He walked toward the cottage and Isla turned back to the meadow. The sky over the ridge had gone ordinary again, the coherence she'd built completely dispersed, nothing left of it but a slightly higher cloud ceiling and the lingering smell of rain that hadn't fallen.
Four minutes. She'd had four minutes of something that felt very close to mastery, and she'd lost it in ten seconds, and she knew exactly why and she couldn't decide which part bothered her more — the losing it, or the reason.
She pressed her palms flat against her thighs and started again.
The wind didn't come back the way it had before. But it came back, eventually, and she stayed in the meadow until noon, working the same stretch of sky over and over, and tried not to think about the fact that the four minutes before the gate opened had been the best she'd ever done.
9
RAFE
Rafe had been too sharp with her. He knew it the moment he said it, that thing about unexpected company not determining control, and he'd watched it land exactly where he'd aimed it and felt no satisfaction from the hit. That was the problem. He'd wanted her to bristle because a bristling woman was easier to leave alone than the one who'd stood in that meadow with her hands loose at her sides and hair whipping around her like her own personal storm.
He'd seen her perfect sky from the track before she heard him. The cloud formation over the ridge was moving with intent, the air over the meadow sitting different from the air around it, and even from that distance the quality of it was unmistakable. Controlled. Deliberate. Nothing like the storm that had put his ship into the dock.
His wolf had gone immediately, stupidly hopeful about the whole situation, and he'd told it to settle down and kept walking but the gate had given him away before he could do anything about it.
He crossed the river footbridge and came back onto the dock road, the Ashvane visible through the tree break, her bow railstill naked without the bracket. He had an appointment at the forge in two hours. He had a letter to the Vanewright account that still needed finishing and a name from the night before sitting at the back of his skull like a splinter he couldn't reach. On top of all that, he had a mate he was not in a position to claim and a wolf that had not accepted this reasoning.
Rafe rolled his shoulders, attempting to let the unwanted thought slide off and kept walking.
The dockside tavern was nothing like the Silver Fang. It sat at the water's edge on the eastern bank, low-built and practical, more working house than hospitality, with a dock of its own that took small river craft and a clientele that ran to traders, freight workers, and the kind of people who had business on the water and preferred to drink near it. Rafe had stopped in twice on previous runs. He knew the barman's name was Petch, that he kept a reliable tab and an unreliable memory for faces, and that the tables nearest the dock door were occupied by river traffic that changed over every few days.
He went in just before noon and ordered coffee before sitting at one of the tables.
The man two seats down was a freight runner Rafe recognized from the north channel. Broad, weathered, with the particular squint of someone who spent too much time looking at sunlit water. Rafe had traded dock space with him once, two seasons back, nothing significant. Enough to nod at.
He nodded. The man nodded back. Rafe drank his coffee.
"Rough coming in?" the man said, after a bit.
"Storm damage. Repairing now."
"Heard it was something unusual. Weather-wise."
"Unusual spring," Rafe said.
The man turned his cup. "Town's had more weather than usual the last few months."
"So I hear." Rafe kept his voice at the same register he used for negotiating freight rates, conversational, bored. "You been running this stretch long?"
"Five years."
"You know the river traffic pretty well then."
"Well enough."
"Anyone new come through lately? North channel, past the gorge?"
The man thought about it, not in the careful way of someone deciding whether to answer but in the genuine way of someone trying to remember. "Couple of vessels last week I didn't recognize. One heavy cargo, Ardenmere registry if I read it right. The other smaller, faster. Private charter maybe."
"Captain's name on the charter?"
"Didn't catch it." He drank. "Why, you expecting someone?"
"Trying to get ahead of a scheduling conflict," Rafe said. "Somebody was asking after my route through here and I want to know if they're planning to run the same timing."
"Competition?"
