Not to Bryn, though. “Why would that be?”
Kiela glanced at Radane and wondered how she was going to explain who she was, why she was here, and why she wanted to stay and hide.
“I want to leave my job as an imperial investigator,” Radane said. “My employers, however, will not be happy about this. I need to disappear.”
That was close enough to the truth, though it downplayed how “unhappy” her employers would be or how many people from Alyssium would like to get their hands on Radane. “You said you had a way to hide me,” Kiela said to Bryn. “Would you have a way to hide her?”
Bryn sipped her tea and studied Radane. “You made a mess of my bakery.”
Hunching her shoulders, Radane stared into her tea. “I’m sorry. I . . . I was not myself. I was . . . I thought I had to be the imperial investigator.”
“Hmm,” Bryn said.
“How can we hide her?” Kiela asked.
Taking another sip of tea, Bryn contemplated it for a minute more. She then lowered her cup and said decisively, “In plain sight. She comes to work for me at my bakery, for free until she’s made up for the mess she made and then for pay after that, in plain view of everyone, until she’s as familiar a sight as Tobin. She becomes an islander, and we convince as many people as possible to swear she’s lived here for years.”
Radane gawked at her. “People would do that?”
Bryn shrugged. “They did it for me.”
Caz and Meep came inside from the garden, and the spider plant helped the cactus up onto the kitchen counter. They sat quietly listening, while Caz plucked stray leaves off Meep’s needles. Meep made a soft sound like a cat purring.
“My wife’s parents didn’t approve of me,” Bryn said. “I’m from a clan that lives . . . Well, better if I don’t say names, but I’m from a forested island far from here and suffice it to say that our clans hated each other for generations. So long that no one could remember how it started, but everyone could list out every single slight and insult and wrong since then to the point where our families were poisoning the trees and rivers on one another’s land. My wife . . . I met her while I was trying to stop one of my cousins from dumping waste into a lake that fed not only into my wife’s family’s land but also onto ours. He completely missed the metaphor about how our hatred was destroying us, but my future wife understood. We started to meet secretly of course, and in the egocentric innocence of youth, we thought if we showed our families how in love we were . . .” She sighed heavily, and then said to Kiela, “I think the rest of this requires jam to tell.”
“Of course.” Kiela got up and opened a fresh jar, and Bryn produced several freshly baked rolls from one of her many pockets.
Radane blinked at them. “Wait, this really is a jam shop?”
“Yes.” Kiela spread raspberry jam on half a roll and bit into it. The bread was as fluffy as a cloud and tasted a bit of pepper and honey, which complemented the jam perfectly. “I used a plant-growth-acceleration spell to grow the raspberry bushes.”
Her jaw dropped open. “You . . . Five crates of . . . And your priority was raspberries?”
“I was thinking of strawberries next, but I haven’t seen any in my garden.” Kiela turned to Bryn. “Does anyone in town have any strawberries? I could replant a few . . .”
“I’ll ask around,” Bryn said. “Strawberry jam would be excellent.”
“I could try mixed berry too, with blueberries and raspberries.”
Radane gaped at her.
Bryn piled a heap of jam on a plate with a roll and handed it to Radane. “Eat something sweet. It’ll make you sweeter.”
“Uh, thanks.”
Looking down at her own roll, Bryn didn’t eat. Instead she continued her story. “You can imagine how it went when our families found out. Both my wife and I were disowned. My uncle, a man who used to give me treats and play hide-and-seek in the woods with me . . . well, he made it abundantly clear how they all felt. My wife died from her injuries at his hand, and her family blamed me. If I hadn’t wooed her, they said, then my uncle wouldn’t have been driven to hurt her. And so I fled. Kept going and going until I came to Caltrey. Changed my name and started a new life here. But her family had hired a professional to exact their revenge. When he found me . . . the people of Caltrey rallied around me. They swore that I wasn’t the one he was looking for. I’d been born here, they said. And he believed them and left. I’ve lived in peace ever since.”
Kiela’s heart ached for her friend. “I’m so sorry.” She wished she could think of other, better words to say. Bryn shouldn’t have had to bear that kind of heartache and grief. She had such a giant heart.
Stretching out a tendril, Caz patted her arm. “We all are.”
“Meep,” the cactus said soulfully.
“Aw, thank you, but I didn’t tell you for pity,” Bryn said. “I tell you as proof it can be done. Islanders protect our own. They adopted me—Tobin’s mother, she’s my sister now, and he’s my nephew. The people of Caltrey are my new family.”
“I’m not one of you,” Radane said.
“You could be, if you want to be.” Bryn held up her hand. “Think about it before you answer. The question isn’t will you be safe here; it’s do you want to stay here? It’s not always easy to start over and become a new person with new dreams. Do you want to start a new life here?”
