of course.” He reached to his shoulder where an enormous sword-like weapon was stored. I couldn’t fathom how I hadn’t noticed it before. Damned thing looked fit to cleave a man in half.
It was barely secured into its scabbard with a strip of leather that Anders unknotted. He unsheathed and brandished the machete in the gold morning light, sweeping it side to side.Despite him being a few feet away, I couldn’t stop myself from flinching back.
“Wouldn’t be caught on the road without it,” Anders bragged.
While I was ready to retreat, Kit pressed forward and caught Anders’s arm mid-swing. “Put that thing away before you hurt someone,” he hissed.
With a smug grin, Anders acquiesced. With the weapon stowed, he returned to the stove and gave the eggs another nudge.
“Did you make enough for us?” I asked while leaning to count the unbroken yolks in the pan.
Anders looked at them, too. “Well, this is all there was, and I’m a pretty big eater?—”
“We’ll stop at the tavern on our way to the stables, Pen,” Kit interjected.
“Why the stables?” I asked.
“To get a horse and cart. And to ask Thoma to look after the kittens.”
I bobbed my head as Kit shouldered our shared pack—a novelty I rather enjoyed since Anders had called attention to it—and headed for the front door.
Anders spun with my spoon raised. “Where are you going? The eggs are still raw.”
“Then you’d better tell them to hurry up,” Kit called back to us. I heard the subtle taunt in his voice as he repeated Anders’s words from earlier. “Time’s wasting.”
I trotted after Kit, leaving Anders scrambling to finish cooking and catch up. He grumbled around his par-cooked egg sandwich the whole way to the tavern where Kit ordered us each a hand pie for breakfast and some dried foods for our trip. It was safe to assume Anders wouldn’t be sharing his.
At the stables, Kit motioned for me to wait outside. I protested the arrangement until he tugged me apart from Anders and explained.
“I need you to keep him away from Thoma. Poor man’s been through enough without having to face down Reimond’s butcher.”
It was a gruesome description, but an apt one. I nodded agreement and returned to my post a few feet away from Anders, loaded with my satchel and sketchbook and nudging my toe against the knapsack Kit had also left me in charge of.
The machete on Anders’s back stretched from his shoulders to his waist, and my eyes kept drifting toward it. Plenty of men in town carried some kind of small dagger for functional use, but I’d never seen anyone else toting around something so obtrusive. I wasn’t planning to ask him about it. I was grateful he’d kept quiet this long and wasn’t about to be the one to change that, but Kit was barely gone a minute before the lumberman posed a question to me.
“Do you draw from imagination or from real life?” His gaze targeted the leather satchel slung across my chest.
I laid my hand on top of the flap cover, remembering the way my sketchbook had been left open in his wake. Merrick used to paw through my things like that. Always snooping over my shoulder or flipping the pages of whatever I was drawing in, seemingly for the sole purpose of making catty comments.
“Real life mostly,” I muttered. “Why?”
Anders braced his arms across his broad torso and looked toward the stables. His lips quirked amidst his bushy beard. “He must pose for you, then.”
