“You should have told me who you were when I first woke up.”
“Would it have made any difference?”
“Perhaps.”
Though he couldn’t say how. If she’d told him last night, would he have been able to sleep knowing who watched over him?
Behind her, Mistress Yahl moved around the fireplace. She’d set tea to steep, her own blend. She’d sniffed the jars of dried herbs until she found what she was looking for. Now, she was making eggs. She had the fixed, milky stare of a blind woman. He didn’t know how she managed to cook without burning herself, but it must be routine because Rowan didn’t seem concerned.
Quietly, he asked, “What happened to her eyes?”
“You. The brand. There was an infection.”
He closed his eyes for a moment. Most brands healed to a light scar, some hardly noticeable. It was rare that they went bad.
Rowan jerked the last of the cloth away from his skin, and he hissed out a breath.
When she turned to toss the dirty bandage into the wash basin, he looked down at the wound. There were three deep slashes curved about his side and lower ribs. A few inches lower, and he’d have been gutted. The stitches looked good. He’d been sewn up often enough to appreciate that. There was some redness and swelling around the site, but it wasn’t the angry color of a rampaging infection.
Turning back with a bowl of water, Rowan began to clean him with a soft cloth. She went about it quickly, as if it pained her to touch him, but she was gentle enough. He didn’t think she was actually trying to hurt him.
He looked over her head while she worked, trying to ignore the press of her slight body against his thigh, the way the sun caught the red in her dark hair, the clean, warm scent of her.
Instead, he focused on the room beyond. On the thin wooden walls, bare save for the hooks holding their clothing—a jacket, a spare dress, a man’s shirt so small that he thought it must belong to Rowan. He’d seen no other evidence that a man lived here.
The bed pushed against the far wall was covered by a pathetically thin mattress. His blanket lay neatly folded at its foot. There was the table, rough but sturdy in the center of the room with two stools underneath. The rocking chair. His saddlebags in the corner, stuffed with more personal belongings than they had between the two of them.
A bundle of dried lavender had been placed in an earthenware crock on the table. The flowers, the faded curtains over their one window, the rocking chair—they were the only luxuries in the whole place. He remembered thinking their cottage in Jarn had been humble, but it had been a palace compared to this.
A sick feeling spread from the pit of his stomach. “How did you come to live here?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Where else would we go? To our country estate? My palace in Caetris?”
“Rowan…” Mistress Yahl murmured in soft rebuke as she set a plate full of eggs on the table and sat down on the stool across from him.
He forced himself to look at her ruined face—the ugly scar, the glassy unseeing eyes. “I’m sorry for what happened in Jarn.”
The words felt pitifully small.
“The day of the trial, I thought… There was no hard evidence. No witch sign. The accusations were thin and all over the place. There was no suggestion of an affinity for anything other than herbcraft and no sign of corruption in that. You heard my report.”
“Everyone in town did,” Mistress Yahl said. “It didn’t make a difference. They’d made up their minds already.”
“There were a lot of witnesses,” Rowan said bitterly. “A whole line of them. Everyone wanted to get a chance to stand up there and tell a wild story.”
“I hadn’t seen that before,” he told them. “I wasn’t prepared for it, the kind of mania that can catch up an entire town and drive them to do reprehensible things. I came to look for you after. One of my men was injured by the mob, and we had to take him all the way to Andur.”
Mistress Yahl took a sip of her tea. “We had to leave immediately after the trial. They wouldn’t let us stay. We would have been days gone by the time you were able to make it to Andur and back. It was kind of you to try.”
Rowan snorted her opinion of that.
“The mayor told me you’d likely returned to the capital. He said you had wealthy relatives there.” He’d wanted that to be the truth. He sometimes thought of them when he saw a dark-haired mother and daughter climbing out of a carriage or entering a shop in Aresdal.
Mistress Yahl grimaced. “No one in the capital would have helped us even if we had the means to travel there.”
Rowan scooped a yellow waxy substance out of a jar and began to smooth it over his ribs.
He flinched at the sting, and her eyes flicked up. “Don’t worry. It’s just simple herbcraft. Nothing in it that will corrupt your immortal soul.”
