"I'll wait here."
"You don't want to—" I stop. Obviously he doesn't. Kestria's already shaking her head.
"The scars. The size. The—" She waves a hand at all of him. "Not exactly inconspicuous."
Right. Missing eye, torn ear. Built like a sexy lumberjack—
"Fine. Wait here."
"Take your time." He leans against a tree. "I'll be watching."
I push past Kestria toward the birches.
Market. Chickens. Rooster. Goat—definitely now. I willbuy out the whole damn herd.
I grab the large bag of coins Keer threw in the bag and jiggle it, grinning at Kestria.
“Lets go shopping”
Chapter 16
"—and if you roast the roots first the texture's completely different, but you have to watch them because they go from perfect to charred in about thirty seconds, I learned that the hard way when I was fourteen, smoke everywhere, Nugget's grandmother wouldn't stop screaming—well, not Nugget's grandmother necessarily, I don't actually know Nugget's genealogy, but a chicken of that era—"
"Mel."
"—the point is you roast them low and slow or you don't roast them at all, and also do they sell honey here? We need honey. Not just for cooking, honey's medicinal, good for burns, good for sealing wounds when you're out of paste—"
"Mel."
"What?"
"You have not stopped talking since we left."
The market moves around us—voices, carts, the clatter of someone stacking crates—and Kestria is looking at me with her head tilted, one eyebrow up, mouth pressed flat and careful.
"That's not true."
"It is true. You covered root vegetables, chicken genealogy,honey, three separate tangents about soil quality, the structural problems with your old cottage walls, and a beetle you found once that I'm still not clear on."
"The beetle was relevant."
"To what?"
"Soil composition. Which affects moonbright potency. Everything connects."
"Mm-hmm." She stops walking. We're between stalls—cloth merchant on one side, dried goods on the other—and the morning crowd parts around us without interest. "You know what else is connected?"
"Don't."
"The talking. And the not-thinking."
"I don't know what you mean."
"You know exactly what I mean." Her hand touches my arm. Brief, warm. "You don't have to fill every gap."
My fingers tighten on the cart handle. Salt. Herbs. Chickens to evaluate. Honey if they have it—honey's good for burns and I'm almost out. Rope—do we need rope? We might need rope. And salt, did I already say salt—
His hand on my elbow when I tripped. The way his fingers—
